1. Cultural effects - Marxist approach
The Marxist view is referred to by a
variety of terms. Fairly common are the terms 'critical' and
'radical'. In Britain and Europe Marxist approaches to the mass
media and, more generally, to culture as a whole ('cultural
studies') were dominant from the mid '60s to the mid 80s
(approximately). Although less dominant now, Marxism still colours
much media research.
Generally, the Marxian view of media
influence depends on an understanding and elaboration of the
operation of the notion of
ideology.
Although perhaps in everyday parlance, the term 'ideology' refers
to a set of (especially 'political') beliefs and values which is
not necessarily related to any particular social class (for
example: Marxist ideology, Anglican ideology, proletarian
ideology, Conservative ideology, socialist ideology, free market
ideology), in the Marxian literature the term is generally used
in an entirely negative sense to refer to a supposedly
dominant ideology which supports the interests of the
dominant class.
Various thinkers (Mannheim, for example) have examined ideology
from a class-neutral point of view, but it is this crucial notion
of domination which is central to the Marxian understanding
of ideology. Ideology is seen as a tool of the dominant classes,
misleading and illusory.
Today, it is by no means self-evident
that class-relations are the fundamental cause of domination and
exploitation. Important though they may be, relations of gender,
ethnicity, of the state to the individual, of one nation or
nation-bloc (e.g. North/South) to another also need to be taken
into account.
As I hope you will understand from what
follows, it is not even self-evident what classes are and where
their boundaries lie. For Marx, it was pretty clear that classes
were determined by objective relations of production and other
primarily economic factors. The 'Marxists' in cultural and media
studies were generally concerned to develop theories of how
relations of domination were developed and maintained, not only or
even primarily by economic forces, but by cultural forces. They
thus paid far more attention than Marx himself to the way that the
circulation of symbolic goods was in itself constitutive and
supportive of relations between individuals. (Further
comments on ideology)
The Frankfurt School
An important source of the left-wing
critique of mass culture is the
Frankfurt School.
Developing
Marx's view
that the dominant class in society not only owns the means of
material production, but also controls the production of the
society's dominant ideas and values (dominant
ideology),
the 'critical
theorists' of the Frankfurt
School examined the industrialisation of mass-produced culture and
examined the economic imperatives behind what they dubbed the
'culture industries'. They saw the products of the culture
industries as providing the ideological legitimation of existing
capitalist societies and were the first to recognise the
importance of the culture industries as significant agents of
socialisation. Thus, what is sometimes referred to as 'vulgar
Marxism' was developed by the Frankfurt School theorists beyond
its rather mechanistic materialism and economic determinism to
include consideration of culture as a vehicle of ideology, as well
as a critique of science and technology as tools of social
domination within capitalism.
The work which is often considered
characteristic of the Frankfurt School is Dialectic of
Enlightenment (1969/1944)
by
Adorno and
Horkheimer, in which they develop their critique of Enlightenment
rationality and of the 'culture industries'. Developing not only
Marx's ideas on ideology and domination, but also Max Weber's
thoughts on bureaucratization and purposive rationality (Zweckrationalität),
they portrayed Enlightenment as 'totalitarian':
For Enlightenment whatever does not
conform to the rule of calculability and utility is suspect ...
Enlightenment is totalitarian
1969/1944
: 12)
Human beings pay for the increase in
their power with alienation from the things over which they
exercise that power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as the
dictator towards people. He knows them to the extent that he can
manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent
that he can make them. (1969/1944
: 15)
As Enlightenment rationality leads to
domination of nature, so it leads also inevitably to domination
over human beings. Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in the last
year of the Nazi terror which they had fled in the thirties, so it
is not surprising that they argue that that rationality, with its
principles of calculability, quantifiability, order and control
leads to fascism, but their arguments that Enlightenment leads to
the 'totally administered society' applied equally to the
United States where they had sought refuge, in part no doubt
because the USA of the New Deal and the struggle against Hitler
was subjected to methods of propaganda, regimentation and social
control not dissimilar in principle from
Goebbels's
(for comments on Adorno's research into fascism, see the section
on the 'authoritarian personality'). The totally administered
society produces the 'end of the individual' and encourages
conformity; where authentic culture once cultivated the
individual, the mass production of the 'culture industries' now
eradicates the individual and produces mass society which
tolerates only 'pseudo-individuality':
From the standardized jazz
improvisation to the original film personality, who has to hang
a curl over her eye so that she can be recognized as such,
pseudo-individulaity is everywhere. Individuality is reduced to
the generality's power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly
that it is accepted as such. Precisely the defiant reserve or
the sophisticated appearance of the individual on show is
mass-produced like Yale locks. (1969/1944
: 163)
an opinion of media products which Adorno
maintained later:
I consider .... that the average
television entertainment is fundamentally far more dangerous
politically than any political broadcast has ever been
(1971/1963 : 56)
claiming that TV entertainment drummed
false consciousness
and 'disguising of reality' (Verschleierung der Wirklichkeit) into
viewers, 'injecting' (einimpfen) them with ideology.
From The Dialectic of Enlightenment
onwards, Adorno and Horkheimer gradually moved away from Marxian
categories, a move which Horkheimer completed totally in his later
life. However, although they shift the focus away from production,
labour and political economy, in Dialectic of Enlightenment
they still see society in class terms, capital against the masses
using the commodification and reification of culture as a means of
the social control of the masses. However, they express little
faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, largely
because capitalist modernity has succeeded in dominating and
mystifying the individual via advertising, mass communications
media and new forms of social control; indeed the term
'proletariat' is generally replaced by 'masses' in their work.
The relative élitism of their viewpoint
is, nowadays at least, problematic for media and cultural studies.
They appeared to distinguish between what they considered
'authentic art' on the one hand and the products of a supposedly
debased mass culture on the other, though they did abandon the
term 'mass culture', which appears to make the masses themselves
responsible for the debasement of culture, replacing it by the
term 'culture industries'. This approach is not unproblematic. I
might appreciate some of the music which Adorno would accept as
authentic, but when I put the B Minor Mass back on the shelf and
put on a Henry Rollins CD it doesn't feel to me as if I am
suddenly the culture industries' dupe. In any case the
emancipatory, revolutionary potential which the Frankfurt School
saw in high modernist art has hardly fulfilled its potential when
Duchamp's and Dali's works are just another corporate investment.
Adorno later discusses
(1971/1963 : 145-6)
the possibilities of media education which must have appeared
quite radical in 1963: a teacher taking his class to the cinema
and revealing to his pupils the deception ('Schwindel') in the
film, a teacher analysing the 'happy music' of Sunday morning
radio, analysing a magazine, showing them how pop music is
'incomparably worse' than a quartet by Mozart or Beethoven or an
authentic piece of modern classical music. Here, of course, we say
'Oh, really? Who says?' I suppose we could just accept that Adorno
was a highly accomplished classical musician and take his word for
it, but that certainly goes against the grain. I can't claim to be
any too keen on pop music myself, but his constantly repeated
attacks on jazz's 'pseudo-originality' grate with me. Can he
really have listened to Parker and found him less original than
Mozart? Certainly Parker was churning out music to eke out a
living (or buy heroin), but so was Mozart - and as for 'mass
production', I know which one's music sounds more like the product
of the production line to me. And which one produced music
primarily for, commissioned by, and listened to exclusively by,
the bourgeoisie? Not Parker at any rate. And even where music does
use standardized musical forms and types it can still express
rebellion against standardization and commodification. Such
oppositional and contestatory uses of popular cultural forms (as
examined for example in the 'New
Audience Research') are simply
not allowed for in Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of the
'culture industries'. From what I know of Adorno's work, whenever
he mentions popular culture, it's always treated as junk, always
the culture industries' snare for the
false consciousness
of the mass public. It's tempting to wonder whether it's not
Adorno, rather than a class of students, whose media literacy
could do with being improved. From Pound, Eliot, Leavis through
Adorno to Baudrillard the same doom-laden jeremiad about the
effects of the cyberblitz of modern media. Come on, Theo, lighten
up.
One might also disagree with Adorno and
Horkheimer over whether or not society is 'totally administered'.
Is it more or less 'administered' now than it was when they wrote?
Was it more or less 'administered' when they wrote than it had
been, say, a hundred years before? And, even supposing it is, in
the sense of greater bureaucratization, does it necessarily follow
that that leads to the 'death of the individual' and increasing
conformity? It's not at all clear to me how you could begin to
determine that, but it certainly doesn't seem to me that, say, the
apparent increase in uniformity which one finds with globalization
is entirely unidirectional. We may well find MacDonald's in Moscow
and Coca-Cola in Shanghai, but it doesn't follow that all sources
of social instability and all voices of dissent have been
smothered, nor is it apparent to me that individuals in modern
societies are necessarily more integrated than they were a hundred
or two hundred years ago. Certainly, to conclude that individuals
are more fully integrated because of their reception of the
messages of the culture industries is too simplistic.
The failure to differentiate between
individuals in the so-called mass is also often a shortcoming of
the 'cultural effects' approach to mass media influence, whether
in the Marxian or lit-crit tradition. Commonly, such commentators
highlight the linearity of communication flow in the mass media,
emphasizing that the receivers of mass media messages are not
generally in a position to reply. But it does not follow from this
inability to reply that the receivers have no control over media
messages and that the act of reception is not participatory. There
is a wealth of research to suggest that audience members actively
choose which messages they attend to and how they interpret them.
Further, their experience of media content can be participatory in
two senses: first, in the sense that media reception is not
entirely linear, audience's reactions are fed back to the media
producers, if not directly through 'phone-ins and surveys, then at
least through the ratings; secondly, and perhaps more importantly,
experience of media messages is participatory in that it is a
social activity, even for those who receive the message on their
own. The messages are elaborated on and interpreted through social
interaction and the scope for such elaboration and interpretation
is arguably much greater than it was before the development of
mass media.
For in-depth discussion of critical
theory past, present and future, see Douglas Kellner's
Illuminations
site.
Cultural effects versus the American
'empiricist' tradition
At the time that the Frankfurt School
were developing their ideas in exile in America, at the
prestigious Columbia Bureau American investigation of media
effects was largely in what we might refer to as the
empiricist tradition.
That was generally concerned with laboratory experiments or field
experiments to try to establish, say, the effects of media
violence on behaviour or the influence of political campaigns in
the media on voting behaviour. Inevitably, although some
experiments or surveys may have been large-scale, they tended to
be limited in their time-scale and could at best establish only
short-term effects.
If mass culture does have the effect of,
say, replacing spiritual values by consumerist ones or undermining
the values of the 'Great Tradition' and supplanting them with
superficiality and sentimentalism (the sort of effect claimed by
critics coming from the direction of
literary criticism),
then empirical research in the American tradition is unlikely to
pick up those effects. In fact, given that research in American
universities was often commissioned by political parties or major
companies, who wanted to know whether their campaigns were having
an effect, then it's unlikely that most empiricist research would
be designed to pick up such longer term cultural effects.
In Great Britain, the non-empirical work
of the Leavises (see the section on
literary criticism)
did not go unnoticed, but the fact that the Frankfurt School's
work was mainly written in German coupled with the fact that their
work was non-empirical and therefore out of sympathy with the
American traditions meant that they went largely unnoticed in the
USA and Britain until the late 60s and 70s.
Some of the Frankfurt School's
conclusions are not dissimilar from the Leavises, though the
Frankfurt sociologists were naturally more concerned with genuine
art as a redeeming force for a revolutionary socialism, rather
than for an intellectual élite.
In recent years something of a split has
opened up between students of 'communication' and students of
'cultural studies'. By 'communication' I am referring to more
empiricist approach and by 'cultural studies' I mean a more
culturalist approach. I think it is fair to say that the Frankfurt
School largely avoided that split, analysing as they did cultural
artefacts within the context of industrial production, introducing
the results of reception studies and so on and integrating these
within their overall framework of critical theory. I think it is
safe to say that their work represents the first major project in
communication studies to attempt to bring the 'empiricist' and 'culturalist'
approaches together. Unfortunately, however, it seems that their
very introduction and development of the concepts of a culturalist
approach has led to a later split. A shortcoming of the Frankfurt
School's analysis is that encoding (if we assume they are right in
their understanding of what was encoded) and decoding are
isomorphic. It is quite possible for the decoding of a cultural
artifact to differ radically from the author's intentions. We now
see a recognition of that, as well as a welcome move towards the
re-integration of the empiricist and culturalist approaches in the
New Audience Research.
One of the conclusions of the Frankfurt
School was that the consumer society certainly offered a better
material standard of living and certain comforts and
gratifications which were welcomed by the workers. However, in
their view, it also in fact encouraged social and political
apathy. That apathy is to the advantage of the groups who control
capitalist society. From this perspective, then, the mass media
are seen as the instruments of oppression and social control
wielded by the groups who control society.
Marcuse was
a member of the
Frankfurt School
who, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, retained his analysis of
society through Marxian categories as well as his commitment to
revolution. He accepted that capitalism had succeeded in raising
the living standards of most of the population. However, in his
view, the manipulation of false needs established by capitalist
advertising is repressive. It leads to one-dimensional thought. It
blocks people's ability to realise that they are being controlled.
Thus, in the United States at least the proletariat has lost its
revolutionary potential, whereas in France and Italy, where the
standard of living has not reached the same level as in the US,
the proletariat retains radical potential. A great supporter of
student movements of the 1960s, Marcuse considered that the coming
revolution of the twentieth or twenty-first century would not be
primarily motivated by material need, but rather by the general
dehumanization, disgust with waste and the overproduction of the
consumer society. While reforms should be attempted and achieved,
reforms would eventually cut into the roots of capitalist
production, namely the profit motive. At that point, where the
system is forced to defend itself to ensure its own survival,
revolution becomes necessary. (1971
: 17-18)
His view was that one of the most
important mechanisms of control in capitalist societies is the
manipulation of the conscious and unconscious. New needs have
to be created to encourage people to buy the new goods which are
produced. People have to be convinced that they really do have a
need for these goods and that possession of the goods satisfies
the needs they have. Thus, in attempting to satisfy their needs
people reproduce the capitalist system. The false need to
purchase these goods sustains social controls over a life of toil
and fear.
Generally, Marcuse tends, like the other
Frankfurt School members, to portray audiences as passive victims
and, like them he laments the decline of the individual and the
demise of authentic culture, a demise promoted by the rubbish
produced by commercial radio and television. The central problem
in the analysis provided by such theorists as the Frankfurt School
is that they must base their condemnation of consumer society on
something, some kind of values, which they consider to be
authentic. Marcuse, as we have seen, bases his critique on the
distinction between false and authentic needs. There is a double
bind here in that the critic establishes his own notion of
authenticity as somehow outside society, presenting a concept of
the human being which is ahistorical and
essentialist.
The double bind, of course, is that this is just as ideological a
project as the project of the supposedly dominant culture.
Post-structuralism
and
post-modernism
would certainly criticize such a totalizing project and treat it
with considerable suspicion since we have seen in the command
economies of the former eastern bloc just what a supposedly
scientific recognition of authentic human needs can lead to.
Opposition to functionalism
What we have referred to above as
'empiricism' and the 'American approach' to media effects research
might also be referred to as a 'pluralist'
approach.
Sociologists might broadly refer to it as
a
'functionalist'
approach (though note that I am no
sociologist). Functionalism seeks to explain social institutions
in terms of their cohesiveness within an interconnected social
system. Thus, there is little room in functionalism for
explanation of social conflict. Since functionalism sees society
(my apologies to any sociologists who consider I've got this
wrong) as something like a very large person replete with needs
and desires which need to be kept in equilibrium, then, from a
functionalist point of view, ideology would be seen as operating
to fulfil those needs.
The American researchers tended to see
American society as having reached a broad consensus. What they
were investigating boiled down to the question of how much the
media might threaten that consensus, for example through the
possible contribution of media violence to 'juvenile delinquency'.
By and large they came to the conclusion that the media did not
pose a strong threat.
Marxists come at the problem from a very
different angle. They ask the questions: where does the consensus
come from? whose purposes does it serve? what rôle do the mass
media play in creating and sustaining it? Looked at form this
angle, the media may be examined from the point of view of the
rôle they play in class conflict and in constructing a view of the
world which suits the powerful. From this point of view, the media
may be seen as having very powerful and far-reaching effects.
Despite the criticisms I have made of
Adorno's, Horkheimer's and Marcuse's views of the operation of the
'culture industries', their importance in cultural studies is not
in doubt. They had a considerable influence on New Left thought (Marcuse
especially), whose investigation of the consumer society and
commodity culture influenced and was influenced by the work in
France of
Barthes,
Lefebvre,
de Certeau,
Baudrillard
and others who have contributed to the indictment of
commodification and the impoverishment of everyday life.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that
One major flaw of many neo-Marxist
theories of the consumer society, evident sometimes, but not
always, in Critical Theory, is a totalizing view and
denunciation of the commodity, consumer needs and consumption.
On this view all commodities are uniformly
seductive instruments of capitalist manipulation, which engineer
homogeneous false needs and consciousness. ..... Commodity
fetishism and false needs, then, supposedly enchain willing
consumers into the institutions, practices and values of
consumer capitalism. .... Commodities and consumption are
negatively presented, simply as means of class domination, and
the model also assumes a magical, diabolical power on the part
of capital to create unreal false needs which it is then able to
manipulate in its own interest. Kellner (1989b
: 158-9)
This does not mean, though, that Critical
Theory is a dead end. Far from it. As already remarked, the work
of the early Critical Theorists fed into and informed into much of
the later work of cultural studies and the current work of
Jürgen Habermas
has developed Critical Theory further. Kellner observes that
the theoretical framework, categories
and methods of Critical Theory make it especially appropriate to
addressing such issues as new technologies and their impact on
social and class structure, politics and culture and the crises
of techno-capitalism. Every era must develop its own radical
social theory and politics, and I believe that the tradition of
Critical Theory provides an excellent starting point for a new
theory of today's techno-capitalism, its crisis tendencies and
its potential for emancipatory social transformation. Kellner (1989b
: 231)
For a glimpse of where Critical Theory
might be going from here, take a close look at Douglas Kellner's
excellent
Illuminations
website
There are many different institutions in
our society which
socialise
us into acceptance of these dominant ideas and values . The mass
media are one such institution. The French Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser
referred to such institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs),
which operate alongside the Repressive State Apparatus of courts,
police, prisons, military and so on. Althusser argued that all of
these ISAs are bits of apparatus for the state to use in order to
manage the consent of society's members, to persuade us to accept
as legitimate for the whole society that ideology which in fact
best serves the interests of the dominant class. According to him,
the ISAs are:
- the religious ISA (the various
churches)
- the educational ISA
- the family ISA
- the legal ISA
- the political ISA
- the trade-union ISA
- the communications ISA (the mass
media)
- the cultural ISA (literature, the
arts, sports, entertainment etc)
The fact that many of the organs within
these apparatuses are within what we would normally think of as
the private (rather than state) domain is no objection since any
ISA can perfectly well function as a state apparatus, whether it
is owned by the state or not; as Althusser see it, they all
communicate and support the ideology of the dominant class, which
exercises control over the ideological state apparatuses
Althusser developed the classical Marxist
notion of a dominant ideology, breaking away from the concern with
the economic base and arguing that ideology is the medium through
which we experience the world. Ideology is seen as a determining
force in its own right. Althusser's focus was on questions of how
we come to 'internalize' ideology, how ideology 'interpellates'
subjects and constructs 'subject-positions'
for them. This focus fed into marxist-oriented psychoanalytic
interpretations of the operation of ideology.
Although Althusser was highly influential
in the development of Marxist approaches to the media, he does
come close to suggesting that virtually nothing other than the
'dominant ideology' could ever be reproduced in
discourse.
To some extent as a result of Althusser's influence there was a
tendency in cultural studies during the 1970s for theorists to
concentrate on the analysis of media texts, uncovering the
ideological meanings within them and assuming that readers
(despite the activity implied in the term 'readers') as compliant
victims of ideology. The focus on culture as a site of social
struggle was to enter cultural and media studies through the
influence of
Gramsci.
2. Criticisms of the Marxist approach
The Marxist approach to the mass media has
not been without its critics. Particularly where it was seen as
moving away from sociology and more in the direction of cultural
studies, it came under attack from sociologists.
Mechanism not demonstrated
In a particularly virulent attack, Anderson
and Sharrock put the boot into media studies in 1979 (Anderson and
Sharrock (1979)).
In their view, media studies practitioners had failed to show how
the media sustain capitalist hegemony, media studies 'men'
apparently being 'utterly indifferent to the particulars of their
materials'. A related criticism which could be made is the
overconcentration of cultural/media studies on textual analysis.
Certainly, since the aim of cultural studies is essentially a
politically emancipatory one, i.e. to enable people to see how
textual processes construct meaning, how subject positions are
constructed, how signification is negotiated etc. and thereby to
cultivate critical reading, then it is not surprising that there
should be a focus on textual semiotics. However, a criticism which
this approach is open to is that insufficient attention is paid to
the institutional conditions within which culture develops.
Bias not proven
In Anderson's and Sharrock's view media
studies practitioners merely show that an alternative account of
reality is possible, they do not demonstrate that the media's
account is biased: 'The mere availability of an imaginable
alternative account does not invalidate that to which it is an
alternative.' They point out, for example, that the authors of
Bad News (see the
Glasgow University Media Group)
seek to show the bias in TV news by comparing its reports with those
in Management Today and The Financial Times. In other
words, the media researchers are just adopting the same piecemeal
approach to the media as most ordinary readers and viewers do and
the latter are just as aware of potential bias as the so-called
media experts.
Ralph Negrine makes similar criticisms of
the work of Hall et al on mugging, since the latter assume that the
media ought to mirror some statistical reality. Negrine points out
that in fact the media reproduce 'aspects of the world which stand
out' (Negrine (1994)).
In his view Hall et al., by criticising the media for creating a
moral panic about mugging when there was no real evidence of an
increase in the crime, miss the point. The point was that there was
concern about the 'senselessness' of the crime and it was that
concern that was conveyed by the media.
In this respect, as Negrine sees it,
Golding's and Middleton's Images of Welfare is more
successful. Their work, whilst recognizing that the media's 'moral
panic' was indeed an attack on the welfare state, also allows that
it exploited existing ways of thinking. In Negrine's view, then,
although the media's reporting may well contain crude and inaccurate
exaggeration, it may still be the case that it arises from, and
reflects, public opinion.
Audiences not considered
This is a very important criticism, namely
that the Marxist critics of the media base their conclusions on the
analysis of texts, with virtually no reference to the readers of
those texts:
'in what we estimate as some eleven
thousand sentences making up Bad News we cannot find any
that make the viewer the subject. It does not seem to occur to
these theorists that the viewer may be no less capable than they,
'the experts' of exercising judgement, wit, scepticism, a sense of
proportion, a different conceptual scheme, an appreciation that
it's only a newspaper story, or a television item, or even a
quasi-Marxist suspicion of capitalist institutions and
organisations. If such capacities are extended to the otherwise
witless and uncritical viewer, the media simply cannot fulfil
their hegemonic task.'
This comes very close, as the authors do
indeed hint, to saying that the Marxist media experts treat media
audiences in the same way as the
National Viewers' and Listeners' Association,
namely that 'we' are not corrupted by these media materials, but
'they' are. In the case of National VALA, because 'they' do not have
the protection of 'our' religious and other moral values and, in the
case of the Marxists, because 'they' are duped by the hegemonic
enterprise and we are not. This is what Thompson refers to as the
fallacy of internalism, whereby cultural critics read off the
ideological messages from the texts themselves:
It is a fallacy because it cannot be
assumed that the characteristics which the analyst discerns in a
particular cultural product will have a given effect when that
product is received and appropriated by individuals in the course
of their everyday lives. The reception and appropriation of
cultural products is a complex social process which involves an
ongoing activity of interpretation and the assimilation of
meaningful content to the socially structured background
characteristics of particular individuals and groups. To attempt
to read off the consequences of cultural products from the
products themselves is to neglect these ongoing activities of
interpretation and assimilation. (1990:
105)
Anderson and Sharrock do indeed appear to
be pointing to an interesting and enduring paradox at the heart of
the generally left-oriented 'liberal' vein of media studies, namely
that on the one hand such commentators are inclined to reject calls
for censorship of violence, sex and so on because there is no
evidence that such materials lead people to commit acts of violence
or rape; on the other hand they are prepared to claim that the
capitalist media are generally powerful instruments in the struggle
for bourgeois hegemony. This is a criticism which was recently
echoed by Greg Philo, formerly of the Clasgow University Media
Group. According to The Guardian of June 2 1996 a book was
planned which was to consist of a variety of contributions from
media studies experts. The general tenor was, according to The
Guardian, intended to be that newspapers had vastly over-rated
the supposed danger to society from violence on TV. Philo's
contribution to the book was rejected, supposedly on the grounds
that it did not subscribe to that view. Philo commented of his
'complacent' colleagues:
Liberals in cultural studies have allied
themselves with the media corporations and the likes of Melvyn
Bragg and Michael Winner. They seem to be saying that the fear
about TV violence has been generated by the newspapers. But how
can they believe that one medium, newspapers, can produce a moral
panic while denying that another, television, can influence
attitudes to violence?
Trivial conclusions
Overall, Sharrock and Anderson reach the
conclusion that media studies, in constantly repeating that the
media are socially produced, that the media do not simply mirror
reality, that importance and interest are not properties inherent in
events and so on, simply succeeds in stating the obvious.
Whilst reception studies and content
analysis may have accumulated evidence to support the 'critical'
approach to the media, they have also undermined any simplistic
understanding of the way that the media operate.
Jürgen Habermas
summarizes the most significant findings which challenge any such
simple view of monolithic culture industries influencing passive
audiences:
- broadcasting institutions are subject to
competing interests and are unable to effect a seamless
integration of economic, political-ideological, professional and
media-aesthetic standpoints
- mass media are not normally able to
escape without conflict those obligations which arise out of their
journalistic mission
- broadcasts do not only or even mostly
correspond to the standards of mass culture and even when they
take on the trivial forms of popular entertainment, they can
readily contain critical messages - 'popular culture as popular
revenge
- ideological messages miss their
addressees because the intended meaning becomes twisted under the
conditions of reception which pertain in a specific subcultural
background
- the idiosyncratic nature of everyday
communicative practice defends itself against an unmediated
manipulative effort from the mass media
- the technical development of electronic
media does not necessarily lead to a centralization of the
networks, even if 'video-pluralism' and 'television demoicracy'
are for the moment no more than anarchistic visions. Habermas (1981)
Vol2. p.574
No dominant ideology
Some critics would argue that the working
classes do not conform because they subscribe to the dominant
ideology, nor
do the ruling classes rule because they have succeeded in the
struggle for
hegemony.
Rather, such critics argue, the working classes conform because they
need to keep their jobs and the ruling classes rule because they are
rich. From this point of view, wealth confers power and that's all
there is to it. The ruling classes dominate, not because they
succeed in establishing themselves in a position of ideological
leadership, but because their wealth allows them, in all the various
ways which are tediously familiar, to buy access to power. The
subordinated classes are dominated, not because they are afflicted
by some notional
false consciousness,
but because they need to survive and in order to survive they need
to play by the rules set by those who run the game. This view is put
quite convincingly by Abercrombie at al (1994),
who point to various studies showing that the subordinate classes'
values are often a contradictory mix of political positions, e.g.
support for the welfare state together with support for New Right
individualism and free market doctrines. That one can certainly not
simply assume that the dominated classes' values are those of the
dominant, nor indeed that they are a coherent set of 'resistive'
values is quite evident from the range of ethnographic and similar
studies which have been carried out in research since the eighties
(see the section on
recent developments).
These studies generally tend to lend weight to
de Certeau's
claims of semiotic subversion amongst the dominated, the 'tactics of
resistance' practised by the weak to undermine the strategies of
dominance practised by the strong.
Where next?
The criticisms referred to above are
primarily criticisms of the application of the Marxist approach,
rather than of Marxism per se. Naturally, Marxism, like any other
political philosophy, has had its opponents ever since Marx first
formulated it. Foremost amongst such critics is the philosopher Sir
Karl Popper and any reader interested in an attack on the very
fundamentals of Marxism is referred to his Poverty of Historicism
and The Open Society and its Enemies. Critics of Marxism have
traditionally had little impact on Marxists, since, as Peter Medawar
points out:
... just as any criticism of
psychoanalysis is construed as an infirmity of the psyche which
itself requires psychoanalytic treatment, so criticism of an
essentially Marxist theory is thought to reveal its author as yet
another victim and dupe of the very socio-economic forces he has
presumed to question. Medawar (1996)
I suppose, then, that if you want to make
up your mind about the validity of Marxist approaches to the media,
you probably need to make up your mind about Marxism itself. I wish
you luck - that is certainly beyond the scope of this website!
You might also wish to question whether the
Marxist approach has much in common with the method of the natural
sciences and whether you think it should. I think we would expect of
a hypothesis in the natural sciences that it
- should be consonant with the observed
facts
- should make predictions which can be
tested
- should be capable of falsification (i.e.
capable of being disproved - in essence the same as the
requirement above)
- should be internally consistent
Whether those are requirements we might
reasonably also apply not only to Marxism, but to the social
sciences in general is also a matter for you to decide, as it is
well beyond the scope of what we can discuss here. You might wish,
though, to begin by asking yourself just what are the 'observed
facts' with which Marxist claims of media influence might be
consonant. That in 'bourgeois democracies' many voters continue to
take elections seriously? That in capitalist societies people go
shopping for goods they could do without? That many working people
vote Conservative, apparently against their class interests? And how
would you go about testing these - could you, for example, take a
control group who are kept isolated from the capitalist media?
Hardly likely. And what about 'internal consistency'? Isn't it odd
that critics on the left claim such enormous long-term power for the
capitalist media and yet are generally loath to countenance controls
on sex and violence in the media because 'there is no evidence' that
such content is harmful? Just what would such 'evidence' look like
anyway?
Those are all questions which you will
rarely have time to address in a media studies course, but it seems
to me that they are pretty fundamental nevertheless.
Over the past fifteen years or so, there
has been some change in the nature of 'radical' criticism of the
media. To an extent, Marxism, because, it is argued, of the collapse
of supposedly Communist states in Eastern Europe, has come in recent
years to be seen by some critics as being as irrelevant as argument
about the divine right of kings. Quite why the implosion of the
eastern bloc is considered to invalidate Marxism is beyond me. If
events in those Stalinist countries were considered to tell us
anything about Marxism, then surely the massacre of the kulaks, the
invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the erection of the Berlin
wall etc. should have invalidated Marxism long ago. The question of
whether or not Marxism leads inevitably to such state terrorism is
surely of more fundamental importance than the fact of the collapse
of states supposedly based on Marx's doctrines. Even the simple
question of whether Marx's predictions were right or wrong is surely
more important than the collapse of communist states.
Be that as it may, there has been a shift
away from Marxism. In part, the 'radical' media researchers have
shifted towards reception analysis, as they have increasingly found
Marxism an inadequate tool, partly as a result of the disintegration
in
post-modern
times of
totalizing metanarratives,
of which Marxism is one. For various reasons, the 'radical'
critics have moved towards the 'pluralist'
position. In some cases, the pluralists have moved in the direction
of the radicals. It is not at all clear at present where all of this
will end up.
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