Missing Marx
By Editor on March 19, 2008 4:05 pm
Much of today’s media research is a pale imitation of earlier work, or an awkward marriage of distinct approaches, eager not to offend. Critical conversations tend to be trivial and a paralysing sense of caution prevails. David McQueen on how neo-liberal ‘reformers’ are picking at the very foundations of media scholarship.
VERY RECENT HISTORY is a strange thing. We can talk easily of any decade except our own — and scholarship is no different in that respect from art, fashion, music or politics. It is easy to describe the trends of 20 or 30 years ago, but much harder to make sense of recent developments. My own research convinces me that media scholarship has entered a highly cautious and — dare I say — ‘conservative’ phase. If such a prognosis were ever accepted it would, of course, be regarded as a small victory for the columnists of The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail who have led a long sniping campaign against Media Studies. But is it true?
Studying television current affairs history over the past three decades has been a fascinating reminder of how far Britain has shifted from the assumptions of a welfare state, mixed-economy mindset that characterised almost every aspect of life under a nominally socialist Labour government in the 1970s and which persisted for a considerable time into Thatcher’s Britain.
Reading PhD studies, academic papers and critical literature, or watching videotaped current affairs and documentary programmes of the 1970s and 1980s is like entering an ideological Tardis. You emerge in a landscape where battle lines are carved deeply, where trenchant, oppositional views about the direction the country should take are traded centre stage rather than at the margins of society, and where radical perspectives are debated in a forthright, unembarrassed manner. Academic study of the media is characterised by the clear sense of an imminent threat posed by the nation’s move towards a more ‘free market’ economy and a refusal to compromise critical perspectives.
Of the 70s, 80s
None of this should be a surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with recent British history, but it is still something of a shock to explore and savour the texture of thought from some 20 or 30 years ago. What strikes me most is the unashamedly radical ambition of cultural criticism of that time. Birmingham and Glasgow Universities clearly led the way in developing the social scientific study of the mass media in the 1970s and 80s, seducing academics from other disciplines in sociology, psychology, philosophy and English Literature to engage in a new and undoubtedly significant and socially relevant field of applied theory.
Stuart Hall, probably Britain’s most important thinker in a generation, then based at Birmingham’s Centre for Cultural Studies developed a rigorous yet sophisticated model for understanding the ideological ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ of media messages by institutions and audiences. Hall identified the role of ‘primary definers’ (the government, police, courts and other powerful institutions) to set an agenda for news reporting.
The Glasgow University Media Group was a second powerhouse of critical thought where the research conducted complimented the work done in Birmingham. Greg Philo, David Miller and others produced exhaustive and definitive studies of broadcast news coverage showing the bias against trade unions, for example, and towards ruling class elite and business perspectives. I should pause to note here that even the word ‘class’ itself has almost passed out of use in contemporary scholarship, as if the widening poverty gap and entrenched class system of Britain had somehow simply disappeared from academic view.
From America, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s ‘propaganda model’ offered further insights showing how the media employed particular ‘filters’ to reproduce dominant ideological perspectives. Chomsky and Herman’s ongoing analysis retains its explanatory power and is highly influential beyond the academy, although curiously, like Marshall McLuhan their work is deeply unfashionable and avoided altogether by many academics.
Much of this work drew its analysis from a line of Marxist-oriented critique inflected and developed through the work of Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, the Frankfurt School and others. The analysis of ruling class domination of the media (‘the intellectual means of production’) and the ‘resistant practices’ of dominated groups was based on a conception of ongoing class struggle. Academics from this period describe their own work quite explicitly as a part of this struggle, an important element of wider ‘resistance’.
Critical ‘radicalism’ in the 1970s and 80s was certainly not confined to academics. Within the media radical perspectives were also influential. A recent study by John Corner (et al) reminds us how refreshingly ‘anti-establishment’ a prime time current affairs programme such as World in Action could be and still draw audiences of up to 10 million. To see John Pilger in prime time on one of only three available broadcast channels exploring the ‘silent mutiny’ of American soldiers in Vietnam; or to discover the dangers of asbestos, tobacco, and poor motor car design; or delve behind the saintly corporate image of Marks and Spencers to see the child labour used to produce the clothes sold in their shops, is to enter a broadcasting environment so different from our own that it produces real disorientation.
The last barricade
That’s not to say that all current affairs from the 1970s and 1980s posed a challenge to the status quo, or that good investigative journalism does not happen today. It’s just that most of it is tucked away in programmes such as Dispatches on ‘minority’ channels facing competition from tens or even hundreds of channels of cheap, titillating, celebrity-driven, advertising-friendly alternatives. Similarly, not all media research today is complacent or unambitious. Simply that with so much more of it around and with the theory wars of the 1990s well and truly played out, there does not seem to be the same invigorating, challenging sense of discovery of 20 years ago, or the explicit debt to Marxist perspectives.
The important, but overstated, work of John Fiske and others in the late 1980s celebrating audience power to decode subversively and transform the products of ‘dominant power blocs’ into ‘resistant practices’ combined, particularly, with the influence of French theory on Cultural Studies, to become something of a theoretical free-for-all with academics rushing to dismantle what remained of crucial Marxist insights into the media’s role in society.
The result is that much of today’s media research is a pale imitation of earlier work, or an awkward marriage of distinct approaches, eager not to offend. Critical conversations tend to be at the level of minutiae and a paralysing sense of caution prevails. As universities are squeezed financially, and academics feel a draught from the cold winds of capital blowing through the economy they are careful not to make themselves targets for future cuts.
No one would admit as much, but academic freedom to think is constrained by the realities of having to pay a mortgage. More ominously, two overtly right-wing publications masquerading as academic studies - Aitken’s Can we trust the BBC? and North’s Scrap the BBC! (by his own admission funded by anonymous ‘interested parties’), both published in 2007, suggest how the future might look for ‘media research’.
Good work still goes on, by Philo, Miller and others, but it is quietly marginalised or often ignored altogether. ‘Mainstream’ media theory, I would argue, is drifting, unanchored. By degrees it pulls away from its theoretical underpinnings and moves to accommodate the shifting realities of a deregulated, ‘free-market’ media environment.
Unpicking the BBC’s remaining public broadcasting commitments and funding guarantees remains the final challenge for neo-liberal ‘reformers’ that stalk television’s regulatory bodies and the corridors of power. Media academics should rally to this last remaining barricade of public service broadcasting against the onslaught of private power.
Fully understanding the threat to our media from corporate power and challenging that threat requires a reconnection with the critical roots of academic media analysis. This would clearly aggravate those traditionally opposed to the tradition, particularly in the right wing press. But then if it didn’t upset those critics media academics wouldn’t be doing their job.
David McQueen is the author of Television: A Media Student’s Guide (1999) published by Arnold. He is currently researching an archive of current affairs programmes at Bournemouth University.
Image: Sunil Krishnan
Your Thoughts (5 Comments)
March 19th, 2008 4:28 pm by Dr Lee Salter
March 20th, 2008 12:18 am by Keith Tomasek
An inspired call to action!
March 20th, 2008 3:45 pm by Hugh Chignell
I have a lot of sympathy for David’s position, but i also think he is wrong.
As someone who was in a British university in the 1970s when all academics in our field were either Marxists or certainly on the left I know this was not a liberating experience. Intellectual life was not energised by the dead weight of Marxism. As for Pilger he reminds me of the US documentary maker Michael Moore and in fact isn’t this the problem? Selective use of evidence to prove a point, deliberate manipulation of evidence and people to fit pre-conceived ideas (eg Bowling for Columbine). I don’t think media academics have retreated or are afraid of radicalism i think that what radicalism means in a global/ post-modern environment needs re-assessment.
You describe a dichotomy between public service broadcasting (good) and commercial media (bad). This really is much too simplistic.
I also think that the idea that media academics are frightened away from proper raidcal Marxist ideas because they have to pay the mortgage is a complete misrepresentation - perhaps they got bored with Marxism because it’s wrong!
This is an important and complex debate so thanks to Chindu and David for getting it started.
Hugh Chignell
March 21st, 2008 5:02 am by Editor
David,
Thank you for this important and thought-provoking article. I’d like to respond to some of the issues you raise, to offer a few speculations on the legacy of Marx(ism) in media studies.
Could one argue that the critical thrust of Marx in media studies has been dampened rather than forgotten, and that in subterranean or oblique ways it continues to make its presence felt productively? Following Foucault, I am inclined to see the Marx of media studies as a founder of discursivity, enabling a space for certain kinds of questions to be asked and to be treated as legitimate. These questions– about modes of production, political economy, ideology, material and historical conditions of media production and analysis– one could argue, continue to animate debates in media studies.
At the same time, I wonder if one might see the field of media studies enriched by the emergence and intervention of other paradigms (whether related to Marxism or not) such as postcolonial theory and poststructuralism. The Marxist paradigm is justifiably open to external critique for its own omissions, assumptions, and forms of symbolic violence. I think it is a fair argument to make that discussions of gender, race, sexual orientation, or colonialism, as they apply to questions of media or more generally, cannot be subsumed under Marxist frameworks without at the same time profoundly destabilizing those frameworks and calling some of their universalist or hegemonic aspects into question.
French cultural theory shares the Marxist critique of neoliberalism. I think, here, of Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the journalistic field and his essays in Acts of Resistance. Poststructuralism itself can be situated, in one respect, as a response to Marxism after 1968 (sidebar: an interesting website on the ‘political in postmarxist theory can be seen at http://www.after1968.org/), and as such, a conversation with Marxism even as it offers an important critique of the totalizing claims of some Marxist paradigms.
Corporate ‘interestedness,’ if one may call it that, in academic production is immensely problematic, of course, pointing to the urgent need for preserving the autonomy of the academy and freeing the conditions under which research and scholarship is produced from corporate influence.
But does Marxism or Marxist orthodoxy in specific disciplines, say, not run the same risk of compromising or stilfing academic freedom and autonomy? (I should clarify that I am not echoing here the reductive argument about the academy as a bastion teeming with Leftists).
I recall an interview with Foucault where he speaks of how his work was initially met with much hostility by the French Left. Edward Said’s Orientalism, was similarly critiqued by Marxist scholars. The Italian author, Lampedusa, was also criticized by the Italian Left, because his magisterial work, The Leopard, dealt with the aristocracy and not with the proletariat– a simplistic reading of literary value if there ever was one!
In the Indian context, Marxist scholarship as much as liberal or neoliberal paradigms of research– not necessarily only in media studies but in other humanities and social science disciplines— has been guilty of excluding other academic perspectives or condemning them as illegitimate forms of inquiry. My point is not that Marxism is obligated to abstain from critiquing other paradigms, but simply that its claims to foundational theoretical status are not self-evident.
A final point about the politics of praxis and Marxism. While careful to distinguish between the theoretical legacies of Marxism and Marxist frames of political commitment, the radical potential of Marxism is, arguably, grounded in that relationship between theory and praxis. But the nature of that relationship cannot be taken for granted and is itself contingent on numerous factors. Quite simply, then, an internal or reflexive awareness within Marxism of its possible complicities with acts of violence will not suffice. An example should make this clearer.
You may have seen the recent news coverage of the Chinese state cracking down on Tibetan protestors. To put it in somewhat understated terms, the Indian Left has not quite responded with the same gusto that they reserve for, say, human rights violations committed by the US.
The hypocrisy of the Indian political Left– and its convenient invocation of either nationalism or transnational Marxist solidarity– is well known. Its silence is not suprising. What is more surprising– or perhaps not– is the silence of Indian Left intellectuals on the reaction of the Indian political Left. There are no critiques in the Indian Left-oriented publications of inconsistencies on the part of Left-leaning theorists, activists, or authors. There are no Marxist analyses of the political economy of the production of discourses on China, no Chomskyian readings of the silencing of Tibetan voices in mainstream Indian media discourse. The actions of China, today, like the actions of the USSR in the past do not provoke the same outrage from the Left nor provide them with the same inspiration for critique that the imaginary of the West, especially the US, does.
I am not suggesting that such silences necessarily imply the lack of value of Marx for media studies. But only that perspectives external to Marx are needed as well.
A final thought: does capital invariably and completely corrupt? Or are forms of negotiations with capital possible that do not compromise autonomy?
Once again, thank you for raising these critically important issues for discussion,
Regards
Rohit Chopra
Editor, Interjunction
March 21st, 2008 9:29 am by David McQueen
Rohit,
You give an excellent critique of the danger of any totalising explanatory framework and I agree with the thrust of your argument that issues around gender, race, sexual orientation, and colonialism, for example, have been enriched by fresh perspectives since the 1980s. My main point is that class-based analysis of the media of the kind common in the 70s and 80s seems to be ‘out of fashion’ at a time when class divisions in Britain have widened to quite stunning levels. The idea that we can just ditch Marxist perspectives as outdated or plain ‘wrong’ is to me equivalent to reaffirming belief in a flat earth. It is a denial of the reality of a ruling class controlling the vast bulk of our media and using for their own class interests.
Hugh says I simplify between ‘good’ public service broadcasting media and ‘bad’ commercial media. In broadcasting I think that PSB has simply created a space that is far less constrained by the profit motive. I would argue that is why the BBC is still regarded as the best broadcasting institution in the world. It is the envy of other nations and having lived abroad for ten years I appreciate it more than most, although by no means uncritically. We also see this in legislative terms in the PSB requirements that fostered Channel 4 - at its best when in its first decade it was relatively free to cater to minority interests. Current affairs programming suffered dramatic cuts as soon as PSB commitment to screen in prime time were dropped. TV shorn of PSB ideals would be catastophic and the British public realise this. Even after the Hutton whitewash trust in the BBC remained fairly firm while trust in Tony Blair’s government declined dramatically.
Finally I would like to stand by John Pilger and Michael Moore. Was Pilger ‘wrong’ to report on the appalling nature of the war in Vietnam? Few other journalists were exposing the reality on the ground. Is Moore ‘wrong’ to show how disastrous gun culture is in the US, or how the Iraq invasion and war on terror were built on so many deceptions, or wrong to expose the ruinous state of private health care in America. When journalists take a highly critical look at powerful institutions or challenge private poiwer they are always accused of being biased, unbalanced, selective in their use of evidence, polemical. Yet mainstream journalism commits the same faults on a daily basis and do not receive the same ‘flak’. That is a double standard that media academics need to expose.
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Good article! However, Marx has not been so completely abandoned. Pluto recently (2003) released Mike Wayne’s “Marxism and Media Studies”, an excellent attempt to get Marxist media studies back on track. Also of note is the work of some American Marxist scholars, such as Dan Schiller (the son of Herbert), who recently (2007) published his excellent “How to Think About Information”. Another Marx-inspired book came out in the US a couple of years ago, called Marxism And Communication Studies: The Point Is to Change It I think the big problem is more one of marginalisation rather than missing as such. After all, Colin Sparks, Murdoch and Golding, Des Freedman, and Hanno Hardt have all written some good stuff recently by employing Marxist categories.