Hegemony, Mass Media and Cultural Studies: Properties of Meaning, Power, and Value in Cultural Production
240
Hegemony, Mass Media and Cultural Studies: Properties of Meaning, Power, and Value in Cultural Production
240eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Three strains of critical cultural and media theory were especially engaged with the continued critique of the role of commodified, industrially produced, mass distributed culture- the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, the Cultural Materialism and active audiences of Cultural Studies, and Critical Political Economy of Communication. This book examines these three paradigms, illustrating the major tensions and points of agreement between them, particularly in relation to the dominant paradigms of administrative social science research and media ecology within communication and media studies more broadly.
From the perspective of the emergent cultural environment, Hegemony, American Mass Media and Cultural Studies argues that the original points of disagreement between these paradigms appear less contradictory than before. In doing so it offers a new theoretical toolkit for those seeking to understand the current struggles for a more just, more democratic media, culture, and society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783485574 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2016 |
| Series: | Cultural Studies and Marxism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Hegemony, Mass Media, and Cultural Studies
Properties of Meaning, Power, and Value in Cultural Production
By Sean Johnson Andrews
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2017 Sean Johnson AndrewsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-557-4
CHAPTER 1
Valorizing Hegemony
American Mass Media, Intellectual Property, and the Economic Value of the Ideological State Apparatuses
INTRODUCTION
I have a problem. And, if you are reading this, it is very likely that you do, too, though you may not think of it that way. Someone else probably owns a significant portion of your consciousness. Memories from your childhood are likely shot through with references to commodity culture — copyrighted songs, poems, books, and movies; trademarked toys; and brands of food and clothing. These references may mean different things to you than they do to anyone else, and, certainly, they form a baseline of cultural communication that can be reappropriated, remixed, and reused just like any other cultural resources from the past. However, these references are made through the medium of properties owned by one or another multinational corporation, which means that they cannot be reappropriated without permission, and likely, without a significant fee paid to the legal owners.
While incumbent culture industry lobbyists claim that stronger intellectual property rights are needed to protect against piracy, this is only one of the ways their value is being protected by these policies. For instance, take one of the more memorable children's parties I have attended in the past two years was held at a Turkish restaurant in northern Chicago, whose owners happened to be the grandparents of the three-year-old boy in question. Most of the kids were cordoned off into a separate corner of the restaurant, reflecting the benefits of ownership, while the twenty or so adults congregated around a long table. In the kids' section were the hallmarks of American children's party fare — fruit, hot dogs, soda, and a bowl of candy. The theme of the party was Monsters, Inc., complete with a showing of the full film on two monitors: a laptop and a large screen plasma TV. But not only did the family not bother with acquiring a license covering this public performance, but the film was also a pirated version, dubbed in Georgian, with the torrent file name clearly visible across the bottom of the screen.
If we look at this in purely economic terms, Walt Disney Company and Pixar lost a sale as the film's rights holders. If they actually invested in the Georgian dubbing, they missed out on the ten to fifteen dollars they might have made on the legitimate sale of a DVD of the film — not to mention the license fee for a public screening of the film. Of course, they received some money indirectly from the licensee who produced the floor-to-ceiling Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. decorations that framed the tables, piled with presents, many of which likely had some relationship to a Disney licensee. But more importantly, Disney has indirectly appropriated all memories of this event as a source of future earnings. This more informal appropriation, enacted not by Disney alone but in conjunction with consumers of its cultural products, is the primary object of this book.
The boy lives in a house where four languages are spoken — Russian, Turkish, Georgian, and a smattering of English. But if the dominant culture administered at this significant milestone is any indication, the cultural property most deeply embedded in his consciousness — or the one his parents wish would be — will be wholly owned by the Disney Corporation for the rest of his life. For at least the next century, the characters he grows to love, their exploits, his interpretations of them, indeed his memory of this event, will be subject to the authority — and licensing fees — of lawyers managing a growing repository of our cultural heritage. Calling this a "cultural heritage" may fly in the face of some understandings of the concept, which are usually focused on either the supposedly more authentic folk culture or the selective tradition of our finest works of art. But insofar as the "imagined communities" of modern nation-states have an active cultural repository of shared meanings, it is largely found in the mass-mediated popular culture of movies, TV, newspapers, and, to a growing extent, digital online content. The difference between this and the more conventional cultural heritage — which is usually held as a common resource — is that this one is owned by a multinational corporation. The slim and diminishing possibility of fair use aside, any future references this boy makes to this film in a legitimate public forum will require paying further fees into the value fund of Monsters, Inc., which now sits at a global box office of over $500 million.
Using these features of our heritage in any legitimate way — that is, using them in any way that will produce more culture, whether through sampling, remixing, or even some accidental inclusion in a true-to-life documentary fashion — will require navigating lawyers, legal fees, licensing contracts, and other juridical enclosures. In this context, it is important to raise our eyes up from the immediate circumstances, to think of culture as broadly as possible — as an anthropological interpersonal process of making meaning about the world and our place in it — and to recognize that, while the particular instance (the pirated film) defies the economic logic of capitalism, at a more fundamental level — the level of the semiotically significant signifiers that activate the signifieds of consciousness itself — culture has been commodified. In this sense, Jason Read's formulation of contemporary capitalism and its relationship to culture is more than suggestive:
It is no longer possible to separate capital, as the producer of goods and commodities, from what used to be called the superstructure: the production of ideas, beliefs, perceptions, and tastes. Capitalist production has today either directly appropriated the production of culture, beliefs, and desires or it has indirectly linked them to the production and circulation of commodities. [...] This transformation also entails a fundamental mutation of labor: it is no longer simple physical labor that has to be put to work but knowledges, affects, and desires. In short, capitalist production has taken on a dimension that could be described as "micro-political," inserting itself into the texture of day-to-day social existence and, ultimately, subjectivity itself. (Read 2003, 2)
While political theorists like Read (2003) and Jodi Dean (2009) have produced elaborate conceptualizations of what this development means for political power and economic value, I am more interested in the way these ideas intersect with those of media and cultural studies.
The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the historical, technological, political, and economic contexts of three critical paradigms of media studies — the Frankfurt School, early British cultural studies, and the political economy of communication — and develop a relevant theoretical synthesis for the twenty-first-century media environment, particularly in the digitally mediated, postindustrial core of the capitalist world system. Each of these theoretical paradigms is important in that they consider media a fundamental part of an overdetermined social totality. However, they each emphasize a different set of determinations, institutions, and social practices. In some cases, these emphases are the product of the limited snapshot of history in which those paradigms of thought developed; but history also has a way of repeating itself, making these insights relevant again. By placing these paradigms in conversation with one another, animating them in a fuller sweep of history, and comparing them to emergent theoretical paradigms, I will develop a productive convergence which better explains the current media environment and its political, cultural, and economic function in the contemporary, Western, capitalist social formation.
But, beyond this theoretical intervention, I also produce an alternative sociological and historical conception and analysis of the changing relationship between the media and culture in Western capitalist countries — especially the United States — over the past century and a half. If we understand culture as a basic human process of shared meaning-making, then having the basic resources of what we might call folk cultural activities transferred to multinational corporations has significant implications for the politics and economics of meaning. I trace the development of a more mediated culture from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth to our present era. I argue that, whatever the relevance of these theoretical paradigms, there has been a qualitative and quantitative shift in the amount of and degree to which our culture is dominated by the mass media. This means that the work we do on and through these media — as culture — is increasingly appropriated by these corporations. Contemporary theorists of digital media are excited by the seemingly new, participatory capabilities offered by Web 2.0 media, but many are also critical of the process by which the labor of users is appropriated. I argue that these developments are actually a continuation of a much older pattern whereby the resources of cultural production become properties owned by major media corporations.
Or, rather, I should say "ostensibly owned," since one of the major problems is that the actual law of copyright and other intellectual property is often overwhelmed by what realist legal scholars call the unequal access to legal resources: regardless of whether major media corporations actually have the rights they claim over the resources in question, they have much larger legal budgets and can threaten suits over properties that would seem to be in their portfolios (Wertheimer 1988). Out of an overabundance of caution, many of the lawyers who underwrite the insurance for mass media distribution require licenses and permissions for uses of mediated culture that should be covered by fair use or other exemptions. This creates a dynamic where even the properties or the uses that should be fair use or in the public domain become lucrative markets for the major media conglomerates, effectively undermining future claims to fair use and allowing those owners to accrete rights out of an inertia of their primitive accumulation of culture (Gibson 2007).
A recent example of this accretion of rights, to return to the scenario above, is the song "Happy Birthday to You." Until recently, the public performance of this song (i.e., the singing of it by party participants at this public restaurant or its use in a documentary movie) was presumed to require a license from Warner Brothers, who claimed ownership over it despite a murky lineage. Since it acquired the license rights in 1988, the company has collected an estimated $2 million per year on licenses for a piece of culture whose value is primarily created in millions of private gatherings (Sisario 2016). In early 2015, after years of animosity over this appropriation, a federal judge ruled that the song actually appears to have been in the public domain for decades — and that Warner Brothers had to pay back $14 million in license fees it collected on a piece of culture it didn't actually own (Mullin 2016). The lead plaintiff in the case was an independent filmmaker Jennifer Nelson, who had experience paying the steep licensing fees for the song and bristled at the notion that someone could own such a basic cultural resource (Mai-Duc 2015). While the resolution of this case is a triumph for the public domain, it should also alert us to the fundamental injustice of Warner Brothers claim: this twenty-first century media conglomerate might have believed it had a legal right to license a song published in 1893, but the question should be why it is even a possibility that they could have this right.
How have we arrived at a stage where the properties of cultural production — like the songs and decorations of a children's party — are owned by a handful of transnational corporations? Part of the answer to this question can be found in the history of "Happy Birthday to You." The song was ostensibly written by two sisters for use in one of their kindergarten classrooms (Brauneis 2008-2009). They later published it and donated the proceeds to a children's education fund. It was decades later when Warner Brothers acquired the license to the song. Legal scholar Robert Brauneis argues that its folk origins may be a legend, but insofar as it is accurate, it points to a different moment in the history of media's relationship to culture: a time when two amateurs could produce a song intended for their local context, but whose publication led it to become, in Brauneis's estimation, "the world's most popular song." By the middle of the twentieth century, media had become more important than ever before to the cultural process of meaning-making; but, in the same proportion, amateurs were less able to produce meaningful culture through that media infrastructure. This media culture was commodified, consolidated, and copyrighted by industrial oligopolies that enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with the US state, which provided legal-technological barriers to entry in the form of monopoly broadcast licenses in exchange for assistance in administering American society and culture. The supposed disruptions of the digital age have not upset the basic relationships established in the mid-twentieth century between media culture, its owners, and the consumer — users who ultimately coproduce its meaning, power, and value.
The first part of this book will reflect on the earlier relationship between media culture: "Happy Birthday to You" was likely written in the twilight of this culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The dual transformation in terms of the saturation and malleability of the media qua culture has been the primary object of media studies since its inception. The remainder of the book looks at what media studies critics have said of this growing consolidation over the course of this transfer of public culture into private hands, asking what can we learn from their sometimes contradictory but always contextual insights in an age where the relationship between culture and media seems to have become more fluid than ever. In this chapter, I outline some of the broad concerns and key concepts that will animate the rest of the study, as well as provide some more recent examples that highlight their concrete, continued relevance in the participatory, digital age.
CREATIVITY, CULTURE, AND COPYRIGHT
The skeptic might point out that there are plenty of cultural resources that are free and open for use and reuse. There remain folk tales and a vast swath of literature that Disney or another culture industry conglomerate has yet to convert (or reconvert) into cartoons. There is popular culture made and distributed by independent producers, with millions of hours of YouTube videos created every week. Insofar as we are looking at components of culture that are recognizable in a broad, popular way, these exceptions prove the rule. In the first case, we might call upon Raymond Williams's distinction between archaic and residual cultural elements (Williams 1977). Of these, while the archaic might technically be a part of the culture, it is not recognized as such. Only the residual really serves as a resource for cultural communication. Or, to use a more quantitative metric, as Franco Moretti does in his essay "The Slaughterhouse of Literature," we might point out: "The majority of books disappear forever — and 'majority' actually misses the point: if we set today's canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 per cent of all published novels" (Moretti 2013, 66). While we might commend Moretti's attempt to read the twenty thousand other books published in the nineteenth century — using statistical sampling and, in his more recent work on The Bourgeois, big data from Google's Books project (Moretti 2014) — it remains the case that what he calls "that forgotten 99 per cent [...] the largest contingent of the 'great unread,'" (Moretti 2013, 67) remains unread; they are obscure reference points for all but a select minority and, therefore, almost completely ineffective as vehicles for broad cultural communication. They might help the random individual navigate the world, but sharing that insight with others would demand that they partake in a conversational prebriefing that only the colleagues and partners of literary critics and film scholars are primed to endure. Our common US folk culture today can barely sustain a reference to Shakespeare or the Bible, much less Mark Twain or Silas Lapham.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hegemony, Mass Media, and Cultural Studies by Sean Johnson Andrews. Copyright © 2017 Sean Johnson Andrews. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.