Will Straw,
Director, Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
CANADA
Time, Culture and Heritage
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Will Straw,
Director, Graduate Program in Communications
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
In a book of architectural theory entitled Anytime, Mennan, Kutukcuoglu and Yazgan
suggest that ìAny culture produces a system of delaysî:
This system [of delays] secures the integrity of a culture, which by definition builds upon
a set of procedural and behavioral codes that transform it into a machine for delay. (1999:
71)
I have developed this idea principally in work I am doing on urban culture; how are cities, we
might ask, machines for delay? Iíll leave that one alone for the purposes of this text. What I do
want to pursue, briefly, is the way in which the contemporary cultural industries function as
machines for delay. One route along which we might pursue these questions involves ideas
developed by the literary scholar Janell Watson. Using terms borrowed from economics, Watson
suggests that we might differentiate beween cultures according to their mode of accumulation
(Watson, 1999: 40). How do different cultures accumulate, organise and preserve their cultural
artefacts? What is the balance, in different cultures, between the old and the new. In what ways,
and to what extent, does the cultural production of the past anchor the cultural production of the
present?
We might extend these questions in relation to the official institutions of national or local
heiritage -- by looking at museums, monuments and archives as important parts of any mode of
accumulation. I am more interested in these questions in relationship to popular culture and to
the cultural industries with which that popular culture is typically linked. More specifically, I
want to address the relationship between media technologies and each cultureís mode of
accumulation.
Let me tell you one of my favourite anecdotes from the recent history of the cultural
industries in the United States. In 1988, Barry London, the president of marketing and domestic
distribution at Paramount Pictures, noted that older people were going more frequently to the
cinema than they had in several years. For almost two decades, movie attendance by those in
middle-age or older had declined; now, in the late 1980s, it was beginning to climb upwards
again. The reason for this, London suggested, was the availability of movies on video cassette
(Harmetz, 1988: C15). As older people rented recent films, they became reacquainted with the
contemporary cinema. Part of this reacquaintance involved finding that they were less estranged
than they imagined they might be from the moral and aesthetic standards of contemporary
cinema. Through video, as well, contemporary star performers became familiar to people who
previously felt cut off from the world of contemporary celebrity. Home video offered people the
opportunities for regular, ongoing apprenticeship in the languages and iconography of
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contemporary theatrical films.
In the 1990s, as well, observors of Hollywood noted that the careers of movie actors were
now longer, more stable than had been the case a decade earlier. Actors could remain popular
despite appearing in several successive films which failed in their theatrical release. Again,
industry observers suggested, the reason for this was the expansion of the home video industry.
The production of videocassettes meant that films which failed at the box office were,
nevertheless, seen by millions of people who rented them on those nights when nothing else was
left in the video store. Performers -- even if they appeared in several flops in a row -- therefore
remained within the consciousness of the public in a more long-term and stable fashion. The
rhythms by which careers and reputations rose and decline were, if you like, smoothed out.
These developments might seem minor and sectoral, but I would like to pursue some of
their implications. The video cassette is a carrier of cultural meanings, but it is, as well, what
media theorists call a bearer of extra-somatic memory -- a carrier of memory outside the body.
Video cassettes, like DVDs or compact discs, bear upon them the identities of performers, the
markers of style or genre, and a range of other features in which the cultural industries have
invested significant resources. Our ongoing familiarity with such features is one of the
conditions of intelligibility of those new products which contain them. A cultureís mode of
accumulation includes those processes whereby older artefacts accumulate, and remain active as
generators of those intertextual spaces through which the new becomes intelligible.
Home video promised, at least for a while, to bring diversity to peopleís tastes and
viewing habits, by making available films which theatrical exhibitors might consider risky. This
has happened, to a certain extent, but home video has served just as forcefully to deepen and
solidify peopleís attachment to a particular Hollywood model. When older people began
returning to movie theatres, because the videocassette had reduced their estrangement from
newer films, historical continuities were renewed and markets were rendered more solid. At the
same time, people were reconnected to a very particular history -- that of Hollywood films, in
particular -- when their estrangement from that cinema might have led them in other directions
(towards imported British mystery dramas on television, for example.)
To the extent that competence in reading the codes and iconography of cinema presumes
ongoing contact with cinema, home video has regularly reinvigorated those memories and
competences necessary for its own success. As such, the videoís circulation perpetuates the
circulation of celebrity persona, styles, and so on. The home video store is one part of our
current mode of accumulation. It extends the life-cycle of films over longer periods than might
previously have been the case, and thus complexifies our sense of cultural turn-over. It makes
recent films accessible to those who respond slowly to promotion and journalism, and thus
enlarges the population of those who have contact with recent cinema.
Video cassettes and compact discs carry embedded memory in purely technical ways, of
course, as media of storage and recording. Just as importantly, though, the industries which
distribute and sell these commodities have organized themselves, over the last decade, so as to
combine the functions of the archive and the retail store. Most of the entertainment industries
now make available an ever-increasing range of commodities from different points across the
history of different media. We might say that cultural industries which once seemed to function
principally according to turnover and obsolescence now operate, at least in part, according to a
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model of accumulation. To a significant degree, success comes from ensuring the steady
availability of titles from different moments in our historical past. This is the case of video
stores, music stores, on-line book stores, specialty television channels, and virtually all the
successful examples of cultural commerce on the internet.
We might consider, in analysing this phenomenon, McLuhanís Fourth Law of Media,
which argued that new media take previous media as their content, but this is only part of the
story. Huet and others claimed, long ago, that firms within cultural industries achieved stability
in their markets principally through the construction of a back catalogue (Huet et al, 1978: 26). .
The sturdy values of products from the past would allow firms to surive the turbulent and
unpredictable markets for new commodities. To this we might add the imperatives and
opportunities which new technologies of distribution have brought with them. It seems clear to
me that, as internet bandwidth grows, and as the channels for distributing music and windows for
exhibiting audio-visual programming increase, the proportion of content which comes from the
past will continue to increase. In part, this is simply a statistical probability: more things have
been made than are currently being made. It seems clear to me, nevertheless, that, amidst the
messy chaos of the internet or cable television packages, one is witnessing an enormously
significant retrieval of the cultural production of the past.
This is of more than theoretical interest, however. It invites us to examine national
cultural industries in terms of the extent to which they are engaged in a revalorization of their
accumulated heritage. On the one hand, we have those well-known processes of corporate
conglomeration, whereby a handful of multinational firms are active in the cultural industries of
most nations of the world. At the same time, we are witnessing the consolidation of national
cultural heritages, as the products of innumerable small, local or national music or film
companies have come, over many decades, into the hands of a small number of firms. Now, in
most countries, these products are being repackaged and marketed, in ways which often draw
explicitly upon notions of national cultural heritage. This has happened significantly in Quebec
over the last three or four years; there is evidence of the same process in Mexico or Brazil.
These processes are not dependent upon state heritage policies, nor are they essential to the
formation of models of cultural citizenship. Rather, they concern the manner in which
commercially-produced cultural artefacts (books, films, musical recordings) once considered
obsolete are now given new commercial life within the formats and markets produced by new
technologies.
Electronic and digital media are in many ways points of convergence and accumulation
for the scattered cultural products of any nationís past. In Brazil, the soundtracks to popular telenovelas of the past 30 or 40 years have been reissued in new packages which hightlight the
centrality of these programs within collective memory. Series of commodities, such as these,
perpetually reassert historical continuities and collective affinities in the face of industrial, social
and technological forces which theaten to disrupt or fragment social and cultural life. At the
same time, these historical continuities are one pre-conditionfor the intelligibility of new cultural
practices.
Over the past two years, I have been a member of the Board of Directors of an
organization called the Audio Visual Preservation Trust. (The Trustís website may be found at
www.avtrust.ca) The Trust was established with significant funding from the Canadian
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government. Its purpose is to promote the preservation of Canadaís cinematic, musical and
televisual heritages, and to increase public awareness of this heritage. The first thing which
might be said about this is that in English Canada -- unlike the case in Quebec, for example -there is virtually no commercial interest in reissuing old English-Canadian musical recordings.
The second thing to be noted, perhaps, is that English Canada may be the only cultural space in
the Americas in which more national cultural commodities are being produced at present than at
virtually any point in the past. If we look elsewhere, to the countries of Latin and South
America, we find, typically, that once active film industries have shrunken or died; we may find,
as well, that the erosion of local or national musical traditions by music from the AngloAmerican world has been significant and ongoing, though it is very far from complete.
In English Canada, there is virtually no sense of a significant, rich heritage of commercial
cultural production. More Canadian feature films have been produced over the last decade than
during any other period in our history; much the same is true of sound recordings, television
programs and, perhaps, published books. This increased production is so new that it has not yet
solidified within any heritage which might function to ground English-Canadian popular culture.
The irony is that, as the cultural industries of English Canada have come to be assume strength in
the present, a whole series of industrial and technological developments have enhanced the value
of the cultural past. These developments have made the marketing of the past an important part
of any successful companyís strategies.
The English-Canadian cultural industries thus confront an unpredicted paradox. A whole
set of commercial and technological developments seem, quite genuinely, to be expanding the
range of cultural options, catering to specialized tastes and even allowing, we might say, for
interesting kinds of disengagement from a U.S.-based cultural model. Audiences for bluegrass
music, tango music, classic jazz, Italian horror films of the 1960s and other cultural forms are
growing demonstrably. All of these tastes, by reinvigorating the products of the past, have
served to diminish the cultural presence of English-Canadian works; many of these
developments, as well, have increased the presence of the U. S. cultural industries.
Paradoxically, perhaps, virtually every development which promises greater abundance and
diversity does so in ways which weaken the proportion of English-Canadian cultural products
within the range of things available. Digital music services, for example, which offer dozens of
specialized channels, rely principally on styles and recordings from the past. These channels are
finely divided into genres, such as cool jazz or reggae, which bring the promise of access to
music outside the commercial mainstream. English-Canadian popular music, whose successes
have almost all been recent, finds itself ever more marginal. It is difficult to elaborate the terms
under which one might criticize these new services. Music delivery systems which promise to
deliver the best of 1930s jazz, of 1960s bossa nova, or Jamaican reggae, fulfil a pedagogical
function which has been part of the enthusiasm greeting new media technologies. At the same
time, however, the effect of this ameliorative abundance is to further marginalize the cultural
production of those nations who have not contributed, in any obvious way, to the production of
important cultural styles or genres.
It has long been noted that the popular culture of English-Canada is marked by several
sorts of discontuity. Products emerge with little relation to other products to which they might
be intertextually related or on which their legibility might depend. While there is a culture of
criticism and commentary within English-Canada, this is nothing like the richly differentiated
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media culture within which the French-language films and music of Quebec are embedded. This
discontinuity has become all the more striking as the cultural industries organize themselves
around the constant reinvigoration of cultural reference points from the past. Thus, the current
Austin Powers film resonates with references to James Bond films of the 1960s, blacksploitation
films of the 1970s, and a host of other phenomena. In this referencing, the cultural centrality of
these moments from the past is thus solidified and the commercial value of those artefacts which
embody those moments is revived. The problem of English-Canadian popular culture is that
successful films or recordings are unlikely to echo each other or require each other for their
intelligibility. An organization like the Audio Visual Preservation Trust, to which I referred
earlier, must confront the fact that familiarity with the products of English-Canadaís cultural
heritage is not required to make sense of those films or television programs produced today.
Such familiarity is not a prerequisite for participation in a national cultural space.
At another extreme, we might find the culture of Mexico. On successive visits over the
past 10 years, I have noticed consistent growth in the availability of older Mexican popular
music, or of films from the golden age of the Mexican film industry. The proliferation of
specialty cable television channels has provided new windows for films from the past, and fan
cultures have taken shape around Mexican wrestling movies or yÈ-yÈ-yÈ music of the early
1960s. I donít want to exaggerate the popularity of these phenomena. Nevertheless, whether
older Mexican films sell in large numbers or do not, their increased presence within retail stores
nourishes the perception that Mexicoís popular cultural heritage is abundant and solid. At the
same time, in the music or film superstores of Mexico or Brazil one may witness the expansion
of sections devoted to music from other countries in Central or South America, or from other
countries outside the Anglo-American axis. These are organized in different ways -- by region,
country, language or style of music -- but they suggest that new kinds of heritage relationships
are being built throughout the cultural markets of the Americas.
The commercial processes by which films and recordings from the past are pulled
together, into new series of reissues or within the back catalogue sections of retail stores, give
weight to the ìpastsî of different national cultures. This weight is one force producing ìdelaysî in
the transformation of cultural markets, but this is not the delay of residual forces exerting their
last remaining forces. Rather, this delay is one effect of the ways in which new media
technologies, by eagerly scavenging the cultural artefacts of the past to fill new, digital formats,
resuscitate the past and endow it with new value.
References
Harmetz, Aljean (1988). ìHollywood Catches a Wave.î New York Times, January 20, 1988,
pg. C15.
Huet, Armel with Huet, Jacques Ion, Alain LefËbvre, Bernard MiËge, RenÈ Peron. (1978).
Capitalisme et industries culturelles. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1978.
Mennan, Zeynep, Mehmet Kutukcuoglu, Kerem Yazgan (1999). ìtitle:. ì In Cynthia C.
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Davidson, editor.Anytime. New York and Cambridge, Mass.: Anyone Corporation and The
MIT Press, 1999. pp. 70-72.
Watson, Janell (1999). Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The
Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.