Critical analysis of media
Consensus and controversy
in the wake of Marx
Figure 4.3 – Two opposing models of media power (mixed versions are more likely to be
encountered
McQuail's Mass
CommunicationTheory
Marx’s analysis of culture

The economic base, the ‘forces and relations of
production’ ‘determine’ the cultural
‘superstructure’ of a society
•
•
•
•
Forces and relations are mainly the technology and
economic class relations that define an economic
system
Slave/owner in an ancient agricultural system
Lord/serf in an advanced agricultural system,
technology allowing for shared farming
Bourgeoisie/proletariat in a capitalist system with the
development of mechanization and factory production
Marx’s approach


Marx was most concerned with identifying the laws of
social change based on the historical development of
societies’ technological and economic systems
He seems to say that the ‘superstructure’ represents a
fairly mechanical reflection of the power held in the base
•

Some argue that he simply did not have enough time to
articulate a more sophisticated relationship
Control over the media, for example, allows the powerful
to provide a nearly uniform ideological presentation across
the entire society
Ideology



Mostly imposed from above, with little attention
to the actions of the oppressed classes
Acceptance is fairly uniform, with the mind
another terrain of oppression
Elite ideologists are either members of the
bourgeois class or employed by the class
•
Though there are certain forms of conflict within the
class, they are resolved when an issue of
consequence for interclass relations emerges
The outcome of determination

For Marx, “false consciousness”
•
•
•
The false beliefs about their real conditions that
workers live under
False consciousness forestalls the development of
“class consciousness,” the learned beliefs/knowledge
that allow the class member to see from the true
perspective of his/her class
Class consciousness leads to revolution or
“revolutionary consciousness” as the classes are
forced to recognize the irreconcilable conflict of their
positions
Class consciousness



It is the role of the intelligentsia to lead the
working class into class consciousness
Only through training and exhortation can
workers break through their false
consciousness
Inherent contradictions in the working of the
base lead to crises, representing opportunities
for the development of class consciousness
Two trajectories

Marx’s analyses have generated two
major contemporary schools of scholars
• Political economy
• Focus on the structure and its influence on culture
• Critical cultural studies
• Focus on the culture/superstructure, its relative
independence, internal workings and influence
over the base/structure
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Four types of relation between culture (media content) and society
McQuail's Mass
CommunicationTheory
Issues for later theorists
(neo-Marxists)


The nature of “false consciousness”
Antonio Gramsci
•
•
•
•
•
Hegemony
Subaltern classes take part in their own deception
Hegemony partial, conflicted, always in flux
• Must constantly be won
• Always in danger of being undermined
Hegemony not a uniform, leaden ideology
representing elite interests
Natural, ‘common sense’
Superstructure

Althusser outlined a number of Ideological
State Apparatuses (ISAs) that served to
“reproduce the conditions of production”--that
is, the teach workers their place in the world
and reproduce them as a factor in production
Political economy




Media are large corporations themselves
Integration into larger corporate capitalist structure
(Dreier)
Effectiveness of corporate control/owners over media
management (Murdock and Golding)
Limited control over content exercised by media
professionals (Tuchman, Breed)
•

Professionalism not the protection against corporate control
some think it to be
Special condition of information producing corporations
(Garnham, Herman and Chomsky, Horkheimer and
Adorno)
Role of the state

Independent actor (Herman and
Chomsky)
• Conflict with bourgeois “public sphere”
(Habermas)

Representative of elite class (Miliband)
Imperialism




Lenin called imperialism the “highest stage of
capitalism”
The exploitation of distant peoples, in which the
local working class conspires, allows the
working class to rise in relation to the
conquered peoples
Nationalism, etc. becomes a mainstay of
hegemony, hiding and deflecting criticism of
local elites or dominant classes at home
The working class provides the army necessary
to dominate foreign populations
Schiller


Imperialism remains an important
influence on global events and trends
Media imperialism is a “subset of the
general system of imperialism.”
• “the cultural and economic spheres are
indivisible”
Schiller


“What is regarded as cultural output also
is ideological and profit-serving to the
system at large.”
“In its latest mode of operation, in the
late twentieth century, the corporate
economy is increasingly dependent on
the media-cultural sector.”
Schiller

American economic dominance and
corresponding cultural dominance
remain supreme, but are declining in the
face of transnational corporate cultural
domination.
• However, transnational organizations are
modeled on American PR, advertising,
research, public opinion, cultural sponsorship,
etc. model.
System direction

“with different specific interests and
objectives, and often rival aims,
harmonization of the global business
system is out of the question. Yet the
generalized interest of some thousands
of super-companies is not that different.”
Critical cultural studies


Dissatisfied with Marx’s cultural analysis
Rejected the claims of positivist social
science, embraced literary and humanist
approaches in balance with social
science methods
Critical cultural studies

Cultural Marxists work off Gramsci’s
analysis
• Ideology
• Entire worldview
• Active structure for apprehending the world—
processing of new information according to rules
that seem natural or commonsensical but in fact
represent certain interests
• Connotative definition of language (Hall)
British Cultural Studies “Birmingham
School”


The British Cultural Studies group attempted to
articulate far more fully what the nature of
“determination” is
Raymond Williams outlined a form of this in his
famous essay
•

“setting limits, exerting pressures”
Williams stands in the gap between “political
economists” and “cultural Marxists”
Cultural analysis


Forms of resistance
Deviant cultures/subcultures
• Williams
•
•
•
Dominant culture
Residual culture
• Retained from earlier, effective, accepted practices
replaced by newly effective cultural practices
Emergent culture
• “new meanings and values, new practices, new
•
significances and experiences, are continually being
created”
“no dominant culture, in reality exhausts the full range of
human practice, human energy, human intention”
The nature of
ideology/hegemony


“Structured in dominance”
Beneath conscious thought—
“unexamined presuppositions”
• Common sense
• Universal truths
Cultural analysis


The nature of culture in a capitalist society
Commodification (Horkheimer and Adorno)
•
•
•
Cheapness/kitsch
Destruction of the meaning of a thing through its
repetition, shoddiness, etc.
Drive out true beauty, uniqueness, quality with kitsch
Cultural Analysis


Role of the ‘audience’ in meaningmaking
Encoding/decoding (Hall)
• Separate, but linked ‘moments’
• Nature of ideology as the apperception of real
•
lived social experience
Language as a site of class struggle
Cultural analysis

Gradual move away from class as the
defining category of all social position
• Race
• Gender
• Sexual preference
• Defining the “other”
Resistance


More recent work has focused on resistance,
on the development of cultural ‘spaces’ within
which the oppressed can resist, fight back,
reclaim their subjectivity
Hebdige (Subcultures)
•
•
Style as a form of resistance
However, style and other forms of resistance are
drawn back into the dominant culture
• Development of a market for style—commodification
Style as resistance

“the challenge to hegemony which
subcultures represent is not issued
directly by them. Rather it is expressed
obliquely, in style. The objections are
lodged, the contradictions displayed
(and, we shall see, ‘magically resolved’)
at the profoundly superficial level of
appearances: that is, at the level of
signs”
Recuperation



“The process of recuperation takes two
characteristic forms:
1. The conversion of subcultural signs (dress,
music, etc.) into mass produced objects (i.e.
the commodity form);
2. The ‘labelling’ and re-definition of deviant
behaviour by dominant groups—the police, the
media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological form)”
•
(Hebdige)
The debate
Political
economists
Cultural Marxists
Determination
Strong, direct
Uncertain, partial
Base/
Superstructure
Superstructure
Superstructure relatively
determined by base independent, or
interconnected
Base
Forces and
relations of
production
Real, historically
determined social being
Superstructure
Uniform, reflective
of elite ideology
Hegemonic, with
influences from many
sources; inflected with
ideology