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Narratives: Endings, Meanings and Morals
[Cross-posted from CEMP]
Notes from the fifth keynote in the Narratives series. This lecture is about story-telling people who make sense of themselves, their past, their present and their future by telling stories. Previous lectures: Introduction, then Stories and Structures, then Familiarity and Strangeness, followed by Performers and Players. Good grief… TL;DR?
The Breakfast Club
We begin with the feel-good comfort movie, The Breakfast Club, released in 1985 when I’d just hit my teens. I considered coming in wearing snow-washed jeans and white sneakers and dancing along with Emilio Estevez, but in the end I spared you that ordeal. The point remains, though: the song, the faces, the sheer awesomeness of this film are tied up with who I am, in a way it is difficult to explain to anyone who wasn’t alive at the time and has no idea who Jim Kerr is.
Coming of age
The Breakfast Club belongs to the coming-of-age genre, a cultural phenomenon that appeals to anyone who is either a) coming of age or b) willing to admit they are nostalgic for the time they came of age.
Coming-of-age: a transformation; the transition from childhood to adulthood; maturing, growing up; a melancholy dispossession of childlike innocence; a challenging rite of passage; a joyful blossoming and flowering; the crossing of a ‘liminal’ threshold; a narrative experience.
Do we all somehow fit in the princess / brain / jock / basketcase / criminal categories? When we watch these kids learn to transcend the stereotypes imposed upon them, do we see ourselves in their place, and feel their liberation as our own? Do we simply see them as people we could be friends with, people we’d want to be around, even if we wouldn’t want to be them? Do we imagine ourselves telling Dick where he can stick it?
And doesn’t that model of the stereotype first imposed and then overthrown provide us with a nice image of the tension between the structures of society which socialise us and the agency we use to become textured individuals? The Breakfast Club is a cinema of sociology. Those who we knew utterly through their typology, become in the transcendence of stereotype, unique and unknown.
Transformative Story
The interesting element of The Breakfast Club I want to look at is the mechanism whereby this group of pigeonholed children become individual adults. They learn to tell their stories to each other, confess that the roles that they play have been imposed on them, and in the act of confession itself, they become new selves, in the confidentiality and intimacy of sudden new friendships. Even if their stories are cliched teen-angst stories of peer pressure and parental abuse, they bring their own textured experience to eternal, endlessly repeating narrative structures; every story is the same and yet entirely new and unique. An endlessly self-similar universe generating infinite possibilities.
At this point, the lecture looks as though it will roll on towards Erving Goffman’s performative theories and Michel Foucault’s conception of the confession. Instead we veer into psychotherapy – and again we avoid the obvious psychoanalytical biggies like Freud, Lacan, and Althusser, and instead turn to the chapter, “Narrative Knowing” in John McLeod’s book, Narrative and Psychotherapy.
Narrative Knowing
McLeod’s analysis helps us because it gives us a way of seeing story from ‘the other side’ – not as a way of buying and selling audiences in the media commodity market, but as tools for self-knowledge and therapy. And perhaps we’ll keep in mind both Brecht’s rebellion against catharsis, but also his desire for ‘performance as instruction’ for those playing the roles and enacting the stories – two aspects of Brecht’s thought which seem very much in tension with each other.
McLeod begins by contrasting what he calls narrative knowing vs paradigmatic knowing. Narrative knowing simply refers to the way people use story to understand the world – experientially, subjectively and phenomenologically.
Paradigmatic knowing is the scientific kind of knowledge which has come to dominate so much of the world we live in and how it is grasped, transformed and built around us. Scientific knowledge, as we’ve seen in earlier lectures, is interested in objectivity, repeatability, generalisability, universality, abstraction. McLeod argues that the history of psychotherapy has seen a decline (which he wishes to reverse) in narrative knowing – the profession has striven to be scientifically legitimate, and so has often privileged abstract propositional knowledge over narrative knowing which is seen as ambiguous, vague, illegitimate.
Recall our man in the tree. We can see the tree – it is an object we can comprehend, and we see how it is, in an abstract way, like other trees. But we are far from the tree, and it has lost much of its detail, its character. We do not feel the tree. The man in the tree cannot see the tree as an abstract object – he feels it, and sees it as utterly unique, it is the only tree in the world at that moment, its pressure on his hands, its strength under his feet and his buttocks, the only thing between him and the body-smashing world beneath him.
Structure vs texture, paradigmatic vs narrative knowing.
So let’s continue and see why McLeod thinks we should reclaim narrative knowing, by examining some of the characteristics of story-based knowledge.
The Individual and Story
McLeod gives us some hooks to think about how story helps us as individuals to understand experience.
- Narrative is a window onto the story-teller’s landscape of consciousness
The narratives we use when we understand and recount our experience are shaped by our individual subjective identities and ways of thinking.
- We all have a kind of personal myth
We all have a story with the power to provide our life with meaning. This self-narrative gives coherence to the often fragmented and episodic experiences we undergo, giving us an over-arching sense of purpose and meaning.
- We are made up of a community of selves
We can think of the variety of stories we use to understand our actions, experiences, relationships as multilinear and various, even though there are moments when we must force this discontinuity into a coherent ‘unitary’ narrative (such as job interviews).
Narrative and Identity
These suggestions of narratives as personal myths, helping us to draw the threads of our various personae into a continuous tapestry, allowing us to shape our lives and our identities, give us a way to think about story and self that looks very like Anthony Giddens’ conception of the ‘reflexive project of the self’, described in his 1991 book Modernity and Self-Identity.
Paulo, by Paulo Tonon
Giddens’ ‘reflexive project of the self’ captures an important aspect of how in contemporary Western society the old ‘narratives’ that we used to glue society together (religion, nationality, geography) have slipped away, forcing us to find other ways to think of ourselves and our place in relation to others. Whether it is through consumption (buying commodities) or through performance (getting out there and living), we are constantly constructing a personal sense of history and direction, which is endlessly being modified and re-understood.
Stories and Sense
We continue with McLeod’s analysis of the role of stories in our lives.
- Narrative has sequentiality which implies a future
We think of our life experiences as sequences which follow on from one another. So we carve experience up into discrete ‘chunks’ which succeed each other, and thus there are always implied future segments which go on to become further episodes in our sequences. (Recall Brecht’s episodic theatre versus Aristotle’s dramatic unities).
- Narratives help us to reconcile the ‘exceptional’ and the ‘expected’
Life constantly surprises us, and confounds our expectations, and we use stories to re-tell and re-author events and experiences, to make sense of the senseless, feel assured in the face of the lack of assurances, to comprehend the incomprehensible.
- The re-telling of stories is a problem-solving technique
Narratives are the mechanism whereby we solve the problems of experience – we recast chaotic experiences into causally related sequences, and thereby ‘manage’ them.
Narrative and Therapy
So, we can perhaps see how the occasional inability to enforce a coherence onto these narratives, these communities of selves, is the very dysfunction that ‘talking cures’ strive to therapeutically correct. But the use of story is not limited to the ‘therapeutic episode’ of needing a counsellor or therapist.
David wrote a blog about his cancer. The last entry was on 5 May, 2004. The comments seem no longer to be functional, but I remember that someone, I suppose from David’s family, wrote in the ever-growing list of sympathetic messages that David had died not long after writing that last post. The comments were a stream of good wishes, and thanks to David for sharing his story, and I thank David posthumously for writing his account so that we can learn from him. His words are not abstract, objectified propositions intended as the subject of analysis in a lecture; they are the textured words of a man’s experience.
Day six: The flight by Wolf_of_Deixais
Although David’s writing seems on the surface just to be an account of the progress of his disease, we can see in action many of the ideas McLeod has suggested. David is mastering the use of technical language, re-telling episodes of clinical detail which recast them as parts in a sequence, explaining what happened to cause his symptoms, and he re-authors events by talking about how he and his doctor are “not too surprised or concerned” about the sequence of events: they have been resolved, reconciled with expectations.
While these narratives have not halted the progress of the disease, we cannot understate the fact that David begins that last post with the words: “Hey, things are getting a little better”, and he uses words like “hopefully”, “routine”, “enjoy”, “boost of energy”, and so on. While the details of David’s condition must strike us as appalling, there is clearly a sense in which David’s outlook is positive even in the face of such physical distress, and that his act of narrativisation and authorship has perhaps contributed to that positive outlook. David is more than his condition, more than his body.
Ivan Noble, another man who wrote about the progress of his cancer before his death in 2005, in his last post, wrote:
“What I wanted to do with this column was try to prove that it was possible to survive and beat cancer and not to be crushed by it.
“Even though I have to take my leave now, I feel like I managed it.
“I have not been defeated.
“Thank you once again to everyone who helped me and came with me.
“The last phase now will, I know, not be easy but I know that I will be looked after as I always have been.
“I will end with a plea. I still have no idea why I ended up with a cancer, but plenty of other cancer patients know what made them ill.
“If two or three people stop smoking as a result of anything I have ever written then the one of them who would have got cancer will live and all my scribblings will have been worthwhile. “
Here again we see the same characteristics of making sense, managing, being worthwhile – assuming a future, a meaning, purpose. Those who die, it is said in a cliched sort of way, live on in the stories we tell about them. But then, aren’t those of us who live, only really alive in the stories we tell about ourselves and each other? Maybe the real secrets to eternal life and immortality lie in the narratives of living, rather than sciences of the body.
Story and Moral Order
Death is the ultimate in endings, and ensuring that death has meaning and purpose is a crucial part of telling stories with happy endings. These stories are unhappy in very real sense of course, and it can seem churlish to say we should look at the bright side. But we can see a sense in which story is used to bring order and meaning to events and experiences which seem to have no sense or purpose. McLeod picks up on this aspect of story too.
- Narratives have morals
Stories convey a moral order, a prescription for behaviour, categorisations of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, a moral landscape.
Blowup
Let’s leave the sad business of making sense of death and turn to the screening of the week and the business of making sense of death! Blowup (Antonioni, 1966) is another murder-mystery, albeit a rather oblique and unconventional murder mystery. We’re not even sure there is a murder! (And by the way, Rear Window and Memento are also murder mysteries – and I even concede that 2001: A Space Odyssey has a murder scene – and I swear I only noticed the heavy murder theme after I’d picked the films!)
Our hero Thomas takes photos of a couple in a park. The woman notices and want him to give her the film. He goes home and develops the film, and starts hanging the photos up around his studio. He moves them around, re-develops some of them, blows others of them up, and re-hangs them – you could even say he is editing them together. There’s a moment when Antonioni simply cuts from one photo to the next – a mise en abîme if ever there was one.
What is remarkable about this sequence is that it of course emerges that Thomas has just witnessed a murder, though he didn’t actually witness it until he had found it in his pictures, in the process of editing. It is as though he was unable to comprehend the ‘reality’ of events until he pieced the fragmentary records of those events together in later tranquillity. It takes him a long time to peer into his photos and produce the story he does, and even then he deciphers the story from blowups which have started to look very like the abstract paintings his friend Ron has created.
We cannot escape the possible hint in the film that Thomas is losing his mind. Indeed, the Soviet critic Juri Lotman saw this film as a damning indictment of the decadence of London in the ‘swinging sixties’. Did he really see a body? How could he have missed a murder? Does the mime tennis ball really make the sound a real tennis ball? Etc.
But we also might wonder if we are being asked to think about whether ‘living in the moment’ perhaps forces us to stop ‘perceiving the events’. We only understand events – maybe we even only perceive events – in retrospect, through reflection, memory, mental editing. We are perhaps as likely to find the ‘truth’ in an abstract work of art as we are likely to find it by living in the moment.
The Way of the World
This existential thought provokes us to question how we can possibly grasp reality at all, and we might consider the consequences of this idea: that we construct our own reality by imposing order onto it, rather than vice-versa. We are the authors of reality.
Historically, of course, many societies have considered that God was the author of reality, and the fact that we have usurped him is a sign of the heights to which human ambition can aspire. Small wonder that we have told stories of hubris since the dawn of time. All that has been in the power of gods – the gift of creation, the beginning of life, providence, giving and taking away, working in mysterious ways, the power of life and death – beginnings, middles and ends – is in the hands of the story-teller.
And what is this conception of providence? It’s a slippery idea which only makes sense if one considers that it is a superintendence over the ‘way of the world’ in the gift of the author – God, or the human mind, whichever you prefer. The author of the work is the equivalent of the God in His heaven. But if we are all authors of reality, how is there anything other than a cacophony?
Social Constructions
We’ll return to some more of McLeod’s observations, which will start to help us understand story as more socially constructed than we’ve seen so far in this essay, which has focussed thus far on the story as an individual’s tool for understanding the world.
- Narratives are always socially constructed
Story is always an act of communication, a action between a teller and an audience (even if that audience consists of nothing more than our own community of selves).
- Narratives are liminal
Stories provide liminality – thresholds between the autonomous bounded self and the social and interpersonal dimensions of our sense of who we are.
- Narratives are ambiguous
Stories consist of ambiguities which allow for creative spaces between the teller and the audience. No narrative is a complete telling and recounting, since such completeness would require exhaustive detail and infinite resources of time, perception and knowledge (godlike qualities?). Narratives are selective, and rely on ambiguity. Such ambiguities create dynamics and dialogues between the story-teller and the audience, spaces in which interpretation occurs.
- Narrative is cathartic
Catharsis is itself an ambiguous term. We’ve seen that Aristotle used it to describe a ‘release’ of emotion through pity or fear. Brecht wanted to do away with it, because it gave too much comfort where he wanted there to be challenge. Whatever it is though, it must rely on recognition, fellow-feeling, empathy, and perhaps even sympathy. Catharsis, then, is a social act.
- Our ongoing personal narratives are co-constructed
We tell each other stories as part of our social bonding, the way we connect to others. McLeod gives the example of ‘adventure stories’, in which people exchange tales of the big fish they have caught. The singing scene (“show me the way to go home”) in Jaws is the perfect example, in which Quint and Matt swap their scar stories and overcome their initial mutual mistrust.
- Narratives often arise around sites of social conflict
Story-telling is often used as a way of resolving tensions and conflicts and offering ‘mediation’ – the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was just such a forum, in which victims and the aggrieved were given the opportunity to have their voices heard and their stories told, as part of a socal ‘healing’ process.
Social Trauma
911 used to be just the number to dial to phone the American emergency services. Now, it is something more – more than any exhaustive list I could write now. It is an event, a calamity, an attack, an act of terror, a cipher for history, and an aggregation of connotations ever-changing and ever-evolving. We know where we were – hence it becomes the site of a million stories. Gordon McDowell’s 911 Timeline shows how just a few of them unfolded on mainstream TV networks.
Away from the broadcast media, people were going online and recording the event in other ways. Metafilter still has the threads from the day, such as this one, complete with incorrect spelling intact – Plane crashes in to the word trade center: a narrative in which the events are inferred and indirectly described, with meanings, responses and reactions providing a many-voiced lens onto something which has become more than real.
If, as we’ve seen, story is a crucial part of personal therapy and social reconciliation, this might be a good moment to ask ourselves whether the mass media environment we live with provides the kind of story spaces which facilitate such reconciliation and therapeutic possibilities?
Apocalypse and After
Apocalypse is the last word in endings. Is it perhaps because we all sooner or later confront our own mortality that we collectively imagine the mortality of society, the species and the world we inhabit. Eschatologists could tell you whether all cultures and societies have eschaton myths. It is perhaps the ultimate moral message: your actions today will determine your fate for eternity, whether you will be swept into the arms of bliss or cast out in to endless torment. A singularity, if you like, around a dichotomy.
Other imaginings of future need not be so finite. There are countless recurring stories, particularly fertile in science fiction, in which dysfunctional futures are depicted – 1984 (Orwell, 1948), Brazil (Gilliam, 1985), We (Zamyatin, 1921), and Metropolis (Lang, 1927). In this scene from Metropolis, we see the worker caste of a future nightmare city. The men are an extension of the machine.
These post-apocalyptic visions are profoundly schizophrenic, torn as they always seem to be along a utopian / dystopian axis. Metropolis separates out society into the toiling underground workers who never see daylight, and the luxurious above-ground owners who are the planners and thinkers. (There’s a mental model right there.) More interestingly, though, these opposed yet mutually interdependent classes mirror the class conflicts and social upheavals which culminated, a decade later, in World War II.
In Zamyatin’s We, the utopian vision of a reasonable, mathematically precise society, in which all conflict has been smoothed away through calculated rational action is punctured by a dystopic underlying feral, inescapably animal human nature. This allegorises the rise of mechanisation, industrialisation, and rationalistic approaches to organising social order as exemplified in the practices and ideals of the new communist Russian society. His insistence on criticising the prevailing social orthodoxies eventually led to his exile from Stalin’s Russia, like so many other artists who were simply unable to reconcile their creative freedom with the totalitarianism of Soviet Russia, and paid the price of either death or exile.
Perhaps we can start to see these dystopic visions as imagined exaggerations of current problems, psychological fears and social tensions, projected into a future storyworld in which the issues can be repeatedly worked out, re-authored, re-cast and perhaps even reconciled in a social, fictional, therapeutic episode?
Apollo and Dionysius
In his 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche outlines a dichotomy in the human condition which lies at the heart of all tragedy – whether it is brought about through hubris, calamity, dysfunction or self-destruction. He represents these opposing impulses by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysius.
Apollo is the god of visual arts, Dionysius of the musical arts; Apollo represents reason and ration, Dionysius intoxication and rapture; Apollo represents individualism, Dionysius represents the mob; Apollo brings light and awe, Dionysius narcosis and carnality. This schism is the inescapable condition which works its way through the stories of individuals, societies and the species.
We need not look too far to find examples of places where our rational intentions fall prey to irrationalism: market-places are built around models of humans as rational actors, yet our lives are ruled by its paranoid, lunatic, chaotic fluctuations and catastrophes. The West likes to narrativise the clash with Islamic fundamentalism as a battle between Enlightenment-led, democratic values against archaic and atavistic fanaticism. Islam as a religion, as Jim Al-Khalili recently demonstrated in his series, Science and Islam (BBC, 2009), is based on reason and compassion, and we can imagine the same contemporary narrative as a story of a reasonable and compassionate devoutness being colonised by the venality and corruption of consumerism and global capital.
And in the technologically self-extending world depicted in Frank Theys’ documentary Technocalyps (2006), we see the same story retold as the competition to be the next step in evolution: we have the technological possibility to direct our own evolution as a species. Do we embrace genetic modification, artificial intelligence, body modification, and nano-technologies for the light-promising, rational future? Or do we fear that our fundamentally animal baseness will spell doom for any such endeavour?
In Zamyatin’s We, our narrator, D-503, stands in a street blanketed with fog. He is enveloped all around by the utterly white, the pure clean white of the opaque fog. A sudden blood red cut in the whiteness – there appears the lips of the woman, the object of his new irrational obsession, her lips appear as though cut from the white world with a sharp knife, “the sweet blood still dripping”.
Too Long Didn’t Read
These are some of the stories of individuals, societies and the species. We are authors who endlessly author and re-author. We narrativise our lives in order to make sense of experience. We use stories to ensure our mental well-being in the face of chaos and the blank face of the universe. We build societies through the social construction of stories, and we work to build our bridges through these stories. We imagine our futures, our deaths, and our destinies, both as individuals, but also as societies and as species, through the imaginative re-working of our recurring fears and hopes.
Media & Participation: Identity
This is a synopsis of the sixth and final session of the Media & Participation unit: Identity.
The sixth session of the Media & Participation unit was concerned with ideas about ‘identity’ and ‘therapy’. The online assignment was:
- make something* that expresses something about who you are; and list the key points that have arisen for you over the course of the lecture series. These key points will be turned into essay questions in the lecture.
[* ‘make something’ – it would defeat the object of a participatory course to tell you what to make. It could be anything from a picture to a poem to a blog post to a video to a sound sample to a sculpture.]
Dancing Joe
In the spirit of fairness, I joined in this assignment – you can see something I made which expresses something about who I am here
The format of the session was the familiar one where we get our heads around some conceptual and theoretical ideas, and then examine the ‘primary evidence’ at hand in order to see whether those concepts, theories and models seem to help or hinder our understanding of the examples.
We focussed on ideas from Goffman, and Giddens to start with. Tim and others have said useful things about Goffman here while some useful notes on Giddens can be found here and here
In short, we’re interested in rejecting the idea that one’s identity is fixed, stable, continuous and unified. Rather, we’re interested in identity as something ‘produced’ and ‘performed’ – what Giddens might call the ‘reflexive project of the self’.
So, Dancing Joe is not merely fluffy fiction. Dancing Joe is a performance (literally and metaphorically) in which I can perform a different ‘front persona’ than the kind of performance I’m likely to produce in a lecture theatre, or a bank manager’s office. These different ‘stages’ may well determine the kind of performance I may be able to produce (and hence in each case I stick to a ‘script’ which is ‘normative’). If I were to stray too far off these scripts (by, for example wearing only pants to my lectures, and talking nonsense), then I might be considered deviant. Maybe Dancing Joe will make you think I’m deviant anyway. Can’t win. Hmmm
Who am I
James made a video, about his addictions. We can argue (we won’t) about whether James is ‘revealing’ aspects of his identity, but we can certainly claim that he is ‘producing’ aspects of his identity. His statements as to his values – more important things than sex, drugs, money – may or may not ‘map onto’ the ‘truth about James’. But they certainly do create in us, his audience, an understanding of what it is to be James.
I am what I consume
Chris chose to represent himself by using album covers to create a mosaic of himself.
Music seems to be an important and powerful resource by which (especially) young people create messages about themselves – asserting their allegiance to specific subcultures (in my day it was goths and new romantics). The way we dress, too, allows us to ‘produce’ in others an understanding of who we claim to be.
But allegiance to subcultures is inextricable with ‘consumption’: CDs and clothes are commodities, which are produced by an industry. Hence Marxist commentators have tended to assert that our use of commodities to signal our identity disguises the fact that we are victims of tyranny.
Baudrillard, in The System Of Objects describes the way that while we feel as though we have a sense of freedom to choose which commodities to buy, actually, our choice is no more than an illusion. According to Baudrillard, the commodities choose us. A pre-defined set of choices whose very existence is predicated on an industry which simply wishes to extract capital from us is no choice at all. Is it really possible to express our individuality through the consumption of commodities, which we only want because we’ve been skilfully manipulated into wanting them through advertising and peer pressure?
Fiske, on the other hand believes we can do exactly that: actually what the Marxists call the ‘culture industry’ is always trying to play catch up with what these young, cutting edge fashion-setters want. Buy Jeans – rip them. Buy ripped Jeans – sew them. Buy sewed up Jeans – fade them with bleach. Buy faded Jeans – dye them. Buy dyed Jeans…. and on it goes.
And in any case, is it more important to find some kind of semiotic system which we can use as a resource to form relationships and allegiances with each other and express our sense of ourselves, or is it more important that we become system-rejecting tramps just to please some jaded old Marxists? You decide.
I am someone else too
Vic drew a self-portrait.
Vic said he was surprised by how sad the portrait looked. Vic is generally a cheerful person. Perhaps the portrait adds depth to this cheerful persona – none of us are always in the same mood, always full of cheer? There is a sad Vic somewhere, whose existence has been conjured. Certainly, we agreed, the production of this portrait can’t be undone, and it will now form (however minutely) a part of Vic that will always be there.
Ur-student
Danda made a sculpture with utility. Some stolen traffic cones and a sign have been transformed into a coffee table. Danda says “everything I do is expressive of who I am in one way or another”.
Some of the semiotic codes in this image which seem to tell us ‘who danda is’ include the traffic cone – the stealing of which is a compulsory part of being a student; does danda seem to be saying yes, I am a student, but I am also a coffee-table maker?
Hoarder
Will took a photo of his notice board. His flatmate is extremely tidy, while Will likes some disorganisation. Will isn’t entirely sure whether his hoarding of paper-based messages is full of usefulness or not.
I too have friends who iron their tea-towels and boxer shorts. Unlike them, I have from time to time kept boxes of crap, which I periodically dispose of in one great cathartic spring-clean.
Aspirations
Dean sees himself more as the bird than the shitty post, obviously.
Snow-boarding artist
Carl likes to express his visual creativity in between snow-boarding breaks.
No man is an island
jimirich emphasises the importance of his friends and family to his sense of who he is.
Saturday Night Fever
wmjb is the greatest dancer. Or is he?
Here’s a question: if you persuade everyone that, on the dance-floor, you’re greased lightning, and everyone believes that, on the dance-floor, you’re greased lightning, doesn’t that mean that, on the dance-floor, you’re greased lightning?
Bricolage man
Patrick is made of Arsenal, web searches, Budweiser, funk, and sleepless nights.
Eraserhead
obourneo describes himself as a ginger-topped pixel man moving forward into something. He’s not sure what he’s moving into, but it feels right.
I am who I want to be
Certainly we concede that something outside of us, (our experience of the ‘exterior’), imposes on us a set of constraints which necessarily determine how we ‘perform’ our identities. We noted that many Marxist ideas tend to assume that we’re passive (and stupid) and therefore unthinking victims of these institutional state apparatuses.
However, a crucial thing to grasp is that ‘who we are’ is a collaborative project. These external constraints are our collaborators in the reflexive projects of our selves, resources that we utilise, play with, or reject, in order to achieve our sense of selfhood.
We noted the example of Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger, who in an interesting piece in The Guardian described a difference between the Salam he believed himself to be, and the Salam whose persona emerged in the blog. We might argue, actually, the persona in his blog was produced by the ‘real’ Salam, and while this persona seems aspirational, perhaps by ‘producing’ this persona, the ‘real’ Salam becomes more like the aspirational Salam.
So instead of thinking of people who write blogs, or create Youtube videos, or just generally make things, as ‘revealing’ aspects of their identity, instead we might think of them as producing new aspects of their identity, consolidating performances they enjoy into their sense of who they ‘really’ are.
Technologies of the self
‘Technologies of the self’ is Foucault’s phrase and a nice set of descriptions of this idea can be found here
Participatory media increase the range of tools available to us to produce the identity performances (or provide opportunities for ‘identity-work’) that we want to engage in.
So, while Arnold and Keen wonder whether participatory media signal the end of culture, the significance of tools which allow us to explore who we want to be, and thereby become who we want to be, dwarves their parochial little concerns.
Rethink normality
silentmiaow made a video. Watch it, and she’ll tell you far more about self-hood and normality than I can begin to hope to explain.
M & P assignment
Here’s the brief for your assignment. Deadline: 12pm Thurs 21st February. We agreed the topics in the session, and I’ve since turned them into proper academic-looking titles. If you weren’t present and you don’t like the questions, email me with your alternative suggestion.
The main assessment for the Media & Participation unit is a 2000 word essay. Choose one of the 7 titles listed below, and use the title to explore the ideas discussed in the unit. You should utilise both primary evidence (examples of phenomena such as media artefacts or events, case studies, etc), and secondary evidence (conceptual and theoretical sources and ideas) in your analysis. Use the essay to communicate your ideas and opinions, and ensure that you demonstrate, in an analytical way, what evidence brings you to favour those ideas and opinions.
The secondary assessment for the Media & Participation unit consists of the online assignments for each of the unit sessions. Please submit, alongside your essay, a short document providing links (urls) to each of your online assignments. See the unit materials for details of all online assignments.
Essay titles
- “RL is just one more window, and it’s usually not my best one.” (Turkle, Sherry, Life on the Screen)
What opportunities for identity work are offered by participatory media?
- Political systems, such as capitalism and socialism, often make claims about the relationship between human freedom and human nature. To what extent do you think that understanding the relationship between human nature and freedom is essential to the functioning of society?
- Foucault says Beckett said “‘What does it matter who is speaking,’ someone said, ‘what does it matter who is speaking.’” (Foucault, M., What is an Author)
Our notions of authorship are inextricably entwined with notions of credibility and ‘authority’, while participatory media undermine the stability of authorship and expertise. What does it matter who is speaking?
- “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.” (Foucault, M., Truth and Power)
Truth is not discovered, it is fought for, contested, won, and lost. Discuss.
- “The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace… In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.” (Chomsky, N., & Herman, E., Manufacturing Consent)
Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model outlines the limitations of traditional media. In what ways do participatory media exceed or adhere to these limitations?
- “Piracy is theft” (MPAA)
Participatory media challenge the validity of current copyright laws. What are those challenges, and their consequences?
- “Property is theft” (Joseph Proudhon)
What challenge do participatory media present to the current norms and practices of the commodity / ownership capitalist system?
I look forward to reading your work, and thanks to all of you for your contributions to the unit.
Media & Participation: Citizenship
This is a synopsis of the third session of the Media & Participation unit: Citizenship.
The third session of the Media & Participation unit was concerned with ideas about ‘Citizenship’. The online assignment was to identify a media space (traditional or new) which allows members of the public to participate in political debate, and explain the extent to which you believe that space empowers people / influences decisions or fails to do so.
A Ladder of Citizen Participation
In the first session, we saw Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation. Do look at it again, and bear it in mind as we go through some of the theoretical ideas. Also, our theoretical focus will not so much be on very recent (breathless) accounts of how the internet is transforming participation, but instead tackle some hardcore theory heavyweights. Hopefully, you’ll find that Benkler , Rheingold , Weinberger , Trippi et al are more useful after considering Hobbes, Rousseau, Habermas, Bakhtin, Chomsky and Foucault.
Political participation
We began with a discussion about voting: the floor was divided between those who felt that not to vote was a waste, and that it isn’t really possible to make a persuasive criticism or contribution to political debate if you don’t even use your vote; and those who argued that choosing not to vote was the only way to express disapproval of the options on offer, even if it was formally indistinguishable from apathy.
We noted that something like a third of eligible voters aged 18-24 voted in the last election. Even of the entire eligible voting population of the country, only 61.3% of the electorate voted; and only 37% voted for Labour, the winning party. That means that less than a quarter of the UK electorate voted for the government.
We can perform a thought experiment here, and consider some of these numbers: 37% for Labour is considered a mandate for (effectively) minority rule; if we imagine we had all voted, there is no reason to suppose that Labour would have acquired more or less than 37%, because the vote is split between several parties (Conservative 33%, Lib Dem 22%, Other 8%).
This is one of the paradoxes of democratic systems – they are sometimes described as the least worst option, because they tend to result in minority rule.
So even if we addressed one of the central criticisms of our democratic process – there isn’t enough choice or difference between parties – by increasing the range of political parties we might vote for, the winning party might have even less share of the vote; and yet, is what we want majority rule? Surely that would require there to be less choice?
Or if we introduced proportional representation, as some of us suggested, mightn’t we simply end up with more people’s second choice than anyone’s true preference?
And finally on this, none of these figures (available here ) tell us why many people don’t vote, or whether the choices we have are enough, too much or too little. How would we know?
Political philosophy
Debates about political participation highlight one of the central tensions that result in lots of individuals all living together in a society: the limits of freedom and the necessities of law.
We can explore some of these tensions by going back to some historical big-hitters: Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
[Clay Shirky talks about Hobbes vs Rousseau as a way of thinking about the architecture of participatory websites here (and more on it here) for those IMPS interested.]
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651. This text is old, long, and frankly pretty boring, but his main thrust as far as we are concerned is articulated by Garrath Williams here:
we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a ‘state of nature’ that closely resembles civil war – a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.
Hobbes’ argument, that we should submit to a sovereign who rules over us by the force of law, arises because he diagnoses human nature extremely pessimistically. Hobbes believed that without sovereign law, human beings will by nature violently compete for survival, fight each other out of suspicion, and seek individual power and glory through force. In effect, Hobbes believes that human nature – that is humans in a natural state unmodified by any kind of overarching social power or society – is base, animal, and tending to violence and war.
In order to guard against this brutal state of affairs, Hobbes argues that an unaccountable (i.e. non-challengable) sovereign should rule society, and expect total obedience – or members of the society should expect punishment for disobedience. This, he argues, is the only way to ensure that the unruly brutish animals that people are will live together with any kind of co-operation.
The Noble Savage
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing ‘The Social Contract’ a century later in 1762, is most famous for his aphorism – “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Richard Hooker explains it thus:
everything that civilized people have regarded as progress – urbanization, technology, science, and so on – has resulted in the moral degradation of humanity. For Rousseau, the natural moral state of human beings is to be compassionate; civilization has made us cruel, selfish, and bloodthirsty […] civilization has robbed us of our natural freedom […] the price of civilization is human freedom and human individuality.
So here we have a diametrically opposed view from that of Hobbes: it is the product of so-called civilised institutions that the moral degradation of humanity has occurred – war is a product of society, while individual human beings are naturally compassionate. Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage, although it has a problematic role in the history of European colonialism, argues that man’s natural state is co-operative, compassionate and noble.
Human nature
Faced with these opposing views of political philosophy we were forced to note that they require us to address what ‘human nature’ consists of – and given that we are familiar with arguments that human behaviour is culturally constructed (gender is socially constructed, cultural differences should be tolerated, etc) it is very difficult to resolve the question.
One issue that arose in our discussion was the inevitability of progress: faced with the hypothesis that there might be some kind of end-state, in which humans finally live in harmony, the response was that this could never happen because it is a part of human nature to constantly strive to know more, do more, achieve more.
These propositions relate to what is sometimes called the ‘teleological view of history’, or even ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ – that there is some utopian end-point to which humanity is striving, and that the course of history is the story of ever improving progress towards that goal. Thinkers such as Hegel and Marx might take this view (though we would probably want to hesitate before stating that Marx thinks that this progress is inevitable). But we might also see the constant forward striving as an end in itself – we do not strive towards a goal which we will ever achieve, rather we strive for the sake of striving – and we always will – and what’s more this striving will always bring us into conflict with each other. A deeper understanding of ‘dialectics’ might help us here, but we leave that for another time and place. In any case, there was not much consensus among us that people would ever be satisfied to live in an permanent social state of harmony, even if it were possible.
We could even draw parallels with debates in evolutionary science, where protagonists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins argue over whether evolution demonstrates ever-increasing complexity (as though life is ‘striving’ towards higher life forms), or whether evolution actually does not care whether the world is ruled by worms or clever monkeys and our proclamation of our species as the highest life form is inextricable with our ‘evo-eco-ego-centrism’.
More tensions
Some of the ideas you put forward were to think in terms of group associations, and our small understanding of anthropology and group psychology: we have loyalty to and co-operate with those close to us – family, kin, tribes, races, etc – our in-groups; while we may come into conflict with those in out-groups: strangers, other races, religions, aliens. So you argued that Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s fundamental positions ignore context – we co-operate with those we trust, we conflict with strangers.
One interesting facet here, though, is that those we consider to have shared interests with us change with context: family vs non-family is different to tribe vs non-tribe, etc. It implies some kind of concentric set of relations which overlap in ways which are negotiable: we can find things in common with people we wouldn’t normally, in different contexts. Now, let’s consider the ways in which communication helps us to negotiate those different realms.
Jurgen Habermas’ Public Sphere
Habermasdescribes what he calls ‘the public sphere’ – as distinct from the ‘private sphere’ which might consist of family and friends, where what we say to each other and what we think about things is retained in relative privacy. What’s particularly interesting to us is that his notion of the public sphere (the public discourses which occur in the wider realm of education, systematic religion, and of course, civil society) is specifically political: that is, concerned with how we communicate in a realm where differences are obvious, but not insurmountable, and how political decision might be influenced by public discourse and communication.
Here’s a useful synopsis from the University of Georgetown (Habermas is notoriously difficult to read, whether in the original German, or in translation):
In the public sphere […] discourse becomes democratic through the “non-coercively unifying, consensus building force of a discourse in which participants overcome their at first subjectively biased views in favor of a rationally motivated agreement (Public Discourse 315).” By looking to rationality, he hopes to produce democratic judgements which can have universal application while remaining anchored within the practical realm of discourse among individuals.
So here we start to see some of the characteristics of ‘ideal speech situations’ that Habermas thinks are necessary for a vital public sphere to perform a primary role in the determination of civil society: competence, autonomy and rationality.
- Competence: participants should have communicative competence: the ability to use and differentiate between 3 different kinds of ‘positions’ – subjective, inter-subjective, and objective.
- Autonomy: participants should be able to contribute any ideas they have without fear of insult or reprisal, and their contribution should be able to take place without coercion.
- Rationality: participants’ contributions should conform to what Habermas describes as ‘rational-critical’ discourse.
In some respects, competence is fairly straightforward – it is characteristic of human beings that they are able to tell the difference between these three domains of reference. Humans can tell the differences between individual responses (“I wish I could fly”), shared values (“air travel is good!”) and apparently objective facts (“gravity is always present on earth”). Sentences such as the following might give us more problems, but we could extract the various different positions they consist of:
- “I’m afraid of allowing my children to have the MMR vaccine”;
- “We refuse blood transfusions because of our religion”;
- “Vaccination and blood-transfusions can have positive individual and epidemiological medical benefits”.
The situation becomes muddied, according to Habermas, because of predominant contemporary attitudes – different cultural and ideological contests within society. What appear to be objective facts may be simply socially constructed inter-subjective positions. Low-copy number DNA evidence is a recent example of ‘evidence’ whose status has recently shifted; juries of ‘peers’ – lay people, rather than experts – may have taken LCN DNA evidence to have more objective status than was merited. Similarly, how would we describe a statement such as ‘human beings are inhabitants of earth, rather than the owners’? In any case, it is a mark of our communicative competence that we can see the conflict between subjective, inter-subjective and objective positions, even if we cannot always clearly diagnose instances of them.
Such competence feeds into our ability to engage in ‘rational-critical’ discourse – since we should be able to recognise instances where we attach ourselves to ‘subjective’ positions, and tolerate and attempt to understand others’ subjective positions – and it is only through ‘autonomy’ that we are free to express our subjective positions at all. And if we are exposed to different subjective positions than our own, perhaps we move further towards a more ‘objective’ position?
So – in an ideal situation, a public sphere is a space where everyone can engage in communication with each other – but with a specific goal: of accepting each other’s subjective point of view, but striving through dialogue to reach some kind of consensus – not coerced or imposed, but reached through rational dialogue. This consensus should be considered the ‘formation of public opinion’ – which can then be acted on in a truly democratic fashion.
So having posited this ideal situation where we can speak freely, expect to be tolerated, be willing to accommodate diversity of opinion, and somehow, thereby, achieve a consensus which should determine public policy, let’s look at some of the examples you suggested, and see if they measure up.
Possible Public Spheres?
jimirich suggested that BBC1’s Question Time programme is an example of a space in which members of the public can participate in political debate, and his analysis implies that the extent to which influence is exerted on political decisions is largely one-way – the panel members may be able to persuade the public of their point of view. Note that we’re not saying that influence works in the other direction – indeed it is a major aspect of our party political system that being seen to change your mind as a party politician is a sign of weakness.
So, we decided that while QT may have some of the characteristics of a public sphere – it is generally non-coercive and ‘rational’ – the emphasis here is on politicians defending their policies, rather than any opportunity for ‘public opinion’ to sway those policies.
cboakes suggested the Labour Party’s website where members of the public can contribute to discussions, though he acknowledges that “it is unlikely that their comments will influence Labours actions”. The example discussion cboakes cites is quite instructive, since the participants descend to insults like “brown noser”, “moron”, and “thick white racist”. So this space (ironically provided by the party of government itself) fails either to exhibit ‘rational-critical’ attributes, or to encourage consensus-building.
Indeed, whatever institutions we care to look at, whether it is political debate staged by mainstream media, online fora, or even town-hall meetings, it’s difficult to not see Habermas’ prescription for public debate as far too idealistic. Perhaps he’s asking too much of us? Indeed David Gauntlett describes one of the problems with thinking of the Internet as a potential enactment of a public sphere – even if we did all engage in respectful dialogue, how would the formation of public opinion be measured? Some kind of voting system, presumably… not terribly different to what exists now.
Another problem with this ideal public sphere, is that the logical conclusion is a ‘universal’ consensus – i.e. the ideal outcome of the dialogue within a public sphere is that we all come to the same point of view, think the same things, agree the same ways forward. At first glance this looks like a laudable, utopian ambition – but actually is it not indistinguishable from totalitarianism?
Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heteroglossia
Heteroglossia is a useful idea which helps us to explore the differences between diverse kinds of discourses and ways of speaking. The concept was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary theorist and critic, and it helps to remember that he was writing from the 1930s until his death in 1975 – that is, under the Soviet regime. Certainly, his career coincided largely with the rule of Joseph Stalin, the totalitarian dictator who stamped out dissent with ‘purges’; the number of his victims is debated, but the debate is over how many millions they number.
“[heteroglossia] represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form.”(Introducing Bakhtin, p21)
It is instructive, then, to consider the importance of ‘heteroglossia’ – literally ‘diverse tongues’ or ‘differently voiced’ – as an idea born in the midst of censorship, and imposed conformity at pain of death. Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia refers both to the fact that language is created through difference (rather like the classically structuralist approach to language as introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure – i.e. it is a formal characteristic of language itself), but also to what might be called ‘social heteroglossia’. ‘Social heteroglossia’ refers to the diversity of discourse that arises from social difference – the different classes within society, and the different situations which ‘frame’ the events in which discourse occurs.
Bakhtin’s work was focussed on the novel as a literary form (which achieved its greatest expression, in the works of, naturally, the great Russian masters like Dostoevsky) as opposed to epic and poetic forms. The novel achieves its most dramatic effects by capturing and expressing the diversity across social spectra.
Social Heteroglossia
The tensions we’ve seen expressed in ideas are also reflected in Bakhtin’s heteroglossia:
“Paradoxically, ‘speech diversity in class society indexes actual inequality’.”(Introducing Bakhtin, p19)
The existence of social heteroglossia (the differences in the way people use language) only arises because of actual differences between people expressed in class, education, economic situation, etc. However, we might argue that suppressing heteroglossia through censorship is a worse evil than recognising it – it is therefore better to allow heteroglossia some kind of expression than to pretend it is not there. We might also think back to Habermas’ public sphere, and consider that if we are ever able to achieve ‘objective’ understandings, rather than simply our own subjective opinion, then exposure to the heteroglossia of the many is essential?
So we could interpret Bakhtin as celebrating the heteroglossia of the novel, even as he worked in an environment in which diversity of opinion was curbed with the threat of death. Though it is understandable that he could not explicitly say so, we can imagine that he would have like to go as far as to say that the freedom to express the diversity of opinions at large in a population would be a good thing elsewhere than simply in the form of the novel. Evidence for this can be found in his description of what he called the ‘carnivalesque’.
Carnivalesque
We met the carnivalesque briefly in the introductory session, as a way of understanding why so much of the use of participatory media is humorous and parodic. Given a webcam and a worldwide platform, more people tend to choose to mime ridiculously to disposable pop songs or pull stupid pranks on their friends who take MMORPGs too seriously, rather than engage in overtly political discourse. Carnival helps us to understand that perhaps such humour and parody is, actually, very political, even if unintentionally so.
Here we must be necessarily over-simplistic, and describe the carnivalesque as the kinds of discourse that arise where ‘ordinary people’ obtain the opportunity to laugh at and ridicule figures of authority. Bakhtin casts a historical eye over medieval carnivals in which performances could take place where the world is ‘turned on its head’ – the fools and clowns can have mastery over kings and rulers. The discourses of authority (such as, in literature, the epic form) can be appropriated and re-used for humour and parody. Bakhtin argues that in situations where ‘folk humour’ can occur, the carnivalesque will emerge – in market places, festivals and comic oral culture. The carnivalesque is grotesque, obscene and parodic. In the middle ages in which people’s experience of direct authority rested in the church, folk humour is a
“boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations [which] opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture”and
“carnival allows ‘free and familiar contact between people’ who would normally be separated hierarchically, and allows for ‘mass action’”.
(Introducing Bakhtin, pp151-152)
Carnival is where folk (or popular) culture can make the sacred profane, the serious ridiculous, and the master a slave, and its medium is grotesque and obscene humour. Taboos can be broken, and censored ideas can be expressed.
Televised heteroglossia?
We should immediately be able to see that the examples we’ve seen so far can’t be described as including the full spectrum of heteroglossia. Television programmes like Question Time exact strict editorial policies which limit contributions to what we might describe as ‘rational-critical discourse’, but therefore exclude many kinds of contribution.
ro5iesuggested ‘The Jeremy Kyle Show’ as a traditional media space in which participation occurs. While Kyle’s show has been described by a judgeas ‘human bear-baiting’, and is often written off as trash TV along with Jerry Springer, et al, our new view of the desirability of heteroglossia might redeem these kinds of programme. ro5ie’s diagnosis does go to the heart of the problem, though:
this is a television programme made for entertainment and [the] extent of help that the contestants receive is debatable.
Online heteroglossia?
The Labour Party’s website’s forum also appears to exhibit a very narrow range of heteroglossia, consisting mostly of ‘flaming’ contributions. This might normallybe diagnosed as a consequence of the disinhibitingeffects of online interaction – we are distanced from the consequences our words when we talk online. But might there also be aspects of the carnivalesque to such trolling and baiting? When is it humorous, and when malicious? Must we always write off such behaviour, and is it not better that such discourse be possible, than that we should operate under censorship?
Meanwhile, Patrickidentifed the ‘rise of citizen media’ as a space where political participation occurs. Patrick notes the same argument which we saw in the last session, where increased participation by ‘non-professionals’ somehow degrades and threatens the contribution of non-amateurs. We might note that we have a new argument to use against Arnold, Keen, et al: excluding contributions from those who aren’t considered to be the ‘professionals’ decreases the heteroglossia we are exposed to – better to have increased participation, even if it is ‘crud’, than to supress the galaxy of possible contributions.
Patrick also identifies the fact that the traditional media do not always express the range of opinion that exists:
[blogging] has enabled people to go against the traditional forms of ‘mass media’ [and] publish their own views and opinions [but] at the same time allowing the freedom of discussion of others opinions, which the traditional media doesn’t.
Let’s consider some ideas about why traditional media only reflects a small range of the possible discourses that circulate in a society.
A Propaganda Model
As we’ve seen, traditional media forms do not necessarily reflect what we might think of as ‘social heteroglossia’. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman suggested a model for understanding why traditional media outlets inhibit certain kinds of discourse. In their book ‘Maunfacturing Consent’, they describe what they call ‘A Propaganda Model’.This should not be understood as the traditional kind of propaganda we may be familiar with, which is intentional and deliberately constructed to produce certain kinds of opinion – as we might understand the kinds of propaganda created by both sides during the first and second world wars.
Chomsky and Herman suggest that certain kinds of opinion are produced and perpetuated by the media, which are not necessarily deliberately deceitful or conspired, but nevertheless act as propaganda. This propaganda is an effective form of censorship, as there are 5 filters which limit the kinds of discourse which may emerge from traditional media. These filters are ownership (who owns the media); advertising (which sponsors subsidise the producers); sources (the kind of sources that can be regarded as ‘authoritative’); flak (the negative reactions that content may attract; and finally, ideology (the kind of hegemonic ideas or orthodoxies that prevail at any given time).
Ownership
The owners of any outlet decide what media will be created. Rupert Murdoch owns, amongst many other things, The Sun, The Times, Sky, Fox, etc. There is often much speculation as to which political party Murdoch will back in an election. We do not need to assume, however, that he tells his editors what to say. Since he owns the various media companies, he is able to appoint editors, and is likely, therefore, to appoint those who will take the kinds of line he supports. There might also be examples of more overt censorship, though: Murdoch owns the publishing house Harper Collins, who dropped plans to publish the book East and West, by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong. It also happens that Murdoch has a huge interest in being able to access the Chinese market as it opens to the West. This is, of course, possibly coincidental, though Chomsky and Herman’s model would imply otherwise.
Advertising
Commercial media outlets which depend on advertising for income cannot upset their advertisers if they wish to stay in business. If Coca-Cola is your sponsor, and you run a story about the potential carcinogenic ingredients of coke, you may well lose your sponsorship. If your major sponsors are members of the automotive industry, you may think twice before campaigning for higher petrol taxes. If your advertisers want high viewing figures, you’re likely to create populist programming, rather than produce ‘worth’ TV. Or, consider the challenge faced by a media sales agent selling advertising space to car and clothing manufacturers for slots around an anti-consumerist programme?
Sources
‘Sources’ refers to who has the authority to tell us what is true and what is not true. So for example, when you watch Newsnight, there are usually a couple of people asked to engage in some pointless argumentative adversarial debate to explore an issue. These people are usually ‘establishment’ figures who have some kind of ‘authority’ on a subject: professors, experts, police, politicians, lawyers, etc. None of these people necessarily have a great deal of interest in revolution and unpopular ideas. After all, when you’re an ‘authority’, why would you advocate ideas which undermine your authority? Why would Britannica praise Wikipedia? Why would politicians want young people to vote when most of them think middle-of-the-road politicians are wankers, and are therefore just as likely to vote Green or Monster Raving Loony?
If you do see ‘ordinary’ people asked for their opinions on current affairs, it is often in a series of vox-pops which illustrate how ill-informed or generally apathetic and stupid ‘ordinary’ people are. You and I are not asked to debate topics in mainstream media, unless we are there explicitly there as examples of ‘stupid, ordinary people’.
Foucault’s ideas about power and knowledge (below) will be relevant to the way certain kinds of people are considered to be authoritative sources.
Flak
Flak is a deterent. Flak is what you’ll get if you broadcast controversial material or opinions. The BBC got flak from the Christian right over Jerry Springer The Opera, and over their reporting of the Iraq war (the Hutton Report was a form of flak). Chris Morris’ spoof news show Brass Eye got a tonne of flak for its episode about paedophiles and its hoodwinking of celebrities. Theo van Gogh got flak and it cost him his life.
Broadcasters sometimes don’t like flak (might lose advertising revenue from one quarter), and sometimes do like flak (higher ratings and therefore more advertising interest from other quarters) – there is flak and there is flak.
Ideology
When Chomsky and Herman were writing in 1988, before the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, they called this last filter ‘anti-communism’. This filter refers to the orthodoxy that might not necessarily seem to be even open to question, or the prevailing hegemony that informs all the other filters. Do you ever see factual programming exploring economic alternatives to capitalism, or political alternatives to democracy? Have you ever seen a BBC documentary celebrating anarchists or advocating revolution?
What can be said and what cannot be said
So we’ve seen that Chomsky and Herman see the traditional media players as a part of a self-serving capitalist system which excludes competitive ideas, and leaves little room for dissent. Even if we accept that this is so, why would we think that allowing room for dissent, or increasing the heteroglossia expressed in media forms, might have any effect anyway? Just because the internet offers potential heteroglossia in a way that traditional media do not, does being able to ‘say things’ really ‘change things’?
Power / Knowledge
Here, we’re going to meet Michel Foucault briefly (we’ll return to him in the last session of the series too). Before we go on to Foucault, though, let’s look at what Allon White has to say about heteroglossia. Foucault is a tricky customer to read and understand, so White’s analysis of Bakhtin’s ideas here will help.
“As Allon White puts it, ‘because languages are socially unequal, heteroglossia implies dialogic interaction in which the prestige languages try to extend their control and subordinated languages to try to avoid, negotiate or subvert that control’.”(Introducing Bakhtin, p19)
So in amongst all this heteroglossia, there are ‘prestige’ and ‘subordinated’ languages, which struggle for dominance. How is this so? Well consider medical langauge (one of Foucault’s favourite subjects). If I say I have a blocked nose, then I sound a little snuffly and pathetic. This assertion will not be enough for me to take prolonged sick leave. However, if my doctor writes on a piece of paper, ‘this patient suffers from post-nasal drip and caused by a compression of pus in the ethmoid sinus, requiring a submucous resection and functional endoscopic sinus surgery’, then my employers will pay me statutory sick pay for as long as the law demands.
On the surface, we might simply say that the doctor’s language is an expression of his expertise, while my language is simply a lay description of my symptoms. However, the point is that authority comes with expertise – or ‘power’ comes hand-in-hand with ‘knowledge’. Foucault argues that ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ are inextricable.
“…the production of knowledge and the exercise of administrative power intertwine, and each begins to enhance the other… This is the reciprocal nature of these two words that Foucault titled “power/knowledge” For Foucault, this is a reciprocal, mutually reinforcing relation between the circulation of knowledge and subsequently the control of conduct…”
So here we see that our conduct (remember Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s positions on human nature were about what our natural ‘conduct’ is) is controlled by the total set of knowledge we have about the world – what we feel to be true. (E.g. we could say it is true that if I am diagnosed with ADHD, or bipolar disorder, or other mental health problems, then I have a pathology that must be treated, and my behaviour is therefore abnormal). And what we feel to be true is determined by those who are credited with knowledge: experts. And how are expertise circulated? Through discourse.
We’ll leave Foucault there for now, since we’ll return to him in the final session about identity and therapy. In the meantime, lets see him as another plank in our hope that increased heteroglossia is a good thing because it pushes much more ‘knowledge’ – and therefore ‘power’ – into everyone’s sphere.
Tokenism
Finally, let’s worry about increased participation in political discussion being nothing more than tokenism. Recall Arnstein’s ladder, in which limited participation is described as tokenism – where a population may be ‘informed’ of policy, even ‘consulted’, but ultimately, merely ‘placated’. Bucy & Gregson put it this way:
“…civic engagement through media, even if only symbolically empowering for the citizen, contributes substantially to legitimising the political systems of mass democracies…”Bucy & Gregson
Media & Participation, New Media & Society, 2001
So our big question, ultimately, is not so much, ‘what is human nature’, but rather, ‘does increased participation result merely in legitimising the orthodoxies in society, rather than changing them’? We’ll leave this question open…
The next online assignment, on ‘Property’ is here.
References
Bucy, E., & Gregson, K., 2001., ‘Media Participation – A legitmising mechanism of mass democracy’ in New Media & Society, Vol 3, No 3, pp 357 – 380 [Online (Athens required): http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Article.asp?ContributionID=5114780 ]
Vice, S., 1997, Introducing Bakhtin, Manchester: MUP
Photo Credits
The Social Contract, psd
Leviathan, senorwences
Jean Jack Rousseau, topsy
Democracy of few, Disgrace of many, ledpup
Unisphere, wallyg
Postmodern Dialogues – Round One, huxleyesque
Powertools as a pasttime, lachlanhardy
A History of Madness... ii
Imported from Menticulture
A History of Madness... i
Imported from Menticulture
April is the Pantagruelist month
Imported from Menticulture
Symbolic Exchange and The Trap
Imported from Menticulture
Enlightenment
Imported from Menticulture
