1 CHAPTER SEVEN: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CULTURAL STUDIES Media Industries and Media/Cultural Studies: An Articulation1 Douglas Kellner (University of California, Los Angeles) The media industries today stand at the center of our economy, politics, culture, and everyday life. Radio, television, film, digital media, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which individuals in contemporary media and consumer societies forge their very identities, including sense of self, notion of what it means to be male or female, and conception of class, ethnicity and race, nationality, and sexuality. Media culture helps shape both an individual’s and a society’s view of the world and deepest values, defining good or evil, their positive ideals and sense of who they are , as well as who and what are seen as threats and enemies, creating, in some cases, sharp divisions between “us” and “them.” Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which individuals constitute a common culture and through their appropriation become part of the culture and society. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is 2 allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the powers that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed. The media industries are powerful forces in contemporary societies, and it is essential to comprehend how they work in order to understand, act in, and transform the environment in which we live our lives. The media industries produce entertainment and news and information, they are commercial enterprises and thrive on advertising, thus helping to reproduce a media and consumer society. The media industries are an essential economic force, helping manage consumer demand, constructing needs and fantasies through advertising and entertainment both of which provide promotion for consumer society. Further, the media are key instruments of political power, constituting a terrain upon which political battles are fought and providing instruments for political manipulation and domination. A central force in social life, the media dominate many people’s leisure activities and help construct how many people see the world and insert themselves into the established society. In this essay, I discuss the potential contributions of a critical media/cultural studies perspective to 3 theorizing media industries. First, I show the importance of the Frankfurt School and their theory of the culture industry for theorizing media industries, followed by discussions of how a model developed by the Frankfurt School and British cultural studies that engages production and political economy, textual analysis, and audience reception study can provide comprehensive perspectives to engage media industries and their production, texts, audiences and impacts.2 I then offer a proposed model of a critical media/cultural studies to engage media industries, and illustrate it with examples from contemporary entertainment and journalism. One of my goals is to stress the importance of critical analysis of both news and entertainment, and the need to combine history, social theory, political economy, and media/cultural studies in order to properly contextualize, analyze, interpret, and criticize products of the media industries. The project thus requires inter- or supradisciplinary perspectives to engage the full range of the import of media industries. The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industry The Frankfurt School inaugurated critical communications studies in the 1930s and combined political economy of the media, cultural analysis of texts, and audience reception studies of the social and ideological 4 effects of mass culture and communications.3 Organized around the German Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the 1930s, their core members were Jewish radicals who later went into exile to the United States after Hitler's rise to power. Establishing themselves in a small institute in New York affiliated with Columbia University, the Institute for Social Research, they developed analyses of the culture industry that had emerged as a key institution of social hegemony in the era that they called state-monopoly capitalism (Kellner 1989). Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin (the latter of whom was loosely affiliated with the Institute), analyzed the new forms of corporate and state power during a time in which giant corporations ruled the capitalist economies and the might of the state grew significantly under the guise of fascism, Russian communism, and the state capitalism of Roosevelt's New Deal which required a sustained government response to the crisis of the economic Depression in the 1930s. In this conjuncture, ideology played an increasingly important role in inducing consent to a diverse spectrum of social systems. Frankfurt School theorists argued that the media were controlled by groups who employed them to further their own 5 interests and power.4 They were the first social theorists to see the importance of what they called the “culture industry” in the reproduction of contemporary societies, in which so- called mass culture and communications stand in the center of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization and mediators of political reality, and should be seen as primary institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural, and social effects. They coined the term "culture industry" to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives which drove the system. The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. The products of the culture industry had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into the framework of mass culture and society. Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the culture industry in a political context as a form of the integration of the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt School were one of the first neo-Marxian groups 6 to examine the effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes which were to be vehicles of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario. They analyzed the ways that the culture industries were stabilizing contemporary capitalism, and accordingly they sought new strategies for political change, agencies of social transformation, and models for human emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle. Their approach suggests that to properly understand any specific form of media culture, one must understand how it is produced and distributed in a given society and how it is situated in relation to the dominant social structure. The Frankfurt School thought, for the most part, that media culture simply reproduced the existing society and manipulated mass audiences into obedience. Yet despite their many virtues, there are serious flaws in the original program of critical theory that requires a radical reconstruction of the classical model of the culture industries. Overcoming the limitations of the classical model would include more concrete and empirical analyses of the political economy of the media and the processes of the production of culture; the construction of media industries and their interaction with other social institutions throughout history; and of audience reception and media 7 effects. A reconstructed critical theory would also involve the incorporation of emergent theories of culture, the media, and society into the project, just as the classical critical theorists, and more recently Habermas, have engaged and incorporated the insights of novel theories of the day into their work. Cumulatively, such a reconstruction of the classical Frankfurt School project would update the critical theory of society and its activity of cultural criticism by incorporating contemporary developments in social and cultural theory into the enterprise of critical theory. In addition, the Frankfurt School dichotomy between high culture and low culture is problematical and should be superseded for a more unified model that takes culture as a spectrum and applies similar critical methods to all cultural artifacts ranging from opera to popular music, from modernist literature to soap operas. In particular, the Frankfurt School model of a monolithic mass culture contrasted with an ideal of "authentic art," which limits critical, subversive, and emancipatory moments to certain privileged artifacts of high culture, is highly problematic. The Frankfurt School position that all mass culture is ideological and debased, having the effects of duping a passive mass of consumers, is also objectionable. Instead, one should see critical and ideological moments in the full range of culture, and not 8 limit critical moments to high culture and identify all of low culture as ideological.5 One should also allow for the possibility that critical and subversive moments could be found in the artifacts of the cultural industries, as well as the canonized classics of high modernist culture that the Frankfurt School seemed to privilege as the site of artistic opposition and emancipation. It is also important to distinguish between the encoding and decoding of media artifacts, and to recognize that an active audience often produces its own meanings and uses for products of the cultural industries, points that I will expand upon below. In spite of these limitations, the critical focus on media culture from the perspectives of commodification, industrialization, reification, ideology, and domination provides an optic useful as a corrective to more populist and uncritical approaches to media culture that surrender critique. Against approaches that displace concepts of ideology and domination by emphasis on audience pleasure and the construction of meaning, the Frankfurt School is valuable for inaugurating systematic and sustained critiques of ideology and domination within the culture industry, indicating that it is not innocent and a “creative industry,” as certain contemporary idiom would have it. The notion promoted by Hartley (2003) and other proponents of the 9 “creative industries” model provides an ideological gloss of positivity on media industries. Such perspectives suggest media are inherently bastions of enlightenment, creativity, and abundance and one might prefer the Horkheimer and Adorno notion of “culture industry” that is more critical and less ideological.6 Moreover, on the level of metatheory, the Frankfurt School work preceded the bifurcation of the field of media and communication studies into specialized subareas with competing models and methods. This bifurcation is documented in the 1983 Journal of Communications (JoC) issue on Ferment in the Field (Vol. 33, No 3 [Summer 1983]). Some of the participants in this discussion of the state-of-the-art of media and communication studies noted a division in the field between a humanities-based culturalist approach that focuses primarily on texts contrasted to more empirical social science based-approaches in the study of mass-mediated communications. The culturalist approach at the time was largely textual, centered on the analysis and criticism of texts as cultural artifacts, using methods primarily derived from the humanities. The methods of communications research, by contrast, employed more empirical methodologies, ranging from straight quantitative research to interviews, participant observation, or more broadly historical research. 10 Topics in this area included analysis of the political economy of the media, audience reception and study of media effects, media history, and the interaction of media institutions with other domains of society. Some contributors to the 1983 JoC symposium suggested a liberal tolerance of different approaches, or ways in which the various approaches complemented each other or could be integrated. Yet I would suggest that the Frankfurt School approach is valuable because it provides an integral model to overcome contemporary divisions in the study of media, culture, and communications. Their studies dissected the interconnection of culture and communication in artifacts that reproduced the existing society, idealizing social norms and practices, and legitimating the dominant organization of society. For the Frankfurt School, the study of communication and culture was integrated within critical social theory and became an important part of a theory of contemporary society, in which culture and communication were playing ever more significant roles. Certain theorists in the tradition of British cultural studies continue this project in a later conjuncture and overcome some of its limitations, as well as updating the project of analyzing the products and effects of the media industries.