Couldry I

Couldry's book has some good points, but, like most accounts of early CS scholarship and the way forward, it often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree in principle with the value of understanding people's reading habits, but it also seems to me to be something that is hardly worth the effort--except if you are a TV producer or advertiser. My feeling here is that in some ways the corporate controlled nature of the public sphere is such that, in some ways, it doesn't really matter what people read or pay attention to or how it means for them--or at least it doesn't matter in the way that Couldry says it does.

He seems to think that the goal of cultural studies is now to see what people are making of popular culture--and in this sense it is basically mass culture. Thus we should look at the mediascape (a term he borrows from someone who borrowed it from someone) and be well versed in its limits, but we cannot assume that these limits are determining. Of course, in what has now become a classic move in these arguments, the idea of determination has moved away from material and social practices into the individual consciousness (is this a neo-liberal fetish or some holdover of Marcuse, which arguably made the neo-liberal movement possible.) In this case, therefore, determination means the determination of meaning. Obviously this is something we could, in some ways, take for granted. "The Letter Doesn't always arrive" or whatever the Derridian analogy is.


Curiously, though he pays scant attention to Hall in the book in general (he seems to have read Johnson's essay on What is Cultural Studies and a few books by Williams and left the early CS stuff at that) he doesn't even mention the encoding/decoding model of reading a media object--and, more importantly, of discerning what could be called the hegemonic interpretation of events. More to the point here is the premise on which this encoding/decoding model rests, on which basically gets left to one side with Couldry (and just about anyone who goes on and on about the need to understand audience interpretations.) That is the rather trite point that these media messages are intended for a very wide audience so they, as a rule, have limited systems of signifiers and stories that they can employ to explain things. At the same time, they are also relying on the audience to do much of the work of interpretation. Even if it is relying on a fairly rudimentary kind of experience and cultural expertise, whether it is a TV sitcom, a music video, or an independant film, the text is hoping that many of the interpretive leaps and expectations will be made by the viewer. On the other hand, since it is arranged commercially, once you've seen the media object, it hardly matters to the major producer (the media corporation) what you think it means: you've paid your money, you've put in your time in front of the TV. If you enjoyed it, great: hope you come again. The only people whose meanings and interpretations really matter are the focus groups they show the films to in the editing process. Though there might be some concern with retention and with generating word of mouth around one of these cultural objects, this, again, matters less in terms of internal individual consciusness than it does with filling seats.

In fact, in so far as this process of interpretation and audiences making meaning is important at all, it is much more a process of acquiesing to a mass media system designed to deliver a identical product to an enormous national (and possibly international) audience. If I view this more from a political economy perspective, it is not because I have a cynical view of the average audience member. They participate in the culture--and there is a culture--because there are pressures to do so and it is far easier to participate in these rituals in some form than to simply reject them wholesale. So they watch the blockbuster film--and more importantly, they pay the admission or rental fee--and I am sure that they have enormous creative potential for interpreting what it means (and/or the pleasure of "getting" the cultural references, intertextuality, etc.) makes it possible for them to feel fulfilled after this experience. If I were to go through and ask a thousand people or a million people what they would say a movie meant, I'm sure I'd get very interesting answers and understanding how those negotiations take place would be beneficial to us all. But that is a very expensive endeavor which, as I mention above, movie studios have largely already done for me. If I really wanted to find out what audience members thought of the text, I'd sneak into Warner Brothers marketing department and find out what the focus groups said it meant.

But the reason I think the focus of cultural studies should be more materialist is that this kind of iaudience consciousness oriented nformation is basically only useful for a certain branch of literary studies or, perhaps, some form of ethnography. The real end result is that mass media producers are able to sell a product that uses stereotypical understandings of the world and still sell it to a large majority of people (either as a product they actually purchase or as a cultural object that is seen as valid and normal--such as when Saturday Night Live or the Simpsons do spoofs of major Hollywood productions). In this process, the product is valorized by the viewers and by the cultural circuit in general and, as we are finding out very quickly, any of the value produced in that process is meant to stay in the hands of the owners of it as a piece of intellectual property. This means not only that the contortions of interpretations people may or may not be forced into to identify with a mass cultural object, that the work they do when they go to the movies, is appropriated; that the range of public cultural references drawn upon in order to create that object are privatized; but also that future uses of that text, future actual reinterpretations and statements about the text in the form of remakes, spoofs or simply clips in critical documentaries (all of which are becoming much more technically feasible) must be cleared with the appropriators, a fee paid and limits placed on the kinds of uses that can be made of that cultural object.

In other words, I come back to the way that, whatever space for interpretation exists for the individual, it is not just constituted by these material and ideological forces, it is determined by them and, in many ways, the people who project this force profit from this work. And I haven't even begun talking about the ideological effects of not only this practice and the limits it places on expression, but of this practice in itself. Particularly in the case of news and political commentary, where the facts are less important than the general drift of the press and powerful avoidance strategies are reinforced so that audience members are encouraged to look for the mainstream interpretation, for some false sense of balance, instead of working too hard to discern something like the truth. A hegemonic sense of realism (in the poltiical science meaning) dominates this conversation, which leads to a dismissive attitude towards most critics as being naive or overly utopian, even when, as in the case of the latest war in Iraq, it was clearly the people in power who most clearly represent that accusation.