Post by Josh Shepperd, The Catholic University of America

This post continues Josh Shepperd’s “On (the) Wisconsin Discourses” series from last year. This is Part 1 of 2 in a pair of posts commemorating Michele Hilmes.

Discourses as Political Will

Previous posts in this series have discussed how the “Wisconsin” tradition of media research has been informed by the Birmingham School approach to the problem of “discourse”. In short, “discourse” is a term that serves as a shorthand concept to refer to how embodiments are bound by stable yet flexible identity affiliations that respond to and intervene among social contradictions. The question of “political will” in discursive theory is defined as temporal hegemonic precedents that social ensembles interpret as they circulate representational codes among a “public”. This concept of discourse, which can be roughly approximated as a logic of how superstructural strictures influence social encounters, is usually applied through analysis of “determinants”, the “limits and pressures” faced by cultural blocs during social selectivity. “Selection” is not theorized as an opportune, consumptive, bootstrapping, or commercially based practice, but as adjustments emergent groups make in spite of limited opportunities for identity recognition or class mobility during social engagement. Discursive interactions are further guided by reference to internal histories communicable to other discursive blocs.

As Nancy Fraser, Michael Warner, Sara Ahmed, Julie D’Acci, and others have noted, publics carry inherent structural limits for group recognition. Part of the ongoing influence of the Birmingham theory of “discourse”, however, is that it accounts for macro forms of participation without prescribing a mandated mode for public engagement. Discursive theorists instead propose that a public is comprised of diachronically shifting perspectives, oriented toward social reciprocation while advocating for maximal visibility for their positions. Discursive power waxes and wanes, sometimes unpredictably, and even if a bloc has developed a “successful” representational code, this does not guarantee that a specific group will become politically “dominant”. Instead, a group’s communicative codes take on hybrid and homologous meanings and consequent applications in everyday life. Literacy of these codes provides insight into past discursive constructs and might help to anticipate strategies for future advocacy.

Discourse or “Discourse About”?

A crucial distinction often missed by contemporary media and cultural studies research is that distribution apparatuses are not continuing with discursive work merely because they are able to increase visibility by saturating perspective; businesses surely do this, as do consumer responses. The relationship between “mere” circulation and dialectical progress is specious at best. Two variables must be qualified so that discursive analysis might make viable ethical claims. The first variable asks: is a discursive construct a sustainable marker for identity formation, beyond a specific phenomenon studied? This question requires a fine distinction between the concept “discourse” and analysis of the discourse about a specific subject or pattern of behavior. The second variable addresses the contours of reciprocation. Does a “discourse” have the capacity to respond to larger social expediencies through an internally coherent logic, or is it a specific reactionary response to a proffered pleasure?

This second point is especially crucial for cultural work if one believes the Birmingham School maxim that discourses are characterized by their struggle for equitable recognition. Here it’s worth pointing out that distinctions should be made regarding what type of recognition is at stake. Consumer activism, for example, might achieve small gains by influencing representational depiction, but it’s not clear if working within the (very limited) constraints of an industrial interface permits advocating against larger conditions of structural reproduction. Paul Willis notes that many dimensions of resistance implicitly articulate solutions to social contradictions, but without clarifying what solution might be anticipated, actants fall into a simultaneous performance of resistance and dominant ideological reproduction. One’s consumer preferences might take on the simulation of a “discourse”, for example, but consumptive practice does not predicate discursive sustainability, ameliorate social parity, or provide grounds for dissension. Thus according to Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and John Fiske, an innate degree of “drift” media literacy is necessary, so that discursive interventions might calculate public impact beyond colonization of the local by standardized culture.

Discursive Analysis of Residual History

This points to the primacy of the work of Michele Hilmes, the subject of the final piece in this series. Besides serving as a mentor and steward of the Wisconsin tradition since the 1990s, Hilmes has engendered a new tradition by clarifying one of the most difficult problems in discursive analysis – how might we trace ideological reproduction in practice itself, beyond critiquing representations after they’ve already been circulated? The Hilmesian approach might be described as an attempt to identify the causative basis of what we regularly call “residual” messages by looking to genealogies of discursive struggles. By introducing a rigorous historiographical model, Hilmes has founded a tradition concerned with the fundamental cultural studies question of how dialectical relationships between processes might be identified through institutional histories, e.g., “radio and film”, “production and reception”, “U.S. and Britain/transnational institutional approaches”. And she has continued with the Birmingham School project of identifying, examining, and contributing to the “media literacy” of varied “publics” besides the Habermasian political, including (and especially) the reflexive “popular”. She has expanded our evidentiary knowledge of how these varied publics – such as the imagined, discursive, and transnational – have reciprocated with the political.

As Wisconsin network historian Douglas Gomery has eminently argued, economies of scale define the organization of media industries as self-sustaining but holistic structures toward distributive and affective outcomes. Hilmes added an additional historiographical mandate: that scholarship look at the ways that institutions are founded and evolve in relation to each other, deliberately choosing structures of organization novel from other institutions. This method begs a fundamental question: to what do discursive blocs aspire, and how might we assess such aspirations without speculation or by uttering ideologically reproductive claims? Part of the answer, according to a Hilmesian historiography, can be found in understanding how institutions functionalize discursive interests.

In a few weeks, Part 2 of this post will look at the historical dialectics of discursive institutional analysis, as developed by Michele Hilmes.

On (the) Wisconsin Discourses: Julie D’Acci (Part Two)

Part One: Here

Does circulating information influence, inflect, or inhibit material relations in empirically verifiable ways? And do strategic interventions in the super-structural sphere actually promote sustainable social effects?

These are easily the two most vexing problems facing cultural studies research. In a previous post, this series argued that Julie D’Acci’s work has attempted to empirically apply the theoretical assumptions of the Birmingham School without emulating a social science method.

Such an approach begins with the observation that cultural processes require evaluation beyond taxonomic description. Mass communication is effective at describing media events by focusing on the relationship between evaluative (after) and predicative (before) time. In contrast, cultural studies seeks to contribute to social change among multiple lines of tactical intervention – industrial content production, information circulation, identity representation, and most difficultly, consciousness formation. Put differently, the when of social change is a central distinction between these two forms of communication analysis.

By focusing on concurrent characteristics of tangible discursive processes, opportune moments to plant seeds for democratic thought are revealed as internal adjustments to qualitative phenomena by discursive blocs. Attention to the temporality of how blocs shift their positional presence among heavily circulating codes and representations, otherwise called emergence, was a central concentration of cultural studies between the 1960s and 1980s.

Two major methodological strains came out of this period, “bottom-up” research that extrapolates scale practices through empirical study, and critical/cultural theory that evaluates circulating concepts regarding perspective, embodiment, and aspiration. Julie D’Acci’s major contribution—her refinement of Richard Johnson’s “circuit model”—can be viewed as a kind of intellectual diplomacy intent on reconciling empirical and conceptual approaches innovated from shared political investments.

The Paradox of Strong Effects in Cultural Studies

As discussed in the last post, the cultural study of media differs from mass communications over philosophical orientation regarding how social change occurs and is elicited. A communications researcher begins by identifying an event, asking a directed question about the event, measuring a response to that question across demographic categories, identifying the legacy of the event in its opinion effects, and then proposing a short-gain solution based upon the political will of the discursive bloc queried. This model of media event analysis, usually associated with Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz, has been successful at communicating social processes to the hard sciences, and is accurate at accounting for opinion and predicting political outcomes that are opinion-based. A quantitative study builds context through a reverse gestalt that assembles parts into a constituted whole. A saturation of directed questions applied across demographic categories can be graphed as a topography of belief, in which utterances after an event provide a glimpse of analytical certainty.

In contrast, media and cultural studies has resisted adopting a strong effects model precisely because qualitative datum, such as imagination, intuition, and residual belief, tend to be minimized when survey findings are translated into quantified results. Survey research cannot assess how the historicity of implicitly coded information is received. Cultural studies begins with all constitutive characteristics of a phenomenon, which are then critically bracketed, detailed, and mobilized in line with a specific tactical project. A cultural analysis resists reactive delegation of a problem or position into a pre-constituted category. And uncomfortably received by social sciences, cultural research also requires acknowledgement of a kind of existential paradox, debated little since the 1980s in media studies:

Qualitative analysis resists strong effects correlations, specifically because analytic research questions predetermine a field of vision. Yet, cultural studies researchers have simultaneously held the belief that media has important role in the struggle over equity and representation. Put differently, cultural analysis believes that reception is more complex than transmission or measurement models permit, yet the method rests on the faith that circulating messages carry “strong” social effects central to the struggle over democratic participation.

Among recent responses to this paradox has been a common conclusion to simply evade this paradox, and continue with empirical mapping as a descriptive form with no intended outcome. This has led to what might be called a “third-wave” of de-theorized cultural studies in which some researchers have argued for increased attention to production blocs that carry emergent characteristics similar to discourses. In some cases, the “third-wave” has taken an additional step in de-politicization and argued that business practices are even more promising sites for eliciting social change than previously favored grass-roots interventions in public forums. While industries are worthy of close analysis, they are rarely if ever engines for equity.

Observing that businesses aren’t invested in social justice research does not reconcile a further existential dilemma that faces cultural studies. Media industries are an inseparable and permanent node in the production and circulation of representations. Part of the field must consist of analyses of the logic of capitalist entities; to do this requires a maxim for political investment, as well as healthy debate over the strengths and weaknesses of conceptual methods. Descriptive work is doomed to make evaluative claims after a social process or media event has already occurred. Cultural analysis that follows a “circuit model” centers on the continuous evaluation discursive reflexivity, as groups refine and begin to circulate their own messages.

The Circuit Model as Sublimation of Relational Distanciation

How to avoid the accidental reproduction of official knowledge? One appropriate method is to reveal inequalities as they occur. Another strong option is to genealogically analyze source concepts and practices as predicates for future social relations. A more difficult option is provided by D’Acci’s circuit model (below): to identify emergences as they’re presented among the constellation of limits of a specific context. Examining cultural emergence requires an understanding of how productive, distributive, and receptive qualities consist of series of exchanges that build valuation. Valuation of a specific coded representation increases circulatory momentum. Heavily circulating codes sublimate cultural processes and become what’s commonly referred to as a “determinant”, or a reference point for future code making.

D’Acci’s proposition is to account for this process by first identifying a 4-tiered but inter-subjective system of circulation. While its spheres—social, industrial, receptive, textual—come from Johnson, D’Acci’s system also implicates an additional methodological fourfold: empirical, conceptual, ethical, and aesthetic analysis, as a way to identify exchanges between interrelated determinants, including the internal organization of each sphere. Under such a rubric, a determinant further acts as a connective that facilitates a continuum of heavily circulating codes, while exposing contradictions opportune for change action. Circulating messages interact with cultural determinants, and the result, as argued by Stuart Hall and John Fiske, is that we can clearly identify discursive emergence.

If one sphere is cut from analysis, it recedes from sublimation into isolated divisions. Over-formalization of one node further has the danger of resulting in reproductive analysis of “official knowledge”, because representation has been cut off the process in which a code has been circulating.

A successful analysis of the sublimation between actants, objects, and processes causes even ephemeral relationships to become empirically revealed as an identifiable communicative relation that can be ethnographically described. Over time mapping of cultural representations might result in a sublated grasp of relational distanciation between circulating concepts. Sublimation of exchanges within a contextual field also reveals how degrees of duration might help to understand constitutive degrees of discursive positioning.

In terms of the ethical investments of cultural studies, devising a method to capture ephemera, subjective interpretation, and anticipatory aspirations, are a central to understanding how the performative dimensions of discourses respond to dominance. These are the sites of resistance, change, and possibility, and they are the first significations exorcised by methods of standardization.

To respond to the second question posed at the beginning of this piece: we can’t be certain if cultural analysis is able to promote sustainable cultural change in the U.S., researchers haven’t organized in a sustained way toward these stated goals. But we do have working theories from which to begin.

Part Two: Here

Why map the relationship between media industries, audiences, and texts? Why has media and cultural studies not adopted a mass communication model for reception studies, although survey research is accurate at predicting and assessing responses to content?

According to Julie D’Acci, Evjue Bascom Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and longtime faculty at UW’s Media and Cultural Studies program, the answer is less due to differences in disciplinary approach than a methodological aporia. Since the 1970s, the field of media studies has attempted to understand the process by which distinct case “spheres”—social relation, industrial production, textual distribution, and content reception— might become a unified disciplinary focus. John Fiske, the subject of the first posts in this series, showed that “discourses” rely upon continued circulation of perspective to remain as coherent cultural forms. Julie D’Acci’s work has set out to correct one of the primary problems in media studies: reconciling why an examination of “process” inadvertently reverts to a de-politicized analysis of “object”.

When researchers only focus “case studies” on one of the four spheres, such work has tended to exaggerate a phenomenon at hand. This problem, which might simply be called “overemphasis”, has the unintended effect of concealing broader social effects of a phenomenon. Further, the methodological shift to a descriptive case study approach has increased concurrently to a decline in the political investments that characterized media studies between the 1970s and 1990s. Julie D’Acci argues that attention to the temporality of inter-mediation might provide compelling incentive to not only account for the dynamic between “industry” and “consumer”, but “social institution” and “cultural agent”. An analysis of the relation between culture, industry, reception, and text, usually referred to as “mapping”, is imbued by ethical imperatives because phenomena are already deeply immersed in discursive struggles over recognition, popular opinion, and cultural emergence. Such a study requires the difficult innovation of a holistic solution-based methodology.

Time or Effect?

The Birmingham School persuasively expanded the concept of “the public” to include “the popular”, the everyday ways that emergent discourses position as tangible forms, through the circulation of their perspective. As was noted by Raymond Williams, the philosophical problem of “emergence” requires a concept of “time”, for which Williams identified “residual”, “emergent”, and “dominant” relations. Yet his tripart analysis of temporality sometimes distracts focus from the fact that most temporality accounted for in cultural studies research is emergent. “Emergence”, like the concept “discourse”, acts as shorthand for a larger argument central to the cultural study of media: that internal change is implicit to any bloc formation, and that codification, representation, and circulation are central to bloc identity. Strategic action in the cultural sphere can influence discourses as they adjust and readjust to social phenomena.

An important contrast well-understood but not often cited is that media effects research began much in the same way, but has harnessed different methods for evaluation. Indeed, mass communications research is extremely accurate at assessing phenomena, and is further distinguished from cultural studies by its ability to divide and subdivide demographic results. Knowledge of demographic reception trends can be applied to social/political platforms with advanced prediction of receptive outcome. Political parties use this approach, and commercial networks have been conducting varied forms of survey research since the 1930s. Since “media industries” largely thrive thanks to quantitative analysis, why has “media industry studies” resisted a similar approach? Why focus on transitions, translations, and transferences instead of just detailing objects and effects?

According to discursive evaluation, the answer can be found in the question of when. Both cultural studies and media effects are capable of some degree of prediction. The difference comes from cultural studies’ belief that the contours of the object studied shifts proportionate to the relation that has been identified. Accordingly, the researcher must approach any question of object identity with some degree of reflexivity, not just in adjustment of methodological application, but also in the limits identified regarding the social effects of their project. An “effect” is an ossified time, with utility as a comparative precedent. “Emergence” is a negotiated time, with broader capacity to account for non-quantifiable aspirations, investments, and identities.

D’Acci’s major contribution to the working concept of “emergence” comes in her expansion of how dialectical temporality is negotiated as proximities of exchange, between specific spheres of study. A working concept of temporality sheds light on the duration of an exchange and possibilities for intervention during discursive adjustment.

Theorizing Performative Circulation: the Polity of Cagney and Lacey

Changes that take place empirically, in relation and in perception, constitute the conditions of the study of mediation, as mediation transitions into a tangible form. This is usually referred to as “circulation” in media studies. Assumptions, inequities, and precedents are written into these processes, and researchers spend careful time assessing where inequities take place. Cultural circulations of inequities are notoriously difficult to locate. Social contradictions often take place implicitly within exchanges, and are revealed only subtly and in passing. Any ossifying survey or case study will delimit the complexity of an event with the purview of the question asked; and as time passes, survey results reflect traces of context.

By accounting for exchanges between spheres, a theory of cultural time emerges in which the line of sight focuses not only on effects or political outcomes, but the performantive dimensions that take place during discursive adjustment. In other words, the tenor of temporal performances between circulating media spheres is not only constituted by exchange between production cultures and receptive communities. Gender performances, according to Julie D’Acci’s text on Cagney and Lacey, are central to and indicative of temporal processes. What is circulated by industries are ostensibly coherent representations of emergent processes. At no point in a holistic analysis of mediation does any specific sphere act as an essentialized cause, though degrees of relative stability are achieved during the mediating process, dependent upon the context of exchange. Thus it remains imperative that broader social investments act as a central impulse for media research, instead of fidelity to legitimize one category or another. Once media analyses struggle to emphasize “originary” cause within the social process, it only can lead to a push and pull over the primacy of a preferred sphere.

The current danger facing media studies comes from the assumption that a legitimation project must emulate a mass communication paradigm in emphasis, by re-appropriating the question of temporality as descriptive reporting of events after the fact, without the same rigor for empirical triangulation one finds in mass communication departments. The survey technique is quite effective for analytic communications, and cultural studies should not underestimate the progress made by that discipline. But for a cultural model to remain sustainable and viable, research must not seek to favor one causative explanation. If part of cultural research includes an investment in contributing to the reconciliation of social contradictions, a capacity to “map” purposively helps to avoid the unintentional reproduction of dominant paradigms.

The next post in this series will focus on D’Acci’s re-framing of Richard Johnson’s “circuit model” as method for mapping the sublimation process of industry studies.

*Thank you to Julie D’Acci for her help in development of this piece.

Previous installments of “On (The) Wisconsin Discourses” on John Fiske can be found here and here.

Sociologist and public opinion researcher Hadley Cantril.

“One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention…” – H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds (1898)

Hadley Cantril, Educational Radio, and The Princeton Radio Research Project

What was the effect of The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” (WOTW) broadcast on Communication and Media Studies? Besides being one of the seminal works of Mass Media history, WOTW turns out to be the subject of the first major commissioned analysis of audience reception that helped to legitimate the reliability of public policy research. The name of that influential study was The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic, written by Hadley Cantril and first published by Princeton University Press in 1940. How Cantril’s book came to be commissioned is almost as central to the history of media research as the program itself.

The back story actually begins with the problems faced by educational broadcasters in the 1930s, the forerunner to public broadcasting in the U.S. Before 1934 there was a robust experiment in public pedagogy run out of universities and school districts, but the Communications Act of 1934 privatized the use of radio so extensively that only about two-dozen stations remained. One of the reasons this happened was because there was no evidence that educational radio was in fact educational. But after 1934, FCC commissioners E.O. Sykes and Anning Prall were interested in classroom extension services via radio, if research could show that educational technology was a viable use of frequency allocations.

In 1935 the FCC formed an exploratory commission with the Office of Education to examine this question, called the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC). Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril was designated by the FREC to supervise a special study on audience reception. He obtained funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and received support from William Paley of CBS through the appointment of a young CBS researcher named Frank Stanton. Cantril also recruited a young Austrian immigrant named Paul Lazarsfeld, and his wife Herta Herzog, completing the core of what became known as the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRP).

Between 1936 and 1939 the trio of Cantril, Lazarsfeld, and Stanton streamlined the methods of “media effects” research, which notably became the primary approach taken by Mass Communication departments after WWII. Lazarsfeld has received many accolades for his methodological contributions, and deservedly so, but it seems to have been forgotten that it was Hadley Cantril who directed the project. And not only was he the director, but he innovated the first model of effects research as early as 1936 by combining the survey research methods of the commercial networks with social psychology. The synthesis of these two methods permitted researchers to account for trends in social opinion with a very high degree of accuracy. Further, results were reproducible even in disparate studies. The key to their success came from the capacity of the “technique,” as Cantril called it, to divide and subdivide demographic characteristics of listeners into specified social profiles.

Though first developed to evaluate the effectiveness of educational broadcasting, the PRP began to turn their attention to the question of how radio aesthetics influenced social opinion. They found that if slight adjustments were made to content, that patterns of reception would palpably change among different demographic groups. Further, listeners had developed tacit anticipation about how they should respond to the ordering of content in a broadcast.

Excerpt from Hadley Cantril’s personal letters.

October 31, 1938

The day after the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, a request came from Frank Stanton’s employer – the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS) – for an opportunity to test their new “technique.” Cantril wrote in one personal letter: “when the broadcast of October 30 occurred, with its responses in mass hysteria over a wide area, the Princeton researchers recognized that here was a perfect opportunity for their inquiry.” On the Wednesday following the broadcast two field workers began the first Mass Communications research canvass—in Orange, New Jersey. They visited the homes of 30 persons who were known to have listened to the broadcast, while other researchers began to tabulate statistics from other sites.

Interviewees reported that they had not been listening very closely, but disruptions to the familiarity of the broadcast in the form of news flashes made them so terrified that they forgot what they had heard just a few minutes before. The play purported to present an invasion by armed beings from Mars, but only four of 30 listeners actually had understood this storyline. Four thought the invasion was by animal monsters, another four thought it was a natural catastrophe, eight thought that it was an attack by the Germans, and one Jewish woman had interpreted the broadcast as an uprising against the Jews.

When asked what made it so realistic, the overwhelming response was that the program’s introduction of well-known government officials and prominent scientists was persuasive. And more so the technical features of the broadcast, its appearance as an interruption of a dance program, the shifting of the news flashes from place to place, the gasping voice of the announcer, his muffled scream when he was about to break down, all contributed powerfully to the illusion. One woman reported that she saw people literally running down the street screaming. Another reported that her town was immediately deserted. However, these instances were often exaggerated.

Title page from first printing of The Invasion from Mars.

The “Effects” of WOTW upon Presumptions and Practices of Media

As Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow have written, Cantril found that there were only a small percentage of “panic” responses to the program, significantly lower than popular folklore has led us to believe. So why is WOTW such a key text for Mass Media history?

The important outcome, as far as the researchers themselves were concerned, was that for the first time a statistically notable sampling of receptions to a media event had been measured. The PRP was able to paint a realistic and thorough picture of the types of responses that occurred, including sub-divided categories of which demographic groups responded in what way.

Among famous legacies of the study: WOTW accidentally indicated just how powerful Mass Media might be as a tool for propaganda. With the aid of Harold Lasswell and Gilbert Seldes, the PRP began to develop propaganda research by the early 1940s. Another less known outcome is that Frank Stanton realized that the demographic analysis he helped to invent could predict likely audience reception in advance, instead of measuring responses after broadcast. Whenever we talk about broad audience appeal or “niche audiences,” we are in part talking about Stanton’s post-PRP/WOTW research and development legacy.

This is the seventh post in our ongoing series in partnership with Sounding Out!, From Mercury to Mars: Orson Welles on Radio after 75 Years. A special thanks to everyone who participated in the #WOTW75 collective listening experiment on October 30th. Stay tuned for more blog posts in the From Mercury to Mars series during December and January.

Miss any of the previous posts in the series? Click here for links to all of the earlier entries.

On (the) Wisconsin Discourses, Part Two (Part One,

What political investments are written into discursive analysis?

The previous post in this series looked at how “discourse” became a foundational concept for Media and Cultural Studies at Wisconsin. Concisely stated, the term “discourse” is used as an abbreviation for how cultural groups adjudicate upon and incorporate information into frameworks of belief over time. Central to this approach is the supposition that the most sustainable opportunity for organizational change occurs during the formation of consciousness. In Emeritus Professor John Fiske’s work, reference to the term discourse carries several political assumptions indebted to the Birmingham School regarding the agenda of media and cultural studies research:

1) Social and political change occurs most sustainably in the superstructural sphere, among belief systems and within conditions of identity formation; 2) Identity formation is subject to what codes and meanings are available in cultural circulation, be it through media, education, politics, or the popular; and 3) Cultural messages can be collected and then assessed, or mapped, among other coherent belief systems for the purpose of strategic intervention.

Put differently, media analysis for John Fiske consists of identifying how coded messages circulate and correspond to other meanings. Central to this orientation, it is assumed that social change can be observed in cultural circulation before it has taken the status of official knowledge or institutional precedent. If a specific practice has become dominant, it will still resist ossification and can be addressed through appropriate tactics. With reference to study of the effects macro-conditions such as regulation and industry ownership, discursive analysis favors evaluation of the everyday practices, meanings, and strategies reflective of consciousness and perspective. “Mapping” is a bottom-up method developed for the purpose of empirically identifying traces of dominant and emergent consciousness in information, opinion, and intention. A cultural studies project is fundamentally based in the hope that researcher literacy of this selection process be utilized for political mobilization.

What is the relationship between media literacy and aesthetic analysis?

Perhaps the most misunderstood element of Fiske’s work is his contention that aesthetic and political domains are never mutually exclusive. Aesthetic construction is, for Fiske, a fundamentally deliberative process directed at circulation. Since screen, image, text, and interpretation are filtered through discursive lenses, aesthetics cannot be divorced from ethical and political considerations. Representations are in the first place constructed with conceptual concerns, be it profit, advocacy, or depiction. And he believes that there are tools for tracing how those concepts become tangible practices and consequent reference points for social engagement.

Fiske argues that political will can be viewed in part among contours of discursive circulation, such as television, popular culture, etc. He claims that traces of consciousness can be seen both implicitly and overtly within how information is conceived, created, and positioned. Groups identify with, resist, or attempt to affect flows of cultural circulation within circulation itself. And in this way, the “understanding” of media adds a tool for political planning.

Which information has the capacity to infiltrate hybrid circulating spheres of political investment relies heavily upon how perceived confluence is interpreted by the internal “sense” of a discursive formation. That pleasure is taken in the consumption of media, for example, depends upon the quality of the artifice of communicative or representational impact, and to how many different outlets, messages, and interpretative channels information is received.

Discursive analysis of media is directed at mechanisms beyond ordered discipline or ideological reproduction at varied productive and interpretive processes. Analysis begins with tangible codes, methods of production of those codes, and distributive practices. To account for the complex processes surrounding media, Fiske proposes something like Richard Hoggart’s concept of “drift” literacy. Fiskean media literacy evaluates how different cultural information is filtered and comes into contact among public and popular spheres.

An act of production can be evaluated for the quality of its creative use of technology, performance, and affect. But for Fiske aesthetics refers to the way that content design serves as a façade for political will. He’s much closer to Bourdieu’s notion that aesthetic evaluation is indicative of one’s place in a social field, than say Kant’s argument that aesthetics are synthetic judgments based in a priori cognitive structures. Either position would be quite different than the assumption that Fiske advocates for a low media effect framework. An audience is not automatically or merely “active”; cultural analysis requires that a discursive formation carry historical engagement with cultural logic and hold coherent views for how to reconcile social contradictions. A discourse cannot spontaneously materialize out of shared habits of consumptive reflection, regardless of the degree of reciprocation between audience members or content manufacturer.

Hence Fiske’s “literacy of media aesthetics” may be thought about as critical evaluation of the artifice and strategies of discursive circulation. For a discourse to sustain, it must be recognized among a social field. And a social field is always embedded within future-directed political struggles over perspective, belief, and material relations. Research into “discourses” includes evaluation of how groups, industries, and individuals develop and interpret coherent codes of framed perspective. Since information is coded by methods of production while inflected with conditions of interpretation, developing tactics for political intervention requires sophisticated literacy of cultural institutional practices.

The next post in this series will look at how the concept ‘discourse’ has been examined by several faculty approaches to research into ‘circulation’.

Why has the term discourse served as such an influential moniker in Madison for the analysis of cultural phenomena?

This series will look at an overarching research theme pursued by Media and Cultural Studies faculty over the past 25 years at the University of Wisconsin. While faculty topics have varied widely from media theory to industry history to the study of content reception, a shared current can be found through the overlapping interrogation and usage of the concept discourse. “Discourse” has been used in multiple theoretical systems since the 1960s, perhaps most famously by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, each who hold contrasting views regarding its meaning. To attempt a general and overlapping definition of the term (that’s open to debate), a discourse refers to: 1) material and ideological practices coordinated by coherent and often non-dominant systems of belief and affiliation, and 2) the structure of internal reference points, assumptions, and reasoning patterns endemic to a specific group, communicated with reference to and relative autonomy from an economic ‘base’. Discourse has not only acted as a concise descriptive marker for cultural phenomena but has exemplified a social justice orientation to qualitative research deserving of continued attention.

The term appeared with earliest regularity during the tenure of John Fiske—a foundational figure in American cultural studies who taught in the Media and Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin for 12 years. Fiske holds the unusual distinction of being both a deeply influential and widely disparaged figure in the field of media studies. Many of the criticisms of Fiske have stemmed from the notion that he depoliticized the overtly political methodologies of the Birmingham School. Yet a revisiting of his corpus, especially how he utilized the concept discourse in Power Plays, Power Works and Media Matters, reveals genuine engagement with the political dimensions of culture. Whether or not he succeeded at formulating a sustainable argument is certainly open to debate, but the widespread assumption that his work lacked an ethical agenda demands reinvestigation and close reading.

What are the political dimensions of institutional, textual, and receptive mapping?

While Vincent Mosco has persuasively pointed to overlapping socio-ethical goals between political economy and cultural studies, there are genuine differences. Central to the political economic tradition is an examination of the political effects of industrial practices. By looking at how laws and examples of institutional sustainability create tangible precedents for future regulatory and informational approaches, political economy endeavors to address policy deliberations and effect change in the present. Cultural studies, in contrast, calls upon a current of cultural Marxism that believes in change as slowly elicited through interventions over spheres of identity formation.

According to this position cultural formations monitor and adjust to available meanings, practices, and affiliations, which Raymond Williams calls determinants. Determinants are learned through evaluation of the circulation of information by cultural spheres over educational, communicative, and public spaces. A discourse forms, aligns, and reforms when necessary through selective self-structuring in response to circulating determinants. A discourse positions itself in regard to circulating determinants, and in turn circulates its own beliefs among informational spheres. Eventually determinants take a life of their own through circulation as active, tacit, and hybrid forms that can then be selected by future groups as conditions for consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent condition that signifies awareness of available meanings, but it can also be located in tangible real-world practices and relationships as a motivational logic.

Rather than asking how consciousness is mediated into circulation, Fiske offers the unusual reversal of assessing how circulation is mediated to other discursive formations. In other words a discourse must circulate into informational spheres to persist. A discursive formation is not a tangible social force until it has been recognized as circulating. Mediation, in contrast, occurs as the condition of social recognition, or reception, within a broad social sphere.

Hence a central tenet of Fiske’s work is the argument that political change takes place foremost through processes of circulation to other proximate cultural groups. Examination of the ‘distance’ between sites of circulation and specific discursive formations, or mapping, helps to identify what groups and messages are visible in circulation, and helps to measure general conceptual proximity between groups. Indeed the strongest legacy of Fiske’s work, also to be attributed to David Morley, has been empirical analysis of the matrices in which media is disseminated and received.

Admittedly hilarious roasts such as David Bordwell’s—that there is an element of cultural studies that believes it can change the world by watching television—are not entirely incorrect. The goal of such an approach is that it conceives of consciousness as something that can be evaluated in its traces amongst sites of circulation, especially media. The will to change cultural inequities is directly tied to what circulating determinants groups have access to during the political act of identity selection. Political economy’s attention to regulatory and institutional practices are crucial terrains of analysis; cultural studies additionally looks to every sphere in which consciousness may be mediated, especially widely circulating meanings found in popular culture.

Yet, while I would argue that Robert McChesney has underestimated this method, he and (Fiske student) Aniko Bodroghkozy are correct to voice concern that no inherent impulse is present in mapping to foment capacities for change. Mere mapping of phenomena in the cultural sphere, as Meaghan Morris points out, falls into the danger of reinforcing banal practice of dominant paradigms. Indeed it is a mistake to argue that the complexity of discursive circulation and selectivity is naturally subversive, and that the political project of cultural studies ends with a descriptive assessment of circulating messages.

But a much needed distinction needs to be made between critical evaluation of Fiske’s politically-directed empirical model for discursive analysis, and differences over political strategies on the left. A depoliticized form of mapping would be rightfully subject to many of these received criticisms. Fiske’s work relies upon the assumption that change in the cultural sphere cannot be elicited without a rigorous understanding of the contradictory beliefs and practices that allow for strategic intervention.

Part two of this series examines John Fiske’s method for political research on aesthetic circulation.

It is a popular conservative position to stand against publicly based institutions and a typical liberal position to halfheartedly support them. The ‘public’, a concept so central to the emergence of democratic spaces during the progressive era, services during the depression, and civil securities during the Great Society, has clearly waned as a rhetorical and conceptual imperative. The logic of privatization has become so strong that every space is seen as a potential extension of accumulation and distribution tactics. It contends not that equity equates to socialism or other absurdities, but that the democratic endeavor is naturally achieved through increased consumer choice and additional pathways of communication. Proponents list an impressive series of recent accomplishments on behalf of private industry: interactive media has increased the capacity for content to reach intended audiences in a way that promotes sustainable consumerist relationships, narrowcasting has provided entire demographics with both lifestyle content and personalized commercials to satiate their habitus, and one may participate freely, safely, and with like-minded users in online spaces. So why would federally funded stations that run low demographic and low-impact programming need to continue if increased consumer capacity and aesthetic complexity have made a ‘public’ media space mandate obsolete? Forty-five years after the 1967 passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, PBS and NPR’s wide hodgepodge of civic, pedagogical, childrens, science, documentary, and how-to programming seem like an anachronism. The ‘promise’ of increased specialization of consumer demand as democratic participation has become a dominant policy position regarding public broadcasting, as well as rationale to privatize and weaken public schools, public housing, settlement houses, public parks, and public universities. Amongst media studies itself, with the deluge of information around private industry, convergence practices, and transnational flows, what significance could a study of our unpopular and endangered non-profit sector offer?

The Free Press has recently presciently pointed to decreased state support and rhetorical attacks upon PBS stations, and the survival of public broadcasting in its current form relies upon these crucial state and federal dollars. But I’d also like to pose a broader historical context. Public broadcasting is not a revolutionary ‘alternative’ to commercial media. It is a specific set of institutional practices, an autonomous self-sustaining extension of the government, and a channel delegated for curricular programming and adult education. In this way it resembles many industrial and aesthetic characteristics so thoroughly studied today. But it is also an enduring concept that served as a basis for an entire generation of media studies. Though the well-documented business-friendly Communications Act of 1934 privatized American media, the concept survived and an entire corpus of communications research emerged to promote media literacy, educational technology, and understand content reception. For over 30 years the consensus regarding the primacy of public media for public spaces inspired researchers to constitute a sustainable academic advocacy culture. This included figures such as Wilbur Schramm (Stanford), who utilized qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine propaganda, UNESCO initiatives, and the effect of communications technology on national development; Dallas Smythe (Illinois), who wrote cutting and trenchant critiques of commercial media practices while heading an influential congressional advocacy campaign that led to the FCC Blue Book and the Sixth Report and Order; and Keith Tyler (Ohio State), who was at the center of many public technology initiatives from closed-caption instructional television to the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (see Allison Perlman’s recent work on the MPATI), while overseeing research on educational radio and television aesthetics later utilized by American Public Broadcasting. During the advocacy period between 1934 and the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, communications research followed an intended purpose.

Hence, at a moment in which public institutions are weathering attacks in virtually every sphere, it’s worth noting that in media and communication studies alone attention to the concept of ‘the public’ has historically engendered wide (and productive) regulatory debate about democratic participation, a media advocacy movement that persisted for over thirty years, and an entire genre of non-commercial programming rubrics. While ‘mapping’ of industry practices and new media innovations will no doubt continue, and it’s a given that commercial media is entertaining, provocative, and occasionally addresses social expediencies, there is no sustainable incentive within logic of accumulation to support a mediated forum for working out social problems with equanimity. Incentive has to be created. Put succinctly, when a research orientation begins with bottom-up evaluation and assessment of how media may promote ‘public’ good in all of its variations, consequent methods can be constituted to examine media not only as proxy of ‘official’ utterances, but toward the realization of debatable social imperatives within a visible field. Such analysis demands strong evidentiary practices, but it also requires that we begin with a rigorous conceptual discussion about implicit assumptions endemic to the object studied and the purpose of analysis itself.