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.

Image: James Turrell, Dhatu, 2010

A year ago, Neil Verma and I assembled a panel for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference titled, “The Aesthetic Turn in Radio Studies,” aimed at mapping renewed engagement by radio scholars with concerns traditionally classified under the heading of “aesthetics”: among them, analysis of narrative structure and broadcast genres, methods of spatial and temporal representation, styles of vocal performance, and experiential qualities of radio listening. This turn to questions of aesthetics has also swept the field of television studies, with a proliferation of work on narrative complexity, TV genres, visual style and sound style, performance studies, and viewing experiences engendered by television’s changing technological interfaces. Yet, despite its prominence in contemporary media research, few efforts have been made to trace the origins of this aesthetic agenda or assess its current methods and goals. A genealogy of the aesthetic turn, I suggest, in fact reveals a return to and affirmation of core concerns extending back to the founding moments of American media studies. While recognizing this rich history, in assessing directions for future work on media aesthetics, I wish to argue the value of a specifically production-oriented approach, as an updated project of “historical poetics” that blends traditional tools of textual analysis with methods derived from current work in production studies.

An aesthetic agenda has, to some degree, been a part of the media studies project from the start, even in the “effects” tradition to which subsequent humanities-oriented approaches are commonly contrasted. Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport’s founding 1935 study, Psychology of Radio, for instance, pursued a detailed investigation of radio’s distinctive modes of affective engagement (its “psychological novelty”) and the presentational styles needed to “conform to the requirements of the medium” (182). In their 1955 Personal Influence, Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld lauded this attention to the experiential qualities of different media, while reminding researchers that the “content analysis” on which effects research relied also required close attention to “form,” or the presentational techniques used to render content via particular delivery channels (22).  Lazarsfeld championed this same approach during his tenure at the Rockefeller-funded Office of Radio Research, warning against exclusive reliance on quantitative studies and courting figures such as Rudolf Arnheim to develop what Rockefeller staff described as a “positive aesthetics of mass communication” that employed humanistic methods to illuminate the communicative properties and possibilities of mass media.† A fully developed program of mass communication research, as Lazarsfeld understood it, would demand strategic forays into the field of aesthetics.

Fig. 1. In a move lauded by Katz and Lazarsfeld, Cantril and Allport’s Psychology of Radio (1935) delineates key differences between storytelling techniques for radio vs. stage and screen entertainment (228).

Despite this early dalliance with humanities-oriented research methods, concerted development in this area was delayed until the television era. Beyond the initial flowering of more literary modes of narrative and genre study in the 1960s-1970s (see, for instance, Lynn Spigel’s discussion of this period), few movements did more to advance the aesthetic agenda than the cultural turn that followed in the wake of work by Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz note in elaborating the foundations of their own multimodal “television studies approach,” the cultural turn brought not only new methods for analyzing audience “decodings,” but also valuable tools for studying institutional contexts and the “encoding” strategies pursued by media producers. From John Fiske and John Hartley’s work on semiotics, to new models of genre study by Julie D’Acci, Robert Allen, and Jason Mittell, cultural studies scholars have encouraged close reading and critical interpretation of media texts, while working to situate these texts within their larger industrial and cultural contexts. Importantly, then, concerns with questions of aesthetics in contemporary media studies represent not a radical correction and repudiation of the cultural turn, but rather a strategic renewal and intensification of founding tendencies within this movement.

Fig. 2. Cultural Studies interventions: The “encoding” half of Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model (1973) calls for combined attention to media texts and their underlying institutional contexts.

The rise of production studies in recent years has offered further opportunities for enriched modes of aesthetic analysis. From John Caldwell’s seminal work on production culture, to Havens, Lotz, and Tinic’s influential “mid-level” approach, production studies scholars have argued the need to supplement structural analyses of media ownership and regulation with detailed studies of craft practices – moving industry studies, in effect, from the corporate boardroom to the studio floor. When coupled with methods of close textual analysis, consideration of struggles on the set and the “self-theorizing talk” (Caldwell) of producers in interviews and trade journals offers valuable tools for understanding, as Havens et al put it, “in an aesthetic sense . . . how particular media texts arise” and achieve dominance (237) – illuminating, in other words, the processes through which particular sets of programming forms and production styles are consolidated, and connecting them to the larger modes of production of which they are a part.

Fig. 3. A production-oriented approach to media aesthetics: Applying new tools for industry analysis from contemporary production studies, while reintegrating close analysis of resulting textual forms.

While most production studies work has remained focused on contemporary media and has yet to fully cultivate the aesthetic component of its research agenda, a production-oriented approach to media aesthetics holds great promise and may be of particular value for historical work. As an updated project of historical poetics, this approach combines close analysis of surface-level textual phenomena (the “what” of media programming) with critical study of the production techniques and institutional logics behind them (their “how” and “why”), isolating privileged formal properties and possibilities of media while recognizing these as historically contingent products of industrial sense-making and consent-winning. However, such an approach remains every bit as much “aesthetics” as “industry studies.” In a field increasingly occupied with an aesthetic agenda, why not call this certain tendency by name and begin serious discussion of its nature and future?

______________

† John Marshall, “Postwar Work in Film and Radio,” Memo to David H. Stevens, December 16, 1943, and “Interview with Rudolf Arnheim, January 3, 1944, Series 200R, RG 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Thanks to Josh Shepperd for his assistance in procuring these documents.

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.

With those words, Pam Wilson captured the urgency of the Fiske Matters conference: Over two days in Madison, Wisc., some sixty speakers and attendees reasserted John Fiske’s still powerful, still relevant ideas for a field in danger of losing them. Among the diagnoses:  Fiske’s examples are now dated, making it challenging to teach his books; the cheap caricature of Fiske as a naïve populist Pollyanna continues to function as a convenient straw man; the new media landscape invites revision of Fiske’s analyses.

But as several people noted, theory is an ongoing dialogue, and the conference demonstrated the value of staying engaged with Fiske’s ideas. Speaker after speaker showed how Fiske’s productive and provocative theories continue to illuminate our current cultural moment and media landscape.  Presenters drew on Media Matters and Power Plays to understand racial politics in the age of Obama and the imperializing populism of the Tea Party movement, or showed how Fiskean approaches to technostruggles, active audiences, and pleasure allow us to analyze power and participation in a range of media forms and practices, including the internet, video games, satellite technology, scrapbooking, poetry, and even—in Fiske’s own keynote address—17^th-century furniture.  This short report can’t capture the breadth and quality of the contributions, but I’ll put my favorite moments in the comments (and hope others will too), and the Twitter feed provides snapshots of how presenters mined the richness of Fiske’s oeuvre.

A modest subtext of vindication also characterized the weekend:  although Fiske has been pilloried and ridiculed, the last ten years have proved him mostly right and often prescient. Henry Jenkins’ keynote, for example, coolly and effortlessly showed Fiske’s theories of active audiences demonstrably borne out in online activism and pop-cultural participatory politics today.  Anyone tempted to mock Fiske along the lines of “Listening to Madonna = liberation ha ha” must contend with Jenkins’ wealth of examples in which the skills, literacies, and pleasures of fandom are deployed for political action.  At the same time, Jenkins showed how Fiske’s approach could be productively updated, e.g. by replacing “resistance,” appropriate to the industrial information economy, with “participation,” which better describes cultural politics in a read-write age.

Fiske himself, despite claiming to have done no theoretical thinking for ten years, continued to offer new ideas and challenges for the field.  An hour into the conference he casually tossed off the insight that norms, which used to be produced at the centers of categories, are now emerging at the margins.  He also suggested that the most interesting problem for this generation is the “technologization of the inner self” through social media, a phrase that should immediately enter the literature (and our classrooms).  It was a delight to see Fiske still producing such generative ideas.

Part 2:  “I am John Fiske”

The conference celebrated not just Fiske’s ideas, but also Fiske the teacher, mentor, and colleague.  There was an “Old Home Week” quality to the weekend, a reunion of friends drawn back to Madison by their deep respect for Fiske (an indisputably great teacher) and the intellectual community he fostered. His students carry his instructional style and philosophy into universities around the world, leading Steve Classen (with many nodding in agreement) to declare “I am John Fiske.” That might sound cultish if you weren’t there, but it simply speaks to Fiske’s students’ attempt to imitate his pedagogical example: clearly explaining difficult concepts, remaining gracious to opponents, and fostering a climate of “serious fun.”  The conference got emotional at times as John’s former students articulated this dimension of Fiske’s legacy, and as a choked-up Fiske himself put it, “Ideas go out there, they float. It’s the people that matter.”

There will be next steps.  The papers will be compiled and published in some form; the website will hopefully become a repository for resources about Fiske; participants will return to their work re-energized as teacher-scholars. The straw-man abuse of Fiske will undoubtedly persist, but Fiske’s ideas will continue to inspire new scholarship and—the ultimate point—help us understand our culture and ourselves. Fiske himself is ever the optimist, thus it seems appropriate to believe that time will continue to prove the central assertion of the conference:  Fiske matters.