Understanding Structuralism Part 4: Media Power, Barthes, Althusser, and…Surveillance?

Barthes and Althusser on Media Power and Surveillance

For Barthes, the problem of media power is that it has an incredible ability to create myth, or to connote. The press, for example, while under cover of the “objective” standards of journalism, can avoid a level of scrutiny that would not be afforded to many other professions. Movies and cinema can serve the same function (e.g., American Sniper) and create myths that effectively naturalize history, thus allowing the fiction to be interpreted as fact or reality. Barthes would ask questions about the myths perpetuated by the media through film, radio, TV, and the press, as well as through other forms of communication like political speeches. Take for example the recent film American Sniper: the connotations, or the myth, of a film like this are tremendous (myths of patriotism, American exceptionalism, Arab/Middle Eastern borne terrorism, etc.). For Barthes these impacts are important in the formation of ideology, i.e. the adherence and belief in myth, because when most people interact with a myth they focus on the mythical signifier as a whole. Through this the reader fails to unmask the falsities of the myth and lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal. In the case of American Sniper it is apparent that it is a film, and the events on the screen are not the true and real events, however the ideas espoused in the film, the mythical signified, are not so easily dispelled and thus are believed to be true, though the film is a obviously a “reenactment.”

Barthes theory of myth is very flexible for understanding media because the form in which the content is produced is not important. The mythical system is able to appropriate all forms of communication and events (sporting events, political campaigns, wars, etc.) and fit them into its structure. Indeed this is the general beauty of most structuralist perspectives: content does not matter because the structure and function are not dependent upon it, therefore there is a fantastic range of applicability to various media. Like most structuralists, Barthes does not go far enough in incorporating history into his theory because, as with most structuralists, he believes that the historical component is second to the structural organization of his perspective, therefore he opts for the synchronic approach.

In studying myths, Barthes was attempting to understand how fictions become realities, or how history becomes naturalized. The attempt to do this is ostensibly to work towards demythification or unmasking myths to bring accuracy to culture. Though it is not as pronounced as in cultural theory, it is possible to see Barthes’ politics in his work to lift the veil of illusion. It may even be suggested that this goal was achieved. In a later essay titled Mythology Today Barthes reflected on the essay Myth Today and noted that “demystification (or demythification) has itself become a discourse” (Barthes 1989:66). Indeed, Graham Allen in his book Roland Barthes writes “the kind of demystifying reading of myths which he practiced in Mythologies has become widespread and, in fact, assimilated by general culture” (Barthes 2003:65).

Barthes goes further than some structuralists, walking a line between structuralism and cultural studies, in that he makes an effort to understand how people are interpreting and understanding myths as well as the impact that myths have on the ground. However, he does not go as far as some like Hoggart did in Uses of Literacy. But, Barthes does go quite a bit farther in this regard than Althusser.

For Althusser, the ideological impositions of ISAs are so effective that they are unavoidable by individuals. This efficacy comes from the ISAs’ ability to determine and instill ideology through interpellation rather than coercion. Further, because the institutions that comprise the various ISAs are “trusted” (the Church, the school, etc.) individuals have no reason to critically examine an ideology that hails them. One might think that the media ISA could be an exception to this rule since so many people distrust the press. However, the media ISA incorporates nearly all media and there are few people so disengaged that they will not be affected by some aspect of the apparatus. Importantly, the format and content of the media do not matter much for Althusser because he believes that the ownership structure necessarily implicates ruling class ideology into even the most seemingly alternative or anti-capitalist productions. In this way the media ISA offers something for everyone, by way of its variety, interpellating individuals, and thus instilling in them ruling class ideologies. What is more, the ISAs are reinforced and operate behind the threat of repression of the RSA. That is, if someone tries to liberate part of the media ISA (e.g., through pirate radio), they are repressed by the RSA through fines, imprisonment, etc. This is consistent across all ISAs. In the Church, exorcism or excommunication; in education the students are suspended, expelled, or fail, while instructors are disciplined or fired; etc. Thus the RSA and ISA work in conjunction to craft the ideologies of individuals such that they are productive workers that obey the rules and believe they are doing so willingly. Indeed, the subject through the Subject loses the ability to resist.

Understanding surveillance through a structuralist lens yields some interesting results. Through the Barthesian lens we can examine the myth of surveillance and the myth of national security. As a myth, national security can be understood by looking at the second-order relationship between post-9/11 intelligence gathering as signifier, the lack of major acts of terrorism since 9/11 as signified and the myth that domestic surveillance prevents terrorism and keeps the nation safe as signification (sign). In other words, the myth allows for the association between surveillance and safety to become natural, lending legitimacy to surveillance. Thus, in the third mode of myth reception, which is the usual mode, the myth becomes true, it is naturalized. It is through this process that the myth is so effective. Because the myth reader does not recognize the myth as a semiological system, but instead as a causal process or fact, the myth can be innocently and uncritically consumed. The process of consumption and the process of naturalization combine, allowing the myth to transcend to ideology. Special skills and effort are required to partake in the demythification that would allow for more accurate realities to be represented. However, most myth readers either lack the skill or motivation to demythify, allowing the myth to remain effective in the creation of ideology.

Althusser’s structuralism approaches surveillance somewhat differently. In his view there might exist a national security ISA or an anti-terrorism ISA (or these may subsumed in the larger educational and media ISAs) that justify the continued use of surveillance through ideology rather than force. Let us take for example the presumed anti-terrorism ISA. This ISA uses interpellation to call to individuals in a society through different means. The media are the most effective at this. The interpellation could be a newspaper headline that says “FBI foils plot to bomb city, keeping you safe.” In this way the interpellation is directly hailing the individual by using language such as “you.” Thus the Subject gains power while the subject believes him or herself to be freely reading the paper and objectively understanding the reality of the story.

There is no indication in Althusser that the ideology instilled by ISAs is speedy. Instead it is likely a long-term project, preventing any interpellation from appearing truly egregious, even to the critical eye. The anti-terrorism ISA does not usually suggest directly that “you need to allow surveillance” but rather it subtly suggests the different ways that surveillance “benefits” you. Similarly, the education apparatus does not overtly say to the student that “you must grow up to be subservient to the ruling class,” instead it works slowly and subtly. New ideologies are fragile, so ISAs must make concerted efforts to grow these ideologies slowly, nourishing them with continuous interpellation. If one were to resist an ISA’s imposition the RSA is there to enforce it. This is seen recently in the NSA’s overt efforts to target and attack the computers of individuals that use anonymity software like Tor to avoid surveillance while browsing online (Schneier 2013).[2]

[1] Saussure: langue/parole, signifier/signified; Barthes: connotation/denotation, language system/mythical system, etc.

[2] “The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA’s application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world. According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The trick identified Tor users on the internet and then executes an attack against their Firefox web browser.”

 

Notes on the Dual State, Exception, and Law: Understanding the Third Reich to inform us about President Trump, the Muslim Ban, the firing of Sally Yates, and things to watch out for.

The recent firing of Sally Yates for standing up to President Trump is scary. It, in many ways, can be read as setting an upsetting precedent that could be indicative of terrible things to come. Below, you will find a fairly long piece on the development and existence of the Dual State in Germany under the Third Reich. When I wrote in many months ago it was not with the intent to inform us about the Trump regime, but it has become useful for that given current events.

-Tyler

—

 

As the Third Reich came to power, Ernst Fraenkel became interested in the ways German politics was changing and power was being concentrated. Unlike most other Jewish intellectuals, Fraenkel was able to stay in Berlin until 1938 because he was a veteran and had a non-Jewish wife. From 1933 until he left Germany, Fraenkel continued to work as a lawyer, defending Jews and political opponents of the Third Reich, and participating in the resistance movement as well.^[1] He also secretly wrote a critical analysis of the Nazi regime, which was published in the United States as The Dual State.^[2] His manuscript, which had to be smuggled out of Germany when he fled, was completed while he was at University of Chicago; it was translated by Edward Shils and published in 1941. This was one of the first major studies to put forward a theory of modern dictatorship.

Fraenkel began his study by looking to the earlier works on bureaucracy by Max Weber. Weber believed that bureaucratization of the modern world had led to its depersonalization. This, in turn, was quite well suited for a capitalist economy and its concomitant system of power. One of the key aspects of Weber’s conceptualization of modern bureaucracy is its hierarchical organization, where the relationships between subordinates and superiors are well established, such that the exercise of power should not be arbitrary and jurisdictions are clearly demarcated. Weber’s understanding of modern society clashes with the structural operation of National-Socialism in Germany.

The National-Socialist state exercised a remarkable number of arbitrary powers but combined them with a capitalistic economic order. For Fraenkel, this was paradoxical because the arbitrary execution of power meant that rational calculation was not possible. But without rational calculation capitalism is not possible. To resolve this Fraenkel worked to theorize how the Third Reich came to power and how its arbitrary power did not immediately destroy the economy. To do this, he theorized that Germany, under National-Socialism, was actually a dual state, the first of which was what he termed the “Prerogative State” and the second was the “Normative State.”

The constitution of the Third Reich was provided by martial law under the Emergency Decree of February 1933 (Decree of the president of the Reich for the protection of the people and the State of February 28, 1933). The decree is rather short with four brief paragraphs. Importantly, however, it states that

restrictions of personal freedom, the right of free expression of opinion, including the right of the press, the right of associations and meetings, interference with the secrets of letters, of the post, the telegraph and the telephone, and the issue of search warrants, as well as of orders for confiscation or restriction of property – all these restrictions are therefore also admissible beyond the otherwise legally fixed limitations.”^[3]

When the 1933 decree was signed into German law, “the political sphere of German public life [was] removed from the jurisdiction of general law… The guiding basic principle of political administration [was] not justice; law [was] applied in the light of ‘the circumstances of the individual case,’ the purpose being achievement of a political aim.”^[4]

The Prerogative State was charged with ensuring that the National-Socialist regime remained in power through what was essentially constitutional martial law, enabled by using an emergency as an excuse to make constitutional changes and exceptions. Under the Third Reich the impositions noted in the 1933 decree were applied arbitrarily. For example, the religious freedoms of Christians were generally not inhibited, while the freedoms of Jehovah’s Witnesses were, as the latter religion became outlawed. Thus, adherents of Christianity were permitted to practice but practicing Jehovah’s Witnesses were jailed. To justify the arbitrary application of legal impositions, the “Prussian Supreme Court (Kammergericht) created the theory of the indirect Communist danger.”^[5] All opponents of National-Socialism, regardless of their political affiliation, were labeled Communist, thus allowing the legal enforcement of the Prerogative State to apply equally to all political opponents of the regime. The Gestapo, which defined itself as “a general staff, responsible for the defense measures as well as the equally necessary offensive measures against all the enemies of the State,”^[6] was charged with this enforcement. The Gestapo had special legal exemptions that removed any legal guarantee for judicial review of their actions. Fraenkel suggests that the Gestapo is synonymous with the Prerogative State. The ordinary police, on the other hand, had no such exemption and their actions could still be judicially reviewed.

It is within the Normative State that the ordinary police are housed. The Normative State is charged with the usual enforcement of traffic violations, disorderly conduct (as long as it is not political), and the like. Although the day-to-day enforcement of most laws remained the jurisdiction of the ordinary police, the Third Reich could, at any time, protect itself from the jurisdiction of the Normative State (judicial review, etc.) by mandating that a particular case be handed over to the Prerogative State for regulation and enforcement, effectively preventing any real judicial review of the Third Reich. In this way, the Third Reich not only used the Prerogative State to

supplement and supersede the Normative State; it also use[d] it to disguise its political aims under the cloak of law… There is a double jurisdiction for all cases regarded as political. The police execute administrative punishments in addition to or instead of the criminal punishments executed by the courts… [citizens can be] deprived of any possibility of defense, subjected to heavier penalties and branded as an enemy of the state for the future without receiving ‘due process of law.’^[7]

Thus the Prerogative State has no interest in formal justice, but only in material outcomes.

The Normative State has jurisdiction over most things that are not considered political by the Prerogative State. However, in the view of the Prerogative State, “political” does not “represent a single segment of… activities;” instead, potentially all activities in private and public life could be considered political if the Third Reich believed it was in the interests of National-Socialism to classify an activity in such a way. In other words, the jurisdiction of the Prerogative State is unlimited and the Normative State exists only because it is the necessary complement to the Prerogative State. “The coexistence of the Normative and Prerogative States is indicative of the National-Socialist policy of promoting the power of efficiency of the state by means of increased arbitrariness… The Prerogative State’s jurisdiction over all other jurisdictions guarantees that the efficiency of the state shall have priority over the liberty of the individual.”^[8] However, it is in the Normative State that the legal institutions essential for private capitalism exist, including the regulation of property, contracts, labor, unfair competition, patents and trademarks, etc. The Normative State, by retaining this jurisdiction over the necessary legal areas required for capitalism, maintained the legitimacy of the Third Reich. In other words, for most citizens the Normative State, with its judicial review, adherence to law, and the like, was the state with which they interacted. Not until a citizen was deemed to be participating in behavior that was “political” would she or he have interaction with the Prerogative State. The intended outcome was to create a population that believed in the Third Reich and National-Socialism. And, as long as citizens believed and behaved, the Prerogative State remained mostly hidden.

The Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter noted in The Sociology of Imperialisms,^[9] “Nationalism and militarism are not created by capitalism, they become, however, capitalized and, finally they take their best strength out of capitalism. Capitalism is gradually drawing nationalism and militarism into its own circles, thereby maintaining and nourishing them. They again influence and modify capitalism.” The Prerogative State is seen as enforcing special laws on only the “truly bad” (i.e. Communists, terrorists, etc.) and the Normative State is seen as enabling capitalism to continue for all the “good” citizens, thereby preventing the questioning of the legitimacy of the Third Reich.

In Fraenkel’s analysis, there must always exist the myth of a dangerous enemy for the dual state to persist in this way. Further, temporary emergencies, such as the Reichstag fire, serve as stepping stones toward dictatorship under the justification of the self-defense of the state. This self-defense logic was used to justify many atrocities carried out by the Third Reich.^[10] It was also the justification for writing the Law of February 10, 1936, which stated that “orders and affairs within the jurisdiction of the Gestapo are not subject to the review of the Administrative Courts.”^[11] Eventually, there was no longer any aspect of life that could not potentially be considered political and put under the jurisdiction of the Prerogative State.

The Prerogative State and Normative State worked together to simultaneously punish opposition and rationalize the existence of National-Socialism. The essence of the Prerogative State includes: its refusal to accept legal restraint; its claim that material justice is more important than formal justice, which has no intrinsic value; that those who oppose National-Socialism are not just criminals but heretics; and that it will yield authority to the Normative State only in situations where this will further National-Socialism.^[12] The Normative State, on the other hand, is used primarily as a tool to justify and rationalize National-Socialism and the Prerogative State. At any time a person could lose the protection of the Normative State, and even though the Normative State would occasionally critique the Prerogative State it was never anything more than an effort to maintain the legitimacy of the dictatorship. The table below lists some of the fundamental properties of each state as put forward by Fraenkel:

Prerogative State	Normative State
·         Works to ensure regime power. ·         Operates outside of the Constitution. ·         No guarantee of judicial review. ·         Supplements and supersedes normative state. ·         Interest in material outcomes, not formal justice. ·         Enforces special laws on those participating in “political” behavior.	·        Jurisdiction over things not considered “political.” ·        Necessary complement to Prerogative State. ·        Institutions essential for private capitalism. ·        Regulation of property, labor, competition, patents. ·        Maintains legitimacy of the state.

 

Recently, the dual state theory has seen some renewed interest among scholars, especially when examining states that current have, or have had in the past, political environments considered to be repressive by Western standards, such as Sakwa’s use of the theory to explain Russia’s hybrid regime that combines democratic and authoritarian features.^[13] Similarly, Jeffrey Kahn used the dual state theory to describe the selective use of law-as-weapon in Russia, where the law is used as a “selective device for oppression and control; it has no limit but the power of the one who wields it and no values external to the wielder that might constrain his actions.”^[14] The dual state is discussed in Vittorio Coco’s work on the ideological divisions caused by the Cold War in Italy, where he examines the “double state” thesis put forward by Franco De Felice.^[15] Jayasuriya examines how Singaporean leaders often suggest the rule of law is a defining feature of Singapore, when in reality the rule of law (Normative State) applies only to commerce, with the political arena under executive prerogative power.^[16] Similarly, Meriéau suggests that Fraenkel’s dual state, Robert O. Paxton’s parallel state, and Peter Dale Scott’s deep state, are all terms used to explain the existence and function of a state within a state. Meriéau suggests that Thailand can be explained by these theories because of the resistance of deep state agents to the orders of elected officials.^[17] Finally,^[18] Brunkhorst uses the dual state theory to suggest that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there existed a global dual state where certain countries were analogs to the Prerogative State in that they had seemingly unlimited jurisdiction and their actions received no notable punishment.^[19]

Interestingly, Agamben’s “State of Expection,”^[20] while in many ways making an analysis similar to Fraenkel’s, fails to make any mention of the dual state theory even as he points out that the Third Reich was a twelve-year state of exception. Further, Agamben suggests that the state of exception in Germany established modern totalitarianism, which can be defined as a

 legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political  system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones.^[21]

In light of September 11, the USA PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo Bay, and the War on Terror, it has been suggested that the United States has entered a permanent state of exception. Mark Neocleous suggests the idea of a permanent state of exception, or emergency, has “at its heart one basic proposition: that the emergency involves a suspension of the law.”^[22] However, Neocleous does not agree with the assumption that this permanent state of emergency is a relatively recent development: “read historically through the lens of emergency power, the current conjuncture is not categorically different to much that has gone on before. As such, the idea that we have recently moved into a permanent state of emergency is historically naïve.”^[23] Indeed, the previous chapter shows that continuous emergencies, most often war, have allowed for exceptions to established law.

Against the logic of liberalism, which suggests that law can allow for a return from the state of emergency, Neocleous criticizes the “legal fetishism” that suggests law is a universal solution to problems posed by power. This “involves a serious misjudgment in which it is simply assumed that legal procedures…are designed to protect human rights from state violence.”^[24] This legal fetishism not only deradicalizes but it also overlooks emergency measures as part of the everyday exercise of power. It is for this reason that a return to normal law is nothing more than a return to political policing of activists, workers, and immigrants. In other words, it is not possible to return to a time when law was not used as power. Do we want to return to the time of the Sedition Act of 1798, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the Pinkertons, the Alien Friends Act, or the Espionage Act? Neocleous writes, “The least effective response to state violence is to simply insist on rule of law… What is needed is a counter politics” against the normality of class power and oppression by law.^[25] This counter politics is likely what Walter Benjamin hoped for in number VIII of his Theses on the Philosophy of History:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.”^[26]

[1] Hubertus Buchstein, “Political Science and Democratic Culture: Ernst Fraenkel’s Studies of American Democracy”, German Politics and Society, 68 (21)(3) 2003, at 52.

[2] Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to The Theory of Dictatorship, (Oxford University Press: New York, 1941)

[3] Reichsgesetzblatt, Issued at Berlin, February 29, 1933, No. 17; Decree of the President of the Reich for the Protection of the People and the State. February 28, 1933, p. 83, Tiel I.

[4]Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, (The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.: 2006), 3.

[5] Ibid., 17.

[6] Ibid., 21.

[7] Ibid., 41.

[8] Id at 71.

[9] Schumpeter quoted in Fraenkel at 183.

[10] Fraenkel, The Dual State, 39, “The co-existence of legal and arbitrary actions, most impressively demonstrated by the confinement in concentration camps of persons who have been acquitted by the courts, is a crucial development of the recent German Constitutional status.” The claim of actions to be necessary for peace or safety was often used as justification for unlawful acts. This is important when considering that the Prerogative State could overrule the Normative State by punishing someone that had been acquitted by the court. In other words, the Prerogative State could punish for actions that were not actually against any law.

[11] Ibid., 27.

[12] Ibid., 40-63.

[13] Richard Sakwa, “The Dual State in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 26 no. 3, 2010.

[14] Jeffrey Kahn, “The law Is a Causeway: Metaphor and the Rule of Law in Russia” in The Legal Doctrines of the rule of Law and the Legal State (Springer International Publishing: Switzerland, 2014).

[15] Vittorio Coco, “Conspiracy theories in Republican Italy: The Pellegrino Report to the Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 20 no. 3, 2015.

[16] Kanishka Jayasuriya, “The Exception Becomes the Norm: Law and Regimes of Exception in East Asia,” 2 APLPJ I 2001.

[17] Eugénie Mérieau, “Thailand’s Deep State, royal power and the Constitutional Court (1997-2015),” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2016.

[18] This is not an exhaustive list of all scholarship that uses the dual state theory, but should give an idea of how it is used to examine various states around the world.

[19] Hauke Brunkhorst, “Democracy Under Pressure: The Return of the Dialectic of Enlightenment in the World Society,” Civitas, Porto Alegre, 10 no.1, 2010.

[20] Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, (University of Chicago Press: 2005).

[21] Ibid., 2.

[22] Mark Neocleous, “The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to ‘Permanent Emergency’,” Alternatives 31, (2006), 193.

[23] Ibid., 194.

[24] Ibid., 207.

[25] Ibid., 209.

[26] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (Shocken Books: New York, 1969), 257 (emphasis added).

Against Legal Fetishism

Mark Neocleous (2006) suggests the idea of a permanent state of exception, or emergency, has “at its heart one basic proposition: that the emergency involves a suspension of the law.”[1] However, Neocleous does not agree with the assumption that this permanent state of emergency is a relatively recent development: “read historically through the lens of emergency power, the current conjuncture is not categorically different to much that has gone on before. As such, the idea that we have recently moved into a permanent state of emergency is historically naïve.”[2] Indeed, continuous emergencies, most often war have allowed for exceptions to established law.

Against the logic of liberalism, which suggests that law can allow for a return from the state of emergency, Neocleous criticizes the “legal fetishism” that suggests law is a universal solution to problems posed by power. This “involves a serious misjudgment in which it is simply assumed that legal procedures…are designed to protect human rights from state violence.”[3] This legal fetishism not only deradicalizes but it also overlooks emergency measures as part of the everyday exercise of power. It is for this reason that a return to normal law is nothing more than a return to political policing of activists, workers, and immigrants. In other words, it is not possible to return to a time when law was not used as power. Do we want to return to the time of the Sedition Act of 1798, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the Pinkertons, the Alien Friends Act, or the Espionage Act? Neocleous writes “the least effective response to state violence is to simply insist on rule of law… What is needed is a counter politics” against the normality of class power and oppression by law.[4] This counter politics is likely what Walter Benjamin hoped for in number VII of his Theses on the Philosophy of History:

 The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.”[5]

Similarly, Raskin (1976) points out that the United States has organized itself according to emergency rules since 1933, first for economic reasons and later for imperial reason. Going further, he also posits that modern presidential power rests on the “willingness to rationalize class relations…” the recognition that “until 1975, one was not to undermine the military and national security apparatus grouping” and “to recognize [Congress’] legitimizing function and find a means of coopting it into the national security apparatus or the lockstep of the great corporations.”[6]

 

 

[1] Neocleous, Mark, “The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to ‘Permanent Emergency’,” Alternatives 31, 2006, at 193.

[2] Id, supra, at 194.

[3] Id, supra, at 207.

[4] Id, supra, at 209.

[5] Benjamin, Walter, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 1969, at 257 (emphasis added).

[6] Raskin, Marcus, “Democracy Versus the National Security State,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 40(3) 1976, at 186.

Understanding Structuralism Part 3: Louis Althusser, structural Marxism, and Ideological State Apparatuses

Structural Marxism, Ideological State Apparatuses, Interpellation, and the Repressive State Apparatus

Althusser saw the reproduction of labor power as requiring two important elements: the reproduction of the skills required for labor as well as “a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order” (Althusser 1971:132). By this he does not exclusively mean the submission of the working class to the ruling class, but also a “reproduction of the ability to manipulate ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’” (133). This means that schools and other state institutions not only teach skills for production but do so in a way that ensures subjection to the ruling ideology. In the structural Marxist tradition there is a specific understanding of the State. Effectively, the State is the State apparatus, which Althusser understands in the following way: “The State apparatus, which defines the State as a force of repressive execution and intervention ‘in the interests of the ruling class’ in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat, is quite certainly the State, and quite certainly defines its basic ‘function” (137). This understanding illuminates the forms of exploitation of, the subtle everyday domination of, and direct physical violence against the masses. All social struggle, according to Althusser, revolves around the possession of the State and State power. His theoretical goal in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is to advance the theory of the State by making not only the distinction between State power and State apparatus, but to also point out the reality of ideological State apparatuses (ISAs).

For Althusser, the State apparatus is composed of the government, Army, Courts, Prisons, etc., which he opts to call the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), all of which function primarily by violence. The Ideological State Apparatuses, on the other hand, is comprised of numerous institutions such as the religion ISA, educational ISA, political ISA, communications ISA, cultural ISA, and more. As we can see there are numerous ISAs while only one RSA, which belongs to the public domain, while many if not most ISAs belong to the private. This distinction between public and private, however, is of little consequence for this structural Marxism because, like the structuralism discussed above, it is the function of the system and structure that is of importance rather than the content within the system. The RSA functions through violence, as mentioned, but ISAs differ in that they function by ideology. Like most structuralism, we see here the common trope of definitions through binaries (e.g. RSA/ISA, repressive/ideological, public/private, etc.[1]) continued in that the RSA functions predominantly by repression and secondarily by ideology, while ISAs function primarily by ideology and secondarily by repression. Thus, “there is no such thing a purely ideological apparatus” (Althusser 1971:145). Importantly, the diverse array of ISAs are united because

“the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of the ‘ruling class.’ Given the fact that the ‘ruling class’ in principle holds State power, and therefore has at its disposal the (Repressive) State Apparatus, we can accept the fact that this same ruling class is active in the Ideological State Apparatuses insofar as it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological State apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions” (146).

Thus, the RSA and ISAs tend to work in a mutually reinforcing way. The RSA, by force, is able to secure the conditions that allow for the ideological function of the ISAs. The ISAs are able to secure the production of themselves, the State, and importantly the relations of production, from behind the RSA’s repressive shield.

In the past, the Church was the dominant ISA, now it is the education ISA. Althusser suggests that “behind the scenes of its political Ideological State Apparatus, which occupies the front of the state, what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one i.e. as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has…replaced…the Church” (154). However, all ISAs contribute to the same result: capitalist relations of exploitation. But every ISA does so in its own proper way, the way most appropriate for it as an apparatus. For example, the political ISA subjects people to the political State ideology, democratic ideology in the U.S., meanwhile the communications ISA “cram[s] every citizen with the daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc, by means of the press, the radio and television” (154).

For Althusser, ideology has a material existence. That is, the individual behaves in particular ways and participates in particular practices that are those of the ideological apparatus “on which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen…” (167). To complicate the situation further, “his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject” (169). In other words, ideologies have real consequences in that they are responsible for the ideas that allow people to participate in certain practices or to take certain actions, and the ideological apparatus from which this ideology springs has an interest in the individual taking certain actions and participating in society in a particular way. The individual believes that he is acting on his own will when really it is the will of the ideological apparatus that is priming him through ideology to act in particular way that are beneficial to the ruling class.

Given that ideologies are structures, they are to be studied synchronically, because what is important is not necessarily their content but the function they perform. However, in this case it is safe to say that the fact that bourgeois ideology is internalized by the proletariat is not an ideal situation. Ideology works through what Althusser calls “interpellation.” To interpellate is essentially to “hail” or to call out to someone such that they know they are the one being called on and not someone else. It is in this way that ideology is able to turn people into subjects. Ideology requires not only subjects but Subject. Althusser makes the connection between Subject and God, but Terry Eagleton has suggested that it should be understood more as a Freudian superego, or the ethical/moral other, but it could also be understood as the Lacanian other (Eagleton 1991:144). It is through interpellation that individuals are “called by ideological discourses, which establish specific kinds of subject positions that must be assumed by anyone who wishes to be an individual in order to ‘respond’ or participate in the activities that are governed by those discourses” (Gunster 2004:187). This is important because through interpellation the individual feels that they are being personally called by an ideology, this helps them willingly accept the ideology and become good subjects.

Althusser points out that most subjects work all by themselves, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the ISAs). These subjects “recognize the existing state of affairs, that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise,’ and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience… to the boss, etc.” (Althusser 1971:179). In other words, the individual is interpellated as a free subject so that he freely submits to the requirements (commandments) of the Subject; he freely accepts his subjection, thus he believes he performs the actions of that subjection willingly.

Structuralism is an attempt to understand aspects of culture scientifically, that is, synchronically and antihumanistically. The lack of attention paid to the subject of history by most structuralists has been a cause for criticism, and the refusal to account for human agency has come under fire as well. Additionally, structuralism is a theoretical orientation that necessitates broad inclusion. As we saw earlier, the theories developed by Saussure, Barthes, and Althusser are quite different, but particularly interesting are the ways the latter two theorists approach the question of media power…a topic that will be discussed in Part 4.

Understanding Structuralism Part 2: Roland Barthes and a touch of Claude Levi-Strauss

Structuralism and Myth

Forty years after the publication of Course in General Linguistics came Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1956). Like Lévi-Strauss, Barthes also worked to understand myth in culture. However, they understood myth in two very different ways. Lévi-Strauss worked to develop a set of rules through which all myths could be understood. He took myths to be a kind of language that could be broken into individual units called mythemes, which acquired meaning in relation to other mythemes. There were rules allowing the combinations of certain mythemes, similar to grammar, and beneath the surface of the narrative created by these combinations was the true meaning of the myth. These “relations…were inherent in the human mind itself, so that in studying a body of myth we are looking less at its narrative contents than at the universal mental operations which structure it. These mental operations, such as the making of binary oppositions, are in a way what myths are about: they are devices to think with, ways of classifying and organizing reality, and this, rather than recounting any particular tale, is their point” (Eagleton 1996:104). Therefore, myths can essentially disregard human thought since they operate with their own logic, and as such we can see the general decentering of the individual subject that has come to be one of the hallmarks of structuralism.

Barthes on the other hand understood the creation of myth to be a “radically semiotic act” (Gunster 2004:190), where “myth is a system of communication…a message… [not] possibly an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (Barthes 1957:93). Interestingly, and against much of semiology and structuralism, for Barthes mythology can only have a historical foundation. In much the same way that the sign is the associative total of the signifier and signified, the myth is also a sign constructed of a signifier and signified, only it is a second-order semiological system – it is made up of the semiological chain that came before it. This means that the sign from the first-order system becomes the signified in the second. In the first semiological order we have an equation similar to: (signified¹) + (signifier¹) = sign¹; in the second order we have sign¹ equal to signifier² thus the second order looks something like (signifier^{2(this is the same as sign1)}) + (signfied²) = signification (the equivalent of sign²), where in the first order sign¹  is the language-object in a language system, the sign as we usually think of it, and sign² is the myth itself, which Barthes calls metalanguage “because it is a second language, in which one speaks about the first” (Barthes 1957:100). Importantly, in myth the signifier has two aspects: “one full, which is the meaning (history of signifier¹), one empty, which is the form (signifier¹ as it is usually consumed, a word or image). For example: the letters in ink spelling c-l-o-v-e-r is signifier¹, the concept of the clover is signfied¹, and the word “clover” is sign¹. This is the first order – the language system. In the mythical system signifier² is “clover”, signified² is “good luck”, and signification (or sign²) is the myth that clovers bring good luck. Barthes’ examples are more complicated in content (Black soldier saluting French flag, pp. 101-110), but the content is not important since it is the structure that is to be understood. Once the structure is understood anything can be substituted for content (e.g. “horseshoe” – good luck – myth of horseshoes being lucky, Black man saluting French flag – glory of France and allegiance of all its sons – myth of France’s equality, power, unity, etc.).

Myth can be received in three general ways, according to the mythic signified (signifier²). First, if we focus on the empty signifier as form the signification becomes literal. For Barthes (1957) the Black man who salutes is an example of French imperiality, he is a symbol for it. This type of focusing is “that of the producer of myths, of the journalist who starts with a concept and seeks a form for it” (115). Second, if we focus on the mythical signifier’s meaning, or the full signifier, it is possible to see the distorting effect that the form and meaning have on one another, such that the Black man saluting the flag is no longer a symbol of French imperiality, but an alibi of it. “This type of focusing is that of the mythologist: he deciphers the myth, he understands a distortion” (115). Third, if we focus on the mythical signifier as a whole, constructed of both the meaning and the form, we receive an ambiguous signification: “I respond to the constituting mechanism of myth, to its own dynamics, I become a reader of myths” (115). Here the Black man is the very presence of French imperiality (115). It is this third type that is most familiar to us, as it is the way that we usually consume myths. The first two are able to unmask the myth, but in the third type of reception “the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal” (115). This third type of reception is also what allows the myth to transcend from semiology to ideology – through the transformation of history into nature. Everything that happens in the myth, when received in this third way, appears natural. To receive the myth of the luck of clovers in this way makes it appear that there is some natural bond between luck and clovers – history becomes nature. As Barthes writes, “the myth exists from the precise moment [it] achieves the natural state: myth is speech justified in excess” (117). It is this naturalness of the myth that makes it so efficacious. It does not appear as anything other than innocent speech.

Understanding that there is more at play than just naturalness or innocence, Barthes points out that “what allows the reader to consume myth innocently is that he does not see it as a semiological system but as an inductive one. Where there is only an equivalence, he sees a kind of causal process: the signifier and the signified have, in his eyes, a natural relationship. This confusion can be expressed otherwise: any semiological system is a system of values; now the myth consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth is read as a factual system whereas it is but a semiological system” (118). Finally, myth gives intention a natural justification, while making contingency appear eternal and Barthes understands this process to be exactly the same as the process of bourgeois ideology. It is by “naturalizing the historically contingent, [that] myth proves fundamentally supportive of the social status quo” (Milner and Browitt 2002:105). Thus, what we should see from the work of Barthes is that his perspective is still wrapped up in the semiological, just as Saussure, however Barthes’ structuralism differs in that he was interested in the textual conventions of myth and the types of reception of myth that allowed the reader to access and interpret it. Still, Barthes maintains an antihumanism that is so common to structuralism. The myth reader (compared to the myth maker or the mythologist) has almost no agency when it comes to how the myth will be adapted or the influence that it will have on the individual or society at large. This is important because Barthes believes that “ideology consists of the deployment of signifiers for the purpose of expressing and surreptitiously justifying the dominant value of a given historical period” (Silverman 1983:27)

[1] Saussure: langue/parole, signifier/signified; Barthes: connotation/denotation, language system/mythical system, etc.

Early cultural studies and media power: Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.

As part of an ongoing effort to examine media power, I am following my last post, which was far too long ago, with a piece that examines the same fundamental question (understanding the nature of the power of media) from the early cultural studies perspective.

 

Overlapping the development of symbolic interactionism in the 1950s (Hall 1980:33) was the development of cultural studies. The two works understood as leading, in large part, to this new tradition were Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society. Though cultural studies, and here we are talking about British cultural studies, has no single theoretical orientation it does have a number of mostly constant perspectives that became tradition before the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in 1964 at Birmingham University and persist today. Below, some of these perspectives will be examined.

Cultural studies can be understood as directed against the critiques of culture made by Max Arnold and F.R Leavis. Arnold and Leavis sought to privilege the cultural elite by charging them with the preservation of culture, which they felt to be under attack in the mid-twentieth century. Gunster (2004) suggests that Raymond Williams’ claim that culture is ordinary and E.P. Thompson’s work on culture-as-class-struggle combined to provide “theoretical resources for redefining culture as the heterogeneous practices through which people express and live their experience, rather than as a normative category in which those practices… are produced” (174). In essence, cultural studies sought to make the point that culture is found in real life, not just in museums, and also to defend the cultures of the subordinated, such as the working class.

In The Uses of Literacy Richard Hoggart worked to correct the perspective that contemporary writers had of the working class – to combat the romanticized depiction of the working class in literature – while examining the impact that literature and entertainment had on the changes seen in the working class over the previous “thirty or forty years.” To achieve this, Hoggart put a great deal of effort into defining the working class, which he did not think could be distinguished by income alone given that there was such a disparity in the amount of money earned within the class. Instead he examined education levels, occupation, speech and dialects, clothing, and more. Indeed, “there are thousands of other items from daily experience which, as will be seen, help to distinguish this recognizably working class life, such as the habit of paying out money in small installments over month after month” (Hoggart 1957:21). He was sure to point out that there were still numerous nuanced differences between the individuals themselves, in an effort to avoid carelessly generalizing. In this study Hoggart examined cultural items that had mostly gone unnoticed: the entertainment and literature consumed by the working class. This included anything from gangster-novelettes and spicy magazines.

He made the argument that “the appeals made by the mass publicists are for a great number of reasons made more insistently, effectively, and in a more comprehensive and centralized form today than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture; that the remnants of what was at least in parts an urban culture ‘of the people’ are being destroyed; and that the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing” (Hoggart 1957:24). That is not to say that all members of the working class were equally affected. In fact, Hoggart (1957) points out that the people in the working class have a great ability to ignore things that are potentially culturally disruptive as well as the ability to absorb the material they choose. He cites the “considerable moral resources of working-class people” as the reason they are less affected than they might otherwise be by the imposition of mass culture. Though the results of Hoggart’s study are interesting, one major of its most important impacts on cultural studies came from his method of investigation, that he “read working class culture for the values and meanings embodied in its patterns and arrangements: as if they were certain kinds of ‘texts’” (Hall 1980:33). Additionally, it is possible to pull out some of the constant perspectives, as mentioned above, from The Uses of Literacy.

Hoggart made sure to work empirically, to avoid romanticizing the working-class; he acknowledged that generalizations about membership were necessary but emphasized understanding that nearly infinite nuances existed between individuals within the working-class; and that the members of the working-class could adapt and interpret mass entertainment, rather passively accepting it. This last point is important because it sets a standard practice for cultural studies: the resistance to the idea of class reductionism – the study’s findings show a resistance to the claim that ruling class ideology is directly forced on the working-class, who inevitably see their own culture and ideology pushed out as the ruling class’ take over. Hoggart took note of the agency of the individuals in the working-class and their ability to partially resist such imposition rather than passively and fully accepting it.

The concept of culture is quite obviously at the heart of cultural studies. However, great difficulty is encountered when attempting to define culture as a concept. Hall (1980) suggests that there are two different ways to conceptualize culture. First comes out of Williams’ Long Revolution and proposes culture as being the “sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences” (Hall 1980:35). Here culture is democratized, no longer consisting of the elements that constitute the pinnacle of human civilization. Instead this is the culture-as-ordinary perspective wherein all elements of society, from the entertainment enjoyed by the working-class to the art of Picasso, are each redefined as one form of a general social process of giving and taking meanings. These meanings are shared, or not, by the community and this how they become active. For Williams, in order “to study the relations adequately we must study them actively, seeing all activities as particular and contemporary forms of human energy” (quoted in Hall 1980:35). The second conception that Hall (1980) points to is more anthropological, where culture refers to social practice. However, Hall prefers the first definition over the second. What he is sure to point out is that in the context of the first definition, the “theory of culture is defined as ‘the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life. Culture is not a practice…it is threaded through all social practices and is the sum of their interrelationships” … “ the analysis of culture is, then, ‘the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships. It begins with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind… Analytically, one must study the relationships between these patterns. The purpose of the analysis is to grasp how the interactions between all these practices and patterns are lived and experienced as a whole, in any particular period” (Hall 1980:36 quoting Williams).

In his essay Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory, Williams (1980) hopes to shift the focus from the superstructure in Marxist cultural analysis to the base, which he feels is the more important concept for understanding the realities of cultural processes (5). Rather than understand the base as an object, something static, Williams (1980) advocates for understanding the base as a process. He writes that “we have to revalue ‘the base’ away from the notion of a fixed economic and technological abstraction, and toward the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships, containing fundamental contradictions and variations and therefore always in a state of dynamic process” (6). However, this emphasis is not to come at the expense of understanding the superstructure. As Williams writes, “if we fail to see a superstructural element, we fail to recognize reality at all” (7). Laws and ideologies that appear natural or universal must be seen as an expression of the domination of a particular class. The intent of this interrogation into the base-superstructure metaphor is to “assert the connectivity of culture, politics, ideology, and economic processes” (Gunster 2004:179).

This leads Williams to a discussion of Antonio Gramsci and the notion of hegemony. He understands hegemony to be more than the mere imposition of ideology, if it were so then one would be glad to overthrow it. Instead, hegemony is a process – made up of numerous forces and processes such as the process of education, the organization of work, the selective tradition, etc. – that continually makes and remakes an effective dominant culture. This is an active and continually adjusting process, it is not singular, but it can be challenged. Importantly, hegemony allows for a central system of practices in any culture. Hegemony should not be understood as mere opinion because it is through this process that the dominant system of meanings and values are experienced and lived. It is in the shadow of hegemony that alternative and oppositional cultures develop, with the former less threatening to the dominant system than the latter.

For Williams, a society is not available for analysis until all of its practices can be included. Therefore, literature and art cannot be separated from other kinds of social practice in an attempt to make them subject to special laws – “they cannot be separated from the general social process” (1980:13). The point for Williams is that it is not possible to separate out literature from society nor from some other body of practices nor can a particular identified practice be given a static, ahistorical relation to an abstract social formation, for the arts make up the part of the cultural process. Importantly, the arts “contribute to the effective dominant culture and are a central articulation of it. They embody residual meanings and values, not all of which are incorporated, though many are. They express also and significantly some emergent practices and meaning, yet some of them may eventually be incorporated, as they reach people and begin to move them” (14).

Occasionally a situation arises where the dominant culture reaches out to an emergent art of performance in an attempt to transform it and through this the dominant culture changes in its articulated features, though not in its central formation. Finally, Williams believes “the true crisis in cultural theory, in our own time, is between this view of the work of art as object and the alternative view of art as a practice” (15). What he means here is that works of art are often not physical objects (e.g. music, literature, etc.), but rather notations which have to be actively interpreted. Thus there is always an active relationship between the creation and reception of a work of art, subject to conventions in the forms of social organization and relationships. This is very different from the production and consumption of an object. This means that it is essential to discover the nature of a practice followed by its conditions, rather than isolating the object and discovering its components. In cultural studies, one should always look for the conditions of a practice.

It is along these last lines of Williams’ essay that we can find what Hall calls the dominant paradigm of cultural studies. It is a conceptualization of culture as interwoven with all social practices, and those practices are interwoven as a common form of human activity: “sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history” (1980:39). This is opposed to the usual base-superstructure formulation of the relationship between ideal and material forces. The dominant paradigm “defines culture as both the meanings and values which arise amongst distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they handle and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those understandings are expressed and in which they are embodied” (Hall 1980:39).

With this foundation we are able to extract some additional features of cultural studies as an approach to understanding society and media. As seen in the work of Hoggart, cultural studies is interested in understanding real, material consequences of cultural objects. Rather than theorize about the implications of media on the changing character of the working class, Hoggart looked at the cultural objects and the culture itself to better understand what was happening. Further, Hoggart was sure to point out the human agency of the individuals that constitute the working class. From this observation he made the claim that these class members are aware of the media and actively interpret it, rather than passively accept it.

Williams sought to make the point that culture should be understood as a whole rather than as a set of isolated objects. The historical process of culture should be kept in mind and it should override “any effort to keep the instances and elements [of culture] distinct” (Hall 1980:39). Cultural studies in general, as seen in Hoggart and Williams, takes a humanist position wherein experience is what constitutes authenticity, rather than authenticity deriving from status as a museum object as had been the usual understanding before cultural studies. Additionally, Williams spent time reworking a number of old concepts such as, base-superstructure and hegemony. He made the point that although the ideologies and culture of the ruling class is nearly ubiquitous in society, thus hegemonic, the fact that hegemony is a constant process and struggle for position means there are ways in which the subordinated classes can actively resist. It is here that Williams sets the stage for the liberatory potential of the means of communication.

In Means of Communication as Means of Production, Williams acknowledges that there are problems of access and control to the means of amplification (radio, broadcast, etc.) and duration (audio recording, etc.). Even though these restrictions (licensing, capital cost, and the like) exist, Williams believes the use of amplificatory and durational means of communication contain great potential as tools of liberation for the subordinated classes, as long as the means of access can be achieved.

Cultural studies approaches the question of media power in two separate, though related, ways. The first, following Hoggart, examines the real impact of media on the individuals consuming it. Though media messages are important, what is equally, if not more, important for this line of cultural studies is the resilience of the consumer and the ability for them to adapt and interpret the messages and material they are given. There are a number of different characteristics (education, moral character, etc.) that could impact their susceptibility to be swayed by media and it is important to investigate them rather than making theoretical assumptions grounded in ideology. The second approach is more associated with Williams. This approach understands cultural as a whole and interactive process while also looking for places that groups can directly resist the hegemony of the ruling class. This goes beyond the resilience that Hoggart noted, it advocates for active resistance for the sake of liberation rather than resistance for the sake of cultural conservatism.

Culture, should be “viewed as a material, social process inextricably intertwined with other elements of social formation. Accordingly, the principal task for cultural critique should be to investigate and map the mutually constitutive relations between different planes of social life… how cultural forms are able to constitute the dominant ‘structure of feeling’ of certain historical periods and express how a specific social formation is actually lived and experienced” (Gunster 2004:179). What both of the above approaches have in common, among other things, is that the power of the media and the ideology of the ruling class are intertwined such that the ruling class’ ideology tends to be transferred through the media with differing degrees of efficacy, making it particularly important to understand. Cultural studies asks questions such as “how do members of the working class resist ruling class ideology when presented through the media?” and “what cultural items are being produced within the subordinated classes and what are the impacts of those items?” and “how can the means of communicative production be utilized by the subordinated classes to resist the hegemony of the ruling class in a practical way?” The goal of cultural studies is to give status to the culture of the subordinated classes, to resist the notion that culture is only what is found in the museum, to emphasize human agency and the ability to interpret and adapt media messages actively, and to understand ways in which culture (which constitutes media and art, of course) can be utilized as a platform of resistance and liberation.

The cultural studies approach does ultimately give individuals agency in society,  without being so naïve to think that no manipulation occurs – this manipulation is a core operation of hegemony after all. The case of surveillance is in some ways at odds with the agency given to the working class by Hoggart. He believes that working-class individuals can often resist various mediated impositions on their culture. However, there is little resistance to surveillance by the working class. While there is a fair amount of critique of domestic surveillance in the written media (newspapers, magazines, etc.), there is much less in the amplificatory communicative modes such as television and radio. For Williams, this means that the written critiques may be out of reach for much of the working class, since reading this kind of writing requires “skills beyond those which are developed in the most basic forms of social intercourse” (Williams 1980:57). Amplificatory systems, on the other hand, are easily accessible for the working class and their messages easily received. Indeed, these system have the appearance of being a direct transmission because the processes of editing the video footage and audio is obscured by the presentation. The amplificatory systems are qualitatively similar to the direct interactions and therefore retain legitimacy. Williams points out that “what is being seen in what appears to be a natural form is, evidently, then in part or large part what is being made to be seen” (1980:61). Further, Williams suggests that modes of naturalization of television, film, and radio are tremendously powerful, and that news generations are increasingly habituated to them. Though Williams is talking primarily of the ways that certain communicative forms hide the real relations of production and relations of men, the point still stands that certain communicative systems have the ability to push on individuals with little critical pushback.

From this it could be suspected that the working class are not more resistant to domestic surveillance because the media they consume is not critical of it. That is, there is a certain power in the withholding of messages from particular mediums and from particular classes. This is almost always in the interest of ruling class, just as there is a ruling class interest in producing and broadcasting certain messages on certain mediums to certain groups. To understand the power of the media in relation to surveillance and the failure of resistance in the working class, cultural studies would not only ask about what messages are being created, but also what messages are being withheld, who is doing the withholding, and what real effect does it have on the individuals that constitute the working class.

 

Gunster, S. (2004). Capitalizing on culture: Critical theory for cultural studies. University of Toronto Press.

Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, culture and society,2(1), 57-72.

Hoggart, R. (1957). The uses of literacy. Transaction publishers.

Williams, R. (1980). Problems in Materialism and Culture. Verso.