[ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the media and cultural studies

[Andrew Feenberg]

I agree, Jernej, that Marxists do talk about the agency of the working class but they also tend to discount other forms of agency in other social settings. I want to argue for a much broader appreciation of agency. I look at the issue from the standpoint of a critical philosophy of technology. The factory was the main scene of technological mediation when Marx wrote and he observed certain new forms of resistance arising in that context which he took to have transformative potential. He interpreted that potential in terms of concepts of revolution derived from the tradition. Hence the notion of "proletarian revolution" which after 1917 came to overshadow all Marxist discussion of politics. What I see is a generalization of technical mediation to the whole surface of society. Facebook is no factory but when its users resist changes in privacy policies, I think this should be understood through a concept of agency in the technical sphere. The agency of workers may have greater transformative potential, but it belongs to the same genre of technical agency. If we start out from this angle, things look rather different than in the Marxist treatments of the Internet I have seen, most of which are unremittingly negative. 

I have a lot more to say on this subject but no time now to say it. But I want to recommend Maria Bakardjieva's book Internet Society to Ekaterina. Also, my own forthcoming book on (Re)Inventing the Internet may be relevant. I'll be talking about it in May. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Jernej Prodnik" <jernej.prodnik at fdv.uni-lj.si> 
To: "Ekaterina Petrovna" <epetrovna at gmail.com> 
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net 
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 11:26:17 AM 
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the media and cultural studies 



Andrew, I think most strands of Marxism never neglected questions of resistance by subjectivities or the possibilities for (counter)power produced by social movements (i.e., they never neglected subjective aspects or considered people as being passive dopes, if anything, they could be seen as too idealist at times), which is nevertheless not a subject matter of critique of political economy as such, or is it? I’m not sure it is. I feel critique of pol-econ basically gives progressive movements one of its key weapons for resistance, but that’s about it, it doesn’t provide organizational prescriptions or really set up any specific goals (unless seriously paired with critical political theory). This doesn’t mean they can’t be inspired by Marxism of course. Unless you’re a stringent dialectical materialist in a Stalin’s mould, and I don’t think there’s many left, you can’t really overlook agency in a broader perspective of how changes in society occur and how to look at society as such. Autonomist (and/or (post)operaist) Marxism have been perhaps most exceptional in these accounts since the seventies, focusing especially on the role of subjects in the production process and how resistance can be set about. Lately it was especially Negri’s and Hardt’s trilogy (Empire, Multitude, and Commowealth) that focused exactly on the questions of agency and resistance of the multitude. They are all remain materialists though :) 

Why would users leave Facebook? Well, I don’t know, but if they feel like they have to protest against Facebook on the Facebook itself, I’m not sure they’re doing it the right way :) It’s up to the users to decide what to do and I fully understand it would be a very difficult decision to leave (social exclusion, inter-personal pressures and so on). But you just have to ask yourself whether you prefer a model worked on by Wikipedia or the one favored by Facebook? The latter is grounded in surveillance over its users, invading their privacy, and selling their private information to the third-parties, it’s using quite suppressive techniques of control and monitoring. It’s probably a no-brainer looking from this perspective, but taking any another one would probably make it all more difficult to leave. And while economically both approaches are in fact sustained by free-work of their users, Facebook hugely profits from this, while Wikipedia has built one of the most amazing knowledge-databases in the world that is available to everyone, demanding nothing in return (sustaining itself through contributions). It’s also a question whether one wants to be included in decision-making process when it comes to the platform he’s basically sustaining with his work - there are some options to influence decisions on different levels on Wikipedia, but almost none on commercial platforms. 
It’s quite depressing however, when you see Google’s yearly profits are somewhere on the level of the whole tax income of Republic of Slovenia (a silly example, but still), latter being just another in the long line of countries going through painful austerity measures recently, while Google formally employs around thirty thousand people (and at the same time you read how a near 30% rise in revenues last year failed to impress Google’s investors;)). 

Best, 
Jernej 



From: Ekaterina Petrovna [mailto:epetrovna at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 7:11 PM 
To: Jernej Prodnik 
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net 
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the media and cultural studies 


That's a very good point actually,as the analysis from the perspective of political economy does not preclude the micro-analysis and actually any good study of the media today should focus on the political economy aspect. My point was that there seems to be a great division today between critical approach: focussing on exploitation mostly and 'celebratory cultural studies'. My point was that both pluses and minuses have to be taken into account, both macro and micro and the analysis of popular culture (again I refer to works of Fiske) seems to me to be a good example where there is a serious analysis of the critique of exploitation and the response of ordinary people to this exploitation. I quote Fiske: 

"Until recently, the study of popular culture has taken two main directions. The less productive has been that which has celebrated popular culture without situating it in a model of power....The other direction has been to situate popular culture firmly withing a model of power, but to emphasise so strongly the forces of domination as to make it appear impossible for a genuine popular culture to exist at all...Recently, however, a third direction has begun to emerge...It, too, sees popular culture as a site of struggle, but, while accepting the power of the forces of dominance, it focusses rather upon the popular tactics by which these forces are coped with, are evaded or are resisted." (Fiske, 1989, p. 20) 

My point was that we should maybe look more into this third direction. Looking at facebook's users as passive dopes misses an important fact about Facebook: it does do something in our lives, people love it (in their majority) and while it is a capitalistic organization, it actually did start as project in a student dormitory...Why, in fact, would people do a massive exodus to something else? Why? And how alternative mediums would sustain themselves? 



Thank you for the reference to the book about surveillance, - i will certainly read it! 



Ekaterina Netchitailova 

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Jernej Prodnik < jernej.prodnik at fdv.uni-lj.si > wrote: 


Hi, 

just a short observation: both exploitation and commodification actually have little do to with playfulness or having fun on the Facebook or Twitter (or anywhere else, where these processes might occur). It’s not what political economy analyzes and it’s actually not that important question, because it’s simply not its subject matter. Which doesn’t mean it’s not important. This is a common misunderstanding that has been retained in cultural studies for decades now, for reasons unknown to me. But I guess it stems from another misunderstanding - of what is actually the goal of critique of political economy. It's definitely not to transparently moralize about an ongoing world-situation and corruption of the ugly capitalists (focusing on bad apples in an otherwise perfectly working system is, quite on the contrary, approach of the non-critical economy), but to try to give an explanation of an objective fact through means of abstraction (even if this can, indeed, be fundamental ground for people's moral outlook and political action, which was of course the underlying goal of Marx). Abstraction in the given example meaning: if the system were in fact to function perfectly, would capitalists still need exploitation? Of course, how else would they extract surplus value? Both concepts, exploitation and commodification, are therefore quite “technical” and don’t focus on the good and the bad (... historically, conditions in the production process were of course terrible, but Marx could’ve easily omitted these examples there are plenty - from Capital and the argument in the abstract would be no different). 

These are quite different levels of critique you’re mentioning, with different epistemological presuppositions, and there weren’t so many authors that would successfully bridge this divide (Vincent Mosco in his Digital Sublime being one of the celebrated exceptions). There has been a huge debate in the nineties regarding these questions and I guess most of the people, participating in it, simply got tired of it. But cultural studies and political economy are not necessarily differentiated when it comes to the macro/micro questions ... Neither commodification nor exploitation are for example ‘macro questions’, they develop and happen in everyday-life situations that actually need to be analyzed on the micro-level, at least in the beginning, to construct a viable macro-theory (besides, why joyful exploitation so easily occurs could be critically analyzed on another, ideological level). 

So, to put it shortly: people can be exploited in the production process even if they crazily enjoy what they’re doing at the same time. Neither of these processes preclude people from rejecting these processes if they find them worth struggling against - for example through making fun out of Facebook in different Facebook groups. How effective the latter is should be quite obvious though: it’s not. To put it in Marx’s terms: they’re just writing about Facebook, but the point should be to change it (if these people are so “critical” about it). And the only way to stop exploitation by Facebook is probably a mass exodus from the Facebook to another platform or to give as little information to FB as possible. Making fun of Facebook in groups can actually even increase passivity and be quite cynical. 

I’m just finishing my review of the volume “Surveillance on the Internet”, which includes some very good chapters from the perspective of critique of political economy. You might find it interesting, especially considering the fact these chapters mostly focus on the micro-level to demonstrate how exploitation is carried out on social networks (mostly through surveillance and data mining). 

Michael, I guess you’re not talking about Marxist understanding of materialism in this case? 

Best, 



From: discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net [mailto: discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net ] On Behalf Of Ekaterina Petrovna 
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 1:45 PM 
To: Goddard Michael 
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net 
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the media and cultural studies 




Hello, 



why Fiske would not be appropriate? While it is somewhat outdated, he gave an excellent oveview, I think, of the relationship between domination (and culture industries used for the purposes of indoctrination and domination) and popular culture, where people engage in making culture industries 'their own'. Engaging in a playful way on Facebook can be seen as an art of making everyday life, and some instances of trickery on Facebook (like numerous pictures making fun of Facebook as corporation) are an example of excorporation (Fiske, 1989). The main point is that while political economy of the media is very important, how users use the media in everyday life and what they think of it, should also be taken into account. The problem with engaging only with critical approach and political economy of the media is that the focus becomes too much on the macro, ignoring the micro...Boyd's studies (2008, 2010), on the other hand, focus, for instance, only on the user, ignoring totally the aspect of the bigger picture (as David Beer rightly pointed out in one of his articles in 2008), - shouldn't we try to go somewhere in the middle? 



I am not familiar, I have to admit, with materialist approaches towards the media, - could you, please, Michael, give me some examples? 



best regards, 

Ekaterina Netchitailova (PhD student at Sheffield Hallam) 

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Goddard Michael < M.N.Goddard at salford.ac.uk > wrote: 


Hello, 



While in agreement with Ekaterina that a diversity of approaches, addressing ICTs and their users on a number of scales, is desirable, I would question whether 1980s cultural studies, especially in the work of Fiske is the best resource for this diversity (Stuart Hall is a somewhat different case since he actually engaged with information theory in such as a way as to leave something salvageable for thinking ICTs at Matt Fuller has argued). 



Other productive lines of inquiry might include materialist media theories/media archaeology, which while depoliticising in some instances, nevertheless provides useful resources for a materialist account of media, media ecological approaches of the post-Guattarian/Matt Fuller variety at least, that go well beyond concerns with e-waste to engage with how specific media generate and interact with a variety of milieux or, on a more pragmatic level some of the approaches developed in the recent Transgression 2.0 collection which to engage with network phenomena like the use of social media during the Arab Spring but also problematise easy assumptions about what this means.......interventions that in some cases might be understood as continuing the perspecitves of autonomous Marxism and to strongly critique the more normative Frankfurt School version of Marxist cultural critique that still seems dominant in many political economy approaches.....just a few suggestions for pre-conference discussion, 



Michael Goddard 



Dr Michael N Goddard 

Lecturer in Media Studies 

School of Media, Music and Performance 

University of Salford 

MediaCityUk 

Salford 

M50 2HE 

UK 



Reviews editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (SEEC) 

Co-Editor of Reverberations: Noise, Affect, Politics, Continuum, 2012 






From: discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net [ discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net ] on behalf of Ekaterina Petrovna [ epetrovna at gmail.com ] 
Sent: 12 February 2012 21:21 
To: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net 
Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the media and cultural studies 




Hello, 

by looking at the abstracts for the conference in May in Uppsala, I see that the main focus so far is on the political economyc of media (or critical studies of media), which is actually the topic of the conference, but shouldn't we also look at the theme of the relationship between the political economy of media (more, macro-context from studies so far) and cultural studies (so, far, as Christian Fuchs rightly points out it has been more 'celebratory cultural studies of media" (2011). However, by focusing on both macro and micro at the same time and by incorporating such works as John Fiske (1989), maybe we could have a new perspective on media studies today? Fuchs (2008, 2010, 2011) proposes abolishment of capitalism (quite an old proposition) or searching for alternative media. The question, however, is: would the users of Facebook actually switch to anything else (the answer is no...at least from my ethnographic studies) and shouldn't we look at facebook itself for these kind of alternatives? After all, recent examples (Arab Spring) show that facebook can be used effectively for organising popular protests, - could Facebook be used for a good cause also in other cases? And another question: by abolishing capitalism, - which society do you envision? 



Graham Murdock says: "where users labour in their leisure time to boost corporate profits" (from paper abstract, 2012) by looking at the use of digital media. If we focus only on this perspective, aren't we in danger of missing an important part of popular culture, as elaborated by John Fiske (1989) and many others (Stuart Hall, etc)? The problem with focusing only on marco context is that we can totally misunderstand the perspective of the user (something which Christian Fuchs discussed in one of the articles with Dwayne Winseck (2011). Users don't consider that they work for free for facebook when they use it, - if anything they have fun and engage in many ways in 'trickering' Facebook (by organising many groups either against Facebook or by making fun of it, on Facebook itself). Also what about the fact that many users use Facebook actually at work (it was banned as a result in many workplaces, but the application to use facebook through phones, somehow, overpassed this problem)? Isn't in some way a kind of sabotage to capitalism in a trickery sort of way? 

Ekaterina Netchitailova (PhD student at Sheffield Hallam) 

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