[ICTs-and-Society] What is Critical Media and Communcation Studies Today?

[Jonathan Beller]

Dear All, 

Forgive the intrusion, especially as I, very regrettably for me, will not be at the Uppsala conference. However I want to say -- as someone who has been working on Marxist political economy of visuo-digital technologies for two decades now, and as someone who has never been friended or had a friend on face-book -- that neither of these practices provide any guarantee of radicalism. Even though it is arguable that representation itself has been fully subsumed by capital-logic and therefore that entry into the domain of representation is now always already a re-entry into networked expropriation structurally managed to increase the accumulation of capital and hence, necessarily, the abundance of dispossession, it is still not a given that to exist at the margins of representation or even beyond the horizons of the representable constitutes a revolution, or even a revolutionary. From the standpoint of existence, to not exist is not necessarily radical. Of course this void, occupied perhaps by the majority of humans on the planet (and undoubtedly by the majority of life), can, these days at least, only be posited from within representation and thus, it seems, from within capital. Imagine what it woud be like to not be on Facebook, to not be an academic, to not be enfranchised at least to some degree as a global citizen, etc.

Which is to assert two things: 1) All of us who are included in this sentence (in any way) are complicit with the production and reproduction of capitalist society and 2) we must strain the limits of discourse far beyond the academico-scientific grammars; which is to say that to seriously embark on the project under discussion on this list serve, one must wage constant war on meaning itself. Meaning that what we need to seek is the non-sensical, impossible, foreclosed, beyonds and futures of actually existing semiosis. In answer to the question in the subject line of this email, it's an aesthetic project, amigos, and also a social one -- finding ways to graft our energies and attentions to the struggles of specters. It is not and never could be merely an economic and/or technical one and be anything other than a radically cynical endeavor.

Reading Marx is never a bad idea, I completely agree, and there are things to learn from our romance with the actually existing Italians. But an analysis that does not understand race, gender, language-group, sexuality, nation etc., as themselves political-economic categories (and not merely analytical categories beyond the domain of political economy) -- that is as real abstractions that themselves operate as engines of production and reproduction -- will find itself writing a technical manual for the overthrow of the state that will serve only aspirant bureaucrats. This is in no way to belittle the brilliant work and brilliance of those who will convene in Uppsala. Only to say that with this project there arises aesthetic, cultural, representational and affective demands that the language of political economy, even Marxist political economy, will be at great pains to execute. It is not time for the discipline of communications theory to absorb the world, rather it is time for the world to absorb the discipline. We must bring the world, the myriad and singular struggles of peoples, and those parts of our distributed selves which are perhaps of the world, into the space of our nascent discipline and run the risk of destroying it. Otherwise the lived time of the global south, all the unremunerated living labor of survival performed by the unrepresented and unrepresentable billions, serves, as it does for the global society, merely to produce a writing surface for us experts too, a virtual place for us to encode our contemplations about leaving facebook from the safety of our offices.

I think back to Negri's early work where he spent some time considering Marx's class hatred. A significant dose of animus to animate the theory. Hatred, rage, outrage, indignation, disgust -- we can use these things, indeed, I would say we must.

With these elements in mind, as well as their utopian corollaries,

Jon






Jonathan Beller
Professor
Humanities and Media Studies
Critical and Visual Studies
Pratt Institute
jbeller at pratt.edu
718-636-3573 (office fax)		
				



On Feb 14, 2012, at 11:24 AM, Ekaterina Petrovna wrote:

> Dear Astrid,
>  
> your take on the role of the researcher/ versus using these platforms for promotion etc, is an excellent one! In fact, there should be an article on it, something like 'Do Marxists use Facebook and why?" or "Can you be critical and STILL be on Facebook?"
> I think that this touches a more general debate about the role of the researcher in the current age: universities become more and more commercial structures and everyone is looking for funds, - and these platforms indeed seem as a way to look for them and promote one's work.
>  
> best regards,
> Ekaterina Netchitailova
> 
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 4:02 PM, astrid mager <astrid.mager at univie.ac.at> wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> this is a highly interesting discussion! I totally agree with the importance of the (Marxist) political economy of Google & co.
> My own work has become increasingly political over the last years showing how the capitalist spirit gets inscribed in search engines by way of social practices, which similarly applies to Facebook and other corporate platforms of course.. I call it the "algorithmic ideology" in the talk I proposed for the Uppsala conference:
> 
> http://www.astridmager.net/?p=1810
> 
> Concerning this line of work I find approaches from critical theory very useful since they allow for understanding how capitalism materializes in search technologies, how users get involved in Google's capital accumulation cycle, how technologies spread and solidify hegemonic power etc. Despite the relevance of these aspects for contemporary internet research - especially because of the celebratory accounts dominating  the field, as someone pointed out earlier - I see a paradox that increasingly disturbs me:
> 
> How do we - critical internet researchers - and our own self-promoting online practices fit into the picture? Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services have become useful tools for promoting our own (critical) work, right? Apart from researches, who just recently commited a social media suicide or never joined those platforms in the first place, lots of researchers are using these services and hence increasing & stabilizing their power, advertising revenue and exploitation schemes.. while lots of internet users only unconsciously support these mechanisms we (and I deliberately include myself here) DO know/ even write about those dynamics etc.. BUT still use the services, which raises a number of questions:
> 
> Why do we use Facebook and not Diaspora.org and other non-profit tools & alternative technologies? (with all their drawbacks Christian pointed out)
> Could we escape Facebook & co. in an age of (academdic) self-promotion where being known/ having followers and friends/ being talked about/ being read has become almost more important than doing research itself?
> Didn't we turn into commodities long before Facebook & Google started their businesses? (Or is it a phenomenon they co-produced?)
> And if users matter (and I do agree on that since my background is in STS as well), how do critical internet researches/ we matter in terms of supporting/ stabilizing those tools? (and other ones like Google Analytics enabling us to participate in and even benefit from the surveillance culture they perpetuate)
> Or could we think of our activities as (ab)using those tools to advocate against them? In fact, where else could we reach people & raise awareness about new media and their negative facets if not on the platforms themselves?
> But could we then ever overcome their power and monopolies?
> And how could we avoid Google if there is no better non-profit search engine available?
> ...
> 
> I wonder what the list thinks about those aspects! (and if people totally disagree with me because they never joined those platforms and thus think of me as weak, cynical and commercialized? - but how do they search then?)
> 
> Thanks for the discussion!! I'm really looking forward to the conference (where I probably "won't shake my head about the stupidity of 90% of what I hear" ;) )
> 
> Best wishes from Vienna, Astrid
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 14.02.12 01:52, schrieb Christian Fuchs:
> 
> Dear colleagues,
> 
> Thanks a lot for the discussion contributions thus far. My own experience is that the more intense and controversial and constructive the pre-conference discussion is, the better the conference will be. And what we really want to have is some good intellectual debates in Uppsala, not one of the usual conferences, where you go, shake your head about the stupidity of 90% of what you hear and go home again. So all of you on this list are very much welcome to engage in the discussion, to contradict what others are saying, to express your views, etc. What we want to foster with this list and the conference is a deep critical intellectual discussion.
> 
> I think the issues brought up thus far require us to consider the relation between:
> a) Critical Political Economy of Communication
> b) Cultural Studies
> c) Frankfurt School Critical Theory
> d) Alternative Media Studies
> 
> I have myself argued that we need a synthesis/integration of these approaches, but I want to be more specific because I do not think that we need any kind of synthesis, but a specific dialectical unity in diversity of specific expressions of these four contributions. So what I want to argue is that all four of these approaches have been (to a more or less extant) both much wrong and right.
> 
> a) Critical Political Economy of Communciation
> 
> Dallas Smythe's and Nicholas Garnham's approaches have been strongly focused on aspects of capital accumulation and commodification, often downplaying the importance of ideology in capitalism, although Marx's Capital, Vol 1, focused on both a) commodification and b) ideology critique (the commodity fethishism chapter). I adivce to re-read Graham (Murdock's) answer to Dallas Smythe in the Blindspot Debate because he very much pointed out the importance of ideology, which builds bridges of Critical Political Economy towards both Critical Cultural Studies (Williams, Thompson, Hall, etc) and Frankfurt School that are both much interested in ideology.
> 
> My own criticism of the approach of "Political Economy of Media/Communication" is that actually there are many forms of political economy (neoliberal, Keynesian, Schumpeterian, institutional, Marxist, etc) and that the use of the term "Political Economy of Media/Communication/Culture/Information" (as in book titles, recent handbooks, etc) has obscured the term "Marxist/Critical" as prefix, although the specific thinkers have had much Marxist and critical intentions. I think the grounding in Marx, which means the groundning in class analysis and the critique of capitalism, should be visible in naming the approach, which it is not if we just speak of "Political Economy of X" and not "Marxist Political Economy of X"...
> 
> b) Cultural Studies
> 
> The works of Williams, Thompson, (partly) Hall etc were much grounded in the works of Marx and were a specific critical analysis of ideology in capitalism. Critical classical cultural studies shared with Frankfurt School the interest in the critque of ideology. I think what happened in much of recent Cultural Studies is that a) the category of class was dropped, which implied a reformist cultural poltics that no longer wanted to abolish capitalism and substituted class analysis by identity politics instead of complementing the two and that b) there was a theoretical simplification. Take a look at an arbitrary work by Fiske, Jenkins et al: They do not cite Marx or Gramsci etc, they only cite what Hall et al say that Gramsci said (and they anyway never cite Marx or Hegel because they have not read these works, which actually is my largest criticism of these thinkers - they are anti-critical theory). I doubt that they have ever read Marx or Gramsci or even Hegel. The Marxist roots of Cultural Studies have been destroyed, and this has resulted in a reformist agenda that no longer questions capitalism. In my own Uppsala conference talk, one part will be a radical critique of Henry Jenkins (and Manuel Castells, who is not Cultural Studies, but something that is also not very critical).
> 
> c) Frankfurt School Critical Theory
> 
> Frankfurt School shares with Classical Critical Cultural Studies the interest in ideology. But the picture of Frankfurt School has both in "Political Economy of the Media" and Cultural Studies often been very simplified, ignoring its own complexities. Garnham and Smythe said that Frankfurt School ignored political economy, which is wrong, if you take a look at the presence of political economists like Friedrich Pollock and Henryk Grossman in Critical Theory. Frankfurt School understood itself always as interdisciplinary project involving various aspects of Marxist thinking. Some strands in Cultural Studies have argued that Frankfurt School has seen the audience as "culutral dupes". Frankfurt School is much more sophisticated, one can think about Adorno's analysis of re-education after Auschwitz, where the media and schools have a special role, Enzensberger's and Brecht's alternative media theory, and even Adorno's take on the need of an alternative TV. The problems of prejudiced Cultural Studies scholars is that they have never read or understood much of Frankfurt School, either because of language limits (not everything has been translated from German to English, so probably you have to be able to read German to fully grasp Critical Theory) or because of ignorance.
> 
> A second aspect is the Habermasian turn in Frankfurt School, I have myself been long critical of Habermas, but think that we should re-discover Habermas' Marxist and communist roots and his big connection to Adorno and Marcuse. But one thing remains: You can refer to Habermas without ever questioning capitalism, you can NEVER refer to Marcuse in a reformist and pro-captitalist way, you can be quite pro-capitalist in relation to Habermas' works (and that is why I think scholars today talk so much about Habermas and much less about Marcuse, which is a pity). So much in line with Andrew Feenberg's works, I think we have to re-discover the importance of Marcuse for Marxist Studies of Culture today.
> 
> d) Alternative Media Studies
> 
> I think the area of Alternative Media Studies is also crucial for transforming society and the media. Cultural Studie has too often focused on altenrative media usage and interpretation, but the question is, if we should not start with alternative practices of producing media (alternatives to Facebook, alternatives to Fox, alternatives to CNN, alternatives to everything). Alternative media have always been close to social struggles, they are social struggle and social movement media.
> 
> The problem that alternative media are facing is that a) if they cannot gain material and political influence (power, money) they are within capitalism based on precarious labour, voluntary self-exploitative labour, lack of resources etc, which enables a radical project, but results in a lack of mass availability, and that b) if they accept material support either by the state (state funding) or capital (advertising, marketization, etc), they may risk loosing their autonomy and criticality. Alternative media in capitalism are facing the antogonism between self-exploitation and autonomy. I think that in alternative media studies, these kind of media are too often idealised witout seeing the constraints. At the same time, it is important to see how actual struggles manage to make use of media for organizing themselves, but are actually facing limits at the same time (state surveillance of media use by revolutionaries, etc). Autonomist Marxist Theory stresses much the role of mediated class struggle today, although it tends to idealise knowledge labour and to ignore the constraints of ideolgoy, which we also have to take into account.
> 
> e) What way to go?
> 
> My proposition is is that all four approaches are failed, to different extent. And I think that the lack today is the focus on Marx. Marx had all of these elements - accumulation, consumption, ideology, struggles and alternatives. So my first and foremost proposition is that by re-orienting our analysis on Marx, and by reading Marx again together with students and young people and everyone, we can gain so tremendously much for establishing a truly Critical Media and Communication Studies that challenges the contemporary dominance of uncritical, instrumental, technological, neoliberal rationality. And this is not purely abstract, it relates to the ongoing and contemporary struggles that we have to fight now.
> 
> So some thoughts about our conference.
> 
> Good night and good luck, Christian
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Prof. Christian Fuchs
> Chair in Media and Communication Studies
> Department of Informatics and Media
> Uppsala University
> Kyrkogårdsgatan 10
> Box 513
> 751 20 Uppsala
> Sweden
> christian.fuchs at im.uu.se
> Tel +46 (0) 18 471 1019
> http://fuchs.uti.at
> http://www.im.uu.se
> NetPolitics Blog: http://fuchs.uti.at/blog
> Editor of tripleC: http://www.triple-c.se
> Chair of ESA RN18-Sociology of Communications and Media Research
> ICTs and Society Network: http://www.icts-and-society.net
> 
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