Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Chapter Two
its national and cultural as well as its political dimensions. It also critically
citizens and consumers, and public and commercial broadcasting, are neither
arising from three sources: the paradox of political power being exercised over
between policy ‘failure’ and political contestation; and the relationship between
policy expertise and political sovereignty. Enhancing the scope for citizen
participation in political decisions that have an impact on their lives has often
been presented as the solution to these problems, but it presents its own issues,
68
agency.
The second half of this chapter explores the concept of national citizenship
reference to the role played by print and broadcast media as cultural technologies
globalisation literature overstates both the newness and the significance of the
audiovisual media content, together with the important roles played by nation-
states and national cultures in the regulation of these international media flows,
The 1990s saw the concept of citizenship put forward as providing a set of
guiding principles for media policy and media studies. Stuart Cunningham
proposed that citizenship discourses provided a direction for research and critical
69
activity in media and cultural studies that would ‘be developed and justified
contributors to the making of television as well as being its receivers, and got
(Mulgan 1990). James Curran (1991), Jo Hawke (1995) and Julianne Schultz
market relations.
political and social citizenship, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock (1989)
concerning their rights; (2) provide all sections of the community with access to
and (3) allow people from all sections of society to recognise themselves in the
for communications and information systems to achieve such goals are maximum
coincided with developments in the 1990s which saw citizenship become ‘the
“buzz word” among political thinkers on all points of the political spectrum’
(Kymlicka and Norman 1994: 352; cf. Turner 1986; Hall and Held 1989; Hirst
contestation’ (Miller 1993: 12), and has been used to justify political projects as
the rights of welfare recipients and schemes requiring the unemployed to work in
‘Third Way’ concept, used to find ways forward in social and political debates
theory, Kymlicka and Norman point to two cautionary issues. First, they observe
that ‘the scope of a “theory of citizenship” is potentially limitless ... [as] almost
between citizens and the state’ (Kymlicka and Norman 1994: 353). Second, they
Norman 1994: 353). A third issue is the complex and sometimes contradictory
relationship between political citizenship, which can be the basis for an open,
rights and duties, including the guarantee of legal rights of independence and
equality before the law, the political rights of freedom of speech and association,
state authorities over formal admission into that community, including the right to
Citizenship in its modern sense has long been connected to the media of
a more critical role as sites for articulation of popular discontent with the unjust or
Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel recognised the relationship between the means
of expression of ideas and the popular imaginary. Kant defined the public use of
reason as ‘that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing
the entire reading public’ (Kant 1971: 55), while Hegel described ‘reading the
morning paper [as] a kind of realistic morning prayer’ (quoted in Donald 1998:
nation-states would not be the direct speech and face-to-face interaction of the
ancient city-states, but rather forms of ‘mediated interaction’ associated with the
development of print technology and the mass circulation of the printed word and,
citizenship have predominated. The first has been that of liberal media theory,
to liberal media theory, the principal requirement of a free media is that it must
interests in the face of institutional power, are central parts of the rhetorical
armour of the media as the ‘Fourth Estate’. Julianne Schultz has argued that, in
the late twentieth century, this has been associated with the ‘watchdog’ role of the
media, and the assertion by journalists of ‘their idealised role as defenders of the
public interest’, in the face of challenges from the executive, parliamentary and
(1991) describes the three principal limitations of liberal media theory as being:
opinion; the tendency for media markets to consolidate the position of dominant
media conglomerates; and the adverse implications for diversity of opinion arising
from the tendency to pursue the largest possible media audience through limited
holding its head in politics while its feet are grounded in commerce’ (Schultz
1998: 45).
Critical media theory shares with liberal media theory a belief in the
media institutions are enmeshed with wider structures of political and economic
power. The tension between the formal equality of citizens in democratic societies,
market economies, is seen as creating a situation where ‘the public sphere - this
space for a rational and universalistic politics distinct from both the economy and
the State - was destroyed by the very forces that had brought it into existence’
(Garnham, 1990: 107). This argument is most full developed in Jurgen Habermas’s
75
among the educated middle classes of Western Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries as the bourgeois public sphere, but which has been marked by
corporate control over media industries, the rise of advertising and public relations
as mechanisms for control over media content, and the growing role of the state in
economic and social management through Keynesian economics and the welfare
state. As a result, for Habermas, the liberal model of the public sphere ‘cannot be
organised in the form of the social welfare state’ (Habermas 1977: 200).
(1990), James Curran (1991) and Peter Dahlgren (1995) have argued for the
ends’, and the ‘opportunity for different classes and groups to take part in the same
public dialogue’ (Garnham 1990: 105). Curran proposed that a decentralised and
democratic media system, around which would operate politically - aligned media,
journalist-controlled media, private enterprise media and ‘social market’ media. For
Dahlgren (1995), the central tension with broadcast media is in the contemporary
76
public sphere, where ‘those media institutions which are of the most significance
for the majority of citizens are … to a great extent beyond the reach of citizen
practices and interventions’ (Dahlgren 1995: 155). In order to overcome this ‘tragic’
nurtured through public policy, to promote strong citizenship and an active civil
society.
Richard Collins (1993) has drawn attention to the tendency in critical theory to
deal with public service broadcasting as a normative ideal, rather than with the
actual conduct of public service broadcasters. The point is not merely a semantic
one since, as Collins observed, in countries where commercial and public service
broadcasters have coexisted, the conduct of public service broadcasters can only
be understood in terms of their interaction with the commercial sector, rather than
from audience competition from a commercial system, the outcome has largely
imagination’ (Collins 1993: 250). Gay Hawkins (1999) has noted the problems
that have arisen for public broadcasters in their ‘assumption that “quality” meant
“not commercial”’, most notably in the ‘perpetual quandary’ that arises between
constitute quality in terms that ‘consistently value the middlebrow over the vulgar
and information and aesthetics over fun’ (Hawkins 1999: 176). From the
1980s, and their relationship to discourses of national identity that were reflective
John Hartley (1996, 1999) has developed a very different model of the
since popular culture is ‘another name for the practice of media readership in
modernity’ (Hartley 1996: 47), and as it is through journalism that the logic of
terms of binary oppositions between the quality and the popular, or the public and
1999), proposing that ‘the uses of television are best understood by means of the
concept of transmodern teaching [and] … what television has been used for is the
78
citizenship with the right to claim an identity based upon difference, Hartley
educational, media and critical institutions for popular attention in the public
sphere, it is the broadcast media that have been most effective in leading a
politics and what Hartley terms ‘do-it-yourself (DIY) citizenship’ (Hartley 1999:
154-165, 186-187).
developed by critical theorists out of Habermas’s work on the public sphere.1 Its
strengths lie in: its focus upon the incidental means through which the media
contribute to citizen-formation; its focus upon what people do with media rather
how the media inform the development of citizens; and its rejection of a
dichotomy between quality and popular media, or public service and commercial
media, from the perspective of how they are used by their audiences. For Hartley,
good popular television can be both popular and critical, fun and informative; it
does not rest upon the ‘sublimation of pleasure to value’ that Hawkins critiques in
the approach taken by ‘quality’ public service broadcasting towards its audience
1999: 55-70), there is also a need to reaffirm the positivity of institutions in terms
providing a basis for political and social agency and meaningful action. This also
and over periods of time, and how these constitute the conditions of existence for
the types of television programming that are produced and distributed in national
television systems. Second, there is the danger of concluding that, since media
texts are polysemic and audiences are unknowable to empirical analysis, criticism
(cf. Flew 1998). Third, since Hartley blurs distinctions between television’s
taste constituencies, his analysis faces difficulties in dealing with some of the
the lack of provision of certain program types for economic reasons, as well as
Critical media theory has observed the ‘split’ nature of the modern citizen,
interest’ media regulation. Toby Miller has observed that this is less a matter of
divided subjectivities, and more to do with a ‘policy divide’ (Miller 1991: 204),
whose significance has become more apparent in an era where national forms of
media regulation are becoming overlaid with global trade agreements and other
forms of international law. A major focus of this thesis will be upon the
these aims being to make it more responsive to the discourses and principles of
becomes not an ‘add-on’ to other forces which determine the conduct on the part
media theory tradition and Hartley’s work present too generalised a framework
for the detailed empirical work on how citizenship discourses have informed the
describe the process in modern Western societies where the conduct of the state
and technical basis for rule. Techniques associated with the practice of
were linked to, yet distinct from, the formal apparatuses of the state. In Foucault’s
work, the state ‘consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations
the practices of government thus requires that these activities of government are
understood, not in terms of the institutions that undertake them, but rather in
government from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, which was associated with
self-governing and self-interested individuals. The result was that ‘civil society’
emerged, not as that which is outside of or necessarily opposed to state power, but
rather ‘as both the object and end of government’, involved with a complex and
shifting set of relationships with state agencies, that provides ‘fertile ground for
82
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (1992) have used Foucault’s approach to
government. They reject dualities such as those between state and civil society,
public and private, coercion and consent, and government and the market, arguing
instead that ‘the state possesses neither the unity nor the functionality ascribed to
it; it was a “mythical abstraction” which has assumed a particular place within the
field of government’ (Miller and Rose 1992: 175). They also reject notions of
political power that assume the imposition of constraints upon citizens, in favour
of regulated freedom ... the more so because most individuals are not merely the
subjects of power but play a part in its operations’ (Miller and Rose 1992: 174).
‘the ideals of government are intrinsically linked to the problems around which it
circulates, the failings it seeks to rectify, the ills it seeks to cure … the history of
three characteristics:
are related.
have posed and specified the problems for government, but also the
Miller and Rose use the term technologies of government to broadly define
through a broad series of domains, that enable ‘the decisions and actions of
regulated in relation to authoritative criteria’ (Miller and Rose 1992: 177). What
through action at a distance. Following Foucault, Miller and Rose observe that
expansion of state powers and capacities; rather, state agencies ‘identify a domain
outside “politics”, and seek to manage it without destroying its existence and its
autonomy’ (Miller and Rose 1992: 177). Central to such a mode of government is
the role played by experts and expertise, who enter into a ‘double alliance’ with
political authorities on the one hand, for whom they problematise new issues and
groups on the other, for whom they provide the techniques and forms of assistance
The theory of governmentality provides the basis for important insights into the
relationships. At the same time, three problems emerge for the theory of
85
paradox of political power being exercised over free citizens in the name of their
own popular sovereignty. One instance of this is what Foucault described as the
of the tricky adjustment between political power wielded over legal subjects and
pastoral power wielded over live individuals’ (Foucault 1988: 67). The paradox
interest, but without their consent, was also observed by Max Weber in his famous
instead that ‘liberation can only come from attacking ... political rationality’s very
roots’ (Foucault 1988: 85). The problem with this argument, which draws upon
Nietzsche’s claim that ‘there is nothing more harmful to freedom than liberal
between power and freedom that Foucault’s genealogy of the modern subject, as a
social agent which has been formed under the sign of various productive regimes
of power, has rendered untenable (cf. Minson 1980; Wickham 1983; Minson
the name of liberty loses sight of the complex links between the acquisition of
capabilities and the growth of autonomy that has characterised the experience of
the principal forms of power in modernity are essentially non-legal, found in the
Wickham, Foucault finds struggles over legal rights and legal regulation,
misrecognition of their object, since power and control actually operate in a more
disciplinary, capillary and subterranean level than this surface level of democratic
and legal rights (Hunt and Wickham 1994: 41-52; 59-61). Hunt and Wickham
argue that this account rests upon a caricature of the significance of democratic or
interpretation that ignores ‘the extent to which the new forms of disciplinary
power have already or can potentially become subject to processes of legal rights
governance. Malpas and Wickham argue that practices of governance can only
ever involve a ‘partial appropriation of things’, and that they must therefore
87
involve instances of failure, since failure ‘marks precisely the limit of governing
practice and not something that lies within its boundaries’ (Malpas and Wickham
1997: 94). Miller and Rose reach a similar conclusion when they observe that
registration of “failure”, the discrepancy between ambition and outcome, and the
constant injunction to do better next time’ (Miller and Rose 1992: 191). O’Malley,
Weir and Shearing (1997) have argued that such approaches to policy failure,
rule through expertise and popular sovereignty. Barry Hindess notes that, as a
or essential basis for the subjection of the majority of the governed population to
rule by a small minority, government ‘has no source of legitimacy outside its own
frequently been presented as the best means of resolving this citizenship gap. Hall
and Held capture this tradition when they observe that ‘rights can be mere paper
claims unless they are practically enacted and realised, through actual
participation in the community’ (Hall and Held 1989: 175). This understanding of
degrees of democracy based upon the scope for participation can be found in the
and equality are nourished and given political being’ (Barber 1984: 152).
typically revolve around three sets of arguments (Richardson 1983). First, there is
the developmental argument, which focuses upon the political skills acquired by
citizens. Second, there is the fairness argument, focusing upon the rights of
individuals to be involved in the making of decisions that affect them. Third, there
for the communication of moral and ethical norms, and the building of
trust and solidarity between actors ... Participation describes three types of
moral principles; and it expresses personal and group affects and needs.
When all three forms of action are available, then participation provides a
means for the creation of social capital from which all central democratic
participation not only gave citizenship a revitalised and more active form, but led
to better policy outcomes than those derived from administrative and technical
‘abstract’ arguments for participation into practices that can be transposed into
areas of policy formation and governance. First, there is the need to clarify the
not themselves lead to positive outcomes from the decision-making process. Kate
90
Harrison has noted that a recurrent problem has been that participation was
frequently listed and asserted, often without any attempt to define precisely what
was meant by participation, and without due consideration of the negative features
participation with active citizenship is frequently based upon the presumption that
the subject of participation is an individual citizen. Rorty (1988) has noted that, in
Paul Hirst notes that ‘organised interests cut across the common civic sphere …
Organised interests are influential to the extent that they achieve their own ends,
citizenship presents two threshold questions in relation to media policy. The first
obligations of broadcast licensees. The second issue is how such participation can
be organised. If theorists such as Rorty, Hirst and Hindess are correct to observe
that active citizenship and policy participation is more likely to occur through
organised interest groups than through the actions of individuals, then what are
the conditions under which an organisation or interest group can claim to ‘speak
for’ an audience or sections of it? The emergence of such interest groups in the
broadcast media sphere, and how they have negotiated interfaces between the
broadcast institutions, the policy process and the wider interests of the Australian
citizenship, has also been central to discourses of nationalism, and the notion that
has observed, citizenship has also always been defined not only in terms of
differentiated from non-citizens, through access to civil, political and social rights
which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (Gellner
1983: 1). Eric Hobsbawm has also drawn attention to the political dimension of
The primary meaning of “nation” ... was political. It equated “the people”
and the state in the manner of the American and French Revolutions... The
For, whatever else a nation was, the element of citizenship and mass
participation or choice was never absent from it. (Hobsbawm 1990: 18-19)
toward universalism, has also coexisted with its cultural element, which stresses
to each other and to those outside of that collectivity. While such claims to
cultural uniqueness on the part of nationalist movements have been treated with
93
suspicion since they were first proposed,3 the inculcation of a ‘common culture’ is
John Hutchinson (1994) has argued that both Gellner and Hobsbawm
secular, rational and cosmopolitan. Stuart Hall makes a similar observation about
led us to expect, not the revival but the gradual disappearance of the
1993: 353)
nationhood have crossed political boundaries, from liberal hopes for world
localism and globalism presented as a strategic vision for political action by the
movements of people and cultural forms and practices, and a resulting set of
1998; Cheah 1998). Lata Mani has argued that trends in the global cultural
mappings of the world, whether in terms of binary divisions or discrete units’, and
where the new politics of difference - racial, sexual, cultural, transnational - can
combine and be articulated in all their dazzling plurality’ (Mani 1992: 392).
Similarly, in the Australian context, Andrew Milner has argued that economic
particular nation has always been a minority sentiment, coming more easily to
particular class formations than others, by virtue of factors such as their work
patterns (Heater 1990: 188). Immanuel Wallerstein has noted that ‘world culture,
the humanism of many sages, has long been advocated on the grounds that it
standing ideal of world culture and global citizenship, world history has not been
there have been ‘gravitational forces restraining the centrifugal tendencies and
organising them … [and] the single, most powerful such gravitational force has
National Identity
anthropologist and media theorist Eric Michaels, Tom O’Regan argues that
and institutional modes of analysis (O’Regan 1990: 54). Similarly, Jody Berland
has proposed that ‘cultural technologies produce not only content and thus
material practices with their own structural effects and tensions’ (Berland 1992:
1992: 74).
the emergence of modern nationalism, Benedict Anderson (1991) has linked the
rise of a market in the products of the printed word, or what he terms print-
capitalism, to the rise of the modern nation-state, arguing that ‘the convergence of
capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created
morphology set the stage for the modern nation’ (Anderson 1991: 46). For
Anderson, this linkage of print media and modern nationalism emerged in three
communication that was linked to growth in the international book trade; the way
that print technology gave a new fixity to language, as ‘the printed book kept a
and power with the codification of laws and rules under modern forms of
governance.
(Anderson 1991: 6), and proposes that the symbolic dimension of nationalism as a
seeks to transcend divisions within the nation-state. Through the modern nation-
state, policies are developed that are self-consciously directed towards cultural
national events, public exhibitions of ‘high’ culture in art galleries and museums,
and the mass media. Anderson’s emphasis upon the role of print media as a
the nation’s past and projections of its future destiny … are embodied in museums
nationalism and its links to everyday life, Anderson limits his analysis to print
98
media forms. Philip Schlesinger has pointed out that Anderson ‘does not push the
(Schlesinger 1991a: 164). The issue is not simply one of choice of medium to
(1951), Meyrowitz (1985) and Carey (1992) have observed that, while print
culture was associated with the rise of nationalism, as it promoted continuity over
and the need for continuity and instantaneity, and oriented toward international
distribution.5
Globalisation has been defined as a series of interrelated trends that include: the
such as broadband cable, satellite and the Internet; the global circulation of ideas,
including regional trading blocs, cultural, professional and standards bodies, and
99
culture’ (Morley and Robins 1995: 11). Such arguments are associated with wider
argument that contemporary global economic and cultural flows have generated
‘fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics’, and that global
(Appadurai 1990: 296, 299). Similarly, John Urry identifies the growing global
polity congruent, to endow a culture with its own political roof, and not more than
one roof at that’ (Gellner 1983: 43), such developments would point to the
national cultures which unify their population. For Appadurai, these global
mediascapes are part of the ‘cultural politics that have subverted the hyphen that
links the nation to the state’, which in turn generate distinctive forms of
100
1989: 101).
international cultural and economic flows in the 1980s and 1990s. Nonetheless,
Hirst and Thompson (1996), who argue that globalisation arguments are
superficial in their use of evidence, lack historical depth and greatly underestimate
historically unique experience of the post-1960s era, and the world economy was
more open in the 1870-1914 period, with volumes of trade, capital flows and
levels of international migration being higher then than now. Linda Weiss (1997)
has developed a similar critique in the East Asian context, arguing that
phenomenon’ (Weiss 1997: 23). Second, the thesis draws too heavily upon the
Western Europe. A related point is that much debate about the so-called ‘global-
local dialectic’, and the associated decline in significance of the national level of
greater European economic and political integration, and that the implications of
seem as unique in countries such as Australia, New Zealand or Canada since, for
these countries, ‘limited and shared sovereignty is nothing new’ (O’Regan 1993:
101). In such countries, the issue for media policy that seeks to regulate
content.
media cultures is therefore mistaken. While studies affirm the centrality of the
United States to the world audiovisual trade, accounting for 70 per cent of total
audiovisual exports, it is also the case that most of the world’s television product
remains local, both in terms of not being broadcast outside of its home country
102
and in its textual style and mode of address. Broadcast media have always been
television has not ‘always been international, both culturally and economically,’
systems. As a result, ‘hybrid’ program forms often emerge which negotiate local,
national and international cultural markets, such as the local production and
international trade in program formats, or what Moran (1998) terms ‘copycat TV’.
Portuguese, Spanish and English language audiences (Sinclair et. al. 1996).
103
markers of the national cultures it came from, and international trade in broadcast
media occurs ‘on the basis of the irreducibly cultural relationships that are
established between certain types of program and the audiences for whom they
are meaningful’ (Sinclair 1996: 55). It is also apparent that nation-states and
global flows and their local impacts within the national community, that includes
over cross-border media flows. It is also important to bear in mind that the notion
culture and national identity, may be more historically and geographically specific
than is allowed for by those discourses arising from the ‘strong’ nation-states of
Western Europe, and may not be so applicable to the majority of the world’s
and cultural sovereignty have been the norm (Collins 1990; Castles 1997;
Conclusion
ongoing tension between rule through expertise and popular sovereignty. This is
market relations are held to be sufficient to meet the needs and interests of diverse
necessary corrective to the limitations of the market. This chapter has sought to
media theory, and the ‘tragic’ accounts of critical media theory, to instead address
technology and national cultures is a complex and contested one. This is seen in
the case, as Richard Collins has argued, that ‘relatively few actual states … fit the
in its own state’ (Collins 1990: 18), then it may follow that the apparent ‘newness’
between culture and polity, may not apply particularly well to the states in which
the majority of the world’s population live. If this is the case, then the model of
sovereignty, found in nations such as Australia, Canada and Brazil, may indeed
provide a template for the development of national cultural policy and its
‘In contrast with printed communications the programs sent by the new media [radio, film and television] curtail
the recipients in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but ... deprive it of the
opportunity to say something and to disagree.’ (quoted in Collins 1993: 248).
2
An argument can be made for public broadcasting that is not based upon claims about quality, but rather concerns
the tendency for commercial media to undersupply particular areas of broadcast programming with strong ‘public good’
elements, such as public affairs programming, critical and investigative forms of news and current affairs and documentary,
and children’s programming (Herman 1997). This shifts the focus away from defending public broadcasting on the basis of
value criteria, towards the notion of maximising programming diversity within a broadcast media system (cf. Flew 1994).
3
One of the most famous rebuttals of the cultural uniqueness of nations was Ernest Renan’s (1882) account of how
the modern European nation was not founded upon dynastic continuity, racial homogeneity, linguistic unity, a common
religion or geographical limits. Instead, Renan argued that the origins of the modern European nation were historically
contingent, and that the conditions for a nation-state’s continuing existence had to be continuously reproduced and
reinvented, in order to win the consent of its people: ‘a nation’s existence is ... a daily plebiscite’ (Renan 1882, in Bhabha
1990: 11, 12, 19).
4
See Flew (1996) for a more detailed discussion of the concept and its applications. That paper draws attention to
five influences upon the concept: philosophies of technology as developed by Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger;
psychoanalytic film theory; ‘social shaping of technology’ arguments, particularly Raymond Williams’ account of television
as ‘technology and cultural form’; Canadian communications theory as developed by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan;
and post-Foucaultian cultural histories developed by Ian Hunter and Tony Bennett.
5
It is important to note that such developments do not necessarily negate nationalism as a political force, but rather
promote the circulation of ideas outside of defined territorial boundaries. Harold Innis drew attention to this in considering
the significance of radio to the territorial ambitions of the Nazis in the 1930s:
In Europe an appeal to the ear made it possible to destroy the results of the Treaty of Versailles as registered in the
political map based on self-determination. The rise of Hitler to power was facilitated by the use of the loud speaker and the
radio. By the spoken language he could appeal to minority groups and to minority nations. Germans in Czechoslovakia
could be reached by radio, as could Germans in Austria. Political boundaries related to the demands of the printing press
disappeared with the new instruments of communication. The spoken language provided a base for the exploitation of
nationalism and a far more effective device for appealing to larger numbers. Illiteracy was no longer a serious barrier. (Innis
1951: 81)