Media Studies

MEDIA STUDIES,
CRITICAL THEORY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Robert M. Seiler

In these remarks I gloss Hanno Hardt's (1989) article on the development of a critical approach to the problems of communication and media in American social science research. Hardt traces the understanding of a "critical" position through four periods: (1) pragmatism of the Chicago School, (2) the empirical sociology of the Lazarsfeld tradition, (3) the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, and (4) the Cultural Studies movement in the United Kingdom. Hardt argues that "communication and media theorists in the United States have embraced a notion of critical research that grew out of a reformist environment and was based on a sense of responsibility among social scientists that operated well within the dominant ideology."

INTRODUCTION

A number of intellectual movements, including pragmatism, neo-Marxism, Critical Theory, and British Cultural Studies, have helped shape the "critical" approach people in media studies and cultural studies take. The term "critical" refers to the social criticism that emerged during the last part of the 19th century, thanks to the advancement of science and the effects of industrialization (Hardt, 1989, p. 559; hereafter cited by page number only). The phrase "social criticism" mean taking a scientific approach to social problems in order to bring about change. Of course, scholars in many disciplines have studied culture: recently, they have focused on ideological representations and the process of ideological struggle with and within the media, stressing the relationship between the media, power, and the maintenance of social order.

COMMUNICATION AND THE STUDY OF SOCIETY

European thought, including British and Continental philosophy, has always had an influence on the development of North American intellectual life. This influence is evident in the development of the pragmatism, that uniquely American philosophy which was founded by Henry James and John Dewey.

These thinkers set out to reconcile morality and science, adopting scientific practice as a way of solving the problems of everyday life (p. 560). John Dewey (1931, p. 24) described pragmatism as an extension of historical empiricism, with one major difference; it does not insist upon antecedent phenomena but consequent phenomena, not upon the precedents but upon the possibilities of action. One might say (quite simply) that the meaning or the significance of a concept or a proposition must be determined with reference to its practical effects. That is, Dewey tried to establish a theoretical context for studying social problems. Social scientists realised that, with an increasing concentration of political and economic power, the study of institutions and collective activities was a key part of social scientific inquiry: accordingly, they tried to expose the predatory nature of American industry (Thorsten Veblen), to offer an economic interpretation of history (C.A. Beard), and to provide a sociological critique of traditional thoughts of individuality and morality (Albion Small and Robert Park). These thinkers emphasized the social processes in their studies, suggesting that the struggle to achieve a perfect society was the same the struggle to achieve a perfect democracy.

Inevitably, these thinkers focused on "communication" as a major theoretical concern, in the sense that they regarded the process of communication as central of the operation of a democratic society (p. 561). Mead (1934) described an ideal society as one which brings people together, and in his own work demonstrated how the self emerges through communication. Dewey (1925, p. 169) argued that communication was instrumental in liberating individuals from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and enabling them to live in a world of things that have meaning. He believed that any critique of culture should involve two considerations: (1) communication as the foundation of society and (2) communication as a necessary condition for the working of democracy.

Accordingly, the pragmatists critiqued the atomistic view of the individual (which disregarded the interests of the collective), on the basis that it had become incompatible with the ideas of democracy. That is, industrialisation and the rapid growth of society had led to the creation of a "public" that was disoriented and unable to identify itself. Dewey (1954, pp. 26-27), lamented the fact that, in developing the so-called Great Society, "the machine age" had partially destroyed the small communities of former times without generating a Great Community. Perfecting the "machine age" that would lead to a democratic way of life. The pragmatists thought that the new technology would encourage the growth of mutual sympathy and a rational public opinion that would transcend class and region. In The Public and its Problems(1954, p. 209), he argued that social scientists should promote this goal via the process of expert inquiry. Dewey stressed intellectual leadership, via the process of social scientific research

The members of the Chicago School shared a critical perspective on the economic and the social injustices of society, and provided theoretical support for the just/humane distribution of material resources, regarding communication as a vital means of adapting to abundance (p. 562). They appreciated the cultural context of political and economic decisions and the effect these decisions had upon the survival of the community.

Critcal social science emerged from researchers' extended analysis of the American press, which had become a target of criticism for social activists and critics within the social science enterprise; at the turn of the century, the American Journal of Sociology served as an important forum about the proper role of the media (p. 563). Believing that social science could translate ethics into action, these reformers hoped to find in social science not merely a description of society but the recipe for social change/meeting democratic goals.

At the University of Cicago, Albion Small organized sociological research; his colleagues included Edward Ross, who wrote about the media, and Robert Park, who pioneered urban sociology and the study of race relations. They were influenced by the activist sociology of Lester Ward, who advocated collectivism and a planned society. In An Introduction to the Study of Society (1894), Albion Small formulated a communication model stressing the role the press played mediating levels of authority. Interestingly, Small's work anticipated mass communication research on gate-keeping and the two-step flow phenomena (p. 564). Ross thought of communication as an important social process; he regarded the press and advertising as potential instruments for manipulating the public. Again, Dewey believed that society exists in and through communication; yet, like sociologist George Simmel, he concluded that it produced conflict. In "Reflections on Communication and Culture" (1938, pp. 195-96), Park wrote that communication fosters competition and conflict but also leads to greater understanding. As a process of transformation, Park wrote, communication involves confrontation and implies change.

These early sociological considerations resulted in a pluralistic model of society, one which offered an alternative to the potential excesses of individualism and socialism in Marxist doctrines of the period (p. 566). This articulation of socialization, cooperation, and balance described a process of change: it described democracy at work. Throughout these deliberations, communication remained a rather abstract idea, one which described a process that differentiated between those in control of the technology (the operators of the press) and those receiving the messages (the public), but failed to recognize the effects of cultural or economic differences of the communication process on the workings of society. Thus, in the minds of these critics, the Great Community (or the Ideal Democracy) was made up of individuals whose interests, capabilities, and understandings coincided with the essence of the community.

Interestingly, the Commission on Freedom of the Press (1947) reaffirmed a belief in the flow of information and the diversity of ideas; it reiterated the dangers of a press dominated by the ideas of owners and those who control the press via economic and political means (pp. 566-67). However, the report failed to alter the commercial intersts of the industry.

THE AGE OF SCIENTISM

By the 1940s, interest in the critical approach to the study of society and communication, promoted by the Chicago School, had waned. Concern over the status of the field as a scientific activity had intensified, affecting the creation of sociology departments, centres of research, and graduate instruction. A generation later, traditional sociology had rediscovered nature and, under the influence of Talcott Parsons, embraced structural functionalism, which claimed to move steadily in the direction of a theoretical system, not unlike classical mechanics (p. 568). The problems caused by the Great Depression, the increasing importance of the media as political and economic institutions, and the rise of fascism and communism in Europe helped shift the focus of social scientific research. In this context, mass communication theory and research turned from a cultural/historical interpretation of communication (offered by pragmatism and the work of the Chicago School of sociology) to a social scientific explanation.

A series of scientific models emerged, representing a shift to a scientific/empirical definition of the field. Harold D. Lasswell (1948) formulated a model that directed researchers' attention to the basic elements of communication in any situation: Who / Says what / In which channel / To whom / With what effect? He offered researchers a powerful formula for understanding communication--and identified the corresponding fields of analysis--audience analysis and effects analysis (pp. 568-69). As it happened, he concentrated on persuasive (political) communication. Interestingly, as Hardt points out, this description of communication is reminiscent of the stimulus-response model (J.B. Watson). This approach implied a concept of society as an aggregate of anonymous, isolated individuals exposed to powerful media institutions engaged in reinforcing or changing social behaviour.

Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949) produced a scientific (mathematical) model which described communication as a linear, one-way process. Significantly, Shannon devised formulas for calculating the flow of information. For a long time, scholars regarded this model as the most important. Not surprisingly, Shannon's mathematical formulations stimulated research into the technical side of communication.

Stimulated by developments in psychology, F. Heider (1946), T.M. Newcomb (1953), and L.A. Festinger (1957) among others produced models that stressed balance and orientation (p. 569). These models helped order and systematize the study of mass communication--by directing researchers' attention to specific components and by encouraging a preoccupation with questions of communication effects. As well, this movement included a critique of methodologies based upon a theory of society that had been firmly established with the creation of mass communication models.

Throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, mass communication researchers--sharing the pragmatic model of society--employed the social science perspective (pp. 569-70). This research related to the values of individualism and operated on the strength of efficiency and instrumental values in its pursuit of democracy and the American dream. Paul Lazarsfeld emerged as a major figure. His interest in methodological problems, together with his study of effects, resulted in a number of media studies that had a modelling effect upon the development of the field. Lazarsfeld was born (1901) in Vienna; he studied mathematics and then developed an expertise in social psychology, researching class and unemployment; he immigrated to the U.S.A. in 1933, and taught sociology at Columbia University from 1940 to 1969. He formulated a research strategy based on the understanding that political power was a function of the shifting relationships between citizens, the government, and the mass media. He founded (1941) the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which became a centre for sociological research, deploying a variety of empirical methods, including mass market surveys, statistical analyses, and focus groups.

We should remember that a number of German philosophers and social scientists moved to North America during this period, and they enriched the intellectual climate considerably. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, a group of left-wing (Jewish) thinkers who had organised the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University, moved to the United States in 1933. The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (as the members called their approach) represented a mixture of neo-Marxist and New Left thinking; it took issue with both Western Positivism and Marxist scientism, critiquing Western capitalism and the forms of society that were created by bolshevik socialism. The Institute returned to Germany in 1949; it disbanded in 1969, but its influence continues, notably in the work of Jurgen Habermas.

In an article surveying mass communication research, Lazarsfeld (1941) identified two streams: (a) administrative research, quantitative research designed and conducted to aid the administration of public and private programs and (b) critical research, designed and conducted to oppose and to resist the administration of power in society (pp. 571-72). Lazarsfeld credited Horkheimer with the idea of critical research, but did not pursue the philosophical or the theoretical implications of Critical Theory for media research. Moreover, he ignored the historical nature of critical research and failed to consider the role of culture in the positioning of the media in society; like his contemporaries, he saw the problems of the media in technological terms.

Lazarsfeld claimed to be engaged in critical research, but in practice he neither engaged in a critique of society nor in a questioning of authority in the reformist sense (p. 573). Instead, he sought models of mass media effects that were predictive: the three-cornered relationship could be analyzed in terms of influences and effects to produce a sense of real and potential imbalance. As it happened, mass communication research moved from purely sociological inquiry to multidisciplinary inquiry. By contrast, the notion of a critical position--as formulated by the Frankfurt School--meant bringing about change.

Reacting to Lazarsfeld's notion of critical research, George Gerbner argued that the cultural (and political) spectre of the age was the dissolution of publics into markets for mass media. As Gerbner (1964) put it, "More and more of this research has succumbed to the fate of mass media contents itself--by being tailored to the specifications of industrial and market operations" (quoted in Hardt, p. 574). Nevertheless, under Lazarsfeld's leadership, mass communication research became a formidable enterprise, one deeply committed to the commercial interests of the culture industry and the political concerns of government.

CRITICAL THEORY

We have been talking about two quite different intellectual traditions, two unique ways of conceptualizing culture and media phenomena: American social scientists, who were guided in their work by the principle of empirical verification, and European Criticial Theory analysts, who insisted upon the critical nature of societal concepts, pointing to the problem of value judgments (p. 576). Horkheimer (1941) claimed that the mass media profess their adherence to the individual's ultimate value and his (or her) inalienable freedom, but they operate in such a way that they tend to forswear such values by fettering the individual to prescribed attitudes, thoughts, and buying habits. Robert Merton (1957) characterised these divergent intellectual traditions with regard to researchers' focus on information on the one hand and knowledge on the other. Merton wrote that knowledge implies a body of facts systematically connected, whereas information does not.

Horkheimer and Adorno present their theory of mass culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, p. 154), pointing out that, in the culture industry, the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production; this person is tolerated only so long as his or her identification with the "generality" is unquestioned: the peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commodity determined by society. This statement had an effect on the mass society debate three decades later.

Whereas European Critical Theory researchers approached culture and society from an qualitative perspective, American social scientific researchers approached culture and society from a quantitative perspective (p. 577). The latter built on the work of such pioneers as Lazarsfeld, Herbert Blumer, Carl Hovland, Harold Lasswell, and others, launching with an increasing sophistication of its empirical methodology into what members of the Frankfurt School called market research; they investigated such social problems as collective behaviour (Blumer), persuasion (Hovland), and propaganda (Lasswell), seeking empirical evidence to demonstrate the workings of a pluralist society.

After four decades, during the 1970s, mainstream mass communication researchers realized that Critical Theory provided a competing social/political theory of society/exemplified an abiding commitment to the study of culture, including the complexity of the media industry in the ideological struggle, and to an analysis of the cultural process, including such topics as power and domination (p. 578). The cultural pessimism of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, together with the political critique of Herbert Marcuse and the theoretical inquiries of Jurgen Habermas into the role of communication in the struggle against bureaucracies, offered North American researchers a conceptual framework for critiquing modern society and discussing the consequences (philosophical and political) this critique will have.

An interest in the emancipatory power of communication runs through the work of Habermas. It surfaces in such works as Knowledge and Human Interest (1971), which discusses language in terms of a critical social science, and The Theory of Communicative Action (1984), which formulates the concept of "communicative action" (p. 584). He sees communication as a process of negotiation, which takes place against a background of a shared culture, a "lifeworld" that offers the condition for any meaningful participation. This means that culture, society, and the individual are structural components of the lifeworld, in which communicative action reproduced cultural knowledge, integrates individuals, and shapes personalities.

As Habermas (1984, pp. 594-95) puts it, (1) culture is the reservoir of knowledge from which participants in communication about the world take their interpretations; (2) society represents the legitimate order, through which participants secure their membership in social groups and affirm their solidarity; and (3) personality refers to the competencies that enable a subject to participate in the process of understanding while maintaining its own identity. In the semantic field of symbolic contexts, the social space and the historical time form (5) the dimensions in which communicative action takes place. Habermas proposes that the study of the media--they free participants from their spatial-temporal limitations--must be the study of culture. The media (elements of the everyday "lifeworld") function as "generalized forms of communication," freeing participants from their spatial-temporal limitations, creating public spheres capable of serving authoritarian or emancipatory interests (p. 584). This perspective on communication and media suggests that "mass Communication" theory and research are invariably tied to the analysis of communicative practices, i.e., issues of communicative competence, understanding, and participation in the lifeworld.

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

Like Critical Theory, British Cultural Studies (another important European intellectual tradition) offered North American researchers an alternative critique of ideological domination and political power (p. 586). Running through this approach is the study of authority, that is, of people living an existence under specific conditions of domination that organize their ideas and beliefs--through social institutions, such as the media.

To begin with, British Cultural Studies (BCS) broke with mainstream British sociology and established itself as an integrative academic field of study, which can be traced through the Weberian, interpretative branch of sociology to the ethnographic discourse of subcultural theorists. We think of neo-Marxist thinkers, including George Luckacs, and the Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse (p. 587). Stuart Hall (1980, p. 25) explained that these writers shifted the research agenda to the key question of the determinate character of culture and ideologies: their material, social, and historical conditions of existence. They reaffirmed the importance of a holistic perspective and confirmed the critique of empiricism and its insistence upon isolated facts. Louis Althusser, with his concept of "ideological state apparatus," and Antonio Gramsci, with his concept of "hegemony," helped establish a rationale for studying cultural texts and practices as "complex formations, necessarily contradictory, always historically specific."

The study of media, together with the study of power, constitutes an ideological issue (p. 587). As Raymond Williams (1977, pp. 139-40) puts it, "the most basic task of the sociology of culture is the analysis of the relationships within this complex unity [of] institutions, formations, and communicative relationships." From this (discursive) perspective, researchers regard ideology as "the power of a particular system to represent its own meanings as a direct reflection of the real, to produce its own meanings of experience (Grossberg, 1984, p. 409). Thus, the conditions for individuals in their social and political environments are defined within the sphere of media. Grossberg (1984, p. 409) goes on to claim that the issue is not so much the particular knowledge of reality (true or false) which is made available, but the way in which the individual is given access to that knowledge and, consequently, em-powered or de-powered. Hall (1979, pp. 340-42) writes: the media maintain their cultural and ideological position by (1) selectively constructing social knowledge, (2) classifying and reflecting upon the plurality of social life; and (3) constructing a complex knowledge order. BCS analysts suggest a return to the subject of experience and the struggle over the power of the text within a cultural and historical moment; a consideration of the ideological effect of the media as they necessarily and incessantly intersect with the social practices of groups and individuals in society.

By the 1970s, American mass communication researchers had shifted their focus to audiences (p. 588). The uses and gratifications approach of the period (illustrated by the work of Elihu Katz, Herbert Blumer, and Michael Gurevitch) retained its functionalist character regarding the presence of an active (consuming) audience, while struggling with the notions of the effects of texts and producers upon audiences under specific social, cultural, or economic conditions. The agenda-setting model perpetuated an effects model of the media while identifying itself with the traditional, theoretical assumptions of the uses and gratification approach.

BCS broke with the models of "direct influence," shifting instead to a framework which drew on what can be called "the ideological role of the media" (Hall, 1980, pp. 118-19). This approach is based upon an understanding of communication as related to the historical process of which it is an "indissoluble" part (p. 588). This approach differs considerably from the North American approach, which has focused on the analysis of culture as a study of a series of empirical facts about media, contents, and effects on specific audiences. We must remember that this approach emerged from an intellectual climate created (and sustained) by a political discourse (see the New Left Review) that operates on the assumption that Marxism as a social theory is quite capable of producing a change in the social and the economic conditions of society.

BCS appeals to North American mass communication researchers, offering them ways of studying contemporary social problems, demonstrating a sense of engagement with political practice and theoretical consideration within the public sphere (p. 589). Mass communications research across North America has encountered the practical effects of politicizing research--via the policies of funding social scientific research. Researchers may well realize that the organizational aspects of the BCS perspective will revitalize the field. We think of the work of Dallas Smythe, Herbert Schiller, Todd Gitlin, Stuart Ewen, Alvin Gouldner, and others. The arrival of BCS has dramatized the question of disciplinary boundaries and the academic compartmentalization of knowledge.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Inspired by pragmatism, social scientists across North America have focused on the importance of culture and the idea that communication is a life process leading to democratic practice (p. 593). This insight marked the beginning of a critical position in social science theory and research within a liberal pluralist position. The Frankfurt School offered a comprehensive modernist view of the cultural and the political crisis of Western society.

A commitment to a critical approach--like the commitment to a Marxist critique of society--will lead to some important changes in the definition of society, social problems, and the media, not to mention in the organization and the execution of research projects (pp. 594-95). Cultural Studies offers the emancipatory power of a social theory, one which promises individuals the possibility of rising above their social and economic conditions. This social theory locates the enquiry into mass communication in the realm of the ideological and explains the role of communication and the place of the media in an examination of the cultural process. This approach links the forms of consciousness and expression with the forms of social organization.