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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

media, democracy, postmodernism, New Right « Previous | |Next »
April 19, 2005

I'm reading the last chapter of Catherine Lumby's Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World. The chapter is entitled 'Media Culpa--democracy and the postmodern public sphere.' Tabloids promote democracy is her argument and she spells it out by criticizing a popular conception of the public sphere:

"Many critics claim that that the meaning of publis life and discourse has become so deracinated that it's now meaningless to speak of a vital public life at all...The well spring of democracy, the popular story goes, is an informed and critical citizenry, and most contemporary citizens are neither ---they're the zombie spawn of late capitalism robotically feasting on distraction and spectacle."

This is the topdown modernist view of the mass media tht has its roots in the Frankfurt's School's critique of the culture industry.

Lumby has argued throughout Gotcha that this picture of politics and popular culture:

"...is a one dimensional and hopelessly nostalgic one which ignores the myriad of ways in which the growth of the mass media has actually increased the diversty of voices, ideas and issues which make up public debate and the political arena."

The mass media is no longer the culture industry.Adorno and co have been flicked into the dustbin of history. We now study popular culture, resistance and identity politics.

Lumby then asks: 'how do we make democracy work in a world where diverse media forms compete for diverse publics?' She says that having a public conversation today means actively listening to what people are saying, regardless of how they're the saying it, where they're saying it and why. She adds:

"The top-down model of public discourse, so dear to the conventional left and right, no longer holds. We live in a world which is swaddled by communicaiton media, by films, books, magazines, radio programs, global cable TV, the Internet and video ...... Confronting this new public sphere means grasping the fundamental changes the mass media has wrought in the way we conceive of politics and culture."

Granted. What then?

Lumby says that in this postmodern world we have to rethink the old modernist dualism and assumptions about high and low, private and public, media and life etc given the diveristy of media and the plurality of new voices and groups. The media is become a vast collage of jostling diverse viewpoints, identities and genres; a sphere that is saturated with politics and which requires us to negotiate the different viewpoints and ways of speaking.

That's Lumby's argument. It is basically one about new media forms broadening and radicalising democracy.

It sort of finishes before it gets started. But this kind of postmodern argument has meant that only a handful of diehard Left intellectuals still rave against the culture industry today. The culture industry has been redefined as a respectable academic discipline, "popular culture", and it has long since ceased to be considered the opiate of the masses. It is now a legitimate terrain of contestation that provides scores of emancipatory possibilities.

What if we put the media forms to oneside and focus on democracy.

What suprises me is how hostile Lumby is to the New Right--which is symbolized by the one nation conservatism of Pauline Hanson. The New Right is seen as sinister, as being beyond the liberal pale. It is deeply racist underneath the new concept of "ethnicity".

No attempt is made to understand the undercurrent populist undercurrent that is gestures towards local autonomy, fiscal austerity and participatory forms of democracy.There is no analysis of the New Right's version of the theory of New Class domination and ideology (of political correctness)its critique of liberalism, and the violent populist rejection of liberalism's abstract universalism in favour of concrete particularity.For Lumby the New Right is really the Old Right.

A key flaw with Lumby's postmodernism is that her cultural media politics in favour of increased decomcracy is not connected to federalism. How is it possible to have radical (or direct, participatory or plebiscitary) democracy, without at the same time advocating a rigorous federal system guaranteeing the autonomy of small constituting states and the differences of regional communities?

Without federalism we are left with the centralized nation-state: the interventionist, liberal welfare state and the liberal conception of community as a bunch of abstract individuals coming together on the basis of accidental cultural identity traits.

What happens when you introduce the core categories, such as self-determination, radical democracy and federalism, into the mix? Who then are the real enemies? Who then is the opposition?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:51 PM | | Comments (1)
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The future of the media?

See here.