Showing papers in "Journal of Communication Inquiry in 1989"

American Television Discovers Gay Women: The Changing Context of Programming Decisions at the Networks

Abstract: In her writing about Hollywood cinema and feminism, Annette Kuhn has pointed out that text and context never operate independently. Although much of the scholarly work about women and film has tended to separate the two elements, often focusing on messages embedded in texts, the interaction and effect of institutional forces on the final film product can never be ignored. Indeed Kuhn herself writes about text and context separately, but cautions against any notion that they are autonomous. &dquo;It cannot be emphasized too strongly, however, that in concrete situations institutions and texts do not operate in isolation from one another, but are interrelated in any and every specific form taken by dominant cinema.&dquo;’

Where Is the "Audience?": Discerning the (Impossible) Subject:

Abstract: a condition which I will suggest as a discerning of an impossible subject By pointing out the limitless boundaries of audience, texts, and reception contexts, Radway draws our attention to the increasing difficulties in capturing the &dquo;kaleidoscopic&dquo; nature of the audience in any reasonable way. The current debates on the problem of audience in cultural studies seem to exemplify this &dquo;condition of impossibility&dquo; as they attempt to grapple with an object of analysis which has already been conceptualized as dispersed and unstable. Central to these debates, it seems, is the question of the possibility and impossibility of theorizing and examining the audience’s experience and subjectivity. My aim in this paper is to attempt to trace how the problem of audience has been reconsidered in recent debates in cultural studies, with particular attention

Ethnography Among Elites: Comparing Discourses of Power

Abstract: The politics and poetics of ethnography have been much debated of late both within anthropology as well as in communication and cultural studies. Although the debate about the precise nature of ethnographic practice is not new, it is probably fair to say that it has been recently reinvigorated and deeply influenced by poststructuralist literary theory and by postmodern philosophy. The insights produced by this interdisciplinary dialogue are many. A central claim in the critique that has been mounted of ethnographic methods centers on the need to differentiate more clearly and self-consciously between ethnographic fieldwork and the practice of ethnographic writing. Where ethnography was traditionally and habitually thought to take place largely &dquo;in the field,&dquo; practitioners are now urged to recognize that ethnography is produced by the collision of two social worlds, the previously erased home-world of the writing ethnographer, and that distant world in the field inhabited and made meaningful by the group the ethnographer wishes to understand. It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of this interactional feature of ethnography. Clearly, ethnographic knowledge could not be produced without entree into another world, but it is equally the product of the social relations, habits, and practices of the usually Western world inhabited by the anthropologist. Indeed George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986) have recently argued in Anthropology as Cultural Critique that although previous ethnographic theory and method focused on the fieldexperience and on the problems of eliciting an alien world-view, the practice of ethnography has always been at least covertly comparative and therefore implicitly preoccupied with the world of the ethnographer. As a consequence of their critique of the power-relations typically hidden within the ethnographic relationship, Marcus and Fischer call for an explicitly comparative, reflexive ethnography where &dquo;cultural juxtapositioning, fully realized,&dquo; would entail &dquo;equal ethnography among us and them, strongly linked&dquo; (Marcus and Fischer, 1986, p. 138). Such a project, as Marcus and Fischer recognize, is an extremely difficult one. It entails not one field but two and it involves us in the potentially selfindulgent and paralyzing activity of reflecting upon ourselves and our own culture. Not the least problem in accomplishing that is the clarification of what

Deterritorializing "Critical" Studies in "Mass" Communication: Towards a Theory of "Minor" Discourses

Abstract: When it encounters resistance from the other, self consciousness undergoes the experience of desire... As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else... In a savage struggle I am willing to accept convulsions of death, invincible dissolution, but also the possibility of the impossible. Franz Fanon, Black Sin, White Masks, p. 218

Polysemy, Plurality, and Media Studies1

Abstract: At first glance, the past decade of criticism directed against mainstream media research seems paradoxical. On the one hand, we accuse mainstream research of naive pluralism; the dominant paradigm, we say, has ignored the unequal distribution of power in society and the exercise of domination, unjustifiably suggesting that our society is happily constituted by a democratic contest between competing interest groups (e.g., Hall, 1982, pp. 60-61, and Mosco, 1982, p. 20). On the other hand, critics say mainstream research has ignored the subtleties of meaning and action by invoking simplistic, mechanistic, singular, and sterile models, models that express more faith in technical expertise than culture and democracy (e.g., Smythe, 1979, p. 175). No wonder that the defenders of the mainstream sometimes look with confused dismay on their critics: we seem to be telling them they are both too pluralist and not pluralist enough. This apparent paradox reflects a set of chronic confusions in contemporary media studies surrounding the plurality of meaning. The critical and cultural theories that have been imported into media scholarship over the past decade, this essay will argue, are not just more sensitive to domination, nor more

Beyond Self-Reflexivity:

Abstract: Elspeth Probyn suggests that what she calls &dquo;postmodern ethnography&dquo; has overcome the epistemological weakness of traditional conceptions of ethnography in its rejection of naturalism and empiricism, in its recognition of the ethnographic project as a question of production of the real rather than its transparent discovery, that ethnography is a practice not of revealing but of writing culture, in short, of story telling. However, Probyn also suggests that in its preoccupation with the difficulties of cultural representation, with the politics of poetics, this epistemological self-reflexivity generally leads to a lack of interest in the ontological position occupied by the ethnographer. In playing off ethnography against autobiography, then, Probyn asserts the importance of ontological self-reflexivity as well, that is, of questioning not only how to tell stories or which stories to tell, but also who is telling whose stories. Of course, the distinction between epistemological and ontological self-reflexivity should not be seen as an absolute dichotomy, but as a difference in emphasis, as the two

On the Road with Three Ethnographers

Abstract: too much on the road and not enough on the vehicle. I have chosen to describe this ongoing and collective process of rearticulation in these terms because the travel metaphor seems quite appropriate to ethnography. To put it simply, ethnography is always about traversing the distance between the familiar and the strange. The ethnographer leaves her home (the familiar) and travels to the other home (the strange), and then returns home to make sense of it in her writing. Of course, the equation is symmetrically reversible insofar as the ethnographer is always the stranger in the midst of the

Take My Word for It: Ethnography and Autobiography

Abstract: fashioned by historical stories is not new. However, to state baldly that as academic practitioners we are also telling stories may still raise hackles in some quarters. Inherent to the notion of stories (academic or not) is the way in which they are organized around certain beliefs and around the story teller. This, of course, conflicts with the epistemological dichotomy that opposes stories to facts. Against this dichotomy, however, feminists (and feminist-inspired work) now frame the issue in other and more sophisticated ways. In this analytic vein it becomes a question of who is telling whose stories. In using the directive, &dquo;Take my word for it,&dquo; I want to explore the recent selfreflective moment within ethnography and the current interest in autobiography. I’ll argue that while this critical turn may offer us new stories, it also requires that we question the assumptions of this practice. Could it be that these new stories reinscribe once again the ethnographer, researcher, or raconteur at the center? While there is an emancipatory potential in the proliferation of &dquo;other&dquo; stories, there is an equal danger that it is still a (male) voice of authority that delivers the theme. The phrase &dquo;take my word for it,&dquo; therefore, is only useful when coupled with Gayatri Spivak’s problematic of the subaltern. The wonderful moment of emancipation, of illusionary freedom suggested by these words, this affirmative clause (take my word for it―or else? jor] ... because I’m going to speak in spite of you?) must be articulated with another project. This other project is one which confronts the linguistic and epistemological reasons of why the other still has her tongue-tied. In Spivak’s argument the conditions that create the subordinated and simultaneously silence her are brought to the fore. These conditions are both

Pictures for the Masses: Photography and the Rise of Popular Magazines in Weimar Germany:

Abstract: Photography evolved as ajournalistic form in the social and political environment of the 1920s. when the idea of photojournalism gained professional acceptance and amacted commercial interest among magazine pblishers in Weimar Germany. The almost immediate success of magazine photography offers a unique opportunity to observe the beginnings of a modem age of journalism that was soon to be dominated by the production of visual images for newspapers and magazines and by the s p e d of newsreels and documentary film. The history of photojournalism is located within the cultural discourse of the Weimar Republic, where the emergence of a democratic system of government also resulted in a broadening of social and cultural experiences that expanded the idea of the political far beyond the locus of government. Specifically, the proximity of journalism to intellectual and artistic expressions of its time. the preoccupation with the notion of realism among writers and journalists, and the fascination with the prospects of technology constitute the cultural environment for the advent of photojournalism and the widespread use of picture stories in a rapidly expending magazine market. Picture magazines appeared during the 1920s in Western Europe when the mass production of photographs became technically viable and commercially desirable as a new form of story telling. Newspapers and magazines began to channel photographic images of the contemporary world through their pages, pretending to report about the social and political conditions of their times, while also using photographs to further their own economic and political goals. Nevertheless, the idea of photography as depicting reality coincided with an increasingly popular theory of journalism as en exercise in objective observation and detached reporting of events. Although such a notion originated in the

Experience, Ideology, and Articulation: Stuart Hall and the Development of Culture

Abstract: The British tradition of media analysis associated particularly with the work of Stuart Hall and the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University is currently undergoing a process of &dquo;internationalization,&dquo; particularly in the USA. The Journal of Communication Inquiry is one of the journals that has been most prominent in this development. An entire issue was dedicated to the work of Stuart Hall, and there have been a number of subsequent articles. But it seems also to be the case that this is no peculiar eccentricity since it appears that many of the younger &dquo;critical&dquo; scholars in the USA are working their way through the key texts of this &dquo;Cultural Studies Tradition&dquo; (CST). One aspect of this engagement which strikes the outside observer very strongly is the extent to which the assumption of Hall into US intellectual life is proceeding at the same time as, and apparently convergent with, the elaboration of the postmodern problematic, and in particular with the reception of Foucault

Media Culture of the Weimar Republic: A Historical Overview:

Abstract: Historical fact, however. was that the fmt German Republic and its media were born to trouble from the v a y beginning. Political confrontations, economic disorganization and recessions. and social disturbances were the landmarks of a country on its way, €or the frst time m history, to modem democratic government. Although keedom of expression was guaranteed in Article 118 of the Weimar Constitution of 1919 that gave its name to the Republic, and although censorship was phibitod, freedom of press and of motion pictures was not mentioned explicitly in this Article. A special Motion Picture Law of 1920 established a Central Censorship Board which had to license every meter of film produced or imported. When broadcasting entered the m e it was already firmy under government control, even before the Reichstag. the German parliament, took official notice of the new medium in 1926. The infamous Article 48 of the Constitution permitted temporary suspension of fundamental rights by President (Reichsprllsident) in the interest of public safety and social order by way of Notvaordnungen (Emergency Orders). Many times the weak and compliant President was persuaded by various politicians to apply Article 48, causing an astonishing number of publications from left to right to stop their presses for several days.

Partners in Heritage:Living the Tradition of Spring Spearing

Abstract: canoes moving silently along the shallows of the lakes, silhouetting Indians poised to spear fish. We who were always &dquo;waus-wa-im-ing&dquo;, &dquo;People of the torch&dquo; are now Lac du Flambeau a transformation which, like the aluminum boats and the miner’s caps we use now to spear spawning walleyes and muskellunge each spring, represents the lived experience of Flambeau tradition. The traditional practice of spearing is being transformed, enacted, and contested in the enveloping distance between the Indian and the Other which pervades the current arena of native cultural struggle: treaty rights. Since 1983, when a court decision ruled that Wisconsin Chippewa retained their rights to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice on land ceded to the United States in the treaties of 1837 and 1842, spearing has been a site of growing non-Indian protest focused on Lac du Flambeau. As Chippewa spear fish off the reservation for 15 days-within quotas and on lakes negotiated with the State--protesters gather in sunset rallies and in the sullen darkness of the spearing grounds, wearing fishing hats with slogans of &dquo;Save a Walleye, Spear an Indian;&dquo; drinking &dquo;Treaty Beer&dquo;-packaged in Christmas colours of red and green on white and labeled &dquo;the tru brew of the working man&dquo; &dquo;Stop treaty abuse&dquo; and &dquo;equal rights;&dquo; and pressing the point home W1U1 gLLJi slwis echoing in me woods of ceded iand, and cries of &dquo;timber nigger&dquo;. This enclave of cultural struggle over the signification of spearing in the region of Lac du Flambeau reveals, I think, an increasingly recognized disjuncture between the conceptualization and the lived experience of cultural forms. This disjuncture carries continuing implications in the broader struggle

Walter Benjamin, Radio Journalist: Theory and Practice of Weimar Radio

Abstract: Today it is accepted that audiovisual media reflect popular culture. Whereas motion pictures were quickly accepted as a medium of artistic expression in their own right. radio broadcasting had to overcome prejudices-at least in Europedictated by a strict definition of culture. Firmly entrenched in the middle-class, this concept of culture strongly opposed any innovation The early twenties experienced a growing movement of cultural criticism that tried to revolutionize an encrusted understanding of cultural tradition. With the advent of radio these discrepancies became increasingly obvious. Euphoric hopes for a new medium offering mass audiences information, education. and entatainment were widely expressed. However, the expectations for this new technical medium of transmission, with its wide social and geographical range, anse from sources that opposed the f m belief in German culture as a constructive and stabilizing force. The latter, nourished by a conservative and elitist mentality, sought. with missionary zeal. to impose education and culture on mass audiences as a national commitment. These expectations that radio could contribute to an awareness for social revolution were doomed to failure. The nonpolitical areas were taken in hand by contmlling organs; censure and program control limited the anticipated wideranging possibilities of this new medium of communication before public opinion even had a chance to be formed.

John Heartfield and the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung:

Abstract: In the mid-twenties, the new photojournalism of illustrated magazines with circulations of up to two million copies gredy determined the interpretation of social reality in Weimar Germany. Although the use of photoessays was a powerful innovation. it served the interests of the middle and upper classes by never questioning the social and political structures of the Weimar Republic, In his essay entitled ‘The Photograph” (1927), Siegfried Kracauer wrote that “the institution of the illustrated magazine, in the hands, of the ruling society, is one of the most powerful weapons against MY understanding.’” Similarily, Bertolt Brecht pointed to the pernicious power of this new journalism: