Sociology of Media (3) Mediation Formats

1. Sociology of Media (3) Mediation Formats Electronic Reproduction (28.11.2007)

2. Outline • A British Trajectory: Cultural Studies • Raymond Williams’ Cultural History of Television • Against Technological Determinism • Need and Technological Innovation • Anglo-Germanic Synergies? • Aura and Structure of Feeling

3. A sociology of media-associations • Fundamental Questions: • Who are the key mediators of these mediation formats? • What relationships and transactions exist between them? • How do their actions ‘bind’ matter, form, use and know-how into distinctive technologies?

4. (British) Cultural Studies • Marxist roots, without Freudian interference – humanist Marxism • Focus on popular culture (and ‘resistance’ c.q. ‘class struggle’) – literature & history. • Founding fathers: Richard Hoggart (English literature), Raymond Williams (English literature), Edward Thompson (history).

5. Raymond Williams on Culture • culture has three layers: (a) lived culture; (b) recorded culture; (c) selective tradition. • The more we move from (a) to (c), the more limited the scope of the cultural becomes and the more closely its meaningfulness becomes tied to the interests of the dominant groups in society.

6. Williams on Television • Focus on ‘cultural forms’ (= genres), which structure and order particular understandings of the world, not primarily at the level of ideology, but at the level of ordinary and everyday banal expectations, (= the primary processes of the technology itself). • Also on the distribution and flow of television programming. The flow of television is an ongoing set of alternative sequences without intervals other than advertising.

7. A historical approach • The history of television is closely intertwined with the history of electricity, which itself is linked to the history of industrial capitalism. Williams’ analysis thus focuses on the interaction between different kinds of ‘needs’ meeting around specific techno-scientific practices. • Alongside electricity, the development of television was also linked to three other technological innovations; telegraphy, photography and later radio (which was already closely linked with telegraphy).

8. A distinctive (?) feature of electronic mediation: technology precedes content • Unlike all previous communication technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content … It is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communication preceded their content (Williams, 1990: 25).

9. Against Technological Determinism • To change these emphases would require prolonged and cooperative intellectual effort. But in the particular case of television it may be possible to outline a different kind of interpretation, which would allow us to see not only its history but also its uses in a more radical way. Such an interpretation would differ from technological determinism in that it would restore intention to the process of research and development. The technology would be seen, that is to say, as being looked for and developed with certain purposes and practices already in mind. At the same time the interpretation would differ from symptomatic technology in that these purposes and practices would be seen as direct: as known social needs, purposes and practices to which technology is not marginal but central (Williams, 1990: 14).

10. Yet…. Technology matters • It is especially a characteristic of the communication systems that all were foreseen – not in utopian but in technical ways – before the crucial components of the developed systems had been discovered and refined. In no way is this a history of communication systems creating a new society or new social conditions. The decisive and earlier transformation of industrial production, and its new social forms, which had grown out of a long history of capital accumulation and working technical improvements, created new needs but also new possibilities, and the communication systems, down to television, were their intrinsic outcomes (Williams, 1990: 19).

11. Need and Technological Innovation • The leading role of elites • Strategic-military use: MIMENET (military information media entertainment network, Der Derian) • Television and ‘pure war’ (as the infinite capacity to prepare for war, Virilio). • The key issue in this model is how to understand the translations between motivations, needs and technological innovations.

12. Anglo-German Synergies • For Williams, social needs are the main driving force of history. • Electronic Mediation became instrumental in the production of popular (mass) culture. • Discovery of ‘working class literature‘ • Television became a cultural industry and its domestication was partly informed by a process of commodification (whilst also being directed by deliberate political and military strategies).

13. The missing link: sense-perception • The television-set was not a commodity from the outset, because it was not yet defined by particular modes of consumption or use, the logic of commodification was encapsulated in the way it relates to human sense-perceptions and modes of subjectivity, as well as participation, that were themselves already radically reconfigured by both mechanical reproduction and electronic communications (such as telegraphy, telephony and radio).

14. Aura and Structure of Feeling • Both embody an attempt to label something that is at once ephemeral, yet contain a sense of logic or internal organization (a bit like Freud’s (1989) Unconscious or Lacan’s (1977) Imaginary). • But… unlike Benjamin, mechanical reproduction for Williams does not radically alter the existential ontology of human perception, but merely reconfigured it, historically, in a new relationship with the capitalist mode of production, its embedding within particular nation states and its possible wider functions for social ordering (including those of a military-strategic nature).

15. Structure of feeling • is not a tangible phenomenon in itself but is as a second-order reconstruction of particular patterns and sensibilities. For Williams, these were historically formed in relation to particular collective experiences of people which were themselves dependent on the material conditions of existence in which these people find themselves. • Is embedded in the material practices through which cultures are historically actualised, reflected by specific media products as well as in the sequencing and programming. It is reinforced by media-institutional strategies and decisions and provide the basis upon which it takes on an appearance of common sense logic. • The closest concept to structure of feeling is Bourdieu’s habitus: ‘a system of shared social dispositions and cognitive structures which generates perceptions, appreciations and actions’ (Bourdieu, 1988: 279n2).

16. Structures of Feeling and Neuropolitics • Mediated cultural production can be seen as an attempt to streamline structures of feeling. In a sense, they are generic forms of ‘neuropolitics’ (Connolly, 2002) in that they shape sense-making processes not at the level of deliberate reasoning or persuasion, but through the embodied sensuality of experiences. • The ‘new’ aura of works of art in an age of mechanical (and electronic) reproduction is thus no longer tied to the creativity of the product, but to its affectivity: its capacity to induce affective relationships between media and their consumption. • The aura is no longer a primary attachment to the meaningful signification of particular content, but to the work of the medium itself.