The Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School is the name given to a group of intellectuals and scholars that met at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, before they sought exile from the Nazi regime. Many of these scholars found themselves in the United States, and continued to critique the world that they viewed as being under the thrall of mass media. Your essential reading this week is by two of the key theorists, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944), seen in the header image. Adorno and Horkheimer claimed that all mass media was essentially the same, and that "culture now impresses the same stamp on everything" (1944, p. 32). Furthermore, any perceived differences between mass produced cultue served merely to support the overall system, and that the similarity of mass media gave audiences no room to think and reflect: Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies... all of the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them [audiences] what to expect; they react automatically. Adorno & Horkheimer (1944, p. 35) One can see that statement about how media impresses the same stamp on everything continues to be true today, some examples of which are demonstrated below. • Movie posters (n.d.) • Women's magazine covers (2016) • K-pop boy bands (2016) • Movie posters (n.d.) • Women's magazine covers (2016) 1 2 3 PrevNext What is ideology? There is a wonderful introduction to ideology, presented by the noted Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his documentary The Perverts Guide to Ideology (2012). You can watch the opening clip from this below, which explains using some contemporary examples what he means by ideology. You can turn the close captioning on, if you find Žižek's accent too difficult. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology - What is Ideology? (2012) There are several terms that are used, which will be explained in the next section. Influence of Marxist theory Many from the Frankfurt School were, at the very least, deeply interested in the works of Karl Marx, who is known as one of the founders of Communism, and from whom one gets Marxist theory. As well as being heavily influenced by Marxism, the Frankfurt School were interested in reappraising and critiquing Marxism, particularly as one of the central hypotheses, of a wide-scale social revolution being imminent, did not occur. The Frankfurt School argued that the claims to movies and radio being art were simply a pretense, a cover for the financial industry that controlled the production of the media. In essence, the suggestions of the social utility of mass media were overstated, sharing more with traditional industry than with other areas of the arts. There are several terms that sprung from a Marxist approach to the study of mass media, and they will be outlined below: 1. Ideology: describes a system of beliefs that are characteristic of a particular class or group - these might be seen as a system of illusory beliefs that can be contrasted with 'true' or scientific knowledge, which is inherently objective. 2. Interpellation: Althusser describes how ideology functions using this term, being the way in which media works on a mass, by addressing itself to the individual - The Frankfurt School argued that the media interpellates its audience. 3. Hegemony: Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime in 1926 until his death in 1936, wrote about 'cultural hegemony' in his Prison Notebooks. Hegemony describes how one social group can dominate society, by normalising the disparities between classes and groups, and creating a perception that their power comes naturally to that group and is of benefit to wider society. 4. State apparatus: Althusser says that the state maintains power through two forms of institution: repressive state apparatuses - such as, military, police, courts; and ideological state apparatuses - like churches, schools, and the media. Problems with an ideological approach One of the central problems with the ideological approach to studying media is that it places (potentially undue) emphasis on popular culture, ignoring other factors that contribute to a society's power structures. Moreover, it treats audiences as passive drones to whom media 'happens', rather than as involved and active participants that help to challenge and recreate meaning from media texts. Similarly, any kind of progressive text that doesn't fit within the typical type of popular media, is accounted for as a rare 'outlier', which, it is argued, only serves to reaffirm the system by hinting at an agency for the viewer that doesn't exist in reality. Having stated these problems, it is worthwhile being aware of the ideological approach, as it is a useful tool for studying media when used in conjunction with a multidisciplinary approach. The history of The Frankfurt School was also among one of the first groups to look at media more seriously, so is deserving of attention. History of audiences Over the course of the first four weeks, you have been learning about a series of approaches to studying media that view audiences through different lenses, but often only indirectly. For the most part, audiences are seen as relatively homogeneous forms, with equivalent reactions and instincts. There are two videos that are presented now, both of which have become mythologised over time, and contributed to the sense that mass media would have a mass effect on a passive audience who were unable to resist. • War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast | PBS America • The Lumiere Brothers - "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" - First silent documentary film - (1896) • War of the Worlds: The Panic Broadcast | PBS America • The Lumiere Brothers - "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" - First silent documentary film - (1896) The notion that media can have such a powerful and irresistable effect is often called the 'media effects' model, 'hypodermic needle theory', or 'magic bullet theory'. These assume that audiences are uniformly controlled by their base instincts, and that messages are shot or injected into audiences through the media. This week, you will read how these perspectives fell out of favour, as early as the 1940s, but were still inherent in much early media studies, including the Frankfurt School. Audience theory Scholars soon started to realise that the hypodermic needle theory of media was wrong, and they began to form a number of approaches to understand audiences instead. This was based on the idea that signs are social, and that they need an audience to engage with them, and we cannot fully understand how meaning is made of messages if we don't understand how audiences receive them. Your reading for this week, Encoding/Decoding (Hall 1973) is going to be central to your understanding of the shift in how audiences are treated. Essentially, it also sees that there is a conflict between the traditional sender > medium > receiver theory, which has already been problematised by theorists like McLuhan, as we've seen in previous weeks. Hall suggests that in the transmission of media, there is an encoding, and decoding process that happens at both ends. While the encoder (media producer) might have a single, or prefered reading of their text, the decoder (audience) may follow three different positions: 1. Dominant/hegemonic reading: Hall suggests that when a viewer takes the connoted meaning from a television newscast, or a current affairs program, and decodes the message strictly in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded by the sender, then they are operating inside the dominant/hegemonic code. 2. Negotiated reading: Decoding within the negotiated version there is a combination of both accepting that the dominant code can make the broad significations (where meaning is communicated in the abstract), while the final meaning is more dependent on the specific situational level of the viewer. 3. Oppositional/resistant reading: it is possible for the viewer of a newscast to be aware of both the abstract and connotative encoding that accompanies a message, but to decode it in a totally contrary way. The suggestion is that messages can be situated on a spectrum from open to closed in terms of encoded meaning, so that some texts invite more interpretation, while others are often viewed uncritically - an abstract painting would be an example of an open text, while a photo may be closed. Typically, mainstream media will often try to close down meaning when encoding a message to avoid multiple interpretations at the stage of decoding. The Death of the Author You'll recall reading about this theorist in Week 2, in which the notion of level of myth-making was discussed in relation to semiotics, and this week this idea is extended upon further. In Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author (1967) he asserts that once an author (or encoder) releases their message to the world, their reading and understanding of the text no longer matters. Instead, it is how people make sense of that text that becomes more important. By considering only how the author intended a text to be viewed is to completely close off all other possible meanings that can be made - and that these meanings might be just as important as the author's original intention. Symptomatic reading example Althusser posits that in all texts there are many meanings, as previously suggested by Hall, which are determined by the conditions of production of the text and the wider structures in which it operates. A symptomatic reading of a text then is intended to reveal that subliminal or unconscious structure of the text, by exploring what it does not, or cannot, say in addition to what is actually being said. The assumption is that by looking at what a particular text either omits or represses, one can get a better sense of the ideological position of the producer. An example of a symptomatic reading of a text is provided here: Symptomatic reading of the movie 300 (2006) Who is media for? How does the media shape how someone might see themselves, and why is this important? These are two of the central questions that you should be asking this week. It is clear that in the past, and only up until very recently, the majority of mainstream media has been quite homogeneous. The types of people you see, and the roles that they occupy have been relatively uniform. However, media is starting to portray difference in their texts, and this opens up new discussions around representation. In approaching this week, you will be combining much of the new-gained knowledge you've gained in previous weeks, such as: semiotics, audience theory, ideology, and hegemony. You will also be required to make the distinction between your taste as a consumer of media, which may include liking some objectively problematic media, and your task as a scholar of media that demands that you are also being aware of and accounting for poor representation in that same media. Feminism and media The notion of 'feminism' can be confronting and also comes with its own range of stereotypes and cliches - that its essentially out to spoil everyone's fun. As your reading this week states, however, 'feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression' (Hooks 2000), p. xii. There are three waves of feminism that are most frequently recognised, which are explained here: First-wave feminism: began around at the end of the 19th century and focussed on female suffrage: the right for women to vote, but was also about the right of 'what women do' to be seen as equal to 'what men do'. Second-wave feminism: began in the 1960s and focussed on social issues: reproductive rights, sexuality, and women in the workplace. The catch-cry of second-wave feminism was 'the personal is the political'. Third-wave feminism: began in the 1990s, recognising that women from varying cultures and backgrounds around the world experience gender discrimination differently. Fourth-wave feminism? There is a question of whether we are currently experiencing a 'fourth wave' of feminism. What potentially makes contemporary feminism different from third-wave feminism are the discussions around what it means to be a 'woman'. This question in particular is discussed in relation to the question of men as feminists, and whether transgender women (that is, male to female transgender individuals) can or should be counted as women. Discussions such as these have occurred around the gender transition of Caitlyn Jenner in the media, and the visibility of transgender woman, Laverne Cox, from the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Equality of representation If having an equal number of female speaking-roles in movies and on television, is one of the goals of feminism, then it is clear that this is still some way off: in the years 2007-2014, there were 30,000 speaking roles, and only 30% of these were women. As you can see in the infographic below, there are a large number of movies with no female dialogue, but very few with little to no male dialogue, even in more recent times. Select the image to open the interactive infographic in a new window. Film dialogue infographic (2016a) The Bechdel test Another approach to looking at female representation in cinema was a simple test proposed by Alison Bechdel, in her comic strip, Dykes to watch out for (1985). This test can give a pretty quick snapshot of gender bias in media narratives. In order to pass the test, a story needs to have: 1. at least two women in it; and, 2. who talk to each other; 3. about something other than a man. Think about some of the most popular narratives of recent times that you have seen. Do they pass the Bechdel test? You can read a recent discussion of the test in Star Wars passes the Bechdel test - but would the rule's cartoon mascot watch it? (Berlatsky 2015). There is also the concept of the 'male gaze', which has persisted in mainstream media, in which women are typically to be viewed as if through the eyes of the main male actor. This is not a new phenomenon, either, as we see examples of the objectification of women in art going back centuries. Race, exnomination, and 'the other' Media represents politics and ideologies, individuals and groups, race, gender, sexuality, class, the able-bodied and disabled. What media chooses to represent can shape how one makes sense of the world, and particularly how you view those that are different to you. However, the media has a very poor record on representing anything other than a relatively homogenous group of people, such that those people and groups who are different remain unrepresented. Even with recent developments in television and film, such as shows like Master of None (Netflix 2016), The Family Law (SBS 2016), and Black Comedy (ABC 2016), there are still many groups that remain under-represented, or not represented at all in popular culture. A way of referring to the distinction between the commonly represented and the unrepresented groups comes from Barthes, who talks about 'exnomination', essentially meaning 'outside of naming'. This theory shows that dominant groups in society are so normalised as to be beyond naming - they have become obvious or 'common sense' - they just are, and their rules just become 'the rules'. This confers on the exnominated, dominant group the status of normal and natural, where differentness becomes 'the other'. Any group, then, that is not exnominated forms part of 'the other'. In today's media world, the exnominated group can be theorised as being: white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle class, 18-49 years old. Anyone that sits outside of these categories, even in just one criteria, is in opposition to this normal group. Examples of exnomination The more that you look, the more you'll see that exnomination happens on a routine basis: think of the distinctions made between sporting leagues, and their women's equivalent. The men's leagues aren't called the men's league, rather, they are just the league. Another example can be found in the image that you've been presented here: in which you can see some older versions of Band-Aid packages. Look closely at the image. Is there anything that catches your eye, or that in any way triggers for you an indication of the kind of exnomination that can routinely occur? What you might have seen is that the bandages are clearly being advertised as 'flesh color', but it is apparent that they are a dull pink colour. This indicates that there is a specific colour of flesh that is considered the 'normal' colour, and other skin colours clearly exist outside that definition. In recent years, there have been many alternative providers of bandages, which come in a range of colours to match the skin tones of other races, but these are still being marketed as alternatives to the typical adhesive bandage. If interested, you can read more about this: The story of the Black Band-Aid (Malo 2013). Band-aids (n.d.) Technological biases There have been some instances where a group of people have been poorly represented due to technological reasons. One such instance is seen in photography, and the development of film, which required photo printing houses to use a series of colour balance cards to ensure the accuracy of their prints. The only problem with these cards were that they mandated an ideal skin colour for balance, which was white, so that peoples with dark skin often found themselves virtually unidentifiable in developed photos. These cards were eventually corrected in the 1980s, but the impetus came not from black people, but rather from furniture and chocolate companies that were frustrated that the colour of their products was not being reproduced well on film. Similarly, there have been several examples recently of digital cameras and computers, with advanced facial recognition software, failing to recognise black people as being on screen, or Asian faces as blinking. Algorithms are often to blame for these failings, as they are often based on the naive benchmarking against a 'typical' white face. Taste and context During this week, you should be starting to consider how and why things come to be seen as being 'in good taste' or 'tasteful', or even what makes something 'cool'. To begin, you can fill in this (entirely unscientific) survey on televisual habits. What does a survey like this tell you? Are there universally accepted or acknowledged shows that demonstrate that someone has 'good taste'? You've been given the prompt to answer honestly, which is an indication that a list like this can tend to elicit less than truthful responses from people. But why? How do you know as a group that certain shows indicate good taste, while others are to be ashamed about, or termed 'guilty pleasures'? It might be clear that taste is not wholly dependent on individuals, but is shaped by context, and it can be studied. You will be studying taste to understand why people form judgements and attachments to media, and to enable you to think beyond a simple idea of audiences. Pierre Bourdieu and cultural capital Bourdieu, a highly influential French sociologist, wrote a seminal work that deals with why people like particular media, using an approach that is strongly grounded in statistical analysis. Bourdieu's work, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (1979), has become the seminal work on theories of taste and different forms of capital. Bourdieu posits that the most important study within the world of media, which was focused on the logic of economics at the time he was writing, needed to be broadened to include the pursuit of symnbolic interests. He wrote that there are three types of capital: • Economic capital - money, assets, items of a fixed value. • Social capital - group membership, networks of influence and support. • Cultural capital - knowledge, skill, qualifications, elements that allow greater access to the other two forms of capital. You will be primarily concerned with the final form of capital, insofar as it is suggested that cultural capital is accumulated, but also transmitted and defined by the sorts of media one consumes. Cultural capital is further broken into three categories: • Embodied - the way you present yourself. • Objectified - perhaps you own something of value (a great work of art?). • Institutionalised - qualifications or awards, etc. Bourdieu sees that the growth of the latter two categories demonstrates how modern societies are structured, wherein taste becomes a social mechanism. In other words: people with high cultural capital are better able to determine what is 'acceptable' or 'desirable' taste within a given society - they become a member of a group known as 'taste-makers'. It is near impossible to say that there is an objective good taste, but rather good taste is whatever the ruling class or the elite tend to like. To recall the concept of hegemony, it is suggested that taste is itself hegemonic, so that observable markers of taste delineate one's social status. Antonio Gramsci wrote about 'cultural hegemony' in which the ruling classes normalise disparities, and create the perception that their power benefits everyone. In a 1949 issue of Life, there is a table that iillustrates what the high-brow (upper class) to low-brow (lower class) like. If you click on the image presented here, you can see the full table. Everyday tastes from high-brow to low-brow are classified on chart (1949) Taste and culture Taste is often categorised in a binary way: there is high art and low art, cultures and subcultures, mainstream and alternative. These binaries are generally unstable, often innacurate and largely unhelpful. However, they are still used informally, or even formally, to categorise cultures. What is clear, and often articulated by theorists, is that taste can express someone's capital to the rest of society, even if who likes things and why is not always clear. Similarly, as you will read about in this week's essential reading, 'bad' taste and 'kitsch' value can be powerful in their own right. Three different approaches to taste come from thinkers you've previously encountered, Adorno and Hall, as well as Hebdige, with whom you are probably less familiar. Their positions can be summarised as: Adorno Adorno's view is that anything within the culture industry is offered to people as a way to "have the freedom to choose what is always the same" - so that regardless of whether something is high or low-brow, it is serving the interests of hegemonic powers. However, he also believed that amusement was the antithesis of art, and there were forms that were fundamentally incompatible. Hebdige Hebdige (1979) wrote extensively about subcultures, believing that people's tastes can allow them to construct identities to achieve 'relative autonomy'. He stated that subcultures challenge at the sybmolic level the naturalness and inevitability of certain ideals. It was these symbolic differences that can be seen to define one's tastes. Hall For Hall, of whom you've read before in this unit, there was no natural division between high and low forms of art. Indeed, what is high and low shifts from one era to another. However, he also recognises that Western culture tends to deploy a high/low distinction as a way of ordering and sense-making. Lastly, Hall makes the point that there is an inherent contradiction in much popular culture, in that is both manufactured, and authentic. Laneways (2016) Taste, cool, and class In recent times, there has been a rapidly shifting sense of what consistitutes 'cool', with the markers of distinction moving from one class to another at a breakneck pace. An example of this might be seen in the adoption of graffiti culture, especially in the Western World, into the mainstream. You can see some recent examples of this in the Netflix series, The Get Down (2016), the announcement of A major Banksy exhibition coming to Melbourne (Broadsheet 2016) , and the use of prominent graffitied laneways on the Tourism Victoria website, as seen above. This kind of dilemma, of the move from counterculture to mainstream, is discussed in your reading this week, focusing on the problems faced by modern music. Dolan (2010) states: 'its history can be read as unfolding in cycles of waxing and waning authenticities: the creation of an 'authentic' style, its transformation into a marketable commodity, followed by a push to renew authenticity by turning to a fresher style' (p. 458). The question remains, though: why do the ruling classes change their tastes once those markers of what is tasteful become adopted by the mainstream?