Hans Magnus Enzensberger: essayist, poet, playwright, novelist, translator. A lucid writer who rejected a career in academia, Enzensberger is also the author of one of the most original, prophetic and incisive essays on the media written in the twentieth century: but, peculiarly, the essay is largely ignored by … media scholars. Enzensberger’s 1970 essay, ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’, first published in English in New Left Review, was an updating and reworking of Walter Benjamin’s much more famous 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. If a rough indicator is needed of the vastly different profiles which these two essays have in the consciousness of the academic community, then we can find it on Google Scholar. As of September 2010, Google Scholar gives a mere, 232 citations of Enzensberger’s essay. In the same month, Benjamin’s justly celebrated essay has 3455, the vast majority, no earlier than 1970 (Benjamin’s essay received scant attention for the first thirty years, apart from Frankfurt School authors such as Adorno and Kracauer). Yet Enzensberger’s essay is at least the equal of Benjamin’s in terms of its intellectual grasp of the historic and political implications of ‘new media technology’. In fact Enzensberger’s essay speaks more powerfully to our time than when Enzensberger originally wrote ‘Constituents of a Theory’. Our new media technology, its digital base and above all the Internet, has made the kind of huge cultural impact that Enzensberger was predicting in the 1970s, when he had to peer into Xerox copying machines and CB Radio to diagnose the tremendous cultural energies and social contradictions that media technology could and would in time unleash.
Perhaps the politics of Enzensberger’s essay has not helped its wider dissemination? Benjamin was a Marxist, but the intellectual traditions that nourished him were highly eclectic and his work is ambiguous enough to attract a sizable audience of liberals. The Marxism of Enzensberger’s ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’ essay is rather less easy to bracket off. Crystal clear, politically tough-minded and realistic, it is also uncompromised by any truck with the then existing Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, which would not have endeared him to academics who used to move within the circle of Europe’s various Soviet Union aligned Communist Parties. Critical, sophisticated, trenchant: a fitting heir to Marx, writing a communist manifesto on the media. An earlier essay, written in 1962 and later republished as ‘The Industrialisation of the Mind’ already diagnosed a fundamental problem with the then nascent study of the media: its terrible inability to match and comprehend the cultural scope and power of what he called ‘the consciousness industry’. The subsequent development of media studies as a specialized discipline only serves to confirm the challenge Enzensberger laid down all those years ago concerning our intellectual frameworks. In what follows then, I will draw on these two essays and through some illustrative examples show how relevant they are to understanding the contemporary new media world we are currently living in. I will pay particular attention to the centrality and fruitfulness in Enzensberger’s work of the Marxist couplet: the technological forces and social relations of production. I will argue that Enzensberger allows us to think through the articulation between technological forces and social relationships and that this allows us to avoid technological determinist models prevalent amongst liberal media scholars. But his work also demonstrates in a profound manner that this is a contradictory articulation. This is important because there is a tendency among the political left to simply dismiss all talk of the possibilities of the new media technology as simply part of an ideological discourse. We shall see that these possibilities are real enough, but that they cannot be properly realized within the dominant social relations of capitalism.
The mind of the individual, Enzensberger argues in the opening of his ‘Industrialisation of the Mind’ essay, the cogito ego, appears to us, as a kind of inner sanctum, the domain of the real I, self forged and self-mastered; the thinking I as a refuge against whatever else is happening in the world ‘out there’. At least ‘in here’, or so we like to think, the I, the self, remains the core of who we are. However powerless and impotent we are in the external world, we suppose that ‘we reign supreme in our consciousness’ (Enzensberger 1982: 3). This belief, Enzensberger notes, is a good example of the influence of philosophy ‘on people who ignore it’ (Enzensberger 1982: 3). The I independent of others is a kind of popular version of bourgeois philosophy in the tradition Descartes and Kant who conceived the individual consciousness as existing independently or apriori from others; the self as a product of the self, ‘a sort of metaphysical do-it-yourself’ (Enzensberger 1982: 3).
This metaphysical do-it-yourself is cultivated by the media and is certainly part of an ideological discourse around empowerment promoted by marketing campaigns and liberal media scholars alike. New technology is sold as liberation and empowerment, feedback systems (phoning, texting, email) are a way of ‘having your say’, the ads that fund media content sell commodities that, we are promised, will be liberating transformations of the self. Yet just as the self – including the most individualistic models of the self – is a product of society, specifically a capitalist society, so this media mode of address is the product of a vast industrial, technological, political and economic nexus of forces and powers.
There is evidently something of a chasm between a model of the self which presupposes its own self-making and the huge scope which a corporate mass media have for providing us with our information, knowledge, desires and fears. This is a corporate media that has reproduced the trends towards the concentration of capital (ever larger amounts of capital associated with the industry as a whole) and the centralization of capital (fewer units of capital in control of this growing overall mass of capital) typical of the capitalist economy in general (see Wayne 2003).
But there is also a chasm between the industrial production of the mind, even fifty years ago, and the fragmented approach to the study of the ‘media’ then emerging:
Newsprint, film, television, public relations tend to be evaluated separately, in terms of their specific technologies, conditions, and possibilities. Every new branch of the industry starts off a new crop of theories (Enzensberger 1982: 4).
Contemporary media theorists such as Toby Miller urge scholars and students alike to develop the multi-disciplinary skills and optics that would allow us to overcome the widely observed divisions between the spheres of production, text and consumption and open up media studies to history, politics, economics, anthropology, sociology, communications, medicine, literature, art and so on (Miller 2008: 221). This call is very much in order. We must escape also the medium-specific focus of media studies and instead think laterally across the media to understand their interrelated role in the production of the mind. Enzensberger urges us to expand our remit well beyond the traditional definition of ‘the media’:
While radio, cinema, television, recording, advertising, and public relations, new techniques of manipulation and propaganda, are being keenly discussed each on its own terms, the mind industry, taken as a whole, is disregarded … more recent branches of industry still remain largely unexplored: fashion and industrial design, the propagation of established religions and esoteric cults, opinion polls, simulation and, last but not least, tourism, which can be considered a mass medium in its own right (Enzensberger 1982: 6, emphasis added).
When we look at the ownership structures of large media organizations, do we have the tools to think as synergistically as they operate in practice, with individual texts and ‘characters’ circulating through ever more convergent media forms: film, television, radio, magazines, newspapers, websites, comics, console games and other quasi-media products (still concerned with representation) such as merchandize and education? Do we have the tools to link such media-specific experiences with broader orchestrations of place as a simulated experience such as offered by tourism and urban design (both of which clearly have a close relationship with visual media)? And what of the links between media companies and the states around the world or the relationship between media companies and other non-media corporations? Is there a link between The Mummy (1999), a Universal Pictures production, the Iraq War and media complicity in it, the video games based on that film and its 2001 follow up, released on Playstation 2 and other platforms, and General Electric, the energy corporation that owns Universal and recently signed a $3 billion dollar contract with the Iraqi government to provide power generation equipment and services? (Clue: Orientalism, monopoly capitalism and Imperialism). Individual researchers might cut across these intellectual divisions, but curricula do so much more rarely, not least because programmes in tertiary level education sell themselves in an increasingly competitive market on their distinctive, specialized brand identities that entrench intellectual and disciplinary divisions.
One possible conceptual framework for encompassing the mind industry in all its scope and scale was offered by Enzensberger’s friend and mentor, Theodor Adorno, via the concept of the culture industry. For Adorno, the historic role of cultural expression to articulate ‘suffering and contradiction, to maintain a grasp on the idea of the good life’ (Adorno 1991: 90) is extinguished by the integration of culture into the imperatives of the profit motive which is inscribed into every facet of the product by ‘economic and administrative concentration’ (Adorno 1991: 85). The autonomy of culture is thus dismembered into a series of market-tested effects, which should not be confused, with the mythology of consumer sovereignty. Instead the audience is ‘an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery’ (Adorno 1991: 85).
This vision of culture integrated into capitalist industrialization is the dominant tenor of Adorno’s critique, although it is nuanced by his customary dialectical thinking. However, Enzensberger detects an unsupportable pre-modern romanticism in Adorno’s juxtaposition of the term ‘culture’ with ‘industry’. It is designed to provoke outcry based on the assumption that culture and industry should have nothing to do with one another. Adorno appears to set his face against the mass media because they are industrial forces just as much as because they are industrial forces organized under the aegis of a specific social form: capitalism. The two categories, industry and its capitalist form are not strongly differentiated in Adorno’s critique. This is one of the key differences between him and Enzensberger. For Enzensberger, because the categories ‘industry’ and ‘capitalism’ are clearly analytically differentiated, his critique is able to explore the potential contradictions between the industrial technological base of the mass media and their specifically capitalist form. This, as we shall see, situates Enzensberger’s critique more squarely within a classical Marxist position that sees an enduring contradiction between the forces of production and the social relations of production. Adorno by contrast, tended to argue that the social relations of capitalism had thoroughly integrated the forces of production and annulled the contradictions between them that Marx made central to his critique. The contemporary distinction between hardware and software should remind us that productive forces includes not just tangible mass produced technology made by disempowered workers, often in sweatshop conditions in the developing world, but the stuff of culture itself: ideas. Enzensberger suggests that the implication that culture has been thoroughly swallowed up by industry obscures a crucial weak point, for the latter is entirely dependent on culture as the very substance that it must deal with but cannot manufacture:
Consciousness, however false, can be induced and reproduced by industrial means, but it cannot be industrially produced. It is a ‘social product’ made up by people: its origin is in the dialogue. No industrial process can replace the persons who generate it (Enzensberger 1982: 5).
The culture industry is thus parasitic; it appropriates, steals, absorbs, inflects, watches, collates, invites and elicits the ‘stuff it cannot manufacture by itself’ (Enzensberger 1982: 5). Increasingly that ‘stuff’ begins life outside the corporate media, although it is often absorbed into it at a later stage. Even here though this dependence manifests itself in the relative and variable but real leverage ‘creatives’ have inside some of the most intensely corporate centres of cultural production. This margin for maneuver for creative talent is always a struggle because the culture industry ‘must suppress what it feeds on: the creative productivity of people’ (Enzensberger 1982: 5). As Ben Dickenson puts it in relation to Hollywood’s screenwriters, directors and stars:
The crucial fracture in the corporate strategy of power is that each film must be sold as its own mini-brand. The logo at the start of a film alone does not sell the product for the corporation, it does not pay the marketing executives or the agents locked into the corporate media structure by their increasing back-end – a cut of the box office – deals. The stars, name recognition of the director, the special effects and the quality of the story sell the film. There must be some aspect of the film’s content that attracts the audience. This means that the shrewd socially engaged filmmakers can create a space for their concept, and win themselves directorial control, if they can convince someone in the corporate owned process that their idea will sell (Dickenson 2006: 163–1).
On this basis Enzensberger argues for smart tactical engagement with the media by the left, to exploit the exploiters weak points and cracks in their armour. Perhaps in response to Enzensberger’s critique, Adorno revisited the concept of the culture industry which he and Max Horkheimer had first coined in their 1947 publication Dialectic of Enlightenment. In ‘Culture industry reconsidered’ Adorno argues that while the film industry, ‘the central sector of the culture industry’ (Adorno 1991: 87) duplicates a number of features of industry generally, such as the extensive division of labour, the use of machines and the ownerships and control of the means of production by a capitalist class, production itself cannot be entirely subsumed into the model of the assembly line. Instead ‘individual forms of production are nevertheless maintained’, but Adorno argues, such artisanal modes of working only serves as the basis for an illusory ideology of individuality (one that can be inscribed within the product itself) that is in reality circumscribed and penetrated by the forces of commodification:
Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary’ (Adorno 1991: 87).
Certainly Adorno, as ever, offers a salutary warning against underestimating the power of the ideology of individualism to mask actual impotence in the face of corporate might. Yet he is in danger of turning a real contradiction into a straightforward duality between illusions (of individual agency) and reality (the power of the system). Enzensberger’s insistence that the system cannot manufacture culture and is therefore reliant on a mind power that cannot be so easily standardized and controlled, is not a collapse back into romantic notions of authorial autonomy, working free from ‘the system’, but a materialist understanding of the contradictory position of cultural production under capitalism. These ideas have recently been taken up in a new form around debates on ‘immaterial labour’. Immaterial labour is essentially labour that produces symbolic goods, is affect orientated and works through advanced technological media and communication systems (Hardt 1999). This is not as new as some of the proponents of immaterial labour like to claim. The early Hollywood film star Rudolph Valentino, whose death in 1926 produced some hysteria amongst his female fan-base would perfectly fit into this definition of immaterial labour as affect orientated and technologically mediated. In other words the dynamics associated with immaterial labour have historical roots in the old media such as filmmaking as much as they are associated with the contemporary service sector (soft people skills) or new media cultural production (such as MySpace) based on digital networks (see for example Coté and Pybus 2007).
The trends towards the increasing significance of culture within certain sections of material production and the increasing proliferation of cultural technologies are mutually reinforcing. Yet far from calling Marxism into question, as is often implied by invoking a mechanical Marxist model that treats culture as merely secondary to economics, these trends towards culturalization, actually pose increasingly sharp questions for capitalist social relations. One of the key aspects of social development that we associate with culture is that it signals a degree of conquest over scarcity and material necessity. If culture is being reflected back into material production (the so called information society) and proliferating as a surplus of culture through numerous technologies devoted to its production, then that in fact is a problem for capitalism as much as it is a business opportunity. Along the axis of restricted, hierarchical control and access to the means of production, and along the axis of artificial scarcity that commodity relations depend on, cultural surpluses transgress the social and economic models of advanced capitalism (see Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1 Cultural Surplus vs Artificial Scarcity
Enzensberger helps us see three interrelated developments that Adorno’s culture industry thesis (not to mention the dominant liberal paradigm in media studies) disguises. Firstly, the sheer productive potential of new media technology must be constantly reigned in and curtailed within the imperatives of commodification and state power. Secondly new media technology, whatever suspicions we must have about marketing campaigns geared around ‘empowerment’, really have put into the hands of what I will call, following Marx, the social individual, enormous powers of communication and media production and even the means of dissemination (although the corporate media still massively dominate global markets). Thirdly, these developments have blurred, in some instances, radically broken down, the line between producers and consumers, professionals and amateurs, insiders and outsiders. These strict divisions of labour, specialization and professional demarcations have played important roles in reproducing unequal power relations. However, with the development of what Marx called ‘the general intellect’ which immaterial labour theorists have drawn attention to, the circulation and production of knowledge as a social product in our contemporary era, can no longer be confined, contained and controlled within corporate research and development departments, as for example, the origin of Facebook (irrespective of its subsequent commodification) or the development of much peer to peer software, demonstrates.
The consciousness industry has a mode of address that is torn between conflicting imperatives. One of its conditions is the decline of theocracy and the unchallengeable word of the priest or even contemporary figures of authority. At the same time the consciousness industry must sustain the legitimacy and authority of the existing social order. Thus it operates in a highly contradictory mode. The consciousness industry posits the independent mind even as it sets out ‘to deprive them of their independence’ (Enzensberger 1982: 7); it posits dialogue even as it seeks to skew and channel debate into the narrowest of possible margins; it posits the new, the now and change, even as it seeks to sustain the existing order of capitalism. The consciousness industry also presupposes human rights, equality and freedom, because the model of the metaphysical do-it-yourself I would be meaningless without them. Marx certainly did not regard these cultural dimensions of the mind industry as illusory:
The worker’s participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his tastes etc, his only share of civilization which distinguishes him from the slave, is economically only possible by widening the sphere of his pleasures at times when business is good (Marx 1993: 287).
If economically the worker is formally ‘free’ (but substantively enslaved) to sell his or her labour to the owners of the means of production, then this creates the normative basis for the workers’ struggles both at the point of production and struggles to be free when they are not selling their labour, i.e., free socially, politically, culturally and so forth. That norm and reality, ought and is, future perfect and present-imperfect, constantly clash, is central to understanding how the media operate:
[T]he industry does not depend on the realization of these rights; for most people, they have never been more than a pretense or, at best, a distant promise. On the contrary, it is just the margin between fiction and reality that provides the mind industry with its theatre of operations (Enzensberger 1982: 7).
That is a wonderful way of expressing the contradictory space within which the consciousness industry operates. The language here should not lead us astray. Fiction does not mean illusion, since any structure which depends on a belief system such as freedom, must provide enough evidence, paltry as it might be, that this credibly exists, or it runs the risk of losing all legitimacy and becoming a laughing stock, which is extremely dangerous for any social order. It is precisely the gap between what is and what ought to be, between what is proclaimed as universal and the partial and limited nature of such universality, which opens what is to the charge of being radically unrealized (i.e., a fiction that should become a reality). But it is also precisely the gap between what is and what ought to be that the consciousness industry constantly promises to close, in order to make what is into what ought to be. It can operate in that gap and promise to close it because of the dynamic change orientated nature of capitalism.
Enzensberger’s awareness of the genuine bases of the utopian dimension of the media, leads him, in the ‘Constituents of a Theory of The Media’ essay, to reject any simple left critique that consumer capitalism is based on ‘false needs’. On the contrary, the needs that the capitalist consciousness industry taps into are real, pressing and in most cases have legitimate ‘physiological roots’. The problem is not that the needs are false but that they are falsified and exploited by capitalism: ‘Consumption as spectacle is – in parody form – the anticipation of a utopian situation’ (Enzensberger 1982: 61). This recognition of the utopian impulses behind the media and the way in which a given media technology may exploit and contain those impulses is the one area that Enzensberger’s work has been widely recognized in film studies as in Richard Dyer’s seminal essay ‘Entertainment and Utopia’ (Dyer 2002) and the study of television (for example see Rose and Friedman 1994: 31).
One of capitalism’s most powerful resources in attempting to close the gap between what is and what ought to be, is the development of the productive forces themselves, that is to say, all the productive capacity implicit in the development of modern technology, culture and science. Such developments are inconceivable without the development of rationality, which is to say the application of reason to solve problems and address needs. Reason in turn implies dialogue and communication since two brains are better than one. Dialogue and communication imply consent, that the ‘two brains’ advance their understanding of solving problems and addressing needs by various levels of agreement that will not be total, but sufficient to advance a common cause. The problem though is that in a class divided society, conflicting interests undermine or limit the degree of causes that can be held in common. In this situation, consent and agreement based on rational dialogue, becomes subordinated to power and the interests of the dominant classes. Still, the need for consent, which discloses the system’s basis in a sociality it must deny, manifests itself in the retention of concepts whose substantive content can never be realized within the system:
the old proclamations of human rights, however watered down by the rhetoric of the establishment and however eclipsed by decades of hardship, famine, crises, forced labour, and political terror … now unfold their potential strength. It is in their very nature that, once proclaimed, they cannot be revoked. Again and again, people will try to take them at their face value and, eventually, to fight for their realization. Thus, ever since the great declarations of the eighteenth century, every rule of the few over the many, however organized, has faced the threat of revolution (Enzensberger 1982: 10).
Here Enzensberger sounds very close to the Adorno of Negative Dialectics, for whom the gap between concepts and their substantive reality in the here and now, had a potentially explosive force. It was a gap that Sartre also pointed to in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. The anti-colonial struggle took the colonizer’s values and concepts (such as humanism) often proclaimed but rarely practiced in the colonies and turned them against the crumbling European empires: ‘Laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the contradiction is explosive’ wrote Sartre (1990:17) in words that still ring out today across Iraq and Afghanistan. Capitalism needs concepts such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘freedom’ and ‘the individual’ just as it needs creative talent, whether scriptwriters or journalists, or software designers, because they are a necessary part of the productive forces. Formal freedom, formal creative autonomy, formal education of the mind, formal co-operation, formal consent, formal dialogue, all are the basis of that very productivity of human labour power that capitalism must exploit:
this is the most fundamental of all its contradictions: in order to obtain consent, you have to grant a choice, no matter how marginal and deceptive; in order to harness the faculties of the human mind, you have to develop them, no matter how narrowly and how deformed (Enzensberger 1982: 12).
The human mind as a force of production is cultivated by the social relations of capitalism and stunted, restricted and deformed by them. This productive force must enter into contradiction with the social relations as surely as the more material forces of production do. Marx pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, that capitalism is plagued by ‘an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction’ (Marx 1985: 85). Under capitalism, the productive forces become dangerously excessive, their capacity for surpluses becomes a threat instead of the fulfillment of the promise of abundance. Such excess and surplus spilling over the narrow confines of the social relations is as pertinent to the consciousness industry and to cultural production as it is to material production. As Enzensberger suggests, ‘[e]ngaged in the proliferation of human consciousness, the media proliferate their own contradictions’ (Enzensberger 1982: 13); this is all the more so with the development of new media technology. New media technology which has put the means of production into the hands of ordinary people, has strained the struggle to secure a top-down consent, at times to breaking point. Important institutions for capitalism, formerly secure institutions that dominated the public sphere without reply, have now been dragged down into the streets and are often engaged in hand-to-hand combat with ‘the mob’.
A perfect example of the ruling class having to man the barricades of public opinion where before their voice went, at least visibly, unchallenged, comes to us in the form of the Raoul Moat Facebook story. This is a story Moat himself was able to narrate into the public sphere, via his own Facebook page, in an unprecedented way for a man who would soon be on the run:
Friday 11.21am Just got out the slammer to a totally fucked life.
11.32am Lost my business. Kids to s services. Gonna lose my home and lost my mrs of nearly 6 years to a copper.
A day after leaving Durham prison Moat shot his former girlfriend, wounding her (although it later transpired from his own account that he loaded the gun with bullets designed not to mortally wound). He also shot dead (using different ammunition) his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend (who turned out to be a karate instructor, not a policeman as Moat thought). On Sunday he shot and seriously injured a police officer sitting in his car. For the next seven days Moat evaded capture. The police mobilized more than 200 officers, 15 police forces and a tornado aircraft with heat seeking technology. Moat knew the Northumberland region in the North East of England very well. Eventually the search circled in around the remote village of Rothbury. On Saturday 10 July, after several hours of negotiations with police officers, Moat shot himself dead in a field, possibly as a result of being tasered by officers using equipment that it transpired, had not been cleared by the Home Office.
Shortly afterwards, a young working class woman, Siobhan O’Dowd set up a facebook page called ‘RIP RAOUL MOAT YOU LEGEND’! In a short time it had thousands of members and by the time it was taken down a few days later, it had more than 38,000 members. The evident sympathy which Moat was eliciting from the public outraged the political right. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron denounced this public sympathy in the House of Commons. ‘It is absolutely clear’ said Cameron, ‘that Raoul Moat was a callous murderer, full stop, end of story. I cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man. There should be no sympathy for him’. A number of MPs called for the owners of Facebook to shut down the RIP site. Facebook refused, although O’Dowd, obviously feeling the media heat, did take down the site herself shortly afterwards.
The problem though was that the political right, as well as the liberal left, could not define the story as they would wish, as they could, once-upon-a-time, without a counter-public organizing around something like the Facebook page and expressing a range of views about the meaning and significance of Moat. Interestingly, it was the right wing media that articulated the class dynamics at work behind Cameron’s illicit ‘wave’ of sympathy. On Sky News, a criminologist talked of Moat tapping into a ‘dispossessed, white working-class, masculine mentality’. The Daily Mail, frothing with rage, could not but articulate the structure of feeling behind the messages left on the ‘RIP RAOUL MOAT YOU LEGEND’! Facebook site, even as they denounced and dismissed it. The article, written by David Wilson under the headline ‘A Howl of Rage from a Bitter and Deluded Underclass’, stated:
The outpouring of support for Raoul Moat has exposed a disturbing sickness at the heart of our society. The man was a murderous criminal, a paranoid narcissist who was a menace to all around him. He died as he lived, in an orgy of self-pity, attention-seeking and violence.
Yet, for a small but vocal section of our society, Moat was not a pumped-up thug but a friend of the marginalised and a warrior for the poor.
In the twisted mindset of his noisy supporters, he has been transformed into a modern anti-establishment hero, with the police cast in the role of the vicious enemy of the people.
There [commenting on the Facebook page] we have all the deranged elements of the pro-Moat mentality: the infantile sense of victimhood; the hysterical abuse of the police; the grotesque belief that masculine greatness lies in thuggery; the portrayal of a killer as a crusader against injustice; and the pretense that democratic Britain is some kind of paramilitary totalitarian regime.
This grotesque narrative has arisen partly because Moat took charge of last week’s drama. Ever eager to paint him as a victim, his supporters claim that he was mentally ill, but this is contradicted by the cynical, deliberate way he manipulated his own image (Wilson 2010).
Wilson accurately diagnoses the symptomatic class roots behind the messages of support for Moat. The wider historical context comes through despite the attempt to write it off as a ‘grotesque narrative’. The mass de-industrialization, the crisis this has engendered in masculine identity, the poverty which decades of neo-liberalism have engendered, the growing wealth of the rich, the scandal over the MPs ripping off the public purse via their expenses that broke only months before and the evident class hostility which many sections of the working class have for the law. Leaving aside the evident contradiction between Wilson’s initial acknowledgement that Moat was mentally ill and his later denial of this because ‘he manipulated his own image’, it was clear that the presence of the RIP Facebook site in the public realm, was causing problems for the guardians of public discourse and morality. Not only did these guardians have to engage with these voices from the streets (O’Dowd we are told is a ‘single mother’ living in a £64,000 terraced house!) but also they increased its profile and weight by doing so. The traditional media, long ago absorbed into the ownership structures of monopoly capitalism, cannot help themselves but be drawn, like a moth to the flame, to this strange new beast, this strange new media technology that allows ordinary people to talk back. Oh the horror! In engaging with this counter public expression, the dominant media are precisely occupying that space defined by Enzensberger: the margin between the fiction of human rights (the right to free expression for example) and the reality (under capitalism) that only certain people can be trusted to exercise such rights responsibly. The Daily Mail article included a section of the RIP webpage (reprinted here – see Figure 6.2). The inclusion of the very counter-discourse within the framing discourse of The Daily Mail causes cracks and fissures in the argument thundering down from above. Within the page cut and pasted, which The Daily Mail itself has selected, there is a range of views expressed. None of them constitute a counter-hegemonic political discourse; there are merely fragments here of a political critique, mixed up with some evidently sexist remarks. But it is clear too, from the very evidence which the newspaper itself has selected, that the views expressed cannot be dismissed as easily as the right wing discourse would like. Moat’s story cannot signify simply and purely that he was a ‘bad man’, which is basically the closure this right wing discourse would like to achieve on the story. But the Facebook site also articulated into the public sphere, sentiments that were equally foreign and utterly remote to the more liberal, but still very middle class media, such as The Guardian.
Figure 6.2 Raoul Moat Facebook Page: The Daily Mail mans the barricades of public opinion
The contradiction between the forces and social relations of production is the central framing master concept of Enzensberger’s second key essay on the media:
Monopoly capitalism develops the consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than other sectors of production; it must at the same time fetter it. A socialist media theory has to work at this contradiction, demonstrate that it cannot be solved within the given productive relationships (Enzensberger 1982: 47).
This contradiction is much more fundamental and all-encompassing than approaches which stress conflicts between creative talent and bureaucrats or producers, corporations vs. independents, private vs. public, new media vs. old media, or even workers vs. bosses. All these are important and valid but must be understood as the various expressions of this fundamental contradiction. With this as our master couplet, we achieve a synoptic grasp of the underlying dynamics at work across the media-scape.
What do the media produce? Answer: means of communication, among other things. And what does communication enable? Answer: informed activity. Enzensberger calls the mobilizing power of the electronic media an ‘open secret’ waiting for its moment to come. In the age of the Internet, its moment has decisively arrived. But these modes of communication are in excess of what the system ideally wants, since it overflows the top-down, vertical models of communication which monopoly capitalism has developed. Instead, communication fostered by decentralized new media technology circulates horizontally, drawing people together in like-minded communities where before they were isolated by the corporate media, unaware of each other and therefore unable to mobilize each other.
In 2010 former Prime Minister Tony Blair published his autobiography A Journey. Blair is an embarrassment to the establishment because he cannot be afforded the respect that the establishment would like to confer on him as a former holder of the highest political office in the land. They cannot confer that respect because Blair is so hated, so reviled and so permanently tainted by his decision to join George W. Bush in an imperialist war against Iraq in 2003. Seven years later, neither forgiven nor forgotten, Blair wanted to have a couple of book signings to celebrate his autobiography, and chose a bookshop in Dublin and another in London. But the London book signing had to be called off after the Dublin event was marred by large-scale protests at the public appearance of someone many regard as a war criminal who should be tried in the Hague. Concurrent with this, someone started up a Facebook page encouraging people to visit bookshops and relocate copies of Blair’s book as they thought appropriate. The Facebook page had thousands of friends within days and soon people were sending photographs (taken with their inconspicuous mobile phones) of copies of A Journey that they had reclassified under Crime, Fantasy, Horror and so forth. This imaginative, participatory and democratic two-fingers to the corporate and media establishment was exactly the kind of active mobilization of people that Enzensberger looked forward to and predicted would emerge, in ways that outstripped the traditional configuration of the media which are monologic rather than dialogic.
Enzensberger predicted that the dialogic potential to mobilize people would cause problems not only for corporate capitalism and the state, but also for the traditional organs of mobilization utilized by the left. Party and trade union structures are generally bureaucratic, hierarchical and unresponsive to their grass roots membership. Insofar as these structures have been inherited from the existing capitalist society, they too, Enzensberger suggested, will be overrun by the technological forces of communication (Enzensberger 1982: 53–5). This prediction came to pass in the 1990s with the rise of new social movements organized outside traditional workplace and party structures, using the new digital means of communication to co-ordinate interventions into the public sphere and disseminate alternative perspectives on the activities of states and corporations alike. The political forms that the new direct action social movements took were informal, participatory, decentralized, often ‘leaderless’ in any official sense or indeed ‘memberless’ in any official registered sense. These forms were an expression of the way the new digital networks themselves were structured:
The horizontal networking logic facilitated by new digital technologies not only provides an effective method of social movement organizing, it also represents a broader model for creating alternative forms of social, political, and economic organization (Juris 2005: 191).
The network structure of the digital media points to a new dialectic in which the polarized opposition between society and the individual that capitalism has fostered, is reconfigured in such a way that connectivity and autonomy can be potentially reconciled. In this reconfiguration we can glimpse the emergence of what Marx called the social individual in the crevices of a society that has crushed the individual on the one hand and on the other, glorified it to the detriment of the social. Marx saw that the technological forces of production that were developing within the production process, embodied a latent sociality that capitalism must suppress. This sociality is expressed in the gigantism of the means of production, that had taken old craft tools once wielded by individual workers, and transformed them into colossal machines requiring a collective labour body to work them (Marx 1983: 364). But Marx also regarded the category of the individual as a critical one, writing about individual use-values, individual needs and the potentiality of the individual (crushed at the point of production as the worker becomes a mere appendage of the machine). This stress on the individual was not merely a residual hangover of a category inherited from Romantic literature. It had in Marx’s theory a real material base: namely the production of goods destined for individual consumption. Thus it is no surprise to find that the production of communication goods for individual use has seen those goods become increasingly miniaturized and adapted for individual manipulation. Just as the forces of production involved in the production process embody a social dimension, so too do the goods designed for individual use. And just as machinery at the point of production becomes a reified coercive force crushing the individual worker, so technological goods designed for individual consumption are reified by occluding their social implications:
It is wrong to regard media equipment as mere means of consumption. It is always, in principle, also means of production and, indeed, since it is in the hands of the masses, socialized means of production. The contradiction between producers and consumers is not inherent in the electronic media; on the contrary, it has to be artificially reinforced by economic and administrative measures (Enzensberger 1982: 56).
The language of the ‘consumer’ market (which attempts to imprison goods within the sphere of individualistic private use) will attempt to disguise the social implications latent within this dispersal of communicative productive power amongst society at large, but the digital media express their irreducible social basis all the same and constantly press to burst asunder the narrow limits of capitalist social relations.
Within Marxism, there is a very wide spectrum of views on the role of the productive forces and their relations to the social relations of production. At one end, orthodox or classical Marxism sees the development of the forces of production as a prerequisite for a socialist society. Sometimes, and detrimentally to the model, technology as a prerequisite is made synonymous with the development of socialism. Although there is in fact a crucial difference between technology as a prerequisite (which still allows for the possibility of a critical relation to the development of the forces of production) and synonymity (which allows for little in the way of a critical relation to technology but simply assumes that advanced technology automatically facilitates socialist relations) they are often blurred and conflated by proponents and opponents of this model. The important point though about this model is the potential contradictions between technology and the capitalist social relations. At the other end of the Marxist spectrum, Adorno and fellow members of the Frankfurt School saw the development of productive forces (i.e., technology) as promoting and reinforcing a culture of compliance and conformity. This, as we have seen in relation to Adorno’s concept of the culture industry, abolished the potential contradictions between industry and social relations. Enzensberger is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, perhaps a little closer to the orthodox, classical position. For him while technology reinforces dominant social relations, it also generates the material resources that challenge the economic, social and political relations of capitalism.
The Marxist understanding of how the media are a productive force that comes into contradiction with existing social relations, must be sharply differentiated from the liberal paradigm. The latter, in a species of technological determinism, see new media technology as resolving problems that stem basically from a class divided society. For example, in the sphere of political communication and the whole problematic around reengaging a public increasingly hostile to the limits of bourgeois representative democracy under neo-liberalism, it is hoped by liberals that tweeting, blogging, texting, the Internet and so forth, can ride to the rescue – as if this was merely a technical problem (see Wayne, Petley, Murray, Henderson 2010):
Anyone who expects to be emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware however structured, is the victim of an obscure belief in progress. Anyone who imagines that freedom for the media will be established if only everyone is busy transmitting and receiving is the dupe of a liberalism that, decked out in contemporary colours, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests (Enzensberger 1982: 58–9).
The media cannot function as palliatives for what are social problems; quite the contrary: the media will exacerbate them. The liberals do not see how new media technology strikes a hammer blow against the privileges involved in the private ownership of the means of production. They cannot see how the new media draw the class struggle onto their own terrain. Enzensberger echoes Walter Benjamin’s argument that technologies that democratize the production and reproduction of culture, wither the ‘aura’ of class privilege and monopoly control. This began when Western art first began to emancipate itself from religious expression and patronage. New media technology has massively accelerated this process of democratization for all forms of communication. Reproducibility does away with heritage and challenges corporate private property rights. When anyone can have a still or moving image technology on their persons as part of their routine accoutrements, like a watch, then popular cultural expression can escape the social and political irrelevance that it was trapped in by its exclusive expression in holiday snaps and tourist videos:
Tape recorders, ordinary cameras, and movie cameras are already extensively owned by wage earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at factories, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere where there is a social conflict. By producing aggressive forms of publicity that were their own, the masses could secure evidence of their daily experience and draw effective lessons from them (Enzensberger 1982: 59).
To a large extent ‘the question’ which Enzensberger raises here has been answered. There has been a cultural shift of enormous proportions so that people no longer see themselves as merely consumers, recording personal and familial history, but as producers who can make interventions in a public sphere they see themselves as actively constructing. The significance of this cultural shift has not been widely recognized; its potential for a real democratization of the public sphere cannot be realized within capitalism however, it can only be distorted into parody forms. Today, the means of audio-visual production are very likely to be in the hands of those opposing the system, recording those who are in turn recording them for security purposes. Even non-activists become involuntary witnesses, perhaps most famously when George Holliday happened by chance to record the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD back in 1991. More recently, an American hedge fund manager caught on his mobile phone the moment when Ian Tomlinson was pushed to the floor by a police officer during the G20 protests in London, April 2010. Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who had been on his way home, collapsed and died shortly afterwards. The video footage found its way to The Guardian and helped open up a criminal investigation into possible manslaughter, an investigation that had looked like being swept under the carpet after a Home Office pathologist reported that Tomlinson had died of a heart attack. A second post-mortem revealed that Tomlinson had died of internal bleeding. When the conflicting post-mortems gave the director of public prosecutions an excuse not to proceed with a trial, the video evidence again played a crucial role in securing an unlawful killing verdict at an inquest jury. This in turn led to the director of public prosecutions clearing the way for a criminal trial of the police officer involved. At its best the media can expose, they can embarrass, they can cause PR disasters for institutions and they can contribute to the slow erosion of legitimacy that many institutions central to the functioning of capitalism are undergoing. They can even occasionally play an important role in holding authority to account. They cannot however change the social and legal relations and coercive forces that protect capitalism. Enzensberger insists therefore that to realize the potential of the new media requires political organization and political struggle.
As various media prove themselves to be problematic to the dominant social interests, so new mechanisms of control and containment are developed, whether legal, institutional or in terms of more sophisticated public relations management. Commenting on the impact of television coverage of America’s imperialist war in Vietnam, Enzensberger remarks:
Where as only twenty-five years ago the French massacres in Madagascar, with almost one hundred thousand dead, became known only to the readers of Le Monde under the heading of ‘Other News’ and therefore remained unnoticed and without follow-up in the capital city, today the media drag colonial wars into the centres of imperialism (Enzensberger 1982: 63).
Just as soon as television news reportage of imperialist wars is neutered by new mechanisms of control, such as ‘embedding’ journalists into military units, along comes another means of dissemination that ‘leaks’ inconvenient truths into the public sphere. In July 2010 WikiLeaks, a web based publisher of documents exposing corporate and state behaviour, published over 90,000 documents produced by US officials detailing how badly and with what cost to civilians, the war was going in Afghanistan. It is telling however that WikiLeaks also worked with traditional media over this event. They provided The Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel with copies of the documents in advance so that they could provide narrative and context to vast amount of information they were releasing. So here we see how the relationship between the new media and the established liberal media is symbiotic as well as one of conflict and pressure. The traditional press had the journalistic resources and skills to sift and present the information. They also had the already dominant position in the media market to amplify the impact of the leaks. Conversely, WikiLeaks had the information in the first place because they are far more accessible to non-traditional sources (which whistle-blowers usually are) than the dominant media, who are locked into speaking to the senior players in politics, business, and other parts of the state apparatus. Of course the mainstream media will attempt to frame and interpret the flow of information coming from non-traditional sources such as WikiLeaks in ways that maintain the integrity of the institutions thus exposed. But this ideological battle becomes more and more difficult. In October 2010 WikiLeaks published 400,000 US army reports on how the occupation of Iraq was panning out, including video footage showing US army helicopters killing and wounding civilians caught up in conflicts with insurgents. The ideological difficulties such leaks cause – no matter how they are framed – is indicated by an opinion piece on the Fox News website by a former US State department advisor who called for WikiLeaks to be designated an ‘enemy combatant’ (Whiton 2010). This would open WikiLeaks up for potential ‘non-judicial’ actions (namely state terrorism and sabotage). This opinion may be at the wackier end of the already wacky far-right politics in the US, but it is an indication of how far outside the mainstream media system (while still influencing it and therefore the global public sphere) the new media can be.
I began with Enzensberger’s critique of the model of the private self, the apriori self- making individual set against the enormous powers of ‘mind production’ now in the hands of capital. The monadic subject of liberal philosophy, free-floating and self-determining, is clearly an ideological construct. But the argument that unfolded did not simply suggest that the individual was the plaything of powerful corporate forces. This is why Enzensberger critiques Adorno’s concept of the ‘culture industry’ as inadequate to grasping the totality of the consciousness industry because for Adorno it is a totality in which important contradictions have been largely eliminated. For Enzensberger, the central contradiction between technological forces and social relations of production remains active, as does the contradiction between culture as such – its basis in dialogue and communication – and capitalist control of the means of production which must contain and control creativity and communication and ensure that exchange takes place within the circuits of capital valorization.
The consciousness industry embodies and reproduces a wider contradiction between culture and control. Its ‘theatre of operations’ is in the space between reality and potential, is and ought, really existing capitalism and the promised life. The capitalist media like to think of themselves as essential safeguards for ‘freedom’, which they interpret as the freedom to privately own the means of production. But the mass media as a technological force constantly press beyond this narrow interpretation and nowhere is this more evident than in the new media technologies that are causing the corporate media industry so many problems. The horizontality and network structure of the new media, their blurring the lines between producers and consumers, their reconfiguring of the individual and the social where we can glimpse Marx’s ‘social individual’ (a far cry from the monadic subject Enzensberger criticizes) afford new possibilities in terms of mobilizing public opinion, disseminating information and providing the means for interventions into the public sphere that leave the traditional corporate media often lagging behind. The corporate media are forced to strike up engagement and dialogue with these new media, increasing their public profile while also intensifying the ideological struggle over the meaning of their interventions, from the Raoul Moat Facebook page to WikiLeaks. The new digital media prefigure – we can perhaps say no more than that, this side of a fundamental transformation in our social relations – a more genuinely democratic culture of communication, information exchange and meaning production, all of which is the basis for a more equal and participatory society, polity and economy. Enzensberger’s two essays on the media offer a trenchant critique of capitalism as the great barrier to realizing that more democratic future.
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