Table Of ContentAdventures in Media and Cultural Studies i
Media and Cultural Studies
ii Douglas M. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham
KeyWorks in Cultural Studies
As cultural studies powers ahead to new intellectual horizons, it becomes increas-
ingly important to chart the discipline’s controversial history. This is the object of an
exciting new series, KeyWorks in Cultural Studies. By showcasing the best that has
been thought and written on the leading themes and topics constituting the discip-
line, KeyWorks in Cultural Studies provides an invaluable genealogy for students
striving to better understand the contested space in which cultural studies takes
place and is practiced.
1 Nations and Identities: Classic Readings edited by Vincent P. Pecora
2 Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks (Revised Edition) edited by Meenakshi
Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner
3 Black Feminist Cultural Criticism edited by Jacqueline Bobo
4 Reading Digital Culture edited by David Trend
5 The Masculinity Studies Reader edited by Rachel Adams and David Savran
6 Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur
Adventures in Media and Cultural Studies iii
Media and
Cultural Studies
KeyWorks
Revised Edition
Edited by
Meenakshi Gigi Durham and
Douglas M. Kellner
iv Douglas M. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham
© 2001, 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
except for editorial material and organization © 2001, 2006 by Meenakshi Gigi Durham
and Douglas M. Kellner
blackwell publishing
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First published 2001
This revised edition published 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2006
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Media and cultural studies : keyworks / edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M.
Kellner. — Rev. ed.
p. cm. — (Keyworks in cultural studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-3258-9 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-3258-2 (pbk.)
1. Mass media and culture. 2. Popular culture. I. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi. II.
Kellner, Douglas, 1943– III. Series.
P94.6.M424 2006
302.23—dc22
2005014104
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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Adventures in Media and Cultural Studies v
Contents
Preface to the Revised Edition viii
Adventures in Media and Cultural Studies: Introducing the KeyWorks ix
Douglas M. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham
Part I: Culture, Ideology, and Hegemony 1
Introduction to Part I 3
1 The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas 9
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
2 (i) History of the Subaltern Classes; (ii) The Concept of “Ideology”;
(iii) Cultural Themes: Ideological Material 13
Antonio Gramsci
3 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 18
Walter Benjamin
4 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception 41
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
5 The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article 73
Jürgen Habermas
6 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an
Investigation) 79
Louis Althusser
Part II: Social Life and Cultural Studies 89
Introduction to Part II 91
7 (i) Operation Margarine; (ii) Myth Today 99
Roland Barthes
8 The Medium is the Message 107
Marshall McLuhan
vvii DCoonutgelanst sM. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham
9 The Commodity as Spectacle 117
Guy Debord
10 Introduction: Instructions on How to Become a General in the
Disneyland Club 122
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart
11 Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory 130
Raymond Williams
12 (i) From Culture to Hegemony; (ii) Subculture:
The Unnatural Break 144
Dick Hebdige
13 Encoding/Decoding 163
Stuart Hall
14 On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research 174
Ien Ang
Part III: Political Economy 195
Introduction to Part III 197
15 Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication 201
Nicholas Garnham
16 On the Audience Commodity and its Work 230
Dallas W. Smythe
17 A Propaganda Model 257
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky
18 Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era 295
Herbert I. Schiller
19 Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research,
Feminism, and Political Economy 311
Eileen R. Meehan
20 (i) Introduction; (ii) The Aristocracy of Culture 322
Pierre Bourdieu
21 On Television 328
Pierre Bourdieu
Part IV: The Politics of Representation 337
Introduction to Part IV 339
22 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 342
Laura Mulvey
23 Stereotyping 353
Richard Dyer
24 Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance 366
bell hooks
25 British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity 381
Paul Gilroy
Adventures in Media and CulturaCl oSntutednietss vviiii
26 Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses 396
Chandra Talpade Mohanty
27 Hybrid Cultures, Oblique Powers 422
Néstor García Canclini
Part V: The Postmodern Turn and New Media 445
Introduction to Part V 447
28 The Precession of Simulacra 453
Jean Baudrillard
29 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 482
Fredric Jameson
30 Feminism, Postmodernism and the “Real Me” 520
Angela McRobbie
31 Postmodern Virtualities 533
Mark Poster
32 Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media
Convergence, and Participatory Culture 549
Henry Jenkins
Part VI: Globalization and Social Movements 577
Introduction to Part VI 579
33 Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy 584
Arjun Appadurai
34 The Global and the Local in International Communications 604
Annabelle Sreberny
35 The Processes: From Nationalisms to Transnationalisms 626
Jésus Martín-Barbero
36 Globalization as Hybridization 658
Jan Nederveen Pieterse
37 (Re)Asserting National Television and National Identity Against
the Global, Regional, and Local Levels of World Television 681
Joseph Straubhaar
38 Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive
Approach 703
Richard Kahn and Douglas M. Kellner
Acknowledgments 726
Index 730
viii Douglas M. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham
Preface to the
Revised Edition
We have produced a revised edition of KeyWorks to collect some of the new mater-
ial that has appeared since the first edition and have also included material that
colleagues have urged would be important additions to the Reader. We are grateful
to Blackwell for allowing us to select eight new essays and to offer a section on
globalization. With the constant proliferation of new media, there is a growing
amount of analyses, debates, and conflicting positions and we attempt to capture
some of the ferment in media and cultural studies today by including fresh material.
These changes are reflected in the expanded and revised introduction to the KeyWorks.
Choices were extremely difficult and we were forced to exclude much important
material. We appreciate comments by readers and users of the text that have helped
with the revision, and the support of our Blackwell editors Jayne Fargnoli and
Elizabeth Swayze. Thanks, as well, to Cameron Laux and Erin Pfaff. We also grate-
fully acknowledge the ongoing support and encouragement of our spouses and
families; heartfelt thanks to Rhonda Hammer, and Frank, Sonali and Maya Durham.
MGD & DMK
About the Editors
Meenakshi Gigi Durham is Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Commun-
ication at the University of Iowa. She has published widely on feminist media studies
and related critical approaches, especially those of race, class, and sexuality.
Douglas M. Kellner is George F. Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education
at UCLA and is the author of many books on social theory, politics, history, and
culture, including Television and the Crisis of Democracy (1990), The Persian Gulf
TV War (1992), Media Culture (1995), Media Spectacle (2003), and FromSeptember
11 to Terror War (2003).
Adventures in Media and Cultural Studies ix
Adventures in Media
and Cultural Studies:
Introducing the KeyWorks
Douglas M. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham
It is increasingly clear that media and culture today are of central importance to the
maintenance and reproduction of contemporary societies. Societies, like species,
need to reproduce to survive, and culture cultivates attitudes and behavior that
predispose people to consent to established ways of thought and conduct, thus
integrating individuals into a specific socio-economic system. Forms of mediaculture
like television, film, popular music, magazines, and advertising provide role and
gender models, fashion hints, lifestyle images, and icons of personality. Thenarratives
of media culture offer patterns of proper and improper behavior, moral messages,
and ideological conditioning, sugar-coating social and political ideas with pleasur-
able and seductive forms of popular entertainment. Likewise, media and consumer
culture, cyberculture, sports, and other popular activities engage people in practices
which integrate them into the established society, while offering pleasures,meanings,
and identities. Various individuals and audiences respond to these texts disparately,
negotiating their meanings in complex and often paradoxical ways.
With media and culture playing such important roles in contemporary life, it is
obvious that we must come to understand our cultural environment if we want
control over our lives. Yet there are many approaches to the study of media, culture,
and society in separate disciplines and academic fields. Often critics take a single
perspective and use a specific method and theory to understand, make sense of,
interpret, or criticize media and cultural texts. Others eschew all methodological and
theoretical critical strategies in favor of empirical description and analysis.
We would advocate the usefulness of a wide range of theoretical and methodo-
logical approaches to the study of media, culture, and society. Yet we do not believe
that any one theory or method is adequate to engage the richness, complexity,
variety, and novelty displayed in contemporary constellations of rapidly proliferating
cultural forms and new media. We have therefore assembled what we consider some
KeyWorks of current theories and methods for the study of the abundance and
diversity of culture and media in the present age. The texts we have chosen are“Key”
x Douglas M. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham
because we believe that the perspectives and theorists which we have included in this
volume are among the most significant and serviceable for engaging the forms and
influences of contemporary media and culture.
The material in this reader provides “keys” which help unlock the domain of
meaning, value, politics, and ideology in familiar forms of cultural artifacts and prac-
tices. They furnish prisms which enable critical readers to see cultural texts and
phenomena in a new light, generating insight into the sometimes hidden production
processes and ideological constraints of media culture. Key theories and methods
help unlock and unveil structural codes and organizing conventions of media texts,
their meanings and values, and often contradictory social and political effects.Under-
standing culture critically also provides insight into the ways that media and culture
construct gender and role models, and even identities, as the populace come to
pattern their lives on the celebrities and stars of media culture. These readings are
also “key” in that they open novel theoretical directions and formulations of culture
and society; at the time of their writing, they presented inventive and sometimes
revolutionary directions in the study of media and culture.
The texts selected are “works” in that their methods and theories enable media-
involved readers to engage in the activity of analysis, interpretation, criticism, and
making sense of their cultural and social worlds and experiences. The theories and
methods presented provide tools for critical vision and practice, helping to produce
active creators of meaning and interpretation, rather than merely passive audiences.
The KeyWorks thus empower those who wish to gain skills of media literacy, provid-
ing instruments of criticism and interpretation. They provide essential elements of
becoming intelligent and resourceful cultural subjects, discriminating readers, and
creative users and producers of contemporary culture.
The texts assembled in this book can therefore help cultural consumers to become
critics and creators. Our introduction will accordingly attempt to demonstrate how
the diverse approaches and texts that we have assembled provide valuable keys to
cultural criticism and interpretation, helping to produce more competent and dis-
criminating critics. We discuss below how the specific groupings of the KeyWorks
provide different approaches to the study of media and culture and point to the
contributions and limitations of each perspective. In this opening introduction, we
accordingly furnish overviews of each distinctive way of seeing and engaging culture
and media. More detailed presentation of the theorists and critics we have chosen,
along with explications of the key concepts, theories, and methods selected, will
head each of the five sections we have delineated.
Theory/Method/Critique: A Multiperspectival Approach
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more
affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our “con-
cept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
