[lbo-talk] "Cultural" Imperialism and $784 Billion NetTransferfrom the South to the North

[Sean Andrews]

On 3/26/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Sean:
>
> Thanks for taking the time to respond to my missive.  I hardly disagree with
> any specifics that you listed, especially the highly negative role played by
> intellectual property rights.  My concern is with a more general causal
> model of media influence.  Are you implying that the media really make
> people think what they do, and the leftist denunciatory diatribes sometimes
> claim to explain their own dismal failure to capture people's attention?

I see the point you're making.  I've never thought of it in quite the
terms you've put it here, but I suppose the leftists who most vocally
promote the idea of western cultural imperialism in this crude fashion
could be attacked for this kind of excuse.  I am actually talking
about the original set of thesis that are basically part of the
political economy of communication paradigm which, on the one hand,
says that the capitalist control of the much of the media reinforces a
certain cultural outlook that is fairly allergic to open discussions
of alternative organizations of society, both because it threatens
their organizational structure and because their commercial nature
exerts all the pressures you mention below.  The argument that Herbert
Schiller makes is above and beyond that in that he is looking at
government documents and corporate memos and the like which provide
evidence of several organizational links and carefully discussed plans
to project "the American way of life" in the form of mass media
propaganda.  In many ways this is hardly a controversial statement any
more, which, perhaps, is why most of the critics focus on the argument
he isn't making (i.e. saying he's wrong about the blunt causality of
propaganda) rather than the one that he is (which is that, whatever
their effectiveness, there was a coordinated effort by the US media
and foreign policy establishment to project "American values" into
other countries, whether they wanted it or not.)


> I think it is a far more complex causal relationship of mutual causality -
> advertisers pickup up popular themes already existing in their target
> audience and gently manipulating and steering them in the desired direction,
> so the audience never ceases to believe that they reflections of their own
> thoughts on TV as opposed to something being broadcasted to them.  And that
> indeed is not far away from the truth - good propaganda does reflect what
> people actually think and want to think and only directs it in the desired
> direction.  There is far more consensus and far less manipulation in
> propaganda than many media critics on the left want to admit.

This is a fair description of most of the process of the parasitic
nature of media, advertising and consumption driven capitalism in the
US.  I'll note that the argument I think is on the table is more about
the use of the US media corporations in the international sphere, but
I think that many of the mediating factors you mention are true even
on that level.

But the key is that the choice of what advertisers (and the producers
of the advertised products) or the media producers pick up isn't some
arbitrary choice nor is it the thing many people already like or take
part in.  It is a strategically chosen and modified to fit within the
existing system rather comfortably, co-opting any of the "alternative"
intonations but leaving out anything truly counter cultural.
Moreover, within the somewhat wider range of products, only a narrow
band is promoted, marketed, and mass produced.  And, within the wider
culture, the institutions doing this promotion have the loudest most
visible instruments of promotion.

I don't ascribe to a McChesney and Co. version of denouncing media
bigness just because it's big, but to say that, because a good number
of people buy this stuff it means that it is objectively the best
stuff or even that it had the most potential for popularity is hardly
true.  In fact, one of my favorite arguments about intellectual
property was made by Jeff Tweedy who said that the reason that the
music industry doesn't want music to be free is that if it were we'd
likely listen to a lot more of it and, in so doing, we'd discover just
how much of it is total crap.  Perhaps this is idealistic, but either
way the bigness of these large corporations makes a simple argument
about the free market shaky at best.  When this is applied to a global
level, the bigness of the US market makes it easy to dump US products
at far under what it would cost domestic producers to make similar
products.  We could argue competitive advantage here or treat movies,
as trade lobbyists wanted to, as meriting the same kinds of regulation
as a simple phone call, but I don't think that would shore up the
problem with

> Then you come with the concept of "cultural imperialism: which again is
> something from the denunciatory repertoire of the left that has little
> analytical value.

I don't know if I am fit to take you on this kind of issue as you're
much more ept than I at making these kinds of arguments, but the issue
is a combination of a historical argument about how the global market
for these products was created--and it was hardly a consumer driven
movement--and a structural argument about how a market with monopoly
control is hardly competative.  I'll admit that there are some critics
who take this too far, but the pendulum has been swinging the opposite
direction for way too long. The goal of disproving the efficacy of
media monopoly has completely missed the fact that the industry is
trying to get way ahead of the curve on that one--and the people who
work on Intellectual property like Lessig don't have enough of a sense
of the earlier argument in media studies to recognize that even the
status quo has problems.  Finally, the analytical value of the
Cultural Imperialism argument, for me, is less about the short term
efficacy of the activities of these players on the ground right now
than about a long term strategy for hegemony.  They may be savvy
enough to feed off public displays of culture, but in the end, they
want to be the ones profiting from whatever culture is created (hence
News Corp's purchase of MySpace, etc.).

The relationship that you describe, i.e. certain cultural
> products achieving dominant position in the natural effect of the market.
> The intense competition among various products force them to the lowest
> common denominator, which is pandering to the most basic human emotions and
> the most widely entrenched cultural stereotypes. Those products that do this
> most effectively - as many US commercial products do - win.  End of story.

If you really believe that, then I'm not sure there is much I can do
to convince you.  I don't agree with the idea that there is actually
an intense competition in any cultural product.  The exception is the
kind of competition Bourdieu points to in his book On Television,
which is a competition between, for instance, newscasters to get a
tiny scoop on the one overly publicized story of the day: the
difference between these newscasts is minute to the outside observer,
but the marginal difference means a lot in terms of the symbolic
capital within the field of other newscasters.  This is even more
pronounced in the non-news (sorry, Doug) of celebrity gossip where
"Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" compete for the
"EXCLUSIVE" features of the evening. Thus if consumers of the most
widely marketed and distributed media are actually "choosing" between
these products, it is a safe bet that there won't be much of a choice
at all: if you are consuming at that level, there are a very narrow
group of products that these corporations are offering for you to buy.
 That people buy them is more of a symbolic ritual, an attempt to be
involved in some dominant cultural practice of consumption, than an
actual choice which might form the micro-foundation of the market
model you propose to interpret this through.

> The concept of cultural imperialism not only does not explain anything new
> in this process, but obscures the fact that all commercial competitive
> markets work like that, whether they are US, French, Islamic or Chinese.  US
> cultural products win because they do a better job in pandering to the
> debased popular tastes and instincts than the cultural products of other
> countries.  Pandering to Third World anti-Americanism is not science but
> propaganda on a par with that produced by Hollywood.

I feel like you're conflating the domestic and international elements
of this argument--and I'm sure at this point, in my answer to you,
I've been doing the same.  But the point of imperialism is that it is
international.  And the point of the argument about cultural
imperialism, which was explicitly geared at informing the US
population about the actions of its government and communications
industry, has less to do with anti-Americanism than democratic
accountability.  And in this case, the focus of Schiller's study was
the use of covert tactics to send pirate signals into other countries
with the goal of formenting either just basic pro-American beliefs and
outlooks in the population, or explicitly advocating the overthrow of
another country, often on the basis of propaganda that had a bit less
truth value than one might hope.  That is Schiller's argument.  It may
have problems, it may be faulty, it may depend on some utopian system
outside the world of realpolitik for its counter argument, but in any
case, it doesn't argue all that much about how effective these
strategies are (though in later books he points out that the
strategies are only being refined to be ever more effective, even as
people addressing his thesis ignore his basic premise.)

I think his basic premise is important for historicizing the current
global media environment, particularly since it now seems that US
media goods are desired by people even outside the official channels
of distribution.  As these media corporations demand more protection
from piracy, it seems to me important to remember the context in which
their dominance developed.  This context, it seems to me, was one in
which the market for the production and distribution of motion
pictures, television, and recorded music was aggressively dominated by
US corporations, in conjunction with military and state department aid
and approval.  They sought to control the main resources of the mass
media environment and, in many cases, were helped by international aid
organizations in fostering the basic infrastructure for that
environment to exist.  Schiller points out that this was done with the
approval of the US government with the explicit goal of fostering a
feeling of goodwill towards the USA.  Whatever the effects of this
ideologically, the structural dominance of the US media is hardly an
accident.

At every step, particularly in the last thirty years, when countries
that did have domestic industries attempted to protect them, the US
cried foul.   This brings me to where I really see the issue of
cultural imperialism.  Because the dominant argument has now become
that we should have a "free flow of information" and free market
arguments are trumpeted by US media industries as often as the
financial sector.  None of this admits either the monopoly presence of
the US media within that global marketplace (however much it is being
challenged by domestic producers) nor does it admit the active
intervention of the US state in order to create that environment.
This is, ultimately, where there is an importance of content for the
dominant theme of the US media throughout the period Schiller examines
up till today has always been "freedom."  Of course the notion of
freedom that they have promoted is one that only the US can authorize
and it is defined not only ideologically but in extensive
international legal frameworks which now include intellectual property
regimes which are necessary to preserve the monopoly market position
of the dominant US distributors.  The latter will likely be true even
if there is a massive upswell of domestic media production in the
South.

I can certainly see your argument about pandering to anti-Americanism,
and I don't mean to overstate the role or influence of the US in
shaping the international regimes of trade and intellectual property
rights.  But I do think it is important to counter the argument that
the US media became dominant simply because they are better at
something (whether it is telling a diverse story due to our
pluralistic society [a canard of Cowen and others] or, in your
estimation, pandering to others) or speak to some kind of universal
value that touches everyone in every society the same (one of the
industry's claims about itself) or that it was in any way the pure
result of the market logic that they are now asking others to accept.
I don't think it is propagandistic to draw some attention to the
history of how the current media environment was shaped--largely
because I think it makes it more acceptable for individual nations to
make their own choice about how they will try to manage their media
environment.  At the very least, the idea of having some state
intervention on the domestic level should at least be seen in the
light of the state intervention that existed on the international
level up to this point and we should be able to point out that, while
the US media may be fairly powerful in terms of their market presence,
their inability to exploit every market in the world equally is hardly
the same thing as "freedom" much less freedom of speech.  Property
rights are a whole other issue but are being promoted with the same
fervor.

Whether any of this passes the smell test for you of actually
qualifying as a form of imperialism seems, to some extent, on whether
you believe that the free market exists as a naturally occurring
phenomenon or whether it is something that has to be systematically
imposed and carefully enforced, often with the threat of military or
financial intervention.  And, for me, the fact that for it to
function, it requires a deep change in the basic expectations and
normal social practices as well as the role of the state, makes the
imposition of this model a form of "cultural imperialism" par
excellance.  That the argument made from the beginning is that any
attempt to shape this model made by social actors other than those
consecrated by the values of the market will catastrophically impair
its functioning seems to me to be the hallmark of the brand of freedom
it actually proscribes.  Though the media itself may not have this
ideological effect (as was originally intended) on the international
level, the industry lobbyists are ever more involved in drafting
legislation that is associated with projecting this ideology into the
legal instruments of other states.

I'm not sure if that makes it any clearer, but it is the way I see the
argument about cultural imperialism as being of continued historical
(if not analytical) relevance, even if some of the function of the
dominant actors and the institutions they control has changed.

s