Culture: Toward a definition of Cultural Power

How do we define or reconcile ‘culture’ however, if it is at all necessary in terms of communication research discourse or in terms of communication of a text in either a micro or macro social perspective? This question is a dubious one and invites a sense of indeterminacy whether to define it in terms of ‘high and low’ culture, ‘suit and street’ culture, ‘orthodox and popular culture’ and so on. All such senses assure an empowered cultural system that involves a long-drawn social hierarchy and domination. One plausible solution is that if ideology is taken off from political and dominant social logic, cultural praxis in micro social format would then be visible. But this specially in a capitalist exploitative society seems to be more evangelical than analytically derived one. But that also seems to be quite aristocratic as it does not care about struggling texts of the audience of underdeveloped countries. Most fundamentally the term ‘culture’ is structurally oppositional to the idea or the study of nature. This is a psychological figuration or pattern that involves ‘tradition’ [comprising of some overriding major proclaimed texts coverting plenty of common narratives], social beliefs [an empowered fall out of ethno-religious and political grand narratives], individual identity, and own territorial feeling [often merged into ethno-religiocity and many other social appearances].

So culture, as often contrarily conceived nowadays, can never be a universal term nor is it having any long historical line-up. Noted cultural theorist Raymond Williams in his “Civilization and Culture” stated culture ‘as a general process of inner development was extended to include a descriptive sense of the means and works of such development...’. Thus Williams strongly proposed the semantic development or transformations of social means or practices into human psychology. Noted Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci while in his note analyzing culture as a middle term between the world of art on the one hand and society and politics on the other.

However toward a plausible definition of culture, in a determinate periphery, one might have to accept overlapping of number of texts regularly happening in political or social frames that might deviate such grand narrative as ‘culture’, otherwise the term can hardly be definable. This is equally true in global frame also, where ‘global culture’ is closely a non-existent phenomenon unless becoming highly dominant and backed by new corporate hegemony. Then only individual audience would consume only information of culture and not the inherent meaning of cultural content or message.

Thus we gradually move on to certain distinctions between ‘popular’ culture and ‘mass’ culture: ‘popular’ when one likes that and ‘mass’ when one does not. But both distinctive features involve a powerful social narrative that accepts any one of the two and wait to its audience while downsizing any deviant approach. Cultural studies thus transcends such binary outlines of cultural distinction, i.e., as mentioned earlier, high and low, popular and mass, suit and street etc. though it must not be misunderstood that it overlooks traditional points of struggle between classes and cultural identities. It more plausibly looks for the atrocities perpetrated over such depressed and low-ordered classes of people. In this course of cultural studies they closely followed Marxian political notion of class and Gramsci’s notion of cultural identification but extended their analysis up to an excorporated emancipation of the exploited class until communist revolution occurs, as cultural studies never denounces such possibilities of revolution.

Raymond Williams (1962) however has provided the most comprehensive definition of culture, as a particular way of life shaped by values, traditions, beliefs, material objects and territory. Culture is a complex and dynamic ecology of people, things, world views, activities, and settings that fundamentally endures but is also changed in routine communication and social interaction [Lull, 1998]. Noted American theorist James Lull has carefully added to this definition that culture is a context. It is how we talk and dress, the food we eat, and how we prepare and consume it, the gods we invent, and the ways we worship them, how we divide up time and space, how we dance, the values to which we socialize our children, and all the other details that make up everyday life. This definition indicates clearly as Lull pointed out also complying with British notion that no culture is inherently superior to any other and that cultural richness by no means derives from economic standing. Culture as everyday life is a steadfastly democratic idea.

The above definition doubtlessly stultifies the textual determinist definition approach of culture and speaks of a complete transtextual stance which also on the other hand negates directly any possibility of political influence on culture thus basically nullifies also democratic institutions, like economy, polity, society, cultural praxis. He also on the other hand, like poststructuralists, has identified that culture is in many ways structured owing to differences in social class. According to Lull, such structuration does not allow variety and scope of culture. His notion of contention with earlier theorists [possibly modernist theorists] is that they ‘have in fact wrestled with the complex connection between social structure and culture for years. In sociology and communication, some theorists have tried to explain why people of various social classes prefer different genres within cultural domains such as art and music’. He continued arguing, why does a young Bengalee prefer Band music while another prefers popular Hindi songs? Does this difference [of taste] show or reveal any connection between ‘class’ and ‘culture’? American Sociologist Herbert Gans has termed such phenomenon as “Taste Culture” that might refer to cultural strata in a social structure. This taste culture has a definite and direct relations with the social class position. Thus the people of upper socio-economic class prefer classical music than that of lower socio-economic class [Gans, 1974]. However French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tried to derivate the problematic relationship between cultural taste and social class positions. In his words, ‘social space is made in social practice, and practice is not determined by social structure. What a person learns culturally is influenced by, but not limited to, the tastes and everyday activities of people who occupy the same social class’.

But the definition of culture still hardly depends on the inferences of different cultural observatories which deal only some preferred cultural genres. So intertextual analyses cannot reach the core of such truth rather invites a neo-liberal counter-structural [mostly mediated] domination. If culture is an assemblage of a number of socio-cultural texts, then these must be released from its base social structures. But this release does not mean sundering between social structure and cultural texts. The most appropriate definition of culture lets these two have mutual responsibility to each other and have developmental relationship also between them. Then only social domination over the structure as “culture” can be avoided.

Culture and power:

Thus if the imperative is to take institutional intervention in cultural activities in a social context into account, the question of power and hegemony would then definitely come forward to shape the edifice of culture. Institutional domination rather intervention can be identified in various ways, like, economic power, political power, coercive power [militarization] that would determine the rules of social space. Structural theorists are interested in these powers and their domination over the signs and texts. But American sociologists have identified another notion of power, i.e., symbolic power, that can be defined, as ‘the capacity to use symbolic forms...to intervene in and influence the course of action or events’[Lull, 1998]. This power also can be institutionalized as mass media organizations, corporate communicative orgnizations. Lull points out beautifully that, the ‘symbolic power and its correlate cultural power, deriving from the tactical undertakings of social actors constructing their everyday lives, are not exercized solely by social institutions. Symbolic and cultural power are far more accessible and usable than are economic, political and other institutional coercive attempts. They are central to daily life, helping us to create, cope with, adapt to, and transform environments structured by forces of economic, political and military authority’. Mass media are the main players exerting cultural power. Cultural power, according to Lull, is the ‘ability to define a situation culturally. By cultural power individual or groups produce meanings to construct ways of life’.

As I have already pointed out that such identifications basically represent a counter hegemony or power alternative to traditional institutional power structures. However Lull, even not being over obsessively concerned to such power analysis, at the same time, has established also the legitimacy of the symbolic or cultural power.

However both Marxian studies, cultural studies [poststructural studies], and American symbolic analyses have expressed their concern to the growth of power culture empowered by homogeneous institutional domination. Marxian studies in its classical version rather communist orientation have strongly expressed about political emancipation of exploited working class toward establishment of dictatorship of the proletariat. Cultural studies have shown a lot more concern about the exploitation of individuality and organized terror against socio-cultural texts perpetrated by traditional institutions. On the other hand American symbolic analysis is also based on the development of neo-liberal outlook of symbolic-cultural texts that are supposed to achieve independence from any traditionalist power structure, though it is equally very keen to recognize unleashing growth of technology and corporate neo-liberalism in the world.

Both cultural and symbolic power contents have the single source of origin in neo-liberal mediation wherefrom people get these elements as a further [second order] empowered homogenized concept and ensure their optimal use. In this context some amount of indigenous traditional outlook toward those contents influence the production of meaning for the time being. These traditional outlooks are very much territory-specific in its character. A young beautiful Indian lady may be very much fond of funky dress codes and may alongside prefer white ‘saree’ during Durga Puja festival. Gans’s ‘taste culture’ theory can hardly explain such phenomenon whereas Lull’s ‘hybridization of culture’ is just a mere observation and Foucault’s culture is just a ‘causal expression’ but none of them look for the dynamic transformational development of such cultural texts overlapping one over another, and a complete deterritorialization of ‘self’ or ‘culture’ toward absolute consumerism would then be prevalent perpetually. Individual then would be least interested to get meaning of those contents, they rather prefer to consume the information only what is being incessantly communicated to them.

Howsoever the notion of cultural power involves how people use the mediated symbols and become compulsively identified as members of some sub-cultural identities, like, popular culture, street culture, suit culture or elite culture, proletariat culture, and by some opinions mass culture.

Culture and Power # II: Popular culture versus mass culture:

People often not able to identifying the underlying power exercise, think ‘mass’ culture same as popular culture. James Lull while defining ‘popular’ has stated that popular, in this sense, does not signify widespread, mainstream, dominant, or commercially successful. Popular cultural texts come from people and are developed from people’s creations, nor is it given to them for temporary or permanent use. James Lull again has stated very loosely that, “this perspective tears away at distinctions between producers and consumers of cultural artifacts, between culture industries and contexts of reception. We all produce popular culture. Constructing popular culture is an exercise in cultural power”. No point is required to counter this statement but lot of concern still is left to the growth of culture industries and dominant commercial elements that affect individual creativity and dynamic ecology of natural cultural elements. Individual creativity often becomes badly influenced by such dominant elements that definitely affect the course of natural creation and popular culture, as the traditional popular folk cultural forms and identities are the worst sufferers from the culture industries. Nowadays traditional string puppeteers of Bengal set puppet costumes, make-ups, screenplays concommitant to the mediated agenda of Mumbai or Kolkata film [culture] industries, thus try hard or fight a lost battle before getting completely extincted.

Now whatever be the fate of popular cultural creations, the definition, what Lull has attempted to produce, would remain perfect in contrast to the ‘mass’ culture. Mass culture basically is a derivated or fall out of some cultural aspects that are formally recognized as a ‘mainstream’, commercially viable, widely mediated, not widely supported but less opposed, ‘national’, ‘central’, etc. If the government builds a bridge or a flyover, often these are dedicated to the nation and the bridge becomes ‘national’ and, at the same time, may be a symbol of pride, power, development that all feed to the ‘national cultural power’ where the population [comprising of all strata, including lower middle class, poor, destitutes, remote dwellers, share croppers, landless farmers, rural unemlpoyeds, highly exploited female workers, industrial workers, refugees, homeless, raped, unemployeds, retrenched, looted, thieves, murderers, convicted, beggers, vagabonds, evicted alongside rich, super rich, educated elites, upper middle class, educated middle class etc.] largely becomes an ‘atomized mass’ irrespective of the plurality of their cultural identities or even class identities to some extent.

Theoretically mass culture do not possess or deserve any better theoretical categorization, but is existent as a subcultural form in any organized cultural power where powerful institutions always intervene in social process more as educator manner than developer, thus available almost in all the phases of modern history so far noticed.

Culture and Power # III: Cultural power and mediation:

American sociologists including media analysts strongly believe that mass media contribute to the process of popular [mass-]-cultural production by distributing cultural resources to oppressed individuals and subordinate groups [Lull, p73]. This is nothing but a sheer fabricated media-idealism that aptly discards the truth. Moreover such contribution of media were seen, in ex-colonial countries, in the developmental paradigmatic phase where media were centrally controlled and regulated. But this phase so far the developing countries had experienced, were by and large incomplete and they also innately felt for the autonomy of media, independent of state controlling. Subsequently media-market expanded to a large extent but squeezed to the oppressed and also the earlier promise of distributing resources to them. Media market becomes largely monolithic in terms of profit maximization [political eonomy] sundering developing countries not only from its traditional roots but from the contemporarity of cultural praxis also.

Edward Said’s narrative on America’s most unpopular war in Vietnam is most worth mentioning here. America’s defeat in Vietnam in mid-sixties has become most so-called popular cultural resource that let the term commercially alive “America’s war in Vietnam”. In India also, with such so-called popular mediated resource as, ‘India is shining’, ‘India: the upcoming superpower’, ‘the superpower of 21st century’ — global media conglomerates, operating in India, along with Indigenous films and other discursive pratices, have invented a very powerful discourse on ‘new’ India that is commercially suited and placed on a highest elite positioning. While Said strongly advocated Foucault’s open ended thought of power, how is power exercised and what are its effects — that set a basic ideation to the notion that ‘what is power and where does it come from?’ In terms of global mediation these questions have a homogeneous turn toward conglomeration of media institutions that is the prime source of power in the 21st century world terrorizing people’s [Foucauldian] right to hold power in contrast to that of the ruling class and media institutions. This is cultural power as James Lull stated, and people have the only option to imitate those mediated symbols. So this cultural power is negative and would outcast people’s creative power and ‘right’ to be productive, and encourage instead only packaging so to consume mass produced media content, regardless of its specificity of meaning. Baudrillard’s conclusion here is worth reading: “media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is ‘real world’; television is dissolved into life; and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is ‘realized’ and the real becomes fictions. Simulation has replaced production [medium is the message]...alas, our individuality, always in the spotlight, is that and only that, in the spotlight. The spotlight functionalizes the human being. The social limits of the spotlight and playing to the spotlight are the individual. The social framework and its communicative action are the self. There is no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle...”.

Popular Culture as Postmodern Culture: I Shop Therefore I Am

The Film Run Lola Run: Life on a crossroad

Popular culture is being widely defined in recent years in terms of postmodernity incidentally by the urban civil identities of many ambitious third world nations precisely Indian social centres. With the adventurous growth of global mediation the gross definition of popular ‘social’ culture has evidently been fragmented into certain inter-temporal but globalist symbolic cultural artifacts as newer codifications of life patterns. The postmodernity of culture in a certain periphery is therefore guided by an imposition of those symbolic globalist cultural artifacts on the locally operative cultural space. Postmodernity can thus be worked out as a post-theoretical condition that overrules traditional cultural contours i.e. ruling culture, deviant culture, oppositional culture and even grossly the popular culture. It also transcends all kinds of traditional social and cultural identity demarcations, like authentic culture, suite culture, street culture, commercial culture etc. But alongside the known elements of regional popular culture one must have a clear idea about what is postmodernism or postmodernity and its association with the popular or contemporary culture.

Immediately after the second world war lots of research works were organized in the United States that challenged all moots of traditional modernist development of society, literature, and of course the popular culture. Number of theorists has worked so far on postmodernism and postmodern culture, notably Fredric Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard et.al. towards a definable, notional release of individual identity from all possible social and political dominations.

Defining Postmodernity

However Jean Francois Lyotard in his “The condition of postmodernity” (1979, translated in English, 1984) has defined postmodern condition as, ‘a crisis in the status of knowledge in western societies’ that overrule all metanarrative apparatus of legitimation, rejecting all totalizing frameworks from telling universalist stories (metanarratives), Marxism, Liberalism, Christianity etc. [Storey, 2001]. Postmodernism according to Lyotard thus rejects all such metanarratives used to dominate, homogenize other voices, opinions, discourses, and other forms of plurality in the name of universal principles. In postmodern condition, heterogeneity or plurality thus rules over the universality and homogeneity of narratives i.e. values, ‘ism’s, ‘logy’s etc.

The annulations of metanarratives as grand narratives in postmodernity however reveals something more than what is commonly understood in terms of the fragmentation of grand narrative. Postmodernity unlike the French Poststructurality here prescribes a plausible post-semiotic outcome of every such critique of the modernist references. This is the most problematic and viscid area of the understanding of postmodernity anywhere other than literary creations. Postmodernity cannot rest in a poststructural indeterminacy but needs a postcommercial or hyperreal space to render the mediated form of the signified of a text.

Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies depend on such metanarratives as grand narratives. The basic tenets of postmodernity therefore reveals that every attempt to create an “order” always calls for an alternative creation of a “disorder,” of an equal dimension, but a “grand narrative” shadows such constructive disorders. Postmodernism while rejecting such metanarratives as grand narratives, welcomes thus “micro-narratives,” micro-stories that explain individual praxis, events, rather than Universalist or globalist concepts. Postmodern “micro-narratives” are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability (Sarup).

In terms of ‘post-codification’ postmodernity can be quite well differentiated from ‘cultural studies’ though both deal with individuality and its cultural developments. Individuality, in cultural studies, largely takes the form of a counter-hegemonic to the modernist institutional legacy of domination but does not ignore the possibility of political unification of the mass. Their counter-hegemony though rejects structural metanarratives or grand narratives, involves a greater installation of plurality in popular cultural praxis. 

But postmodernity on the other hand not only rejects Universalist metanarratives but gives also a plausible and at the same time quite utopian end of a ‘disorder’ wherein reality, according to them, may occasionally exist. The counter hegemonic individual does not prefer postmodern ‘disorderly chaos’ that needs support of hyperreal ‘postconsumerism’ to establish itself. Cultural studies inherits ‘ideology’ independent of any political metanarrative, say, ‘base and superstructure’ but indeed political and further directs people to organize struggle.

Genealogy of postmodernity

While tracing out the genealogy of postmodernist thought one must rediscover and redefine the course of historicism that tells us outright development of modernism along with massive optimistic development of science and of course social science. ‘Modernist thought had its successful origins and developments in the European Enlightenment period. This era was sharply demarcated by a celebration of the liberating potentials of the social sciences, the materialistic gains of capitalism, new forms of rational thought, due process safeguards, abstract rights applicable to all, and the individual it was a time of great optimism (Milovanovic, 1992a, 1994a; Dews, 1987; Sarup, 1989; Lyotard, 1984; Baker, 1993).

Postmodernists are fundamentally opposed to such modernist thought. Sensitized by the insights of some of the classical thinkers, ranging from Marx, to Weber, to Durkheim, Freud, and the critical thought of the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thought emerged with a new intensity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Let us wage a war on totality” stated one of its key exponents (Lyotard, 1984: 82). Most of the key concepts of modernist thought were critically examined and found to be wanting. Entrenched bureaucratic powers, monopolies, the manipulative advertisement industry, dominant and totalizing discourses, and the ideology of the legal apparatus were seen as exerting repressive powers. In fact, the notion of the individual free, self-determining, reflective, and the center of activity was seen as an ideological construction, nowhere more apparent than in the notion of the juridical subject, the so-called reasonable man in law. Rather than the notion of the individual, the centered subject, the postmodernists were to advocate the notion of the decentered subject’ (Dragan Milovanovic).

Baudrillard on postmodernity

According to one of the most vibrant theorists of poststructurality, Jean Baudrillard, postmodernity is not simply a culture of sign, rather it is a culture of ‘simulacrum’, i.e., introspective identical copy that transcending the original text determinacy, on what Walter Benjamin has reiterated that, mechanical reproduction has destroyed the ‘aura’ of the work of art. Baudrillard’s notion was the long drawn distinctions between original and the copy has now been virtually destroyed, and so the geo-social space and the relative metanarratives. This, according to Baudrillard, is the simulation process. Basically, as simulation is expressed, all the recorded contents, like film, music, are nothing but a copy without the original. John Storey has added that a film is a construction made from editing together film footage shots in different times and spaces. Baudrillard’s simulation is the hyperreal regeneration of a reality text in absense of its original identity and hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity, where in its realm the distinction between simulation and the ‘real’ implodes in which real and imaginary gradually collapse into each other (Storey, 2001). Also in this way French poststructuralism merged into the conditions postmodernity. What is still important here is to note that, according to Baudrillard, simulation is getting more and more real than the real. It can perform even better than what the real does. This is also where media operate so powerfully, because it leads people to simulate the real more importantly than the event. So even been badly defeated in Vietnam war in Sixties, American film industry could still manage to let the simulation alive in favour of US Army in number of Hollywood productions over years.

Baudrillard then made simulation analyses forward to rediscover ‘Disneyland’ that justified postmodern culture quite effectively but left a great utopian space activated also. In his words, ‘...Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the society in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real’.

Another one of the most influencial analysts of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson, in his Postmodernism and Consumer Society, has pointed out postmodernity as a condition where the erosion occurred in the older distinctions between high culture and mass culture or popular culture. Thus postmodernity transcends the traditional vested interest that has been preserved in the realm of high culture. According to Jameson in the realm of moderity [high modernity] popular culture has been brutally influenced institutionally toward high cultural praxis. Postmodernism according to Jameson, breaks any particularity or form of popular culture. It thus releases all popularly emerged texts from traditional or conventional motivation and pressure. Jameson argues these cultural texts as a ‘periodizing concept’ and is dominant in the neo-liberal economic and cultural paradigm what he has termed ‘postmodernism: the cultural logic of late capitalism’ that connotes neo-liberal transnational development of capitalism in the contemporary age of globalization. In this context Ernest Mandel’s trial of three stages of development of capitalism is to be considered: ‘market capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’, ‘late or multinational or transnational capitalism’. Jameson while referring these stages of capitalist development into his cultural schema ‘Realism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’, argues that capitalism in its last category puts forward the purest form of capital into the uncommodified areas (Storey, 2001).

The question of historical transformation toward postmodernity:

Now to reach the core of such transformation of historical periods either from market to transnational orientation of capitalist development or from cultural ‘realism’ to ‘postmodernism’ a plausible alternative schema is needed other than typical historical metanarratives. Here in this context postmodernism differs sharply from cultural studies. Even though traditionally empowered historical metanarratives are being rejected by both postmodernism and cultural studies, there is a major difference between these rejections. For Raymond Williams the transformation of historical periods does not entail complete structural destruction of previous cultural codes and installation of a new one. It simply may cause a paradigmatic shift of ‘relative cultural codes’ that may involve a massive transformation of ruling of popular culture what we can denote different phases of dominant codes. Jameson in this context argues that postmodern condition is basically ‘the cultural dominant’ of late or transnational or neo-liberal [economic] capitalism that along with the free movement of capital delimiting newer cultural boundaries across national borders, calls for emancipation of cultural texts welcomes indeterminacy which is independent of its traditional signification process. But what is still worth mentioning about Jameson’s notion in this context is that postmodern dominant culture belongs to the western capitalist societies which have achieved hierarchy in both economic and popular cultural praxis, otherwise postmodernism and postmodern culture has also been characterized in many ways, such as, ‘Pastiche culture’, ‘culture of quotations’, culture of flatness or depthlessness, superficial in most literate sense, i.e. free from meaning etc. However, according to Jameson, postmodernity or postmodern culture is hopelessly a commercial culture typically promotes consumerist capitalism.

Media effect and cultural studies: From Culture Industry to Global Postmodern

With the coming out of the notion of culture industry, in mid forties, under ultra-nationalist and high-capitalist control, media evolved a massive mass culture for the atomized subordinated audience producing mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the nationalist context of industrial production [Kellner, 1997]. So the produced and mediated commodities manifested identical features as the other ‘produced’ of mass production did. These were: commodification of the produced, standardization or homogenization and enmassification of the produced. The culture-industry, as Kellner accords, had the specific function of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into the framework of the capitalist system. Thus culture industry, in Frankfurt discourse of study, produces a consumer society that stabilizes the contemporary capitalist system, formulates new strategies for political change, political emancipation that becomes social norms imposed on common working class. This development thus however transcends the traditional or classical Marxist notion of existence of working class as prime instrument of future revolution. 

So a direct effect of mass media on the common individual and working class existed all through the development of mass mediation communication technology in the last century. Herbert Marcuse [1941] in his article “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” argued that technology posits a “mode of organizing and perpetuating social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behaviour patterns, an instrument for control and domination.”

The notion behind such argumentation of media dominance by the Frankfurt cultural theorists was based on some on-hand life time experiences. In Nazi Germany they experienced absolutist collaboration of centralized media and vertical dominance of the state machinery toward controlling media and mediation promoting monolithic mass cultural instruments to produce a homogenized Fascist culture. On the other hand while in exile in the United States they started believing that the so called American ‘popular culture’ in the name of ‘liberal-pluralism’ was also very much motivated toward the interest of the state capitalist jingoism and governed by the transnational industrial corporations.

The governmentality of such popular culture reflects another scale of mass production and ensures mass consumption through certain commercial value-systems, belief-system that serves American Capitalism as a whole. Individuated space in both systems [in German Mass Society and American Popular Society], what they called ‘Fordism’ [mass production-mass consumption to ensure homogeneity of capital, i.e. mass desire, mass taste, mass behaviour (Kellner, 1997)], were never allowed to blossom beyond overshadow of the techno-capitalist system. Individual thought and desire were brutally suppressed in the Fordist consumer society.

What however was thought of Fordist mass production and mass consumption trap by the Frankfurt theorists was criticized by later theorists like Walter Benjamin et. al. and theorists of British cultural Studies only in terms of the hypothesis of taking the ‘mass’ quite atomized and crippled. Emerging in the Post-Fordist era [roughly the post second world war period] they thought on the one hand, that culture industry also could articulate important roles of individuals and on the other hand ‘atomized mass’ as working class could also be believed as an instrument of social and political metamorphosis against the onslaught of mass culture of the culture industry.

In this course of development of cultural studies ‘Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ of Birmingham University started working on class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and media culture while exploring revitalizing elements in the ‘working class’ through extensive study on effects of television, radio, newspapers, film, advertisements on individual audience in terms of cultural texts and they also emphasized on plurality of individual audience and politics of ideology and signification of the text. Thus in this regard the notion of British Cultural Studies appeared highly political and they could reach the core of mass-cultural domination and the core of consumer society. Theorists like Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall opposed in this context the mass cultural theoretical notions of configuring media effect that takes individual audience as ‘heavy viewers’ and ‘active audience’ beyond its natural plurality and spontaneity, believing that such preconception or predomination certainly devours the individuated space in public spheres. So they started theorizing social mediation praxis and processes.

But notwithstanding all oppositions regarding the revival question of working class in the growing consumer society, both schools of thought were unanimous on the notion of integration of the working class beyond its individual class-cultural identity and the decline of its revolutionary consciousness in the capitalist consumer society. Birmingham theorists, specially Stuart Hall here formulated the notion of the ‘politics of signification’ where they recognized any form of alternative voices against the massive institutionalization of thought and hegemony of the dominant cultural ideology. In this way of rediscovering the working class ideology cultural theorists [French, British and German] resurfaced the capitalist integrated consumerist media politics and created an alternative space for common audience to combat monolithic media effect on them. Noted theorist Douglas Kellner supplemented beautifully the Frankfurt notion of cultural studies, in his words, that ‘...mass culture and communication were instrumental in generating the modes of thought and behaviour appropriate to a highly organized and massified social order...mass consumption and culture were indispensable to producing a consumer society based on homogeneous needs and desires for the mass produced and a mass society based on social organization and homogeneity. It is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and television, insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood jingoistic films, national magazines and other mass-produced cultural artifacts’.

Basically ‘media effect’ analysis is highly a political discourse in terms of its theoretical binarity between capitalist mass culture toward an integration or homogeneity of consumer society and the notion of individuality in pluralist cultural possibilities. Media effect in consumerist societal configuration takes individuals as mass and considers them quite proactive toward mediated contents, i.e. heavy viewers of media and prone to the consumerist effect of mediation. This notion of understanding media effect devours the individuated space i.e. political space that let individuals be the natural victim of mass culture, ends up with the mass consumption of obscenity, titillation, pornography and violence. Thus through consumerist media effect analysis one can only consummate to the extent of consumption of mediated content.

Politics of the Active Audience Research:

Following the cultural nuances about the effect of mass cultural domination over the mass among two theoretical schools [Frankfurt and early British Cultural Studies] were almost of a unanimous opinion of domination of mass culture which makes audience atomized. But on the other hand, as argued above, Benjamin, Hall (et.al.) thought of rejuvenating the audience psyche by counter generation of media use.

But other than such political and cultural research groups [Frankfurt and Birmingham groups] some communication theorists propounded a new theoretical discourse to judge media effect with statistical figuration. Communication researchers J.G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch have classified the above two discourses of media effect research in a temporal order like Marxist media research and political communication research. While discarding the Marxist notion on the one hand, they have made certain further time-spatial subcultural grouping of the media effect research discourse. ‘Research into political communication effects has undergone at least two major shifts of direction since its inception. In an initial phase, which lasted from approximately the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the Second World War, the mass media were attributed with considerable power to shape opinion and belief. In the second period, from...the 1940s to the early 1960s, they were believed to be largely impotent to initiate opinion and attitude change, although they could relay certain forms of information and reinforce existing beliefs...’ (Blumler & Gurevitch, The Political Effects of Mass Communication; Culture, Society and Media, pp240).

There was, however, a third category of researchers like, McQuail, P. Lazarsfeld, H. Gaudet et. al. who found the ‘audience’ very much proactive to any media content to gratify their temporal needs. According to James Lull, instead of asking “What media do to its audience” this ‘uses and gratifications group’ pounded upon the notion “what do people do with the media”. This notion however according to them signifies the active audience.

This brand of argument as ‘media effect’ has resulted in a natural political polarization not only in media research but also in ideological discourse around the world. The active audience notion virtually tried to move away from the political media research discourse and gave the ‘transcorporate commercial mediation’ a global space to operate. Moreover the active audience research stands against all earlier quantitative ‘effect research’ with a notion that statistical figurations can hardly establish human behavioural pattern or metamorphosis. James Lull asks in this context, ‘how can we determine the particular impact of mass media compared to other environmental influences when analyzing human consciousness and behaviour?’

Extending however Blumler’s notion, Joseph Klapper (1960) meanwhile has derived that media can reinforce human behaviour than changing it, putting Wilbur Schramm’s notion of uncertain media effect forward that media can influence some of its audience, in some time about some things (Lull 1995). Transcending all earlier empirical media effect notions that focused only on negative outcomes, active audience researchers considered audience members are not at all passive receivers of media content or victims of media (Lull, 1995). They have explained that individual audience play always active role to use their media to gratify their individual needs. But uses & gratifications researchers too set on empirical statistical figurations to measure the extent of gratification. James Lull in his analysis concerns, ‘what’s more uses & gratifications researchers - like the effects researchers before them - theorize audience activity in behaviourist terms. Adapting quantitatively based methodologies and theories from psychology and sociology, ultimately these researchers also regard audience members essentially as rats in a maze or beans in a jar. Human emotion, cognition and behaviour are once again reduced to statistical data’ [Lull, 1995].

Therefore it can well be accomplished that as a whole of the discourse of mass communication research, the politics remains in older binary opposition between Marxist tradition of communication research on the one side and the techno-capitalist empirical research of human behavioural order on the other, along with an internal debate over the legitimacy of statistical figuration to measure human behavioural order. So the politics of active audience research reaches out to a highly ideological morphology that seeks out emancipation of the audience.

Changing discourse in social outcomes of mediation:

Effect theorists have time and again identified social transformation through various case studies that show the pivotal role of media in the metamorphosis. But they all seem to have stopped their rediscovery journey while reaching in so called globalization era. They have all confined themselves in a binary oppositional lane where state power and awaiting new media development live in a sufficiently coexistent space. Therefore globalizing change in media and society, for them, has become an awaited destination. This is nowhere difficult to identify how state powers intercept freedom of media, from Fascist governments to the ex-colonial national governments of the third world nations etc. But it also seems to be sufficiently pertinent to identify or rediscover the postmodern transcorporate media domination over fragmented subcultural groups of audience. Basically institutions ranging from the central state power to global corporate power manifest an isomorphic outcome to create a mass society either centrally or in some social pockets, even if Lull’s conceptual generalization of diversity is taken into account.

From mission and revolution to outright consumption:

On the other hand cultural studies which earlier had considered media culture as a critical element to the techno-capitalist culture industry and prescribed setting an alternative goal toward revolutionizing people, from mid seventies to the present, transformed from its socialist revolutionary outlook to a postcommercial postmodernist trend of identity and gradually became less and less critical to capitalist media culture and the contemporary postcommodified culture. Like uses & gratifications approach the ball has been thrown to audience’s court in terms of reception of mediated content, consumption and satisfaction or gratification, thus turning around from earlier notions like how media texts are being produced in media industries. Kellner argues in this context, ‘from this perspective the proliferating media culture, postmodern architecture, shopping malls, and the culture of the postmodern spectacle became the promoters and palaces of a new stage of technocapitalism, the latest stage capital, encompassing a postmodern image and consumer culture...’

Therefore as Kellner rightly argues that the new rise of global technocapitalism and finance-capitalism promotes the new turn of postmodern cultural studies. This ideological shift is a new revisionism (McGuigan, 1992, Kellner, The Farnkfurt School and British Cultural Studies: A Missed Articulation) in cultural studies which even ignores the Derridean space of intercontextuality or the protest against space domination. This does not produce or generate individuated cultural space but set a new cultural populism which alternately produces the same but oppositional degree of mass culture for mass production, treats audience an individual creature. Although this turn in cultural studies seems to devour the space of any grand narrative of domination, historical teleology, pseudo-liberation (both capitalist and socialist) but at the same time confronts with the Marxist derivatives by which the notion of capitalist domination over an individual and social audience could have been identified. This would then be the political articulation of struggle of an individual and a society to organize a revolution.

Politics of margin in global postmodern:

As argued earlier, the nuances between British cultural studies and other forms of western cultural studies were largely going beyond any modernist historical narratives toward either a political revolutionary narrative of struggle or a multicultural consumerist fragmentation of narratives. Although both thoughts arguing the same reduction of narratives from any social time and space, the latter multiculturalist fragmentation realizes new control of over determined capital and new order of technologies that offers audience the sense of a new ordained space for receiving mediated texts. So a new margin beyond the traditional political space is drawn to over-determine the human exposure and use of media. This new margin beyond the traditional social margins attempts to restore the cannon of western civilization, as Kellner exemplifies as Thatcher and Reagan eras, Bush (Junior) to Barack Obama era of rejuvenation of American nationality etc. But for the rest of the world it involves pluralizing of culture (Kellner 1997), opening of traditional political margins, what Hall supposed that to be away from western cultural domination, but nowadays totally controlled, regulated by transnational corporations and media conglomerates, the new cultural arbitrators, new missionaries of techno-cultural capitalism reduced to a newer trend or grandnarrative of the new world order. Thus culture industries in the global postmodern era has reached its culminating point while a handful number of media conglomerates through ruthless merger and acquisitions controls the information order and entertainment industries of the world. Kellner argues that ‘...the globalization of media culture is an imposition of the lowest denominator homogeneity of global culture on a national and local culture, in which CNN, BBC, NBC, the Murdock channels and so on impose the most banal uniformity and homogeneity on media culture throughout the world...’. So a new order of monocultural margin controlled by the media conglomerates has been imposed on the political struggles of various subcultural and political groupings.

Ideology: Signification from structure to poststructural

when ideology defines a struggle...

The signification of a message is commonly argued to have polysemic explanations thus, along with, duly establish the variety of human recipient or decoder in a geo-social format. Such heterogeneity can be classified through political, economic, and obviously other various cultural identity specifications. A decoder can thus be identified in accordance with his / her class identity, mundane individual identity and also group identity [like ethnic, religious...]. The natural heterogeneity can only be defined or identified by an eternal signifier what we may call ideology. Ideology is thus a much reductionist signifier representing a vast thought-structure that encompasses any temporal aspect of human life. Noted theorist Raymond Williams (1977) defined ideology in the following three categories:

(a) System of belief of a class or group;

(b) False consciousness or ideation of the ruling class which is opposed to the scientific and pragmatic knowledge;

(c) A process which produces ideas and meaning;

Psychologists’ views tell us about ideology as a useful tool to produce transparent attitude; they feel that society determines the existence of ideology than individuality. Classical Marxian theorists on the other hand think that ‘ideology’ of the oppressed class determines a political dimension of social relationship and thus produces constructive relationship being always affiliated to any mass identity. Later in many countries including third world nations, Marxian theorists have started even recognizing the ‘ideology of individuality’ to combat the commercial outburst of ‘individualism’ along with the traditional class-driven mass political ideology. Legendary Marxian theorist EMS Namboodiripad has beautifully explained the transformation of mass ideological format taking Chinese case of transforming the classical expression of ideology “Dictatorship of Proletariat”: “…China does not call its own system a Dictatorship of Proletariat, but a People’s Democratic Dictatorship…What does this change in terminology mean? It means, first, that the dictatorial element is preserved. Secondly, it is not the Dictatorship of Proletariat but the dictatorship of the entire people against a small stratum of the former ruling class”. It is however an evident truth that class inequalities and surplus extraction of divided labour therefore are the prime sources of ideology in a society altogether.

Raymond Williams however argues that dominant class squeezing the process and means of production creates a false ‘mythic’ consciousness in the name of ideology in the working class psyche. Using this illusive structure extensively they influence people and the mass consciousness. In this course they try to get a strong hold of mass media owning these organizations to transform common mass a mere tool of corporate propaganda.

EMS Namboodiripad here has been pragmatic to the core to explain the referent of ideology in socialism and socialist systemic ideology: the socio-political set-up established in the Soviet Union and socialist countries of Eastern Europe was called the “Dictatorship of Proletariat”. Experience with the working of that system has shown that though major achievements have been registered under it, the dictatorship of the proletariat as practiced in the Soviet Union and socialist countries of Eastern Europe had serious deficiencies. Marxists-Leninists throughout the world have now come to the conclusion that there is no going back to the system that existed in Soviet Union…”

Ideology and signification: 

It is already evident that in a specified social territory the appropriate signification of communication depends upon the social responsibility of cultural stance which ensures the meaning of the message. Such specification of culture determines the ideological stance of the communicator. If a dress-code signifies a specific meaning it can then also disseminate ideology of the communicator. However the concept of ideology is a staunch Marxist analytical phenomenon which has tended to have developed in socialist revolutionary movements and also in the pluralist discourse of the transformation of cultural elements. It is now important to note Fredric Jameson’s argument. ‘All class consciousness — or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes — is in its very nature utopian’.

However ideology, as commonly observed, is the procurement of a system (semantic system) of ideas by a set of people on similar contextual planes which not only prepares the base of a social structure but also sustains plausible expression by which people can interact with each other and also with the institutions. Naturally contradiction and conflict are always the necessary outcomes of ideological existence of human being as it embeds both instinctive and professional courses of struggle within a social structure where people earn the necessary footage to work with or to live in. Thus in a capitalist socio-economic format, exploitation often causes severe contradiction between different ideological codes of general people and social institutions. Ideological practice has the natural heterogeneity in various micro-social formats, like marriage, service providing institutions, charitable institutions, shopping malls, religious groups, business organizations, professional sporting institutions, and even rock bands coexistent along with the political ideology. It is being graduated to be more complicated in the contemporary information processing age also. All the facets of the social structure have common fascination to produce dominant or elitist forms of culture separately, fabricators of which often called ‘elite’ and ‘opinion leader’, as we can observe information elite, elite rock band, elite or dominant religious groups and elite members of the civil society.

American Marxists like Fredric Jameson and others from Frankfurt school have tried to place ideology in a utopian environment where ideology is basically a false consciousness and often structured by the ideas of the dominant class. In this way they have discarded any possibility of ‘ideology of masses’ or the concept of political ideology. Noted Marxist Louis Althusser has defined ideology as it “... is a system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group...ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence... we commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many world outlooks. Of course, assuming that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth (e.g. believe in god, duty, justice, etc....), we admit... that these ‘world outlooks’ are largely imaginary, i.e. do not correspond to reality. However, while admitting that they... constitute an illusion, we admit that they do not make allusion to reality, and that they need to be interpreted to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of the world (ideology = illusion / allusion)” (Althusser, 1994). 

Althusser however though has recognized the referent of beliefs as used to refer ideology the definition doesn’t still substantiate the concept of ideology as a structure which has got a structural relationship with all existing social parameters. Thus he also has discarded the “dialectical” relationships among different ideologies in a geo-social format. In reality the ideology and only the ideology controls and regulates the politics of the signification process. Thus political ideology may not proceed with the religious ideology and different religious ideologies have open, ‘not imaginary’, confrontation with each other.

Marx had shown the binary conflict that working class people have their own ideology which is opposed to the capitalist class. So the ideology substantially determines a way of life of a person, which may or may not express its alignment with other people’s lives. Thus opposed to the concept of illusion, ideology can be substantiated by its social and material outcomes, which on the other hand assure or define cultural dimensions of every living even non-living object. So we live in heterogeneous codifications of ideologies. But neo-Marxist theories didn’t correspond to any revolutionary change of existing society or social conditions and also denounced class identities of common mass to release ideology from any structural or revolutionary composition. Noted Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci has dealt with the ideology as synonymous to the struggle. He however recognized unification of working class people and organized struggle for ideology to organize a revolution. Another Sociologist E. Veron defined, “...if ideologies are structures ... then they are not ‘images’ nor ‘concepts’ but are sets of rules which determine an organization  and the functioning of images and concepts... Ideology is a system of coding reality and not a determined set of coded messages ... in this way, ideology becomes autonomous in relation to the consciousness or intention of its agents:  these may be conscious of their points of view about social forms not of the semantic conditions (rules and categories or codification) which make possible these points of view... then an ideology may be defined as a system of semantic rules to generate messages... it is one of the many levels of organization of messages, from the viewpoint of their semantic properties...”

As noted cultural theorist Stuart Hall has explained that in a society, contradiction between significations is an inevitable outcome complying with the natural course of ideologies in social matrices. Thus ideologies can produce structures and also an inherent dynamism on the other hand, which overrule any level of domination from any of the stagnant, age-old ideological practices and remain unaffected. Extending definitions of ideology he has made a successful critique on Marx and Louis Althusser. According to Marx, ideology works because it appears to ground itself in the mere surface appearance of things... it represents social relations as outside of history: unchangeable, inevitable and natural. Thus Stuart Hall argues, despite scientific discoveries involved in the total development European modernity in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Marx defined the whole development as ideological discourse as it recognized and reoriented social relationships and capitalist economic order as inevitable. Hall established that all kinds of social parameters of development set and derive various dimensions of regulatory consciousness [not all to be regarded as dominant] which produce the sources of ideologies. On the other side, Hall, while analyzing Althusser’s view, which “... tended to present the process as too uni-accentual, too functionally adapted to the reproduction of the dominant ideology”, has made a very useful critique, “... Indeed, it was difficult, from the base-line of this theory, to discern how anything but the dominant ideology could ever be reproduced in discourse”. Hall continues arguing, “...since signification was a practice and practice was defined as any process of transformation of a determinate raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means of production, it also followed that signification involved a determinate form of labour, a specific work...”. Thus according to Hall, meaning is not therefore determined by the structure of reality but by the process of signification being appropriately done through social practice. This is also to be noted that the meaning, then, may not be as obvious as the given structure of reality but the signification can produce another dimension of meaning also. Hall also has made a useful recognition of social struggle which always influences the signification. Thus in this way of analysis Stuart Hall has recognized the inevitability of ideological struggle as a necessity to organize a movement. He nicely argues that if a trade union has lost its ideological struggle then the dominant capitalist interest may get an easy success to curb down the movement by imposing legal and political or administrative means.

Signification, Plurality & Politics:

It is already discussed that signification leads to a cultural outcome of contemporary social practices which naturally ensures cultural heterogeneity of a geo-social periphery. So there is a natural tendency to have one cultural prophecy may emerge as dominating other cultural forms in a pluralist format. But this process, at least, in contemporary social practices can hardly leave the idea of ‘ruling class’ or ‘oppressed class’ as to be easily identified. Naturally the question of the future of organized ideological struggle is gradually getting harder to answer. This jolt, however, even problematizes the Marx’s seminal concept that “...the ideas of the ruling classes are in every epoch the ruling ideas”, i.e., the ruling class also rules intellectual properties. Even in the contemporary developing societies such traditional identification marks of ruling class steadily get fragmenting and the situation becomes trickier than to be identified in the above manner. EMS’s analysis on Chinese dictatorship as dictatorship of the entire people against small stratum of the ‘former ruling class’ depicts such a fragmentation of traditional identification process.

Specially in developing countries the need for industrialization accentuates some emerging cultural trends which are gradually homogenizing the mode of social practices and ideological stance by almost identical syntagmatic arrangements of signs in commercial outlets. There is no doubt about that the underlying politics of signification of these syntagms is to dominate the lookers mystifying the notion of subordinating them as consumers. Though some will definitely feel oppressed and there are still millions of people left out of this aspect of development, it is yet difficult to virtually identify people who are to be considered as oppressed. It is doubtless that people of low income group [as measured by the administration] can always be identified as oppressed; and, the slogan of ‘education for all’ is not yet achieved, but the civil society believes that people are to be paid according to the degree of some people’s education. It is then very hard to distinguish the ruling class and oppressed class in such all round plurality. Only no alternative condition exists in these developing countries probably in ‘Bustee’[slums] areas where people are really barred from getting minimum civic amenities, but this signification is also no longer valid because both public institutions and NGOs nowadays claim to have initiated several measures of developing these areas and its people. Moreover the overall awareness toward Parliamentary Democracy has transformed the cultural aspirations of poor people and even destitute to reject the validity of domination from a single-dimensional authority. As Stuart Hall argues, “that notion of domination which meant the direct imposition of one framework, by overt force or ideological compulsion, on a subordinate class, was not sophisticated enough to match the real complexities of the case”, the situation of developing countries tells us exactly this truth. If it goes now to be difficult to identify ruling class, how can we determine the signification of “hegemony”? But the unequivocal truth is that people are nowadays found severely oppressed by the rules or regulations of number of establishments which cannot be structured under a single nationalist umbrella. Actually the notion of industrialization in developing nations has been justified by two modes of signification:

The first one is that even to be oppressed a person needs first to get at least a job to survive. The second one is that while inviting foreign investment you will have to accept the farthest extent of full fledged corporate-cultural domination which is the prime responsible for fragmenting traditional social bonds and cultural continuity into many sub-cultural structures in the society. Both fiscal and monetary deficits in the developing countries [analyzed in Indian context] have reached to a point of absurdity that they even are not in a position to prepare its infrastructure for foreign investment and for which they invite foreign institutions to build up infrastructure. But they have chosen the easiest way to open up the economy and market and reformed economic structure favourable to that, without doing anything for internal economic and administrative reforms for earning revenues on its own axis. It is needles to say that this signification also has been countered by several other significations. Probably the most valid signification is that despite being able to understand the corporate-cultural domination the developing countries must organize rapid industrial development for its own survival. Moreover the growing social movements against such stream of development have not given any political or ideological alternative which the common mass can really depend upon. So who is there to represent the ruling class and is supposed to oppress the common people? It is absolutely difficult to identify.

Signification and the process of mediation:

At this juncture plurality in the developing societies are accentuated mainly by the development and concentration of media and other signifying institutions. On the other hand media reveal its most distinguishable feature of producing consensus in the society among the prevalent pluralist outcomes of socio-cultural activities. Such consensus is doubtless to be existing beyond any mass political ideology. So media whereas trying to be producing consensus, cannot be held direct responsible to hold the power and be hegemonic to its audience or the society. So far the wide spectra of the process of mediation occurring in mass communication, which sets ideological plurality in a social format, media often flow its contents beyond the ‘sovereign will of the people’ and have become powerful to claim to have people’s opinion. On the other hand Daniel Chandler argues interestingly about the mediation process of other social institutions, “our social institutions also involve processes of mediation, which ‘organize, select and focus the environment through various transformational structures.’ They tend to channel human behaviour into predictable routines...”. It is thus to be clarified analytically that all kinds social and media institutions in a society try to mediate messages comprising of their cultural codes to perpetuate its sustainability. Chandler’s critique looks very important here in this context, “we can be so familiar with the medium that we are ‘anaesthetized’ to the mediation it involves: we ‘don’t know what we’re missing’. Insofar as we are numbed to the processes involved we cannot be said to be exercising ‘choices’ in its use. In this way the means we use may modify our ends...”. specially in developing societies the concept of plurality through the process of mediation has equivocality in a cultural domain of two sides. One is the process of formulation and other is the process of decoding. Social and media institutions often formulate plurality in terms of its narrow corporate objectives with a notion to feed the mainstream views of all the sects but often found less accommodative recognizing alternative or sub-structures of a society. While in formulation of plurality, these institutions are not very keen to explore and accept all sources of ideologies which may proceed against the plurality what they try to formulate to earn best out of every bargain. On the other hand people with its individuality or different forms of smaller sub-cultural identity, accept plurality to participate in a mediated or given consensus to avoid any risk or institutional pressure while decoding the message. So they have to be quite compromising decoding a message what media disseminate to ensure consensus in its favour. Here the concept of deviant attitude cannot be sustained though plurality with all its heterogeneous properties apparently looks very kind enough to recognize or absorb any deviant attitude. So a severe institutional pressure has finally resulted to become both necessary and sufficient trends of plurality or the neo-liberal pluralism.

Globalization of Culture: Rise of Cosmetic Heterogeneity

Does global culture exist at all? To start with Fredric Jameson, If globalization of economic practice by and large means absolute liberalization of both developed and developing nations including US-allies, or if we demand for optimal and independent use of technologies, do then we have to accept Jameson’s notion of ‘superficial’, ‘depthless’, and outright ‘commercial’ mediated postmodern cultural forms? This is otherwise not at all trivial as Lull argues that he would rather prefer to ‘concentrate on more concrete developments by emphasizing how people interpret their changing worlds, make them meaningful, and advance their personal, social, and cultural interests’. But this may also look too much utopian when huge number of have-nots is to be considered. They are nowhere in a position to deal with, define, advance, their individual cultural interests. It is true even for the middle class people also throughout the globe. So let’s not talk only about their social or socio-cultural interests. Even a middle class Chinese wage earner [earning $200 p.m. in Chinese currency, her husband was earning at that time, in 2000, was nearing $300] Zhang Iazhu, one of my once close associates, was hardly in a position to build up a duplex house for their own when this is not really an impossible task for a middle class Indian wage earner of almost same dimension.

The most dreaded metanarrative of our time is ‘globalization’ which refers to a massive sense of somewhat ‘away cultural’ notion that promotes, according to Lull, the scope of current developments in communication and culture, but more than that in a specific contextual reality. Though Prof. Lull has given an enhanced outlook toward modern developments [mostly corporate developments], does not believe that we have become one people. He argues further, ‘it is true that potent homogenizing forces including military weaponry, advertising techniques, dominant languages, media formats, and fashion trends undeniably affect consciousness and culture in virtually every corner of the world...but these political, economic-cultural influences do not enter cultural contexts uniformly...’. But the main problem with this analysis is that for people of most developing nations this plurality is often considered as ‘homogenizing forces’ as the prime effects of ‘globalization’ over their natural cultural heterogeneity that may further be extended to the natural mixing of symbolic cultural elements. These even affect all interactions in ‘diverse local conditions’, what Lull has tried to save as an imperative to establish that we are not affected by such homogenizing forces. Furthermore such homogenizing global cultural forces have not accomplished their globalization journey but received sufficient on-going protest from alternative socialist forums in different parts of the world. So Lull’s notion that ‘we will not become one people’ seems to be quite different from the on-going anti-globalization movements.

However let’s now move into the nitty-gritty of the metanarrative ‘globalization’ specially ‘of culture’ and ‘communication’. Many theorists, like James Lull, Arjun Appadurai have time and again tried to establish a root natural heterogeneity of cultural praxis that let people not become so called ‘globalized’. They believe at the same time that such homogenizing forces may affect consciousness and culture but do not surprisingly recognize the invading motives of the globalizing forces. Anthony D. Smith has however defined the practicing heterogeneity of culture, ‘...if by culture is meant a collective mode of life, or a repertoire of beliefs, styles, values and symbols, then we can only speak of cultures, never just culture; for a collective mode of life, or a repertoire of beliefs, values etc., presupposes different modes and repertoires in a universe of modes and repertoires. Hence, the idea of a global culture is a practical impossibility...’

I am now interested in talking about the mediated global, commercial cultural forms and codes that evidently accompany the mediated cultural contents that Lull et.al. exclude from their globalizing list. A stark difference of outlook has therefore always been evident between neoliberal ‘cultural development’ theorists and anti-neoliberal and progressive social thoughts.

However noted American sociologist Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that cultural heterogeneity [the idea that culture takes many forms] is much more valid than any theory of encroaching cultural sameness [Lull, 1995]. He has however excluded any possibility of taking globalization as Americanization, or neoliberal postcommerciality whatever. He argues: ‘...global homogenization invariably subspeciate into an argument about Americanization, or an argument about commoditization, and very often these two arguments are very closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from the various metropolises are brought into these societies, they tend to become indigenized in one way or another: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spetacles and constitutions...’. But surprisingly such diaspora of cultural arguments and elements do not at all designate the contemporary form of globalization and quite motivated to subscribe a progressive historical outlook which was bitterly countered, derecognized earlier during war and even post war period of time. Excolonial countries were the worst sufferers of such colonizing motives of the West. They have never felt the necessity of using Asian societies and markets until the contemporary phase of globalization when they feel an extraordinary need of Asian market and social structures because of severe internal economic and social crisis. Noted corporate strategist Kenichi Ohmae has thus pointed out: ‘the capital markets in most of the developed countries are flush with excess cash for investment. Japan, e.g. has the equivalent of US$10 trillion stored away. Even where a country itself hovers close to bankruptcy, there is often a huge accumulation of money in pension funds and life insurance programmes. The problem is that suitable and suitably large - investment opportunities are not often available in the same geographies where this money sits. As a result the capital markets have developed a wide variety of mechanisms to transfer it across national borders. Today nearly 10% of US pension funds are invested in Asia. Ten years ago that degree of participation in Asian markets would have been unthinkable’.

What they have done is, therefore accepting a growth of cosmetic cultural heterogeneity in every ideal term but deliberately rule out the politics of signification and so the appropriate installation of plurality. So the question of indigenous cultural forms being affected is nowhere discussed in their texts. 

Scape theory:

Nevertheless while he is stressing upon the impossibilities of cultural homogenization and any kind of domination over any particular form of culture Arjun Appadurai has classified ‘heterogeneity’ of culture into five ‘scapes’ which according to him, can assure such impossibilities of homogenization of culture. These five scapes are: ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, and mediascapes. 

Ethnoscapes refer to the deterritorializing migration of people from one part of the globe to another in various forms, as analyzed by John Tomlinson, like, tourists, immigrants, refugees, guestworkers, exile, and so on [Lull, 1995].

Technoscapes refer to the movement of corporate technologies from one place to another. Globalization of techno-capitalist development remains the prime consideration.

Financescapes refer to the undeterred movement of finance capital and industrial capital from any transnational source to any newly developing region, e.g., World Bank, International Monetary Fund, foreign development funds of some European states, like DFID of British government etc. 

Appadurai argues in this context that these scapes are quite disjunctive to each other and also unpredictable in nature but fail to understand the common unipolar and irreversible cultural factor ‘domination’ jointly perpetrated by the transnational corporates and group of nations led by the United States. Massive military aggressions in several nations, like, massacre in Indonesia, Mexico in late sixties; devastation in several West-Asian countries in two-three decades from early sixties; economic-cultural-military-industry axis domination in several Latin American states, like, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Costarica, Panama, Brazil, an other Boliverian states; allied participation in Gulf War in subsequent two stages [1990s and 2003-04] completely destroying Iraq and glorious remaining of the oldest Mesopotamian civilization, massacre in Afghanistan; promoting the civil wars actively in African states and former East-European nation states; and most recently nuclear deal with India follow so many earlier economic and cultural blockades since last forty years.

However by Mediascape, Appadurai argues about the transnational telecast of mass media technologies and mass produced images they constitute. Audience, according to Lull, here constructs narrative of the images produced and shown. This concept refers to when we see a Mexican film we construct an image of common Mexican lives. 

By Ideoscape Appadurai has expressed political images and in ideological domain, Lull has accommodated fundamental rights, freedom, responsibility, equality, discipline, democracy etc. which make up ideoscapes specified for different regions and habitations.

Thus by these five disjunctive ‘scapes’ Appadurai has emphasized on heterogeneity in diffusion of innovative and adoption of new ideas that overrule any form of hegemonic interaction, homogeneous ideation and influence. Mass media, as a special referent, communicate diverse and extended, polysemic contents that nowhere correspond to any homogeneity of message. So homogeneous constellation in cultural praxis is impossible.

On the other hand Stuart Hall while moving into the multiplicity of encoding and decoding of mediated message discards such automated outcome that human beings naturally conceive culture that is independent of any form of domination. Hall in this context while installing the same plurality of meaning of the message structures has stressed upon underlying struggle performed by the decoder of message. He conceived the message having close relation with the production function where lives the struggle for meaning and identity as well as the pertinence of domination. He quite substanively argues that polysemy must not be confused with plurality because in every social space classifications in cultural political orders are being imposed to constitute a ‘dominant cultural order’ that rules the dominant or preferred meaning for its audience. And this dominant cultural order however articulated by dominant social institutions.

Encoding-Decoding model:

Hall argues in this model that ‘broadcasting structures must yield encoded messages in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institutional-societal relations of production must pass under the discursive rules of language for its product to be realized. This initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse are in dominance. Before this message can have an ‘effect’, satisfy a need or to be put to a ‘use’ it must first be appropriated as meaningful discourse and be meaningfully decoded. It is this set of decoded meanings which have an effect, influence, entertain, instruct, or persuade with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological, or behavioural consequences’. Thus with this relational discourse structure creates a code and yields a text-message and also determines ‘effect’, ‘uses & gratifications’.

The model however reveals that meaning structure of encoding may not be same with that of decoding. They do not constitute ‘immediate identity’ and codes are not symmetrical, i.e., codes produced by the encoder-producer may not be symmetrical with the codes of decoder-receiver. So denotive meaning of a code largely depends on situational ideologies and therefore class struggle in language is almost inevitable that signs and codes enter into struggle over meanings. Hall argues in this context that literal or denotive meanings are not outside ideology and always perpetrate struggle. 

Cultivation theory revisited: Audience brought back from ‘hyperreactive’ allegation

As it has been already argued that polysemic nature of codes [verbal, visual, televisual etc.] basically reveal asymmetry between codes of encoder-producer and that of decoder-receiver and lack of equivalence between them. This functional proposition is successfully used to explain Gerbner’s notion of ‘television content’ where such lack of equivalence can be widely seen among the audience. Hall argues that ‘it might also transform our understanding of audience reception, reading and response as well’.

Cultivation analysis in Gerbner’s notion tells us the long term heavy viewing of televisual contents [preferred ones] leads to a substantive change in audience behaviour and ideology. But as Hall argues that televisual content or television programmes are not at all behavioural inputs. Interestingly he remarks that ‘though Gerbner has mentioned that representations of violence on TV are not violence in reality but the message or image of violence, but we continue doing research on the question of violence as if we are unable to comprehend this epistemological distinction’. Gerbner however condemns the audience for becoming hyperreactive to such projection of not violence but the image of violence.

Hall in this context has explained semiology of televisual signs and its atachment to the immediate cultural praxis. According to Hall, all televisual signs are more than a ‘sign’, are a combination of visual and aural ‘discourses’, thus become an Peirce’s iconic sign that even depend on the things represented. Thus studying visual signs or languages often leads to a deep confusion and controversy is the first outcome in the society. He argues further that visual language transforms [translates] three dimensional reality into a two dimensional plane ‘it cannot be the referent or concept it signifies. The dog in the film can bark but it cannot bite’. So the reality exists outside the language but constantly mediated in this language. So our knowledge [even that may be discursive] has been produced and assured in this way. Hall says that true and transparent representation of the ‘real’ is not our knowledge but how it is being articulated is going to be the thing we are interested in and this is the ‘code’. Thus code analysis is as important as to analyze our understanding to it and according to Hall, Peirce’s iconic signs are similar to the Sausseurean code [the particular cultural arrangement of signs]. In his words, ‘...naturalism and realism - the apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or the concept represented - is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the real...’. So even continuous observation of the image or the mesage of violence [not the real] would cause a serious effect on audience psyche or behaviour.