REPRESENTATION : Hegemony

Hegemony is a representational strategy of power; a way of using representations to control other people. In many ways hegemony is the central concept of media studies. This idea is crucial to the key concepts of representation, ideology, narrative, institutions and audience so it is essential that we develop a detailed understanding of the idea.

Let us start with a definition:

Hegemony is a representational strategy of social power that aims to ensure the continued tacit or active support of the majority of the people for the rule of the minority (even though the rule of that minority – the elite – is not in the interests of the majority). This is achieved by representing all groups bar the elite as unfit or unsuitable to hold and wield legitimate power and by representing the elite as the only group capable of ensuring social peace, prosperity, justice, etc.

For example:

The ‘fearful outsider’ is the most commonly encountered representation used by the elite to control the majority and ensure that the majority continue to tacitly support the rule of the elite. Anyone or any group who can be depicted as ‘not one of us’ or ‘outside the boundaries of normal society’ (i.e. as other) is being represented as fearful so that the majority of the population will turn to the elite (who hold and wield all the power in society) for protection. Consider; ‘hoodies’, paedophiles, criminals, ‘chavs’, foreigners, immigrants, every front page of the Daily Mail, indeed any moral panic is a hegemonic success because the elite will be turned to by the people to save them from the source of the panic (see the list above).

More technically we can say that:

Hegemony is the manufacture consent through the manipulation of the common sense.

Terminology

Other – The ‘not us’ from which we derive some sense of who ‘we’ are. This ‘we’ being a common sense notion useful to the manufacture of consent and not the reality of the social group in question; use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ always establishes a ‘them’ who are not us (i.e. it sets out what is normal – us – and what is abnormal – them).

Manufacture Consent – No elite can rule through force alone and forever. A ruling group needs the consent of the majority to maintain and replicate (i.e. hand it on to their children) their rule. The consent, however, is not sought from the majority – they could decide the wrong thing after all – nor left up to them rather it is manufactured by the elite through the processes of hegemony. It is a consent that is not freely given nor is it fully informed (quite the opposite) rather it is carefully built up for us by the elite; it is a consent we give with out knowing and without option.

Common Sense – The realm of uncritical assumptions and acceptance of what is normal and abnormal as defined by the elite or as Gramsci put it:

“Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. 'Common sense' is the folklore of philosophy and always stands midway between folklore proper (folklore as it is normally understood) and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.”

Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from cultural writings. London (Lawrence & Wishart) 1985, 421

Moral Panic – A moral panic is a collective outburst against a perceived threat to the ethical underpinning of the community. Often this threat has been outsiders to the community – Jews and Roma have suffered terribly at the hands of moral panics – but anyone or group who can be seen as outsiders (on grounds of their identity or actions) can also be constructed as a threat and thus cause a moral panic.

Links

Hegemony

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/contributions/gramsci.html

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm

http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/soc/courses/soc2r3/gramsci/gramheg.htm

http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm

http://rykalskireadsthemedia.blogspot.com/search/label/Hegemony

http://www.bisa.ac.uk/bisanews/0205/bisa0205_2.htm

Common Sense

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/csme/meas/papers/coben.html

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=308

Moral Panic

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/fdevdet.html

http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/media/mugging.html

http://www.mediaknowall.com/violence/moralpanicnotes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20030430.shtml

REPRESENTATION: Stereotypes

All media texts are full of representations of the exterior (you could call it 'the real') world and as whole things are themselves representations. Media texts will represent types and groups of people, places, times, opinions, ideas, concepts, events and actions to us and we have to try and work out where the representations come from and what they are doing. All such representations are mediated and are not the things themselves but media constructions made out of the idea (that is someone's or some group's idea) of the thing.

Type/Stereotype

One of the first issues to get to grips with is that of typing and stereotyping by the media. Typing is the ascription of assumed group characteristics to an individual that is assumed to be a member of the group in question. It is a very common human behaviour and we all of us do it all the time to make sense of people and groups we know little of. Stereotyping is the same activity, lumping someone into a group without knowing if they really are a member of that group, carried out with negative intent or effect. So to make assumptions about a person or group you do not know is typing but to make those assumptions with the intent or effect of denigrating, dismissing, disempowering or harming someone is stereotyping.

Stereotypes can be very hard to erase or change once someone has adopted a particular attitude. The point is that a stereotype is a habit of mind (an idea which is habitually used without critical awareness by a person) and so is a part of the person who uses the stereotype. It is common for strongly established stereotypes to become deeply rooted in the common sense of a culture and these widely held and un-critically accepted habits of mind are the most dangerous stereotypes. They are the ones most likely to be acted on and they are the ones most likely to lead to a moral panic (consider these instances – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Birmingham_riots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till).

Links

Stereotypes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/

http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/special_initiatives/toolkit/stereotypes/what_are_stereotypes.cfm

http://www.revision-notes.co.uk/revision/875.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/TF33120/gendertv.html

http://www.understandingprejudice.org/apa/english/page11.htm

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/media/library/stereotypethreat

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_112.asp

http://www.tolerance.org/teach/web/index.jsp

Ten Great Films and Some Reasons to Watch Them

This is by definition a highly subjective list and it would be well worth you thinking hard about what you consider your 10 greatest films are and why they may be different to this list. You might also want to look through this list-of-lists from Sight&Sound.

I do not want to offer you a list of the ‘greatest’ as that would be structured towards old hollywood greats so let me suggest the following for you to watch to consider the breadth of great films available. This list comes from my own media experience and is therefore coloured by my own preferences and tastes. It is worth noting that the lack of female directors amongst the film makers listed below isn't really my fault; the world of film making is very strongly dominated by men.

1 - The classic classic
Citizen Kane - dir. Orson Wells 1941
One of the most influential film drama’s of all time. Well’s critique of power in US society is scathing and the techniques he developed for this film influenced all subsequent films. There is so much to consider in this film that viewing it is the only way to begin to understand it.

2 - A English Thriller Classic
The Lady Vanishes - dir. Alfred Hitchcock 1938
Hitchcock was one of the all time great film makers and so many of his works could be considered here (Vertigo, Rear Window, North-by-North-West, Psycho, The Birds, etc, etc...) but for me The Lady Vanishes is a wonderful example of the master’s work.

3 - A mad satirical classic
Dr Strangelove or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - dir. Stanley Kubrick 1964.
Kubrick is another of the all time great directors and 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Paths of Glory or A Clock-Work Orange could all appear in this list. I have selected Dr Strangelove, however, because of the three perfect comic performances by Peter Sellers. Sellers, one of the greatest comic actors of all time, appeared in several films where either his presence alone elevated them to greatness or his performance pushed the works into the stratosphere (as was the case with I’m All Right Jack). The combination of Kubrick and Sellers means that Dr Strangelove is not to be missed.

4 - A modern romantic classic (with a bitter edge of protest and satire)
Strictly Ballroom - dir Baz Lurhman 1992
No-one ever believes me when I tell them that this seemingly innocuous Romantic-Comedy is one of the most political films ever made. Watch it, think about it, study the context of creation of the text, and try and consider the revolutionary call that is its subtext. Its true genius is only revealed when you think about it really hard.

5 - A master-piece of story telling
Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne) - dir. Guilliam Canet 2006
French cinema has contributed so much to world film culture that it seems odd to pick out this recent Thriller-Romance as one of the top ten films. The works of Jean Renoir, La Nouvelle Vauge (especially Truffaut & Godard) and a host of contemporary film makers place french film culture at the forefront of world cinema. The French, however, have always made great, great crime fiction (Rififi, Sur Mes Lèvres, Le Samouraï, Les Diaboliques, etc, etc, etc...) and so a nod to that great history seems appropriate here and Tell No One is such a well made and well told story that it deserves your consideration.

6 - A beautiful classic
Chungking Express - dir Wong Kar-Wei 1994
Watch it, watch it, watch it! Its just amazing!

7 - A documentary classic
Biggie and Tupac - dir Nick Broomfield 2002
Broomfield’s touching, effective, and engaged treatment of the deaths of Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur is a great example of the art of documentary.

8 - The genre classic
Shane - dir George Stevens 1953
Shane’s great strengths are its crystalline morality, beautiful locations, and sense of tragedy. The Western has thrown up so many amazing films (The Searchers, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Little Big Man, High Noon, The Good the Bad & the Ugly, Rio Bravo, Rio Grande, etc....) and any or all of them could be on this list but the place of honour goes to Shane for the tragic beauty of its ending.

9 - The bitterest pill
Chinatown - dir Roman Polanski 1974
Polanksi is another great film maker and this 1974 response to the classic film noirs of the 30s & 40s shows this greatness to full effect.
It is not the great directing, dialogue, lighting, sets & locations, acting, and plotting that makes this film worthy of your consideration but its end and the awful inability of anyone to do anything other than accept that conclusion.

10 - The eighties movie
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - dir. John Huges 1986
Nothing exemplifies the silliness of cinema in the 80’s better than Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The 80’s saw so many great comedies come out of Hollywood that it now look something of a golden-age; Ghostbusters, Trading Places (Dan Akroyd’s Loius Winthorpe III is a fantastic comic creation), the action-comedy Beverly Hill’s Cop, Heathers, etc. Ferris Bueller combines a post-modern sensibility with an old fashioned anarchic humour and a teenage high school setting to very great comedic effect.

Right-Blog; idiocy writ large

The right often shouts out that it dominates the blogosphere and has won all the arguements. This, however, is just shouting as the right has achieved no such thing. Indeed the reverse is the case as the right has simply and utterly retreated from argument and has become discursivly sterile.
The right seems to have decided that as long as it shouts loudly enough no one will notice that it's only talking to itself. The result is that the right-blogosphere has become a space almost seperate from the rest of the Internet/www (almost in the fashion of the successionists found in Gibson's Bridge cycle) giving the impression to the members of this social space that there are no competing voices and that indeed they have swept the field. The victory is, however, an illusion.

Posted with LifeCast

Troubled Traveller

Greg Hands, the Conservative MP for Hammersmith and Fulham, has initiated a classic silly season storm in a tea cup by attacking the historical information sections of guide books for their left-wing bias in a post on a tory blog. The post is classic right-blog nonsense whose principle purpose is to attack the BBC (a key target of Tory hate from the Thatcher years because its a state rather than private institution and therefore ideologically unspeakable and because it occasionally reported news) as a supporter of Islamism. The route to this remarkable accusation is nonsensical and so we wont let it detain us (the guide book says something, Greg disagrees and therefore, even though the two propositions are not mutually exclusive, the BBC is a supporter of islamism...); there is after all something altogether more interesting in the text.
History, the study of the human past, is a hugely contested field of human action because the past is so crucial to us. Our identity is forged in and connected to our understanding of the past and so control over the past - over how history is carried out - is control over people. This has been a truism since at least 1948 but historical and historiographical work since then has clearly shown this. Hobsbawn and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition is a key text in this historiographical tradition and works such as Anderson's Imagined Communities, Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy, the fascinating pairing of Said's Orientalism and Cannadine's Ornamentalism (which really must be read together in order to see how Cannadine has used Said's ideas and responded to and reworked them), and Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country, Ferro's The Use and Abuse of History, amongst others, have tried to get to grips with the past's power over the people of the present, to understand it and to show people how that power works.
However, all of this is inimical to the right's programme for the past. Following the lead of Leo Strauss and Maurice Cowling the political right turned its back on history and sought an alternative use of the past; for them the past was a propaganda tool and nothing else. Strauss articulated this propaganda use of history most clearly through his emphasis on the 'noble lie' that his studies of Plato had led him to (Cowlings acolytes tend to express their support for this programme through the, more coded, privileging of the works of von Treitschke). The key to the project is that people not understand the role of the past in the present and the role of social power in the construction of the history that communicates that past to the people of the present.
This rejection of history as attempt to understand the past finds its ultimate expression in the right's retreat into speculative fiction (they describe it as 'counter-factual history' but it is alternative past fiction in the mode of Philip K Dick, Robert Harris, and Ward Moore) which even though it suffers from a series of logical failures, is restrictive in what it can represent and fails to develop or expand understanding of the past in any way has come to be championed by the 'historians' engaged in this propaganda project. Although given the purposes of their project this is to be expected.
There is another reason for the right's rejection of history and lies in modern history's heretical embrace of social studies of various kinds. Sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminist & queer theory, social and discursive psychology, post-colonialism and (gasp!) post-modernism have all been embraced by history to assist it in the study of the past over the past five decades. This is heretical because all of these discipline (and now of course history) believe that their is such a thing as society and that social action by humans ought to be the focus of study. This is the ultimate heretical act for the contemporary right and by taking this terrible course history has condemned itself and is deserving of contemptuous dismissal.This is why modern right 'history' is so naive, anti-intellectual and ineffective. The proof of which can be seen Mr Hands' own post. There is nothing in the post that is anything other than rhetoric, discourse and representation; he provides a (necessarily) subjective interpretation of some historical interpretations and then condemns interpretation. Hands isolates (but gives no page reference for) the following,

The brand new Lonely Planet guide to the USA (5th ed, 2008) tells us that "Roosevelt did much to ameliorate the pain of the Great Depression"

aside from a reflexive hatred of Democrat presidents on the part of Tories it is very hard to see why the quoted statement is indicative of left-wing bias; its just an interpretation of the past and a very uncontroversial one at that.
The very use of the terms 'facts', 'bias'' and objective' by Greg Hands suggests a deliberately old fashioned uber-conservative and extremely infantile approach to history on the part of the honourable member. A-level syllabuses have rejected such terms and the approach they indicate since the mid-1980's and university level historical education had been moving away from this nonsense since the early 1970's at the latest. Hands rejects history and historical understanding in the very act of shouting his seeming defence of them.
Finally, Hands finishes with an attempt at sarcasm that falls flat because he fails to recognise that Fox News already publishes books because it is a part of News Corp and thus a sibling to Zondervan the US christian publishers and, of course, HarperCollins. So if NewsCorp wanted a print outlet for for the Fox News form of 'truth' it could easily have it. Of course it might be easier to use one of the newspapers they own - I think The Times has a travel section on both days of the weekend.

Fallon; Flogging Fun

Fallon have made a name for themselves beyond the microcosm of the Advertising Industry with the success in the wider society of their less directly selling and more open in meaning adverts for Cadburys.
Fallon are of course a long established advertising company, having been in operation for twenty-five years, with offices across the globe but the effect they have achieved with their most recent advertising is to make themselves a talking point in addition to the adverts being note worthy.
The two central adverts in the Cadburys campaign - Gorilla and Trucks - have stirred up a great deal of general cultural interest because of the entertainment value of the texts. This, of course, is the intention. Fallon long ago noted the need for adverts to step out of the context of advertising and become entertainment so that its marketing effect would last beyond the act of broadcasting; through the adverts becoming a topic of discourse or phatic interaction.
The effect of the first advert - Gorilla - was especially powerful in this regard. The combination of anthropomorphism and narrative enigma and action in the text powerfully interpellates the readers of the advert. The anthropomorphism is the trick of it; the our sensation of affinity with the great apes is well established and the fascination evoked by their behaviour is a constant part of human life. Apes - real or mocked up have played key roles in several texts (the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan sequence, Clint Eastwoods Every Which Way movies, The Mighty Boosh, Trading Places, the now infamous PG Tips adverts, etc.) because they are so wonderfully 'other'. It is this otherness and our sense that perhaps the gorilla really could play the drums - and enjoy the experience - that gets us talking about the advert long after the text has left our screens.
The second advert, Trucks, is not so powerfully effecting. The sense of play and enjoyment is still present but the anthropomorphism is not. The audience do not read the Trucks as enjoying the fun but their drivers; who we do not see. This anonymity prohibits a strong identification with the world of the text and limits the interpellating force of the advert.
These two adverts display a key aspect of Fallon's approach to advertising; a structure for adverts that can only be called the Fallon Fun Format. The trick of the structure is to hold the selling or branding message back until the very end of the text. This is most obvious in Fallon's excellent spots for Sony Bravia where the branding message arrives only briefly at the very end of the text after the intriguing fun has played out. In the first of the Bravia TV spots, Balls, the combination of the rubber balls pinging down the steep streets of San Francisco and the laid back soundtrack is great fun to watch and the product/brand being pushed is only revealed at the last when our appetite for information has been whetted. The same structure is at work in the Gorilla, Trucks and other Bravia spots and this is no coincidence. The selling function of this structure lies in the breaking down of our defences to the branding through the entertainment provided. We are captured by the high entertainment value of the adverts and thus do not begrudge the advertisers their crack at the whip when it comes; it seems fair recompense for the show they have put on rather than a hectoring annoyance. This last achievement is the greatest because most audiences dislike advertising breaks and the commercials that fill them; turning that response around is very clever indeed.

Close Up Of Terror

Michael Powell's Peeping Tom contains an even more trenchant critique of the close up. In this text the close up is an act of murder and the 'director' is a psychopath. Not even Sunset Boulevard is as scathing.

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