Jason Toynbee

Ideology critique: the challenge for media studies

Taking our bearings from Stuart Hall’s essay from 1982, ‘The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies’, we argue in this discussion piece for the need to pick up the tools of ideology critique once again. Quite simply, the contemporary moment where accelerating inequality is masked by blame of the poor and of migrants demands it. The case is made first through a critique of ideological responses to the economic crisis after 2008. Then in the final section we examine advocacy of ‘social mobility’ in the public sphere, an ideological project if ever there was one.

Copyright, the Work and Phonographic Orality in Music

Shaped by a combination of romantic aesthetics and capitalist economics in the 19th century, the musical work was only enshrined in copyright law at the beginning of the 20th. However, even as the distinctiveness of the work was being legally inscribed, there emerged a new form of popular music making based on iteration. The recorded blues depended on continuity with other record-songs rather than the uniqueness of the individual work. Significantly, the phonographic orality at stake here was effectively unregulated, with ‘plagiarism’ being tolerated. The contrast is then with the hip hop genre. This has the same iterative mode as the blues, yet with the later style rights owners have become quite litigious, and now guard their symbolic property jealously. Focusing on the USA this article examines the differences between the two moments of blues and hip hop by analysing some key music copyright cases. It argues that despite stronger legal scrutiny of phonographic oral production in the contemporary period, this does not represent straightforward censorship in the way suggested by some commentators. Rather recent cases show the deep contradictions in copyright law between principles of uniqueness and tolerable continuity, and between the codification of physical sound and formal structure in music. These contradictions are inherent in the capitalist organization of music making, and are not susceptible to any quick policy fix.

Ideology: towards renewal of a critical concept

In this response to our critics and fellow-travellers we reaffirm our claim that contemporary media studies should reinvent a critical concept of ideology. We do this through addressing some of the problems with older critical conceptions of ideology and suggesting potentially fruitful ways forward through engaging with research traditions that have become neglected or are overlooked in the field. This avowedly inter-disciplinary position draws on political philosophy, critical realism, ordinary language philosophy, and discursive psychology. At the end of the essay we show how a critical concept of ideology can be applied in analysis of news reporting.

Continuing the Struggle in Hard Times

I take a grey October walk through a slice of the city near my home. There are Edwardian brick terraces and, further out, semis from between the wars. On the footprint of a factory I see a clump of freshly built, toy town houses. Strangely, a few engineering workshops linger on here and there — ghosts of the industrial past. But the big plants have all gone, and with them the militant labour movement that fired up the city and made it a centre of radical politics during much of the twentieth century. Nostalgia threatens to overwhelm me as I think about this. It’s a perversely pleasurable feeling: melancholia mixed up with memories of my own arrival here as a student years ago. Of course it’s an utterly self-indulgent sentiment too. For radical politics means nothing unless it confronts ‘now’.

Book Review: Robert McChesney Communication Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media New York: The New Press, 2007, 301 pp. ISBN 978 1 59558 207 2

common sense as a tool for analysis and site for future inquiry, is overdue. But perhaps even more valuable is how this historically informed analysis of the politics of consumption invites within the field of globalization studies a robust follow-up conversation about the limits of a market-driven social imagination and its implications for responsible resource control and environmental stewardship.