Mike Wayne

TELEVISION NEWS AND THE SYMBOLIC CRIMINALISATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE

This essay combines quantitative and qualitative analysis of six UK television news programmes. It seeks to analyse the representation of young people within broadcast news provision at a time when media representations, political discourse and policy making generally appear to be invoking young people as something of a folk devil or a locus for moral panics. The quantitative analysis examines the frequency with which young people appear as main actors across a range of different subjects and analyses the role of young people as news sources. It finds a strong correlation between young people and violent crime. A qualitative analysis of four “special reports” or backgrounders on channel Fives Five News explores the representation of young people in more detail, paying attention to contradictions and tensions in the reports, the role of statistics in crime reporting, the role of victims of crime and the tensions between conflicting news frames.

Post-Fordism, Monopoly Capitalism, and Hollywood's Media Industrial Complex

This article seeks a dialectical critique of and synthesis between two conflicting paradigms. In exploring the changing structures and global markets of Hollywoods media industrial complex, it draws on, but also critiques, post-Fordist accounts of corporate change and market competition. It identifies the new dominance of the multi-divisional corporate structure and its combination with subsidiary and subcontractor modes of inter-corporate relations together with a new emphasis on branding to tap into segmented global markets. The second paradigm, the political economy of the media approach, has failed, to its detriment, to draw on or to engage theoretically with post-Fordist discussions. This is largely because post-Fordist accounts implicitly or explicitly suggest that one of the central dynamics of advanced capitalism - namely, its tendency towards the centralization and concentration of capital (the Three Cs Thesis) - is being corrected or reversed. Political economy rightly refutes this but we have to explain why the real relations take the appearance-forms (of autonomy and plurality) that they do and how this connects to the cultural dimension of the media-industrial complex. The analysis includes a case study of Disney as a multi-integrated corporation.

The Performing Northern Working Class in British Cinema: Cultural Representation and its Political Economy

Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996), The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), Little Voice (Mark Herman, 1998) and Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000) are a cluster of recent British films which represent an embattled Northern working class transgressing personal, gender and/or class boundaries that take them into uncharted spaces via public performance. The soundtracks of these films are very important. They are the vehicle by which a retro music based culture industry comes to be seen as some sort of amelioration of circumstances and/or (a sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent) transformation of the self. These films are fairly typical of the story which mass culture likes to tell about class: namely, that it is always on the decline rather than changing. This narrative of decline in turn implies that class is not an on-going element in the production of such signifying practices and that therefore the epistemological powers of class analysis have waned. To counter this requires locating British cinema within the specific economic conditions of production structuring these films. For these conditions are class conditions, they are social relations and not just a question of economics and institutions. While the working class is characterized by their relative lack of movement and mobility, their rootedness in place, capital is characterized by its restless mobility, its continual crossing of borders and transgressing of boundaries, its movement through space and a relative indifference to concrete place, or an engagement with concrete place only on terms that satisfy its accumulation imperative. We shall see that, with the exception of Brassed Off , these “British” films are in fact the product of American based Cultural Transnational Corporations (CTNCs). The CTNCs work through British subsidiaries or subcontractors to plug into national and regional cultures and articulate the resulting products across international markets via the American market. These films represent the recently acquired viability within the North American market of a certain kind of British film (low budget) offering a specific regional focus within Britishness (they are all set “up north”). I want to explore the implications of such an international political economy (and the pressures of commodification it brings to bear) for films addressing national and regional cultures with any complexity or specificity or (given the themes in the films of socio-economic crisis) political combativity. Brassed Off has often been assimilated to these other films and there are obviously generic and thematic similarities. However, while the film does share with these films some of their ideological

Kant's Philosophy of the Aesthetic and the Philosophy of Praxis

This essay seeks to reconstruct the terms for a more productive engagement with Kant than is typical within contemporary academic cultural Marxism, which sees him as the cornerstone of a bourgeois model of the aesthetic. The essay argues that, in the Critique of Judgment, the aesthetic stands in as a substitute for the missing realm of human praxis. This argument is developed in relation to Kants concept of reflective judgment that is in turn related to a methodological shift toward inductive and analogical procedures that help Kant overcome the dualisms of the first two Critiques. This reassessment of Kants aesthetic is further clarified by comparing it with and offering a critique of Terry Eagletons assessment of the Kantian aesthetic as synonymous with ideology.

Mode of production: new media technology and the Napster file

This essay explores the economic and cultural contradictions of capitalism which new media technology illuminates through its own distinctive prism of material practices. It critiques the technological determinism that accompanied the dot.com boom and shows why the hopes of a new economic paradigm underpinned by new digital technology were unfounded. The essay argues that the category mode of production, which diagnoses the fundamental contradiction between the forces and social relations of production, remains central to any account of capitalism and new media technology. The essay supplements the mode of development category with Manuel Castells’ notion of a mode of development (informationalism). It also discusses Marx’s analysis of fixed capital to explore the contradictions which technological advances intensify. In particular the essay argues that new technology in general and new media technology specifically generate economic and cultural contradictions for capitalism (as well as opportunities). These contradictions are illustrated via a case study of Napster, the music file swapping Internet service which the large media corporations crushed. However, music file swapping services continue to operate, demonstrating that new media technology has potentialities that cut against the priorities of accumulation and private property.

Transcoding Kant: Kracauer’s Weimar Marxism and After *

Abstract Kracauer’s rehabilitation in the 1990s sidelined his Marxist framework of the middle-to-late Weimar era in favour of the then still dominant if decaying paradigms of poststructuralism and postmodernism. It was also silent on the relationship between Kant and Marxism in Kracauer’s work. This essay addresses these weaknesses by arguing that Kracauer transcoded the structure of Kant’s ‘problematic’ around reification into a Marxist framework in the middle-to-late Weimar period. The essay considers how Kracauer conceived the mass ornament (photography and film especially) as a site of reification and critical pedagogy. It explores his strategies of de-reification and their overlap with Walter Benjamin and the ruptures and continuities between the radical Weimar work and his later Theory of Film. The essay argues that the Theory of Filmcan be better understood as a transcoding of Kant’s philosophy of the aesthetic in the third Critiqueinto the film camera itself, although the Marxian framework of the Weimar period is now considerably attenuated.

Constellating Walter Benjamin and British Cinema: A Study of The Private Life of Henry VIII

A certain methodological conservatism and insularity has settled over the study of British cinema which has come in some ways to resemble the more empirical strand of British film culture. In the 1980s much was made of recovering those genres (such as melodrama and horror) which had been marginalized by a critical consensus built around ‘realism’ (Higson). Historically, the British middle class has long been obsessed with social order and the version of realism which underpinned critical assumptions was well suited to providing it. Yet there is perhaps, to appropriate Julian Petley’s well known metaphor, a “lost continent” to be recovered, not only (as Petley suggested) in terms of genres but methodological possibilities as well. The pioneering attempt to apply a Gramscian analysis to Second World War films (Hurd) has by and large not been developed, at least by British academics. Marcia Landy’s sustained use of Gramsci to study British film is an all too rare example of mobilizing a theoretical paradigm from outside British society (Gramsci). This essay seeks to arrange a constellation between British film and the work of Walter Benjamin, focusing on Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII. The recent publication of Benjamin’s great unfinished work, The Arcades Project, provides the opportunity to develop Benjamin’s relevance to the study of film and illuminate British cinema through the lens of an ‘alien’ conceptual apparatus, just as Korda’s film in part filters British history and myths through a distinctly European aesthetic. The Hungarian Korda and the German Benjamin, were both from the middle class and as such familiar with their national high cultures, but both were committed, in their different ways, to engaging with mass culture and the new media of the twentieth century. There is a temporal co-incidence between Benjamin’s magnum opus, which was compiled during the 1930s, an era of economic and political crisis, and The Private Life of Henry VIII, which was released in the depression year of 1933. Difficult as it may be for us to imagine now, (and perhaps this is one reason for my interest in this historical moment) some kind of “break with the past, the major operation,” as the poet, C. Day Lewis put it (Symons 24), seemed imminent and inevitable to many people, even stalwart defenders of capitalism. The crux of my analysis is that for reasons and in ways yet to be discussed,

Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century

Considering Class offers international, interdisciplinary perspectives on class analysis today. It explores the gap between the class forces shaping the world and the paucity of class-consciousness at a popular level. The book shows the importance of the cultural struggle.

The Dialectical Image: Kant, Marx and Adorno

For the intellectuals, the philosophers and the priests, the Word has always been favoured over the Image. Since Plato’s parable of the cave of shadows helping to enslave the credulous, the Image has been associated with in-authenticity, manipulation, the transient and contingent, the feeble-minded and the masses. There has been a theological dimension to this distaste for the Image. For Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, the Image, which is by definition a finite thing, is singularly ill-equipped to represent something as infinite as God (Hobbes 2006: 34–35); hence the prohibition on Graven Images in the Jewish religion. The Word, by contrast, seemed to belong to the Mind, not matter that could decompose; it was Universal, not particular; its written manifestation belonged for a long time as the exclusive property of the ruling classes. In this context the Image threatened in effect to transfer the property of the ruling class — its cognitive concepts and moral ideas — to the masses in a form they could master. For Benjamin, this was one of the implications of the increasing mechanical reproduction of art in the 20th century: ‘the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition […] in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced’ (Benjamin 1999a: 215).

Young People, Politics and Television

We have seen that the capacity for representative democracy to be representative of social interests other than capital is on the decline. Therefore, the rationale for popular involvement in and representation through the political process is being eroded in the minds and actions of many social groups within Western democracies, including young people. After two world wars, the winning of the popular franchise laid the basis for the social democratic Keynesian welfare state in Europe and post-Roosevelt (and later after the black civil rights struggle) a similar if somewhat watered down social democratic model in the US. The establishment of the social democratic settlement in the UK after the Second World War had removed young people from exploitation in the labour market by providing universal state education and other welfare benefits. Phil Mizen argues that young people were one of the biggest beneficiaries of the post-war strategy of inclusion (Mizen 2004:17). In underscoring the break with this strategy of inclusion and universal support inaugurated by the new neoliberal dispensation, Mizen is arguably a little uncritical of the social democratic model. The welfare state was still a compromise between capital and labour after all and the state still undertook to mould the latter to the needs of the former through its various apparatuses, such as the education system (Willis 1977).