Plan for the day

• Assignments Page (Finally got that up…)
• Syllabus Update: No Leading Class Discussion Assignment
  • Weekly Participation Questions
  • This week’s: How do you consume news?
  • Participation is now 25% of your grade
• More on Prevailing Cultural Attitudes
• The Public Sphere
• Democracy and Media

Over all goal: Recognize the value (capitalism) underlying American culture. Male-dominated public sphere privileges profits: if it doesn’t make money, it’s not real work. Political preferences are irrelevant because media (specifically soundbite media on TV and non-public radio*) create/capture audiences for marketing products. Work is exchanging labor for wages, which then allow citizens–trained by ideology–the freedom to consume.

Feminized work is devalued not only because of systemic sexism but also because it doesn’t make money. Culturally, women are considered adept at nurturing, assisting, and, of course, childrearing roles.

*Yes, I’m biased, but Guglielmo Marconi pursued the wireless because of it’s commercial potential, so, if we’re being accurate, radio technology’s history is enmeshed in profit. The public radio model does use corporate sponsors and has a similar format for profit radio (news shows and segments), but its purpose is more to inform than to create constituencies to “get behind” a topic or policy.

Definitions for Discussion

Often when dealing with philosophy, rhetoric, and theory, the terms we use aren’t universally understood across disciplines. Meaning(s) is (are) entwined with word usage and history. Therefore, dictionary definitions are often inadequate to grasp the meaning of a term fully. The definitions below are to guide you in ways of thinking about culture as opposed to regurgitating in casual conversation.

• Critical Theory: [defintion not in the reading] often refered to as “theory,” an umbrella term for the many analyses of culture; examining society and culture and their products to understand how culture mediates a society’s ideology. Uncovering the ideology of a culture.
• Critical Rhetoric: this perspective is in contradiction to an assumed universalist sense of reason in the formation of a discursively constructed reality. “The perspective is useful both for the political speaker, as heuristic in composing discourse, and for the rhetorical critic or audience member responding to that discourse” (Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, p. 619). Traditional rhetoric (and all speech acts) persuades if both sender and receiver agree upon logic and reason–they’re “universal.” Critical rhetoric recognizes contexts and situations.
• Late welfare-state capitalism: a term for a late and post-industrial economy where businesses provide “welfare” type benefits (retirement, health care, insurance, etc.) to employees.
  • Please show me that you’re able to point to a contemporary example of this…

Jürgen Habermas “The Public Sphere” (1964)

Jürgen Habermas is still alive and well at 91.

• Public sphere: not the government, not a crowd, not the press (per se) but where public opinion is formed and (in theory) all citizens may contribute and be informed by this sphere.
• p. 51: “Today, newspapers and magazines, radio and television are the media of the public sphere.”
• p. 50: “…public opinion can by definition come into existence only when a reasoning public is presupposed.”
• p. 53: “…the newspaper publisher…changed from a vendor of recent news to a dealer in public opinion.”
• p. 54 (special interests): “The public sphere, which must now mediate [special interest] demands, becomes a field for the competition of interests.”
• p.55 (paraphrase): publicity is not an invitation for critical debate on a subject; instead, it’s to get people behind an issue.

If you have HBO Max, I highly suggest watching Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957). We’ve known for a long time that the media is influential…and superficial.

Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender?” (1991)

Fraser doesn’t directly react to Habermas’s article “The Public Sphere” but a later work. However, the discussion of the “public sphere” is germane (pun intended) to Fraser’s critique of the underlying masculine embodiment of these spheres.

• Marx’s definition derived from his letter to Arnold Ruge: “Critical Theory [is] ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’” (p. 253). {Note: the online translation is different–scroll to the very bottom.}
• “A critical theory…frames its research in the light of contemporary social movements with which it has partisan though not uncritical identification” (p. 253).
• Material reproduction: “societies must reproduce themselves materially; they must successfully regulate the metabolic exchange of groups of biological individuals with a nonhuman, physical environment and with other social systems” (p. 254).
• Symbolic reproduction: “societies must reproduce themselves symbolically; they must maintain and transmit to new members the linguistically elaborated norms and patterns of interpretation that are constitutive of social identities” (p. 254)
• Childrearing falls outside of Habermas’ social-theoretical framework: “childrearing is not per se symbolic reproduction activity; it is equally and at the same time material reproduction activity. It is a ‘dual-aspect’ activity” (p. 255).
  • Therefore, children must be born (material reproduction) in appropriate ways so as not to be a social burden and must be socialized (symbolic reproduction) to abide by the norms of the dominant culture.
• Socially integrated action contexts: “…are those in which different agents coordinate their actions with one another by means of an explicit or implicit intersubjective consensus about norms, values, and ends” (p. 255).
  • p. 255: “[The classification of childrearing as symbolic and other work as material reproduction] could be used…to legitimate the institutional separation of childrearing from paid work,” which is “a linchpin of modern forms of women’s subordination.”
  • Similar statement on p. 259: “…linchpin of modern women’s subordination…”
• System-integrated action contexts: “…are those in which the actions of different agents are coordinated by the functional interlacing of unintended consequences, while each individual action is determined by self-interested, utility-maximizing calculations in the “media” of money and power” (p. 255-256).
• Capitalist “exchanges occur against a horizon of intersubjectively shared meanings and norms” (p. 256).
• p. 257: “Habermas’s categorical divide between the “private sphere of the lifeworld” and the “private economic system” faithfully mirrors the institutional separation of family and official economy, household and paid workplace, in male-dominated, capitalist societies.”
  • “It directs attention away from the fact that the household, like the paid workplace, is a site of labor, albeit of unremunerated and often unrecognized labor…”
  • “…women are assigned distinctively feminine, service-oriented and often sexualized occupations. And it fails to focalize the that fact that in both spheres women are subordinate to men.”
• To Fraser, the capitalist context is not free of ideology (although, really, nothing is non-ideological) because it is maintained by cultural assumptions and social practices–there is a marketplace that requires participant acceptance. Ask yourself, “Why does the latest HDTV–brand new–cost the same as when the previous HDTV model came out?”

Public and Private Spheres

• Private sphere: “the nuclear family” (p. 257).
• Public sphere: “the space of political deliberation” (p.257).
• Habermas separates family from economy (p. 257).
• Fraser’s main argument: “[Habermas] fails to focalize the fact that in both spheres women are subordinate to men” (p. 257).
• Family units are sites of coercion and male dominated (p. 257).
• Normatively secured forms of socially integrated action: “…are actions on the basis of a conventional, prereflective, taken-for-granted consensus about values and ends, consensus rooted in the precritical internalization of cultural tradition” (p. 258).
• Communicatively secured forms of socially integrated action: “…are actions coordinated by explicit, reflectively achieved consensus, consensus reached by unconstrained discussion under conditions of freedom, equality, and fairness” (p. 258).
• Fraser’s linchpin of modern women’s subordination: “the separation of the official economic sphere from the domestic sphere and the enclaving of childrearing from the rest of social labor” (p. 259).
  • Let’s complicate Fraser’s argument. If Habermas is a product of patriarchal thinking that ignores (intentionally separates) women’s contributions to society, why does patriarchy insist on heteronormative relationships?

Patriarchy or just Androcentric Bias Pervades Capitalism

Fraser is critiquing Habermas’ social-framework theory not because she thinks he’s dead wrong but because it doesn’t allow for a feminist-centered perspective, which would change the capitialist system. Habermas is socialist-leaning, and Fraser seems to be also. This article is not a simple “for” or “against” discussion. Fraser is pointing out that male domination is so entrenched in the capitalist system that any critique must be able to confront Patriarchy. She isn’t explicitly advocating the solution; instead, she’s devising a way to approach a feminist conscious critique of capitalism and the superstructures built up in support of the system.

• p. 262: “In Habermas’s view, citizenship means participation in political debate and public opinion formation.”
• p. 262: “…another aspect of citizenship not discussed by [Habermas] is….the soldiering aspect of citizenship, the conception of the citizen as the defender of the polity and protector of those–women, children, the elderly–who allegedly cannot protect themselves.”
• p. 263: “…male dominance is intrinsic rather than accidental to classical capitalism, since the institutional structure of the social formation is actualized by means of gendered roles.”
• p. 264: “…some form of dedifferentiation of unpaid childrearing and other work is required….as long as the citizen role is defined to encompass death-dealing soldiering but not life-fostering childrearing, as long as it is tied to male-dominated modes of dialogue, then it, too, will remain incapable of including women fully.”
• What does Fraser mean when she claims that “work[ers] are compensated by enhanced commodity consumption” and “there is a major decline in the importance of the citizen role as journalism becomes mass media, political parties are bureaucratized, and participation is reduced to occasional voting” (p. 265).
• p. 266: “Decolonization encompasses three things:
  • …the removal of system-integrated mechanisms from symbolic reproduction spheres;
  • …the replacement of (some) normatively secured contexts by communicatively achieved ones;
  • …the development of new, democratic institutions capable of asserting lifeworld control over state and (official) economic systems.”
• p. 267: “welfare state capitalism does inflate the consumer role and deflate the citizen role, reducing the latter essentially to voting–and, we should add, also to soldiering.”
  • “[Habermas] overlooks that it is overwhelmingly women who are the clients of the welfare state.”
• p. 268: “Welfare measures do have a positive side insofar as they reduce women’s dependence on an individual male breadwinner. But they also have a negative side insofar as they substitute dependence on a patriarchal and androcentric state bureaucracy.”
• p. 272: “Habermas’s account….fails to theorize the systemic, money- and power-mediated character of male dominance in the domestic sphere of the late-capitalist lifeworld.”

Her point is that gender discussions need to be a part of any critique in order to uncover “the evil of dominance and subordination” (p. 273) intrinsic to both the public and private spheres.

• While one could simply belabor the point that capitalism rules because capitalism rules, that would be utterly unproductive. The point of our inquiry should be to recognize the tenets of a system under which we live.
• What is the division of labor? Are there male jobs and female jobs?
• What is a goal of Fraser repeatedly mentioning that childrearing is unpaid?
• What are the ways families socialize their members into the capitalist system?
• What are some attributes of capitalism, especially gendered ones, that pervade the media? In other words, because the media are a product of the culture from which it comes, what marks it as capitalist?
• Is “decolonization”–removing the systemic biases from capitalism–possible?
• How does the media reinforce, thwart, or ignore the systemic bias of capitalism?

Thomas Jefferson et. al.

I included this reading in order to have us revisit the formal document that establishes (sure, not totally) the United States of America.

• People should be able to govern based on the consent of those governed (in fact, they are guaranteed this right by nature).
• After the preamble: notice the listing of abuses. There aren’t heavy details, but there are many abuses the writers point to for why the colonies ought to separate from Britain.
• In essence, the listing is a group of sound bites that can be used to gather support for rebellion.
• The Natives: notice the one group (besides the British) that the writers “call out” as particularly aggressive. They seem like…

Our Public Sphere

What is our public sphere? In other words, where is public opinion formed and what mediates that communication? This is a perfect time to consider our class’s definition of rhetoric: how meaning is communicated through discourse, texts, media, etc.

But isn’t reality reality?

• More on our public sphere–time permitting
• Video for this week’s discussion prompt on Canvas: 24-hour news comment from Jon Stewart (10/12/2009)

David Mervin: “The News Media and Democracy in the United States.” 1998.

I don’t post a set number of notes on each article. These notes are to guide your thinking but not replace your own reading of the material.

This article was published over 20 years ago and doesn’t consider Internet news, but the point to come away with is how powerful the American media are and the perceived impact on democracy. A new conversation didn’t just come about after online news…you’ll notice some things haven’t changed…

Values apparent in the article

• Informed citizenry (p. 7): “A vigorous democracy cannot settle for a passive citizenry that merely chooses leaders and then forgets entirely about politics….Some kind of public deliberation is required that involves the citizenry as a whole” (Page, 1996).
  • Consider this in the context of Curran, Fenton, and Freedman’s discussion of slactivism and clicktivism, where users quickly like or donate and then leave the conversation.
• Television as less intellectual effort (p. 9): “As Neil Postman has argued coming to grips with political news presented in print requires a far greater degree of intellectual effort than watching television” (1985).
  • I’m not sure this is so straightforward, but I have plenty of evidence that multitasking means you do “simultaneous” tasks worse than if you focused attention on a single task.
  • Yes, reading is an example.
• (p. 9): “The primary purpose of television is for entertainment.”
• infotainment: presenting “news” like entertainment not to be informative.
  • I use quotes around news because, in contrast to well-researched journalism, cable news appears to be factual and well-vetted.
  • Although journalists are a part of the overall media, I think we need to distinguish between journalism and infotainment that passes a news.
• (p. 10): “Watching television newscasts clearly does not engage the mind in the same way as reading columns of newsprint.”
• (p. 19): Ends on a reference to Adolph Hitler. He’s making an argument, and of all the wars he could have chosen, he chose WWII.
  Remember this for the Conniff reading from last month?

Democracy and the Media

• Role in politics (p. 7): The media play a more dominant role in selecting candidates.
• Consider this along with Donald Trump’s rise to become the Republican candidate in 2016.
• The media (including journalists) followed his every move and covered his every tweet…

Quality of Coverage

• Brief and Superficial coverage of politics (p. 10): “the coverage of political news is brief and superficial: complexities have to be skimmed over and there is no opportunity to debate controversial matters in the sort of depth that informed decision-making requires and that newspapers, theoretically at least, can provide” (emphasis mine).
• Cronkite on TV coverage (p. 10): “Hypercompression of facts, foreshortened arguments, the elimination of extenuating explanation all are dictated by television’s restrictive time frame and all distort to some degree the news available on television” (his biography, 1996).
• Pictures distort reality (p. 11): “Pictures, rather than illuminating complex situations, often distort the reality—oversimplifying and exaggerating, emphasizing the ephemeral and the trivial at the expense of the truly consequential” (emphasis mine).
• Question: Do *we* want in-depth coverage, though? Doesn’t the media give us what we want? If we keep watching, why would they change?
  • *By “we” I mean the collective, possibly prevailing mass of citizens—I do not mean a universal exists.
• Political coverage as ‘horse race journalism’: “[TV producers] have relatively little interest in issues, or policy alternatives, instead presenting politics as yet another form of sporting contest with individuals competing against one another for political advantage.” (p. 16)

Cultural Norms

• American leeway in criticizing public officials (p. 13): “the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution gave citizens and the press an absolute, unconditional right to criticise official conduct.” (“criticise” is the British spelling)
• UK willingness to tolerate secrecy (p. 12): “In the United Kingdom…reporters have to operate in a culture marked by restrictive libel laws and a willingness to tolerate secrecy in government.”
• Secrecy of government officials in US is less (p. 14): “Populism and a degree of openness, rather than hierarchy and secrecy, prevail in the American political culture. There is a widespread belief that the people have a right to know what is being done in their name.”
  • Question: What ideologies, prevailing cultural attitudes, support Mervin’s observation?
  • Do we need to revisit Asimov’s “Cult of Ignorance?”

Celebrity Status and Power of Media Talking Heads

• Cronkite and the Vietnam War (p. 18): “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”—LBJ’s statement to an aide after Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was un-winnable in 1968.
• Christiane Amanpour’s “ ‘nose for death and destruction’” (p. 18): news deliverers as celebrities who can influence policy.
• Question: Who do you trust for news? In fact, what do you consider “news” vs., say, “information”?

Mervin wrote this in the late-1990s, so the proliferation of online news wasn’t what it is today. Twenty-four hour news channels were quite popular in the 1990s. Do they allow for more in-depth as opposed to superficial coverage of stories?

The events of 2020 have shown the superficiality of news or what passes as news. Some news is really opinion (conviction, in fact). If you want to read an assertion that requires … read this “article”:

• “Socialists, with George Floyd, Get Their Anti-Police Wedge” Cheryl K. Chumley
• I went to her page at The Washington Times and saw a series of brief (around 100 words) pieces–not articles–that read like long tweets. In one rant about the protests on police brutality, she claims, “[George Floyd]’s become the tool by which socialists, communists, anarchists can topple our nation’s police forces.”
• But then consider this: She wrote a 2014 book Police State USA, which is about how bad it is to militarize police forces. Here’s a quote from her book blurb:
  • “The acquisition by police departments of major battlefield equipment emboldens officials to strong-arm those they should be protecting. The failure of the news media to uphold the rights of citizens sets the stage for this slippery slope.”
  • Obviously, she’s for police when they attack those she’s against, but she’s against the police if they affect her sense of “freedom.”

Next Class

We’ll be discussing Ch. 3 and 4 in Barker and Jane, so don’t wait until the last minute to do your reading. Don’t forget the Discussion Posts on Canvas.