Introduction To Part One_phd_terry Flew

Part One

2

Introduction to Part One

Culture, Institutions and Cultural Policy Studies

Cultural interests and attributes… can only be described and assessed relative to delimited norms and forms of calculation; that is, those made available by the actual array of historical institutions in which such interests and attributes are specified and formed. Clearly such an argument entails setting limits to the concept of culture and cultural development. (Hunter 1988b: 106)

Ian Hunter’s call for cultural studies to be less concerned with abstract dialectical struggles and to orient itself more towards the history and politics of cultural institutions, and the everyday practices of those who administer them, provides an important starting-point for understanding the emergence of cultural policy studies in Australia. At the core of the cultural policy studies debate, which was a dominant one in Australian cultural studies in the first half of the 1990s, were two issues. The first was a call for cultural studies to be less concerned with textual and interpretative criticism, and to be more concerned with the distinctive institutional arrangements through which cultural practices are administered. Second, there was a view that, by linking cultural studies to social-democratic politics and citizenship discourses, there existed a greater possibility of enabling intellectual work to contribute to more effective forms of political practice. In

3 particular, it was envisaged that such a ‘reformist’ cultural studies practice could inform the practices of relevant decision-making agents in particular institutional and policy fields. In explicit contrast to the neo-Marxist lineage of cultural studies, this would involve an ongoing engagement on the part of critical and cultural intellectuals with regulatory and policy agencies, or what Tony Bennett described as ‘talking to the ISAs’ (Bennett 1992c: 32). 1

In light of cultural studies’ historical associations with the radical and antistatist politics of the New Left (Hall 1992), it is not surprising that such arguments were believed by critics to involve an evacuation of cultural studies’ critical vocation in the name of political pragmatism. At the same time, however, theorists such as McRobbie (1996), McGuigan (1996), Lewis (1997) and Ouellette and Lewis (2000) have considered the possible political gains for cultural studies in developing a more policy-oriented approach to media and cultural analysis. Moreover, there has been a growing body o work, particularly in Britain, that has sought to apply a ‘cultural industries’ or ‘creative industries’ model for understanding creative practice in capitalist economies (Mulgan and Worpole, 1986; Garnham 1987; Lewis 1990; Pratt 1998; Leadbetter 1999; Landry 2000).

Cultural policy studies as it developed in Australia the 1990s was strongly oriented toward what may be termed the ‘modern’ institutions of government, or those which emerged at the historical interface between state formation and the

4 development of political and cultural technologies of national citizenship, such as museums and educational institutions. Importantly, these have been areas of cultural activity that, until quite recently, have either been exclusively the preserve of the state or subject to strong regulatory tutelage by state agencies. As a result, the gap between the institutions and their related policy frameworks is typically not that great; policy is formulated by the relevant agencies, and implemented by the cultural institutions that they are responsible for. This has led some critics, such as Miller (1994, 1996) and Craik (1995), to argue that Australian cultural policy studies worked with a theoretically underdeveloped understanding of policy, leading to an unduly benign image of government, and an uncritical acceptance of the ‘bureaucratic imaginary’.

Consideration of broadcast media policy changes the focus of cultural policy considerably. In countries like Australia, with a predominantly privatelyowned media sector, strategies to link the use of media technologies to principles of cultural citizenship has always occurred in the face of considerable resistance from powerful corporate interests to such governmental practices. While a ‘citizenship’ discourse can be traced in media reform campaigns in Australia, it has existed in competition with prevailing notions of the media audience as consumers, and the importance of private media institutions being protected from undue government interference in their everyday operations. Policy is therefore unable to function as a ‘master discourse’ to institutional practice. Instead, policymakers have to aim to guide the conduct of commercial broadcasters towards

5 preferred governmental ends. They do so in a political environment where that commercial broadcasters are not simply the subjects of government policy, but are also politically powerful entities able to exert considerable influence over governments to influence policy outcomes towards their preferred ends.

Broadcast media is also seen as having the potential to corrode national citizenship, as its capacity to be simultaneously distributed across space has been associated with an uncoupling of the ‘fit’ between polity and culture within a national space. Chris Barker (1997) has observed that, as a ‘globalised’ cultural technology, television presented a profound challenge to the integrative structures associated with the development of national cultures through the institutions and practices of nation-states. The dominance of the United States in global audiovisual trade is seen as presenting further dangers to national citizenship, particularly the threat that media globalisation will promote U.S. cultural hegemony, cultural imperialism, and undermine distinctive local and national cultures. Debates about broadcast media policy in Australia have thus always been concerned with the question of what Philip Schlesinger (1991a: 162) terms ‘communicative boundary maintenance’, in a culture that is highly open to cultural imports from other English-speaking countries such as the United States and Britain. Media globalisation is also increasingly having an impact upon national policy, not only in terms of investment and product, but through the ways in which international trade agreements, such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), are promoting an ‘internationalisation of media governance’.

6

Institutions and Discourse

Any institution implies the existence of statements such as a constitution, a charter, contracts, registrations and enrolments. Conversely, statements refer back to an institutional milieu which is necessary for the formation both of the objects which arise in such examples of the statement and of the subject who speaks from this position (Deleuze 1988: 9).

One of the central tenets of cultural studies has been that ‘reality’ or ‘the social’ is culturally constructed and, as a result, social meaning is invariably open to political and cultural contestation. John Hartley has described a central task of cultural studies as having been to ‘convince activists and adversaries alike that discourses organise practices, that the real is constructed (partly through media), and that, therefore, reality is materially affected by media discourses’ (Hartley 1991: 11). Independently of cultural studies, the work of Michel Foucault was developing a materialist theory of discourse, through establishing the rules of formation of a discourse and the conditions of existence of discursive formations. McHoul and Grace argue that the key implication of this work was that:

If discourses don’t merely represent ‘the real’, and if in fact they are part of its production, then which discourse is ‘best’ can’t be decided by comparing it with any real object. The ‘real’ object simply isn’t available

7 for comparison outside its discursive construction. (McHoul and Grace 1993: 35)

Recognition of the materiality of discourse presents a theoretical challenge of establishing the relationship between discourse and that which constitutes nondiscursive relations, such as institutional, social and technical relations (Foucault 1991). One approach, that has been characteristic of political economists such as Golding and Murdock (1991), Mosco (1995) and Garnham (1997), argues that the nature of texts and discourses is largely determined by the material realities of media and cultural production and distribution under capitalism. By contrast, Stuart Hall has argued that while ‘material conditions are the necessary but not sufficient condition of all historical practice … we need to think material conditions in their determinate discursive form, not as a fixed absolute’ (Hall 1996: 147). Bennett has observed a contradiction in Hall’s argument, in that it ‘puts discourse on both sides of the equation’, meaning that since ‘“material conditions” … are discursive in form, [they] cannot fulfil the role assigned to them of setting limits to discourse. (Bennett 1992a: 256). Recognising a similar contradiction in neo-Marxist cultural theory, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe proposed a ‘post-Marxist’ alternative, that rejected the distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices, instead insisting upon ‘the material character of every discursive structure’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 107).

8 All three of these theoretical positions have their origins in Marxist social theory. As a result, whatever their differences, they share a similar tendency to conceive of institutions as elements within broader structures. A reluctance to differentiate the institutional forms of culture has been a recurrent legacy of structuralist Marxism, where state and para-state institutions were assessed on the extent to which they promoted ideological hegemony or were instruments of state repression as part of the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The approach to institutions in Marxist social theory has been premised upon the assumption that the practices of institutions can in some sense be ‘read off’ a broader analysis of structural and social relations. As a result, the need to study institutions as distinctive analytical entities is subsumed within the task of interpreting capitalism as a social totality.

If such a perspective is found to be an untenable basis from which to understand both economic agents and the national systems in which they operate, as is argued in Chapter One of this thesis, then institutions emerge as an object of critical analysis in new and interesting ways. It becomes essential, for example, to analyse national legal and policy forms as significant in their own right, rather than as ‘reflecting’ other ‘global’ structural determinants, since they constitute aspects of the conditions of existence of institutions and therefore influence their decision-making practices. Another implication is that corporations should be conceived of, not as unified entities with a singular goal, but rather as institutional sites where a diverse range of calculations and practices are undertaken, and

9 whose boundaries are not fixed, but rather intersect with the calculations and practices of other forms of social agency, including regulatory agencies, trade unions and community organisations (Thompson 1982). In the ‘mixed economy’ of Australian broadcast television, this points to the need to consider how the conduct of private media corporations that control broadcast stations and networks is shaped by the legal, regulatory and policy environment within which they operate, rather than assuming that their overall conduct is structurally ‘given’ by the private nature of their ownership in a predominantly capitalist economy.

Citizenship Discourse and the ‘Deep Structure’ of Australian Broadcasting

The concept of citizenship does not by any means imply a politics of the status quo - a sophomoric version of civics. (Cunningham, 1992: 11)

If the problematic of underlying structures is rejected, then it becomes possible to think of discourses and institutions co-existing at a similar ‘mid-range’ epistemological level. It becomes very fruitful to think of discourses and institutions as not only co-existing but interlocking, in a manner akin to two ropes in a ship’s knot. Both discourse analysis and institutional analysis face the challenge of how to explain stability over time and structural change, as well as how to deal with differences and continuities between nation-states and over historical time. Michel Foucault’s approach to the study of discourse sought to

10 establish ‘the positivity of discourses, their conditions of existence, the systems which regulate their emergence, functioning and transformation’ (Foucault 1991b: 69). In an analogous manner, Anthony Giddens’ concept of structuration traces the ways in which institutions and institutional configurations become embedded over time in particular places, and are in turn constitutive of social and political fields, forms of identity and allegiance, and modes of discourse and ways of thinking about issues. Foucault’s approach to discourse and power, and Giddens’ approach to institutions, together provide a means by which the intersection of discourses and institutions can be understood as enabling a ‘deep structure’, that is durable over time, to emerge within identifiable fields of social regulation and cultural practice.

It will be argued in Chapter One of this thesis that such a ‘deep structure’ has existed in the field of commercial broadcasting as it has developed in the 20 th century, although its institutional forms and political permutations vary significantly across national broadcasting systems. The idea that broadcasting involves an essentially commercial relation between broadcasters and their audiences, subject to the neutral oversight of a regulatory authority, has always been qualified in practice by the expectations that the users of such powerful technologies of public communication are subject to obligations to serve the ‘public interest’. As a consequence, commercial broadcasting licensees are seen as having ‘public trust’ obligations to the community, in order to justify having such exclusive access to the airwaves as a system of mass media distribution. In

11 Australia, the relationship between such concerns and the resultant institutional and policy settlement came to solidify around three key elements:

1. The strong capacity of the commercial broadcasters to influence the policy and regulatory environment; 2. A perceived trade-off between requirements on the broadcasters to meet policy objectives such as adequate levels of local program content in exchange for exclusive access to the airwaves, and the ability to earn monopoly profits through restrictions on competition; 3. A counter-discourse that has demanded greater public participation and stronger regulatory influence over commercial broadcasters, as a condition for their access to such profitable and influential means of mass communication.

Broadcast media policy, as with all forms of public policy, has both a normative and a technical dimension. In this thesis, the normative dimension of broadcast media policy is understood through its intersection with citizenship discourse. Citizenship discourse has become increasingly important in media studies in recent years, and this thesis will explore how the concept of citizenship has been used by media activists and policy-makers to manage the ‘policy divide’ between broadcast media as a commercial industry and a cultural resource. This involves developing an understanding of the relationship between media and citizenship that does not reduce the relationship to either freedom from

12 government controls or the necessity of non-commercial broadcasting, but allows for a detailed understanding of how legislative and regulatory mechanisms have been used in Australia to try and make commercial television broadcasters more responsive to the discourses and principles of citizenship.

Citizenship is understood in this thesis as operating at two interconnected levels - the political and the national - with the cultural dimension of citizenship permeating both. Campaigns to extend the principles of political citizenship into broadcast media policy have drawn upon two principal elements. The first has been the way in which the ‘public trust’ attached to private ownership of access right to the broadcasting spectrum renders broadcast licences a form of both public and private property, or what Tom Streeter (1996) has termed ‘soft property’. Given the contingent nature of such private property rights, state agencies have a potentially strong capacity to determine the legal and institutional arrangements and conditions attached to such property rights, such as a requirement on broadcasters to be responsive to ‘public interest’ discourses. Second, it points to ambiguities within citizenship discourse itself, or, more precisely, the extent to which the practices and political rationalities of modern forms of government can be seen as generating a ‘participation gap’, arising from the distance between actions taken on behalf of citizens by government agencies, and the actual involvement of citizens in decision-making processes that affect their lives. This perceived ‘participation gap’ has not only animated campaigns for opening upon broadcast media policy to greater public scrutiny; it has been a

13 central element of political campaigns for ‘democratising democracy’ (Giddens 1998: 72) that first gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, and which continue to be an important element of radical reformist politics.

Citizenship rights have been historically attached to the ‘imagined communities’ of

nation-states.

In Australian

broadcasting,

the

central

manifestation of principles associated with national culture and national citizenship is the requirement that commercial television broadcasters program a required quota of Australian content, also including sub-quotas for drama, children’s programs and, more recently, documentaries. The Australian content quota has been strongly supported by the production industry, media unions, academic critics, and public interest and activist groups. Regulatory authorities have also seen the Australian content quota as a central means by which commercial television broadcasters fulfil their public interest obligations to the Australian community. It has thus been a central component of the social contract between broadcasters, regulators and the public.

Policy Structures and Policy Activism in Australian Broadcast Media

The alternative is fundamentally concerned with process, with recipes rather than blueprints, with cooking rather than engineering. In a sense, everything in the policy world is really just process ... We cannot afford,

14 therefore, to view policy as just a study of decisions or programs ... Policy is the continuing work done by groups of policy actors who use available public institutions to articulate and express the things they value (Considine 1994: 3-4).

The ‘turn to policy’ in cultural studies was seen, both by its supporters and critics, as seeking to bring the perceived ‘hard edge’ of the social sciences, with their use of quantitative methodologies and more ready access to government agencies, to media and cultural studies. Yet the above quote from Mark Considine indicates that, within the field of policy studies, there has been a concern to modify its self-image as an applied, problem solving area with a strong orientation towards its government clients. Other theorists in this field, such as John Forester, have drawn upon critical theory to argue that policy is best analysed as a ‘mid-level range of institutions that links the lived world of actors to the broader structures of society’ (Forester 1993: 12).

One issue that is central to these discussions is the relationship between different debate cultures, and the positions that social actors occupy within them (O’Regan 1996). The communicative positions that are occupied by bureaucrats, academics, activists and industry representatives with the policy culture of Australian broadcasting are in many instances quite ritualised. The alliance between the production industry, the media unions, academics and policy activists around supporting Australian content regulations, and the ritualised forms of

15 opposition displayed by the commercial broadcast networks to this position, is one example of this that is considered in this thesis. Debate cultures become most interesting, however, when those speaking from within one communicative position are required to translate their arguments and key concepts into forms that make sense to those from another debate culture. This thesis considers two instances where such ‘translation’ was required. The first, discussed in Chapter Five, concerned attempts made by Australian media and cultural studies academics to translate their critical accounts of ‘Australianness’ into discourses that made sense to those responsible for administering areas of media and cultural policy where these debates were relevant, such as Australian content regulations. The second, discussed in chapter Six, concerned the ways in which the fields of media and communications policy were rendered interpretable to economic discourse, as these policy areas were linked to the principles of microeconomic reform and competition policy.

The approach to understanding policy developed in Chapter Three outlines the four key elements of a policy system:

•

political economy, or the institutional forms and structural relations through which resources are produced and distributed;

•

policy institutions, including both the formal governmental and regulatory authorities responsible for the administration of laws, but

16 also the rules and procedures through which the conduct of institutional agents is structured within this policy system; •

policy cultures, or the shared sets of values, assumptions, categories, customs, conventions and discourses that allow competing interests within a policy system to maintain ongoing and productive relations;

•

policy communities, or the relations of alignment, dependency or antagonism that emerge within a policy system over time, leading either to a sustained value consensus, or to conflict, contestation and policy change.

Discourse analysis has proved to be highly productive for policy analysis in general, and media policy analysis in particular, as it can be observed that statements enter into an order of discourse which already has its own rules, hierarchies and conditions of existence. The concept of policy discourse is particularly important to an understanding of policy cultures and policy communities. It is through the emergence of a dominant policy discourse that hierarchies of meaning and significance can be attached to the diverse statements of competing interests in the policy field, so that statements are regulated in terms of their capacity to influence policy outcomes.

It is in relation to such dominant policy discourses that the role of academic and professional expertise becomes highly significant in a political sense. Drawing upon the new relationships between knowledge and power that

17 are associated with the rise of specific intellectuals, or intellectuals working within given decision-making fields (Foucault 1980), a number of possibilities in the deployment of expertise in the field of broadcast media policy in Australia can be observed. The traditional utilisation of politically neutral expertise to assist in ‘rendering social relations governable’ (Johnson 1993: 151), has raised issues about the ethics of policy studies, including cultural policy studies (Forester, 1993; Miller, 1994). Another approach, that becomes increasingly important in Australia in the 1980s, is the linking up of this expertise to wider personal and institutional networks of media policy reformers, or what Anna Yeatman (1998) has described as activism in the policy process. Such activism involves building linkages and coalitions between policy ‘insiders’, such as progressive bureaucrats and government ministers, and policy ‘outsiders’, such as activists, academics, unions and community groups, in order to develop tactical advantage in shaping and shifting the policy process.

This thesis establishes that the central elements of a policy system in Australian broadcasting emerge in the 1950s and 1960s, which continue to dominate for the remainder of the century, in spite of significant challenges from quite disparate sources in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The political economy of Australian television, and the policy structure, essentially reproduces that established in Australian radio in the 1930s (Johnson 1988; Potts 1989; Counihan 1992). The structure is based upon a dual system of commercial and national public service broadcasters, with the number of commercial broadcasters in a

18 licence area being determined by the regulatory authority, and licensed commercial broadcasters being required to meet ‘public interest’ obligations as determined by the regulatory authority. Under such regulatory arrangements, where market structures and market outcomes are highly regulated and competition takes place in a circumscribed fashion, the scope for policy activism on the part of regulatory agencies is, in principle, quite high, as they can determine the scope and limits of private property rights. In practice, however, such regulatory agencies have tended to interpret their mandates conservatively, and to be more protective than confrontational towards the industries they regulate.

This regulatory conservatism is an example of what Robert Horwitz (1989) has termed ‘soft legalism’, where regulatory agencies possess the formal apparatuses and capacities to enforce decisions, but tend in their everyday conduct toward practices that ensure mutually satisfactory outcomes between contending institutional agents. The perennial danger of such informal and consensual modes of regulation is that of regulatory capture, where the interest of the regulators in a ‘quiet life’, and those of the regulated industries in policy continuity and no new challenges to decision-making autonomy, mesh around structures that have preserved the status quo, and actively excluded dissenting voices or potentially competing interests. The comparative stability of institutional, policy and regulatory structures in Australian broadcast television from the 1950s to the 1990s, and the high profits it has guaranteed to broadcast networks, has allowed

19 the demand to be reluctantly conceded that part of this surplus be redistributed for ‘pro-social’ objectives, such as the development of Australian national culture and national citizenship through mandatory Australian content requirements. Other demands of media policy reformers, such as the use of citizenship discourses to demand greater openness on the part of the commercial broadcasters on the basis of the ‘public trust’ through which they have access to broadcasting spectrum, have met greater resistance from the broadcasting industry, and a more variable response from regulatory agencies.

1

The ISAs are Ideological State Apparatuses, a term first used by French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser (1977) to describe those institutions seen as reproducing ideological hegemony in capitalist societies.