An Interview With Nicholas Garnham, Part I

Nicholas Garnham is Professor Emeritus at the University of Westminster, UK, where he was one of the founders of the Media Studies program (as the Polytechnic of Central London), and a founding editor of the journal Media Culture & Society. He is the author of Samuel Fuller (Secker & Warburg, 1971), Structures of Television (BFI, 1972), and Capitalism and Communication (Sage, 1990). Prior to founding the Media Studies degree at the PCL, Professor Garnham worked as a documentary filmmaker for the BBC and as a Governor at the British Film Institute. His pioneering work in media studies is well known for its focus on the political economy of the media, and on matters of cultural policy, and his reputation as a critic of some recent trends in cultural studies will only have been strengthened by the trenchant nature of the arguments marshaled against post-modernism, post-structuralism, and populist/audience studies, in his most recent book, Emancipation, The Media & Modernity (OUP, 2000).

A declaration of interest: Professor Garnham co-founded the journal MC&S, which generously invited me to sit on its board many years ago. Garnham was also my professor, back at the Polytechnic of Central London, and is still an intellectual mentor.

The interview was conducted via email in May 2008. My thanks to Professor Garnham for kindly taking the time for this discussion.

-- Andrew Goodwin

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Q1. Before we discuss some of the arguments in your book Emancipation, the Media & Modernity, I would like to ask you, as a pioneer in the founding and development of media studies, how do you now view the expansion of the field into so many areas of secondary & higher education, into publishing & the media, into the culture industry itself?

Nicholas Garnham: I have been very ambivalent for a long time about the expansion of media studies. When we created the first Media Studies degree at the then Polytechnic of Central London it was a specific, contextually constrained development. On the one hand it was designed to develop thoughtful practitioners. At the time one of the key positions of critical sociological studies of journalism was that it was the early socialisation/professionalisation of journalists through pre-degree level training schemes the NCTJ [the National Council for the Training of Journalists – AG] and apprenticeships on provincial newspapers that explained the maintenance of a conservative journalistic ideology and set of unquestioned news values. Thus on the media practice side our media studies degree was just one case of “the long march through the institutions” -- an attempt to create a new cadre of professionals. (I am not sure that I still believe that position -- for better or worse the broadly conservative media agenda is, I now think, much more deeply rooted than media professionalism -- or indeed the dominant ideology whatever that might be).

On the other, theoretical/academic side the media studies degree was a position taken within an academic development: the foundation of the polytechnics and the CNAA [Council for National Academic Awards, now disbanded] enabled initiatives outside the dominant disciplinary boundaries policed by the established Universities. On the one hand this enabled us to pursue a serious study of popular cultural forms largely excluded from the syllabus/remit of University Arts departments. On the other hand we were able to take a distance from the dominant mode of study of communications within established social sciences. This was dominated by social psychology, linguistics and the empiricist study of communication processes.

Thus vis-à-vis the established study of texts and their producers we distanced ourselves from, in particular, established literary studies -- one sees the same move in the formation of Cultural Studies at Birmingham [the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK]. Vis-à-vis the dominant social science paradigm we were concerned to stress from within a broadly marxist framework a historical, institutional dimension and of course political economy. The subsequent promiscuous development of media studies has, in my judgement, too often pursued a range of superficial themes -- driven by fashion -- and thus forgotten the original questions with which it started -- broadly what are the social implications in the widest sense of the development of a set of central institutional forms and associated practices for the production and circulation of symbolic forms.

In my view most of these issues are probably better studied at post-graduate level. What most contemporary media studies lacks is the necessary grounding in the basics of the humanities and social sciences. Without this media studies too easily becomes the pursuit of the fashionable -- its agenda in fact determined by the media themselves. Media studies at A-level I regard as an absurdity - too many prospective media studies students are simply motivated by media celebrity itself.

Q2. Media studies is thus faced with three problems, the last of which I should like to address to you. First, the development of media ideologies that go way deeper than mere professionalism. (An example might be the extent to which TV journalists/producers now expect politicians to do things their way, as if the mediascape were a sort of natural environment.) Second, the arrival in the lecture theatre of generations of students (and I think I may have been a member of the first such generation) who have only ever known a mass-mediated culture, and who (therefore?) want to succeed within the terms set out by the culture industry. Third, however, we have this problematic category, which you call “a broadly marxist framework”. Isn’t the problem here a much bigger one than that posed by unthinking media makers and consumers, since the theoretical “framework” that was supposed to explain all this has itself all but collapsed?

Nicholas Garnham: I am not entirely clear what you are driving at here. I don’t imagine you want to get into a general discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Marxism and what if anything might take its place. Certainly I think that the strengths of Marxism have been rejected along with its manifest weaknesses. But I think the real problem lies in the notion of framework. As my book stresses I think that what has been dangerously lost is the sense of doubt and the limits of human knowledge central to both the Kantian and at its best Marxist traditions. Thus my sense is that human practices and social processes are much messier things than too much ‘theory’ or ‘frameworks’ allow for. What theory or framework is appropriate will depend on the problem/question being addressed and the available, relevant evidence. Thus I cannot stress often enough that it is the question which is the crucial issue.

Q3. What was the idea behind starting the journal Media Culture & Society? Do you regard the project as a success? And what in your view is the future for academic journals?

Nicholas Garnham: Again Media Culture and Society was a specific intervention. I had been one of the associate editors of Screen who resigned over a dispute about the dominance of Althusserianism and an associated set of theoretical and theoretic dogma. MCS was designed as a specific riposte to Screen. Its project was to hold in balance a historically informed and materialist approach to Media and their connections to Culture and Society with relevant theory and empirical evidence. As its title indicates it was intended to recognise the cultural turn but without being culturalist and dumping the heritage of empirical sociology including economics -- indeed without abandoning the core of a more traditional and rationalist Marxism. Thus it was opposed to the theoretical (at this time largely Althusserian) approach to culture and texts and at the same time to the narrow empiricism of US dominated media sociology. It also had from the start a multicultural/multi-lingual dimension, particularly wanting to be open to developments in western Europe outside a narrow imported set of French gurus. Hence for instance the importance of the early issue on Bourdieu.

The project has been a success in the sense that it has become one of the leading international journals in the field and has done so by pursuing its original agenda and introducing important work and themes into the international debate. At the same time it has of course been normalised. I think this is inevitable. It is now for better or worse a peer reviewed journal driven by submissions not an intellectual intervention. It thus now reflects the state of the field -- a state which I personally do not see, on the evidence of submissions to MCS, as either vibrant or particularly interesting.

As to the future of academic journals clearly the net is changing things, but as with other supposed net impacts, I don’t think things will change either as much or as fast as some claim. There still remains and will remain in my view a place for peer reviewed editorial choice -- even if this is enabled by the net. Whether this will continue to be done by commercial journal publishers is another question.

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[We will post the remainder of this conversation over the course of the week, concluding with a printable version of the entire interview.]

Gone

He must go on?

Er, no, actually... he can't go on.

Endgame.

(Thanks to Tom for the tip & the Beckett.)

Eleven Players In Search Of An Author

Today's Euro Chumps League final in Moscow between Chelsea and Man Scum may be the occasion for many of you to ask yourselves, Am I committing the Intentional Fallacy by wishing that Chelsea manager's had a more acute existential investment in the outcome of this important match? The prof will now, er, tackle this matter...

At the beginning of this season, Chelsea sacked the most successful manager in our history, replacing him with someone who had been hired the previous season as a director of football, but whose involvement in coaching & managing a professional football team was neither extensive nor all that impressive. Seven months after successfully steering the team to second place in the English Premier League & to a Chumps League final, or -- if you prefer -- successfully divesting my team of every shiny fetish object that had once found a happy home in its bulging trophy cabinet, our manager now contemplates the biggest game in Chelsea's history with an attitude that might be appropriate if, say, he were a Method Actor working up a performance as an especially low-key funeral director with a nasty Valium habit.

But we do not expect William Shakespeare to give a press conference on the evening of the premiere of King Lear at which he seems uninterested in the outcome of the performance & at which he tells us nothing about how he constructed this great work of art. If we then find the actors in the play talking about the production as if Shakespeare had nothing to do with it, we might be even more disappointed. And if the critics then chip in with suggestions that large chunks of the play are in fact improvised & based on plot ideas dreamed up by Shakespeare's rich uncle in Chipping Norton, well it's not hard to see why we would be disturbed.

According to some lit crits this is of course precisely the situation. And according to the Intentional Fallacy we should not be disturbed. It doesn't matter who created the play/team, it only matters what the play/team does.

But it does matter about intention & it does matter whether or not this Chelsea team has an author. If the manager is not in fact the author of the team then this raises the prospect that the team may have no author & be an accidental phenomenon that would be less likely to reproduce success in the future than if it had one. And if the team has no author the players will know this, thus putting them at a disadvantage. Maybe football teams are examples of collective authorship, like a rock group? Perhaps. But then we would want everyone involved in the process to get the appropriate credit, which is not something the current Chelsea manager emphasizes (or, in fact, ever mentions).

That stupid play Six Characters In Search Of An Author. Someone once compared it to the Jerry Springer Show.

GO CHELS!

Popular Music & Society (Vol. 31, No. 2)

The current issue of the journal Popular Music & Society (Vol. 31. No. 2, May 2008) is guest edited by B. Lee Cooper & is devoted to New Orleans Music. It includes various resources on the area's music plus the following articles:

* "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?" Discovery, Dominance & Decline of Crescent City Popular Music Influence, 1946-2006 by B. Lee Cooper

* Hearing The Boswell Sisters by James A. Von Schilling

* Two Sides Of Frenchmen Street and New Orleans Hybrid Music: The Panorama Jazz Band and the Zydepunks by Robin Roberts

* Seeds Scattered by Katrina: The Dynamic Power of Disaster & Inspiration by Don McLeese