Mediating Cultural Politics: A Dialogue with Georgina Born

By Jean Burgess

Georgina Born is Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music at Cambridge University, and was Official Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.  She trained as a classical cellist, and then played in a number of jazz and avant-garde rock bands, including Henry Cow, following which she studied for her first degree and PhD in Anthropology at University College London.  Born works on the sociology of culture, and in particular on cultural production and the politics of culture in relation to music, information technologies and broadcasting. She is known for her ethnographic studies of major cultural institutions, and has published two major books based on them. Rationalizing Culture (1995) is drawn from Born’s ethnographic study of Pierre Boulez’s Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. The study combines ethnography and history to give a critical socio-cultural analysis of computer music and of the institutionalisation of the musical avant-garde. Her 2005 book Uncertain Vision, based on her ethnographic study of the BBC, provides a comprehensive and critical account of the transformation of the public service broadcaster through neo-liberal policies and the ‘new public management’ in the last decade. It links historical and institutional analysis to textual analysis and criticism. She has also edited Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (2000).

The following dialogue is based on an interview conducted as part of Professor Born’s visit to Brisbane in 2006. In the first of three public seminars she gave at the University of Queensland (UQ) and Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Born argued that post-Habermasian theories of the public sphere and communicative action provide a means to rethink public service communications in conditions of pluralism and inequality, and discussed a range of current BBC initiatives in light of this normative model. In the second lecture, Born outlined the history of the BBC and discussed how the BBC will fare in the future, given the challenges thrown up by its commercial competitors and political antagonists, and the rising stakes for Britain’s pluralist democracy in an era of continuing media expansion. In her third lecture, ‘Musical mediation: ontology, technology and creativity’, Professor Born developed a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, comparing the concept of ‘the work’ across eras and genres - especially jazz and improvised electronic musics—and developing the three concepts of social, distributed and relayed creativity. While in Australia, Professor Born also taught a travelling masterclass on the uses of ethnography in cultural research for postgraduate and early career researchers, sponsored by the ARC Cultural Research Network.

The following dialogue provides a counterpoint to these events and to Born’s work as a whole, drawing together and extending key themes in the cultural politics of both public service broadcasting and new media technologies. It begins by discussing the possibilities of public sphere theory to provide useful models of institutional design.  The discussion moves from there to SBS Television – an example of Public Service Broadcasting that provides an interesting contrast to the BBC, especially by virtue of SBS’s relationship with the politics of multiculturalism in Australia.  The second half of the interview draws out the issues around cultural value, cultural power and the politics of technology in relation to new media, and concludes by focussing especially on the problems and potentialities of ‘user-generated content’.

JB: You’ve done three lectures here in Brisbane: two at UQ, both on Public Service Broadcasting and the BBC, and then one here at QUT today on ontology, creativity and mediation in music. One thing that struck me in the second BBC lecture was around the idea of the Habermasian universal public sphere. I’m wondering to what extent that sits with the public service broadcasting context in the UK as opposed to other places?

GB: What, the claims of a Habermasian kind of function? That was the first [lecture] really. I was interested in the fact that, very much after Habermas, there’s been this huge debate, not least amongst feminists, around dismantling the notion of the universal, male, bourgeois public sphere. I’m always very interested in the contradictions in the post-Habermasian debate - you slide between the descriptive and the normative. And a lot of the power of the notion of the public sphere is lost once you pluralise it and move into notions of counter-publics. The whole idea was that this was a universal space of dialogical engagement, so there are all kinds of interesting things before we even get to the subaltern counterpublic literature, but bracket all that. And then there’s really interesting work by James Tully that I’m fascinated by - he’s interested in the Canadian debate around indigenous peoples, which must resonate here in Australia.

Anyway, what I was trying to do in the lecture was say to the media debate, which often doesn’t look outside its own backyard, that there’s all this conceptualisation out there about how you can work with the post-Habermasian problem, and why don’t we bring those ideas into conjunction with the discussion of concrete broadcasting systems. So that was the idea.  Whether my institutional design works - which was to say that one could think about orchestrating, in a very classic structuralist way, a dialectic between broadcast and narrowcast, point-to-point and network media, and to think about what normative functions these things could fulfil.  So that’s what that paper was about, and I hope it translates, because it’s a flexible system. I was always fascinated by SBS for example.

JB: Well, one of the really interesting things about SBS of course is that the design of the institution has grown up alongside debates around multicultural policy. It actually grew out of multiculturalism, and you can see the way that programming has responded to its charter’s shift as the articulation of multicultural policy in the public sphere shifts.  To the point that, now, you have a really interesting mix of programming that is directed to discrete minorities, programs that are designed to get the ‘minorities’ speaking both to each other and to the ‘majority’. But then you also have this kind of postmodern, cosmopolitan, arty aesthetic mixed through that.

GB: So it kind of works? I mean you were able to use the terms of my paper just then, weren’t you…

JB: Sure.

GB: You’re saying this all happens under one channel, this is all SBS, but it does it differently with different parts of the schedule.

JB: Yes, that’s right.