By Jean Burgess
Georgina Born [1]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 [2], 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.
GB: I’m fascinated when you say the whole design of SBS as a channel has followed, or mirrored, or bounced off the policy debate. That’s so interesting, and that’s exactly how it should be. I mean, the policy debate can go wrong, and weird things can happen with television channels, but to have a very immediate sense of response [to policy debates] in that way seems to me tremendously important and in Britain, one of my points is we don’t have such a responsive system. There are moments, for example the moment of Channel 4 in the early 1980s was such a moment, but they’re rare and you can pick them out like that. And for the last twenty years it’s all been neo-liberal. It’s all just been about freeing up markets, and consumer choice.
JB: Going back to the Habermasian question, I wasn’t presuming that you were imposing the idea of a universal public sphere, but I was wondering whether it was really possible for the BBC to see itself in that way. Because it actually seems quite odd to me that a public broadcaster - even one as large and historically important as the BBC - could think of itself as having any kind of universal address. And that seemed to me to be what you were saying, that idea of, if you like, the category of the middle or the majority - that in the BBC there is still a sense of addressing a nation.
GB: Well, yes, sure. It’s a very imperfect thing - even these mass channels don’t really mop up the demographics. Though as you know, one of the most fascinating things about telly is that it is the only medium we have which does aspire to that. You know, the death of Diana, the World Cup, some international disaster - these events are the closest we get to having a universal audience. Of course in reality these things are much compromised, but it’s when you do the comparison that these things come out. In the United States now there is nothing approaching the existence of ‘universal’ ‘mass’ channels of communication. The networks are down to 17% of audience share, and so within that any one of the networks must get much less. And in contrast to the UK, in the United States you see the corollary in the nature of the political culture, this banalised, cynical national-political marketing machine that happens every four years, held up against the reality of a complete emptying-out of any kind of national federal political culture of any real sophistication or continuity. And it seems to me the media system seems to mirror or perhaps to have produced this effect.
The institutional design point that I’m arguing - and I don’t think it’s that controversial - is that we need, as it were, ‘mass’ channels which at least aspire to some kind of universality. In terms of how people in the BBC see themselves, everyone would demur from notions of a national culture in a sense. And yet, politically, in the last few years, there has been a fear of multiculturalism and in my opinion a completely spurious fear of falling apart and a fragmentation of society. You know, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, they’re all mouthing notions of social integration and the nation again. So this thing is in play, and yes, they have a very strong sense of responsibility in the BBC for what they call ‘creating a national conversation’. And in that sense I think they’re absolutely right, in that they have a dialogical model. ‘Orchestrating’ is a word I like to use: they think they are one of the primary media for orchestrating a national space, and see themselves as having this responsibility.
JB: Yes, OK. And I’m glad you made that comparison to the States, because it allows me to get to something else I wanted to talk about. I don’t know if you use the term ‘cultural democracy’ or not, but let me use it for a moment. Because I think you can see distinct differences between how ‘cultural democracy’ as an ideal is interpreted in a space like the UK as opposed to the US, differences that go right to the core of political and media cultures in both places.
GB: Yes I do indeed use that term: in the Epilogue of my book Uncertain Vision, I address exactly these issues of the role of public service broadcasting in reinforcing the cultural dimensions, or preconditions, for democracy, and democracy as a specifically cultural phenomenon. I argue there that in contemporary conditions of media plenitude, the challenge of achieving a benign national media ecology becomes increasingly difficult, that the need for a supervening vision becomes more pressing, and that governments’ foremost tool for positive intervention has been PSB. I suggest that only PSBs can be delegated by government to exercise a critical and creative oversight of the evolving media ecology and, on that basis, develop considered interventions in it under no other imperative than the public interest. This is not an argument for PSBs as the sole means of creative interventions, nor that they should block out other interventions, nor that they should be unresponsive to or unsupportive of other public or indeed commercial media initiatives – on the contrary. (I like to think these caveats may placate proponents of the creative industries paradigm, who seem to see PSBs as entirely monopolistic and anti-creative in their operations!) But PSBs are the only publicly-oriented, non-commercial big animals in the media jungle. I argue further in the Epilogue that if democracy is as much a social, cultural and ethical phenomenon as a political one, then its continued development depends on government perceiving that the delegation of this oversight to PSBs is vital for the progressive evolution and re-imagination of our democracies. PSBs are therefore engaged in a supremely important dialectic with government: delegated by government to secure the conditions for democracy’s expanded well-being. Suffice it to say that I have learned in my visit to Australia that government here – with its relentless bullying of the ABC – is, to put it mildly, not allowing itself to perceive, or act upon, this critical dialectic, which is essential to mature democracies. I think, and have repeatedly voiced the view in my visit here, that Australia urgently needs major institutional reform to ensure greater independence in the relations between your PSBs and government.
JB: Moving on to new media, my question is around what spaces of hope there might be for cultural democracy or voice for minorities and so on in new media spaces. Especially considering the fact that, if you like, the ‘cultures of production’ in that space - the cultures of web design, web development, online enterprise and so on - are based primarily on the West Coast of the US, where cultural democracy basically means increased individualisation, increased choice and a better ‘fit’ of content to the individual.
GB: How you were talking at the end relates strongly to the paper on music, mediation and digitisation I gave today. And there seemed to be a feeling in the room after my talk about the extent to which we should concern ourselves or not with the nature of these technologies at the level of design - the infrastructural level of them and what is designed into them. You know, how they design us.
JB: Yes, and part of that is that we’ve all learned above all never to be technologically determinist.
GB: Oh, sure. The model now is ‘affordance’, isn’t it: the notion that technologies prefer, or enable, or invite a certain mode of address. But we need the rider that some of these technologies are easier to fiddle with and misuse and abuse than others - to resist the mode of address that they offer - and some aren’t. And I was trying to say in my talk today about music technologies that some of them are black boxed - it’s actually bloody difficult to get inside and use them differently. And that wasn’t the case with the turntable, for example. But your other point, about technologies being designed on the West Coast and individualisation being written into them, I mean this concerns me and fascinates me. For example, in regard to work on computer games, I was over at the University of California at Irvine this Spring doing fieldwork and looking at people studying games online. I was fascinated that these American academics - these anthropologists working on SecondLife, World of Warcraft and so on - were, to my mind, not standing back far enough from the fundamental framing of these games - the ontologies, maybe. For example, these games are often predicated on the idea of property - it’s all about property ownership, or the ownership of things. And there’s a libertarian polity, you know, the very design of the thing is fundamentally encultured, it’s fundamentally an American sort of liberalism. And yet it seemed to me that the anthropologists of the virtual might not be seeing that, and I found that very bizarre. I mean, they were seeing it, but they weren’t really standing far enough back, in my opinion, to do the critique. I’ll wait to see, because they’re writing it up. But I’d like you to say more about that question of writing the individualisation into the technologies. Because of course we all think about the Net as absolutely resisting that. The dominant trope is that the Net is not at all about individualisation - it’s about relations, the network.
JB: Sure, the network is about connectedness, but it’s individuals that are being connected in different ways to whatever they choose to be connected to. Let’s take Flickr, the photosharing network, for example. Within the Flickr network it’s counter-intuitive, although not impossible, to sign up as a user that is an entity other than an individual human being. And the rationale for that is that it’s designed for personal photosharing and not for corporate advertising or something like that. And so of course the language is all around connecting individuals to other individuals. The assumption is that you will connect to other individual users because you like their photographs, because you share an interest, or because you already know them on an interpersonal or social level. And so I think the term affordance is a good one, actually, because the design of the Flickr network does sort of gently invite certain modes of participation; and on the other hand all of the interactions and activity in the network that we can observe are created by users participating en masse. So there is a sense at the design end that you’re creating an open, configurable system that the users can come along and do ‘anything’ with, and yet that ‘anything’ seems to be taking quite a similar shape over and over again.
GB: There are several things in what you’ve just said. One is that we see sovereign subjects everywhere. This is all about a proliferation of ourselves as sovereign subjects who choose which networks and which applications and which communities we are connected into. So part of that sovereign subjecthood is the command, ‘be active’: ‘you will choose, and you will be active.’ Zizek has the most wonderful line on this - he coins a term that I love: he sees interactivity as a kind of fascism, and he says instead that the truth of what we are seeing here is ‘interpassivity’. And I’m completely with him: he’s inverting and trying to resist this seductive language, to argue that we should disobey the command to ‘be active’.
JB: Except that, in a way, you have to participate in order to resist. You have to participate to exist.
GB: Yes, the paradoxes are really profound. And what’s weird is that a lot of those notions have migrated from the business community, and we all know that the business community wants us to participate, that’s very obvious. But they migrate, so that the BBC now uses these concepts. Interactivity, user-generated content, choice - those are the BBC’s prevailing terms now. In fact they’ve just announced a restructure on the basis that user-generated content is the future.
I’m really interested in Zizek’s point, though, because it sparks a whole lot of other issues. One of them is the prevalent critique today of centralised production announced in ideas of user-generated content and of the ‘prosumer’. So, you know, these are seen as forms of empowerment, as progressive, because we’re moving away from the centralised media production model. Immanent in that is a whole debate around power - power in communicative terms, its links to social power, and so on. And I think that we tend to work with such crude models on a number of levels. One of the things this relates to is our understanding of consumption. Now, it’s not that I have big problems with an active consumption model, obviously not. But what the active audience model has done is occlude our concern with, for example, negative modalities of consumption - that there are modes of consumption that are not particularly productive or developmental of the psyche, and we have to think about those elements of consumption that can be replete with problematic forms of fantasy or whatever it might be. Another aspect of this whole problem is that there’s something wrong with taking communicative power. But it’s a rank form of idealism to say that you don’t need centres of communicative power. We need centres of ideas and expression; we shouldn’t tyrannise ourselves with the notion that everybody is an author, and everybody is really going to be as talented in the production of this or that form of ideas, or of art, or of cultural production as everybody else. But these have almost become impossible questions, censored questions.
JB: But going along with that we need to communicate a much more sophisticated understanding of the way that aesthetics actually relates to specific social contexts as well. Because I think you’re right: a really primitive form of this argument is that all value is purely relative and therefore anybody can be an author and everything will be OK. But actually, in my work on everyday content production, I’m trying to look at the ways in which that content is meaningful and might circulate in very small micro- or nano-publics. And I think that argument actually helps - being specific about what cultural value or what social utility or cultural work a particular cultural practice has or does, this can actually help us to keep large-scale cultural production in the frame.
GB: And to be less relativistic – yes, I agree.
JB: Right, being specific is not the same as being relativistic.
GB: Absolutely not. As you say, we can be alert to the various kinds of value that different kinds of cultural practice and cultural production have. They may have social utility or communicative utility or community-building utility or anti-alienation utility. These are all absolutely valid. And yet – and please, this is not an elitist argument - there are also specific forms of cultural value or ideational value. This whole question touches on a kind of envy of the power to speak or create - and here we might invoke Kleinian psycho-analytic terms: Klein develops the concept of envy as the wish, the drive, to destroy the other’s creativity – prototypically, the mother’s creativity - out of an incapacity to tolerate another’s power over one, or one’s dependence on another for nurturance or feeding, also of ideas. I find these tremendously useful and important ideas, against some crude ways of conceiving and critiquing inequalities of communicative and representational power. So on the one hand, the power to speak does evoke envy, but we still need to valorise it and to defend it; on the other hand, we can nonetheless engage in critique of inequalities in the right to speak or create, which of course have a reality. But it’s a mad fantasy that we should all, always, have the equal power to speak; it’s just unhelpful. So what we have to do is develop that more nuanced account of in what circumstances and circuits there might be the power and the right to speak, and the specific modalities of those moments, and that’s very important, it seems to me.
Jean Burgess is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She recently completed a doctoral study at QUT on the politics of everyday creativity, cultural participation and digital culture, and holds a Master of Philosophy in English (Cultural Studies) from the University of Queensland. Jean publishes in the areas of new media, everyday creativity, popular music and educational technologies, and has extensive teaching experience in undergraduate cultural, communication and media studies. Her current research concentrates on the mass popularisation of everyday media creation and use in relation to technological change, both past and present. More information at http://creativitymachine.net/ [3]