Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 Communication/Media Studies overview QUESTION 1) List and describe the primary paradigms in mass

s communication studies. Be sure to provide a description of central figures in the field. QUESTION 2) How does each of your paradigms understand the concept of communication philosophically speaking? How do they differ? How are they similar? QUESTION 3) Position yourself within the paradigms you list for question 1. 1. History/Mapping the Field Where traditional overviews of Mass Communication/Media Studies attempt to fit the breadth of scholarship into a bifurcated structure critical vs. administrative, qualitative vs. quantitative I believe that a tripartite structure makes more sense given the differing ways at which paradigms approach, philosophically, the idea of communication (the next question). In what follows I will trace the history of the field within three paradigms: the effects paradigm, the institutional paradigm, and the technological paradigm. I begin with the effects paradigm, the original perspective. It is Wilbur Schramms 1963 article Communications Research in the United States that creates the field (mythologically) as an institutional field of study, while the epistemic birth lies in Lazarsfelds break from the strong effects paradigm. He connects psychology, sociology, and political science. Research here examines the transfer of messages and how it can be made more efficient, whether it be the mechanical-technological transmission of messages as was the case in Claude Shannons work, or an understanding of how to distribute political information as was the case with Lazarsfeld. This paradigm is broken between weak effects and strong effects. The second paradigm that I describe is the institutional paradigm. Within this paradigm are the Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, and Political Economy. While FSC existed independent of communication and mass media studies, for the purpose of this essay I describe its emphasis and role in US scholarship as arising out of the debate between Adorno and Lazarsfeld. For this school of thought, the emphasis is on the way that institutions reproduce themselves through communication processes, whether it be the work of Adorno and Horkheimer on the ways that mass communication consumption naturalizes the fascist relations of capitalism, the work of Stuart Hall for whom meaning is a site of compromise and/or resistance, or the work of John Fiske, for whom consumption is a mode of resistance for women, that also maintains the system The final paradigm that I describe is the technological paradigm. Arising out of the work of McLuhan if not Innis some years earlier, this paradigm is not concerned with what institutions are produced through the media, or what effects the media have, but the ways in which technology use transforms the social world and the individual. Within this paradigm I include media ecology and American cultural studies as represented by the work of Cary. At the end of this paradigm, in transition to the next question, I describe the collision between American and British cultural studies, and the contemporary division to be made between the two paradigms based on political alliances. The Effects Paradigm

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 Mass communication, although a topic of interest for numerous disciplines during and after World War I, was not a formalized discipline until the 1960s. Wilbur Schramm can be credited with the fields institutionalization, and it was he who laid out the fields forefathers: Lewin, Hovland, Laswell, and Lazarsfeld 2 psychologists, a sociologist, and a political scientist. Each was a bearer of scholarly capital on loan from 19th century scholarly disciplines, and continued to have effect on mass communication studies a field characterized by its emphasis on quantitative, and not speculative, methods. This explains the exclusion of some early women researchers, such as Hortense Powdermaker, who conducted the earliest ethnography of media producers in the field. For Schramm the founding moment for the field was with the appointment of Lazarsfeld to the Princeton Radio Project in 1935, and Lazarsfelds move away from strong effects research conducted by Laswell. For Laswell, a critic of mass mediation, propaganda was information stimuli used to move individuals to a particular cultural space of collectivity. En masse, individuals moving throughout the city were exposed to various forms of messaging, which would be able to insight a mass riot with destructive results. Education, on the other hand, was a set of messages that could be used to inform individuals about the world around them, and could prevent individuals from falling prey of bad mass media messages. Through this binary established by Laswell, we can distinguish between the hypodermic needle theory (what propaganda does, despite the term hypodermic needle never being used by Laswell) and the magic bullet theory (what education does, again never used by Laswell). Instead of this model, Lazarsfeld argued that media would have weak effects. Lazarsfeld, on recommendation by Cantrill (from Cantrill & Allports radio studies), was appointed the director of the Princeton Radio Project. Using quantitative methods such as laboratory experiments, surveys, content analysis, and external measures (ratings), Lazarsfelds center was paid to examine the relationship between media and politics, particularly as it connected to the educational function of radio (that Rockefeller had convinced congress was the responsibility of commercial stations, and that no public spectrum need be placed aside). If we are to understand with Schramm that this was the moment in which Mass Comm became a field, then we should understand Mass Comm as a renaming and/or rebranding of propaganda studies. In the context of Schramms personal biography, who was a cold warrior scholar previous associated with the State and War department before finishing his doctorate, and the funding by Rockefeller, which was intended to start propaganda production and studies that Roosevelt refused to undertake, then this rebranding and revisioning seem contradictory. Lazarsfeld would argue, in the 1970s, that media had no effect on how individuals voted in elections, showing that media has no effect on short term decisions; Schramm, similarly, would argue that children are not hypnotized by the television, nor did it compromise thought, but children use television for the purposes of socializing, education, and entertainment. Yet, both would participate in the Rockefeller Communication Seminar that produced propaganda to win the hearts and minds of the third world, and search for possible sites of ideological usurpation in US media, while arguing that media had no effect on individuals. Lazarsfelds later collaboration with Katz on Personal Influence examined the ways in which individuals understood the political landscape and made decisions about product consumption, personal alliance, and individual decisions. They found that information functioned on a multistep flow, in which opinion leaders in groups of peers, who condensed information gained from multiple media sources, served to guide decision making amongst individuals more so than the media. In this volume, Katz and Lazarsfeld argue that people use the media; they are not used by it.

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 It is from this study that Uses and Gratifications research arises, and the weak effects tradition continues. Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch argue that research should focus on the psychological origin of needs not the mass media origin of them and the ways in which individuals use media to meet those needs. Katz et al. are interested in the ways that mass media are able to maintain a Durkheim=ian whole of society, while reduction anomie the contradiction they study being the necessity of mass media to sell objects to individuals, and the potential that mass media could through mass culture create a mob of mindless consumers. From this paradigm comes work like that of AM Rubin and Rosengren & Palmgreen. Rubin argues that a distinction must be made between the ritualized use of mass media I read the newspaper every morning, because I read the newspaper every morning and the instrumental use of communication I want to be entertained or informed, consider how each medium might meet that need differently, and make a rational decision about which medium will allow me to meet my needs. Similarly, Rosengren and Palmgreen argue that the expectancy value, or the type of satisfaction that might be met, is based on the individuals own rational expectations of that medium and not advertising via indoctrination. At the same time as the uses and gratifications stand of the effects paradigm develops, so too does a return to strong effects. McCombs and Shaw, although before the canonized return marked by Gitlins critique of the dominant paradigm, are some of the earliest strong effects researchers. Analyzing the information distribution of the 1968 election, they argue that the media maintains a particular political order not by telling us what to think, but by telling us what to think about. Further, media does not reflect reality, but filter and shape it. While this agenda setting is a strong effect, the return to such an approach is often narrativized as beginning with Gitlins critique of Lazarsfelds peoples choice research. Lazarsfeld argues that the research had been compromised by its funding source, as could be seen in the dismissal and quieting of C. Wright Mills work on the project. More importantly, however, Gitlin argued that the concept of power behind the research had been wrong: the lack of change in short term decision making was not a sign that the media wasnt working, and that there was no power present, but, rather, that media had powerful effects because there wasnt a change. Power, he argued, functioned on continuity and not disruption. Briefly, this marks the epistemic sociological distinction between strong and weak effects as the classic sociological debate between Durkheim and Marx. For the former, and the weak effects, media was naturally a static entity which, organically constitute, resisted anomie by elaborating internal structures and schema of the subjects mind; for the latter, structures were not of the mind, but of oppressive systems, and that society was naturally a site of conflict stifled by said structures the idea at operation in Gitlins critique. This distinction should not be taken as a division between conservatives and radicals, for the managerial right and the radical left both had their own versions of strong effects research. On the right, Elisabeth Noelle-Newman argued that the media functioned to produce a form of consonance, such that channels only represented a limited perspective on political orientations. Spiral of Silence argued that this consonance produced a social life in which individuals would not speak oppositional views in fear of being ostracized from the peer groups, in the same way that media outlets would not promote oppositional views in fear of losing advertising. If, for Noelle-Newman, strong effects caused individuals to be fearful of speaking out, for Gerbner and Gross strong effects caused individuals to not leave their home in fear of being the victims of crime. There was a correspondence, for Gerbner and Gross, between the amount of television a person watched or time spent living in the television world - and the belief that the outside world was much like that television reality. They called this a cultivation effect, and measured it through cultural indicators of tv viewing experiences. The result of the 3

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 proliferation of crime, in the news and entertainment media, was what they called the mean world effect: the rise in gun purchases and fear of crime, despite the decline in national crime rates. Strong effects is also prevalent in framing theory. Framing theory derives from the research of Goffman in sociology, and is imported to mass communication studies by Gaye Tuchman. News stories, Tuchman argues, are given meaning through systems of values found in other narrative structures. These narrative frames define a central problem, its causes, its moral stakes, and proposes particular solutions. Such an approach was instrumental in Gitlins analysis of the making and unmaking of the New Left in the US. Protests, Gitlin argued, were framed in a way so that it was seen as a collaboration between youth and celebrities wanting more than they had worked for, and the characterization of the motive as greed made the solution seem to be more police (oppression) and not a more just society. The Institutional Paradigm In 1935, on a favor from Horkheimer, Lazarsfeld invited Adorno to join the Princeton Radio Project. Lazarsfelds hope was to use special project funding from Rockefeller to join critical and administrative research in unique and exciting ways. However, Lazarsfeld found Adorno to be non-complacent in taking up any systematic method of inquiry, and his work to be against the best interest of the project. Adornos response was to argue that his work was not the collection and classification of facts, but rather to examine the horizons of possibilities within social phenomenon. Further, Adorno added, his role was to critique the lingering propaganda functions of mass media, not enter into methodological circles where social phenomena were studied using methods that created the phenomena. It is in this division between critical and administrative research that I locate the institutional paradigm calling it institution because, as Ive shown, critical theorists exist in both the left and right, and the effects tradition. The institutional paradigm is concentrated on the role and power of media institutions as shapers of society. The paradigm, as I will argue, springs from Frankfurt School critical theory in the United States before, during, and after World War II. From FSC come to disparate branches, not necessarily historically, but conceptually: Political Economy and British Cultural Studies. I will focus on the former, as the latter is exhaustively recounted in my other exam. The latter will be addressed briefly to provide context for the merger between the technological and institutional paradigm. The hallmark text of the institutional paradigm is Adorno and Horkheimers Culture Industry. Their concern is for the ways in which media outlets under capitalism produce a particular set of needs for people, and positioning themselves as the only means through which those needs can be met, produce and naturalize structures of oppression and exploitation. The theory is not simply one of ideology, but a theory of practice and structuration a term I will return to momentarily. For Adornos work on popular music, it is not simply that mass music messages are pro-capitalism. The problem lies in the ways that mass production of music, in 32 bar AABA format, denaturalizes the relationship between part and structure, such that the subjugation of part to the structure and not the existence of the structure simply for the purpose of the part is naturalized in the political practice of individuals. The structure of society, in short, is produced through the structure of music, through listening. The concern for Adorno and Horkheimer are thus the ways in which media ownership and the industrialization of culture mobilizes the commodity form in order to generate wealth and capital in the hands of a few central companies. From the concern over ownership and labor comes the political economic perspective of media studies. Friedrich Pollock, the primary political economist of the Frankfurt School, 4

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 argued that the mobilization of culture under which media was generally assumed in the generation of popular consent was a characteristic of all capitalist societies. Ideology, Pollock argued, was determined by and tied to the base. This was particularly true of the US, who, having only minimal rebuilding to do at home much unlike the UK, poured money into the information and entertainment industries along with consumer research against propaganda. The earliest US political economist addressing communication work, canonically, is Herbert Schiller. Analyzing the flows of both capital and programming, Schiller noted that the US had begun using its media exports to win the hearts and minds of the third world, while also creating a form of infrastructural imperialism that undermined the supposed goodwill between countries. This approach, I would argue, was simply political economy applied to communication. Dallas Smythe, however, who himself argues the origins of PEoC in FCS, was one of the first political economists of communication and not simply a standard political economist. Following Horkheimer, whose Mass Culture and Art had argued that the commercialization of leisure had become a tail comet of labor, Smythe argues that political economy has historically missed the ways in which media had resembled Fordist production. For Ford, wages were increased so that individual workers could buy the very cars they make, driving down the price of their labor, while also paying taxes to the state to create road systems that would require the purchase of cars. Media, Smythe argues, buy and sell audiences to advertisers, such that TV viewing becomes labor to media institutions and television programming the wage paid for the viewers labor of watching advertisements. Viewers labors are commodified, and in watching these ads buy more goods, advertisers buy more commercial spaces, and the wage of television programming is reduced to make room for more commercials. Eileen Meehan, who argues that networks also buy and sell intellectual property in a way that connects them, commercially, into an oligopoly, would later take up this strain of thought. This reproduction of television content between networks further reduces the labor of the viewer, further reduces the species being that would be developed in the labor of leisure, and ultimately arrives at a dead end of cultural production and infinite regression. Thomas Guback, working from Schillers framework in the context of UNESCOs free communication legislation, examined the ways in which Hollywood a) exported its media to other media markets globally, while b) rejecting the entrance of foreign markets into the US cinema market. The effect, he argued, was a complacency generated amongst US citizens produced through structures. Where cinema studies had focused on the critical analysis of movies as texts, Guback argued that much more emphasis needed to be paid, instead, to the institutions if scholars wished to explain structural forms of inequality and the lack of a communist revolution. Wasko, combining Guback and returning to Pollock, examined the ways in which Disney movies produced particular ideological subjects for the sole purpose of pleasing shareholders. Disney was not in the business of producing ideology, did not exist for its production, but rather to be traded publicly and to generate capital by generating wealth for its shareholders. Rejecting the idea that media is the origin of ideology, Wasko shows that Disney readily reproduces it through its media properties such as her article on Bat Dance insofar as it sells media objects. Media objects, she further argues, are not just movies, but are the interconnections between theme parks, merchandising, and movies that all interface ideologically and make a lot of money. The second lineage of the institutional paradigm is that of British cultural studies. If political economy takes its lead from Adorno, cultural studies takes its from Walter Benjamin, for whom the mass media/culture produced both the conditions of subjugation and revolutionary consciousness simultaneously. For cultural studies, the media commodities did 5

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 not produce subjects per se by regimenting media technology use, rather, users practices produced themselves as subjects through the ways they allowed technology to organize their worlds. A focus on language and/as culture, as Hoggart and Williams would argue, could transform the mass distributed media into a site for revolution as they attempted to do in the Adult Education centers they worked. For Hoggart, in Uses of Literacy, the mass culture being used to erase the class cultural difference between wealthy and poor while the economic gap increased. However, the working class was not tabula rasa, but it was their culture its senses of media use that produced them as media subjects. Williams similarly argued that pop culture was a site for organizing against the market logic of the everyday. Culture, and media by extension, he argued, was a structure of feeling, a historically produced disposition articulated through the likes of literature and music, that was not wholly the product of media industries. The revolutionary strands of life remained to summoned through critical pedagogy. In this, British cultural studies, by focusing on the means of domination, countered the political economic genre of thought by showing that capitalism was not, as it was assumed by political economists, a totality. If action seemed only motivated by an economism, or ideology simply the thing produced by media, it was because of a failure in analysis. This approach resonates with Halls later encoding-decoding model, in which he argues that the two processes, and the meanings therein, are separate and transformative throughout the process of mediation. Values are embedded in media production (encoding), while those values are considered and altered through the editorial and buying process (circulation), augmented by their positioning within a constellation of other media texts during broadcast (distribution), and mediated by a viewer whose life provides as much a source of meaning development as the media themselves (decoding). In this process, Hall argues, there are three potential readings: the hegemonic the one embedded within the media object; the negotiated a different meaning that has similar political ends to the original meaning; and the oppositional a meaning developed that is contra the political motivations of producers. A shift in cultural studies and British history re-oriented the field to the production of ideologies, and the overdetermination of media meanings. This rekindled the emphasis cultural studies had on class antagonisms, while shifting it to other intraclass antagonisms such as race. One such focus was the articulation of whiteness and National identity, and black-ness and crime the central focus of Policing the Crisis. Hall et al. argues that crime is itself not such because it is an offense to society, but rather that it is an offense to society because it is crime; not the cause of societys decomposition, it is, rather, its sign. As a sign, it is not benevolently defined. As the diametric opposition to labor, it become attached to unemployment at a time when mass unemployment plagued black British communities. The racialized use of the mugging language, imported from the united states, and the connection between labor and crime in the UK, created a moral crisis in which black Britons were framed by newspaper editorials not premised on fact as criminals, the language then used by reporters in news stories thus neutralizing its ideological leanings through a produced objectivity, giving way to its use and reproduction in legal language of the courts. While Hall focused on the negative ideology of race produced by crime news, Hebdige examined the ways in which youth bridged subcultural and racial groups in the bricolage of resistance absent in media, which was the originator of the idea that race is a schism in society in the first place. Black and white youth cultures were in dialog in constructing a counter-narrative to this representation. Out of seemingly hegemonic systems, Hebdige argued, a counter cultural revolution could be produced. This argument would then be picked up by John Fiske in the United States, who argued that the religious metaphor of the commodity fetish and the shopping mall cathedral failed to examine the ways in which shopping was a form of semiotic guerilla warfare inspired 6

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 by de Certau. Women, Fiske argued, used shopping to create forms of spectacle and public presence otherwise denied to them by a male culture, making do with the semiotic resources available to them under the economic control of men. Technological paradigm The final paradigm I wish to discuss is the technological paradigm, and because of time constraints, I will be briefer than in the past two. This category, also, contains a much shorter historical narrative. In the technological paradigm, the concern is no longer over who owns the media, nor what meanings are broadcast, but the ways in which media use transforms us. Starting from the work of McLuhan, the field divides into two parts: media ecology and American cultural studies. For both of these areas, and the reason for calling this the technological paradigm, history is transformed and moved by technological change, and always bound up in the crisis of introduction the emphasis of Rick Altmans crisis historiography. McLuhans work, coming out of popular culture studies in the English tradition not unlike the history of British cultural studies, focuses on the ways in which media extend our senses and reorder the perceptual world, creating particular types of social reactions. The medium is the message: technology, the medium of dissemination, is only the messages, not meaning but the ways that phenomena change our orientations and attitudes, and not transcendent of that. McLuhan uses this understanding to provide a historical survey of mankind. In mans early day, reliant as he was on the spoken word, communities were close groups of information distribution, and interpersonal relations were elemental to daily life. With the first invention, the alphabet, man became slightly alienated from one another, as the word could be traded between one individual to another without direct contact. It is with this change that mankind shifts from being an oral society to a visual society. With the rise of the second technology, the printing press, individuals became even more alienated as texts no longer required transmission from one individual to another, but could occur from one to many libraries, here, become an asylum of loneliness. Finally, however, for McLuhan, the computer age has brought a merger between oral and visual that maintains the community of the former while relying on the efficiency of the latter. Two primary figures engage with McLuhans order of time in interesting ways. The first, Walter Ong, argues that instead of conceptualizing the move from each historical moment to the next as the leaving of a sensual order to the other, that we should focus on the positionality of the senses: particularly the relationship between primary and secondary orality. In the global village, a term used by McLuhan to describe the contemporary electronic age, secondary orality has not reached the status of the primary orality of early humans. And it is from this secondary orality, and the way in which our senses are arranged accordingly, argues Ong, that society maintains its self imploding distance. Similarly, analyzing word processing and other forms of e-textual production, media ecologists have argued that the secondary orality is a romanticized ghost, and that if anything, we have entered a new age of electronic production. Further, representing the cognitive turn in media ecology, this new age must be understood cognitively in terms of the ways posthumanism has reorganized and rewired the brain. The second branch of the technological paradigm is that started by Carey, in resistance to the behaviorism and positivism otherwise dominating American communication studies until the 1970s. Where quantitative approaches serve a purpose, Carey argues, it is to explain causal phenoma and not understand them. To understand phenomena requires a shift to a humanistic and pragmatic method of inquiry, in which individuals are made and remade through the communication they engage in. One example, from Carey, is his analysis of the ways that the 7

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 telegraph is what makes possible monopoly capitalism. By spreading individuals over wide space socially, the value of face to face interaction is reduced such that, for instance, individuals are not offended by doing business across long distances. It is the decomposition of social links, at the same time as the construction of higher distances of sociality, that make the buying of distant businesses socially acceptable. But, contradictory to this evolution of capitalism, it is also forms of depersonalized mass mediation that make US democracy possible founded, as it were, on the democracy of the Greek foreign in a republic do vast for such a forum to exist. Careys work in American Cultural Studies interfaces with British cultural studies during the 1980s, and is best seen in the work of Lawrence Grossberg. Grossbergs focus, not on technology proper, is on the ways in which cultural formations function as technologies what, he asks in one instance, does rock and roll do? The definition of Rock and Roll cannot be nailed down, as it means differently for each person who interacts with it, and if pleasure is derived from its loudness is there really a meaning? Instead, we must ask how Rock and Roll organizes the world into particular systems and categories of distinction, and the ways in which individuals make sense and embody the contradictory notions rebel and patriotic conservative embedded in that process of classification. This interface between the two fields resonates throughout cultural studies today in the study of the social dimensions of technology. Arguably, in addition to introducing British cultural studies to the United States, Grossberg is also one of the earliest US sound studies scholars. And from his work, and the junction of British and American cultural studies, work like that of Rick Altman and Jonathan Sterne arise. I will discuss this junction momentarily, as it is one in which I work. 2. Philosophies of Communication In the now seminal Communication as Culture, Carey argues that embedded in the secular US approaches to communication are two religious orientations towards communication. The first is a transmission view, wherein, by nature of a messages transportation, it has a radical affect on the individual. The second is a ritual view, wherein communication is a process of becoming and transformation of the individual regardless of the semantics of the process. The first is applied to the dominant paradigm, in which the messages arrival and interpretation will either change or not change, weakly or powerfully, depending on the theorists perspectives. Carey argues that this is a spatial logic, as it focuses, again, on the transportation of messages and the effect of its transportation. The second, ritual view, refers to Careys work and that of American cultural studies. Based on the early Chicago School of pragmatism, Mead and Cooley, communication is a process in which the self is developed in process. The meanings, the transportation, are not so important as the ways in which the experience of communicating produces particular individuals experience. Carey argues that this is a temporal logic, as the communicating subject is not considered constant and defined solely by their actions, but altered over time with their engagement with technologies. While the notion of becoming and production of the self would seem to apply to the Frankfurt school of critical theory in interesting ways. But, in part, the metaphor obscures the important fissures between American cultural studies and the institutional paradigm. Careys notion of ritual is taken from anthropological figures like Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, for whom rituals are a process that fix the violation of taboos in the maintenance of society. And, while communication as ritual for British cultural studies and political economy, does fix taboo, they do so in the re-production of a structure that is not of and by a group of people but pressed on to them. Again, Im returning here to the difference between a Durkheim-ian and Marx-ian concept of society. From the Institutional Paradigm, then, I would argue that we need a third paradigm: communication as structuration. Structuration refers to the processes in 8

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 which structure and agency are bound up in a dialectically transforming and reproducing process of practice. It is the nondialectical structure of figure and form in which the figure exists because it fits within the form - in popular culture that gives way to citizens understanding themselves as a subject of the state and not its constituting body. For Political Economy, while through methodological and methodical imprecision appear to be utilizing a communication as transmission model, the focus is on the ways a commercial media create in leisure, a site of escape and revolution, a structure of labor; and how that labor is increasingly devalued through the proliferation of advertisement and integration of media owners. And, for British cultural studies, it is the potential that practices determine the orientation of individuals not the apparatuses with which they practice that fuels the need to pay attention to the meanings, motivations, and cultures from which individuals interact with media an opposite approach to the American cultural studies technological determinism. This metaphor, however is troubled by the merger of British cultural studies and American cultural studies in the United States a Marxist British cultural studies still exists independent of American cultural studies, but American cultural studies is now wholly interfaced with British approaches. The technological approach, as transformed by Grossberg, provides an interesting way in which to engage with poststructural-esque (a clunky category, to say the least) anti-ontological/humanist theories of power like that of Foucault, Deleuze, and Bifo. This is particularly interesting in the work of scholars examining neoliberalism as a political re-organization of the moral and symbolic universe, in such a way that pessimistically if not more realistically assumes that there is no outside of the system, no revolution to be had. From surveillance society, to control society, to security society, an American Cultural studies today approach problematizes the oppositional binary of Durkheim-ian ignorance of and Marx-ian optimism that power is at play in transformative ways such that it undermines the ability to distinguish between ritual and structuration. And, it is a murky zone of epistemic transformation and transition at this point in time, just as cultural studies claims to have always been. Locating myself in the field Sound studies, as a field, has a long history in communication studies, starting early with Allport and Cantrills work on radio voice and charisma, and then in Adornos work on listening and structuration described above. Despite this historical fact, the it is often stuck in the in-between of communication studies and musicology, as Norma Coates describes, as each disavows the field as the responsibility of the other. Sound studies also has connections to new media art theory, cinema studies, and cultural anthropology. My research attempts to combine communication studies and cultural anthropological approaches as Carey had done in order to produce a historical account of working class Gibraltarians British way of listening as dialectically bound to the production of space. In this way, I draw on the turn to listening in sound studies pioneered by Jonathan Sterne, and think of listening as a technology that is, a practice with which individuals have but no option to engage, put to the ends of producing a particular political order in a way vaguely similar to Lawrence Grossbergs early musical work. Focusing on the historicity of listening as a technology of subjectivity, I write against historical surveys that place listening as some type of romanticized past in the age of communication, such as the work of McLuhan, Ong, and John Durham Peters. Similarly, I critique work like that of Foucault and Virilio, who unknowingly place listening as an outmoded historical site of surveillance and control in an age of hypervisuality. As a study of colonialism and listening, further, I answer calls by international communication scholars like Raka Shome for an introduction of cultural studies and the 9

Bryce Peake Exam Day 4 analysis of the process of domination (not just its economic means). And, my own feminist political orientation towards issues of gender, race, and class, as an engaged scholar, I am indebted to theorists like Roderick Ferguson, Evalyn Nakano-Glenn, and Grace Hong. My focus on the non-neutrality of technology whether technology proper or practice as technology is a product of work like that of Lisa Nakamura, Anne Balsamo, and Donna Haraway. This is all to say, in short form, that I in many ways position myself within cultural studies. I do so because of the vague-ness of the field, as well as its political orientation towards postcolonial gender, class, and race issues. But, my cultural studies is defined not as an institutional alliance or alignment of some form or another, but comes out of my work. Im less concerned with what tradition that I fit into, if Im citing the central texts, and doing an acceptable type of project, than I am doing exciting, historically conscious research on the political organization of space and sound through listening.

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