independent media and the occupy movement

What place does “indie media” such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal hold in the larger media universe? What is its function with respect to the present Occupy Movement? How are the collective representations, imagery, and ideological frames of the Occupy Movement, as publicized by indie media, communicated to the so-called mainstream media?

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To answer these questions, one must clear away the underbrush of popular terminology used to talk about the media. It is common to hear a distinction raised between the mainstream media (MSM) and indie media. What counts as the MSM is not the product of any ideological consensus, since the boundaries of such an entity are largely defined by the viewer’s ideological standpoint. For example, conservatives consider Fox News to stand in opposition to the MSM, understood to be the major networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), cable networks (MSNBC and CNN), public media (NPR and CPB), and newspapers such as the NY Times and Washington Post. From a structural perspective, however, Fox News occupies a place within the field of the MSM. Hence, to avoid analytical confusion, it makes sense to dispense with the term MSM; what one is confronted with is not a situation of mainstream versus marginal but rather a single media field in which different journalistic entities can be identified as dominant or dominated within the field itself.+ The dominant and dominated positions in the field are determined by the economic and symbolic capital attributes of a particular media concern. In this case, what Fox News may lack in symbolic capital (i.e. it represents points of view that are, for the journalistic tastes of MSNBC, the NY Times and the Washington Post, “outside the mainstream” of “legitimate” public opinion), it more than compensates for with its economic capital, which it uses to transform the field itself, primarily by incorporating Republican politicians, strategists, and pundits as experts and paid analysts (e.g. Palin, Rove, Huckabee, etc.), or by acquiring a dominant “mainstream” newspaper like the WSJ and reshaping its editorial outlook. In other words, Fox News’s media strategy has largely succeeded in moving formerly marginal political perspectives into the mainstream of public debates.

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Hence, with their vast economic resources “liberal” and “conservative” media wage a struggle over symbolic capital in the media field, a struggle which also depends on accruing economic capital. The former wage a preservationist strategy (to preserve its dominant position as the legitimate definition of journalistic taste, as “objective”) against the transformative strategy of the latter (which claims for itself the legitimate definition of journalistic taste, as “fair and balanced”). In this competitive struggle, representations of the Occupy Movement by the dominant and dominated media concerns are skewed towards the spectacular, the shocking, and the outrageous, since such representations are proven to hold an audience’s attention, which drives ratings and, thus, advertising revenue. (This is verified, for example, by perusing the reportage of “embedded” journalists from the NY Times). The moralizing attitude expressed by pundits towards the movement — either advocating for or admonishing it — is less significant than the structural tendency to present provocative images of movement actions and participants as provocative.

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Indie media’s relationship to the media field as just described is best understood as an externality: it is outside the field at present. However, this means that its structural exclusion or positioning outside the media field, its position outside the game, renders it powerless to transform the media field. Thus, its representations of the Occupy Movement make little impact on the field itself. Whereas one can find presentations of the mundane and the ordinary in indie media journalism (discussions of consensus building as a political strategy, the organization of the provision of food, clothing, and books for demonstrators at Zuccotti Park, and the like) along side the shocking (typically, instances of police violence against demonstrators), when indie media interfaces with the media field, or rather when the media field incorporates the products of indie media, there is a tendency to emphasize representations of shocking rather than the mundane, which only legitimates the journalistic gaze of the dominant and dominated media within the field. Consequently, the relationship of indie media to the movement is actually fraught with political risk.

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Indie media has been referred to as a people’s media, indigenous media, insurgent media, counter-publics, and wild publics. However, its self-defined oppositional position with respect to the “mainstream” is undermined by being outside the media field: because it is outside the game, it is not a player in its own right. Indie media’s lack of economic capital means it must rely on the dominant and dominated media concerns to present its collective representations as it wishes them to be understood. Lacking the capacity to impose its weak symbolic capital on the media field, indie media is also unable to impose its journalistic taste or perception, which brings together the mundane with the extraordinary, on the producers and consumers of the products of the media field. This does not mean that it serves no positive function for the Occupy Movement; such a positive function is its role in representing the movement to itself, of digesting and reflecting back to the movement its own, diverse understandings. As such, indie media serves as a repository of social knowledge and collective memory for the movement, reminding it where it came from, why it came into existence, and what it is doing.

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In order to bring the fully rounded representations of the indie media covering the Occupy Movement into the media field itself, the movement must generate its own representatives, who can articulate the complexity of the movement to the media field without falling into the trap of highlighting the strange, the different, the radical, and the revolutionary. Social movements are ordinary occurrences in much of the world, which have always co-existed with the institutionalized political process. In my view, what the Occupy Movement should avoid at all costs is allowing itself to be represented to the media field by philosopher-journalists (e.g. Noam Chomsky and Cornell West), writer-journalists (e.g. Naomi Klein), all-purpose, intellectual-journalists (e.g. Noam Chomsky), activist-journalists (e.g. Al Sharpton), who are reflective of already existing structural positions in the media field and who play scripted roles in this field for the dominant and dominated media concerns.

+my discussion is indebted to Pierre Bourdieu, On Television (1998)

political romanticism

In The Guardian David Graeber has extolled the Occupy movement. However, it is worth noting that public demonstrations still seem to have an effect in nations where civil society is restricted or non-existent (see the “Arab Spring”) and in France (in the form of the general strike), but this political style is pretty much exhausted in the USA, almost to the point of becoming a cliche. The declining significance of street protests is made worse when organizers (if any exist) promise more than they can deliver. Occupy Wall Street… until what happens? The closing of the DJIA? What Graeber purports to be one of the signs of the fall of the American Empire, the tribal drumbeats echoing through the canyons of lower Manhattan, is a spectacle; meanwhile, for criminal banksters and feral traders (like the USB thug Kweku Adoboli) it’s business as usual.

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The anarchist vision apparent in Graeber’s commentary (“This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged”) is no substitute for a real political theory of how the widespread change its author envisions might be actualized. Hardt and Negri suffice for the sound bit imagination of well-meaning demonstrators; the rest of us can still hope for something more profound.

the poverty of a political culture

Unless one were to change "Americans", little can be changed about US politics. Ill informed, lacking an education in political theory and history, suspicious, covetous, and displaying symptoms of the narcissism of small differences towards any group that appears to be making social and/or economic progress (first Catholics, then Irish, then Jews, then Blacks, then Women, then Gays, then Mexicans, etc.), Americans are a sorry lot. Claiming practical knowledge bred of healthy exposure to the "real world", they are as gullible as the most benighted country bumpkin: ready to believe the worst and fear the best, they sell short when they should hold out for long. In the defense of "Americanness", they act "un-American". In the defense of liberty, they act illiberally. Worse yet, the American electorate has given rise to a political class that is scandalously inept. The carnival barker, the circus impresario, the sales huckster, and the soap box demagogue are still models of political comportment and representation, which is why money and policy are interchangeable entities in American politics. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the task the 99% demonstrators have set for themselves is daunting: it is not simply to change a banking system or create a chimerical people's capitalism but rather to change an entire form of subjectivity.

99%

It is an empirical question whether the marriage partners of capitalism (in its totally mythical form as "self-regulating market") and representative democracy (in its totally mythical form as "popular sovereignty") are fully compatible, and practically functional, in conditions of emergency such as an economic crisis (particularly a crisis that is global). In the present situation, the finance banking system, which is not subject to the controls of any particular "government," contributed to a crisis; whether "the People" (Tea Party or #OWS) can do anything about it using the instruments available to the American government is an open question, particularly when the ideal of a self-regulating international market holds sway in public opinion and in practice.

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The problem is that since the 1930s and 40s (and Taft-Hartley), there's no political language for talking about class directly in American politics. After all, Americans are all middle class by definition, up to a yearly income of $250K. There's no accounting for class differences between the owner of a small business, a well paid freelancer, a plumber, and person who works two jobs: they are all middle class. Hence, class distinctions are recognized as distinctions in culture (e.g. educational attainment, prestige of educational institution, patterns of consumption including books, religion or lack thereof, neighborhood, region, linguistic fluency, prestige of occupation, home-ownership, etc.).

#TeaParty v. #OWS: a tale of two movements

The Tea Party is a new iteration of a long-standing political tradition, classically defined as the "paranoid style" by historian Richard Hofstadter: a pot of conspiracy thinking leavened with a healthy dollop of nativism and covered with a poujadist lid. Far from being an independent political movement, the Tea Party is a creature of the Republican Party and has always sought its nirvana on the happy hunting grounds of right-wing conservative fears: fear of government, fear of a black President, fear of gays, fear of Mexicans, fear of Muslims. Establishment Republicans love the energy but loathe the substance of the Tea Party, just as level headed Republicans sought distance from the mania of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

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The #OWS crowd is the typical mix of left-wing and progressive causes one finds at any large demo. The symbolism of the mass gathering is, however, losing its efficacy as a carrier of political meaning. It is telling that only confrontations with baton-wielding and mace-spraying police (as opposed to Blackberry-wielding and derivatives-spraying financiers) have brought it wider attention: alas, the police don't run "Wall Street" or crash the Lehmann Brothers of the world. At some point, enlightened elements of the #OWS will figure out that engagement with the Democrats is the only means to bring about practical reforms. Clever Democratic politicians would be wise to leverage this left-wing angst. But short of an actual revolution, no new form of people's capitalism is likely to emerge and the youth of the nation must grow accustomed to conditions of scarcity that have beset most people at most times in history. The golden years of the housing and credit bubbles are gone forever.

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Life in a declining empire: get acclimated