Mediation (Marxist Theory And Media Studies)

Mediation (german: Vermittlung) in Marxist theory refers to the reconciliation of two opposing forces within a given society (i.e. the cultural and material realms, or the superstructure and base) by a mediating object. Put another way "Existence differs from Being by its mediation (Vermittlung: 124). By concrete-ness and Connection?..“The Thing-in-itself and its mediated Being are both contained in Existence, and each is an Existence; the Thing-in-it-self exists and is the essential Existence of the Thing, while mediated Being is its unessential Existence....” (125)" (Lenin 1914-16, ''Book One: The Doctrine of Being'' In "Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic").

Similar to this, within media studies the central mediating factor of a given culture is the medium of communication itself. The popular conception of mediation refers to the reconciliation of two opposing parties by a third, and this is similar to its meaning in both Marxist theory and media studies. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or alternately labor, depending on how one views capitalist society (capital is the dominant mediating factor, but labor is another mediating factor that could overthrow capital as the most important one).

To give a concrete example of this, a worker making shoes in a shoe factory is not only producing shoes, but potential exchange-value. The shoes are commodities that can be sold for cash. In this way, the value of the labor of the worker is the exchange-value of the shoes he or she produces minus his or her compensation. At the same time, however, the shoes produced have certain social or cultural values as well. In this way, the worker's labor is mediating between the economic or exchange-value of the shoes, and their social or cultural, or symbolic value.

In media studies, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan treat "the medium is the message" or the medium of a given social object (such as a book, CD, or television show) as the touchstone for both the cultural and material elements of the society in which this object exists. McLuhan is famous for critiquing the different types of cultural and material processes that are made available between print media (like books and magazines) and electronic media like television, radio, and film. While print requires thinking that is linear, chronological, and separate from the thinking of others, electronic media are considered more organic, simultaneous, and interdependent on other media and on other users of that media.

Many thinkers are now considering how Marxist theory affects the way we think of media and vice versa, at the same time that new media are becoming a major form of communication. Contemporary media theorists often use elements of Marxist theory, such as mediation, to look at how new media affect social relations and lifestyles through their ability to communicate images, sounds, and other forms of information across the globe at incredible speeds.

Mediation in Marxism

The problem of mediation in Marxism is also referred to as the problem of determination, or namely how social actors navigate the social structures that bind them. For Marx, the primary form of mediation is labor, which forms a dialectical relationship between a worker's body and nature. Labor thus mediates between humans and the natural world. Once labor becomes reified, or made into an abstraction that becomes a commodity, however, it becomes alienated from the worker who owns it and becomes exchangeable just like any other commodity. Once this occurs, capital becomes the mediating or determining factor, with the capitalist setting the wage rate or exchange-value of labor. The only thing the worker owns in this case, his or her labor power or ability to work, becomes the worker's sole means of subsistence. The worker must get as much value from his or her labor as is possible on the open market in order to survive.

A major theme in Marxism is the problem of mediation or determination: what amount of agency does labor have in light of the determining forces of a given culture. Implicit in this is the underlying fact that labor is itself worth something, and thus the mediator is actually money, be it access to money or its possession. All arenas of conflict are mediated by how money acts as a primary determining agent in the outcome of that struggle. As James Arnt Aune has reflected, questions that arise concerning this problem include: “How do institutions, practices, and messages shape class formation? What alternative institutions, practices, and messages are available to those who wish to reshape class formations within the framework of structural possibilities?” (46). The question of mediation, then, is a question, as Aune puts it, of how Marxist theory mediates “structural possibilities and popular struggle” (46).

Marx and Engels

For Marx and Friedrich Engels, social actors are caught in a cycle of mediation between the economic base of a culture and the ideas and value systems of the culture that is given rise to by this base. Thus, as he famously formulated in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. (64)

For Marx and Engels, then, the ruling classes control the subordinate classes through domination of the ideas available in the culture. In this way the subordinate classes are said to be mediated by the effects of ideology, or “false consciousness” or a belief system that doesn't allow them to see the oppression they are enduring for what it is. The problem with this idea, as many Marxists have noted, is that it doesn't leave room for members of the subordinate classes to act on the world around them through alternate forms of mediation.

Antonio Gramsci

Later Marxists such as Gramsci would problematize this notion of ideology or false consciousness by studying the ways that workers operate during periods of “organic crisis,” or those times when social classes become detached from their traditional parties and a violent overthrow of the ruling classes is possible. Seeking to describe the ways that governments regain control of these classes during such periods of unrest, Gramsci developed the idea of hegemony, a process by which social actors within the ruling classes convince subordinate classes to consent to their own oppression once again:

The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may take sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres. (210-11)

Unfortunately, Gramsci died before he could completely articulate how hegemony mediates the subordinate classes in periods of relative calm or how to work against the powers of the ruling classes as exerted in this way. Importantly, however, he had vastly complicated the ways that later Marxists would think about mediation: as a means of persuasion utilized by the ruling classes, rather than as complete control of the available ideas within a given culture (ideology).

Cultural materialism

The work of Raymond Williams and other members of the Birmingham Center for British Cultural Studies would further extend the notion of mediation in cultural materialism. For Williams, this notion should connote a social actor's position in relation to co-determining aspects of a social formation, or a multitude of pressures and limits that are always changing and being changed by the social actor.

Thus, for Williams:

"Society" is then never only the "dead husk" which limits social and individual fulfillment. It is always a constitutive process with very powerful pressures which are both expressed in political, economic, and cultural formations and, to take the full weight of "constitutive," are internalized and become "individual wills." Determination of this whole kind—a complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures—is in the whole social process itself and nowhere else: not in an abstracted "mode of production" nor in an abstracted "psychology." (87)

Under this guise, mediation becomes a process of lived reality whereas social actors are not so much duped by ruling ideas as incredibly involved with the understanding and circulation of those ideas through their own expressions of individual will. This is a much more dynamic process of mediation than previous versions, but one heavily dependent on a more in-depth theorization of Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

Articulation theory

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have further theorized the complexities of mediation through their development of articulation theory, to describe the ways that certain notions become dominant in a culture, given the relative openness of the social in heavily industrialized nations such as the U.S. This openness results in a “non-necessary belongingness” for the various elements of a given social formation, or an indeterminacy to the way that history, culture, economics or the material world, and social actors come together to form dominant notions. Thus, for Hall:

…the so-called unity of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be articulated in different ways because they have no necessary “belongingness”. The “unity” which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. Thus, a theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects. (53)

Under articulation theory mediation becomes a complex, indeterminate process by which social meanings are circulated under the historical conditions of a given culture and social actors take up these meanings or not based on a complex interplay of all the parts of the social whole.

Mediation in media studies

Within media studies mediation is also used in the same sense as in Marxist theory: thinkers try to look at how a given medium reconciles the various forces of history, culture, economics or the material world, and how social actors use that medium to navigate these various meanings and values. The central problem for any media theorist, similar to the problem of a Marxist theorist, is to attempt to analyze what is possible and what is limited by a given medium. Or, in other words, how does the structure of the medium limit how that medium can be used and how do social actors work both within and against that structure?

Mass media and the culture industry

There is another sense in which media theorists look at this question, too, and that is by looking at the "mass media" as a whole. Beginning perhaps with the Frankfurt school’s theorization of the "culture industry," particularly in the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, theorists have tried to understand how mass audiences are both affected by and can affect the massive, corporatized media establishment that we see in countries like the U.S. As Adorno and Horkheimer reflect:

The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them. (167)

Early theorists such as these saw no agency whatsoever for audiences of the culture industry, claiming instead that this industry was founded on mass deception and that the average consumer was a cultural dupe being inculcated into the values of the ruling classes without realizing it. Many critics of this school feel that this represented a reintroduction of Marx's ideas about mediation, or media as purveyors of a dominant ideology that destroyed the possibility that audiences for mass media were able to work against these ruling ideas.

Marshall McLuhan

Perhaps one of the best known media theorists, McLuhan