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Understanding Global Media Imagination: A (Reflexive) Interview With Shani Orgad

2014-02-25T19:33:19Z

In an image and media dominated age, where immediacy and encounters with distant others are legion, what kind of imagination makes up our global psyche? How are we invited to think about others, and in the process ourselves, and what does it tells us about media, identity and our global world? These are the core questions of Shani Orgad’s latest book – the work of several years of intense, detailed and original research. The Global Journal met the LSE senior lecturer in Media and Communications to talk about the limits but also the potential of imagination in an increasingly mediatized global world. And to see what lessons Global as a media outlet can learn from some of the finest academic research in media studies.

What are these media representations that your book is concerned with and how do they shape a global imagination?

I am interested in the archives of images, narratives, notions and ideas produced by media that are being accumulated and absorbed in our mind. I am not referring to a direct relationship by which, for example, a TV program simply gets into our imagination archive that we then use. Rather, what concerns me is the cumulative process by which images and the ways we are invited to imagine feeds into how we see the world, ourselves and others. My understanding of representation is dual in that I look and analyse the objects produced by the media but I also constantly reflect on what kind of reality it tries to capture and how this feeds into the way we imagine the absent. Imagination is the capacity to form mental images and concepts of what is absent. We encounter images and narratives in the media, and we are able to fill the absent – what is not there - with some kind of a mental concept or image. This is where imagination comes in. Media producers both imagine and produce representations and we as viewers both consume and imagine. Through media and representation, we self-represent ourselves, others and our world.

I deliberately didn’t frame the question of imagination as a one of thinking. Not that I exclude the question “how the media shape the way we think about the world”. But imagination allows capturing a much more dialectic and complex idea that includes the cognitive, but crucially also the affective, the emotional. We often imagine something before necessarily knowing it. Sometimes we need to imagine things that we don’t know, that we have not encountered personally. The argument of the book is that we live in a world full of uncertainties and that we should allow a space for our imagination to accept that. And for the media to more proactively provide this space of ambivalence; a space that would allow us to admit that not knowing and not fully understanding are inevitable features of life today.

How did you go about addressing the two challenges of technology and globalization in the book?

Technology is the propeller of the process of cultural globalization that I am interest in. The opening of the book - using an advertisement from the 1950s - puts at the heart of the discussion the technological force behind the shrinking of distance, and its consequence: bringing the far away to our ‘here and now’. The process of imagining far-away others, events, and places depends on technology. Of course we can imagine independently of media technologies but what interests me is how our imaginations are fed through representations that are produced and disseminated by technology. So technology is at the background, but underpinning this story.

With regards to globalization, it’s probably a mark of my own history and entry into this debate, for I came to London in 1999 when Anthony Giddens was the Director of the LSE. Many of us, me included, were very enthused about the ideas of globalization and the global world. And of course, at the same time, quite a lot of doubts and questions started to be raised: do we live in a global world? Is it really globalization? The schism, that is not always helpful, between the national and the global started to be pronounced quite vocally. To me, the spaces of intersection between local, regional and national spheres of representation and imagination constitute significant spaces, within what I regard as ‘global’. Discussions within national spheres about how are we being seen in the world, what the world says about us are relevant questions to address in the process of globalization. They are of course national discussions occurring in the national sphere and shaping national imaginations, but they concurrently implicate the way we imagine ourselves as part of or in relation to the globe. It is therefore unhelpful to think about these only in terms of the national and national media.

I have tried to distance myself (normatively, that is) from celebrating or embracing cosmopolitanism. In the book I address cosmopolitanism as an ideological project, not as an empirical reality. The issue of migration, for instance, is one where the local –within national spheres - is clearly the result of a global process and a response to global pressures.

The centre of my interest in globalization is therefore as a cultural rather than economic process– notwithstanding the fact that economic processes underpins a lot of what I am looking at. But what has driven me is a curiosity about how globalization manifests itself in the cultural realm, beyond the homogenization / heterogenization argument. The book is neither a utopian nor a dystopian account of the consequences of cultural globalization. Rather, it is an empirically-grounded exploration that suggests, following Arjun Appadurai, that one of the central forces that propel globalization is imagination, and asks what possible effects it might have.

The book concludes with a discussion of the “self” that is located in a global context. I show how global and national “public issues”, concerning war and conflict, humanitarian disasters, and migration, are explained and imagined in the media by a focus on the self, often in the form of the story of an individual’s intimate life. I argued that the focus on the personal and the intimate invites deep and meaningful engagement with the issue and potentially fosters interest in the other. At the same time this focus in the media on the individual encourages an inward, self-centred view, which fails to invite opening up to the world outside us, and to contemplating alternative lives to the ones we lead.

You write: "What I discuss as occurring within the current media environment is that the ethnocentric, largely western 'we' is changing, specifically because groups and individuals who previously were excluded from the public media space are gaining visibility and voice, a process which is calling into question the symbolic frontiers between 'us' and 'them' ". Can you give some examples of such appearances in the global media landscape and talk about their significance?

One of the case studies I am looking at in the book is the 2005 French Riots in Paris’s suburbs, but the broader argument applies to many other cases. You could look, for instance, at the Arab uprisings. The key process I discuss is the way in which formerly “others” enter the public sphere by gaining visibility and voice, those that were and still are to a large extent relegated to being ‘exotic others’, be them the “Arabs” in the Arab World, or the suburban youth, particularly of Maghrebi descent in the case of the French riots. These “others” have the capacity today more than ever to voice themselves on mediated stages that can become very quickly global – through, for example, online and social media, and international news networks. In the words of a French blogger: “Finally the microphones are pointed towards us”. And it’s in this reversal moment - without being too utopian about it for of course it has its limits – that these youth, who were historically excluded from French TV screens, eventually gained a voice, on BBC world, Reuters or Al Jazeera. This kind of moments challenge both the sense of the nation as a stable category but also the sense of “us” as Western viewers and our relations to those often impoverished “others” that have been historically shown in ways we have become so used to. These moments of reversal, however brief, may not always seem meaningful and they assuredly need to be cumulative to have an effect, but I believe they contribute to a process of opening up, which, in its most extreme form, I call estrangement.

As an international magazine dealing extensively with global issues and which interacts a lot with NGOs, media and public communication practitioners, we are very interested in hearing some of your ideas about how the media industry can contribute to a different global imagination and for instance your ideas of ambivalence and non-narrative structure.

I have had a lot of discussions with NGO communication people and journalists working about humanitarian crises and war. To their credit, the majority of them are highly aware of the pitfalls of what they do and are reflexive of many of the consequences of the representations they produce and how they feed our imagination. More awareness and reflexivity is already a great step – despite an economic media climate that favours certain stories and styles and delegitimizes others. But taking risks, being innovative and refusing to fit in existing categories have quite often made an impact and propelled some important changes in how people and places are represented.

The technological developments we are witnessing of social and online media, and the increasing visibility open up a possibility to have a more ambivalent media space; a space that includes stories that allow the assigning of an object or an event to more than one category, or stories that are unable to categorize some things at all. I draw on Zygmunt Bauman in referring to the idea of ambivalence. I am not calling for reversal of global power – as can be seen, for example, in the narratives about Asia as “the next global power”. These narratives are locked in familiar categories of financial power and empire. They fail to offer other formations of global relations, that wouldn’t necessarily fall into the familiar categories that ultimately reproduce inequalities.

Certainly, we need narratives, we need clear explanatory accounts that help us to cope with the constant uncertainties, fragility and lack of coherence of our times. Narratives work to impose symbolic order on the modern experience which is fraught with ambivalence and anxieties. At the same time, I conclude the book by arguing that we need symbolic spaces to articulate the contradictions and tensions brought by modern life in a global world, by the disembedding of social relations from their local contexts. We need representations that allow us to ‘live with’ ambivalence and to accept incompleteness, lack of closure and moralizing.

Take the case of migration. As a migrant who arrived in London in 1999 I have experienced contradictions, ambivalence and uncertainties, just like many other migrants. When I researched representations of migration for one of my chapters - in various contexts from Chinese press representation of local migrant workers, other Asian countries, as well as North American and European contexts – I was hoping to be surprised and to be able to say to many previous studies: “you got it wrong, the representation of migration in the media is not always about either criminalizing migrants and victimizing them, or celebrating the promise and benefits of migration. But sadly, my research confirmed this rigid representation, which I call nightmare and dream ‘scripts’ of migration. In contrast to these rigid scripts, the experience of migration is ambivalent by definition. It is fraught with uncertainties, dilemmas and the inability to categorize. You can be away from your home country all your life and still experience this ambivalence, and this ambivalence needs to be negotiated sometimes on a daily basis. Where is there space in the media today for articulating this negotiation? We have a topic here – migration – where the reality of people’s experiences refuses narrativity because it’s so complex and full of contradictions and yet the majority of its representations that we encounter in mainstream media – as well as in online and social media – insists on categorizing and narrativizing, and refuses to acknowledge this ambivalence. I am not simply saying that everything is uncertain but that media representations should document and explore these uncertainties. So my hope is that media professionals – journalists, editors, producers, bloggers, social media users - would take this into consideration, despite the logistic, technical and aesthetic constraints, the process of production, and the impetus of news and other media genres to impose closure, that work against ambivalence. I do believe that media representations can become a vital force in re-educating our imagination in this direction.

Thank you

Media Representation and the Global Imagination by Shani Organ, Polity Press,£16.99 / €19.50

Made In China

2013-05-22T15:33:56Z

China’s Silent Army: The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers And Workers Who Are Remaking The World In Beijing’s Image, Juan Pablo Caedenal & Heriberto Araújo, Allen Lane, £25.00.

More than a sporting event, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 marked the beginning of a new era for China on a global scale. In the wake of this coming out party, journalists Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo set off on a journey to investigate China’s economic activity in the developing world. They tracked China’s presence in untapped markets – from the extraction of raw materials in Russia’s taiga and Burma’s jade mines, to gigantic construction projects in some of Africa’s most turbulent states.

While the rest of the world suffered the economic consequences of the financial collapse, Beijing’s intervention in the financial system allowed China to sidestep the recession. The Asian giant is buying debt, giving out loans, investing and acquiring assets globally. But economic success has a cost – Chinese banks are financed by the deposits of millions of Chinese savers receiving negative returns, combined with strict controls on capital outflow. China’s steady expansion is indeed led by a “silent army” of millions of anonymous citizens “with a limitless capacity for self-sacrifice”.

Through countless stories of ordinary Chinese emigrants working in the developing world for minimal salaries, without job security, contracts or medical insurance, in China’s Silent Army the authors provide readers with a first-hand, detailed and vivid account of China’s global reach.

Give It Up

2013-05-22T15:26:09Z

Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What it Means for Our Economic Well-Being, Zoltan J Acs, Princeton University Press, $29.95.

In Why Philanthropy Matters, Zoltan Acs traces the role of philanthropy in the history of the United States, arguing the practice is a cornerstone of American-style capitalism and intrinsically linked to entrepreneurship, opportunity and wealth creation. In Arcs’ view, the success of the American model has developed through a dynamic process both enabling and requiring philanthropy: giving is a catalyst for innovation (proxy for wealth creation) and a creator of opportunities (softening inevitable inequality). The combination of capitalistic entrepreneurship and philanthropic giving is depicted as unique among developed nations and ripe for export.

The numerous examples Acs supplies may be enticing, but the assumptions and conclusions remain unpersuasive. The role of philanthropy in shaping the uniqueness of American-style capitalism is neither proven, nor convincingly demonstrated. Indeed, one could argue philanthropy was not an inherent cultural element, but a necessary offset to a weak social system. Moreover, philanthropic initiatives not focused on innovation and capitalistic progress – for instance, those devoted to the arts, environment and labor rights – are merely considered. The same goes for international aid.

While punctuated by amusing anecdotes, this is an American-centric book valuable mostly for the insights it offers on why American philanthropy has mattered to America.

-MC

Lost And Found In Global Politics

2013-05-22T14:19:52Z

Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When It’s Most Needed, Thomas Hale, David Held & Kevin Young Polity Press, £55.00.

Gridlock sets out to explore a growing failure in global governance, whereby countries are increasingly unable to cooperate effectively on issues of pressing global concern. The authors point to the multiple factors and pathways blocking international action – a governance gap affecting nearly all areas of global activity.

In highlighting the historical contingency of no longer effective mechanisms, the authors are not just pessimistic, but almost frightening. In their telling, gridlock results in further gridlock and the condition will only become more pervasive. Abandoning traditional knowledge silos, the authors endorse a multidisciplinary perspective. For those who would seek a way out of the present predicament, however, Gridlock might be disappointing. While very convincing when it comes to examining systemic reasons for failure, it does not prove multilateralism is an unfit basis for global cooperation and governance.

The need for more global governance is evident – too bad Gridlock provides few serious paths towards a more constructive future. When the authors mention “bottom-up solutions working without a central solution,” it is certainly interesting. But these small-scale initiatives are immediately challenged by the lack of broader, if not global, cooperation. Maybe time to risk throwing some utopian ideas into the mix to shake up the analysis of a “global box” slow death.

Feeding The Market

2013-05-22T14:16:03Z

The Secret Financial Life Of Food: From Commodities Markets To Supermarkets, Kara Newman, Columbia University Press, $26.95.

From haute cuisine to gastro-anthropologic travels to simple recipes, television programs and books alike have celebrated in the past few years the rise of food as a fundamental element of contemporary pop-culture. In these gastronomic journeys, food is depicted in all its forms and shapes, but the link highlighting its path from farm to table rarely gets a look in.

The Secret Financial Life of Food departs from this ‘food-porn’ paradigm to bring us back to the real world where food is treated as a commodity and traded in massive quantities of standardized quality. In the book, the Spirits Editor at Wine Enthusiast Magazine, Kara Newman, gives us a thoughtful and tightly packaged historical perspective on the evolution of commodity markets in the United States, from the early days of the republic onwards. In each chapter, she presents a different commodity – from pepper to corn, cocoa to soybeans – documenting in a clear and succinct way the fortunes (and misfortunes) of related trading.

Where the book promises somewhat more than it delivers, however, is in drawing a clear connection between commodity trading and culinary and grocery practices. Nevertheless, The Secret Financial Life of Food is a thoughtful, historically grounded and sharply writtern book opening a window on a theme that, despite its importance, is seldom discussed off the trading floor or outside specialized courses.

When Black Gold Runs Dry

2013-05-22T13:01:48Z

Wheel Of Fortune: The Battle For Oil And Power In Russia, Thane Gustafson, Harvard University Press, $39.95.

In Wheel of Fortune, Thane Gustafson explores the imminent challenges faced by Russia if it is to remain a global heavyweight in the oil sector. He traces the tumultuous evolution of the Russian oil industry from its controversial beginnings with perestroika, glasnost and the demise of the Soviet Union, to the era of unregulated privatization and subsequent rise of the so-called oligarchs. This in-depth account, featuring rare interviews and biographies of influential figures examines the vast and often murky extent of mutual dependence that exists between oil and the Russian state.

Gustafson's thesis is that the Russian oil economy has reached a critical crossroads.Stagnant levels of oil production due to decaying infrastructure and falling reserves mean a destabilizing fiscal adjustment is on the near horizon. Simply put, if petrodollar revenues are not “channeled by the state to support Russia's other strategic industries" major economic and political turmoil lies ahead. Gustafson argues the impact of any fiscal upheaval would have dire consequences for global economic - and thus political - stability.

Thankfully, Gustafson does offer a glimmer of hope. Paradoxically, the future of the Russian oil industry is contingent upon Russia’s ability to diversify by growing other sectors of the economy. Whether or not the political will exists in Russia to choose this path remains an unanswered question.

For All European Politicians

2013-03-27T10:42:11Z

Making the European Monetary Union, Harold James, Harvard University Press, $35.00.

It is hard to read Making the European Monetary Union. Not because the euro is part of the story, but because the clarity of its insights into the Eurozone’s current weakness provide us with a handy, yet sobering, view of the future. Harold James’ investigation into the roots of the European monetary project transports the reader back to the early stages of the continent’s post-war rebirth. Using an array of resources unavailable until now – notably, material from the European Committee of Central Bank Governors and the Delors Committee – he sheds light on some critical European political failures.

From its very establishment, the euro has been divorced from the fiscal activities and realities of its membership. As one of the most creative thinkers behind the currency, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, explains, “neither the United States Fed nor any other central bank in the world is, like the Eurosystem, confronted with the challenge of not being the expression of a political union.”

James questions the founders with their “cadeau empoisonné” – this “strange currency” is primarily the expression of men and political will. European politicians should learn from the virtuoso intelligence of such a prominent historian, while economists should yield for now as James is at the peak of his powers.

-JCN

Hypochondriac Societies

2013-03-27T10:22:43Z

Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health, Joseph Dumit, Duke University Press, $23.95.

The average American is prescribed and purchases between nine and 13 prescription-only drugs per year. Overall healthcare expenditures were over $2 trillion in 2011 and are projected to reach one-fifth of the country’s GDP by 2020. Drugs For Life reveals the glaring contradiction that exists between economic policies prescribing cuts in healthcare and more effective medication, versus a continual growth in costs.

Joseph Dumit explains how marketers began to redefine the very concept of health in the 1960s, replacing the idea of inherently healthy bodies with the concepts of risk and prevention. In this new paradigm, to be normal is to be insecure. Throughout the book, Dumit unravels the corporate strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies to appropriate research and clinical trials, manipulate facts and norms and expand their market. Despite his challenge to the hijacking of public health by the private sector, the sheer size of the pharmaceutical industry means governments are compelled to let the industry conduct studies at a lower cost. Companies have taken control of research, scientific literature and advertising – bypassing regulators and healthcare professionals.

If the purpose of healthcare is no longer to reduce the need for future treatments but instead to increase that need, then the meaning of health and its relationship to business must be reconsidered.

- AS

Heavenly Governance

2013-03-27T10:19:25Z

A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China's Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future, Jiang Qing, Princeton University Press, $39.50.

The latest book by prominent Chinese scholar Jiang Qing, A Confucian Constitutional Order is a detailed discussion about the practicality of a Confucian constitutional design in contemporary China. The author proposes a system of government founded on the “Confucian Way of the Humane Authority,” with three distinct and coexisting forms of political legitimacy: of the earth, of the heaven and of the human. Implicit throughout is a critique of constitutional democracy as a form of government, with Qing suggesting “the power of the people” cannot be the only source of political legitimacy.

The book is structured explicitly as a dialogue. Jiang leads with detailed descriptions of his vision of a Confucian constitution, describing a tricameral system based on the equilibrium (not equality) of different forms of political legitimacy, an Academy of scholar-officials with a supervising role and a “symbolic monarchy” of direct decedents of Confucius himself.

The fundamental premise of the work is the argument that the official embrace of Confucianism in China could become an important part of the solution to China’s “moral and political predicament.” Such discussions demonstrate that while much disagreement remains, ideas about a Confucian constitution could certainly serve at least as a good conversation starter about China’s political future.

-MT

The Return of the Veil

2013-01-23T08:21:16Z

A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East To America, Leila Ahmed, Yale University Press, $30.00.

The hijab is back – on an increasing number of women’s heads, and as a subject of public debate. This discussion is often premised on contentious and stereotypical images of veiled women as a reflection of Islamic oppression. To what extent is the veil’s resurgence a reaction to these perceptions? Are there different meanings to the hijab? What do Muslim women – veiled and unveiled– have to say about their choices? These are just some of the questions that Harvard professor Leila Ahmed poses in A Quiet Revolution.

Ahmed provides an interesting historical analysis of the issues surrounding the hijab since the beginning of the 20th century, before exploring in detail the “unveiling movement” in Egypt. She then reflects upon the revival of Islam in the United States, and the different forms of activism that have emerged as a result. A key theme throughout is the connection between the reappearance of the hijab in the East and West. Ahmed argues that understanding the situation in Egypt – a non-Islamist society that went from unveiled to predominantly veiled society in less then 30 years – will help shed light on contemporary dynamics in the West.

In the same vein, Ahmed demonstrates how religious movements are not static. They can transform across frontiers and generations “and take root in environments where new social and political conditions open up new possibilities of belief, practice and interpretation.” Ahmed’s critical perspective on the politics of the veil in Egypt and the United States is a valuable contribution to the study of hijab, and, thus, to a better understanding of the status of women in Islam.

Z. K.

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