Chapter 8: Production, Consumption, and Regulations

Cultural studies is not economics

• Production, consumption and regulation in cultural analysis

• But not as central, as identity and representation

• Doesn’t aks for effectiveness like economics would

• Drawn on Paul du Gay “doing culture”

Production of goods and of meaning

• Production is a concept from the field of economics

• Marx theory of class interconnected with it

• Cultural studies is concerned with production of goods, but also the production of representation, as a complementation (not contradiction)

• Production of goods and meaning always goes hand in hand

The representation of production

• How is production and the invention of a new product represented?

• Both by the company behind it and the culture at large

• Different narratives about the invention of the Walkman (Paul du Gay and co)

  • Narrative about “Heroic individual” → visionary person, 

  • connected to specific “Japaneseness” of invention

  • “Routine organizational change” and happy accident

• All three narratives have in common that company strategy and systematic planning are downplayed (even though it is clear that this is valuable)

The transition from silent to sound film

• Entertainment business downplays strategy and highlight heroic individualism or happy coincidences (sometimes both at the same time)

• Example: transition from silent to sound film in Hollywood cinema (late 1920s)

  • Possible to record sound, synchronicity was the hard thing

  • Two competing systems for recording sound were being developed;

    • One recorded the sound on a disk;

    • The other, which eventually won out, recorded it next to the images on the film strip

The big film studios

• Big film studies controlled the market, well aware of the transition to sound

• Still they leaned back and waited for the right moment

• Only when Warner Brothers had big successes with sound films (like the Jazz Singer 1927) they made the change

• By 1930 silent films had nearly completely disappeared

Singin’ in the Rain

• In this movie the transition to sound is represented differently (just like it is in Hollywood)

• Usually portrayed as chaotic, spontaneous, and initially not very successful

• Success is due to individual efforts of the positive characters and a number of happy coincidences

Dream factory

• Drawing attention way from the fact that film studios are part of a usually highly efficient capitalist mode of production

• Hollywood often being referred to as “dream factory” → very accurate

• Hollywood produces narratives that answer and fuel our dreams and desires; and the film studios are also factories

• Classic Hollywood Cinema (1920s - 1950s): film studios were organised just like other factories were at the time

• Today; the mode of production has changed in that hardly any film is now produced under one roof by one company alone

• What hasn’t changed: film production is highly organised and highly specialized (endless credit scenes)

• → leaving little to coincidence and individual heroism

Production has an impact on meaning

• The way production is organized has an impact on the meaning of the product, be that an object or a film

• On most general level: how much money is available?, production of representation

• Choices for the sake of commercial reasons also impact the meaning (expl. Scene in Breaking bad)

Raiders of the Lost Ark

• First indiana Jones movie; characterization in the beginning

• Confronting an enemy with a sword, Jones killing him with a gun → scrupulous in his methods

• Actor suffering from food poisoning, being unable to film the planned scene with his whip

• Production needed to continue, since delay costs loads of money

Post-production of a film

• Things can also be changed in the post-production of a film

• Scene in Pretty woman, Vivian struggling to use the right cutlery

• Comic effect only chosen in post production

Invisible editing

• A scene = a dozen different shots, joined in editing

• Impossible to notice the scenes not being filmed in this specific sequence

• → editing becomes invisible

• → this creates a stong illusion that allows the immersion in the story / film

Long takes

• French new wave of the 1960s used long shots

• = shots that last at least half a minute

• Sparse editing and seem particularly realistic

• But Hollywood's film studios encourage the directors to film short takes, to be able to join the takes in post-production

Close-Ups

• Several reasons for the preference of many short takes → that create specific meanings

• This form of editing allows the frequent inclusion of close-ups

• close-ups: shots where an object or a part of the body, usually the face, is singled out

• Close-ups allow to emphasize on different details (like the good looks of actors → important for success)

An economic style of filming

• Short clips are faster and thus cheaper to film than long takes

• If sth goes wrong, it takes little time to redo

• Long takes (in contrast) take more time to set up, film, redo

• → this makes short shots a more economic style of filming

Empowering the producer

• Filming short shots takes power away from the director and gives it to the producer, who can do the post-production without the director

• Directors are not (alone) responsible for the film result

• European style filming directors are therefore not likes in hollywood, since they do not oblige to these economic rules

Consumption of goods and meaning

• A economic category, but also inextricably tied to questions of representation and identity

• We consume representations as much as material goods

• Consumption of goods and meaning always goes hand in hand

• Some objects, for example, express our identity

• Different theoretic approaches to consumption

Production of consumption approach

• Du Gay and co authors

• Consumption = entirely passive

• Production of consumption approach; developed by frankfurt school (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse)

  • Heavenly influences by Marxist ideas

• They see consumers as entirely passive, and also see them as helpless victims of capitalist production

• “Consumers, they suggest, simply accept the meanings inscribed into a product in the act of production, and these meanings keep consumers satisfied and prevent them from developing a genuine class consciousness, that is, an awareness of the exploitative structure of society, and thus any revolutionary spirit.”

• Problematic because:

  • Distinction between genuine and artificial needs

  • Relies on questionable distinction between high culture and mass culture

Needs are culturally constructed

• Genuine needs: based on human biology and the natural rhythm of human interaction, uninfluenced by the logics of modern consumer capitalism

• False needs: not natural but manipulated or induced by producers, advertisers and marketers; having no basis in nature

• Problematic binary between nature and culture; which we see itself as culturally constructed

• Foucault → makes references to biology also problematic; no truth outside discourse

• All needs are culturally constructed

The culture industry

• This theory (consumers being passive) is also problematic because it relies on a questionable distinction between high culture and mass culture

• High culture: opera, poetry, etc = untouched by the logic of capitalism and its mode of production (Horkheimer and Adorno); 

• it somehow exists detached from the everyday world → therefore seen as valuable and answering to genuine needs

• Mass culture seen as product of the culture industry; therefore (supposedly) artificial and false, and only satisfies the false needs created by capitalism

Consumption as appropriation and resistance

• Diametrically opposed theory

• Considers consumption as appropriation and resistance

• Most basic level: consumers are not passive but active; do not merely accept the meanings inscribed into a product during production, but create their own meanings

• Actively resist the meanings created by the producers and appropriate it → taking over the product for unintended uses and creating own meanings

• Theory developed by french philosopher Michel de Certeau

• Consumers = “active agents” (du Gay)

• Example Walkman: uses more personal (listening alone) than intended (with people, intended by two headphone jack sockets)

Certeau locates all meaning in consumption

• But extreme theory, because it sees all meaning in the consumption

• By Michel de Certeau

• “Consumption practices as inherently democratic and ‘subversive’” as opposed to the logic of capitalist production

Production and consumption construct meaning

• Consumers can resist the inscribed meanings and appropriate a cultural artefact, but they do not do this all the time

• Often enough they use cultural artefacts exactly as those who produce them have envisioned it

• All meaning created during consumption is subversive in the sense that it undermines the meaning created during production - often it merely complements this meaning

• Meaning created during consumption is not automatically democratic

Three different ways of reading

• As defined by Stuart Hall

• Reading = a specific way of consuming teyts

  • Dominant-hegemonic reading

    • Follows and accepts the meaning inscribed during production, not necessarily the intended one

  • The negotiated reading

    • Largely follows the meaning suggested by the text itself but deviates from it in some ways

  • The oppositional reading

    • Resists and rejects the meaning inscribed during production, substitutes it with a very different meaning

Consumption as sociocultural differentiation

• Now adding identity

• Performing identity through consumption

• Relation of identity and consumption theorised by Pierre Bourdieu

• Consumption analysed as sociocultural differentiation

• Different groups (classes) consume different goods or the same goods in different ways in order to distinguish themselves from each other and thus to confirm their collective identity

• → theory called “Distinction” (1979) by Bourdieu

Strengths and weaknesses of Bourdieu's theory “distinction”

• Useful since it allows understanding of what we consume to accumulate cultural capital; 

• And to understand that taste is not something that can be objectively measured and that some people have and others lack

• “sees social class as the main determinant of consumer behavior and social status” and neglects other identity categories such as gender, race, or age 

• Practices of consumption can also create collective identities (that did not exist before)

Romance novels

• In the past exclusively heterosexual love portrayed

• Often they don’t like each other in the beginning, she amuses him, but then the narrative turns and he begins to see her worth; end is marriage and happy ever after

• Pride and Prejudice (1813) = precursor of the genre

• But also Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey novels participate in this genre

• Romance novels often interpreted by scholars as extremely problematic articulations pf patriarchy and heteronormativity 

• Because the narrative suggests that men and women are different by nature, naturally desire each other, and a happy romantic relationship needs woman to be submissive

• See Radway

• But reading/ consuming romance novels as kind of resistance to the patriarchal society

• Complex interplay between production, representation, and consumption, and the construction of identity

The influence of consumption on production

• Production can also react to consumption

• This is one of the reasons why products are tested before they enter the broad market

• Production and consumption often influence each other

• Expl. if majority of audience dislikes a movie

Legal and cultural regulation

• Works on two levels

  • Laws and official rules → sanctions and punishment if one does not oblige to this kind of regulation

  • Unwritten rules, tacit agreements about what is considered acceptable (e.g. voice level, amount of intimacy)

• Unwritten rules are for sure a cultural phenomenon, but so are also the official rules; since they are negotiated and created

• Struggle and controversies over regulation are usually struggles about meaning

The Walkman

• Good example to look at the boundary between private and public

• Private consumption of music strongly tied to private space, but Walkman made private consumption of music possible in a public space

• → therefore challenges the given boundaries

• Consequently perceived as out of place

Regulation is often tied to identity

• Official rules depend on being reinforced, or at least the silent complicity of the majority of the people affected by those rules

• Not everybody is equally likely to be reminded of the rules

• Cultural capital pf the disturbance is usually considered high culture (e.g. opera music)

The obligations to wear a mask

• One example on how different rules can be enforced, and dependent on time and identity

• → regulations are part of complex cultural processes in which meaning is negotiated (with the meaning of the pandemic changing, the meaning of the regulation changed as well)

The impact of regulation on production and consumption

• Regulation can have an impact on consumption and production

• Mass consumption

• Even in masks (during pandemic) people’s identity changed the kind of masks they wore (color, kind of mask, etc)

The production code

• Hollywood films have been regulated for most of that industry’s existence 

• These regulations have had considerable impact on production and consumption as well as representation

• “Production Code” committed studios to follow these extremely restricting rules

• To avoid regulation from outside, the film industry opted for self-regulation

Allusions or symbolic representations

• This production codes made married couples sleep in twin beds in films from the 1940s, all hands above the sheets

• The code didn’t say how married people had to be portrayed, but it rules out certain kinds of presentation

• To represent certain things directions, films had to do with allusions or symbolic representations that spoke to adult audiences who knew the code

• E.g. phallic symbol, cigarette after sex, fixing hair

Rating system

• Different degrees of explicitness in casablanca and north by northwest can be explained by the 18 years between them

• Code remained officially in place until 1968, but was less and less enforced

• Instead there was a rating system introduced, that considered how suitable the films was for certain audiences

PG rating

• When less people are allowed to watch a movie, it will generate less money

• Film studios therefore try to get clearance for a big audience → necessary for success

• PG → “parents guidance suggested” → recommended to parents to accompany their children, not a legal rule but recommendation

PG13 rating

• PG rating severely criticised because movies like Gremlins or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom were perceived as too violent for young children

• Therefore rating “R” (restricted); everybody under 13 must be accompanied by adult

  • Originally they said 17, but teenagers would not watch the film with parents → therefore less money → change inspired by Spielberg

Success of blockbuster films

• PG13 perfectly suited for the success of blockbuster films

• Because most money that is made is made through merchandise

• Therefore it is crucial that children watch those movies, additionally with their parents

  • More tickets get sold; parents have the money children don’t have

  • But teenagers can watch alone

• → this shows the link between regulation and identity

Regulation influences representation

• PG13 also determines what the films can show and what not

• Expl. nudity is a taboo in american culture, but less concerned with violence (in star wars there is little blood)