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STUDY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA POLICY 11
Bourdieu’s focus on the reproduction of state power through rituals
and symbols provides a dynamic framework to make sense of the blurring
of lines between public and private institutional actors that make
up modern modes of regulation. This approach allows us to consider
how domestic and global communication and media policy is increasingly
negotiated across the range of policy-making arenas by a variety of
institutional actors – most notably state bureaucrats and representatives
from transnational firms but also recognized delegates of civil society –
who compete over access to resources as well as the very rules of governance.
Communications reform is clearly an economic issue, and raising
questions of allocation and distribution are crucial to understanding the
technical processes of expansion, distribution and efficiency. A meaningful
understanding of political transformation of the policy process,
however, requires that we confront the symbolic dimension of economic
processes. Bourdieu offers an insightful alternative to circumvent tired
questions concerning an assumed ‘conflict’ of material versus ideological
interests shaping state actions.
The bureaucratic bodies of national or even multilateral state institutions
may process new rules shaping what local and transnational publics
watch or how and what they pay for access to information. Nevertheless,
the ‘business of rule’ is necessarily connected to ‘the business of creating
emotional attachment to the state or “noncontingent” identities’
(Berisen 1999: 360). Taking up Anderson’s claims, feminists, subaltern
studies scholars and other critics from a variety of disciplines have examined
the making and unmaking of national culture, citizenship and
political identity both historically and ethnographically through various
media, from print and broadcasting to the proliferation of new technologies
(Abu-Lugodh 2004; Kraidy 2005; Rajagopal 2001).
In turn, the study of the symbolic domain investigated within the
broader field of cultural policy studies has drawn from Michel Foucault’s
writings on governmentality (or the intensified regulation of modern
societies whereby human practices became the objects of knowledge,
Regulation and discipline), allowing state policies to appear natural in a
given cultural context (Burchell et al. 1991). For instance, Tom Streeter
(1996) has argued that the US state’s regulation of private ownership of
the broadcast spectrum with broadcast licences created a system of ‘soft
property’ premised on the specificities of corporate liberalism. From a
Marxist tradition based on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond
Williams, Jim McGuigan (1996) has examined how historically rooted
policy discourses set the parameters for cultural politics and the policing
of culture. Feminist scholars have pushed the boundaries of investigation