John D.H. Downing - Radical Media

RADICAL MEDIA
Rebellious Communication and Social Movements

By: JOHN D.H. DOWNING, with Tamara V. Ford, Genve Gil and Laura Stein

Sage Publications, Inc.

Thousand Oaks, California

Copyright 2001 by Sage Publications, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Downing, John.
Radical media: Rebellious communication and social movements / by John D. H. Downing; with Tamara V. Ford, Genve Gil, and Laura Stein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8039-5698-3 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8039-5699-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Mass media. 2. Social movements. 3. Radicalism. I. Title.
P91. D67 2000
302.234dc21 00-008781

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

01 02 03 04 05 06 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

C ommon approaches to communication media are wildly lopsided precisely because they refuse to take seriously the historical persistence and geographical pervasiveness of radical alternative media. Although the extent of such media at the dawn of the 21st century CE is broader than ever before, and therefore ever more demanding of our analytical attention, radical alternative media are by no means latecomers to culture and politics. They are simply relative newcomers to the established research and theory agenda, which has a predilection for the seemingly obvious and the easily counted. By radical media, I refer to media, generally small-scale and in many different forms, that express an alternative vision to hegemonic policies, priorities, and perspectives.

Filling in a very to upgrade mainstream media practice are all vitalbut it is essential.

How can small-scale radical media have any impact worth having? This book sets out to answer that question, but the short answer is they have multiple impacts on different levels. Let me offer two rapid examples.

In the downward spiral of the second Cold War of the early 1980s, I was only one of many Americans, Russians, for both leaders to claim credit for stepping back from nuclear proliferation, beginning with the superpower summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1987. Had it not been for these movements and their media, the possibility of mutual assured destructionthe war strategists official doctrinewould have loomed ever larger.

This is an instance with major international impact. The Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Polish case studies in Section 3, the Iranian case that we refer to intermittently, and the international anti-apartheid movement are some others.

On a much less dramatic plane are the little photographic visiting cards (cartes-de-visite) that Sojourner Truth used to sell to support herself in her later years. These little photographs of oneself, used as visiting cards and as mementos, were something of a national mania in the 1860s. Truth sat for 14 of these, all of them showing her dressed as a respectable upper middle-class woman, mostly sitting with her knitting on her lap. Over a century later, the image may seem entirely banal. But as Nell Irvin Painter (1996) points out, in context, the image made a radical assertion. Truth was not working in the field or over a wash tub (the only other visual images of her). She was, by contrast, a respectable woman:

Black woman as lady went against the commonplaces of nineteenth-century American culture. But by circulating her photographs widely, Truth claimed womanhood for a black woman who had been a slave, occupying a space ordinarily off limits to women like her. She refused to define herself by her enslavement. Seizing on a new technology, Truth established what few nineteenth-century black women were able to prove: that she was present in her times. (pp. 198-199)

This instance, aside from encouraging us to acknowledge the all-important question of context, tells us something more. There is no instantaneous alchemy, no uncontested sociochemical procedure, that will divine in a flash or with definitive results

In this multifarious, seething broth that we name society, what counts as politically oppositional, as personally expressive, as experimental, as embedded in the cultural present, as heralding the publics future, as reclaiming the forgotten merits of the past? For those with instinctively tidy minds, this category dilemma generates genuine pain, a real intellectual abscess. While, nevertheless, not wishing to praise fog for its own pure sake, it is perhaps precisely the indeterminacy of this seething broth that is the most important point. From such cauldrons may emerge social and cultural change in many directions, positive and negative and in between. The 1848 revolutions in Europe, the turbulence in Russia during the first decades of the 20th century, the Weimar Republic period in Germany, the Quit India movement of the 1920s through 1947, the international ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, are only a few examples.

Without such cauldrons, there is stasiswhich may sometimes be preferred by reasonable and constructive peoplebut the issue here is not so much what is desirable as what actually happens and its relation to radical alternative media. And, simultaneously, what is at issue is the relation between (sometimes imperceptible) eddies and ferments of opinion and expression and the impact of such media. The specific question of whether any particular activity in this alternative public realm is to be considered oppositional or self-indulgent or reactionaryor some compound of theseis a matter for argument. Maybe, it will be many decadesif everbefore the significance of such events can be established. But for present purposes, it is the ferment itself that counts, as matrix to radical media.

In the original edition of this study, published in 1984 by the South End Press collective in Boston, Massachusetts, I adopted an antibinarist and a binarist definition of radical media simultaneously. I was intensely concerned to challenge a prevailing orthodoxy of the time, namely, that there were only two viable models of how to organize media, the Western capitalist one and the Soviet one. Each system had its ideologues and its counterideologues. In the West, a disturbing number of individuals on the political left could be found who were, if not advocates of sovietized media, then at least reluctant to attack them or the Soviet system, on the spurious grounds that to do so would make it easier for Western media barons and ideologues to sing the corrupt glories of their own communication media, supposedly free agents of free expression. In the East, decades of intense frustration at the absurdities and worse of their own media systems led many thinking people to yearn for Western media and to write off critical Western media researchers as smug, deluded idiots. Either way, an international consensus seemed to hold that only two models of media organization were feasible or even imaginable.