Governing the Public: Technologies of Mediation and Popular Culture

Abstract

Media technologies are an integral and vital element of democratic governance. The political public of representative democratic r egimes are mediated publics, in that they exist and are constituted as publics through the mediation of technologies of mass media. The public sphere of democratic politics is part of, and central to, the mediated sphere of popular culture. There is a structural and necessary relation between the popularization of culture and the democratization of politics. A governmentalist approach understands political media technologies not as aberrations in the light of democratic theory but as the practices of ª actually existingº representative democracy. Genuine popular democracy does not exist, fully formed, in the publics constituted by the media technologies but is most likely to flourish in popular culture and through media technologies.

‘Respect the life of the countryside’: the Country Code, government and the conduct of visitors to the countryside in post‐war England and Wales

“…In order to understand how governmental programmes work in practice, geographers need to extend their focus beyond a few species of written and visual texts to examine how a range of materials, and particular techniques of the self, shape and configure the spatialities and temporalities of governmental networks. As the writings of sociologists (and a few geographers) have shown, all manner of more‐or‐less mundane, unique or mass‐produced objects and media perform important roles in programmes and technologies of government – enabling an array of individuals and institutions to govern at a distance, over more‐or‐less extended periods of time (see Law 1986; Dean 1999; Osborne and Rose 1999 2004; Rose 1999; Hannah 2000; Barry 2001; Ogborn 2002; Simons 2002). Acts of parliament or executive decisions count for very little unless they can be translated through an array of authoritative or effective media technologies/technologies of government – including letters, government reports, television news programmes, company memoranda, telephone calls, e‐mails or Country Code booklets – which are actively consumed and translated into particular techniques or practices of self‐government in different spaces and times.…”

“…Geographers engaging with Foucault's work on government have considered the role of an array of calculative and graphical devices and inscriptions in programmes of government (e.g. Murdoch 1995 1997; Murdoch and Ward 1997; Hannah 2000), but their fairly large‐scale studies of state governance have tended to provide only a partial examination of the heterogeneity and materiality of these governmental networks and they rarely focus on the many mundane, everyday, backgrounded technologies and media which help maintain governmental programmes (however, see Barnett 1999; Simons 2002; Thrift and French 2002; Merriman 2005). Likewise, whilst geographers have engaged in theoretical discussions of Foucault's writings on techniques of the self, self‐government and subjectification (e.g.…”

Law/Culture: Power, Politics and the Political

“…Modification comes through the use of alternative theories of power. Notably, this discussion has made no reference to Foucault's thesis on governmental power despite its usage across a substantial body of research and analysis within criminology and socio-legal studies (Ashenden, 1996;Hunt, 1999;Lippert, 2002;O'Malley, 1992;Stenson, 1993), as well as within cultural studies (Bennett, 1998;Simons, 2002;Valentine, 2002). Certainly, a governmental framework opens up the ground of law/culture as a space of practical politics where 'counter-conducts', conflicts and struggles over the sites, techniques, discourses and subjects of law/culture are rendered explicit as a problem for government.…”

Yizo Yizo: Citizenship, Commodification and Popular Culture in South Africa

“…The distanciation of radio and television as modes of communication involves a diminution of the intensity of influence that can be exercised through such mediums. In so far as the medium of this attempted regulation is popular culture, mediated democratic citizenship tends to flatten the cultural conditions of democratic participation (Ouellette 1999, Simons 2002. The attraction of governing populations through media technologies is therefore haunted by the persistent fear that media publics are essentially ungovernable.…”