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Profiles as Representations
In many respects, this book has attempted to provide a model of analysis of the fears and uncertainties that profiling techniques and technologies are attempting to address. An implicit theme in many if not all of the previous chapters has been the questioning of strictly visual critiques of consumer culture. Within the burgeoning field of cultural studies, particularly film and television studies, semiotic models of analysis have successfully demonstrated the arbitrariness of the sign (Barthes 1957, 126) and subsequently the ideological and cultural aspects of communication, particularly mass-mediated imagery.[5] Attempts to contextualize the ocular dimension of consumption have also played a pivotal role in debates over the ideological nature of the media.In so doing, influential frameworks—such as Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding model (1980), which assesses the sphere of production and also the ways in which audiences watch, consume, and make meaning out of cultural programming—have also highlighted a number of limitations. First, although some have successfully contextualized the consumption of media texts in the domestic sphere (Morley 1986; Lull 1990), these spaces of consumption remain relatively static and unproblematized, not altogether unlike Foucault’s panoptic subjects.[6] Second, the semi- otic and encoding/decoding models have been overwhelmingly restricted to the consumption of televisual texts. Consumption and production in databases and on the Internet remain uncharted. Finally, such a focus on watching has restricted ‘‘representation’’ to the film or videotape frame. What is missing from the frame becomes underrepresented. Distortions become ‘‘misrepresentations.’’ Within Hall’s model, these strictly textual definitions have given rise to a series of protracted debates pitting theories of mass culture against theories of popular culture. The so-called resistance debate, drawn from John Fiske’s (1989a, 1989b, 1992) reading of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), is perhaps the inevitable result of a dichotomous model that produces either duped or resistive audiences. Although television certainly retains and even expands its cultural power, this book questions the implications of the forms of consumption that take place in an almost infinite number of places, at varying times of the day and night, and through an increasingly complex network of communication, information, and consumer technologies.Technological, topographical, and theoretical (particularly post- structuralist) problematics, however, have led to a rethinking of methodological and analytical questions within the fields of media and cultural studies. The Culture, Media, and Identities series of books written or edited by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, and others from the Open University in the United Kingdom, for example (Sage Publications, 1997–2001), has attempted to broaden the scope of cultural methodologies and the binary producerconsumer model. Du Gay’s series introduction is clearly influenced by Richard Johnson’s (1986) questions on the analysis of culture and is quite illustrative in this regard (du Gay 1997, 3–4):
The five major cultural processes which the book identifies are Representation, Identity, Production, Consumption, and Regulation. . . . Taken together, they complete a sort of circuit—what we term the circuit of culture—through which any analysis of a cultural text or artifact must pass if it is to be adequately studied. . . . Remember that this is a circuit. It does not much matter where on the circuit you start, as you have to go the whole way round before your study is complete. What is more, each part of the circuit is taken up and reappears in the next part, that is, of how Identities are constructed. And so on. We have separated these parts of the circuit into distinct sections, but in the real world they continually overlap and intertwine in complex and contingent ways.
Each of the five categories within du Gay’s ‘‘circuit of culture’’ may or may not be restricted to the study of mere ‘‘artifacts’’ and ‘‘texts,’’ but the model affords a flexible, almost cybernetic system of reproduction. The authors describe this approach as a ‘‘third way’’ that considers people ‘‘in action’’ (du Gay et al. 1997, 102). What remains sketchy in Hall and du Gay’s analytical model, however, is its treatment of the political, which is somewhat surprising given the aforementioned debate over political action and resistance in cultural studies. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, the book that sets the tone and philosophy of the entire book series (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay & Negus 1997), unfortunately remains largely descriptive as it follows a commodity through the five interconnected ‘‘stages’’ of the circuit. In the book’s conclusion, the authors mention the manner in which the commodity in question (the Sony Walkman) coincides with and to some degree facilitates the privatization of public space (du Gay et al. 1997, 120). On the question of politics, such a model probably would emphasize the importance of democracy and space.
Unlike the ‘‘circuit of culture’’ model, my arguments in this book have emphasized the place and role of the individual within the broad technological system of cultural and economic reproduction. In so doing, I have offered a similar circular methodology—a ‘‘diagrammatic method’’ that can account for commodities as well as the accumulation, diagnosis, and mapping of personal information, all pivotal elements in the ongoing reproduction of consumer markets. In other words, as consumers, citizens, parents, children, members of various ethnic groups, and so on we are represented (or misrepresented) in and through texts, and we are actively solicited for our opinions, likes, wants, and desires in the process of rationalizing and revising various elements of sales, distribution, advertising, and marketing. Before we move to any understanding of politics, we therefore must first understand the terms on which a system reproduces itself—the techniques that are employed to rationalize, map, and govern.[5]One of Hall’s (1973) first influential articles at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies turned to semiotics to discuss the ideological dimensions of a newspaper photograph. [6]I’m speaking more on a geographical than domestic level—Morley’s (1986) work clearly contributes to an understanding of the gendering of space within the home via the consumption of television programming.
