Commodification: Content, Audiences, Labor

Seven COMMODIFICATION: CONTENT, AUDIENCES, LABOR

Introduction to Chapters Seven to Nine

Having examined the political economy approach, the concept of communication, and the development of a political economy of communication, the book now draws on this work to offer a general theory to guide our understanding. Specifically, this chapter is the first of three to provide a conceptual framework for the political economy of communication. It starts with a philosophical foundation and proceeds to address the core ideas for thinking about the field.

We begin by considering the philosophical foundation in non-technical language and then move to a more formal presentation. The political economy of communication calls for an approach to understanding that accepts as real both the abstract ideas that guide thinking as well as concrete observations or what our senses perceive. It thereby rejects the view, prominent in some theories, that only our ideas or only our observations, but not both, are real. Political economy also rejects the position that there is no reality, that neither ideas nor observations are in any important sense real. Moreover, this philosophy means that reality is made up of many elements and cannot be reduced to one essence. Neither economics (e.g. money alone drives the media) nor culture (e.g. people's values shape the media) provide the magic key to unlock our understanding of communication. This philosophical foundation also brings to the forefront the ideas of social change, social process, and social relations which require re-evaluating the emphasis that political economy has traditionally placed on social institutions, like media businesses, or on seeing social class as a structure rather than as a social relationship.

Putting these ideas into practice, this and subsequent chapters move to identify three processes that make up the main starting points for political economy research, thereby guiding us on how to apply political economy to the world of communication. Commodification is the process of transforming things valued for their use into marketable products that are valued for what they can bring in exchange. A good example is the process of turning a story that friends enjoy into a film or novel to be sold in the marketplace. How does the human act of communication become a product produced for a profit? Spatialization is the process by which mass media and communication technology overcome the constraints of geographical space. For example, television overcomes distance by bringing images of events on the globe to every part of the world. Moreover, companies increasingly use computer communication to organize business on a worldwide basis, thereby allowing them greater access to consumers, workers, technology, and capital. It also provides them with the flexibility to move rapidly when the need arises, e.g. the availability of low-cost or better skilled labor elsewhere. What happens when communications goes global and when businesses make use of communication to create and manufacture their products worldwide? The third key concept is structuration or the process of creating social relations, mainly those organized around social class, gender, and race. For example, political economy describes how access to the mass media and new communication technologies is influenced by social class inequalities that divide people according to income and wealth, enabling some to afford access and leaving out others.

In more formal terms, the political economy of communications is grounded in specific epistemological and ontological principles. An epistemology is an approach to understanding how we know things. The political economy of communication is based on a realist, inclusive, constitutive, and critical epistemology. It is realist in the strong sense that it recognizes the reality of both concepts and social practices. In this respect, it is to be distinguished from idiographic approaches that argue for the reality of ideas alone and nomothetic approaches which maintain that ideas are only labels for the singular reality of human action. Following from this, political economy is also inclusive in that it rejects essentialism, or the tendency to reduce all social practices to a single political economic explanation, in favor of an approach that views concepts as starting or entry points into a diverse social field. To understand social reality you need to choose concepts and theories. The choice of one concept or theory over another is made because you conclude that the concept or theory is more valuable than the alternatives. However, such choices are not meant to be assertions of the one best, or only, way to understand social practices.

Additionally, the epistemology is constitutive because it acknowledges the limits of causal determination, including the assumption in causal analysis that units interact as fully formed wholes and in a linear fashion. Rather, political economy approaches social life as a set of mutually constitutive processes, whose units act on one another in various stages of formation, and with a direction and impact that can only be described in specific research. Finally, this approach to political economy is critical because it sees knowledge as the product of comparisons with other bodies of knowledge and with social values. For example, my political economy is critical in that it regularly compares the knowledge acquired in research against alternative bodies of knowledge in, for example, neoclassical economics, pluralist political science, and cultural studies. Furthermore, this approach measures the knowledge gathered in political economic research against the social values that have guided much of it over the years, including democracy and its components, civic participation, and social equality.

In contrast to epistemology, which provides a framework for understanding how we know things, ontology describes a framework for understanding the nature of being. Specifically, ontology distinguishes seeing things as structures or as processes. Is the river a thing or a flow? It is both, but which one is emphasized? Traditionally, political economy has emphasized things or structures such a multinational media firms and the governments that oversee them. My theoretical framework calls for a departure from this traditional approach to political economy by placing social processes and social relations in the foreground. This means that research starts from the view that social change is ubiquitous, that structures and institutions are constantly changing, and that it is therefore more useful to develop entry points that characterize processes rather than simply to identify relevant institutions. According to this view, studying media institutions is important but it follows from an analysis of a social process, e.g. turning stories into films and other marketable products.

Guided by this principle, the remainder of this chapter and the following two develop a substantive map of political economy with three starting processes, beginning with commodification, the process of transforming use to exchange value, moving on to spatialization, the transformation of space with communication, and finally to structuration, the process of building structures with social agency. Placing these processes in the foreground does not replace structures and institutions, something that would substitute one form of essentialism for another. Rather, these are entry points that comprise a substantive theory of political economy, one preferred choice among a range of possible ways to explain social reality.

Adam Smith and classical political economy distinguished between products whose value derives from the satisfaction of a specific human want or need, i.e. use value, and those whose value is based on what the product can command in exchange, i.e. exchange value. The commodity is the particular form that products take when their production is principally organized through the process of exchange. Commodification is the process of transforming use values into exchange values.

Marx began Capital with an analysis of the commodity because he found it to be the most visible form, the most explicit representation, of capitalist production. Capitalism literally appears as an immense collection of commodities. Although this appearance did not go unnoticed in classical political economy, the tendency was to naturalize it, a point that marked a critical departure in Marx. What for Smith and his followers was "a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity" was instead for Marx the product of "a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite." One of the keys to Marxian analysis is to deconstruct the commodity to determine what the appearance means, to uncover the social relations congealed in the commodity form. As Jhally has documented, in one of the few sustained analyses of the commodity form in the communication literature, Marx took a broad view of both the commodity and the meaning of use value. For Marx, commodities ensue from a wide range of needs, both physical and cultural ("from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference") and whose use can be defined "in various ways." The commodity might arise from a range of social needs - including satisfying physical hunger and meeting or contravening the status codes of a particular social group. Moreover, contrary to some interpretations, use value is not limited to meeting survival needs but extends to the range of socially constituted uses.

Some critics have not been satisfied with this formulation, arguing that the distinction between use and exchange value obscures more than it illuminates. For example, according to Sahlins, Marx acknowledges the social character of all value but tends to naturalize use value, "to trade away the social determination of use-values for the biological fact that they satisfy 'human wants.'" Baudrillard extends this critique by maintaining that use value is ultimately left outside the sets of structures and codes that constitute specific exchange values. This critique reminds us that Marx's chief aim was to interrogate capital and, given the primacy of this interest, he neglected detailed treatment of ideas that embody the fundamental negation of capitalism, including use value and the social contours of a socialist or Communist society. Nevertheless, the cultural critique also defines a boundary that political economy will not cross because the critique aims to do more than suggest gaps. It also substitutes an idealist relativism that defines value as whatever the cultural code specifies and, as suggested in the variability of human cultural practice, this can amount to practically anything. Political economy admits to variability, but bounds it by the understanding that uses are conditioned (in Marx's language) or limited (in the language of Raymond Williams) by the structural properties of the commodity and take their existence from them. Drawing on Rubin, Jhally suggests the language of "partial necessity" to deal with Marx's recognition that "usefulness does not dangle in mid-air." Alternatively, one might suggest the mutual constitution of use values and retain the distinction between socially constituted use values and values which arise from a specific set of social arrangements, such as the market, which produce exchange values.

Peeling back what Marx called the "onion skin" of the commodity's appearance reveals a system of production. There are two general dimensions of significance in the relationship of commodification to communication. First, communication processes and technologies contribute to the general process of commodification in the economy as a whole. For example, improving the channels of communication in the clothing business, particularly with the introduction of global computer and telecommunication technologies, expands information about the entire circuit of production, distribution, and sales. This improves inventory controls, thereby saving on space and increasing the likelihood that stores stock only what customers want. Second, commodification processes at work in the society as a whole penetrate communication processes and institutions, so that improvements and contradictions in the societal commodification process influence communication as a social practice. For example, the international tendencies to liberalization and privatization of enterprises, which picked up steam in the nineteen eighties, transformed public and state-run media and telecommunications institutions throughout the world into private enterprises. This turned public service communication with social commitments to universal access and content that reflects the broad range of society into commercial communication that provides access to those who can afford it and content that delivers audiences to advertisers.

Given the interest in situating communication within a general political economic analysis, it is useful to start from the general process of commodification and examine how it relates to communication. From the point of view of capital, the production process begins with the capitalist's purchase of the commodities labor power and the means of production. The total output is sold for more than originally invested and the addition is called surplus value, which may itself be invested to expand the accumulation of capital. In essence, capital is value that expands through processes of production and exchange. Marxian theory takes this analysis one step further by concluding that these are exploitative processes because the expansion of capitalist control eliminates alternative systems of production and forces labor into a social relationship wherein it takes on the status of a commodity, or a factor of production, along with land and raw materials, and is made to give up its control over the means of production. As a result, workers are made to exchange their labor power for a wage that does not compensate fully for the labor they sell. The commodity labor is reproduced through processes of absolute exploitation (extending the working day) and relative exploitation (intensification of the labor process) that deepen the extraction of surplus value. Exploitation is a sine qua non of the capitalist labor process, but the degree of exploitation depends on the state of class struggle. For example, when workers organize a union or otherwise resist exploitation, capital has to make adjustments in the labor process. Thus, the commodity whose appearance fills the markets of capitalism is also a congealed set of social relations that connect capital to the commodity labor in a struggle for control over the value generated from production and exchange. For example, the DVD of a Hollywood film that appears in a video store is also a set of social relations that links Hollywood producers to screen actors, directors, and writers, who struggle over who will profit from the value generated from sales in stores and from distribution over the Internet.

In the Marxian view, the commodity objectifies exploitative social relations by presenting them in a congealed form that makes them seem natural. Hence a computer appears to us as a commodity with a defined set of use values and a specific exchange value marked by its price. Its value in use and in exchange tends to mystify the ability to comprehend the computer as the embodiment of an international division of labor that stratifies productive relations along class, gender, national, and spatial dimensions. A deeper level of mystification is revealed in Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism, according to which the commodity not only congeals social relations and hides the struggle over value, but takes on a life and a power of its own, over that of both its producers and consumers. For Marx, such fetishism was once limited to religion:

In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

In fact, for Marx, the commodity fetish is more powerful than its counterpart in religion because commodities have a material embodiment that presents itself directly to the senses in ways that religious beliefs do not. In this view, the commodity contains a double mystification. First, it naturalizes the social relationship between capital and labor. It is the computer that appears and not a struggle at the point of production over, for example, how much workers who produce computers will earn. Second, the commodity is reified, i.e. it takes on a life of its own that stands against the individual and society and comes to shape both. We turn the computer into a mystical icon, the embodiment of what I have called "the digital sublime." The first point sees the commodity as the natural outcome of a production process, rather than the social consequence of a fundamental social struggle; the second point completely cuts the tie to a production process and situates the commodity in its own social realm. The computer appears as a power over people, as the force that shapes, determines, constrains, or otherwise controls social development. The outcome of this double mystification is that the product of a social process is given an existence of its own and the power to mold social life.

Commodification refers to the process of turning use values into exchange values, of transforming products whose value is determined by their ability to meet individual and social needs into products whose value is set by their market price. Owing in part to the emphasis on structures and objects over processes and relations in much of political economic thought, the term commodification has not received substantial explicit treatment. Nevertheless, it is implicit in discussions of the process of capitalist expansion, including the global extension of the market, the privatization of public space, and the growth of exchange value in interpersonal life and in sexuality.

It is important to distinguish commodification from commercialization and objectification, processes with which it tends to be associated. Commercialization is a narrower process that specifically refers to the creation of a relationship between an audience and an advertiser. For example, the commercialization of the airwaves means the growth of broadcast advertising and the development of programming to deliver audiences to advertisers. Since the market encompasses more than commercialization, e.g. the commodification of labor, we view commodification as a broader process. Objectification is a still broader notion that is often confused with commodification. For example, in his work on reification, Lukács describes the process whereby the relations between people "take on the character of a thing and thus acquire a phantom objectivity." Commodification is a specific form of this process whereby the "thing" that acquires phantom objectivity is a commodity, that is, an object whose value is established in the marketplace. Objectification is a general process that refers to the many different ways dehumanization takes place. Political economy focuses on one important manifestation of this, the process of commodification.

The Commodity Form in Communication

The political economy of communication has been notable for its emphasis on describing and examining the significance of organizational structures responsible for the production, distribution, and exchange of communication commodities and for the regulation of these structures, principally by governments. Although it has not neglected the commodity itself and the process of commodification, political economy has tended to foreground corporate and state structures and institutions. When it has treated the commodity, political economy has tended to concentrate on media content and, to a lesser extent, on media audiences. It has paid considerably less attention to the commodification of labor in the communication industries.

The emphasis on media institutions is understandable because today's global media conglomerates are very powerful. They are able to extend that power by creating content that brings in revenue each time it is used and reused by audiences around the world. Companies then deepen that revenue stream when they take that same content and repack it for use and reuse by subsidiaries that extend across the print, video, film, and new media sectors.

Notwithstanding the importance of institutions, emphasis on their activities has meant less than adequate attention to the commodity form of the mass media and, particularly, to the commodification of audiences and of labor.