PhD thesis,
The Media Concept: A Genealogy
Yale University, New Haven, CT, (2020)
Abstract
What does Media Studies study? Recent contributions to the field have made the compelling case that everything that communicates meaning—texts, bodies, networks, environments, the world itself—is media, declaring the field’s status as the discipline of all disciplines. But media is also something historically and linguistically specific: the concept didn’t even enter common usage until the late 1950s. This dissertation examines the specificity ofmedia’s semantic forms—mass media, the media, mediums, mainstream media, and media studies—each ofwhich serves as the inspiration for one ofits chapters. But I am no less invested in the word’s vagaries and (sometimes obscurantist) capacity: what forms ofpolitical critique and ideological mystification does media afford? Just as each chapter is defined by an iteration ofthe media concept, so too is it focused on a specific social formation—the intelligencia, the market, the art world, the industry—that has appropriated the media concept to reinforce its own boundaries and influence. Chapter One recovers the already dense meaning of “mass media” from a 1959 conference, hosted by the Tamiment Institute, titled “Mass Media and Mass Culture,” featuring Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Randall Jarrell, and the President ofCBS Frank Stanton, among other intellectuals and industry titans. For the conference’s illustrious speakers, “mass media” was variously a boon to civic participation, a scourge inviting corporate monoculture or totalitarian social control, and a clever euphemism for commercialism. Zooming out from the high-level circumlocution ofthe Tamiment conference, I trace the term’s multiplying meanings (and related terms) in the New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Vogue, Ebony, Jet, ArtNews, and the Partisan Review between 1950 and 2000—a corpus ofmagazines that I built and analyzed using word-embedding models, with support from Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab. The results ofthis data collection and processing lead me to the questions that motivate each ofthe dissertation’s subsequent chapters. In Chapter Two, I question the historical significance ofpersonifying media (i.e. the media) for midcentury black intellectuals—even as communication theorists like Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton were dispelling the notion of a singular, centralized media as a myth perpetuated by Cold War paranoiacs. Beginning with Harold Cruse’s call to Black intellectuals to “revolutionize the cultural apparatus” and “neutralize CBS, NBC, and ABC, ” I use archival and textual analysis to reexamine the complex relationship between Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison—often seen as ideological and stylistic opponents—in terms oftheir different political and rhetorical strategies for confronting, revolutionizing, and neutralizing “the media,” singular and hegemonically white. Chapter Three moves from the Black press and publishing to art criticism and museums. I demonstrate that in the very decades that the “media concept” entered the vernacular, the “medium concept” began to shape art criticism, art history, and museum studies. It became standard practice, for example, for wall labels and catalog captions to display the medium, or material, of the work of art; and art historians and connoisseurs began to use the un-Latinate plural “mediums” to rhetorically elevate and distinguish the category of art from the imperial spread of mass “media.” This was no coincidence: mediums emerged as a category for the organization and appreciation of art as thedialectical counterpart to media, and in response to the cultural imperialism ofits mass- produced forms. I analyze the cultural criticism ofClement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss, alongside the exhibition archives ofthe Museum ofModem Art. I then turn to the earliest theorists and purveyors of “camp” culture—Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford, Gore Vidal—to demonstrate that the camp sensibility worked through the mediums/media dialectic toward a self-critique ofboth high and low art forms. Chapter Four turns to the institutional history ofAmerican electricity companies, film studios, and broadcast networks, which in the 1970s and ‘80s stopped being called agents of “mass media” and were rechristened as tributaries ofthe media’s “mainstream.” In this age of conglomeration, these industries pivoted from competing for “mass audiences” to functioning as collaborators or subsidiaries, and presented the “media personality” as their friendly face. A study of eponymous TV shows ofthis era (from the Nat King Cole Show to the Mary Tyler Moore Show), reveals that, unlike “mass media,” agents of “mainstream media” could absorb alternative media into their flow of programming and capital. Mobilizing the logic ofthe “personality,” they even made racial and gender difference the face oftheir increasingly consolidated production. In each ofthese chapters, “media” bolsters a secondary concept that it also threatens to obsolesce: culture, democracy, art, diversity. So, too, with the humanities— as Media Studies offers itself anew as a macro-disciplinary means ofunderstanding our world.
