Abstract
‘Participation’, as Nico Carpentier discusses at length in the early chapters of this engaging book, is an important if loose and slippery idea both in media and in politics. Indeed, it has become a fashionable term. The extension of the invitation to participate is a regular ingredient in the strategies of media producers and politicians, making the notion one that lends itself to various ruses – varieties of ‘participation-lite’ so to speak (or what Carpentier calls ‘minimal’ versions), not to mention those that are relatively straightforward acts of deception. Nevertheless, the adjustment of power relations through more participation by non-elites remains a necessary objective for democratic development in a number of spheres of politics and civil society, even if aspirations here need to be informed by a sense of those structural factors that, in most societies, will work to limit the scale of the changes realistic levels of participatory expansion might bring. He makes the useful point that, in democratic political structures, ideas of ‘participation’ are often in tension with ideas of ‘representation’ (where finally a more passive role – if one nevertheless celebrated as ‘active’ – is allocated for the practice of civic involvement).
Carpentier’s book is a substantial one, quite a lot of it made up of material that has been published in other versions elsewhere. This makes it something of a compendium of his thinking on the topic, but repetition is largely avoided and the expansive approach has clear benefits for a volume which wants to put a number of detailed case studies alongside an ambitious scheme of conceptual commentaries. The first chapter alone (‘Defining “participation”’) extends to over 130 pages.
At the level of the case studies, the book treats a variety of media productions, and often their audiences, to close and nearly always productive analysis. The Belgian discussion programme Jan Publiek, the access programme Barometer, the TV reality show Temptation Island, the BBC’s Video Nation project, the Czech experiment with interactive cinema, Kinoautomat, and the community radio project Radioswap provide the main examples. What Carpentier wants to know is how these various generic projects worked to enable and to manage participation and how their success was assessed, including by producers and by participant/audiences. What rhetorics and aesthetics of the ‘participatory’ were employed? What thematic/formal relations were established? What did it all ‘lead to’? How did the content finally measure up in terms of criteria of ‘quality’? The approaches have many similarities but they also show differences of both form and function, making for some sharp contrasts as well as instructive comparisons.
Theoretically, Carpentier situates himself within the context of a post-political, post-democratic framework. This is one way – drawing on the accounts of Mouffe, Rancière and Žižek among others – of viewing the tendency towards a technologised, managerialist politics where there is a significant degree of detachment of governments from effective participatory structures and flows, even if there are also regular claims to be increasing participatory opportunities. In Britain, David Cameron’s rather nervous playing around with the idea of the ‘Big Society’, promising new horizons of civic involvement (but only alongside the quiet maintenance of a strong grip by state and corporate agencies on most things that really matter), would be a good example of this latter ploy. How to view ‘participation’, and the media’s role, within the perspective Carpentier establishes? He runs out his discussion and analysis using five ‘key words’ – Power, Identity, Organisation, Technology and Quality. This allows him to open up considerable conceptual space around his central term, space within which to embed his case-studies. Perhaps some of the broader contextualising discussion here, although thoughtfully developed, could have been a bit more tightly edited around the developing, central theme.
At points throughout the book, the play-offs between minimal and maximal degrees of participation, between micro and macro levels of activity, and between participation ‘in’ the media and participation ‘through’ media are brought into the discussion. These terms are defined usefully and their interrelationship brought out well. In particular, the positioning of the media (both as ‘in’ and ‘through’ spaces) in respect of larger political and social structures is nicely handled. Yes, the media are crucial to engagement in the broader relations of power, but success at the media level does not directly convert to success (effectiveness) ‘beyond’.
The book’s engagement with aesthetics is often illuminating (the example of the Kinautomat project of interactive cinema particularly so) and Carpentier is keen to bring matters of ‘quality’ into the picture. He suggests a way forward for a more participatory, contingent notion of ‘quality’, one that will escape the controlling effect of dominant established criteria (as exercised, for instance, by some of those media managers otherwise committed to valuable participatory projects). There is recognition, with an emphasis on television, that quality criteria are varied – as the now extensive literature around ‘quality TV’ shows. An opening up of ‘process-based’ rather than essentialist, ‘artefactual’ ideas of quality seems to him to be the route to the democratising of the term (he has some shrewd things to say about the way the ‘professional/amateur’ distinction works within media production). I began to wonder here whether this section would not have benefited from a little more attention to the wider debate about quality in the arts, as for instance generated around the work of Bourdieu (who does get a citation). My own view is that the question of television quality, and the routes to its ‘democratisation’, only start to come properly into focus when considered, albeit briefly, against instances such as those of quality in cinema, literature, music and painting. The medium’s economy and its relations to the thorny idea of ‘the popular’, including at the level of audience expectations, are very specific and yet an informing connection with the larger sphere of cultural endorsement continues to be present.
A short conclusion re-states key ideas and advances the not entirely surprising view that struggles around power relations will continue to follow opportunities for, and initiatives of, ‘participation’. Among the broader framings in play here, there is not only the nature of the economic order but also the positioning of the individual as variously ‘citizen’ and ‘consumer’ within specific orders of subjectivity, orders from which some of the more radical (‘maximal’) forms of participation might hope, if only by steps and partially, to remove themselves. Here, a little more about the ‘ideological’ as well as the ‘democratic’ character of the present state of affairs might have helped. The ‘post- democratic’ framework also raises and sometimes begs questions about previous periods of democracy – in part, the familiar issue of ‘When was good?’
This is an extensive and thoughtful book which, even when working through familiar ground, brings to the discussion a clear and often provocative approach. Unfortunately, there is no index, a real deficit in a volume with such a complex structure of interrelated themes. Perhaps having let the author run out just over 400 pages, the publishers decided that this was pushing things too far!