Abstract
One of the pleasures of reading is occasionally finding lively or informative or wise words disguised behind a dull or conventional title. Such is the case with John Corner’s Theorising Media: Power, Form and Subjectivity. One would have to admit that the title does not seem particularly enticing. ‘Theorising Media’ is such a generic title that it could be applied to countless manuscripts setting out, in standard textbook fashion, the various ways in which media can be ‘theorised’, giving a student reader a sense of what counts as ‘media theory’ in a particular discipline, be it communication studies, media studies, cultural studies, sociology or whatever.
Despite its generic title, John Corner’s book does something different, and something far more interesting than the packaging indicates. It is in fact a significant contribution to getting back to some grass-roots issues about precisely what it is one is saying or doing when one is ‘theorising media’. This is not a mere review of different ‘theoretical’ schools of thought in particular disciplines. Instead, it is a systematic attempt to think through what the practice of ‘theorising media’ is or could be.
The book has an admirably clear and tidy structure whereby Corner proceeds to show what media theorising is and what its various implications are. Part I consists of three chapters, each of which takes as its task the consideration of how one can theorise one of the three terms in the book’s subtitle, namely power, form and subjectivity. These chapters are the heart of the book, and they are very good indeed. The more advanced reader can appreciate the penetrating nature of Corner’s understanding of the debates that have centred around these key words (a phrase I choose advisedly) over the last 30 or 40 years, within and across the ever-shifting constellations we customarily call academic disciplines.
These analytic chapters are much more than just the histories of those debates, as the reconstructions of the trajectories of the debates count as significant interventions within them in their own right. Yet an advanced undergraduate reader would be able to understand what was going on within them, such is the clarity, concision and unpretentiousness of Corner’s prose. Although the book can be used for upper-level undergraduate teaching, it is worth reading by scholarly readers just for the acuity of these chapters alone.
What marks the book out as particularly commendable is that it is clearly the product of a long career spent thinking carefully about what the media are, and what they can and cannot do. The reader feels that they are in the presence of a calm and assured but not at all overbearing authorial presence. One of the most impressive aspects of the scholarship on display here is its unobtrusiveness. Corner’s knowledge-base is such that he can roam quite far and wide, not just across disciplines (and the gamut of just about every discipline interested in ‘media’ is covered here), but across time, such that debates and disputes of the present time are effectively contextualised within wider histories of what media power, form and subjectivity have meant in previous decades.
It is also the case that a book with the title of ‘Theorising Media’ could have been awfully pretentious, displaying the convoluted but empty prose of fashionable postmodern and post-postmodern ‘media theory’. Corner’s approach is about as far from that sort of pompous spectacle as one can get. The reference points here are not unintelligible post-Baudrillardian exercises in obscurity, but rather the sorts of very major thinkers who have shown how to ‘theorise media’ in careful, comprehensible, analytically sophisticated but, crucially, empirically grounded and contextually sensitive ways. The guiding spirit here seems to me to be Raymond Williams, reflected not least in the fact that Corner has in effect treated power, form and subjectivity as three privileged ‘key words’ for the investigation of what media are or can be. The same sense of careful and assiduous historically informed analysis that is redolent of Williams at his best is present here – although one must say that Corner’s prose style is markedly more appealing than that of much of the later Williams.
There are two other sections. In the first, the more general considerations of power, form and subjectivity that were set out earlier in the book are used to frame discussions of, respectively, the concepts of propaganda, ideology, public knowledge and popular culture. These chapters, as also with those in the following section, are based on previously published work. This does not harm the book, as it is clear that its major raison d’être is to allow Corner to locate his more specific, previously published interventions within a broader analytic framework, the adumbration of which is done in the opening chapters. This central section contains a range of thoughtful, often penetrating insights into the history, multiple usage and contemporary state of the concepts in question. Again, great clarity is brought to bear on the issues, and even a reader like myself who greatly disagrees with Corner’s assessment of the notion of ideology as moribund can at least appreciate the elegance and concision with which he makes his case.
The final section, entitled ‘Visuality and Documentation’, reflects Corner’s career as a distinguished analyst of documentary film and television. Again based on previously published work, there are interesting discussions here of the use of the physical landscape in documentaries and how film-makers have developed a wide range of strategies to visualise ‘politics’. Unlike earlier chapters, those towards the end of the book seem particularly of interest to specialists in documentary studies, and they do not form a core part of the pedagogic potentials of the text as a whole. It would have been good to have an overall concluding chapter, spelling out how the general framework had been informed or advanced by the more specific chapters, but that is a minor complaint.
Once the initial hurdle of an unpromising title was jumped, the pleasures of this book became very apparent. The conjunction of deep scholarship lightly worn, together with a straightforward writing style that can reach out to non-specialists while more advanced readers are kept engaged, is a very welcome thing indeed. The excellence of the first three chapters means I will now make them compulsory reading for any PhD student I supervise who is embarking on any sort of study to do with ‘the media’. Corner’s book would show such a reader that ‘theorising media’ can be an enlightening experience, rather than the obfuscatory one it often degenerates into being.