Having briefly recalled how much (c

Having briefly recalled how much (contra ANT) we can learn about power's workings within discourse, I want to return to the question of social form raised earlier via work on media's ritual dimensions which draws on Durkheim's account of the social origins of religion. This move might seem paradoxical in this context, since Latour at least makes it very clear that the sociological tradition he wants to get distance from is precisely the Durkheimian (2005: 8-9). Latour, however, ignores the cost of this move, which is to put to one side the belief questions that media raise, and their links to the legitimacy of media power. Ritual analysis enables us to explore the cultural 'thickenings' (Lofgren 2001) around media that are so important to its authority- 'thickenings' that ANT, as a theory of association, not representation, is less well placed to grasp.


It IS Important to emphasise right away that ritual analysis is quite different from old-style ideological analysis, for it is precisely the simple notion of 'belief' implicit in classic Marxist ideological analysis (statements explicitly believed by people, yet false) that a notion of ritual practice moves beyond. Rituals work not so much through the articulation, even implicitly, of beliefs, as through the organisation and formalisation of behaviour that, by encoding categories of thought, naturalise them. As Philip Elliott put it: 'to treat ritual performance as simply standing for political paradigms is to oversimplify it. [Ritual performance] also expresses and symbolises social relationships and so, quite literally, mystifies them' (1982: 168). While this might sound like classic 1980s ideological deconstruction, Elliott here turns back from complete reliance on Steven Lukes's (1975) deconstruction of political ritual as pure ideology and acknowledges the force of Durkheim's theory of how social order is maintained through the embodiments of ritual practice. As Elliott and many other writers from Dayan and Katz to Michel Maffesoli have argued, there remains something very suggestive about Durkheim's account of totemic ceremonies for understanding contemporary political and media rhetoric. It is not a question here of relying on the historical accuracy of Durkheim's (1995) account of totemic ritual, or of accepting his claims about the origins of religion. The interest today of Durkheim's work lies in seeing how his proto-structuralist analysis of 'sacred' and 'profane' captures a generalisable pattern which links (1) those moments when we are, or appear to be, addressed as a collectivity and
(2) certain categories of thought which have an organising force in everyday action. It is in this limited - but I hope precise - sense that I have borrowed from Durkheim to build a theory of the ritual dimensions of media (Couldry 2003a).
From this perspective, Durkheim can still teach us a lot about how to interpret the generalised claims that media make about the social world. But from that recognition we can head off in two very different directions. The first route (the 'neo-Durkheimian') argues that contemporary media reinstitute, through electronic means, the unity of the totemic ceremony (for example, Dayan and Katz 1992). The second approach - more compatible perhaps with today's greater scepticism towards totalising rhetorics of 'the social' - uses Durkheim merely as an entry point to a practice of deconstruction. Accepting that Durkheim draws our attention to the constructions encoded in ritual - the claim of media to invoke social order, to stand in for, and give us privileged access to, a social totality - this second approach aims to dismantle those constructions, drawing on anthropological insights about the organising role of ritual categories, the normative force of ritual boundaries and the expressive resonance of ritual practice, while rejecting any assumption that ritual really is the basis of social order. Indeed, this second approach rejects the very notion of 'social order' as a normative or necessary category while examining more closely the naturalisation of certain claims to social


order in contemporary societies. The second approach is distinct both from ANT and from neo-Durkheimian functionalism: acknowledging (unlike ANT) those media representations which mobilise large emotions and encode large claims about 'the social' through their organisation and formal patterning but on the other hand (like ANT) refusing to take such media forms at face value and always remembering the material asymmetries which make them possible. Sensitised to the potency of ritual form by Durkheim, but inspired by a deconstructive spirit closer to Foucault, Bourdieu or Laclau, this approach to media power looks to media rituals' formal details as important sites where contemporary power is encoded and naturalised. As Maurice Bloch once put it, ritual is 'the use of form for power' (1989: 45).
Because it focuses on details of form, ritual analysis done properly (that is, with a substantive rather than purely nominal concept of ritual action)3 gives us the tools to trace patterns not just in media discourse but also in everyday actions oriented towards media. It is vital to explore the linkages between the 'special moments' of media rituals (the final night of Big Brother or a person's entry on to the stage of Jerry Springer) and the wider hinterland of practice Catherine Bell (1992) calls 'ritualisation' (for example, practices as banal as flicking through a celebrity magazine
while you wait to get your hair cut). There are many terms in play in media ritualisation: not just celebrity, but the constructed categories of 'media'/'ordinary' people, things, places, times (and so on), and the category of 'liveness' (which indirectly affirms the priority of direct connection though media to social 'reality'). This approach is motivated not by a special interest in ritual or ceremony per se - there is no claim here that media rituals are emergent forms of secular religion! - but instead by a concern with the ways in which certain claims of/to social order (Wrong 1994) are naturalised in discourse and action. The subtle effectiveness of media power - the extraordinary fact that extreme concentrations of symbolic resources in particular institutions have remained legitimate for so long - requires theoretical tools of some subtlety for its analysis. Ritual and, just as important, ritualisation are just two of those tools.
More broadly, ritual analysis provides an account of what Bourdieu called 'the production of belief' that links us back into the local and detailed processes from which even the largest and grandest mappings of the social world derive (remember ANT) while drawing us outwards to explain the representations and formalisations on which much political and cultural staging relies. Consider the Live 8 concerts in early July 2005. In those events quasi-political actors (current and ex-music stars) orchestrated a process in which citizens could plausibly act out participation in political decision making - something very different from the political spectacle Murray Edelman deconstructed two decades ago (1988) as ideological rhetoric performed at a distance from audiences. The more participative Live 8 events bring out how ritual analysis - an attention to 'subjunctive'


or 'as if' language that is drawn upon, however elliptically, in action - can supplement ideological analysis (important though the latter remains of course in uncovering the explicit discursive contradictions around such events). Only the former can explain how some of the Live 8 marchers (as quoted by media) saw themselves as being 'part of the message' given to governments and as a means to 'force' change in the very same political establishment that (in the United Kingdom at least) had already endorsed the spectacle in which they acted! We return here to the dialectic between attention and inattention that I noted earlier.
At this point, given our wider aim of explaining social theory's role in media analysis, it is worth reflecting on what the theoretical term 'ritual' adds to the descriptive term 'spectacle'. This emerges in my one small disagreement with Doug Kellner's excellent and courageous book Media Spectacles. Early on in the book, when introducing his topic, Kellner writes that 'media spectacles are those phenomena of media culture that embody contemporary society's basic values, serve to initiate individuals into its way of life' (2003: 2, added emphasis). But is this true? What are these ideals and values Kellner talks about, and where is the evidence they are so simply accepted and internalised by those outside media industries? This is clearly a rhetorical concession by Kellner, but why concede even that much? This small point limits Kellner's critique of contemporary spectacles: since Kellner's argument starts by taking the normative force of spectacles for granted, the only possibility of political resistance in our era must be forms of counter-spectacle. But I would want to go further and acknowledge forms of resistance that question the basic principles and preconditions of media spectacle, and the inequalities and totalising rhetorics on which that production is based. But to do this we need a more detailed theorisation of how exactly spectacle works to encode categories of thought and action: in other words, a theory of media rituals - not for our own edification, but to deconstruct more fully both the contents and the form of media's claims to represent the 'truth' of populations.

Hasil (Bahasa Indonesia) 1:

Setelah sebentar ingat berapa banyak (contra semut) kita dapat belajar tentang cara kerja power dalam wacana, saya ingin kembali ke pertanyaan tentang bentuk sosial mengangkat sebelumnya melalui kerja pada media ritual dimensi yang menarik pada account Durkheim's tentang asal-usul sosial agama. Langkah ini mungkin tampak paradoks dalam konteks ini, karena Latour setidaknya membuatnya sangat jelas bahwa tradisi sosiologis yang ia ingin mendapatkan jarak dari adalah justru Durkheimian (2005: 8-9). Latour, namun, mengabaikan biaya ini bergerak, yang dimasukkan ke satu sisi pertanyaan keyakinan bahwa meningkatkan media, dan mereka link ke legitimasi kekuatan media. Ritual analisis memungkinkan kita untuk menjelajahi budaya 'thickenings' (Lofgren 2001) di sekitar media yang sangat penting bagi para otoritas-'thickenings' semut itu, sebagai teori Asosiasi, tidak representasi, kurang baik ditempatkan untuk memahami. Hal ini penting untuk menekankan segera ritual analisis sangat berbeda dari gaya lama ideologis analisis, untuk itu adalah justru gagasan sederhana 'kepercayaan' tersirat dalam analisis ideologi Marxis klasik (pernyataan eksplisit dipercaya oleh orang-orang, namun palsu) bahwa gagasan praktik upacara bergerak melampaui. Ritual bekerja tidak begitu banyak melalui artikulasi, bahkan secara implisit, keyakinan, seperti melalui organisasi dan formalisation perilaku yang, oleh encoding kategori berpikir, naturalise mereka. Seperti Philip Elliott meletakkannya: ' untuk mengobati prosesi pembukaan Cupu Panjala sebagai hanya berdiri untuk paradigma politik adalah untuk menyederhanakan hal. [Referensi] juga menyatakan dan melambangkan hubungan sosial dan Jadi, secara harfiah, mystifies mereka ' (1982: 168). Sementara ini mungkin terdengar seperti klasik dekonstruksi ideologis 1980-an, Elliott di sini berubah kembali dari lengkap ketergantungan pada Steven Luke (1975) dekonstruksi ritual politik sebagai murni ideologi dan mengakui Angkatan Durkheim's teori tatanan bagaimana sosial dipelihara melalui sangat praktik upacara. Seperti Elliott dan banyak penulis lain dari Dayan dan Katz untuk Michel Maffesoli berpendapat, masih ada sesuatu yang sangat sugestif tentang Durkheim's account totem upacara untuk memahami kontemporer retorika politik dan media. Hal ini tidak pertanyaan di sini bergantung pada keakuratan sejarah Durkheim's rekening (1995) dari totem ritual, atau menerima klaim tentang asal mula agama. Bunga hari Durkheim's bekerja terletak dalam melihat bagaimana analisis proto-structuralist 'Suci' dan 'profan' menangkap generalisable pola yang link (1) saat-saat ketika kita, atau muncul untuk menjadi, ditujukan sebagai kebersamaan dan(2) kategori tertentu berpikir yang memiliki sebuah kekuatan yang mengorganisir dalam tindakan sehari-hari. Hal ini di terbatas ini - tetapi saya berharap tepat - merasakan bahwa saya telah meminjam dari Durkheim untuk membangun sebuah teori dimensi ritual media (Couldry 2003a).Dari perspektif ini, Durkheim dapat masih mengajarkan kita banyak tentang cara menafsirkan klaim umum yang membuat media tentang dunia sosial. Tapi dari pengakuan itu, kita bisa kepala off dalam dua arah yang sangat berbeda. Rute pertama (' neo-Durkheimian') berpendapat bahwa reinstitute media kontemporer, melalui sarana elektronik, kesatuan upacara totem (misalnya, Dayan dan Katz 1992). Menggunakan pendekatan - lebih kompatibel mungkin dengan hari ini lebih skeptis terhadap totalising rhetorics 'sosial' - kedua titik Durkheim hanya sebagai sebuah entri untuk praktek dekonstruksi. Menerima bahwa Durkheim menarik perhatian kami untuk konstruksi yang dikodekan dalam ritual - klaim media untuk memohon tatanan sosial, untuk berdiri di untuk, dan memberikan kami akses istimewa ke, totalitas sosial - pendekatan kedua ini bertujuan untuk membongkar konstruksi tersebut, menggambar pada antropologi wawasan tentang peran mengatur ritual kategori, kekuatan normatif batas-batas ritual dan resonansi ekspresif praktik upacara , sekaligus menolak setiap asumsi bahwa ritual benar-benar adalah dasar dari tatanan sosial. Memang, kedua pendekatan ini menolak yang sangat pengertian tentang 'tatanan sosial' sebagai kategori normatif atau diperlukan saat memeriksa lebih erat naturalisasi klaim tertentu untuk sosial urutan dalam masyarakat kontemporer. Pendekatan kedua berbeda dari semut dan dari neo-Durkheimian fungsionalisme: mengakui (tidak seperti semut) orang-orang media representasi yang memobilisasi besar emosi dan encode besar klaim tentang 'sosial' melalui organisasi dan formal pola tapi di sisi lain (seperti semut) menolak untuk mengambil bentuk media seperti pada nilai nominal dan selalu mengingat bahan asymmetries yang membuat mereka mungkin. Sensitised untuk potensi bentuk upacara oleh Durkheim, namun terinspirasi oleh Roh deconstructive lebih dekat Foucault, Bourdieu atau Laclau, kekuatan media pendekatan ini terlihat ritual-ritual media resmi rincian sebagai situs penting mana kekuatan kontemporer dikodekan dan warganegara. Sebagai Maurice Bloch sekali meletakkannya, ritual adalah 'penggunaan bentuk kekuasaan' (1989: 45).Karena berfokus pada rincian dari bentuk, ritual analisis dilakukan dengan benar (yaitu dengan konsep substantif daripada murni nominal ritual tindakan) 3 memberi kita alat untuk melacak pola tidak hanya dalam media wacana, tetapi juga dalam tindakan sehari-hari yang berorientasi terhadap media. Sangat penting untuk mengeksplorasi hubungan antara 'moments khusus' media ritual (malam final Big Brother atau seseorang masuk ke tahap Jerry Springer) dan daerah pedalaman yang luas praktek Catherine Bell (1992) panggilan 'ritualisation' (misalnya, praktek dangkal sebagai membolak-balik majalah selebritiSementara Anda menunggu untuk mendapatkan memotong rambut Anda). Ada banyak istilah dalam bermain di media ritualisation: tidak hanya selebriti, tapi dibangun kategori 'media' / 'biasa' orang, hal, tempat, kali (dan sebagainya), dan kategori 'liveness' (yang tidak langsung menegaskan prioritas koneksi langsung meskipun media sosial 'realitas'). Pendekatan ini dimotivasi bukan dengan minat khusus dalam ritual atau upacara per se - tidak ada klaim di sini ritual-ritual media tersebut muncul bentuk agama sekuler! - tetapi sebaliknya oleh keprihatinan dengan cara-cara di mana klaim tertentu/untuk tatanan sosial (salah 1994) dinaturalisasikan pada wacana dan tindakan. Efektivitas halus kekuatan media - luar biasa fakta bahwa konsentrasi yang ekstrim daya simbolis khususnya lembaga tetap sah untuk begitu lama - memerlukan alat-alat teoritis kehalusan beberapa untuk analisis. Ritual dan, sama pentingnya, ritualisation adalah dua alat tersebut.More broadly, ritual analysis provides an account of what Bourdieu called 'the production of belief' that links us back into the local and detailed processes from which even the largest and grandest mappings of the social world derive (remember ANT) while drawing us outwards to explain the representations and formalisations on which much political and cultural staging relies. Consider the Live 8 concerts in early July 2005. In those events quasi-political actors (current and ex-music stars) orchestrated a process in which citizens could plausibly act out participation in political decision making - something very different from the political spectacle Murray Edelman deconstructed two decades ago (1988) as ideological rhetoric performed at a distance from audiences. The more participative Live 8 events bring out how ritual analysis - an attention to 'subjunctive' or 'as if' language that is drawn upon, however elliptically, in action - can supplement ideological analysis (important though the latter remains of course in uncovering the explicit discursive contradictions around such events). Only the former can explain how some of the Live 8 marchers (as quoted by media) saw themselves as being 'part of the message' given to governments and as a means to 'force' change in the very same political establishment that (in the United Kingdom at least) had already endorsed the spectacle in which they acted! We return here to the dialectic between attention and inattention that I noted earlier.At this point, given our wider aim of explaining social theory's role in media analysis, it is worth reflecting on what the theoretical term 'ritual' adds to the descriptive term 'spectacle'. This emerges in my one small disagreement with Doug Kellner's excellent and courageous book Media Spectacles. Early on in the book, when introducing his topic, Kellner writes that 'media spectacles are those phenomena of media culture that embody contemporary society's basic values, serve to initiate individuals into its way of life' (2003: 2, added emphasis). But is this true? What are these ideals and values Kellner talks about, and where is the evidence they are so simply accepted and internalised by those outside media industries? This is clearly a rhetorical concession by Kellner, but why concede even that much? This small point limits Kellner's critique of contemporary spectacles: since Kellner's argument starts by taking the normative force of spectacles for granted, the only possibility of political resistance in our era must be forms of counter-spectacle. But I would want to go further and acknowledge forms of resistance that question the basic principles and preconditions of media spectacle, and the inequalities and totalising rhetorics on which that production is based. But to do this we need a more detailed theorisation of how exactly spectacle works to encode categories of thought and action: in other words, a theory of media rituals - not for our own edification, but to deconstruct more fully both the contents and the form of media's claims to represent the 'truth' of populations.