18.3: The Current Conjecture
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- Herman Gray
- University of California Press
Among the most significant elements that define the current conjuncture with respect to media and diversity, we would certainly have to account for the impact of the new international division of labor and the new international division of cultural labor, including especially the rise of new media capitals and production centers, such as Bangalore, Lagos, and Hong Kong, along with highly skilled and unskilled labor forces. 12 These production centers generate specific content organized around nation, ethnicity, language, and history, all of which provides a sharp contrast to—while adding to and complicating—U.S. conceptions of diversity. So too the changing functions of culture within the global circulation of information, entertainment, and cultural products that scholars like George Yudice and Arlene Davila explain as the expediency of cultures. These expediencies add cultural diversity and celebrations of diversity and cultural differences to the working of culture and media, especially in terms of the circulation of content ranging from gaming culture to cinema. 13
The post-network-television environment and the realignments of platforms for the delivery and distribution of content, as well as reception experiences and consumption practices, require a different research approach with diversity as a complex object of research. 14 In this context, multicultural programming content is very much an element of branding and marketing deployed by content producers to reach precise sectors of their desired markets (for instance, reality television shows about rural white working-class families, or programs about black church women or the ordeals of Silicon Valley high-tech employees). Seen from this perspective, it would seem that in the current media ecology, diverse characters, story lines, and content producers are no longer in short supply and that the alignment between representation and demography, now understood as identifiers for market segments and lifestyle choices, has, in the gloss of the postracial society, been fully realized. This is no longer a condition of content scarcity but one of saturation and hypervisibility.
Added to corporate transformations of the U.S. media ecology is the impact of juridical and legislative state institutions and practices in legally inscribing and authorizing color-blindness in voting rights laws and college admissions. Underwritten by the principle of color-blind legal and social practices, diversity, supplemented by its proxy multiculturalism, is the expressive form for the institutionalization of what Rod Ferguson calls minoritarian discourse. For Ferguson, the discursive life of minoritarian discourse is expressed explicitly as a value commitment to diversity in the culture of university classrooms as well as in scholarly research. Ferguson cautions that this value commitment has an increasingly normative function, and thus in his view is an operation of power/knowledge that works to exclude the social actors and political struggles that made race, ethnicity, and gender discursive sites of struggle around inequality and emergent sites of non-normative imaginaries. 15 This reordering provides the scholarly rationale and authority for the circulation of knowledge about lifestyle differences that find their way into production suites, executive offices, and media content.
The point is simply that unlike the conditions that produced the alignment of networks, studios, and the state as objects of political protest by groups and the alliance between demography and representation as the accepted means of redress, the conditions that define the present conjuncture are predicated on the cultural recognition of difference, the deployment of diversity as a social practice, and their normative operation as a discourse of management and regulation. 16 In short, the current conjuncture destabilizes the alliance between demography and representation as a response to exclusion, invisibility, and stereotypes and reorders it around diversity and multiculturalism as markers of consumer brands, lifestyle choices, and postracial cultural appreciation.