MC433 - week 3

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These are my notes from October 12 for MC433 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Human Rights, Communication Rights, and Media Literacies

Readings

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (chapter 1)

Published in 1970 in English (originally published in Portuguese 2 years earlier). This is a lovely & quite philosophical work that draws heavily on critical theory, though its practicality may be limited (and it may be used as a way of shifting the burden away from the oppressor and onto the oppressed). I have some rough notes below, but if you’re into Hegel or Lukács or just beautiful prose, you might as well read the original.

• the oppressed cannot (should not) oppress their oppressors
• their only option is to liberate, both themselves and their oppressors
• only the oppressed are capable of doing this—only they can be the revolutionary subject
• if the oppressors are ever generous, it’s on the back of an unjust social order
• there’s a natural tendency for the oppressed to, eventually, become sub-oppressors in turn
  • the reason: their whole image of humanity is defined by the image of the oppressor
  • selfhood inextricably shaped by their concrete existential situation
  • e.g., worker who becomes a manager then tends to oppress other workers (because it’s the most prominent social relation they’ve known)
  • the shadow of the former oppressor is cast over them still and they cannot escape
• duality of the oppressed: they are both themselves + the internalised consciousness of their oppressor
  • here he cites Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (“Mind” in the book’s translation) & his master-slave dialectic
• incidentally, I thought it was funny that Lukács’ book on Lenin was cited via its French translation, when it was originally published in German (maybe Freire could read French but not German)
• “the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for redemption”
  • the oppressed themselves must develop a pedagogy—it cannot simply be handed to them by their oppressor
• we need a humanist, not a humanitarian, approach—without humanist sentiment, humanitarianism becomes dehumanising
• the oppressed are not capable of initiating violence
  • their very existence as the oppressed, and the prior subjugation that entails, is itself violence
• only the oppressed can free their oppressors by taking away their power to oppress & therefore returning their humanity to them
• we can’t just broadcast propaganda to the oppressed; they must enter the struggles as fully empowered humans, whatever that means in practice

MacBride report (pages V-1-18)

A UNESCO publication entitled “Many Voices One World” from 1981. A fairly radical take on the key role of communication in the world, and how we need national media/education/etc to try to alleviate the effects of the market. Moving away from the right to free speech and toward the right to communicate.

Lecture

• today: looking at the power of law (as enforced by the state) to regulate technology (as opposed to markets, which we looked at last week)
• tension between the right to free speech & having an orderly society
• in the postwar context (decolonisation, post-Holocaust, etc), ideas on communication starting to shift
  • right to communicate starting to supplant the idea of right to information
  • burgeoning satellite communications industry, which is being carved out in a very inegalitarian, first-come first-served way (mostly by US)
  • shifting away from a one-way, free-speech centered model to a bidirectional, discourse-driven one (monologic -> dialogic)
• Non-Aligned Movement during Cold War, which consisted of countries that explicitly did not want to take sides
  • challenging US domination & imperialism
  • founded in 1956 with India, Indonesia, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Ghana
  • one goal was to reorganise existing communication channels (which were often a legacy of a colonial past)
  • they introduced a resolution at UNESCO to move away from monologic order and toward a dialogic one (at the time, UNESCO was a fairly authoritarian institution for technology/knowledge transfer)
    • in order to establish & maintain a new economic order, we need to also establish a new information order, one based on communication
    • need to address lack of respect for Third World countries
    • concern about information news flows & monopoly power of some existing communication agencies
    • noted an unequal distribution of communication ability around the world
  • as a result, UNESCO established the MacBride Commission, which authored the MacBride report from the readings
    • main goal of the report: to set norms for state policy in influencing the media
    • very different from the self-regulating, American-exceptionalism approach of the Hutchins report
    • criticised the supposed “right of free speech”, elevated alternative rights
    • end goal is to make Third World countries self-reliant & recognised as truly independent
    • recommended better quality international news, partly through better conditions for journalists
    • saw communication rights as a prerequisite for human rights
    • to be achieved through a state-regulated paradigm, NOT a laissez-faire one
    • incidentally, the aftermath of this report was that the US soon pulled out of UNESCO (in 1984) and only rejoined in 2002, and ofc now we know UNESCO as a very different body—UNESCO’s mission was thus transformed from establishing communications policy to, what, designating World Heritage sites?
• now onto the pedagogy (Freire) approach
  • roughly contemporaneous w/ MacBride report, but very different in terms of its approach
  • it’s naive to expect the dominant classes to develop education to transform the oppressed
  • the pedagogy must be immanent, must come from within—you need a critical & liberating dialogue
  • contrast/compare with Fraser’s idea of a counter public sphere?
  • but ofc this approach doesn’t talk about the state at all—it’s focused on norms (self-development)

Seminar

• interesting tension: the possibility that the MacBride report used anti-American sentiment as a sort of cover for justifying state-run monopolies
• on Freire’s pedagogical approach:
  • putting all the responsibility/burden on the oppressed
  • definitely more on the abstract rather than the realistic side
  • kind of paternalistic in some ways
  • my worry with his sub-oppression thing (which I find compelling on a philosophical level) is that it sort of feeds into this whole “reverse discrimination” narrative that’s been, unfortunately, dominating the airwaves lately
  • he never really defines “oppressed” or gives examples (beyond worker/manager I guess), probably with the intention of making his text universally applicable
• linking this to last week’s seminar on Southern press & the “false generosity” of the white Southern editors—in that case, the burden of responsibility being on the oppressed may not necessarily be a bad thing
• comparing with Fraser:
  • for Freire, there’s a moment when the oppression stops, and the oppressed can begin to build a pedagogy in peace
  • Fraser’s approach is more realistic, recognises the real barriers that the oppressed can face in public spheres
  • Freire focuses on a much smaller piece and thus abstracts away such barriers
  • Q to think about: what does Freire’s theory imply for the right to communicate & the ideal role of the state?

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