Page 188 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Globalisation, transnationalisation, culture 167

in markets and advertising revenues. There is cultural critique here but it is not
founded on essentialising American culture but on arguing that there are values
promoted within a system driven by profits from sales and commercial advertising.
Yet such reformulations do not entirely evade problems of cultural definition.
For Thompson (1995: 169), Schiller’s ‘transnational corporate cultural domination’
‘still presents too uniform a view of American media culture (albeit a culture
which is no longer exclusively at the disposal of American capital) and of its
global dominance’.
Measuring exports does not resolve the problems. Transnational co-production,
co-ownership, as well as ‘translation, franchising, reversioning, and piracy’ make
the task of distinguishing the originating sources, much less linking these to
‘national’ cultural characteristics, increasingly difficult (Tunstall 2008: 251).
Other analysts highlight the complexity and contradictions within cultural texts.
As Mirrlees (2013) shows, Avatar can be read as engaging counter-hegemonic
discourses as well as hegemonic ones of imperialism and orientalism. Avatar is a
form of global popular culture whose transnational creative production, mainly
across the US and New Zealand, problematises national cultural frames, as do
the diverse interpretations of the film including the appropriation of the Na’vi as
symbols of the people and groups oppressed by neoliberalism and militarism
worldwide. Produced by News Corporation, Avatar became the highest grossing
film of all time, the top selling cinema release in China and with some 70 per cent
of revenue generated outside the United States. Critical political economy
rightly highlights the structural imbalances in cultural flows and points to detri-
mental consequences, but this must be allied to analysis of the influences shaping
specific cultural production, circulation and reception, and considerations of the
ideological boundaries and polyvalency of texts.
Another set of problems concerning ‘transnational corporate domination’
concerns the articulation of relationships between capitalist enterprises, states
and imperialism. Boyd-Barrett advocates a ‘reformulation’ of media imperialism,
replacing the international, territorially based concept of imperialism with one of
‘colonization of communications space’, the latter taking greater account of the
increasing hybridity of media systems (Boyd-Barrett 1998: 167). McPhail (2006)
proposes electronic colonialism. Yet such reformulations are challenged for their
conflation of economic, cultural and political power. For Pieterse (2004: 34) the
idea of ‘corporate imperialism’‘is a step too far and a contradiction in terms, for
it implies non-state actors undertaking principally political (not just economic)
projects’. This is certainly not to argue that corporations do not support political
regimes or ‘projects’, or that political power is not used instrumentally to further
corporate interests. Rather, different kinds of power and agency, while interlocking,
still need to be distinguished analytically. Most transnational corporations, Pieterse
argues (2004: 34) ‘can achieve their objectives without control over sovereignty;
economic influence of the type provided by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO
regulations suffices, along with lobbying and sponsoring political actors’. This
debate raises an important set of issues addressed in theories of imperialism,