Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions.

• Author: Benson, Rod

Armand and Michele Mattelart. Translated by James A. Cohen and Marina Urquidi. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) 219pp.

As common wisdom would have it, there is the real world -- active, vital and above all relevant And then there is theory -- obscure, esoteric, the realm of dilettantes. This division has been especially pronounced in the world of the mass media. What can theory possibly tell us that we don't already know?

This question, grossly simplified, is the central one addressed in Armand and Michele Mattelart's densely argued, occasionally jargon-laden, but ultimately illuminating Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions. Precisely because most people assume they understand the media, the media industry has gained an unprecedented ability to affect the most intimate aspects of our lives. This is why it is so important to question the common wisdom.

The Mattelarts, two of France's leading media scholars, are prolific writers whose works have often crossed the French-Anglo cultural divide. Together, their previously translated books include International Image Markets (1984, with Xavier Delcourt) and The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction (1990). Armand Mattelart is the author of Transnationals and the Third World: The Struggle for Culture (1983) and, with Ariel Dorfman, the classic How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1975). Michele Mattelart is perhaps best known as the author of Women, Media and Crisis: Femininity and Disorder (1986Y

Rethinking Media Theory may, however, be the Mattelarts' most ambitious project to date. Originally published in France in 1986 as Penser les Medias, the new English translation is valuable in providing the most complete synthesis of the Mattelarts' wide-ranging knowledge of the media. As they state in the preface to the English edition, their aim is

the analysis of the evolution of thought and research on information,

communication and culture in France. But reference to the

case of France does not by any means indicate a confinement to it.

Indeed, this work raises questions that transcend the limits of any

geographical perimeter.

Such grand pretensions invite some rebuke, and indeed, the trouble is already evident in the title. "Rethinking" assumes there is a coherent theory to be rethought, when in fact there is a multitude of theories so far-flung in their assumptions and methodologies that the key proponents rarely, if ever, engage in debate. Since Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor Adorno locked horns in the 1930s, the struggle has been between so-called administrative research aimed at understanding and justifying the current state of the media system, and a critical approach that questions existing commercial or state-controlled practices, measuring them against ideal conceptions of human freedom and democracy.(1)

Historically, this divide has also broken down along American-European lines, and the Mattelarts are currently among the world's leading exponents of the critical school. The authors note Robert Merton's 1949 remark that captures wonderfully the stereotypes -- if not the more complex differences -- between the two approaches:

The American knows what he is talking about, and that is not

much; the European knows not what he is talking about, and that

is a great deal.... The European imagines and the American looks; the American investigates the short run, the European speculates on the long run.

Certainly, French structuralist and cultural...