News Fetishism and the Hegemony of Forms
Dr. Peter Nielsen

Introduction

In recent decades, a profound development has taken place when it comes to media, especially regarding internet, social media and smartphones. In this context, the nature of media is crucial. Typical conceptions call attention to the fact that media have to do with technology, institutions and communication. Media theory accordingly is about technologies such as television and the internet, institutions related to these as for instance New York Times, CNN and Twitter, and it is concerned with the communication that is facilitated through these institutions and technologies, such as news, analyses, films, television programs and tweets. This view of the media predominates even in critical media theory, which usually analyzes the actual content, the ownership relations of the media institutions as well as the various communicative frameworks in a critical light. 

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1994) thus criticized the idea that media are democratic forums with equal opportunities for all. In opposition to this idea, they developed a theory of the media as settings for capitalist and elitist propaganda. The messages produced in the media spring from economic and political conditions characterized by a radical bias in favor of commercial interests and the power elite. The role of critical media theory is thus to promote progressive ideas and to uncover the lies of the Establishment.

Furthermore, it is seen as important to take control of the means of production of the media in order to promote equality and democracy. From the end of the 1960s, there has been a range of examples of this type of media criticism concerned with critique of dominant media institutions and creation of alternative media channels to balance or finally replace the capitalist and elitist media. This type of media criticism is characterized by the way that media are seen as neutral platforms for communication, which can be used for different purposes and thus ideally should be used with the aim of overthrowing the prevailing order.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri for instance perceives the new media in this way. They argue that “computer algorithms employed by giant corporations like Google and Facebook exact a kind of violence on all users through the expropriation of intelligence and social connection” and add that “we can take hold of those weapons and neutralize them or, better, set their operation towards new goals or, better still, make them common and thus open to general use. Biopolitical weapons, such as digital algorithms, might in fact be the most important focus of contemporary struggle” (Hardt and Negri 2017, 273). 

The central characteristic of media criticism is that the media are mainly analyzed with a focus on their content, and, furthermore, they are understood as secondary to their economic and political context. This theoretical account should however be turned on its head in light of the exceptional media revolution in recent decades. Media today are primarily characterized by the fact that form overshadows content, it is the specific forms of media today that needs to be analyzed. At the same time, media are primary in relation to economy and politics, which can actually today be understood as mainly media (Nielsen 2016).  

Political Economy of Media

Following Marshall McLuhan’s well-known statement, the medium is the message; we get a different point of departure for media criticism. This statement constitutes a radically different approach to media and media criticism, which has become still more relevant. It implies a focus on form and the specific media domain, which has economic and political dimensions as well.

That the medium is the message means that its form is more important than its content. Form should be understood as abstract and general, while content is concrete and particular.

That the medium is the message furthermore implies a dynamic, where the importance of the form accelerates, which entails a generalization of the form at the expense of concrete relations and particular events. The medium tends to become self-referential and depleted of meaning from the outside.

In this perspective, media are thus not mainly technologies, institutions or communication. The latter certainly are part of the general media domain, but what is at the center of the analysis is something quite different, namely that media are understood as specific social tendencies that marks the relation between form and content. More than anything else, the spreading of media constitutes a development, where specific social forms become prevalent at the expense of the formation of ideas, empirical processes and concrete actions by the agents involved.

From this perspective, capitalism can be seen as the first mass media and Karl Marx as the first media critic (Baudrillard 1988, 22-3; Baudrillard 1999, 67). Marx (1977, 43) identified capitalism with a huge accumulation of commodities, and ”its unit being a single commodity”. The bourgeois economists focused on the content of commodities as the basis for satisfying human needs, but Marx shifts focus to their form: the commodity form. From where does this mysterious nature of the commodity form come, he asks rhetorically, and answers: ”Clearly, from this form itself” (Marx 1977, 76). The commodity form brings with it a fetishization; In other words commodities seem as if they are ”independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race” (Marx 1977, 77). This form rises from the capitalist mode of production, where exchange takes place through competition in markets, including the labor market, where the commodity labor power is bought and sold. 

Marx’ theory of commodity fetishism can be understood as a critical theory about capitalist production, in which we see exactly the displacement from content to form and the same change in social tendency as caused by medialization. Marx’ theory can accordingly be interpreted as a critique of the medialization of production in capitalism: The commodity is the message.  

The commodity being the message means that the form of commodity, i.e. the capitalist mode of production and the logic of the market, governs people’s specific relations, creative powers and concrete life. Economic life is organized in a way that limits people’s scope of action. Over time, this tendency increasingly manifests itself, as the form of commodity diffuses together with the expansion of capitalism. Economic growth intensifies medialization. The meaning of capitalism is capitalism. Hence, human beings and nature suffer.

In light of the economic development in the 20th century, one can offer a complementary critique of the medialization of consumption. With the development of consumer society, production and the wage earners no longer have the special status they had in the 19^th century. Fetishism now also includes consumption and the consumer.

Jean Baudrillard (1981, 171) emphasizes that ”consumption goods also constitute a mass medium”. In consumer society we see that ”just as needs, feelings, culture, knowledge – in short, all the properly human faculties – are integrated as commodities into the order of production, and take on material form as productive forces so that they can be sold, so likewise all desires, projects and demands, all passions and all relationships, are now abstracted (or materialized) as signs and as objects to be bought and consumed” (Baudrillard 2005a, 219). Only in consumer society is fetishism fully manifested. It is crucial that utility ”is a fetishized social relation” in the same way as capitalist commodity production, and it ”is the two fetishizations ” together ”that constitute commodity fetishism” (Baudrillard 1981, 131).

With the rise of consumer society capitalism is more deeply embodied. It is then not only through production that we are governed by the commodity form, but also as consumers: through experiences of happiness and desire, through realization of different ‘projects’ as consumers and through the general experience of ourselves as not only wage earners, but essentially as creatures with infinite desires that can only be satisfied through the consumption of commodities. 

Through the development of capitalism and later the consumer society economic life thus becomes medialized to such a degree that our two central economic identities, as wage earners and consumers, are glued onto the form of commodity and growth mentality. Form outweighs the specific content, which here means our multiple desires and various identities as human beings in concrete contexts. Furthermore, medialization expands from not only production onto consumption, but also more generally through economic growth, which means that people work and consume more.

With the branding of consumption and work in the last decades, we now live in an enchanted and seductive economic universe that covers everything from our most intimate feelings and most ardent political passions to our global reality and future prospects.

Economic medialization has become all-encompassing. There are no boundaries – no absolute free spaces or external values. We can no longer clearly and unequivocally identify anything that is not a part of the dynamic capitalist system. There are no longer categorical differences in economic life, but only ”a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridity and artificiality” as Hardt and Negri (2000, 188) put it. 

The News Form

Medialization of the economy has unfolded parallel with the spreading of what is usually meant by media, i.e. texts, newspapers, radio etc. Through most of history, up until a few years ago, the economic medium has, however, overshadowed the general media domain. Nevertheless, in the last 40 years a real revolution has taken place in the media domain, with numerous television channels, internet, social media and smartphones, which is comparable with the transition to a capitalist economy. Initially the printed media were universal, but later electronic and visual media also entered the picture. A radical transformation, however, takes place with the emergence of digital media, which are now paradigmatic even in the sense that they affect the entire media domain through digitalization of printed, electronic and visual media as well.

Commodities are to the economy what news is to the digital media. News is the form that overshadows the content and structures the entire media domain.

The crucial factor is that news are related to events that have taken place just now, or are taking place in this very moment. Anniversaries of ’big events’, for instance the 50 years anniversary of the events in 1968 in May 2018 likewise have news value. The news form is abstract and general like the commodity form. News coverage levels out everything and destroys differences.

News is nothing new. But when the medium becomes the message in the digital media, news becomes the predominant form; a form that the media in general are guided by and simultaneously refine. What characterizes this type of medialization thus is that the news form overshadows the content and influences the entire media domain. A generalization of the news form takes place at the expense of the events and social conditions, which the news is supposed to be about. Ultimately, news becomes a self-generating form that reproduces itself without reference to external conditions. News closes in on itself. Commodity fetishism is then supplemented with news fetishism and a hegemony of form arises.

The news form influences society and implies radical displacements in the way, in which society works and develops. This is both an independent media logic and a dimension of an entangled and progressing general medialization of social life. Capitalism implies that the commodity form is established as the dominant structural form and the commodity form expands through growth, that means the production of still more commodities at an ever increasing speed; an exponential logic. The news form imitates growth in its own dynamics, but more accurately, it is characterized by intensification and virtualization.

Today news is the primary media form, and social development is written in the language of mass information and the news form. What characterizes consumer society, according to Baudrillard, ”is the universality of the news item […] in mass communication. All political, historical and cultural information is received in the same […] form of the news item” (1998, 33). Newsworthiness is not just one category among others, but ”the cardinal category” (1998, 34, bold in the original) and ”we shall never get back to pre-news and pre-media history” (Baudrillard 1994, 6). 

The intensification of the news form has especially occurred through the emergence of news in real time. News in real time is a phenomenon that originates from 24 hours news channels like CNN. On these channels, news is broadcasted 24 hours a day, every day of the year. News in real time allegedly brings the viewer closer to the events, but actually, it changes time itself and the experience of reality in our societies. There is a fundamental difference between historical time and real time. In real time, what happens is that, paradoxically, ”objective reality disappears. And not just the reality of the present event, but also that of past and future events. […] Real time is a kind of black hole into which nothing penetrates without losing its substance” (Baudrillard 2002, 108). It is the very ties to the historical content and the relation to reality that are severed when the news form is performing in real time.

We thus see an intensification of the loss of content entailed by medialization, when news coverage takes place in real time; it affects not only the events covered in the news, but also reality itself and the historical perception of time, which tends to be lost forever, because ”at bottom, nothing takes place in real time” (Baudrillard 1994, 90). News overwrites the past, the future and present events as linkages in a historical sequence.  

The intensification of the news form impacts people’s perception of time and reality and the course of events. This happens to such a degree that events, which are our frame of reference for historicity and reality, fade away. In the 20th century, with its major crisis, struggles and conflicts, there was a sense of a future. Today we no longer have a future – we are temporally located after the future, as Franco ‘bifo’ Berardi (2011) phrases it. And as Paul Virilio points out, that has general consequences: ”If we have long lost the depth of time of the past and of long durations, this ’post-historic’ wreck actually not only invalidates the future, the depth of field of rising generations. It also invalidates the present, the present tense of an ‘event-based history” (2010, 59). 

News fetishism hollows out time and reality. There are fewer events, they lose their epochal force and their relation to reality disappears. Instead of events, what we experience to an increasing extent and intensity in the media are what Baudrillard refer to as non-events. This is something entirely different. 

It is characteristic of events that they ”break […] with all previous causality” (Baudrillard 2008, 60), while non-events take place in another dimension, in a ”realm of perpetual change, of a ceaseless updating, of an incessant succession in real time” (Baudrillard  2005b, 122). Ultimately, the news is the event, because as soon ”as they are both involved in and involved by the course of phenomena, it is the news media that are the event. It is the event of news coverage that substitutes itself for the coverage of the event” (Baudrillard  2005b, 133).

News in real time and non-events are intensified forms of news that involve an increasing element of media-generated unreality, but which nevertheless refer to real phenomena or provide a particular perspective on elements of reality.

Proliferation of Non-News

In its most advanced and paradoxical form news becomes non-news. The flow of news refers in this case to the virtual and non-verifiable, to the empty void of facts. It is news as pure form, free flowing news particles, stripped of content. Non-news has many forms and they occupy a growing part of the media. While non-events create a situation with an abyss of information, non-news entails a constantly increased noise level.

We experience it for instance as an emerging layer of analyses and commentaries, especially on top of economic and political news, where focus is on future and/or unofficial states of affairs. In the field of economy, economic forecasts are widespread: about future growth, inflation rates, unemployment, oil prices, etc. These are discussed in the same way as actual economic facts in the media, even though they are really nothing more than reports from an imaginary and unknown ’future’.

Economists’ forecasts are replaced by new forecasts at an increasing pace and such forecasts are presented and discussed as news in the media, even though economists’ scenarios for the future virtually never correspond with reality. They are non-news. 

Similarly, in the field of politics, opinion polls are presented as political news about current reality, although they consist of statistically manipulated samples from imaginary elections. Such political non-news is then accompanied in abundance by political speculations and comments about political spin and political life behind the facade, which have in common that they are based on non-verifiable analyses of politicians’ motives, power struggles and strategies, typically involving the media themselves.  

Non-news thus is a further escalation towards media circularity. It is characteristic that commentaries and analyses either concern unofficial circumstances behind the scenes, or, if concerned with future ‘facts’, that they subsequently are never systematically compared with real news. It appears to be of no relevance if it turns out later that the forecasts, opinion polls and commentaries were wrong or misleading. No consistent correction of non-news and news takes place. Economic forecasts for instance never are corrected by reality. Even after the financial crisis in 2008-9 and the covid-19 crisis in 2020, where economists’ forecasts showed themselves catastrophically wrong, new forecasts by the very same economists, using the very same economic models, are considered reliable news in the media. Neither have numerous examples of erroneous opinion polls called political non-news into question. When discrepancies are discussed, which of course occasionally happens, it has no consequences. Such isolated cases are soon after buried under the growing piles of new, uninterrupted non-news. The logic of the news form outweighs everything.

Non-news and non-events originate from the inner logic of the news form, rather than from external conditions – Closer than being there yourself! More up to date than reality! Get the news before the events! – And hence, they accelerate the loss of content in economy and politics.

The news form has an even deeper impact on our lives and activities than the commodity form. There, not our only work, consumption and money become independent forces, but even communication itself and the very exchange of information. News thus has a more profound importance for our identities, relations and opportunities. With news fetishism, loss of content becomes a general social condition in the hegemony of forms.

Critical Theory Then and Now

40 years ago, television was the most advanced technical medium and they were big, heavy boxes. Back then, it was still appropriate to develop critical theory with a focus on economic and political content. That is no longer the case. 

A broad range of critical theories exist, which based on the critique of political economy identify a societal change within capitalism after the crisis in the 1970s. Common to all of them is that they analyze substantive changes in the economy and politics, such as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, from welfare state to neoliberalism or from a society of discipline to the society of control, etc. In such analyses, the development of digital media, the news form and informatization either are totally absent or thought to be secondary or indirect, as technological or cultural factors within economic and political processes. Hardt and Negri (2012) are among those, who have come closest to genuinely analyzing the development of media as an independent factor with growing significance. Still, their focus continuously is on analyses of economic and political content.

The relevance, however, of such economic and political analyses of content has diminished, as medialization and the related changes of forms have become increasingly important in the last 40 years. In recent years medialization has become so radical and pervasive that we have gone beyond a threshold. We are witnessing a process of transformation so epochal that critical theories based on analyses of capitalism in the two preceding centuries concern the past, rather than the present; and the gap between these two is growing right now and will continue to do so in an accelerated pace in the years to come.

The tendency at present is that the news media and general medialization overwrite the commodity form and capitalism. This tendency calls for a reorientation of critical theory; for it holds true for basically every type of critical theory in the last decades that they are rooted in the political and economic dynamics of the 20th century, especially the crisis in the 1970s and its after-effects. The growing problem with these analyses is that they block the view to fundamental system changes in present societal formation. We no longer live in the 20th century and today the crisis in the 1970s belongs to the past, just as much as the crisis in the 1930s. It is a mistake to believe that the 21st century will somehow be a copy of the 20th century, and to believe that the paradigm for all changes is the period around 1968. The present tendency is that media and form are primary, while political and economic content becomes increasingly secondary. The current digital media revolution is as groundbreaking as the economic revolution 200 years ago, that triggered a transition to capitalism.

Society did not fundamentally change with the spread of television. For that purpose television is too stationary and monological. That is the case, even though a range of different television channels has emerged since the 1980s, including 24 hours channels that are essential to the intensification of the news form. The internet then provides the plurality and interaction necessary for radical medialization. However, not until the mobility of smartphones and the importance of social media in everyday life in the 21st century do the digital media reach such a degree of complexity and continuous interaction that they overwrite the economic medium.

Smartphones make the internet available almost everywhere and to everybody. They can be used on the move, and on social media like Facebook and Instagram, the news form and the flow of information become an integral part of daily life for the growing number of users. The broad public takes part in the news coverage. 

This recent development is not unambiguously good or bad compared to the forms of capitalism in the previous century. The forms dominating our lives today surely are limiting and characterized by structural logics, but they simultaneously provide opportunities and imply an essential openness. One may say that today, paradoxically; life is both more open and more closed than earlier: more open at a subjective and microscopic level, but more closed at an objective and macroscopic level. The pathologies related to the current developments mainly spring from the fact that the mechanisms, which made correction of problematic societal developments possible in the 20th century, no longer work adequately; for they depend on a constant focus on content, which is no longer there and cannot be restored. The decoupled logics and the structural lack of feedback lead to a dynamic at the macro-level, characterized by a pervasive and inevitable decay, as well as social frustration over the hegemony of forms. 

Three of the essential figures of thought in critical theory have become obsolete. There is no longer a dialectics between agents and structures. The question of reforms or revolutions is outdated. Moreover, today critique or resistance no longer operates as the driving force of society. 

The general model for social dynamics that became popular in critical theory at the end of the 20th century was based on a combination of agents and structures, subjectivism and objectivism. The basic idea is that society develops through an interaction between structures and agents. Structures exist as a precondition for the actions of agents, but do not determine them, as agents may change the structures and develop new structural forms. The important objective for critical theory then is to identify undemocratic and unjust structures, formulate a consistent critique and then urge agents, existing or potential, to change their patterns of behaviour and thus bring down these structures. In this perspective, critical theory is a critical interlude that reflects and epitomizes society’s own continuous self-criticism, in anticipation of progressive changes.

And how are such changes then supposed to happen? The traditional answer still is that changes must take place through reforms, revolution, or a subtle combination of gradual reforms that then eventually culminate in a radical break. As regards the question about agents and structures, in the last decades we have seen a general softening of positions that earlier seemed quite irreconcilable; and, similarly, we do not see such an explosive opposition between reforms and revolution today, possibly because the general expectation of an impending revolution has drastically diminished. Even Hardt and Negri (2017), who are amongst those authors that have theorized and anticipated revolution in recent decades, have lowered their expectations significantly. In the short term, it will primarily be possible to implement reforms; reforms that may then to varying degrees point towards changes that are more fundamental and act as catalysts for systemic divergence.

When these two figures of thought are combined and related to the 20th century in critical theory, a scenario typically emerges of a societal development, where critique and resistance are the driving forces in a process of transformation, but a process without a radical break with capitalism. According to Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), it was especially the critique by the New Left that led to changes of capitalism after 1968. This critique was integrated in the system and structural changes did take place, but not so fundamentally that the basic economic system was transgressed. The structures of capitalism are flexible, and even radical resistance may lead to reforms through systemic processes. To Hardt and Negri, capitalism at the turn of the century, Empire, is a result of a long-lasting struggle against capitalist modernity. Empire is a progressive development, despite intensified exploitation and repression, as there is greater potential than ever for global liberation through continued struggle for democracy and common wealth in the 21st century.

Capitalism has changed after the crisis in the 1970s, but according to these authors, and to the main tendency in contemporary critical theory, these changes have not been so profound that the models for social dynamics are fundamentally challenged. The economy and politics of capitalism are still the focus of attention, and critique of repressive social conditions still needs to be articulated for interacting with social agents, who could change the world through practical resistance. 

These thought figures, and their combination, sure are appropriate for understanding the development in the previous century, but when they are projected into the future, their relevance is rapidly decreasing. The current media dynamics involves a decoupling of the structural forms from the agents’ actions and their content, a virtual detachment that has repercussions on society forming a smooth kind of governance.

Critique and Resistance Today

The primacy of structural forms and their interconnectedness today mean that the dialectics between agents and structures has collapsed. The present hegemony of forms turns in on itself and is increasingly unsusceptible. Simultaneously, the actions and meanings of agents become depleted, so that they increasingly become structurally insignificant. This is both an extreme objectivism and an extreme subjectivism, having its origin in the media. From the agents’ perspective, the media are plastic and amorphous. The agents may be ever so critical and put up resistance, but it is like throwing a stone into a lake: Depending on the size of the stone, there will be a greater or lesser splash and some ripples spread in the water, but shortly after the surface of the lake will be completely unaffected by the occurrence. The hegemony of forms is similar to this smooth surface.

Individual agents and small groups do have a wide degree of freedom, more than ever before, and they can institute significant changes at the micro-level, such as the formation of activist groups or ecovillages, but at the macro-level, the basis for fundamental structural changes is fading away. There is lots of discontent and resistance nowadays, and that will still be the case in the ’future’, but not the kind that leads to revolution. Today we see no common understanding of a better institutional order and no one to bring it into existence. There is no deep and collective understanding that a better kind of society could exist – no common vision or utopia. In this respect, society is entirely postmodern (Lyotard 2001) and there is no way back to capitalist modernity (Baudrillard  1994, 35-6).

Nor will the kind of reform, we experienced in the 20th century, be likely in the ’future’. That would require a web of progressive institutions to implement the reforms, but the institutional order in the media age is characterized by degeneration and we cannot expect that new progressive institutions will emerge on the same scale as in the previous century. We see no signs that new institutions or identities like the workers movement, The Left or the welfare state will appear on the scene in the 21st century. What we experience at present is rather a process of institutional inertia in a social vacuum – and the institutional and ecological decay seems to continue. Critique and resistance with enough strength to progressively transform the content of society at the macro-level are conspicuously absent – and that has increasingly been the case since the 1980s corresponding with the ongoing media revolution.

The scenario of critique and resistance described in critical theory has barely changed in the last 200 years. Critique and resistance are seen as articulate and systematic protest. It can be theoretical, practical or both. It is loud and extrovert – it focuses on particular events and it usually assumes the form of movements that express anti-systemic or counter-hegemonic demands on behalf of specific groups or more general parts of the populace. The classical example is the workers movement and Marxism. Later we witnessed the Frankfurt School and the connection between these theorists and the new social movements in the 1960s and afterwards. 

The recent decades have then again brought news such as the globalization movement, internet activism and the climate movement that are discussed and reflected on by current critical theorist such as Naomi Klein. However, such traditional critique and resistance is entirely overshadowed by the predominant media dynamics in this century.

Neither critical theory nor the social movements of today attract news attention for more than a short time and thus cannot achieve lasting societal significance. At first, the workers movement and later a broad spectrum of political parties and new social movements lead to significant institutional and discursive changes in the 20th century. Society’s dominant institutions and identities experienced innovation and development that for a period was sufficient to satisfy a major part of the population and maintain capitalist growth at the same time. 

Traditional critique and resistance offer conspicuous inputs to the system that may lead to reforms and mitigate a crisis. Seen from this perspective the globalization movement and the climate movement could have contributed to a new growth model with greater global equality and more climate-friendly work, consumption and technology in the rich part of the world. However, it did not happen, and nor is it likely to do so in the ‘future’.

The feedback mechanisms necessary to make society’s institutions representative and adaptable no longer function to a sufficient extent. Social movements may temporarily affect the news form but that is the end of it. They are transformed into non-events and non-news instead of being agents of lasting social change.

Thus, rather than taking up the fight and confront power and authorities, today the important thing is to take flight, to evade and move away, to become invisible. This is not a collective endeavor, but it is a telling expression of a mass protest that is neither interactive, nor making demands, but instead refuses to take part. Such a refusal, which is basically without an explanation, takes very different forms and is never absolute. Nevertheless, it is an effective way of counteracting the hegemony of forms – perhaps the only way.

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