The Strategies of Transnational Communications

Diaspora 4:3 1995 The Strategies of Transnational Communications Anthony Amove Brown University Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Armand Mattelart. Trans. Susan Emanuel and James A. Cohen. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Originally published as La Communication-monde. Histoire des idées et des stratégies. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1991. Armand Mattelart, professor of communication and information sciences at the Université de Haute-Bretagne in France, has been a leading figure in transnational communications theory since the early 1970s, when he initiated his analyses of the global political economy of media. Throughout his work, Mattelart has sought to focus critical attention on the institutions of culture and communications , their participation in processes of economic control and political domination, and struggles from below against these forces. Mattelart has played a central role in the effort to expand the scope of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's critique of "the culture industry" in The Dialectic ofEnlightenment and to elaborate a more sociologically grounded analysis of capitalist institutions of cultural production, reproduction, and distribution. Well in advance of the current attention to processes of transnationalization in media and culture, Mattelart stressed the profound impact of transnational corporations on cultural production. In a number of works over the past two decades, such as Multinational Corporations and the Control of Culture and Transnationals and the Third World: The Struggle for Culture, Mattelart has examined the ways in which these economic institutions have monopolized global media flows, commodified and capitalized once relatively autonomous spheres of public debate and culture, and assimilated communications to the end of profit making. While Mattelart has clearly documented the monopolization of transnational cultural exchanges—especially between the First and Third Worlds—by transnational corporations, he has also made clear the strong links between global capital and the state. Although some contemporary theories of the globalization of capitalism have suggested that the era ofthe nation-state is nearing its end, ifit has Diaspora 4:3 1995 not already been surpassed, Mattelart has repeatedly shown the interdependencies binding capital, including transnational capital, to powerful state institutions. In his writings—often coauthored with Michèle Mattelart, a sociologist based at the Centre de Recherche Scientifique—he has underlined the continuing relevance of the Marxist argument that the ruling ideas of a given society are the ideas of the ruling class and that the ruling class monopolizes both the means of economic production and the primary levers of state power in modern capitalist societies. By turning attention to the state, Mattelart has demonstrated the importance of national policies that regulate media and cultural exchanges, and support corporate expansionism, and he has documented the impact ofthese policies on various cultural practices. Mattelart has also drawn attention to the political struggles over the creation ofvarious forms of popular culture that seek to provide alternatives—and often direct challenges—to officially sanctioned cultural, social, and political institutions. He was a participant in the international effort to draw attention to such phenomena in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is now variously associated with the rise of cultural studies in England, the creation of "people's theater " throughout the Americas, Africa, and Europe, and an emphasis on considerations of struggle, contestation, negotiation, and resistance across a range of intellectual disciplines. Although born and educated in Belgium, where he studied political economy and law at the Université de Louvain, and further educated in France, where he earned a postgraduate degree in sociology from the Universit é de Paris, Mattelart entered the field of global communications and cultural studies while teaching in Chile. He taught at the Universidad de Chile from 1962 until a United States-supported, right-wing military coup d'état overthrew the leftist government of President Salvador Allende in 1973. During the Popular Unity period of Allende's presidency (1970-73), which created a significant political opening and sense of revolutionary possibility for intellectuals across the world, Mattelart was actively involved in popular communications initiatives in Chile. As in the early work of the cultural studies collective at the Birmingham School in England in the 1970s, one finds a much needed attention to the structural dynamics of capitalism and the importance of class analysis...