Abstract
We encounter the concept of participation in a wide variety of contexts, not least in many areas of contemporary media and communication research. Its ubiquity can easily lead to it being taken for granted, with its meaning remaining bland and uncontroversial. This will quickly change for anyone who reads this book; indeed, anyone who writes about participation in regard to politics and media and chooses to ignore this text will be running a serious risk. Nico Carpentier has written a volume that not only problematizes the term, but also links it to several conceptual frameworks. The result is not a final, ultimate definition of the concept, but rather a detailed insight into how and why it is and will remain contested, as a ‘floating signifier’. At the core of his perspective is the understanding that defining and enacting participation, as with democracy more generally, is ultimately about struggle. The media, in turn, therefore become key sites as well as objects of such contestation. This ambitious book, weighing in at over 400 pages, and with over 40 pages of references, is an important contribution informed by the author’s broad intellectual range, sharp analytic capacity, and democratic commitments.
There is a decided poststructural dimension to Carpentier’s approach, with some Foucauldian inspiration in his methodological approach (‘archeo-genealogy’) and the strategy of what he calls ‘thick theoretical description’ in the analyses. It is impressive how he manages to accord a logical, common-sense character to his perspective. While the text is not one that most readers will breeze through, the writing is clear, the discussions lucid. The many diagrams and models help integrate the conceptual development. Not least the case studies that he presents, with their concrete, empirical character, assist nicely in illustrating his points. My sense is that the uninitiated will quickly get the hang of it, as he succeeds in making notions about contingency, fluidity, difference, the lack of ultimate stability of meaning and identities appear, as not only self-evident but eminently useful – quite a feat in itself. A reader may choose to disagree with this intellectual horizon – but the author makes it less likely that one would want to. Introductory- and probably second-level students would find it difficult, but it would certainly be accessible to third-level students in a number of fields.
The book consists of a short introduction and seven chapters. The first chapter sets the stage, with an ‘interdisciplinary overview’ of the concept of participation. Each of the following five chapters is based on a keyword that ushers us into the theoretical-academic debates within the respective field; the volume ends with a short conclusion. The five fields that Carpentier has selected to explore the meanings, tensions and stakes in regard to the concept of participation are: power, identity, organization, technology and quality. He keeps the media in sight in all the chapters. He probes both within and across these five frameworks, illuminating contingency and diversity of the notion of participation. He stresses that the signifier ultimately refuses fixity because of its connection with the political, within various ideological and democratic trajectories. At bottom, participation has to do with power relations (a reality that is often ignored) and thus there are always efforts to define and control it.
The orientational Chapter 1 provides not only a general presentation of the concept and the tensions around it, but explores relevant intellectual terrain where participation plays an important role. He begins by situating participation in the context of democratic theory. Carpentier is quick to remind us that democratic theory is hardly a unified body of thought, and he proceeds to offer a valuable roadmap of its permutations, including what he calls the ‘maximalist’ version (i.e. what might be termed a radical republican horizon), on which his own analysis rests. Arguing that in the late modern world, the boundaries of institutional politics are giving way to broader manifestations of the political, he continues, in the following sections of the chapter, to address participation conceptually in relation to spatial planning, North–South perspectives on development, arts and museums and communication. He interrogates discursive currents and ideological motifs in all of them, with the discussion on communication comprising well over half of the chapter. This section conceptually inserts participation into such topics as audiences, communication rights, deliberation and the public sphere, media technologies and organizations, genres such as talk shows and reality TV, community and alternative media and the significance of the newer digital media.
This discussion on communication is structured by the models of democracy that he develops in the first section. He concludes the chapter by juxtaposing three concepts that help to illuminate the conceptual terrain and to focus attention on the dimension of power: access, interaction and participation. His argument is that access should be understood largely in terms of presence, interaction has to do with the socio-communicative relationships facilitated by the media, while participation fundamentally has to do with co-deciding. Each of the three concepts is angled via the notions of production and reception and addressed in terms of technology, content, people and organizations. It may sound bewildering, but the coherence is built into the text as it unfolds and is neatly summarized in a diagram. This framework is a very useful contribution, offering an analytic toolkit for empirically elucidating people’s mode of relationship to the media in concrete cases.
Each of the five keyword chapters begins with a crisp conceptual introduction, followed by mostly two empirical case studies from the media domain (the chapter on technology offers one case study). Thus, the chapter on power provides a 10-page overview of the concept and ranges across theoretical currents as well as reflecting back on the history of ideas. These conceptual introductions are by no means ritualistic exercises in erudition: they aim to prepare the ground for the empirical analyses to come. They also synthesize and focus intellectual strands relevant for the overarching framework that the author is constructing in the course of the book. The empirical cases here are two Belgian television programmes, focusing on the management of audience discussion in one (Jan Publiek), and hegemonic identity of media professionals in the other, and the discursive power they wield in the context of the programme (Barometer).
The chapter on identity likewise takes up an extensive literature, with authors such as Laclau/Mouffe and Zizek looming large. Again, the discussion results in a perspective that helps pave the way for the empirical analysis. The notion of identity is linked to an understanding of the contingent subject – which in turn is reinserted into his schema of maximalist democracy. The first case study returns to the Jan Publiek programme to examine how ‘ordinary people’ are discursively constructed as oppositional/antagonistic positions towards other categories: celebrities, experts, politicians and media professionals. Based on focus-group interviews among the audience and interviews with participants, the study illuminates how the ostensibly ‘participatory’ character of the programme is controlled and constrained as the ‘ordinary citizens’ confront the ‘power bloc’ of the other categories. The second case study analyses Temptation Island and its online discussions, exploring such themes as pleasure, morality, gender, relationships with all the contradictions involved for identity and participation – neatly linked to the analytic framework. The remaining chapters continue in this analytic-empirical mode. Case studies in these chapters include the BBC’s Video Nation, the Belgian radio exchange project RadioSwap, the interactive Czechoslovak film Kinoautomat from 1967 that has been broadcast in recent years on Czech television, the online platform 16plus, and a set of Austrian and Swiss community radio stations.
The conclusion pulls together the main threads from the book and also accentuates the struggle for participation in the history of democracy since the late 18th century. The book ends on a pedagogic note by providing a summary model of the structuring elements of participation – a very useful device that both integrates the key elements that have been presented and invites future application. The utility of the book would have been enhanced, however, by the inclusion of an index.
Carpentier has broken new ground over an old concept, challenging the reader to rethink it while at the same time providing resources for how this can be done. He has put together a volume that should serve as a turning point in the conceptual discussions and practical research around media and participation, which must be seen as quite an accomplishment.