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Media Frames & Histories of Assemblage

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Media Frames & Histories of Assemblage Media Frames & Histories of Assemblage Luke Barnesmoore Department of International Relations San Francisco State University [email protected] Laurent El Ghaoui, Vu Pham Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of California at Berkeley [email protected] [email protected] Abstract: Media frames tend to be defined relationally to the dynamic relationship between global flows of governance and the local norms, identities, values and banal practices of targeted markets. Through synthesizing a precise statistical study of semantics in large collections of news items with Foucault’s History of Thought Methodology and DeLeuze’s Assemblage theory, we present a mixed-method analytic approach, The History of Assemblages, for studying macro frames of representation in socially normative texts. Our approach examines how the manifestation of neoliberal ontological assemblages in local cognitive environments inflects the construction of representational discursive frames. We use innovative tools to visualize narratives over time in sources with multiple language services and are thus able to quickly summarize how differing news media sources and language services narrate topics in the space between ontological and epistemic norms associated with neoliberal globalization and the socio-political, cognitive environment of target language markets. Key words: Assemblage, History of Thought, Machine Learning Methodologies, Comparative Research/Methodology, Anthropology, Constructivism. Introduction Globalization has been a central point of discussion in modern International Relations scholarship. At the mechanical heat of the globalization process itself are the “blurred boundaries” of global governance impelled by increased flows of transnational capital in the globalized world.1 These “blurred boundaries” have given rise to tense interaction between the pre-existing political rationalities and historical contexts that exist at the local level and the ontological and epistemic norms carried by globalized neoliberalism into the local. Given that each local context will be very different, we must first identify the ontological and epistemic norms that unify the global neoliberal project. This tension between global and local does not, however, mean that they rest in perpetual conflict. On the contrary, neoliberalism works to actively rearticulate local norms within the lexicon of globalized neoliberalism.2 This encourages subconscious identity associations with the ontological and epistemic norms of the global lexicon in the target public mind. To identify the neoliberal norms, we must locate a discursive space in which pre-existing local rationalities and historical contexts are rearticulated within a neoliberal lexicon that subconsciously normalizes the ontological assumptions and epistemic mechanisms that structure the global neoliberal project. Due to the rather opaque and stratified nature of the discourse by which neoliberal norms are inserted into the socialization process and to the subconscious nature of this insertion, we must study these questions qualitatively. We must focus on the ‘causal discursive materials’ directed at target publics, which can be observed. This is in opposition the ‘subjective discursive effects’ of these causal materials in the public mind, which cannot be observed. As such, we apply Michel Foucault’s History of Thought Methodology.3 It is the impossibility of directly observing one’s subjective faculties that necessitates the development of qualitative knowledge generation models. These modes allow us to extrapolate our observations of epistemic materials in causal discursive space, into postulates concerning the ontological assumptions and epistemic mechanisms that might rise from the interference pattern between these observed epistemic mechanisms and the local norms of the target public mind. We take news media sources with multiple language services as our location for analysis to examine target publics at a macro- linguistic scale. The purpose of this paper is to extract the methodological essence of the ‘History of Thought’ and ‘Assemblage’ approaches and rearticulate them as a multidisciplinary approach applicable throughout the social sciences and humanities. In so doing, we hope to rearticulate the essence in a way compatible with the use of our tool. We encourage 1 Gupta, A. (2006). “Blurred Boundaries.” In: Sharma, A. (ed.) & Gupta, A. (ed.), The Anthropology of the State Reader, 211-242. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 2 Ong, A. (2007). Boundary Crossings: Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32, 3-8. 3 Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others, trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. readers to engage this work, then, with an eye to the applicability of the general methodological approaches for their own field of study. The more general purposes of the Critical Theory presented in this paper are illustrated clearly by Daniel Hallin’s use of Tolstoy to define Critical Theory. “Critical Theory is concerned with the ability of human beings to reflect on their social life for the purpose of discovering, as Tolstoy once put it, ‘what we should do and how we should live.’”4 At this level, the purpose of this paper and our larger methodological project is to shed light upon the forms (ontological assumptions and epistemic mechanisms) through which people have been socialized in both past and present eras. With our analysis, we seek to provide readers with the knowledge and tools with which to reflect upon, and take agency in, how they think, behave and be, and transcend the way they have been told, through socialization, that they ought to think, behave and be. Our first section will outline and explain Michel Foucault’s History of Thought Methodology and his term ‘Bio-Power”. Next we examine Lisa Rofel’s modern ethnographies of neoliberalism in China, as they in many ways echo Foucault’s method. From here we examine Aihwa Ong’s scholarship on Global Assemblages and Global Form and bridge her scholarship with Foucault’s History of Thought methodology to propose a knowledge formation model for use with our tool. Method Michel Foucault History of Thought In introducing the Veridiction Model, Foucault first orients his study of the History of Thought between the History of Mentalities on one hand, and the History of Representations on the other. He defines the History of Mentalities as an analysis that moves from observed forms of behavior to the expressions that give rise to or inflect perceptions of such behaviors. He then provides two definitions for the History of Representations. The first definition identifies it as an analysis of representational functions in relation to objects represented and representing subjects (i.e. ideology). The second defines it as an “analysis of representational values in a system of representation.”5 Foucault elaborates: “An analysis of representations in terms of a knowledge (connaissance) – of a content of knowledge, or of a rule, of a form of knowledge – which is taken to be a criterion of truth, or at any rate a truth-reference point in relation to which one can determine the representational value of this or 4 Hallin, D. (1987). “The American News Media: A Critical Theory Perspective.” In: Forester, J., Critical Theory in the Public Life, 121-146. Boston: MIT Press. p. 121. 5 Foucault, M. (2010). The Government of Self and Others, trans. Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 2. that system of thought understood as a system of representations of a given object.”6 From here, Foucault provides a definition for the History of Thought that traces the boundary between the Histories of Mentalities and Representations. He defines thought as the “focal points of experience in which forms of possible knowledge (savior), normative frameworks of behavior for individuals, and potential modes of existence for possible subjects are linked together.” 7 It is the joint articulation of these three elements of thought (forms of knowledge, frameworks of behavior and modes of existence) that Foucault argues we find the focal point of human experience.8 In a subsequent lecture, Foucault argues that the history of thought approach “should be conceived of as a history of ontologies which would refer to a principle of freedom in which freedom is not defined as a right to be free but as a capacity for free action.”9 Thus, we study the history of ontology in relation to the ability of differing ontological ascertains to provide the human subject with the capacity to actualize their latent capacity for free will. Foucault provides an example of his History of Thought approach by explaining his study of the History of Madness. He begins by differentiating his history from the Histories of Representations and Mentalities by stating that he has neither studied madness as an “unchanging object” acted upon by systems of representation through history, nor studied it from the lens of the attitudes towards madness through history. Foucault instead attempts to study madness as a cultural experience. In studying madness as a cultural experience, Foucault proposes we take a new perspective in our analysis (makes a “theoretical displacement”). First, we must view madness as “a point from which a series of more or less heterogeneous forms of knowledge were formed whose forms of development had to be analyzed” (i.e. “madness as [a] matrix of bodies of knowledge”: medical, psychological,
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