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The Slippery Slopes of “Soft Power”

Production Studies, International Relations, and the Military Industrial Media Complex

Jonathan Burston

The MIM-plex, Media Studies and the Academy

Since the time it was first identified in the late 1960s, the nexus conjoining various sites within American entertainment, media, and communications industries to sites inside the US military has been called by many names. Among them are the military industrial communications complex (Schiller, 1969), the military information society (Levidow & Robins, 1989), and the military entertainment complex (Lenoir, 2000). In an attempt to shorten what is perhaps the most commendably comprehensive designator for an entity that, in actuality, ties together many different economic sectors – namely the military industrial media entertainment network or MIME-NET (Der Derian, 2001) – alternatives have recently been volleyed such as the military industrial media complex or MIM-plex (Burston, 2003), and, even more simply, the Complex (Turse, 2008). Different appellations direct readers to different precincts inside this large and amorphous social, political, economic, and martial formation while simultaneously conveying its size, its complexity, and its growing power and influence. Insofar as its power and influence were indeed works in progress, the earliest of these analyses of the MIM-plex's tentacular reach and prowess could sometimes feel, alternately, over-stated or undertheorized. Herbert Schiller's pioneering (1969) study explained in detail, for the first time, the significant linkages existing between the American communications sector and both the civilian and the martial branches of Eisenhower's famously named “military industrial complex”; but the conclusions drawn in this otherwise important work suggested, perhaps in too deterministic a manner, connections between American communications' might and “successful” imperial outcomes. Levidow and Robins' (1989) farsighted analysis of the emerging “military information society” chose an appellation for that society that rendered invisible its ludic dimensions even as such dimensions figured into their own analysis. Nevertheless, these preliminary portraits provided valuable frameworks within which media scholars have been able to discern many of militarized, mediatized capitalism's future advances.

And those advances have been profuse. Today, journalists “embedded” within the armed forces of various nations have become unremarkable; and equally so have hit prime-time TV dramas glamorizing contemporary military life (in the US, JAG and NCIS) or simply militarized life (Canada's The Border and Flashpoint). The Pentagon's media office, widely regarded as the best public relations (PR) house inside the US government, provides aircraft carriers to blockbuster film projects it deems suitably on message (Robb, 2004; Boggs & Pollard, 2007). Movie studios collaborate with the military in formulating battle simulation exercises, so that the Pentagon may benefit from Hollywood's superior ability “to understand formulas and how to play with them, to think outside the box, against the grain and backwards from completion,” thus gaining “a much deeper and more subtle grasp” of the new, volatile possibilities inherent in global asymmetrical warfare (Stockwell & Muir, 2003). Video games glamorizing war eclipse Hollywood blockbusters in their sights, sounds, and fury. They are made by entities such as the army-funded research center, the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California (USC), which develops and markets video games such as Full Spectrum Warrior while creating additional immersive digital tools and military training platforms that are regularly leveraged into entertainment markets (ICT, 2010; Korris, 2010). Arms manufacturers invest in Hollywood and Hollywood in arms manufacturers (Hozic, 2001, pp. 135–168). Indeed, the extent of cross-ownership between Hollywood, arms manufacturers, Silicon Valley, bio-tech, and the wider quotidian economy of white goods, widgets, and Wonder Bread is unprecedented (Turse, 2008). Those of us who are fortunate enough to be members of pension funds or players on the stock market tend to follow the example set by such corporate cross-investment. Meanwhile, more than half of American federal discretionary spending regularly goes to the procurement of military goods and services (Hedges, 2009, p. 153), while any hopes that an Obama administration might be able to slow down the machinations of “the permanent war economy” (Melman, 1974) are fading under the hot, harsh light of the twenty-first century's own emergent realpolitik, assisted in no small measure by a Republican Congress. Previous reports of the MIM-plex's growing influence now hardly seem exaggerated.

Yet, despite this state of affairs, significant gaps in media research on the MIM-plex remain. With a few notable exceptions (Berland & Fitzpatrick, 2010; Der Derian, 2001; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Hozic, 2001),¹ extant work, taken as a set, is a little recursive in its analytical remit, focusing primarily on military–media cross-ownership and concentration (Turse, 2008), its myriad technological outcomes and their implications (King, 2010; Winseck, 2008), and the ongoing spectacularization of war (Compton, 2004; Giroux, 2006; Power, 2009; Retort, 2006). This body of writing is extremely valuable nonetheless, and it provides the necessary foundation for a wider body of work, still to be written, which aims to understand an even greater number of the broad social, political, and cultural implications of the MIM-plex in its manifold incarnations. To be sure, as a large, amorphous, tentacular, transnational macro-political formation whose various names all aim to describe its sobering ubiquity, the MIM-plex can be a daunting object of analysis. But scholarship already suggests that the MIM-plex (and many of its namesakes) constitutes something more than a new name for hyper-capitalism or a new short-hand for left-leaning polemicists (often bent on a pessimistic determinism). It is, rather, a potentially efficacious way to characterize the global socioeconomic frame inside of which most goods and services are now produced. It is therefore a potentially useful heuristic device, which we can deploy in order to better illuminate the structures inside of which we work and live; inside of which media producers both enable and resist the imperatives of an ever increasingly militarized global capitalism.

Given this increasingly militarized constitution of contemporary global capitalism, and given the increasingly prominent position that the media industries inhabit within it, studies of media work that deploy the heuristic device of the MIM-plex – on blockbusters celebrating imperial firepower, on television news programs creating and re-creating new castes of global enemies, on massive multiplayer online war games – ought to matter now more than ever. Yet, when it comes to thinking about the MIM-plex, the research trajectories of production studies, like those in other media studies neighborhoods, seem to stop somewhat short, and somewhat automatically. Production studies rarely situates its sites of inquiry with the analytical frame of the MIM-plex at the ready, and a more wide-ranging approach to our objects of study may now be in order. Undertaking such an approach ought to do us, as media production scholars and as media scholars more generally, a great deal of good. For thinking more regularly with the MIM-plex might likewise require us to amend an assortment of assumptions about how media studies matters – or ought to matter – to others in the wider world of academic, policy, and activist research. Consider, for example: Within an international political economy cracking under the weight of worldwide wars conventional and non-conventional, braking at the precipice of planetary environmental catastrophe, and balking at real recovery from global financial meltdown, how might our particular expertise in mediated meaning-making matter to a field that, in general, finds itself more frequently called upon by governments for its own particular expertise? How might media studies matter, for instance, to international relations?

According to a multiplicity of its own practitioners, the field of international relations has been enduring a prolonged methodological crisis for some time now.² Erected in a less problematically mediatized moment of the last century,³ IR's dominant “realist” theoretical frame was constructed using the grid-like certainties of the nation-state, military force, and pre-digital economies of innovation. Mainstream IR has been less swift to embrace the late twentieth century's cultural turn than many other neighborhoods in the academic world. This likely has a great deal to do with the perpetually chaotic conditions attached to its object of study. At a first glance, realist IR, prioritizing as it does analyses of competitive individuals, sovereign states, and the international system to the exclusion of much else – including most matters of central concern to media and cultural studies – would appear to have every reason to command its own ascendance within the field. After all, even after the cultural turn, international relations do appear to continue to run largely by state- and quasi-state-led logics, which pertain in no small order to monopolies of violence and in which, as a consequence, “culture” may often take on “an aura of frivolity” (Walker, 1990). As such, it is all too frequently theorized as “that residual realm left over after all forms of observable human behavior have been removed” (Stephanson, 1994, p. 110) – in other words as merely the icing on the cake of global politics.

But, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, realist IR scholars have been engaging with poststructuralists, constructivists, feminists, and others who share a certain minoritarian status within their own discipline, in the hope of theorizing a planet increasingly characterized by postnational, postindustrial, posthuman, post-everything uncertainty and risk – a planet that, often now, seems nearly untheorizable within conventional IR frameworks. Inside this newer conversation, the matter of culture has figured quite centrally. Taking place largely to one side of those debates on globalization and culture that are familiar to media and cultural studies practitioners (see, for example, Thussu, 2009, 2010), this somewhat more specialized debate on the place of culture in the international system has been halting and productive in turns. Despite the long-standing efforts of non-realist IR scholars, and indeed despite the efforts of media scholars in international communications studies, with whom many IR specialists are already in regular dialogue (see, for instance, Sarikakis and Shade, 2008a), the long-term influence of culture on conventional IR theorizing remains unclear. Still, in IR neighborhoods with growing populations and influence, a wider awareness of the blind spots built into the field's traditional approaches has lately begun to emerge.⁴ No longer merely an afterthought (after statecraft, after warcraft, after the economy), culture is beginning to appear to many as a more significant and efficacious analytical tool than IR has conventionally assumed. Despite a collective uncertainty as to where the dialogue may ultimately lead, culture, especially as it is produced and conveyed through mass media and through various information and communications technologies, is gaining a new and notable traction inside IR.

The fields of IR and that of media and cultural studies have talked before. But, although notable interventions have already laid important ground for a dialogue between IR and media and cultural studies (Comor, 2001; Gillespie, 2006; Hoskins, 2006; Hoskins and O'Loughlin, 2010), mainstream scholarship in each academic neighborhood is only beginning to realize fully the utility of such an initiative. I want to propose in this chapter that researchers in media and cultural studies ought to rejoin at once the recent dialogues on the place of culture within IR theory and practice. Media studies practitioners, I wish to argue, ought to play a more central part in revealing, to a field still largely immersed in the exigencies of realpolitik, how political and economic power are made operational within mass and cyber-mediated representations. As Aida Hozic has argued so cogently in relation to “Hollyworld” and the “Digital Coalition” (descriptors of the MIM-plex coined by herself), “power is nothing but the ability to organize fantasies,” and for this reason the American film industry is properly understood as “political”:

Hollywood's capacity to sit “on the fence of real and fantastic,” according to Hozic, produces other notable capacities as well. Not least among them is the capacity to obfuscate “the distinctions between public and private, politics and economics, work and leisure that have long been regarded as the foundation of modern capitalism” (and, one might add, as the foundation of realist logics inside IR) (ibid., p. 159). As we shall see, other precincts of the MIM-plex share such capacities: most importantly perhaps, distinctions between military and civilian are becoming increasingly blurred. Given media studies' familiarity with arguments such as Hozic's (herself an IR scholar) on the power of representation, the fact that conversations between media studies (including production studies) and IR have not deepened and broadened seems a lost opportunity.

I also want to propose, however, that media studies has a lot to gain from enjoining our colleagues in other disciplines such as IR, and for reasons that extend beyond charity or proselytism. Certainly our own perspectives on the myriad relationships that exist between power and representation provide ample reason for us to engage more frequently with those of our IR colleagues who are now asking questions about these same relationships. But IR's recent turn to various precincts outside its conventional purview in search of answers to its own disciplinary dilemmas (Diplomatic History, 1994; Millennium, 2003; Security Dialogue, 2007) has had a salutary effect on the field as a whole – something that many scholars inside media studies are now trying to provoke as well. I want to join recent calls for a wider dialogue between media studies and other disciplines (Couldry, 2006; Hesmondhalgh, 2011; Hesmondhalgh & Toynbee, 2008) by suggesting that we would now do well to follow IR's example in this regard.

IR's new focus outward has been salutary in no small part because of theoretical and methodological lacunae inside the discipline that have been revealed and attended to as a consequence. Media studies ought to use new opportunities for a dialogue with IR as a means of re-examining one of its own abiding theoretical–methodological difficulties: work inside an ostensibly progressive media studies is often just as guilty of treating feminist analysis as a kind of secondary analytical tool as is the ostensibly more conservative field of IR. Despite some laudable exceptions (Huws, 2003; Mayer, 2005, 2011; McKercher & Mosco, 2007), studies of media production are no less culpable in this regard (on which see McLaughlin, 2008). Moreover, notwithstanding our expertise on the subject, an abiding, excessively binaristic approach to the matter of representation is often directly linked to media studies' often less than holistic integration of feminist analysis. Such an approach, as we shall see, generally sets matters of “representation” against matters of “action” and then manages to slide down an entire hill of suspect pairings, landing rather too easily at an epistemic bottom where women are somehow native to the domestic sphere, while men happily inhabit the public one (on this, see also Elshtain, 1981; Fraser, 1992; McGuigan, 1998). In undertaking further dialogue with scholars, policymakers, and activists outside their own field, then, media studies researchers need to pay careful attention to the influence of a pervasive masculinism from inside of it – a masculinism that has often diluted both the significance of entertainment and the role of entertainment labor within discussions of media power.

IR scholars sympathetic to the study of culture might in turn consider the dubious gender politics attached to one of IR's more widespread synonyms for culture: “soft power.” I shall expand upon this idea below, and with no small degree of humility, given the blind alleys (both epistemic and strategic) that media scholars have themselves encountered when undertaking their own analyses of relations between a problematically feminized “culture” and a purportedly masculine “global public sphere.” A brief look at one small corner of the MIM-plex, USC's Institute of Creative Technologies, gives us a chance to see how dangerous such gendered and sexualized assumptions are to cogent research in both media studies and international relations. For it turns out that there is very little that is “soft” about the power that entertainment labor produces at institutions like the dubiously named institute. Indeed, when one considers matters of power and representation within the analytical frame of the MIM-plex, it turns out that, quite often, there is very little that is soft about soft power at all.

A few words on method and the MIM-plex are warranted, however, in advance of our visit to the ICT.

Thinking with the MIM-plex

In June 2009, international entertainment capitalism's paper of record, Weekly Variety, touted a notable banner headline: “TANKS A LOT, UNCLE SAM,” it shouted, while the sub-headline below explained the pun: “Pic biz, military coordinate battle plans for mutual benefit.” In the article that followed, Peter Debruge described how closely the producers of that summer's top blockbuster, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, cooperated and collaborated with four of the five branches of the US military. “Only the Coast Guard sits this one out,” Debruge noted with a mixture of dread and admiration. He also noted that each branch of the US military “maintains a satellite office in Los Angeles to liaise with the entertainment industry, on everything from giant-robot action movies to documentaries to series such as ‘NCIS’ or ‘Army Wives.’” The army, Debruge went on to point out, “even lent a hand when a soldier appeared on ‘America's Got Talent’” (Debruge, 2009, pp. 1, 9).

With all due respect to Variety, this is not necessarily banner news. In fact, the Academy Awards' first winner for Best Picture was the spectacular Wings (1927), which served as a military recruiting vehicle for many subsequent years, and which had heavy backing from the War Department. Collaboration between the Pentagon and Hollywood, then, is nearly as old as the American film industry itself (Boggs & Pollard, 2007). However, as I have suggested elsewhere and as Variety's own reporting on the Transformers sequel also suggests, what now warrants our careful consideration is the ubiquity, sophistication, and complexity that have lately come to characterize such collaborative nodes (Burston, 2003). The fact that the computer games industry, which now regularly dwarfs Hollywood in various sales-related statistics, is thoroughly saturated with such arrangements likewise repays our attention. Indeed, the reach of the MIM-plex extends much further even than this. Since 9/11, American propaganda operations have expanded well beyond their traditional locations in state-funded bodies like Voice of America or the Arabic-language Radio Sawa, extending their reach far into the corporate sector, including PR firms and mass media. Such expansions are doctrinal rather than accidental. One recent compilation, originally conceived by former instructors at the Joint Command, Control, and Information Warfare School of the US Joint Forces Staff College, calls for “horizontal as well as vertical integration and cooperation, [including not only US Government] agents and departments, but also non-governmental units and private industry as well,” so that information operations (IO) may “become the true force multiplier that it has the potential to be” in twenty-first-century battlespace (Armistead, 2004, p. 47; also see Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1997). As a result, observes Dwayne Winseck, “the lines between public affairs and media relations, on the one hand, and propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other, have blurred beyond recognition” (Winseck, 2008, p. 425). Instances of this kind of blurring abound everywhere, even when neither the hand of the state nor that of its corporate proxies are obviously in evidence. So, for example, Michael Butterworth and Stormi Moskal (2009) describe “an unprecedented overlap between military and sporting discourses” since the end of the Cold War and the advent of the “war on terror” (Butterworth & Moskal, 2009, p. 415). They go on to write that, “[i]n the wake of 9/11, the blurring of sports and war has found additional strength. The past several years have brought near constant reminders of the American military through baseball stadium rituals,” “NFL ‘kickoff’ ceremonies,” “NASCAR (auto racing) displays of belligerent patriotism, and an almost endless list of military appreciation events at college football games” (ibid., p. 416).⁵ Perhaps most importantly, the blurring of boundaries between the social and the martial is not simply limited to spectacle and propaganda. As the popular historian Nick Turse properly reminds us, “[t]he high level of military–civilian interpenetration in a heavily consumer-driven society means that almost every American (aside, perhaps, from a few determined anarcho-primitivists) is, at least passively, supporting the Complex every time he or she shops for groceries, sends a package, drives a car, or watches TV” (Turse, 2008, p. 18).

A daunting heuristic device indeed, this military industrial media complex. What, then, can we say about it if we are to turn the term into something useful, into something more than a phrase that, in its propensity to reify, obscures more than it reveals? What can we say about the MIM-plex that actually illuminates our current condition and provides us with a map for future production research?

To start with, we must repeat and ultimately embrace its inevitable complexity. For in its complexity, and to borrow, mutatis mutandis, from Hesmondhalgh's landmark work on the cultural industries, the MIM-plex is also a place of great ambivalence and contestation (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). Second, because of the complexity of this vast formation, we must acknowledge that it will require different methods with which to study the various practices, objectives, and outcomes of its various actors. An approach as catholic as this can remind production studies researchers that the MIM-plex is not so much a thing to be studied as it is an aggregation of forms, relations, and sites inside an increasingly militarized global capitalism, where cultural workers – sometimes willingly, sometimes otherwise – engage in its perpetual and widespread reproduction. Needless to say, research objectives need not work to reify the MIM-plex by attempting to define, for example, its formidably expansive parameters. Such initiatives risk the promotion of an inherently defeatist telos.⁶ Research objectives, rather, might best locate and theorize discrete instances of MIM-plex production – ultimately, one hopes, toward its incremental transformation (the old saying that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time is probably quite apt in this instance). Our own discrete instance of MIM-plex production here is the Institute for Creative Technologies.⁷

A Powerful Question: Culture, Power, and the Institute for Creative Technologies

Born in 1996, the ICT is the result of a grant from the US military and is affiliated with the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. At the ICT, technologies of the digital spectacular are being developed simultaneously as entertainment technology and as cutting-edge military technology. Its mission statement reads:

The ICT is housed in Marina Del Rey offices planned by Star Trek production designer Herman Zimmerman, and Hollywood management there has included former senior executives from the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Paramount, and Disney. They work hand in hand with the military and with designers from the digital effects houses of Silicon Valley, who are otherwise busy transforming movies, videogames, and amusement park rides as we know them.

Hollywood and Pentagon representatives at the ICT have collaborated in the development of military training platforms that double as commercially available video games – such as C-Force, Full Spectrum Warrior, and others. The ICT has sponsored brainstorming events with Hollywood creatives in the service of future US-sponsored counterterrorism efforts. Last but certainly not least, the ICT also develops immersive environments exclusively for training use by the military, all of which are instantly evocative of The Matrix and feature digital actors equipped with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. The monstrous moral implications of this kind of “virtual war” have already been well expostulated by James Der Derian. On the battlefield, the enemy soldier has become nothing more than an avatar in a videogame, “an electronically signified ‘target of opportunity’”; one whom we may eradicate with greater psychic ease than we can eradicate his carbon-based ancestor; one who is thus “much easier to ‘disappear,’” both in the symbolic and in the material register (Der Derian, 2001, p. 120).

If we think for a moment about how the activities of the ICT work, on the one hand to aestheticize politics by turning war into a game, and on the other to politicize aesthetics by transforming games into killing machines, we begin to see how new forms of “militainment” do a pretty good job of tearing apart a whole series of conventional assumptions about what “culture” is and what its relative importance might be to matters of global peace and security. Where does cultural commodity end and military technology begin, for instance, when it comes to commercially released video games like Full Spectrum Warrior, which double as training platforms for the marines?⁸ Despite the obvious ways in which both fields could work to illumine the transformative dynamics inherent in production sites such as this one, this particular conjunction between entertainment and military power remains, to my mind, undertheorized both in media studies and in international relations.⁹ One significant reason why this is so is that, despite the presence of outstanding feminist scholarship in both fields, blind spots on matters of gender interfere with both IR and media studies thinking questions of power and representation together. We need to turn to this problem now.

Hard Power, Soft Power, and the ICT

Most media studies scholars have little difficulty identifying the fundamental links that exist between the free, diverse, and equitable flow of cultural expressions and the cause of global peace and security. Communications policy functions, for instance, as “a major determinant of the context in which other sectors (such as healthcare, education and job training) will develop in the current phase of globalization” (Raboy, 2002, p. 114). As such, Marc Raboy rightly suggests, communications policy needs to be understood “as a profoundly political issue, as part of the struggle for the democratization of the new global governance system” (ibid.). Indeed, this understanding of communication and culture as always already political forms the basis of our own field of study. But, for the great majority of IR-influenced policymakers who attend to matters of global security, cultural power, in the words of IR eminence Joseph Nye (2004), is soft power. Soft power, according to mainstream policy, is important, but only secondarily: after we've attended to failing states, global warming, arms buildups, and so on. Soft power has become a popular phrase inside IR – as it has in less specialized, mass media discussions of global politics. Both China and India have adopted soft power as a formal component of their foreign policy platforms; Hillary Clinton deploys the phrase frequently; and IR literature debates its merits on an ongoing basis.¹⁰

Media studies ought to argue against mainstream assumptions such as these.¹¹ We ought to be demonstrating how the expression “soft power” obfuscates as much as it clarifies. We need to show our IR colleagues how, in its semantic downgrading of cultural and communicative practices, a concept endowed with the freighted gender politics of “soft power” can in fact reproduce relations of power that arguably help aggravate the prospects for global peace and security.

What precisely is the phrase “soft power” meant to convey? At its most innocuous, “soft power” is meant to describe “the ability to use politics and culture” rather than weaponry, in order “to pursue [. . .] strategic interests (Lowe & Spencer, 2006, p. 9). So, according to Nye (2004), whereas “hard” power, military and economic, uses coercion, soft power uses attraction. Whereas hard power promotes the government use of war as means to a given end, soft power suggests diplomacy – coupled with the power and influence that comes, in America's case, with the real estate that headquarters the world's most important media and entertainment corporations. Whereas threats and force are military power's primary currency and payments or sanctions are the currency of economic power, soft power deploys “culture.” In the high-cultural realm, this deployment might take the form of artistic exchanges or of Fulbright programs. In the realm of popular culture, movies and television are often understood as the most prominent soft-power vehicles (Nye, 2004), though the Internet needs to join that list too. Indeed, Nye speaks of the need for “information power” to be coupled with soft power and influence.

The problem with such suggestions is this: Despite binaristic formulations that posit hard military power on one side of the social equation and soft cultural power on the other, it is no longer always productive to think about cultural power and military power separately. One need only spend a little time at the ICT website before choosing quickly to stop thinking about the X-Box or Full Spectrum Warrior as Silicon Valley's key cultural export. Instead, one comes to think of it as Hollywood's primary military export. With the advent of militainment, the intricate relationships between popular cultural forms and military technology have all become rather difficult and confused, but this much is certain: Very little can be said to be “soft” about the kind of cultural power the self-proclaimed Institute for Creative Technologies administers. That this statement is so obviously true, and yet so counterintuitive at the same time (the ICT, after all, promotes itself as a think tank for the entertainment industry), suggests that an even deeper problem lies at the heart of the hard power/soft power binary – a problem embedded in the dynamics of binaristic thinking itself.

We think a great deal with binaristic constructions like hard power/soft power, but binaries do not always produce good thinking. Very often, they function as little more than a simplistic short-hand that leads us toward inauspicious generalization. There also exists a suspicious dimension of domination, a questionable “relation of power between the poles of a binary opposition” in which one term is implicitly valorized at the expense of the other (Hall, 1997, p. 235). Binaries such as “hard/soft,” for instance, or “hard power/soft power” are closely connected in discourse to others such as “military power/cultural power,” “The Pentagon/Hollywood,” and “action/representation.” These in turn are frequently linked in discourse to binaries such as “public sphere/domestic sphere,” and, last but certainly not least, “masculine pursuits/feminine pleasures.” The implications of such thematic linkages are perhaps more easily viewed when these binaries are laid out in a table (see Table 3.1).

Table 3.1 Implications of the hard power/soft power binary

Hard power	Soft power
Military power	Cultural power
World of action	World of representation
The Pentagon	Hollywood
Martial sphere	Civilian sphere
(Legitimate) masculine pursuits	(Suspect) feminine pleasures
Public sphere	Domestic sphere

We may begin to see how the problematic politics of gender is often lurking just below the surface of a great deal of IR policy work. But two larger points need making here.

The first is that policy that thinks binaristically – that thinks “politics” on the one hand and “culture” on the other, or “hard” power now and “soft” power later – prevents us from fully understanding the realities that lie before us all in the task of building a peaceful planet in the twenty-first century. Forward-thinking IR scholars have already suggested some of the dead ends one encounters when pursuing (often tacitly) masculinist policy goals, and they are hardly rooted in problems of “mere” semantics. Questions of language, after all, often point us to deeper questions, such as how structures of gender inequality are reproduced in discourse. So, for instance, as IR scholar J. Ann Tickner (1996, p. 156) has argued, “the unequal roles of protector and protected, assigned to men and women respectively” through policy and in everyday language, not only render women second-class citizens everywhere. They also “reinforce national identities that prioritize war and conflict. These masculinized, militarized identities,” Tickner continues, “which depend on their relationship to devalued characteristics associated with femininity, have been important for states in legitimating their foreign policies.” Therefore to say that say that state-to-state (or state-to-quasi-state) conflicts are not problems embedded in cultural conditions is really to ignore a rather large elephant in the room.

In this light, then, it is not so much that culture is an object of politics as that politics is an object of culture. Amy Kaplan (1994, p. 99) unpacks the argument further: “Culture,” she writes, “has been excluded from foreign policy on grounds traditionally associated with the ‘feminine.’ [. . .] In this formulation, politics is to culture as man is to woman.” As a result, she continues, “[t]he discursive field of diplomatic history seems to be organized in part around the exclusion of both culture and gender, which are subordinated to the realm of the domestic, a sphere associated with the home and women.” It is for reasons such as this, Kaplan suggests, that “both sides of the inaugurating debate of diplomatic history defined the ‘realism’ of foreign policy as a realm of rational calculation, cordoned off from the exigencies of the cultural.”

The second point that needs making is that avoiding such blind spots now becomes an increasingly important charge for media studies, too, insofar as the machinations of the MIM-plex are very much our own concern, and also insofar as media and cultural studies have always understood themselves as fields of study dedicated to changing the world and not merely to describing it. It appears, however, that this is more easily said than done. By and large, media studies scholarship also falls far too frequently into the gender-binary trap – to the extent that our own capacity to make sense of the hows and whys of the military industrial media complex, for instance, is dangerously compromised as a result. As I have argued previously (Burston, 2003), for media studies, comprehending the politics of entertainment programming still seems generally to matter more as a buttress to the theoretical needs of media scholarship on news-gathering. Inquiries into the dynamics of entertainment capitalism are understood to be useful only when they shed light on the octopean nature of media capitalism more broadly, or when they reveal emerging nuances in the realm of ideology. The information/entertainment binary is as stickily hegemonic as it is because entertainment, as a category of production, reception, or analysis has conventionally been understood as more oriented toward the private, domestic, “feminine” sphere. Still the source of a powerful wariness for far too many of us in the field, the world of fictional representations and of their suspect pleasures is best left to savor in times of quiet reflection, preferably in the private space of one's own home. Wiser, thinks media studies as a rule, to leave the public realm available for “the real thing”: for mobilization, for engagement, for politics traditionally defined (and, of course, for reporting the “hard news” on all of the above). I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Clearly, real men don't work in Hollywood (and they don't write about it much, either). This kind of binaristic logic prevents otherwise perfectly good thinkers in each field from thinking clearly about how “soft” cultural power, and “hard” economic and military power all combine inside the MIM-plex. Media studies may need to do a little theoretical house cleaning of its own, then, before it can effectively explain to a large and “establishmentarian” cohort of foreign-affairs policymakers why separating the realms of culture and politics is dangerously misguided; why the realms of culture and politics must instead be understood as profoundly intertwined.

Disciplinary Dialogue, Global Security, and the Purview of Production Studies

The activities underway inside Hollywood's new martial precincts reveal how carefully we now need to think about cultural workers whose professional circumstances are increasingly tied up with things other than culture – at least as conventionally defined. The ICT and many other similar nodes of collaboration between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the military suggest that we clearly need to examine the ways in which cultural workers are deeply invested in the MIM-plex and the particular ways in which they necessarily constitute an integral element of global security politics as a result. Production studies now needs to consider those cultural workers whose professional circumstances have a new and disturbing specificity, which we have yet to fully acknowledge.

Cognate work outside the field of production studies has begun to do precisely this. Elizabeth Losh (2009) and Nina Huntemann (2010) have each deployed some measure of on-site research in order to unpack the production politics of the ICT and the computer game-cum-recruiting vehicle, America's army, respectively. But work that explicitly undertakes production ethnographies has the best potential to reveal how the politics of making representations and the connotational politics of the representations themselves are ultimately so intertwined as to be inseparable. This is where we come in. Media ethnographers ought to uncover the regimes of control and the spaces for agency that form militainment workers' work practices, professional subjectivities, sense of duty, and sense of options. This is not as difficult an assignment as it may first appear. Despite the presence of some very large “no-go” zones inside the military entertainment establishment, there remain numerous small, “flexible,” or independent operations – subcontracted digital animation companies, for instance, which are likely open to enquiry in ways in which suburban Virginia has never been (and never will be). In any event and whatever the circumstances, fieldwork in the trenches of Siliwood is now absolutely essential if we are ever to make any sense of the many complicated sites of struggle on the new terrain of twenty-first-century popular warfare culture.

More broadly, in choosing to think with the MIM-plex in production research, we may assist media studies as a whole in accomplishing a very important task. As the ICT's example ought to make clear, it is now necessary for matters cultural to be visible outside of the same old “soft” policy precincts where, traditionally at least, few of the really big decisions on matters of global peace and security are made. Media studies scholars ought seriously to consider taking up the task of intervening in policy debates – most especially in policy debates taking place outside the carefully policed boundaries of a largely feminized (and consequently subordinate) cultural-policy ghetto. If we do not, then we risk perpetuating the gendered split inside global policy production that has long kept cultural policy so marginalized in international fora (on which see Beale, 2008). In an era where an institute for “creative” technology can reasonably represent itself as such, this status quo cannot – must not – hold any longer.¹²

Some readers who are new to debates regarding the parameters and purpose of media studies may find calls like the one I am making here a little surprising. How is it, they may ask, that, in a field that aims to understand the forms and functions of the Fourth Estate, matters of policy are considered to be largely off limits? Why have media researchers who are not directly engaged in the fields of political or international communication largely eschewed – at times even disdained – the study of the intersections of media practice with the politics of state power? Nick Couldry (2006, p. 5) furnishes us with the beginning of an explanation when he writes:

Media scholars have had reasons of their own for this state of affairs and for the delegation of such concerns to particular subfields within the wider discipline. Many have been more interested in establishing their own specific criteria for the selection of objects of study in what still remains a relatively new academic field. This may be especially true of media production studies, which, having emerged as a distinct subfield even more recently than most, has concerned itself, quite properly, with charting its own borders. These are borders that, understandably enough, largely limit the range of our inquiry to the conditions and experiences of labor in the media and in the cultural industries and to their adequate theorization (Beck, 2003; Hesmondhalgh, 2007; Mayer, Banks, & Caldwell, 2009). Other reasons pertain more directly to questions regarding the actual utility of examining state power. Some media studies researchers, for instance, still labor under the misapprehension that the state is being subsumed (rather than transformed) by transnational corporate power and that studies of media practice and reception are, accordingly, better fitted to the transnational register. And scholars with feminist sympathies tired long ago of the many phallocentric assumptions attached to older notions of what properly constitutes the political, looking first to the (once) new social movements, and then to affective communities and other social formations for cues on how best to study the transformational potential of cultural practices.

Happily, over the course of the last three decades our engagement with newer political precincts such as these has finally brought media studies kicking and screaming into maturity. Indeed, whatever fullness and variation we can attribute to the wider field of media and cultural studies, it owes a certain debt of gratitude to the “Thirty Years' War” between media political economy and cultural studies. But, even as those battle lines begin to fade, the ambiguous legacy of a somewhat tense peace remains. It often takes the form of a broadly consensual understanding formed among media studies scholars who work outside the subfields of international and political communication – an understanding along the lines that, really, state power (subsumed, transformed, or otherwise) is someone else's academic business, not ours. In effect: there are few practical or theoretical vectors joining media studies to the study of global struggles for power, conventionally defined, and few concepts or practices linking the districts of media studies to those of international relations (among others).

Properly focused examinations of the now myriad articulations of the MIM-plex can and do reveal how, at this historical juncture, such assumptions may be more than merely misguided; they may be dangerous. Media scholarship can no longer ignore the role that global politics plays in innumerable instantiations of media practice – not any more than international relations, political sociology, and political science can ignore the role that media practice plays in the production of global politics. This is especially true given the degree to which mediated representations of violent cyber-patriotism and cyber-sectarianism are now located precisely at the center of mainstream popular culture – not only in the global North, but in the global South as well (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Stahl, 2010). Scholars seeking to understand the dynamics of work inside sites such as the ICT, which produce the physical and virtual goods of militarized entertainment capitalism, are especially well positioned to advance such arguments. Moreover, continued research into different precincts of the MIM-plex will likely have the salutary effect of focusing the production studies lens on a still underexamined neighborhood of media production, even as it begins to tease out larger questions that production studies scholars now need to ask of their research, such as: For whom, precisely, are the subjects of our ethnographies working? And does this work contribute to the social good?

Previously, such questions were often eschewed by production studies researchers, as they could (and did) often link up to a set of high-cultural aesthetic assumptions that could blindside a progressive politics of pleasure and emancipation. But in the era of the ICT the stakes have clearly changed. In their own recent examination of the video-game industry, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter argue that, inside a militarized global capitalism, games such as the ICT's Full Spectrum Warrior (FSW) generate “subjectivities that tend to war” – not merely by eliciting in their millions of players a desire for extra-lucid depictions of atrocity, but by promoting, hand in hand with multiple other media outlets, war's most sinister banalization in addition. “FSW contributes to the broader banalization of war,” Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009, p. 118) observe,

Adding insult to virtual injury, FSW does this even as it deploys fictional story lines rooted in contemporary events in Iraq and Afghanistan. In such a manner does the “[v]irtual involvement of civilian populations in actual imperial war [make] military games a homefront component of full-spectrum dominance” (2009, p. 118).

These linkages between virtual representation and actual military power, I wish to suggest once again, are best explained to scholars from other fields by way of a dialogue with media studies scholars. But such a reinvestment in media studies' tentative dialogue with international relations will do more than assist other scholars in expanding their own purviews and methodologies. It will also serve to remind us, media studies practitioners (including those of us engaged in production research), that ours is a field of fundamental importance to many others – a reality that we have often forgotten while undertaking the (often) somewhat monastic task of defining ourselves. In remembering this, however, we will be in a position (to borrow from Couldry again) to bring “to an important interdisciplinary question (the preconditions of democratic politics)” media and cultural studies' pronounced and abiding interest “in agency and voice and the forces that constrain them” (2006, p. 75).

Inhabiting a similarly commendable ethical register, David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker have recently written of the need to consider “how positive and emancipatory aspects of labor – including creative labor in the cultural industries – might be made more prevalent, and how negative aspects of work might be contained, controlled or even eliminated.” Underlying this question, they maintain, “is a deeper one: which political projects may best enhance human well-being and social justice with regard to work?” (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011, p. 222). They rightly suggest that, within what is now a burgeoning literature on creative work, these are fundamental issues that have yet to be thought through in their entirety. Now it may be that we will never all concur on the relative merits of various types of entertainment programming, but surely we can all agree that, ultimately, neither the banalization of war (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009) nor the increasing ease with which we may now banish enemy combatants from our consciences (Der Derian, 2001) contributes much to the cause of social justice or to the planet's health in general. The field of production studies has a major role to play in remedying the situation Hesmondhalgh and Baker describe, and production research on the MIM-plex in particular provides an especially compelling set of research objects toward that end.

Here, however, production studies scholars should not lose sight of the role that a more fully integrated feminist analysis must necessarily play in such an undertaking. The gender binaries that appear so regularly to interrupt the progress of a more holistic set of trajectories in international relations have everything to do with the regular promotion of “public man” on the one hand and with a concurrent demotion of symbolic representation by virtue of its often unstated, but nonetheless powerful association with “private woman” on the other (Elshtain, 1981). This is the relationship of “hard power” to “soft power”; of how, as Amy Kaplan explained above, “politics is to culture as man is to woman.” This state of affairs is only too familiar to media studies practitioners. A tradition of feminist media research that is arguably longer than its IR counterpart has somehow failed to prevent a similarly binaristic way of thinking from rendering problematic a great deal of our own work. Endeavoring to change this state of affairs is also part of the ethical project that is now required of media and production studies. Charting new forms and relations that emerge from inside the MIM-plex provides us with one important way forward, insofar as a number of its most emblematic precincts appear to confound the already dubious distinctions between hard and soft power once and for all.

NOTES

1 While both Hozic and Der Derian hail from international relations, it is precisely the commendable holism in their work that permits the latter to be read and understood by media scholars as “media research.” As I argue below, their dialogical example warrants the emulation of media studies scholars seeking to expand their own purview. My thanks to Keir Keightley for talking me, over several helpful conversations, through some of the ideas developed in this chapter.

2 See Lapid and Kratochwil (1996), Smith, Booth, and Zalewski (1996), Brecher and Harvey (2002).

3 After Auslander (1999), I loosely follow Baudrillard's (1981) deployment of the term “mediatization” insofar as it describes the media “as instrumental in a larger, sociopolitical process of bringing all discourses under the dominance of a single code” (Auslander 1999, p. 5). I do this, again, following Auslander, even as I eschew Baudrillard's fatalism more generally.

4 See Booth (1996), Lapid (1996), Walker (1990), and Lawson (2006). For feminist interventions from inside IR, see Enloe (1996), Zalewski (1996), and Sylvester (2002).

5 Also see Stahl (2010), and especially Burstyn (1999), which provides a superb elucidation of the “sport nexus” and of the “sport-media complex”: these work together to promote and maintain a pervasive, hyper-masculine militarism in the US and abroad.

6 On which see Pick (1993, p. 11). Also see Hardt and Negri (2004, p. 40).

7 Some of what follows derives originally from Burston (2003).

8 America's Army provides another famous example. See Nichols (2010) and Huntemann (2010). Various other activities of the ICT similarly suggest a number of ways in which cultural production and the production of global insecurity are indeed rather formidably intertwined. See Burston (2003), Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009), and Huntemann and Payne (2010).

9 This, despite a slowly emerging body of research on the ICT (see previous footnote).

10 A sampling of these debates is available in Berenskoetter and Williams (2007), where Steven Lukes counts himself among the detractors of the term, declaring it “a blunt instrument” (Lukes, 2007, p. 95). Most of us in media studies ought to be able to come to the same conclusion (though possibly for different reasons).

11 And in making this argument I am building on arguments already put forward by constructivist, postpositivist, and feminist scholars in IR and by a number of thinkers in media and cultural studies who are supportive of IR's “Third Debate” on such matters. For a useful overview of this debate, see the items cited in footnote 4. For a useful recent contribution from media and cultural studies, see Van Zoonen (2005).

12 The recent call for “a more synergetic and collaborative approach” to the study of communication “among scholars from different traditions and backgrounds” and to the centrally important task of participating in global policymaking, a call launched by Sarikakis and Shade (2008b, p. 14), commands my vigorous assent.

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