Price and Institutional Agency
The question of where agency for transformation lies in Media Sovereignty is especially important given his emphasis on rhetoric. As a discipline, rhetorical studies seems to suffer a constant crises surrounding the power of rhetoric to effect action/human behavior. Price provides no new insight into this disciplinary question, however. Agency for Price seems to reside in governments, corporations, NGOs, juridical structures, militaries, and other institutions. These institutions implement rhetoric in a unilateral asymmetric, top-down way to control individuals, so almost nowhere in Price’s book do the consumers of media content play a role other than as manipulated hordes. For example, Price states the effects of “tropes of restructuring” on central and eastern Europe to highlight consumers’ lack of agency: “For the audience, the consequence is the rapid remaking of the images on the screen almost from the beginning—what is vaunted, how people dress, and the narratives that are told. Television and radio become the handmaidens of the radical transformations of the street, the coming of McDonalds, and the reordering of what constitutes acceptable visions of the future” (114). The citizens of central Europe are powerless in the face of capitalist imagery: see advertisement, buy freedom fries. These multilayered institutional powers, the Man, possesses the only agency here. This confluence of agency to effect action is stated, in brief, in one instance in Price’s book, when he introduces his analysis of the V-Chip: “The interrelationship between government action, industry action, and evolution of norms is illustrated, somewhat whimsically, by the experience” with this new technology of information control (125). “Information intervention” is implemented by the powers that control media distribution and content, not the individual consumer who’s left only the action of pressing an on/off switch.
In contrast, the only obvious people who possess any individual agency to effect action are advocates for new information control models. According to Price’s argument, “Metaphors evolve into models, as the intuitive value of a figure of speech transfigures into a program of action” (86). For example, Charlotte Beers and Norman Pattiz helped to mold the United States’ information control response to 9/11. They advocated a media model, the United States government implemented it, and the Muslim masses were manipulated into obeisance to American values. The persuasive action on Beers and Pattiz’s parts was effective; their models became norms of operation. However, the rhetorical effect on Muslim populations constitutes near total rhetorical failure.
This response may seem quite negative, but I appreciate the importance of Price’s study. I learned a lot through his landslide of examples and evidence. My main complaint, and I think almost any scholar of rhetoric would agree, is that Price throws the term rhetoric around with flippancy. He provides an amazing contextual analysis and exposition of the rhetorical situation, but almost every time he gets to a juicy text, he doesn’t analyze it. The words just seem like mere elements of context rather than a focus of study. There are a couple brief exceptions, like his discussion of the Supreme Court decisions in Reno v. ACLU. Thus, ultimately, his analysis serves to strip agency from individuals by placing it wholly with institutions.