What is enough?: An interview with Toby Miller on degrowth and sustainability in media (studies)
by Toni Pape and Mary-Joy van der Deure
On the occasion of our special section #Enough, we invited media scholar Toby Miller for a discussion on the topic. Toby Miller is professor of media studies at the Universidad del Rey Juan Carlos. He has published widely on a variety of topics, including cultural citizenship and policy, sports media and sports cultures, American makeover culture, violence, and the humanities. In addition to this he has edited numerous volumes and anthologies on film theory, television studies, global Hollywood, and popular culture. We extended our invitation to discuss yet another one of his fields of expertise: the environmental impact of media. In his books Greening the Media, co-authored with Richard Maxwell, and Greenwashing Culture and Greenwashing Sports, Miller critically assesses the environmental impact of media technologies, industry practices, and consumption patterns. 
In this interview we talk to Miller about overproduction and growth, advertising and consumerism, ‘corporate social responsibility’ and environmentally sustainable policies, the environmental footprint of media preservation, academic publishing, and degrowth in academia. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Toni Pape: You’ve done a lot of research on the relation between media culture and the environment, including greenwashing and the issues it covers up: pollution and overproduction. It seems to me that, in your work, your focus is on the cultural sector as part of a capitalist, growth-based economy. How do you approach the notion of ‘enough’ from this intellectual perspective? Is there ‘too much’ cultural production?
Toby Miller: I think of this in terms of situation comedy and the value of Lenin (with an I). So if you think about very successful British sitcoms like Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers from the late 1960s to mid-1970s, one reason why these things were so popular in many parts of the world and so successful is that the writers only had to come up with six or nine episodes a year. Whereas if you’re writing a situation comedy for network television in the US, it might be 35 episodes a year. And not only that, but then the attempt is, in typical cultural industry fashion, to replicate the same thing on another network, with minor differences. So in terms of Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea of repetition and difference, you get minimal differentiation and maximal repetition. So the quality of the thing inevitably diminishes. It’s not because US sitcom writers are less ironic, less sarcastic, less amusing than their British counterparts. It is that they have to do more of it.
And the same if you think about something like so-called Scandi Noir, Scandinavian or Nordic noir television. And as you are probably aware, one of the stimuli for Scandi Noir was that the Sky Group in Britain bought up US television crime shows so they were no longer available for UK broadcast television to buy. So what did those networks in Britain like Channel 4, the BBC, and ITV do instead of doing what they normally do, which is to buy low-grade, massively overproduced US crime drama? They bought not-overproduced, high-quality Nordic noir. This got interpreted by some cultural critics as a sign that the British were opening up to multiculturalism, to different languages, to different ways of seeing the world. Of course, it’s got nothing to do with viewer desires. It has everything to do with which network had the money to buy what was a scarce but in fact overproduced resource and who had the money to buy an available but underproduced resource. Nordic noir is going to be five or six episodes per season. They’re all of cinematic quality visually and in terms of the script. They’re exciting, they’re interesting, they’re different – and they’re not caught up in car chases or things like that.
So, I think the Leninist doctrine of overproduction, where money chases repetition rather than difference, is true, and a really big problem in terms of cultural production. You can think the same of sports, the way in which it leads to massive overproduction. In football, we’ve recently had the obsession with the Euros, but there’s also the idea of a Super League that will take over from the Champions League and which will involve more and more and more and more and more and more football. This results in the cheapening of the lives of the players, the diminution of their career lifetimes, but the production of more and more material for television and online companies. So that’s my basic thing about overproduction in the media: that money flies towards a successful formula which is then quickly exhausted.
Pape: In your writing, you critique the ‘ideology of growth’. Does this imply an affirmation of degrowth thinking? Or are you skeptical of it like other Marxist thinkers (e.g. Matthew Huber)?
Miller: There is a lot of virtue in critiques of growth that come from indigenous cosmology. I’m thinking in particular of things that have had a lot of influence on me, that come from various parts of Latin America, but also the animal rights movements – ideas like harmony between people and other species, balance, equanimity, decency.
At the same time, I appreciate that no government in Western Europe or the United States is going to embrace the idea of diminishing growth. Because they have bought into, and continue to promulgate, the idea that economies must grow in order to satisfy the needs of their citizenry – particularly in countries like the Netherlands or Germany or Spain, where there isn’t much ‘substitution effect’, in other words people having lots of babies. When this is twinned with people living longer and doing so after leaving the working population, you need to find a way of filling the gap and you do it through growth and through immigration. There seems to be no other way of doing it, right? So I get all of that, but guess what. You can also do it through redistribution. The wealthiest people in the world have vast resources that are not put to productive use.
What do I mean by productive use? Their resources are not put into cultural production of an artisanal or demotic kind. They’re not put into listening to workers and citizens – and by workers I include unpaid workers in reproductive labor. They’re put into buying corporations, gutting them, taking their saleable resources, and selling them on. To give an example from the gaming industry, lots of startup companies involved in the creation of audiovisual games see young people in their 20s and 30s working 60, 80, even 100-hour weeks with the promise that, when they go to market, they will be paid in stock shares and get a great return. In fact, the guy who runs the ten-person company is the one who has all the shares. It’s normally a guy, and his plan is that when they’re close to getting the game ready, he sells it to Microsoft or Sony or Apple, who have no intention of ever producing it. They just want to stop a rival from doing so. So these young people walk away from little companies with nothing at all, because they didn’t get a percentage of the sale to the big companies. You get the same with football teams and how they recruit, develop, and trade young talent. Another brief example would be so-called news deserts that can now be found all over the world. The news deserts are places where there’s no local newspaper, there’s no local news radio, there’s no local news television. Why is this happening? Big hedge fund companies buy the companies that hold 20 or 30 local newspapers and then shut them down because all they’re interested in is the real estate where the newspapers are housed.
I get the desire for growth. I understand where it comes from. But I think it’s ill-advised, because it fails to take account of the way in which what counts as growth is mostly the unproductive use of capital. And so instead what we need is a massive redistribution of income, downwards. Fifty years ago, CEOs used to earn about 20 times what a guy working to build the cars earned. Over the last 50 years, the ratio went from 20:1 to over 300:1. Too much money going to people who are not productive. And I want to see the kind of redistribution of income that occurred in Western Europe and the United States after the Second World War. So, I’m not necessarily saying degrowth in all its iterations is desirable, but I think the chorus of endorsement of growth that you get from some Marxists and Social Democrats as well as conservatives is ill-conceived.
Pape: You mentioned several interesting examples of the unproductive use of capital in the media sector. In your writing about greenwashing, you show that this also has an aesthetic side. I’m interested in the aesthetics of overconsumption. Here, I’m partly thinking of the desire for higher resolutions and special effects, the interface aesthetics of ubiquitous access (e.g. the Netflix interface), but also advertising. But I wonder whether we can also determine certain tendencies in terms of content. What characterises the media aesthetics of contemporary overconsumption? What types of images do we see? Any kind of ‘content’ that you take particular issue with?
Miller: Well, I guess women’s bodies have been used again and again to sell all sorts of items, from cars to yachts to computers to clothes. And there’s a longstanding and meritorious body of activism and research into that issue. And there’s lots of content that I don’t like. I’m not a big fan of YouTube home movies made by people trying to be influencers. You know: the family going on a holiday. ‘Here we are opening the back of our car in order to put our luggage in. Here we are taking a selfie of ourselves, looking at the luggage.’ I get that’s of interest to people, but it’s also often involving really rather deceptive product placement. And it’s not very well-written, directed, shot, edited. So that’s just an example of something I don’t like. What would I like to see?
There needs to be some sort of nexus between textual and occupational representation in order for content to be improved. What do I mean by that? It’s perfectly legitimate to look at the representation of Jewish folks in television drama or at the representation of women in narconovelas. That’s important. But we also need to look at who the writers, directors, and producers of this kind of content are. Is there a nexus between male screenwriters and highly sexualised representations of women in everything from advertising copy through to, say, narconovelas? How do we make for a more democratic, a more open system in terms of textual representation, but also occupational diversity?
I’m thinking of network news in the United States. You’re going to have a white guy around my age, a Black woman, and a Latina as the three presenters. And then you’re going to have a weather guy who’s Latino and an on-the-spot reporter who’s Asian. Why is this done? It’s done because of the demography of the desired viewership of the station. The news network wants to show that the actual representation in our society of different racial formations is present on screen. But have a look behind the screen and everybody’s white: everybody making the decisions, everybody choosing which stories get told. There’s no change. And some of the research done on Hollywood directors shows just how Black representation on screen is shooting up. But it’s not happening at the level of directors and producers. And it’s in reverse for Latin@s.
So I think one way of getting better content, in terms of what I like, is to see a real transformation in the labor process. And with a real transformation in the labor process to open up the key jobs to the actual demography of countries, you can get textual change as well. We would see much greater diversity, occupationally and textually, by opening up the labor process. And that might also solve some of the problem of overproduction of the same thing. So I guess in terms of the aesthetics of advertising and the aesthetics in general of production, my notion is that, rather than banning this kind of television or this kind of cinema or this kind of game, we should instead insist that the people who make it are not just the imaginary target audience.
Mary-Joy van der Deure: The aesthetics of overconsumption makes me think of platforms like TikTok and Instagram and all the shadowy, unclear advertising that takes place there. There are now specific rules surrounding platform advertising, but it remains a gray area. I often see that brands are targeting specific influencers because of the demographic they want to reach. So how would you say this translates, in an ideal world, to online consumerism and aesthetics?
Miller: I’m thinking of something like Substack, which presents itself as a place where literature rather than fiction can flourish – literature in the sense of something that is more avant-garde, more different, more diverse, and so on, where there isn’t a big bad corporate owner in the background, where the money comes from the owners of the platform taking a percentage of the fees that readers pay to writers, and so on. But how do you actually scrutinise things like product placement? Stories, recollections, memoirs, short reportage that is about a certain phenomenon, where in fact people are taking money from companies. So even in that more artisanal, evocative, transformative space of Substack, there are problems of this kind. And they’re especially insidious when it comes to the digital world. It’s the sort of transformation that occurred in rap music, when rap music would get its bling legitimacy in the 1980s by mentioning brands, which then said, ‘Oh, something’s going on here. We’ll pay you for the number of times your song that mentions us is on the radio.’, or now Spotify. And of course that moves on to the next phase of being paid to mention the thing in the first place. And this is a really big issue about which we need more education.
Most people are more literate with the media than I am. But we need to strengthen our ability to identify product placement and understand when it’s happening. We could go back to Edward Bernays and his attempts to get women to take up smoking in the 1920s and 1930s through Hollywood product placement. This could enable people to have an appreciation of some of the data showing that media effects can be very real. Not necessarily in the sense of making you go out and shoot people, but when it comes to products, a lot of this stuff really does work. And the problem is when people aren’t aware of what’s being done because it looks as though it’s part of the diegesis, the story world, but has been positioned there and is totally unnecessary for the narrative or the mise-en-scène. It is an iterative attempt to ensure sales. So there is real value in being able to point that out and requiring that it be mentioned. Not in an asterisk at the bottom of a Substack contribution, not in a small bit of ticker tape on TikTok, but front and center: ‘I was paid to do this by x.’ A bit like the laws on packaging tobacco nowadays. I think that sort of requirement is really important when it comes to product placement. And the same goes for the political sphere and both deep and shallow fakes. But this is even harder to police, trying to get people to say where this was made, how it was made, by whom it was made.
van der Deure: Lately I’ve noticed a trend in companies implementing environmentally-sustainable policy. For example, the use of energy-efficient technologies and logistic optimisation, or data centers partially relying on green energy. This is of course in part due to consumer demand, something that people are asking for, but a lot of the time this is also financially motivated. Because it’s often cheaper, it’s less resource-intensive, and in the end therefore more cost-effective. So, it’s perhaps not greenwashing per se, because it is actually green, but I was wondering about your thoughts on capitalist motivations for environmentally-positive change. Can this still be effective if the underlying system, which we also discussed in relation to cultural production, is not changed?
Miller: The virtue signaling practices of Amazon, Google, Netflix – ‘We’ve listened, we’ve learned, and we believe in a green transformation. Plus, it works for us financially!’ – are mostly hogwash. Why hogwash? For all sorts of reasons, but a big one is that a lot of the ecological impact of those entities is not so much direct as indirect, by which I mean, if you’re watching football on a telephone, if you’re watching the Euros on a telephone, if you’re doing a search on Google Scholar, if we’re talking to one another today, what energy sources are being used? We’re not just using the energy sources of Zoom, we’re using the energy sources of the cities where we live. How on earth do we know what the energy mix is? So we need a much more radical transformation of the internet in terms of energy sources everywhere, which means not just the internet, but electricity more generally. This is a huge problem.
What else do we need? When I was a child, my parents moved around a lot. I lived in different countries and different cities. One of the things that I saw everywhere I went was socialism. What do I mean? The telephone exchange, the public school, the post office, the electricity depot – all these things were publicly financed, publicly run, and with all kinds of subsidies for people who lived in the country, for example, so that they would still have these networks of communication and power. If you’re not in a city, you don’t pay the real cost of getting the service or object. It’s subsidised by those where economies of scale apply. That’s very good, but it rarely happens anymore. The public subvention that used to operate as a means of creating and running these services goes towards attracting business. In other words, if you look at the Carolinas, where Apple has lots of its data centers: coal, coal, coal, coal, and coal – paid for by taxpayers. Again and again, taxpayers are providing hidden subvention for the so-called green transformation, which a) isn’t necessarily green, because it depends on an entire system of energy sources right across the internet, and b) often sees a very dirty mix of energy being used by data centers. So what do we need?
We need a taxpayer revolution. We need citizens to be aware that their money is being wasted on these absurdities. In the name of sustaining good jobs for workers in coal industries, people need to know what the actual cost of those jobs is, what the cost would be if people were retrained in green areas, and what the cost would be if, instead of there being a profit margin that had to go to corporate capital, it were all done on a socialised basis.
In addition to this, if one expands the notion of greenness to include the labor process, I would like to see the working circumstances of people addressed. We’ve seen that certain elements of corporate social responsibility can lead companies like Apple to engage in some level of ‘ownership’ of what their partners do in the manufacture of their goods, in particular the grotesque exploitation of labor on the part of subcontractors, especially in China. But I want to see more than that. I want to see Apple questioning why we need another iPhone with minimal improvements in service, if any. Of course it’s because ‘our shares have to go up with the promise of a consumption spike’. I don’t think that’s necessary at all.
This should also involve a connectedness between citizens, consumers, and workers. Most of us in this conversation work. We do things for money. Yes, we’re consumers, but we’re also employees. So how do we connect our use of the gizmos in front of us? How do we see ourselves not only as customers, but as fellow workers with the people whose blood is metaphorically inside our devices? The people who did the mining on a quasi-slavery, feudal basis in Congo to get hold of the minerals; the people in China who manufacture componentry; the people in Brazil and Mexico who dismantle devices under unsafe conditions in search of recyclable materials.
We need an audit of the entire life of the commodity side, an audit of the life of the commodity sign that enables us as users to also be citizens and fellow workers and be in touch with the people who make and disassemble the devices we are involved in, but also be aware of the mixture of sources of energy that enables our use of the internet. We need to think about the totality of the life of the commodity sign as it flies around the globe, not just in the sense of apparatuses, but also in terms of the operation of the internet itself.
van der Deure: You already addressed IT technologies and their life cycle, the use of the internet, but also specifically the use of digital storage. You could say that, in line with overproduction and overconsumption, we’re also over-preserving, from the tens of thousands of pictures on our phones, to the data centers we use for our Instagram and emails. I also want to direct that notion to the preservation of cultural heritage. This is, of course, very valuable and there are possible methods for more ‘green’ preservation. But it is also relevant to closely reassess what we are preserving and when we can say that we’re perhaps preserving enough. Should a stricter appraisal be implemented?
Miller: Personally, I think that we need an audit that tells us on a routine monthly basis what the environmental impact of our photos, our songs, our video clips and so on is. And of course, we realistically need some regulation at the public-policy end. On the score of cultural preservation, conservators and curators are used to making tough choices about what can be kept and what can’t, in terms of space. I’ve spoken to people who run museums of photography, who don’t want any more old cameras or computers, who haven’t got the space. So the fact of making choices about what you preserve is ordinary. Now, of course, sometimes we regret not preserving something. Think of all the television that’s been lost because no one thought television had any cultural significance for illustrating an epoch or educating people. So they taped over things all the time. But this is something curators and conservators are used to debating. They’ve done it all their professional lives. I’d like to see their expertise brought into debates about how we deal with digital preservation. There is this notion that the digital is a limitless, inexhaustible green resource. So we need to explain that it’s none of those things. And then, once choices have to be made, draw on the expertise of people whose profession has a century or more of professional engagement with what to keep and what to cast aside.
van der Deure: And what about degrowth in academia? As we’re talking about the cultural industry and media production, we should perhaps also look at ourselves. There are already discussions about frequent flying and the use of ICT technologies. But in your writing, you also discuss the production of physical and digital books as well as publications. How can we, as scholars, take responsibility for the resources we rely on every day? What could degrowth in academia look like?
Miller: It would get rid of lots of line managers, first thing. I get the idea of less air travel. I had a very bad time twenty years ago when both IAMCR and ICA asked me to set up task forces on this. And people just said, ‘You’re taking away my fun. You’re taking away my annual affair. You’re taking away my one time when I can be with people who think the way I do.’ And I gave up. I’m a quitter. Often I give up when I feel as though I’m against the tide of history. Now those institutions are thinking a lot more about those things. Times have changed.
But realistically, the allocation of resources in general in academia, in so many countries, has become lopsided because there’s a growth in mistrust. So I’d like a growth in trust and a degrowth in mistrust. The managerial monads who try to control our lives think we’re lying all the time about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what it means. They think we are like them: selfish and aggressive. When I started out as an academic, there would be one dean who would be voted into office by the faculty. There would be no associate deans, no assistant deans, no research managers. Lean, lean, lean. Resources went to people who taught and wrote. How hard can it be to say, let’s give more resources to people who teach and write? Now, ironically, the point of such a reallocation is to get away from overproduction. Because it’s quite clear that too much production in the academic world is leading to rubbish being produced.
A couple of years ago, two colleagues and I were invited to guest edit a special issue for one of the top-ranking media journals in the world. Many of our invited contributors’ submissions were rejected within a matter of hours because, it turned out, people who ran this journal had an algorithm which said: ‘Unless X number of articles previously published in the journal are cited, unless Y number of editorial board members are cited, and unless there is mathematical manipulation of data, we will not publish a submission.’ After we complained and insisted on a different procedure, the journal published the special issue – then six months later demanded 500 euros from me, and two years later announced it had rejected our editorial (which it had published, of course!). So in other words, these people are cosmically inefficient, stupid, exploitative, and corrupt. And I’m afraid that happens again and again.
There’s a huge problem with corruption, which has to do with the idea of constant production of knowledge and competition for the amount that’s done. So what we need is, on the one hand, a transformation in managerialism so there are fewer people running academic life, fewer of them insisting on producing more and more stuff, fewer journals engaging in exploitative behavior and predatory behavior, fewer rewards to bureaucrats who lord over faculty and tell them what to do, less of a focus for the social sciences and the humanities on grantwriting based on a bench science model that is inappropriate for much of the humanities and the social sciences, a restoration of block grants to universities so they can be dispersed across the faculty, and a change in the way in which young faculty are told to behave. ‘You must publish two articles from chapters in your dissertation.’ No. Read more books. Don’t produce more.
I am worried about this extraordinary culture of exploitation and duplicity, married with gigantic levels of managerial power and the misallocation of money to these people, married to not so much an incentive scheme but a dictate to young people to reproduce this system, at great peril to themselves.
Pape: Your examples are also concerned with academic publishing and indexing. As an open access journal we find it difficult to navigate such a fraught and exploitative publishing landscape.
Miller: There is a lot of resistance now to Scopus and other indexing systems because many scientists say this is a bunch of nonsense, citing exactly the sort of example I gave you of the special issue that I co-edited and the corruption that blighted that story. It’s why you get the San Francisco Declaration on academic publishing with things like the Association for Cell Biology – not just crazy Marxists like me – saying this is all corrupt, it’s pointless, it’s stupid, it’s not generating good science. We don’t want it.
Pape: We also have to do a lot of work in convincing our readers and the members of the NECS community that we should resist certain indexes. It’s political work, because if we’re not in a certain index many universities do not recognise NECSUS as a legitimate publication channel for their employees.
Miller: I think that’s a very real concern for lots of scholars, especially in so-called emergent economies. It applies to lots of people I work with in Latin America as well as Europe. What can be done about it? First of all, scholars need to organise together against bureaucrats, and not just university bureaucrats but governmental bureaucrats, to point out the flaws with these systems: that they reproduce a college of elect white men writing in English as their first and often only language; that they utterly fail to engage with the real demography of the populations they allegedly serve; that they see the reproduction of the same forms of knowledge. These systems don’t stimulate innovation. They don’t stimulate deep thinking. They don’t stimulate diversity of quality.
And we need to support things like the San Francisco Declaration and get people with editing experience at major schools to stand up and be honest about it. We also need to get professional associations to be more real. I think of journals like the American Sociological Review, which is the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association, or the Journal of Communication, the flagship of the International Communication Association. Rarely, if ever, do they publish a single article in a year that I want to read, or that I need to, in terms of research that matters to me. But they are successfully parthenogenetic. They enable the reproduction of the same kinds of people with the same sorts of knowledge within professions. We need to get the associations to be much more open about what counts as knowledge. I’ve edited five journals, two of which I started, and my experience has been that the more you get people focused on where the journal is cited and recognised, the less interesting material you get.
Pape: This connects nicely to our question about writing. Previously, Mary-Joy and I talked about how we appreciated your style, which is accessible, sharp, and critical, but also humorous while making an argument. So we were also wondering about your approach to writing. As a prolific author, how do you go about it?
Miller: I’m not sure what my style is, but I can say this. What I choose to study emerges from three forces or sources. One is progressive social-movement agendas. If social movements are talking about race, environment, trans life, or violence, I want to learn about that. I want the agenda to be partially set by them. And I want that to intersect with the scholarly agenda, not just in English but in the languages that my co-authors and I understand. And then, finally, when there are absences or distortions in public policy that make me think some sort of contribution could make things different. And so I look for different audiences based in part on those three forces, and that means writing somewhat differently for those audiences. So those are the influences that tend to operate on me. I want to make sure that I’m collaborating with people where I can help them in some way. I do a lot of collaborative writing and it might be about language, it might be about gender, it might be about physical positioning on the globe where I can help make something happen for them.
Pape: Maybe that’s also why there are two greenwashing books, because a sports audience needs a slightly different approach?
Miller: I can tell you that that is absolutely correct. I was originally contracted to write a book about both. When I almost finished, I thought, ‘This is stupid. The overlap is not what I think it is.’ So I asked my editor how she would feel about making it two books. And she said that she was about to write to me and say the same thing: two books.
The theoretical apparatus is very similar. Some of the wording is similar. The criticism is similar, but the object you construct is different. Friends of mine wrote a book about arts policy and sports policy in a particular country, and nobody read it because the constituencies were distinct. Maybe not in terms of what people like – people might like art and sports, but they tend not to profess both of those things in their academic work.
Pape: One final question on cultural citizenship. In the book Cultural Citizenship, you demonstrate through many examples how important the cultural relation to the state is for both individual and collective identity formation and political action. At the same time, you make very clear that citizenship can no longer be disentangled from consumerism. In Greening the Media, you and your co-author introduce green citizenship as a corrective to political, economic, and cultural citizenship. But given that cultural production in the Global North is so unsustainable, is it not plausible that green citizenship and other forms of citizenship are fundamentally at odds with each other? What consequences can or should we draw for cultural citizenship? How can we prevent legitimising unsustainable culture based on tenuous claims to political participation?
Miller: In the twentieth century, some of the supposedly unitary forms of subjectivity that would purportedly impel the history of the future – the working class for Marxism, women for second-wave feminism – have fallen apart as blocs. They’re not real alliances. For example, Marxism has for a long time excluded people not involved in ‘productive labour’. In the case of the women’s movement, it saw the exclusion of women of color, Indigenous women, working -class women. Those unitary blocs tended to fall aside in the 1990s and early 2000s. Citizenship became an available option that was more inclusive. At the same time, the three kinds of citizenship that I write about were converging in certain ways.
After the Second World War, the original political citizenship – which we receive from ancient Rome and Athens through the French and US revolutions – granted political citizenship to millions of people. There were 50 members of the UN in the late 1940s – now they have almost 200. They’re mostly democracies and generally have political rights to vote. They’ve almost all extended those rights to women and cut the age you need to be to vote. They’ve taken away a franchise limitation for those with private property, and so on. So you can see there’s a sort of Whiggish, teleological unfurling of political opportunity.
Economic citizenship, which many of us would trace back to the period after the Civil War in the US, when the widows of Union soldiers who died got a pension in recognition of their loss of future income. But it was essentially the Great Depression and the Second World War that led to the emergence of the welfare state and the promise that we’ll send your sons off to fight, and they’ll die, but your husbands will have jobs forever. The state would take responsibility for full employment and a package of reforms to provide education, health, and housing on an equitable basis. This kind of economic citizenship got turned on its head with the neoliberal revolution. ‘I don’t need the nanny state’, was the well-known British expression. That revolution has transformed economic citizenship and is a core part of redistributing income upwards.
Then there’s cultural citizenship, which is about the right to communicate and the right to a cultural identity. Many progressive constitutions – like India’s after it was liberated from the British, like South Africa’s after it was liberated from apartheid – include the idea of cultural diversity as a right, as a core integer of subjectivity. And these things, of course, merge when cultural politics becomes a big part of Politics with a capital P, when culture becomes not just a welfarist category or a private realm category, but part of gross domestic product. Included with that interlacing, as you say, are inevitable consumerist components, particularly in terms of the ‘legitimate definition’ of cultural citizenship, which is often in terms of purchasing power rather than the right to identity outside the market or for the environment, which has become a competing master discourse of great power and importance.
The adoption of this new category of environmental or green citizenship raises new issues, like the idea of human rights being extended to animals. This is important, particularly as we understand more about the emotions, pain, and suffering of our fellow animals. In addition to the rights of animals and the environment, we need to consider our obligations towards other creatures. Because we are the species with the ability to communicate on behalf of others in an argumentative way. And we are the species responsible for transforming the environment of our fellow animals in ways that they’ve never done. To us is given the gift of communication beyond that of our fellow animals. So we also need to understand our fellow animals and vocalise on their behalf for other people.
Pape: Let’s do what you do in your podcast: are there any last things that you wanted to bring up, or a part of the conversation you wanted to cycle back to?
van der Deure: I really appreciate your thoughts on academia. As an early career academic, I think this is very welcoming and encouraging.
Miller: Well, maybe I could pick up on that theme to finish things. The advice I’ve given over many years to doctoral students is this: satisfy to the minimum – but satisfy – the requirements of the state and the university. It should be ‘to the minimum’ because those requirements will change and suddenly the massive investment you made in X or Y is worth nothing. So keep doing what they require you to do, but don’t believe in it and don’t think it’s going to be true in Q amount of time.
Listen much more to tendencies in the international community from scholars that you respect. What are they doing? What are they writing about? Some of that is about participating in professional associations, but a lot of it is also about what you’re reading and the commitments of those authors.
And then the third thing, which is of course the most important, is to cycle back – to use that expression – to what got you into the game in the first place. What excites you? What makes you passionate? Why do you care? Keep bearing that in mind. And as part of that, realising that satisfying the state and the university, also keeping up with academics you admire and with professional associations, are not going to sustain you. Doing what you care about sustains you.
Authors
Toni Pape is a cultural theorist and media scholar at the University of Amsterdam. His books include The Aesthetics of Stealth (2024), Figures of Time: Affect and the Television of Preemption (2019), and the co-authored Nocturnal Fabulations (2017). He is on the editorial board of NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies and an editor of the 3 Ecologies imprint at Punctum Press.
Mary-Joy van der Deure is a junior researcher at Utrecht University, working on the project AI-TaDa: Automatic Indexing for Historical Television Data. She has previously worked on the project CLARIAH WP5: Media Studies and Audiovisual Data, and the CLICK-NL project Re-Frame on the reuse of audiovisual data in journalism.
References
Lenin, V. Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism. London: Penguin, 2010.
