The Cultural Prison: Discourse, Prisoners, and Punishment

By John M. Sloop

The incarcerated in America's cultural imagination.

The Cultural Prison brings a new dimension to the study of prisoners and punishment by focusing on how the punishment of American offenders is represented and shaped in the mass media through public arguments. The study is based on an analysis of 642 articles collected by the author from American popular journals and magazines, as well as newspaper accounts, films, and public speeches, spanning the years 1950 to 1992. By piecing together and studying these popular narratives, he divides the history of prisoners and punishment into four eras, each marked by a shift in value system. He argues that the discourse, or rhetoric, surrounding prisoners and punishment on the public level works as a historical force that shapes contemporary culture.

The author is concerned that the public seems to have an inability or unwillingness to question or resist cultural definitions of normalcy and legal behavior. He explains that ideally moral behavior should be a matter of public debate rather than of unquestioned perpetuation, and he urges increased understanding of institutional and cultural discipline and our questioning the ways in which the constitution of punishment and prisoners influences us culturally.

The"cultural prison" refers to the way in which this study acts as an investigation of "the discipline of discipline"; it is an examination of the way in which discipline is shaped and formed in public discourse. The volume concludes with a fascinating account of the move to electronic means of surveillance; coupled with the representations of the prisoner along the lines of race and gender, it explains what these new techniques mean to contemporary culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817390440

Book preview

The Cultural Prison

STUDIES IN RHETORIC AND COMMUNICATION

General Editors:

E. Culpepper Clark

Raymie E. McKerrow

David Zarefsky

The Cultural Prison

Discourse, Prisoners, and Punishment

John M. Sloop

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 1996

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sloop, John M., 1963–

   The cultural prison : discourse, prisoners, and punishment / John M. Sloop.

p.   cm.—(Studies in rhetoric and communication)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 0-8173-0822-9

   1. Prisoners in popular culture—United States. 2. Mass media and criminal justice—United States. 3. Discourse analysis—United States. I. Title. II. Series.

HV9466.S66    1996

365′.973—dc20

95-38732

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-9044-0 (electronic)

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: The Historical Force of Rhetoric and the Disciplinary Force of Culture

2. Prelude to the Present: American Histories of Punishment

3. Rehabilitation and the Altruistic Inmate, 1950–1959

4. The Inmate Divide: Rehabilitation and Immorality, 1960–1968

5. Rehabilitation, Revolution, and Irrationality, 1969–1974

6. The Meaning of Just Deserts: Valuing Our Discipline, 1975–1993

7. Conclusions, Beginnings: Into the Future

Appendix 1. Theoretical Perspectives

Appendix 2. Differentiating Eras of Discourse

Appendix 3. Percentage of Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons by Race and Gender

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Portions of chapter 6 originally appeared as ‘The Parent I Never Had’: The Contemporary Construction of Alternatives to Incarceration, Communication Studies 43 (1992): 1–13, copyright 1992 by the Central States Communication Association; used by permission.

Thanks to the Drake University Center for the Humanities for funding portions of this project.

While I would like to express particular thanks to the following people, I recognize that the collaborative nature of all writing means that I will leave many other very important people off this list: I am indebted to the members of my dissertation committee—Bruce Gronbeck (adviser), Michael Calvin McGee, Sam Becker, John Lyne, and Rudy Kuenzli—as it was central to the completion of my dissertation, upon which this manuscript overlaps in part. My ongoing relationships with several of my graduate school peers cannot go unnoticed, as I am deeply in debt to the following people: Todd Boyd, Dana Cloud, Fernando Delgado, and Ben Attias. Accolades for her patience and insight go to Jennifer Gunn. For keeping me aware of what’s really important, I thank Christopher Sloop. Inspiration and a payback of a different kind to my friends Sara Romweber, Michael Rank, and Andy McMillan—I owe the three of you very much. For support and inspiration when the editing and rewriting processes seemed at their darkest, I must thank the colleagues, friends, and students at Drake University, especially Robert Hariman, Bill Lewis, Allen Scult, Jon Ericson, Jody Swilky, Richard Abel, Barbara Hodgdon, Andrew Herman, Joseph Schneider, Rachel Buckles, Jennifer Stiff, Jon Shectman, and Shari Stenberg. For keeping me company in my office on my Sony CFD-440, I thank Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses) and Thelonious Monk (especially Ruby, My Dear). Finally, my most sincere thanks go to my friend-peer-teacher-collaborator Kent Ono, to whom my debt is deeper than I care to imagine.

1

Introduction

The Historical Force of Rhetoric and The Disciplinary Force of Culture

In late 1987, after having been convicted of drug possession and driving while intoxicated, Maria Arnford was to be sentenced by Texas District Court judge Ted Poe. Because Texas prisons were at the time filled above suggested capacity levels, primarily because of laws that either lengthened sentences or mandated imprisonment for virtually all classifications of crime in Texas, Judge Poe found himself faced with what has become an increasingly common problem: balancing the legal and popular demand for imprisonment and the spatial and economic constraints that create prisons so overcrowded as to constitute grounds for claims of cruel and unusual punishment. In this case, Poe chose to utilize one of the few alternatives available that would not increase the population of any of the state’s prisons. Arnford’s home was transformed into what was in effect a mediated prison: a video screen, camera, and transmitter were installed to assure authorities, who would call at random, that Arnford was home, constantly ready to transmit her image back to them. Furthermore, Arnford was asked at random times to provide urine samples as evidence that she was following orders to abstain from drugs and alcohol for the duration of her punishment. According to the conditions of her sentence, Arnford was permitted to leave her house only for preapproved therapy appointments, community service activities, and church meetings. The gaze of the state was fixed intently upon Arnford, its probe monitoring not only her movements but the composition of her blood.

While the form of Arnford’s punishment is provocative on its own grounds, it is not the most engaging or troubling aspect of this narrative, a story told in the pages of People. Rather, Arnford’s personal assessment of the monitoring system is simultaneously both more chilling and more intriguing. When asked to comment on the effects of this experimental punishment, Arnford noted, This program has been like a parent to me, the parent I never had (quoted in Outside the Walls 23).

From the moment I first read this statement, Arnford’s words have haunted and engaged me. Her assessment is one positioned for polyvalent reactions; it is sure to bring encouragement to those interested in the rehabilitative possibilities of punishment, tears to the eyes of civil libertarians, and slightly nervous nods of recognition from those familiar with Michel Foucault’s thesis of the carceral society and the panopticon. As a person’s body and subjectivity are overtly open for testing, therapy, and control by the state, she neither protests nor stands by numbly accepting what is her due. Instead, she expresses a feeling of gratitude, one that encourages a continuance of her correction. While Jean-François Lyotard has recounted the death of the metanarrative and the advent of the postmodern condition, and while Jean Baudrillard has been busy living the life of a postmodern, noting that our condition is one in which we are gorged with meaning, and it is killing us (1988, 63), I take pause on the basis of this and similar stories. Maria Arnford is not represented as confused about the stability of metanarratives nor is she represented as being laid to waste by excess meaning; instead, in embracing the state as parent, she appears to have found a strong shoulder, a strong metanarrative to provide a renewal of both life and meaning.

If we approach this story from a rhetorical angle, assuming the influence of discourse on creating social issues and subjectivity, a number of questions arise. First, what are the rhetorical circumstances that create a reality in which a claim such as Arnford’s could be published in People, a widely distributed popular journal, without attracting much attention? Second, what are the possible cultural effects of a shared reality that encourages such complete penetration of one of its participants, albeit a criminal one? Third, what is the cultural significance of the gender, class, race, and sexual orientation of Arnford, each at least implicitly suggested in the article (i.e., Arnford is a woman, middle class, Caucasian, heterosexual), in this representation of discipline? Finally, and perhaps most important, what type of social world is implied by our uncritical acceptance of her words, and what alternative visions might be offered?

In approaching these questions and their accompanying problems, I am interested in understanding how it is that we, as a culture, have constructed a reality that allows this particular configuration of discipline. In order to gain this understanding, to comprehend the present discourse about punishment and about those who are punished, I have also found it necessary to examine the history of public discourses dealing with punishment and prisoners in the United States. With this perspective, I could work forward to see how the layers of discourse from the past continue to act as forces in shaping the contemporary construction of prisoners and punishment. In short, I wanted to know how we had arrived at our current condition, and could only do so by understanding the discursive undergirdings of our current conceptions of prisoners. In the chapters that follow, I present the lines of argument about prisoners that have developed over time and the characterizations and narratives that shape our contemporary cultural understanding of prisoners and punishment in an attempt to answer this initial line of inquiry.

Assuming that the discourse surrounding prisoners and punishment acts as a material social force that creates space for the current discussion of punishment, particularly alternatives to incarceration, I investigate the general cultural positioning of prisoners. Theoretically, this project requires an inquiry into the relationships between culture, mediated images, ideology, hegemony, rhetoric, and discipline.

Because I am less interested in how prison sentences are enforced than in how dominant culture talks about their enforcement, my primary focus is on how the institutional punishment of our society’s offenders is represented in mass-mediated and popular outlets. That is, I am more interested in how we talk about prisoners and punishment than in a discussion of what prisoners and punishment really are. I wish to claim (and will clarify this claim below) that the behavior, morality, and subjectivity of all members of a culture are tied to the way misbehavior, particularly via characterizations of prisoners, is represented in mass-media outlets and public arguments. In what follows, I argue that mass-mediated representations of prisoners function as a public display of the transgression of cultural norms; as such, they are a key site at which one may investigate the relationship of the individual to culture in general, as well as the cultural articulation of proper behavior. Hence, the cultural articulation of the prisoner and the punished teaches everyone, convict and law-abiding citizen alike, his or her position relative to cultural institutions that constitute the culture at large.

Because my particular orientation toward discourse and the study of culture may be unfamiliar to some readers, I will begin below by briefly outlining my understanding of the impact of rhetoric in culture as a disciplinary force. Moreover, I will describe the particular discourses that are the subject of this study, noting the ways these choices shape the claims and observations I make throughout the book.

Rhetoric and Culture, Energy and Mortar

The assumption with which I begin is that rhetoric acts as an extraordinarily powerful and historical basis by and through which cultures and individuals are constituted.¹ The relationship between rhetoric and culture is a fairly slippery one, however, and while I’m not one given to definitional moments in an essay or book, it seems here that an attempt to provide some sense of that relationship will be helpful in understanding how I approached this study. In noting that culture is the very material of our daily lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings (184–85), Paul Willis provided a double-edged definition of culture: while culture is positive in the sense that life could not be experienced without the bricks and mortar that give it shape and substance, it is also negative, or constraining, in that bricks and mortar have a discursive materiality that privileges existing discourses, existing ideology. As discourses and definitions become generally accepted within culture, they are assumed and hence act as sedimented practices. Particular orders of discourse, shared definitions, must exist if human beings are to have consciousness of themselves and the world around them. Yet, the need for regularity gives such discourses a solidified nature in which change and transition become difficult.²

If culture refers to the bricks and mortar of everyday understandings, rhetoric is the energy of culture. That is, just as energy in the material world represents the work of material objects, rhetoric is that which is the energy or movement of the symbolic or cultural world.³ These conceptualizations have at least two implications that are relevant to this study. First, rhetoric and culture cannot be studied separately. When we study the movement or work of bricks and mortar, we necessarily investigate the bricks and mortar themselves. When we investigate culture, we are almost necessarily interested in the ways in which culture hangs together, how strong is its pull on those who are held together by it. Second, if rhetoric is the energy of the symbolic world, the ease with which we perceive it is related to its power. Hence, rhetoric that is the most obvious can also be the most harmless in that we can most easily protect ourselves from it by shying away from it. Just as one knows better than to touch the exposed wiring in an electric cord, one can also learn to shy away from get-rich-quick schemes after being burned once too often. The task of the rhetorical critic, paralleling that of someone whose job is to measure low levels of radiation in residential areas, is to measure and reveal the energy of the bricks and mortar that have become so commonplace that we no longer notice their power. Through awareness, we can seek to change our reactions.

Saying that one is studying the bricks and mortar of everyday life and the ways in which these bricks and mortar constrain and enable is more problematic than it may sound initially. Two sets of questions arise: first, what locations and types of discourse does one study in order to examine the bricks and mortar of a particular group of people? How broad a set of claims can be made on the basis of those discourses? Second, and in some sense most important, what is the status of a work that purports to be a study of the discourses on a specific topic? How does that work itself operate as a part of the energy of culture? Indeed, how does the critic position rhetorical criticism that purports to be doing cultural criticism?

In that this is an investigation of a series of discourses about a particular cultural topic, it is a cultural history of prisoners and punishment that assumes that such representations work to offer knowledge and subject positions to cultural participants, providing part of the material that allows them to exist while simultaneously constraining their knowledge/understanding. In attempting both to justify the particular set of discourses that I am investigating in this text and to explain the status of this work as a discourse in itself, I want to be clear that my investigation focuses on dominant discourse, dominant ideology. My attempt is to provide a practical edge to what has been called critical rhetoric.⁴ As Robert Hariman recently has pointed out, discourse theorists and critical rhetoricians have been guilty in part of theorization without the performative edge they so often claim to valorize (Afterward). This book should be seen as an attempt to draw from the critical rhetoric perspective but to put in play its critical and performative promise.⁵

The promise of critical rhetoric was made by Raymie McKerrow in 1989 when he delineated a critical practice that would pull together disparate scraps of discourse which, when constructed as an argument, serve to illuminate otherwise hidden or taken for granted social practices (101). Based on the assumption that the discourse and communications of contemporary culture are fragmented, critical rhetoric gave over to critics the role of pulling together the multiple layers of communication that take place in culture and of drawing them together to show the ways particular objects of discourse are created, how relationships of power aid in the determination of these definitions, and the senses in which different people have varying opportunities to speak on different topics.⁶ If one wants to understand how a particular term or idea has cultural meaning, this perspective requires that rather than investigating academic or philosophical discussions of the topic, one focuses on the public discourse surrounding it (McGee, Origins 25).⁷ It is what is in the open, what is accepted as true, what people are willing to claim in public places, that acts as true and provides meaning for those who embody specific terms and positions. Only to the degree that an idea is convincing to a large number of people will it carry social force and gain materiality (Condit, Decoding 9).⁸ Hence, prisoners and punishment only have meaning to the degree that their usage acts upon members of a particular culture. We cannot understand the enacted meaning of the term prisoners by looking only at what philosophers or sociologists of crime and punishment mean by it unless such philosophers and sociologists have taken their discourse into the public forum and made claims in the ideological struggle over its meaning.⁹ By looking at philosophical debates over the meaning of punishment or the nature of criminals, we perceive how the term operates within philosophical communities. By looking at popular discussions of the same arguments, we understand more fully how the dominant culture uses and shapes the concepts in everyday life.

To respond to the first few questions I asked above in problematizing this perspective, the pulling together of disparate fragments from a culture is the study of dominant culture; it is the study of what the most popular voices have had to say about a particular topic. While dominant ideology is certainly important in that it influences, positively or negatively, the ways in which all members of a culture constitute not only given objects of discourse but also, and importantly, their selves, I should also be clear that this study is limited to a reading of the dominant discourses of a culture, rather than of overtly resistant ones or of marginal ones. While resistant themes may run through some of the discourses that are dominant, as a whole such discourses tend toward stability of the overall system.

I have suggested that the way in which a term works in practice in the present is highly dependent on how it has functioned in the past. I have also suggested that understanding the present meanings of a term, the culture’s brick-and-mortar understanding of a topic, requires that the fragments of dominant discourse be assembled and an argument or story drawn from them. However, asserting that a particular term gains its meaning in material usage provides a virtually never-ending set of locations from which to investigate its cultural usage, even if one is studying dominant discourses. Where, then, from all of the available discourse, does one look to find the dominant meaning of, say, the term prisoner in practice?

When Michel Foucault posed this question during his archaeology phase, he claimed that there must not be any privileged choice. One must be able to read everything, to know all the institutions and all the practices (Order 3). Foucault posited himself as the ultimate discursive positivist, uncovering all discourse surrounding objects and unearthing the rules and relations that allow objects to appear, presumably separating himself from, and exhaustively researching, contemporary discourse, investigating every instance of a term’s usage, every treatise, every legal document, every utterance, every grunt (Archaeology 185). In practice, this claim is absurd, although certainly admirable. Realizing the impossibility of such a search, Foucault’s genealogical perspective tightens limits on what would be analyzed in that the guiding criterion of genealogy can be argued to be persuasiveness rather than comprehensiveness. That is, while genealogical investigations continue the turn away from transcendentalism, they are also more pragmatic. Hence, Foucault provides discourses from a variety of types of sources (daily papers, diaries, journals, discussions, and so forth) in enough detail to persuade his reader that he has indeed come to a thorough genealogical investigation (Truth 117). My own choice of discourses borrows perspective from Foucault’s claims about both archaeology and genealogy.

Hence, I have attempted to be comprehensive within a particular domain of discourses (popular journals) while at the same time fleshing out my readings of these discourses with spot checks of discourse from other domains (primarily newspaper accounts and films).¹⁰ In order to investigate the popular meaning of prisoners, I have comprehensively collected and investigated all articles from popular journals under the heading prisoners (or under relevant subheadings)¹¹ in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature from 1950 to 1993. In this way, I provide a comprehensive study of one set of discourses while simultaneously checking on other forms of popular discourse. In full, this approach provided my study with 642 popular articles dealing with prisoners.

The second set of questions that this perspective demands be answered concerns the status of the critical work itself (that is, the text you are reading). If discourse has meaning in the interstices of power and knowledge, this text itself cannot be purely descriptive; nor, on the other hand, can it be scientifically explanatory, as it is itself one discourse that adds to the overall understanding of the terms prisoner and punishment (as well as terms that are often represented alongside these two, like, say African American or homosexual).

When Foucault moves on to his genealogical phase, he focuses more on the relations of power that shape the creation of subjects within local conditions and examines the influence of the past on the present. Here, with more of a Nietzschean flavor, he closely investigates the operations of power, particularly as it operates in and through bodies in the production of knowledge and subjectivity. Whereas archaeology depicts the subject as a fictitious construct, genealogy attempts to understand and illustrate the material context of the construction of this fiction, to illustrate the political consequences of subjectification, and to draw out possible lines of resistance (Clarifications 189).

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault questions his own desire to write a history of the discipline of the body and answers, in a now oft-quoted passage: Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present (31). Here, and again in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault moves to reappropriate history, to see the writing of history as a task with roots and effects in the present. In writing a history of the present, one writes a history that highlights the present, that comments on it, and in the process of discussing matters particular to the present, transforms the present and its objects. A history of the way the meaning of homosexuality has developed culturally, for example, might lead the present members of a given culture to acknowledge the groundlessness of our ideas on homosexuality and homosexuals and, in the process, transform the overall cultural representation and positioning of homosexuality. As Foucault notes, History has a more important task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons and antidotes. Its task is to become a curative science (Nietzsche 90). Discourse, then, including genealogical studies, is always already a material force acting upon the knowledges and activities of the present.

Hence, in that all discourses about the past act as forces in creating the present, the genealogical study is itself a force of intervention. This book does not escape such a status. It cannot be seen as purely descriptive, nor can it be seen as an objective description of the causes of shifts in the representation of the prisoner. While I have attempted to be thorough in constructing a fully developed narrative, my text is necessarily also an effective discourse.¹²

The Cultural Prison: Institutional and Cultural Discipline

As the title of this section notes, discipline operates on two levels throughout this text: the institutional and the cultural. Discipline not only refers to how institutions (such as governments, schools) literally and physically discipline individuals (for example, by incarceration, whippings) but also refers to how discipline takes place on a cultural level through the reactions of the looking-glass self. Ignoring Louis Althusser’s structuralist leanings, one could claim, in his idiom, that I am interested here in looking at the way in which ISA (ideological state apparatus) discussions of RSAs (repressive state apparatuses) themselves act as a form of discipline; I am interested, then, quite literally, in critiquing public discussions of disciplined subjects. In that I will argue that public discussions are themselves a form of discipline, I am interested in the disciplinary power of discussions of discipline, the discipline of discipline.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault delineates a line of difference between forms of punishment in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century France. He is taken with the shift from public executions of criminals and the focus on the discipline of bodies to the 1970s’ conception of a punishment aimed at the soul, directed toward the rehabilitation of the individual. He notes that ever since the new penal system . . . has been in operation, a general process has led judges to judge something other than the crimes . . . and the power of judging has been transferred, in part, to other authorities than the judges of the offense (22). Foucault indicts our current society as disciplinary and points to the normalizing procedures that affect every aspect of our lives, procedures masked by the link between power and knowledge. He claims that each of our institutions and the representatives of these institutions—law and lawyers, education and educators, religion and priests, and so on—are on the lookout not so much for the violation of laws and rules as for departures from what is normal (298–99).

The creation of this carceral society has encouraged the emergence of a new form of law—a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution, the norm—and places each of us in the role of the judge (304). We need only add the title judge to our occupational and cultural roles to understand the implications of this claim; we are a society of teacher-judges, doctor-judges, social worker-judges, psychoanalyst-judges, friend-judges, spouse-judges, and so forth. Through the human sciences and our disposition to rehabilitate the individual, our job descriptions necessarily include watching for those who fall outside the boundaries of proper human behavior and thought.¹³ The growth of the carceral society necessarily leads to the deterioration of even an imaginary private space in which the individual can freely or easily behave outside of normal behavior. We live in a carceral society in which a large number of forces work to hold individual subjects within certain grounds of behavior, to discipline them.

I contend that this notion of discipline may be transferred to the general behavior of mass-mediated discourses, which, as a characteristic of operation, work in tandem with the dominant social structure and the dominant ideology by disciplining all opinions counter to it. In other words, I am conducting an investigation of ideology and culture through a discussion of the disciplinary nature of the mass media. I suggest that ideology and the mass media are interconnected because the media and its operators reflect ideological demands not by intent but simply as a matter of operation.

Although I have emphasized that rhetoric (discourse) operates as a force in culture, I am not attempting to construct a prison house of language argument. My focus is on the public construction of prisoners and punishment and hence on the starting material with which people operate; what people individually do with this material is a different question. I do not mean to suggest that displaced subjects have no agency within their constructed boundaries. Indeed, recent work in cultural studies has witnessed a reemergence of discussions on how human subjects are able to provide individual interpretations of cultural artifacts that provide resistance to dominant cultural discourses. From the early 1980s onwards, work within cultural studies shifts attention increasingly away from the production of discourse (writers, producers, schools, and so forth) and the product (books, newspaper articles, broadcasts) and to the ways in which the weak in society make use of cultural artifacts in order to create a sphere of autonomous action and self-determination within the constraints imposed upon them.¹⁴ Essentially, this shift represents a move to a Gramscian theory of hegemony, one in which it is made clear that in order to have control over subordinate groups, the ruling group must win and shape consent so that the power of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural. If consent must be won over, there is room for resistance from nondominant groups within culture.¹⁵

I place myself in a central position between structural theories of discourse and those that search for signs and room for resistance in all activities engaged. My position is somewhat similar to that articulated by Celeste Condit in her response to cultural critics and theorists who emphasize the power of audiences to control, with relative autonomy, their interpretations of mass-mediated discourses. Condit suggests that the audience’s ability to shape its readings is limited by factors such as the audience member’s access to oppositional codes, the ratio between the work required and pleasure produced in decoding a text, the repertoire of available texts, and the historical occasion (Rhetorical 104). Rather than autonomous audiences or totalizing media, Condit views media and audiences as interactive in the assessment and creation of mediated messages. Furthermore, Condit notes that because television or any mass medium addresses upscale viewers for the purpose of attracting advertisers, these media are constraining simply because their economic interests encourage them to address this dominant audience and promote its interests (Rhetorical 112). The audience has power to interpret, then, but that power is limited both by its own characteristics and by the economic interests of the media. Unlike arguments claiming that audience reception has very little effect on the ultimate meaning of a mediated message (for example, its sexism or racism), Condit sees media outlets as placing constraints on how a message might be read even though audiences place the ultimate value on what is essentially a shared meaning of the text.¹⁶

The most important conclusion to draw from this argument is that mass-media outlets, due both to the position of the producers of mass-mediated texts as members of mass culture and to economic constraints that require marketable output, will necessarily reproduce, albeit with minor changes, the dominant culture’s ideology and its perspective on any topic given voice. Hence, while a representation of a woman or an African-American male prisoner, for example, might be different than the empirical reality, it cannot be outside of what is ideologically acceptable to a great number of people whom advertisers wish to reach. Change can occur, but only change that is already somewhat