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Abstract
Recent years have seen a productive dialogue develop between political-economic and cultural approaches to media studies. In this spirit, this article draws on the analytic tools of political economy to produce a textual analysis of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. In particular, we argue that Rowling has woven throughout the Potter series a set of contradictory discourses related to class and consumerism. Yet out of this heteroglossia, AOL Time Warner—the holder of the series’ film and merchandising rights—has activated a narrow reading of Harry Potter that subordinates Rowling's critique of social inequality and materialism while amplifying those moments in the texts that celebrate the “magic” of commodity consumption. Our conclusion discusses the role such corporate activations might play in the struggle over how commodity production and consumption will be understood in the wider social field.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the editors of CCCS and the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our paper and their helpful suggestions for revision.
Notes
1. Graham Murdock, “Base Notes: The Conditions of Cultural Practice,” in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. M. Ferguson and P. Golding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998); Todd Gitlin, “The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies,” in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. M. Ferguson and P. Golding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998); Leslie Steeves and Janet Wasko, “Feminist Theory and Political Economy: Toward a Friendly Alliance,” in Sex & Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media, ed. E. Meehan and E. Riordan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
2. Chris Barker, Making Sense of Cultural Studies: Central Problems and Critical Debates (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002); John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987); Larry Grossberg, “Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy: Is Anybody Else Bored with This Debate?” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, issue 1 (1995): 72–81.
3. See especially the “dialogue” between Larry Grossberg, “Cultural Studies vs. Political Economy,” and Nicholas Garnham, “Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Reconciliation or Divorce?” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, issue 1 (1995): 62–71.
4. Douglas Kellner, “Overcoming the Divide: Cultural Studies and Political Economy,” in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. M. Ferguson and P. Golding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998); Eileen Meehan, “Commodity, Culture, Common Sense: Media Research and Paradigm Dialogue,” Journal of Media Economics 12, issue 2 (1999): 149–63.
5. Paul duGay and Michael Pryke, Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Open University Press, 2002); Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
6. Eileen Meehan, “Leisure or Labor? Fan Ethnography and Political Economy,” in Consuming Audiences? Production and Reception in Audience Research, ed. I. Hagen and J. Wasko (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000).
7. Carol Stabile, “Resistance, Recuperation, and Reflexivity: The Limits of a Paradigm,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, issue 4 (1995): 403–22.
8. Eileen Meehan, “Commodity, Culture, Common Sense.”
9. There are, of course, other political economists who have begun to take issues of culture and meaning seriously in their work. For examples, see Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000); Oscar Gandy, Communication and Race: A Structural Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
10. The critical literature on the commodification of children's culture is rich and voluminous. See especially Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children's Culture in the Age of Marketing (New York: Verso, 1992); Ellen Seiter, Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Norma Pecora, The Business of Children's Entertainment (New York: Guildford Press, 1998); Henry Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); Marsha Kinder, ed., Kids’ Media Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004); B. Langer, “The Business of Branded Enchantment: Ambivalence and Disjuncture in the Global Children's Culture Industry,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 4 (2004): 251–77; Jyostna Kapur, Coining for Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Transformation of Childhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
11. The firm formerly known as AOL Time Warner has since re-named itself, returning to the moniker of TimeWarner (presumably to exorcise the demons of the dot.com bust of 2001). We have chosen to stick with the previous name to emphasize that most of the relevant decisions regarding the commodification of Harry Potter were made while the “AOL” was still part of the firm's name.
12. Kent Ono and D. Buescher, “Deciphering Pocahontas,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, issue 1 (2001): 23–41.
13. “Global Potter Sles Top 300m Mark,” BBC News website, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4308548.stm (accessed on January 5, 2007); “Harry Potter and the All-Too-Rare Windfall,” The Economist, 18 July 2005.
14. Nigel Reynolds, “$100,000 Success Story for Penniless Mother,” The Telegraph, Spring 1997, http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/1997/spring97-telegraph-reynolds.htm (accessed April 7, 2006).
15. “Top Book Publishers in the U.K., 2004,” Printing World, 3 September 2004, 20; Alan Cowell, “Harry Potter and the Magic Stock: A Children's Book Series Helps Rejuvenate a British Publisher,” New York Times, 18 October 1999, C1.
16. Cowell, “Harry Potter and the Magic Stock,” C1.
17. Janet Wasko, How Hollywood Works (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 54n2.
18. Nigel Reynolds, “Harry Potter, Inc: The Boy Wizard Makes a Spectacular Return,” Maclean's, 17 July 2000, http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/2000/0700-macleans-reynolds.html (accessed April 7, 2006).
19. Reynolds, “$100,000 Success Story for Penniless Mother.”
20. Andrew Walker, “Harry Potter is Off to Hollywood—Writer a Millionairess,” The Scotsman, October 9, 1998, http://www.quick-quote-quill.org/articles/1998/1098-scotsman-walker.htm (accessed April 7, 2006).; David Lieberman, “Marketers Count on Potter Film for Golden Touch,” USA Today, 18 July 2000, B1.
21. Lieberman, “Marketers Count on Potter Film.”
22. Lieberman, “Marketers Count on Potter Film.”
23. Saul Hansell, “Media Megadeal—The Overview: American Online Agrees to Buy Time Warner for $165 billion; Media Deal is Richest Merger,” New York Times, 11 January 2000, A1.
24. Alex Kuczynski and Bill Carter, “Media Megadeal—The Empire: Potentially Big Effect Seen on Varied Units of AOL Time Warner, New York Times, 11 January 2000, C11.
25. David Kirkpatrick and David Carr, “A Media Giant Needs a Script,” New York Times, 7 July 2002, C1. Later, AOL Time Warner shareholders would file a lawsuit against the company's executives, alleging that during the early 2000s, AOL improperly overstated its revenues by more than $1 billion. The lawsuit also contended that AOL executives sought to conceal this discrepancy from investors in the months prior to AOL's purchase of Time Warner. Shareholders had cause for concern: in the months after the takeover, AOL Time Warner's share price dropped by 70 percent. David Kirkpatrick, “Lawsuit Says AOL Investors Were Misled,” New York Times, 15 April 2003, C1; David Kirkpatrick, “Added Value: Dissecting a Deal That Soured,” New York Times, 22 June 2003, C5.
26. Christopher Grimes, “Harry Potter and the Sales Team,” Financial Times, 16 November 2001, 17.
27. Brycchan Carey, “Hermione and the House Elves: The Literary and Historical Contexts of J.K. Rowling's Antislavery Campaign,” in Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, ed. Giselle Liza Anatol, (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 103.
28. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (New York: Scholastic, 1998), 19.
29. Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 32.
30. Ximena Gallardo-C and C. Jason Smith, “Cinderfella: J.K. Rowling's Wily Web of Gender,” in Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, ed. Giselle Liza Anatol (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
31. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (New York: Scholastic, 1999), 8.
32. Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 20.
33. Rowling, Prisoner of Azkaban, 22.
34. Remus Lupin, a teacher at Hogwarts in the third book, is often described as careworn and impoverished, due primarily to his status as a werewolf, which makes it difficult to secure steady employment in a wizarding world suspicious of his “kind.”
35. Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 100–101.
36. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (New York: Scholastic, 2000), 157.
37. Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 77.
38. Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 108–9.
39. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (New York: Scholastic, 2003), 154–55.
40. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (New York: Scholastic, 1999), 16–17.
41. Rowling, Goblet of Fire, 182.
42. Rowling, Goblet of Fire, 378–79.
43. Suman Gupta, Re-Reading Harry Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
44. Rowling, Goblet of Fire, 224.
45. Rowling, Order of the Phoenix, 385.
46. Rowling, Order of the Phoenix, 832.
47. Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication (London: Sage, 1996). By constructing a class system that is more categorical than relational, Rowling has shown herself to be more Weberian than Marxian. As Erik Olin Wright points out, both Weber and Marx agree that class position determines access to resources, and this differential access shapes both an individual's life chances and their material interests. But while Weberian class analysis focuses largely on the distributional conflicts generated by class inequality—that is, how the rich can “outbid” the poor for key resources like commodities, education, housing, and health care—Marxian class analysis centers on the origins of class power and inequality in the productive system. Thus the key concept in Marxian class analysis is not distribution but exploitation. What divides the classes, in Marxian terms, is not merely an unequal distribution of resources, but the question of how those resources are produced, by whom, and in whose interests. The wealth generated by a capitalist firm, in short, is produced by extracting more value from labor than labor is paid. This wealth, extracted from labor, then becomes the private property of the firm, to be distributed or reinvested as it sees fit. Thus, not only is wealth unevenly distributed—a process that enhances the life chances of some and reduces them for others—but the origins of this unequal distribution in a relationship of exploitation point to the inherently antagonistic material and political interests of competing social classes. For more on the distinction between Weberian and Marxian conceptions of class, see Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Student Edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27–34.
48. Wright, Class Counts, 27–34.
49. Gupta, Re-Reading Harry Potter, 139.
50. Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1999), 410–23.
51. Williams, “Advertising,” 422.
52. Williams, “Advertising,” 422.
53. Gupta, Re-Reading Harry Potter, 133.
54. Gupta, Re-Reading Harry Potter, 133.
55. Rowling, Goblet of Fire, 97.
56. Rowling, Prisoner of Azkaban, 151.
57. Rowling, Prisoner of Azkaban, 13, 167.
58. Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 71–2.
59. The cloak's status as a commodity is revealed when Ron, upon seeing Harry receive the cloak, exclaims “I've heard of those. … If that's what I think it is—they're really rare, and really valuable.” Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 201.
60. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987).
61. Eileen Meehan, “‘Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!’ The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext,” in The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, ed. R. Pearson and W. Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991).
62. Ono and Buescher, “Deciphering Pocahontas.”
63. Kapur, Coining for Capital, 153.
64. Kapur, Coining for Capital, 153.
65. Kapur, Coining for Capital, 156.
66. Rick Lyman, “Harry Potter and Hollywood's Cash Cow,” New York Times, 4 November 2001, A1.
67. B. Falitz, “Warner Bros. Pictures Unveils Exclusive Web Experience Dedicated To Harry Potter and The Chamber Of Secrets,” http//: www.media.aoltimewarner.com (accessed November 19, 2004).
68. For example, on his first train ride to Hogwarts, Harry opens a “chocolate frog” that includes a witch and wizarding trading card with an animated picture that gestures, waves, and is able to leave the frame altogether. “Muggle” consumers are now able to purchase from Hasbro their own chocolate frogs that include trading cards complete with lenticular imaging so as to provide a “magic image” with moving characters. To complete the simulation of Harry's experience, the cards do not feature witches and wizards from the books or movies. Since Harry's cards feature figures from the past—people with whom he would be unfamiliar—the Hasbro cards introduce characters not mentioned in the novels.
69. Rowling, Sorcerer's Stone, 104.
70. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
71. For Bourdieu, doxa is a “particular point of view—the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view.” This said, he writes, we should never forget that what “appears to us today as self-evident, as beneath consciousness and choice, has quite often been the stake of struggles and instituted only as the result of dogged confrontations between dominant and dominated groups.” Practical Reason, 56–57.
72. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 76–80.
73. Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987).
74. For an insightful review of the political possibilities and limits of Adbusters’ anti-corporate campaigns and parodies, see Christine Harold, “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, issue 3 (2004): 189–211.
75. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 146.
76. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 148.
77. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 148.
78. William Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).