Empowering Youth or Reshaping Compliance? Star Magazine, Symbolic Production, and Competing Visions of Shabab in Syria
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M.Phil Thesis in Modern Middle Eastern Studies
By George Weyman
Wadham College, University of Oxford
May 2006 |
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| Thesis in PDF format (no images) —1.16 MB |
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Table of Figures
Figure 1: Star magazine before and after
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Figure 2: Star magazine has offered a space for restaurant and caf brands to compete
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Figure 3: Modern billboards and banner advertisements in central Damascus
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Figure 4: The UG-supported advert calling on readers to endorse the regime at a time of crisis
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Figure 5: Syrian-produced brands which imitate global brands
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Figure 6: In addition to flags, banners, and posters, the Syrian regime sought to reassert national solidarity in the face of international pressure during the winter 2005 by re-appropriating advertising space for the display of regime-national symbols
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Figure 7: In the privatization of symbolic production, the regime-national and corporate-private codes of persuasion borrow from the same source
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Figure 8: Tina Busted on Cam lounging in bikini and sarong on her yacht
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Figure 9: As`ad Tarbih in the Lebanese Got Cha Exclusive
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Figures 10 and 11: The Lebanese-produced LInterview is also rejected from the Syrian magazine. The Syrian-produced Star Interview is a far cry from the Lebanese material
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Figure 12: Duddlys Column is the centrepiece of the Lebanese paparazzi material that is re-packaged to form Star News in the Syrian Magazine
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Figure 13: Backstage (here called Star Kawaliss) is one of four features (Star Interview, Real Star, Double Star) which precede the Lebanese-produced Star News
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Figure 14: the Star Team of young amateur writers in the magazine
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Figure 15: Caroles bullet points written on the white board to spark a discussion on young people and parental roles during a meeting with the Star team
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Figure 16: Ahmed ranked these images of women from 0 (acceptable) to 10 (unacceptable)
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Figure 17: The antithesis of paparazzi journalism – Star Zaman – traces Syrias modern history through events, places, and institutions
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Figure 18: This cartoon, though not from the Al-Domari, is nevertheless typical of the critique it pursued
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Figure 19: Milad Yusuf in Star Interview, first as a rock-loving biker in black T Shirt and sunglasses, then as himself in crisp white shirt with Star staff
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Figure 20: Three examples of Real Star. Men are displayed at work, writing, phoning, using the computer, commanding the office space; women are seen as the providers of a warm domestic space
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Figure 21: Star Elak
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Figure 22: Images of Inhouse Coffee
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Acknowledgements
To Kathleen, mum and dad, friends and family, and to all those who helped me research this thesis in Syria. A particular thank you to Walter Armbrust whose support and supervision have been invaluable.
1
Introduction
As far as Syrian
press vendors were concerned, the copy of Star magazine that arrived on 2 July 2005 was just another weeks instalment
of the paparazzi title. A brief
glance at the magazines front cover would present little to suggest otherwise:
the brand title retained its five-pronged star in place of the letter A; the
issue number – 30 – registered the magazines continuity; the faces
of selected celebrities still radiated youth and vitality. But a closer inspection of the cover would
point to the fundamental change that had taken place within: gone was the
English-language banner reading Weekly paparazzi magazine to be replaced by
an Arabic phrase, We have achieved change and we have not been changed (Gheyirna
wa ma tagheyirna). The Lebanese and
Western celebrities who graced the cover of the Lebanese-produced magazine had
been largely exchanged for Syrian stars of a different kind. Turning to the first page, an
English-language editorial written by a member of the new all-Syrian team raved
about the implications of Stars
transformation. Wow, it began,
a phone call which costs only 4 S.Y.P [Syrian Pounds] can cause all
this? Dedicated to introducing
youth work, the editorial spoke directly to its intended young Syrian reader:
I know youd probably think that we arent good enough for this work, but
well prove to you that were worth your time.
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Star magazine began life in Lebanon during the summer of
2004. Produced by Integra Publishing
and Marketing Solutions, the Lebanese subsidiary of Syrian-based conglomeration
United Group, the magazine was packed with paparazzi snaps and gossip from
Lebanon, the Arab world, and the West.
Catering mostly to a young female readership, Star combined celebrity news, exclusives, gossip-based
interviews, and fashion with film and TV reviews, games, and horoscopes in the
mould of any Western celebrity magazine.
In December the same year, the magazine was brought out in Syria with a
new issue number and different adverts, but otherwise exactly the same
content. However, 29 issues later,
in July 2005, the Syrian magazine was transformed in a bid to reflect Syrian
interests and values. The Lebanese
content was dramatically trimmed down, and the focus was channelled towards
Syrian actors and public figures. Other features concentrated on issues deemed
important for young people such as preparing for interviews, making lifestyle
choices, and pursuing relationships.
The writers who contributed most of the Syrian-produced material were
not high-flying paparazzi journalists, but young student amateurs brought in to
form what was called the Star Team. According to the current editorial
manager, Carole Ibrahim Bashara, who joined in July after the change, the
Lebanese issue was not appropriate for young Syrians. In her version of events, Stars general
manager Khaldoun Qita` Al-Na`l had the idea to adapt the magazine to the Syrian
market on the basis of statistics indicating an appetite for a more authentic
magazine amongst potential readers.
Syrian culture, according to Carole, is more local and Arab-focused than
cosmopolitan Lebanese culture. The
intense political context, in which Syria was being widely blamed for
orchestrating the murder of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri
in February 2005, was also a factor in persuading Star Syrias management to tone down the Lebanese
content.
Certainly, cooperation remains between the two offices – for
example, Star Syria continues to
offer a package of pages from the Lebanese version. But the marked differences between the Syrian- and the
Lebanese-produced magazines offer a unique insight into the cultural
differences between the two societies, and point to the enduring desire of
Syrian cultural producers to authenticate representations of social life.
A study of Star
Syria is not only pertinent to the
prevailing cultural and political order; it can also contribute to an
understanding of the broader historical narrative of the modern Middle East. The Syrianization of the magazine, a
process which has continued apace since the new version was first established
in July 2005, articulates with other periods and countries where
popular-culture forms adopted from the West have been gradually authenticated. Ryzova has documented how the
construction the woman-as-a-body
in popular illustrated magazines of early- to mid-twentieth century Egypt began
in the 1920s with imported sexualized images of Western women. These were
replaced gradually over the next few decades by localized, personalized
images of Egyptian womens bodies made capable of relating directly to
specifically Egyptian publics. This authentication lag in popular
culture is observable in numerous other realms. Wise has shown that Reality TV formats and entertainment
programming bought in the first case directly from Western formats is
increasingly becoming authenticated as ethical and consistent with Islamic
principles. In a bid to mimic and improve on the
success of Western reality TV formats Super Star (Future TV) and Star Academy (LBC), a new religious channel, Al-Risella (The Message), will launch in Cairo during
2006. It will be dedicated to
producing authentic entertainment programming compatible with Islam. Similar trends could well hold for the
establishment of fast food outlets, the development of satellite news channels,
and the production of video clips in the Middle East. Star can be
located within this broad historical trend, and is therefore a valuable source for
considering modernity in the region.
Indeed,
a study of Star aligns well with the
broad thrust of studies which have considered popular culture and mass media as
crucial realms of social contest and experimentation in the modern Middle
East. What is at stake in an
analysis of popular culture goes far deeper than many assume; it has potential
repercussions for understanding shifting state-society relations, changing
perceptions of West-East incompatibility (or alternatively, productive
synthesis), and emergent responses to the pace of globalization. In short, popular culture is a fertile
field for gaining an appreciation of the Middle Easts experiences of
modernity. As high cultural
production is often linked to the national cause, the contest between
elite-high and mass-low cultural visions elucidated by Twitchell in the Western
context
is all the more dramatic in the Middle East where national identities remain
emergent and malleable. This
thesis has a firm contribution to make to understandings of cultural contests
in Syrian society. In addition,
class contests are also relevant.
Despite the fact that media professionals in the Middle East habitually
claim to speak to all levels of society, the cultural output they have produced
throughout the twentieth century has consistently shown class biases and
presented class-based role models to be emulated. The ongoing relevance of the paradigm
in which the emerging middle classes are drivers of an authentically Arab
modernity is compellingly confirmed by Star magazine.
Furthermore, no group could be more representative of the vanguard than
the young middle classes. It is precisely this group to which Star magazine claims to speak, and it is all the more
didactic as a result. Because the
young are equated with the future of national progress, contests over how
society should look are played out more urgently amongst those who seek to
speak to and shape the young. The
notion of youth (shabab), which
in the Middle East has tended to refer to unmarried adolescents and young
adults, is a modern concept which emerges with the advent of mass education. Intervening between childhood and
marriage, mass education provides for a period of social and personal
transformation in which social relations and experimentation can take place
outside the home. Consequently,
young people (shabab) are prime
targets for those both within and beyond the state who seek to raise public
morality, as well as for private companies forging new patterns of leisure
consumption. For all these
reasons, a popular-culture youth magazine is an ideal avenue for exploring
changing social relations and cultural visions within Syrian society.
Studies examining
the role of mass media in shaping social perceptions in the Middle East have tended
to focus on the consumption of widely-consumed media events, particularly
dramatic serials (musalsals), and
largely during the fasting month of Ramadan. But, as Salamandra notes, the
fragmentation of audiences brought about by the rapid increase in accessible
programming has rendered such ethnographies and analyses problematic at
best. What is needed to trace
developments in the media landscape of the Middle East is ethnography which
looks instead at the processes of production. Such ethnographies are, to date,
rare. It is acutely difficult to
maintain regular contact with busy media professionals, let alone observe their
practices at work. However,
because Star magazine is largely
produced by young amateur writers who are more willing to share their time than
professionals, it offers a unique opportunity to engage with the process of
production and gain an otherwise unattainable insight. Moreover, the ethnographic element of
this thesis, which is developed particularly in chapter 4, provides an occasion
to revisit and question the theoretical assumptions of the neo-Marxist
Frankfurt School. A study which
details the interactions and experiences of young amateurs involved in
producing a popular-culture magazine they might themselves consume can vividly
highlight the flaws of an analysis which posits that popular culture is
mobilized by a small clique of managers who aim to dupe the masses into passive
consumption.
Star is also problematic for Frankfurt-School theories of
popular culture because it defies easy categorization. In the first instance, it is
problematic to claim that Star is
a mass-consumed product. With a print run of 10,000 copies in Syria, half of
which are distributed for free according to the magazines website,
the magazine has clearly yet to reach a mass audience in the way that, for
example, satellite television has. Indeed, it might be inferred that the
magazines impact in Syrian society is limited at best. Yet, Star is relevant to the study of contemporary mass media
in Syria because it aspires to
reach a mass audience. As we will
see, contests played out within the Star Team to determine the proper role of the magazine in
Syrian society demonstrate that those who produce it consider it a national
magazine of national importance.
It is, unmistakably, the first Syrian-produced magazine in many decades
to combine celebrity culture with commercial advertising. Moreover, although accurate readership
and audience ratings are notoriously hard to obtain in Syria, many of Syrias
urban young know about the magazine.
Distributed in cafes, restaurants, and hairdressers, the magazine has
located potential readers and entered the inventory of domestically-produced
print media in a country where such publications are rare. Since domestic print media have been
overtly linked to the ruling regime for decades, Star is testimony to a new kind of publication which can
neither be defined as uniquely regime-driven nor as singularly driven by
commercial interests. Certainly,
the drive towards sales and profitability is taken very seriously by Stars managerial team, and the magazine is clearly
geared to exploiting advertising revenues. Perhaps more importantly, the company which owns the brand,
United Group (UG), is business-oriented and keen to make its investments
succeed. The range of brands the
company has built up in Syria within the fields of marketing and media is
testimony to this: the telephone directory Yellow Pages is a proven commercial
venture world-wide; the classified advertising publication Al-Waseela promotes
trade and commerce; the outdoor-media company Concord which specializes in
billboard advertising is highly lucrative. Unlike the commercially unviable
political magazine Abyad wa Aswad (Black
and White) owned by Bilal Turkmani son of Defence Minister Hasan Turkmani, Star magazine aims to lure a mass readership and make big
money. Yet UG is also close to the regime and
in part seeks to promote political continuity as any state-owned publication
would.
What UG and the other
private media companies in Syria are busy advancing is a corporate social
responsibility which bolsters the ruling regime. UGs website claims the company is proud to belong to our
[Syrian] community to share its needs and to efficiently contribute to its
development. One of its chief publications is the
English-language Whats On, a free
magazine which looks at cultural and recreational events in Syria. Like the highly didactic Star
magazine, Whats On presents a very positive image of Syria and its
cultural infrastructure which, given the timing of the two publications
emergence on the scene, points to another agenda within UGs remit. Not only is UG dedicated to commercial
growth, but also to maintaining the stable and secure [political] environment
that has characterized Syria, which, as its website suggests, is essential for
commercial opportunities and economic prosperity. But this is not the only reason why UG is keen to maintain
the political status quo. UGs founder and current Chairman, Majid Suleiman, is
the son of the former head of the Internal Security Branch (Mukhabarat), Bahgat Suleiman. This is important because, during a period of great
political, economic, and cultural turmoil, the Syrian regime headed by the
young Bashar Al-Asad has sought to widen the public sphere whilst
simultaneously mobilizing new techniques of state control. Many of the methods
of maintaining power (with the exception of patronage) previously favoured by
Bashars late father, Hafiz Al-Asad – the overwhelming cult of
personality focused on the President, the stringent socialist economic model,
the corporatist institutions of state – seem increasingly untenable. Private corporations with close links to
the regime, as this thesis will argue, are central to the regimes bid to
produce a new generation of politically-compliant, culturally-confident,
wealth-generating young Syrians.
The
part-privatization of authoritarianism is seemingly a model which has been
harnessed elsewhere. As chapter 2
will tentatively suggest, Egypt has for some time been developing techniques of
control in which private corporations are active and relied upon. Although it is beyond the scope of this
thesis, it is possible that the use of private capital in the reproduction of
the legitimating structures of authoritarian rule has a history within the
Middle East which extends back to the 1970s. The Infitah policies
of economic liberalization pursued in Egypt first by Anwar Sadat and more
recently Hosni Mubarak may contain the seeds of the dynamic I describe. It is clear that Mubaraks campaign
during the first contested Presidential elections to ever take place in Egypt
in the summer 2005 was greatly enhanced by the validation he received from the
private sector in an ostensibly voluntary show of support. Nevertheless, this mechanism of control
is being all the more urgently mobilized in Syria because of the profound
threats it is facing.
The pressures
facing the Syrian regime are three-fold.
Firstly, the Syrian economy is struggling to find alternatives to the
oil revenues and Soviet financial support so crucial in previous decades. Having been forced to terminate its
thirty-year military and political presence in Lebanon – the financial
hub of the Levant – Syria now has reduced access to world markets and
capital. With a staggeringly young population, Syrias overwhelming priority is
to find young people jobs and opportunities within the country. Secondly, the regime faces on the one
hand, a growing Islamist threat domestically, and on the other hand,
unprecedented and hostile American and Israeli influence in the region –
American forces have occupied Iraq since 2003, Israeli military strength
continues to grow, and now Lebanon, once the backyard of Syrian interests, is a
de facto US satellite. Thirdly,
perceived political threats to the regime are replicated in the cultural
sphere. With the advent and spread
of satellite, mobile telephone, and internet technology, Western and Lebanese
cultural production has not been so prevalent in Syria for over forty
years. The regimes ability to
shape the cultural consciousness and national identity is further eroded by the
growing strength of sectarian and Islamists trends which have risen again in
Lebanon and Iraq, and are thought to be growing in Syria as well.
These pressures
should be understood within the context of a changing political environment in
Syria. Since the early nineties,
the Syrian regime has been pursuing a policy of guarded economic liberalization
in an attempt to adapt to post-Cold War realities. However, it was not until the death of Hafiz Al-Asad in
2000, bringing to an end his thirty-year tenure as President and the passing of
power to his son, that commentators saw an opportunity for media development
and political change. The period
which followed, dubbed the Damascus Spring, seemed to suggest that widespread
liberalization in the spheres of politics and media was inevitable. Civil
society groups were permitted to meet in public and discuss Syrias future for
the first time in three decades. Yet many of these reforms have been reversed,
and the imprint of authoritarianism remains. Despite this, the regime has made clear its intention to
pursue a gradualist but consistent policy of economic liberalization. Reforms enabling greater foreign
investment and the establishment of private banks indicate this consistency on
the macro-economic scale. As for the employment of young people,
the Syrian regime has set up a number of agencies, such as Bidaya (Beginning) and the Syrian Young
Entrepreneurs Association (SYEA), to
encourage wealth creation.
Meanwhile, the Junior Chamber International (JCI), the youth version of
the International Chamber of Commerce, has recently been established in
Damascus providing a node around which business interests can coalesce and
young people can be encouraged to volunteer.
It is in the
context of this partial economic liberalization that Star has emerged. It is one of a growing range of
lifestyle and specialist magazines produced privately in Syria. In addition to UGs Whats On, three privately-owned magazines were established in
2005: Shabablek, Jouhaina, and the English-language Syria Today. This
trend can be aligned with the emergence of Syrias first private radio
station - Al Madina FM – and the freeing up of access to internet,
mobile phone and satellite technology.
These are trends Bashar
Al-Asad has been encouraging since the late nineties when he was acting
president of the Syrian Computer Society. Indeed, he continues to publicly
encourage widening media access as Syrian President today. In a keynote speech given at Damascus
University in November 2005 he spoke of mobilizing Syrias young to take
advantage of new media for the Syrian national benefit:
The world is moving very fast. And
there are challenges produced by these changes. There have been new opportunities for
achievement. Since at the heart of these changes lie information,
communications and the digital revolution, we have all to work in order to
integrate young people into this information age and to provide the integration
mechanisms in all our institutions, cultural and media structures
His message, it seems, is being
heard by those media professionals dedicated to widening the scope of domestic
media. But, as will be argued in this thesis,
this development is small and highly controlled by the government. The range of publications to be
established in recent years is miniscule by comparison to other periods and
places experiencing genuine media freedom. The new media – the internet and satellite television
– pose a tangible threat to the states control of citizens access to
symbols, products and information, as is attested by Bashar Al-Asads
accusations against the Arabic language media which adopt the causes of the
enemies and the opponents of Syria and wage a huge media campaign to inflict
moral defeat on Syria. The threat has been met with three strategies: first,
the expansion of Syrian-produced output through these new media; second, the
controlled development of domestically-produced media; and third, the continued
censorship and scrutiny of domestic publications.
Star is remarkable precisely because it encapsulates
these three strategies. Firstly,
it is dedicated to building national confidence by harnessing the energies of
young people towards engaging with Western-inspired popular satellite
television through the lens of Syrian-produced output. Secondly, it is part of the widening
scope of domestically-produced media, to which Al Madina FM and Whats On also contribute. Thirdly,
it shows the continued insistence within the Syrian regime towards censorship
in print. In Syria, publications produced
domestically have been inextricably attached to the machinery of the regime for
over thirty years. The three major
newspapers in the country, Tishriin,
Al-Ba`th and Al-Thawra, are overtly controlled by government, and private
publications have been strictly limited. One solitary private newspaper
dedicated to examining and critiquing the regime – Al-Domary –
surfaced in 2001 to great international fanfare. Produced by the celebrated Syrian cartoonist, Ali
Farzat, the paper was eventually brought to its knees in 2003 after provoking
censors with a thoroughly negative depiction of Saddam Hussein during the build
up to the US-led invasion which Syria opposed. One result of censorship is that domestically-produced
publications are scrutinized intensely. What is represented, claimed, discussed
arouses more intense reactions because it is seen as emanating from some
internal national conscious. Indeed, perhaps because of censorship,
contests over representations of social life which take place in print are all
the more intense. Star, then, is a very useful starting point for
understanding social change in Syria today.
Combining
interview, ethnographic, and textual sources, this thesis will consider the
magazines content and production in order to determine the extent to which Star and the changing media landscape in Syria is
testimony to the empowerment of young people through media development. I will argue that Star magazine reflects shifting state-society relations
in Syria whereby the regime is seeking to widen the public and commercial
spheres whilst concomitantly reshaping and enhancing the techniques it uses to
constrain them. Due to the
methodological problems associated with mapping and interpreting reactions
amongst consumers and readers of the magazine, as well as time considerations,
the thesis will not make substantive claims about how the magazine is being
received in Syria. Rather, the
discussion will focus on how the magazine is produced and what it intends for its readers. Indeed, one significant area of investigation which could
provide a productive field for future study is the magazines relationship with
religious norms and discourse.
This thesis touches only on religion in so far as to say that Star is an avowedly secular magazine devoted to
bolstering secular visions of society.
Chapter 2 looks at the relationship in Star between national-regime symbols and commercial
symbols, and argues that the magazine is testimony to the part privatization of
national symbolic production in Syria as an efficient technique of
control. It tentatively suggests
that similar techniques of control are observable in other Arab states, notably
Egypt, such that the mechanisms of authoritarianism may be converging across
the Middle East. Chapter 3
considers the relationship between the Lebanese- and the Syrian-produced
material in the magazine, and suggests that Star is part of a cultural war in which Syrian cultural
producers seek to engage with global media and popular culture on their own
terms for national ends. Finally,
Chapter 4 is ethnographic and focuses on the dynamics within the team of young
amateur writers, comparing the consensus within the team to the consistencies
of the magazines didactic discourse.
It claims that Star seeks
to displace patriarchal norms with a new privatized corporatist consensus by
displaying a group of middle-class modern young Syrians to be emulated.
2
Privatizing Symbolic
Production: New Space for Commercial Brands, New Means for Regime Control
God protect
Syria. The final words of Bashar Al-Asads speech to Damascus University, 10
November 2005
God protect
Syria. The slogan adorning the front cover of Star magazine, issue 50, 19-26
November 2005
God protect
Syria. The name and chorus line of a rousing song played as an exclusive on
Syrias first private radio station, Al-Madina
FM, in late November 2005
Introduction: Star as a Site of Symbolic Contest
One
way of understanding commercial lifestyle magazines is as a space for competing
symbols. Star magazine is one of a group of magazines which have
made available and are circulating such a space. The magazine collects and orders these symbols, whilst also
creating its own and recycling others (particularly from the internet) which it
claims as its own. The space for
competing symbols which Star has
created is, therefore, overtly managed by its design and editorial staff. Nevertheless, this space represents in
microcosm what is taking place more generally in Syrian society where broadly
two sets of actors – state and what might be termed private-corporate
– are vying to imprint their images in the consciences of young
people. This is not just some
market-place battle for brand supremacy, but part of the on-going web of
contests which will decisively shape the future of Syrian society and its
relationship with the state.
A
central role of the public space Star
circulates is to expand further the reach of commercial advertising and
therefore, at least theoretically, allow for the development of rival
publications and media. This has
happened with tacit state approval and is part of the regimes changing
strategies for maintaining power. But the wave of new commercial
publications in Syria, of which Star
is a part, is tiny in comparison to media developments in other periods and
regions where commercial freedoms have been greater. For example, Martin details the emergence of an
unprecedented variety and number – at least 260 separate titles –
of periodicals published in the Democratic Years in Syria between 1954 and
1958.
Similar developments took place in pre-Shah Iran.
More recently, Perthes has noted that in the aftermath of the civil war, over
100 radio stations and 50 television networks were established in Lebanon. The wave of new journals in Syria today
numbers only in the tens at most.
This goes to show either that the conditions needed for a wider range of
commercial publications to take root have not materialized, or that the regime
is both involved in producing and containing the commercial media development
as it grows.
Star, it will be argued, is evidence for the latter. A tension at the heart of regime
thinking in Syria for over a decade has been how to liberalize the economy in
order to generate new revenue without undermining regime authority. According to Hinnebusch, the fear is that,
as the Syrian bourgeoisie grows and develops resources through private capital,
so the regimes authoritarian rule will be contested. In order to be economically effective and politically
unthreatening, he notes, economic liberalisation [has] required the
emergence of a reconstructed bourgeoisie on good terms with the regime [italics added]. The extent, depth and rapidity of
economic liberalization then has been constrained by the interest of the
regime. As Heydemann notes, It is the state,
not capital, that defines the private sectors terms of engagement and the
boundaries of its participation. Regime interests may have been playing
a dual game of liberalization and constraint with private capital interests for
some time, but the job of constructing a wealth-generating secular middle class
on good terms with the current
political order is still very much in its embryonic stages, a theory which Star confirms.
How this task is played out in Star is the subject of this chapter.
It will seek to show that the magazine is testimony to the
part-privatization of regime symbolic production and has opened up a space for
commercial advertising that is crucially constrained by regime rhetoric.
Reading Regime Intention from Symbolic
Production and Social Discourse
Such a close
emphasis on the regime as an actor in social change in Syria has come in for
criticism. Salamandra has argued
that studies of Syria have tended to over-emphasize state centrality. To redress this, she proposes an ethnography
of elite groups which avoids regurgitating a story of economically or
socially disenfranchised groups battling a hegemonic state.
But, as any cultural history of print media in Syria would show, the state has
been central to events, restricting the
range of publications produced domestically and managing the output of the
three lead dailies – Tishriin,
Al-Ba`th, and Al-Thawra. As for
media specifically aimed at young people, there has been very little to speak
of largely because of the nature of state power in Syria over the last three
decades. Indeed, to gain an
understanding of the regimes strategies for maintaining its power does not
entail the assumption that across society all groups are disenfranchised and
see the state as the enemy, an assumption Salamandra quite rightly seeks to
avoid. Rather those at the heart of government
emanate from a bourgeoisie-in-formation, partly official with a foot in both
public and private sectors.
Elsewhere, studies
have tried to diminish the relevance of the state to cultural and social
analysis. Appadurai is a leading
proponent of an idea that sees global society in terms of flows, or scapes,
of ideas, people and capital. Whilst compelling on the level of those
global flows states are largely powerless to impede from crossing borders or to
shape unilaterally, such as capital flows, this theory drastically
underestimates the continuing relevance of states for understanding domestic
social change. As a brief
comparison of Star magazine in Syria and
in Lebanon will show, the Middle East is far from impervious to mass-mediated,
popular and hybrid cultural innovations from outside the region. But that comparison will also show how
widely state preoccupations can infuse media representations of society, not
least because the symbolic field Star generates is acted upon by the state, as well as by other non-state
actors. Another pressing question
concerning the state revolves around the much debated viability of
distinguishing between the state and society. Mitchell argues that the state, far from being a coherent
structure imposed on society, is a metaphysical effect of the disciplinary
powers which characterise the modern age. Grounded in the idea that modern
methods of power – ordering space, partitioning time, systematizing
surveillance – worked to endow modern institutions, such as armies,
schools and hospitals, with the appearance of having an independent existence
greater than the sum of their parts, Mitchells argument dismisses any notion
that the state is really an independent or unified structure. Mitchell is indeed right to think that
the idea of the state is powerful
because it attaches unity, morality and independence to what is in fact
disunited, amoral and dependent. But, although Mitchell shows that
ultimately a complete definition of the state is a hopeless task, he does not
show how continuities and discontinuities in structures, functions, and goals
attributed to the state work through complex interactions with social forces
and actors around them. What this chapter seeks to understand
is how discontinuities (changes in engagements with private capital) are
managed to the maintenance of continuities (the ongoing authority of the
Al-Asad line, its close cohorts and mechanisms of power such as the Ba`th
Party) through symbolic production.
A
study which takes symbolic production very seriously is Lisa Wedeens Ambiguities
of Domination. In this book, which seeks to understand
the cult of Syrias late President, Hafiz Al-Asad, as a form of power, Wedeen
argues that official discourses must be read as strategies without
strategists. In this, she borrows from Foucaults
formulation that
the significance of official
discourses is to be found in the conditions of their manifest appearance,
the transformation which they have effected, and the field where they
coexist, reside, and disappear, rather than in silently intended meanings,
or in the explicit intentions of leaders who formulate these discourses.
Yet, I argue that Wedeens theory,
in seeking to claim the middle ground between total constructionism and total
voluntarism, actually
conflates two issues. Thus, on the
one hand, she bases her argument on voluntarism, claiming that materialist,
ideational, and punitive theories of state power fail to understand the role of
Hafiz Al-Asads cult, since they do not explain why the Syrian government
expends exorbitant sums of money and scarce resources on symbolic production. Here, Wedeen is arguing that we should
study the regimes symbolic production as a mechanism of power precisely
because it is a deliberate strategy. Yet, on the other hand, she claims that
the cults effectiveness –
its ability to engender compliance through rituals of uncommitted adulation on
the part of citizens – is discursively constructed. Thus, she argues it is unlikely that
anyone specifically designed a policy calling for transparently phony rituals
of obeisance. It is my contention that these two
positions, as far as is possible, have to be unravelled because they
simultaneously confirm and deny the significance of intention in forms of power. Firstly, we should argue that, although a policy of spending
exorbitant amounts of state money on symbolic production to bolster the regime
is a policy with a cultural and discursive legacy that extends far beyond
Syrias borders, nevertheless the policy has been actively selected out of a
range of possible policies. Secondly, we should argue that the effects of that policy are constitutive of the cult of Hafiz
al-Asad and must be read from the conditions of the cults manifest
appearance. The task in this
thesis, then, is to look broadly at phenomena relating to the former which are decipherable
through the latter. In other words,
this thesis assumes that Star is
testimony to the ways in which the Syrian regime is trying to reshape
society. It is far too soon to
posit the effects of Star and
magazines like it for Syrian society, but it is not too soon to try and analyze
what such published material strives to achieve through the interaction of
state and private actors, discourses and symbols.
Widening the Space for Brands
to Play In
As
has been pointed out, the emergence of a host of new commercial magazines is
not a novel experience in Syria.
As Martin has demonstrated, the mid-1950s saw a rapid and unprecedented
growth in published material, although the experience did not last. For young Syrians today – the
target readers of Star – there has
been no comparable period of commercial freedom during their lifetimes. The current period, then, is new for
the young Syrians Star concerns
itself with. More commercial
freedom entails more space for commercial symbols (brands), which suggests that
brands, and their managers, are accumulating a growing power in shaping social
life in Syria. An example of this
is the growing competition between Damascuss eateries. Salamandra has examined
the growing trend in which old Damascus is being commercialized for bourgeois
leisure through the establishment of new restaurants in renovated traditional
houses. This development continued apace during
the time in which she wrote her book,
and has continued since then.
During my research visits to Damascus, at least three new bar-restaurants
were established in the old town, and one new restaurant was being built. What has accompanied this development
more recently has been a growing competition amongst the restaurants and bars
of Damascus, and Syria more widely, to win the struggle for customers, a
struggle which centres on the battle to achieve brand supremacy. Star is testimony to this latest development, which has
seen restaurants and cafes advertising themselves in published material like Star, particularly during times when consumption is
encouraged, such as the fasting month of Ramadan. Issue 44, for example, published during Ramadan, features
three adverts for one of the most popular restaurants in Old Damascus, Haretna,
an advert for a fast food joint, Batata, and one for an open-air restaurant in Aleppo, The Roof (figure 2).
Issue 58, published during `Id Al-Adha, contains adverts for Barada
Sport Caf, Inhouse Coffee (a caf), as well as Haretna.
But even during non-festival periods, eateries and cafes make a strong
showing in Stars advertising
space. What this contest
demonstrates is that commercial media and forms of commercial enterprise which
revolve around consumption, particularly leisure consumption, depend on each
other to develop. As Ohmann has
argued for the US, advertising (and the lifestyle magazines through which
advertising developed rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century)
played a crucial role in
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smoothing out the course of
[capitalist] accumulation. For the capitalist, advertising ensured
that new markets could be forged and consolidated, and new production lines
could be adapted to the more precise predictions of demand. For the magazine
producer specifically, readers attention was traded for advertising revenue at
a profit. If Ohmanns thesis is an
accurate indication of the integral role magazines played in consolidating
Americas rapid march to industrialize, then we can make some tentative
inferences about Stars intended role in
widening the playing field for corporate and capitalist development in Syria.
Star is not the only space available to advertisers in
this widening field. Billboards
are now an established feature of Syrias urban landscape and line road
networks (figure 3). There is no more flamboyant and ironic
example of this than the stalled building site of a state-funded mosque in
central Damascus which has now become the largest advertising faade in the
city, and probably the country, as the supporting structure for an enormous
banner promoting Areeba (the
telecommunications company). Al-Madina FM, Syrias first private radio station, is a favourite of Syrian
advertisers and is perhaps so aware of the prevalence of advertising on its
schedule that it advertises its own brand in Star with the slogan Friday without advertising. Satellite television, although regional
in its reach, has exposed Syrians to greater brand diversity than was
previously possible in a country where still many Western brands are not widely
available or are proscribed. At the same time as the space available
for brands to lodge themselves in the popular consciousness has been widening,
a small elite of domestic companies dedicated to very contemporary branding
techniques has emerged to dominate the key commercial spheres of
communications, media and leisure consumption. This core group of domestic companies, including United
Group (UG) which runs Star,
joined forces to sponsor the website www.salam.sy devoted to encouraging the defence
of the regime
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during the international crisis
over Syrias suspected role in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minsiter,
Rafik Al-Hariri. UG holds a
commanding hand of brands across the media, advertising and marketing spectrum,
Areeba and Syriatel jointly dominate the market for mobile telephone
service providers, SCS-NET is the
strongest private internet service provider and so on. What these companies share is a
foundational belief in their brands as vehicles for sales, a national reach and
a willingness to use their strategic position in developing media to promote
themselves. But there is also room
to play at their margins: Syria has witnessed a considerable growth in private
advertising agencies.
The website of Chilli adverts,
the agency which produces ads for Al-Madina FM, is testimony to the role of smaller players in
building awareness of domestic brands and confirming the advertising prophecy
that brand is more important than product. Above all else, the students with whom I mixed while
researching this thesis were aware of the new domestic brands, as well as
foreign ones, and were more than willing to participate in this unequal game,
shared by corporations and individuals, of entrenching brands in public life.
But we should not
get carried away. The growth in
both advertising and the space in which advertising is to manoeuvre is quite
small. By comparison with the
magazines of 1950s Syria, the range of adverts, products and services, as well
as the number of new publications available to advertisers and consumers, is
very narrow. Martin details the bewildering variety of cars, home appliances,
cosmetics, fragrances, cleansers, medications, entertainment media and venues,
travel opportunities, and financial services on display in a selection of
magazines from the period which he describes as comparable [for a Syrian] to that
seen by his contemporary American or British counterpart.
This range is not replicated in either Star or the crop of new Syrian magazines, which focus on
other media (mobile phones, radio, internet services), soft drinks (Fayruz,
pepsi), and restaurants (Haretna). Advertising in Star consists of one of two things: either an advert will
fill a whole page or it will feature as a sponsor along the bottom margin of a
page. But because the same
advertisers straddle both spaces, the number of total adverts on offer remains
relatively small. Of course, Star may not need much advertising to cover its
production costs, but considering that UG manage one of the few market research
companies, IPSO-STAT, in addition
to Star, it seems likely that Star would be able to advance its advertising revenue
where others could not go. Indeed,
if we turn to another growing realm for advertisers to compete – the
internet – domestically-produced websites are conspicuously short of
advertising on their pages. This
points not just to the limitations of the medium in a country lacking the
infrastructural, technological and economic resources to maximize the internet,
but also to the role the state is playing as a constraining force on the very
commercial growth it seeks to generate.
Nevertheless, the
space available for competing commercial brands to vie for public attention is
expanding. Although the Syrian
regime is partly responsible for overseeing this development, the growth of
advertising and private capital does pose a number of dilemmas for it. In what follows, I will lay out four
broad dilemmas which present themselves to the Syrian regime as it seeks to
widen advertising space. I will do
this by setting commercial developments in their immediate historical and
sociological contexts and by comparing the historical legacy of Ba`thist
visions of society with the logic of the capitalist imaginary. I will seek to show that theoretically
the two visions are incompatible and antagonistic. Subsequently, I will seek to show how the regime intends to
resolve these concerns.
The Needs of Corporate Capital
versus the National-Regime Imaginary
Studies of consumption
and advertising in the Middle East have stressed that the state and
private-corporate world can work in partnership towards the goal of building
patterns of consumption around national events. State-managed Ramadan television in
Egypt, for example, has long succeeded in bundling commercial and state ideologies with entertainment in ways
which go unnoticed by the audience.
Elsewhere, Neo-Marxist theorists have maintained that the state and
private capital can function ideologically in concert because they present two
sides of the same structural equation: bourgeois capitalist control over the
means of production. Yet, in Syria, the logic of unheeded
capitalism and of the regimes vision of society continues to grate with
profound effects. This dynamic is
particularly true of the potentially conflicting ways in which the regime and
corporate capital imagine the individual.
Ba`thism, which continues to provide the rhetorical material of much
official discourse and the doctrinal DNA, at least in theory, of many of
Syrias institutional structures, places socialism and the national
collectivity above the individual. Despite the ideological weakening of
Ba`thist resolve during the Presidency of Hafiz Al-Asad, and the concomitant
rise of the cult of personality around him,
Bashar Al-Asad has inherited the discursive, institutional, and ideological
legacy of Ba`thism,
and has to confront that legacy in order to assert his own position and power.
He cannot simply wipe the slate clean and start again; rather he has to find a
way to incorporate or adapt the rhetorical infrastructure of Ba`thism towards a
new politics of control. This is
clear from the keynote speech he gave at Damascus University in November 2005
in which he responded to international pressure on Syria over its suspected
role in the murder of Rafik al-Hariri.
He repeatedly appealed to the unifying concept of pan-Arab nationalism
as part of and indivisibly linked to Syrian nationalism, claiming that current
threats were campaigns waged on the Arab nation, and Syria in particular The rhetorical legacy of Ba`thism
continues to provide guidelines for proper national conduct, since the fear of
moral defeat is half, if not three quarters, of the real defeat in any battle,
whether it is military, [or] cultural[italics
added]
This rhetoric potentially places limits on the kinds of consumption individuals
can pursue.
The
national-regime imaginary has often translated into certain set roles for young
men and women. In the first case,
achieving manhood has hinged on the expectation that men should be fighters and
defenders of the nation. During the three decades of Hafiz al-Asads rule, the
possibility of military confrontation with Israel loomed large. Regime rhetoric defined Syrians as the
steadfast defenders of the Palestinian cause and of Pan-Arab nationalism. The state instrument to implement these
rhetorical ideals, the army, was massively expanded by years of ambitious
military spending, and the numbers in the army as a proportion of the national
population reached unprecedented heights. Even today, it is compulsory for most
men to serve two years of military service, providing the state with a powerful
opportunity to shape, on the one hand, the way that young men think of
themselves as defenders of the nation, and on the other hand, to mould popular
understandings of masculinity around notions of honour, duty, warrior-ship and
obedience to the superior and compelling will of the state. Military service remains a pivotal moment
in young mens lives. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see men
in military uniform across Damascus. A uniform is a social signifier which
marks men as soldiers in the national army first and individuals second. Despite army cutbacks, the regime has found
few concrete alternatives with which to re-order its rhetorical structuring of
what it means to be a man. Hence,
images of the President show Bashar Al-Asad in military uniform not just to
construct him as an authority figure, but as a man and as a defender of the
nation.
In the case of
women, studies have shown that national movements in the Middle East of the
late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries emphasized womens roles as disciplined
mothers and managers of the domestic space. Najmabadi has shown the modernist
trajectory of what she calls the domestic sciences in Iran which sought to
transform women from being part of the household to being manager of the
household. Womens education was given high
priority by nationalists and modernists because women were in turn seen to be
the educators of the nations sons and daughters. Similar trends have been noted for
Egypt. Shakry has argued that in
order for Egypt to become modern, women had to be educated both in the science
of child rearing and the authentic customs of the nation – only then
could the health and prosperity of future generations of Egyptian men and women
be achieved. The long
legacy of modernism in Middle Eastern states then has been to define women as
mothers whose proper place and roles reside in the home. National movements
have further entrenched womens roles by incorporating religious personal law
and paternalistic family structures, into the machinery of state.
Of course, these
concepts, both for men and women, have been contested and challenged, but the
broad schema of how the State relates to the individual has never been
completely unravelled.
Corporate capitalism, conversely, seeks to propagate the idea that the
individual is either determined by lifestyle consumption choices or
professionally as a member of a private corporation. The crucial point is that stressing motherhood roles for
young women and military roles for young men take both out of the social realm
where they can be encouraged to consume.
Developing a lifestyle, and therefore an individuality according to the capitalist principle, depends on
being able to make, and being aware of others making, lifestyle choices about
consumption – buying and wearing certain clothes, taking part in certain
leisure practices and so on.
Finally, it should
be noted that Star is not only using its
pages to further regime symbols and blur the lines between brands, regime
symbols, and popular aphorisms.
Issue 52, produced in December 2005, comes with a rubber wrist band
designed as the national flag and a CD of national songs within a sheath
bearing the same image of the Syrian flag as the previous weeks front cover (Figure
7). These techniques signal the exploitation of marketing tactics
characteristic of the corporate world, a development which is central to
understanding
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current trends in regime
message-making. CDs are mass consumer goods which
newspaper publishers in the West have long been offering to readers for free in
order to promote their product.
The wrist band has seen a global rebirth of late as US fashion giant,
Nike, has cashed in on ethical awareness by selling bands which mark solidarity
to certain ethical campaigns. Star is also exploiting this development, demonstrating
it is tuned in both to global youth fashions and to regime needs.
Privatized Symbolic Production
in Egypt: the Convergence of Syrian and Egyptian Styles of Authoritarianism?
It
is possible that privatized techniques for legitimating authoritarian power as
evidenced by Star have their roots, as
far as the Middle East is concerned, in Egypts Infitah (Opening).
This period of economic reform led by Anwar Sadat in the 1970s led many
commentators to assume that Syrian and Egyptian styles of authoritarianism were
quite separate; at the time of Egypts Infitah, Syria was experiencing the consolidation of regime
power by Hafiz Al-Asad in ways which sought far-reaching state involvement in
all matters economic and social.
It was not until the early nineties – a period which witnessed the
demise of the USSR and questioned the very viability of the state socialist
model – that economic liberalization really took shape in Syria in the
form of Investment Law Number 10 of 1991.
By this stage, economic shifts were well under way in Egypt although
authoritarianism was not. It is
perhaps sensible, then, to suggest that the mechanisms of control described
here and illustrated in Star
– close alignments between capitalists and regime officials, ostensibly
voluntary shows of support for regime continuity propagated through the media
by private businesses, and the authentication of consumer products – have
been developed for some time in Egypt.
Indeed, it is common knowledge that Gamal Mubarak, son of the current
president Hosni Mubarak, is being groomed to take the reins in a stable
transition of authoritarian rule reminiscent of the Hafiz-Bashar transition.
Capitalists seem to be involved in making this transition possible. Certainly
the sophistication of Hosni Mubaraks media campaign which helped him to
victory in the first contested presidential elections ever in Egypt in 2005
point to the fact that the convergence of regime and private-corporate
interests through media is well-established there.
3
Constraining Star News: the Lebanese Paparazzi Pages Wedged between
Syrian Musalsals and National Canons
The world
is developing and progressing around us and we Arabs need to keep abreast of
the positive changes in this world whilst keeping in line with our authentic
Arabic traditions and being on our guard so as to keep at bay western mass
media which are destroying the minds of the children of our Arab generation.
Star
Magazine, issue 48, 2-9 November 2005
Introduction: Syrian-produced
content does battle with Lebanese Star News
Star magazine is testimony to the on-going contest in
Syria between two discourses engaged in what is seen to be a struggle for youth
consciousness. By juxtaposing
Syrian- and Lebanese-produced material, the magazine itself becomes a site of
that contest. These opposed discourses orient the reader in radically different
ways, one geared to constructing and affirming a vivid national imagination,
the other directed towards an imagined world of celebrity culture that
virtually erases Syria as a sphere of cultural production. Moreover, the ways in which these
opposing discourses and modes of representation are physically ordered in the
magazine suggest that Star is
designed to reassert a vision of national confidence in the face of growing
pressures on youth consciousness from Lebanese and global media production.
The Syrian version
of Star magazine has retained a number
of pages from its Lebanese sister publication. These pages broadly fall into two camps: on the one hand,
those with a primary focus relating only tangentially to celebrity – Star
style, Star horoscopes, Top Movies, Mots Flechs and Faux
Jumeaux – are ordered to the back of
the magazine (as in the Lebanese version) and are interspersed with other
Syrian material; on the other hand, those pages directly devoted to celebrity
news and gossip are shuffled to the middle of the magazine and treated as a
coherent whole called Star News.
That this collection of pages is not in fact sequential in the Lebanese
magazine is testimony to the process of selection and reordering in the
transfer of pages. As the great
majority of the Lebanese celebrity pages borrowed to create the Syrian
magazines Star News concentrate
on stars from the West or from Lebanon itself, Star Syria creates for itself a window on the world which
effectively discounts a Syrian-conceived celebrity culture. This window is both internally ordered
and externally constrained. Internally, it moves broadly from a Western-only
focus in English to an Arab world focus in Arabic via a section which fuses
Western and Arab topics in both languages. Externally, this section is shuffled to the middle of the
magazine, hemmed in by overtly Syrian pages, wedged into the constraining
framework of a Syrian agenda which, in its avowedly nationalistic
self-reliance, seeks to impose both material and ideational boundaries on its
opposed Lebanese other. The
Syrian pages which achieve this effect - Star Zaman and Double Star – were not original features of the Syrian magazine but are now
firmly established in its repertoire.
Both speak a voice antithetical to the paparazzi thrust of the Lebanese
section: Star Zaman charts
institutional, social, architectural, and technological history in
twentieth-century Syria whilst Double Star displays a young Syrian professional
complete with a familiar inventory of personal details – age, profession,
studies, hobbies – and a handy slogan for life. These pages work to contain the paparazzi section not just
because they deny the relevance of mass-mediated stardom to cultural and
national progress, but because they point away from the west to an indigenous
legacy of modernity and a home-grown class of wealth-generating
professionals.
Too Paparazzi for the Syrian
Copy: Lebanese Material Rejected from Star News
Star News, the unit of Lebanese pages addressed to celebrity
news within the Syrian magazine, is characteristic of the paparazzi tone and
approach of the Lebanese magazine more broadly, a tone which is markedly at
odds with Syrian Star
material. Carole, the editor of Star Syria, argues that the paparazzi magazine embodied
by Star Lebanon is not
appropriate for Syrians, claiming that a purely paparazzi magazine is not
reflective of Syrian culture or popular demand. Instead, in her view Syrians want a
magazine with news, taste, and both serious and funny articles. It is certainly true that Syrian Star
offers a duality that its Lebanese
counterpart does not – the Lebanese magazine is an unashamed paparazzi
magazine, whilst, by contrast, the Syrian magazine works to impose constraining
borders on paparazzi culture through a self-generated counter-ethic and
tone. Indeed, in some ways Star demonstrates that a paparazzi culture generated
within modern Syria is for the time being non-existent.
Star News, then, makes selective use of Star Lebanons
paparazzi ethic. Most obviously
missing from Star News are the
exclusives in which Star Lebanon
pursues an Arab (almost always Lebanese) celebritys private life over two
pages or more. This component of
Star Lebanon has seen many formats – Got Cha, Busted on Cam, Star Live, Star
Shots, and Happy Hunting – all of which catch celebrities unawares in
public or private. Many do little
more than display a celebrity with family, spouse or father, but some offer a more
provocative insight. For example,
one issue shows Lebanese singer Tina relaxing with friends on a yacht wearing
nothing but a bikini and sarong, a view of lavish celebrity culture and female
exposure far removed from anything Star Syria would produce (Figure 8). Other issues display celebrities
kissing in public, arguing in fashion boutiques or making up after a row with a
partner. Or then theres the Got Cha report on Mr Lebanon 2003 As`ad Tarbihs birthday
celebration in Downtown Beirut (Figure 9). The reader is presented with a sequence
of photographs which are constructed to form a narrative in pictures. Attached to each photograph is the time
it was taken and a caption which pokes fun at Tarbih. For example, at 1.36 pm we see him sitting alone slumped in
his chair at a street caf table. The photograph shows him with his jaw
extended forward and both
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hands
on his chin as if he is deeply impatient.
The caption reads As`ad Tarbih knows how to occupy himself while he
waits! Then at 1.50 a female
friend arrives. The photo shows
Tarbih launching himself at her, his neck craned forward to kiss her and back
arching out of his chair which he still holds with one hand, his right armwrapped around her. The caption reads,
He hasnt got used to sitting alone, especially on his birthday so she
quickly comes to join him sitting out. The narrative continues: we see him
gleefully receive and open a birthday present from her, we watch her feeding
him with an outstretched hand, and at 2.10, we witness him arch across the
table to show her something on his mobile phone, a gesture which brings their
heads into contact. The caption
reads, He knows how to get her close to him! To complete the story, we see her leave the caf walking off
into the distance, back to the camera, at 3.12, and then, apparently a whole 13
minutes later, we are shown Tarbih again slumped in his chair, this time with
hands on his head, looking away from the camera. The implication is that Tarbih is gazing in the
direction his partner walked away, his body language signalling that he is
completely overcome with adoration for her. The caption poses a rhetorical question: Waiting for
another present?! Finally, the
magazine shows Tarbih pursuing his celebrations later that evening but with no
trace of the female friend caught on camera earlier in the day. But there is no use celebrities trying
to hide their romantic escapades – Got Cha will get em.
The power of the
sequence of photographs is to build a narrative without text. The captions only confirm what the
pictures already say. The
photographs are no more than disparate images of fleeting moments; it is their
selection and ordering on the page as a coherent sequence which moulds the story and works to frame the
celebrity interaction. The
sequence of pictures – Tarbih waiting impatiently, then launching himself
at his partner when she arrives, then opening her present with an ecstatic expression– can only make sense if we assume that Tarbih is madly in love. This assumption gives added meaning to
the image of him craning forward to show her his mobile phone: he wants to get
close to her. This is precisely
what the caption imagines – showing her his mobile phone is only a tactic
Tarbih employs to achieve his real goal. But the caption goes one step further:
by proposing that Tarbih knows how to get her close to him, it insinuates
that he is a good lover, experienced in the strategies of romantic persuasion. That those very same strategies revolve
around a mobile phone points to the captions lively irony. The caption, then, takes the
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narrative built by the photograph
sequence as its point of departure and uses it to mock the celebrity it
simultaneously builds up.
The paparazzi
approach exemplified by Star Lebanons Got
Cha Exclusive of As`ad Tarbih has proved
problematic for Star Syria in a
number of ways. Most importantly
perhaps, it is intrusive and steps beyond acceptable bounds of public decency
in Syria. The paparazzi ethic is
provocative, and therefore entertaining, in a way which runs counter to the
dominant shame-modesty ethic of patriarchal Syrian society. Carole did hint that Syrians love to
gossip and indeed she seemed keen to challenge patriarchal values on a number
of levels (discussed in the next chapter), but she also distanced herself from
embracing an ethic which might be seen as the antithesis of shame-modesty. In other words, Star Syria may not be keen to champion shame-modesty so
much as to protect values of honour.
In a related way, then Star
Syria would find problematic the determination in Star Lebanon to mock famous figures in their private
lives. Star Lebanons satirical tone is the flip side of its
absolute indulgence in celebrity for celebritys sake – particularly the
kind of celebrity which is buttressed by popular appeal amongst adolescent
girls. Star Syria seeks substance behind its notion of
celebrity. Finally, Star Lebanon is tied into Western codes of popular
culture. As Twitchell reminds us,
popular culture is popular in part because it takes simple ideas seriously and
energetically. Star Lebanons exclusives take simple narratives and
energetically deliver them through the most accessible of media:
photographs. Although Star Syria continues to describe itself as an
illustrated (musawwara)
magazine, it does not reproduce the popular culture which, as Twitchell
demonstrates, has been encircling the globe for much of the twentieth century;
rather it seeks a didactic function and a role in constructing national canons.
In addition to the
Lebanese exclusives in the Got Cha
mould, Star Syria also rejects
the Lebanese celebrity interview, LInterview. The
motivation behind LInterviews
omission cannot be explained only by the fact that its focus is Lebanese; the
overtly paparazzi tone and approach are also important factors. LInterview does give space for artists to discuss their work
and careers, but more potently it takes a provocative, confrontational angle on
the star. A pertinent example of
this is an interview with the Lebanese singer, Carole Samaaha (Figure 10). Each of the three pages of the
interview is divided into two columns, one of which is text, the other
photographs of the celebrity. The
photographs, which span roughly two thirds of the width of each page, dominate
the piece much as in the Lebanese exclusives, but here they are promotional
pictures taken in a studio. They
show Samaaha part-concealed by blue net curtains in the intimate surroundings
of what looks like a bedroom.
Deliberately racy, the pictures display Samaaha in provocative poses,
titillating and alluring the reader with smiles and glances from a variety of
camera angles. Indeed, her outfits
are all revealing. Speech bubbles convey bite-size extracts from the text as if
she were talking intimately with the reader.
As for the
interview itself, it seeks both to buttress her celebrity and intrude on her
private life at the same time.
Take, for example, the following exchange about her personal finances:
Star: What about your fortune?
Samaaha: Im not rich, Ive got
enough. I do very few concerts out
of choice, but not because there is no demand
Star: Isnt artistic prestige sometimes bought by money?
Samaaha: To tell the truth Im not
materialistic, and money matters dont bother me
Star: Would you therefore buy an old car?
Samaaha: We dont have to go that
far, if I am not rich that doesnt mean that I am a beggar. Money provides comfort but not
happiness
The first question bluntly takes
for granted the fact that Samaaha is rich. This assumption couched in such an open-ended question
grossly oversteps the margins for decency and respect upheld in Star Syria.
The second question makes a further assumption Star Syria would find problematic: that artistic prestige
is enhanced by material wealth.
Finally, the third question overtly mocks Samaaha, throwing back at her
the evasive responses she gives.
By claiming she is not materialistic, she attempts to deflect attention
from her finances. But this only
adds fuel to the fire, allowing the journalist to posit an extreme
interpretation of her non-materialistic streak and build it into a patently
absurd question for a celebrity, Would you therefore buy an old car? The only way she can extract herself is
by claiming the question is unwarranted.
This
aggressive approach designed to corner the celebrity and so expose her publicly
works on the basis that the readers attention is caught by revelation and
controversy. In Star Syrias pursuit of national canons, revelation and
controversy can only be unhelpful, as we will see. But LInterview
is not only intrusive and assertive; it is also dogged in its pursuit of
salacious gossip, exclusive detail, and celebrity exposure. Here, for example, are the final five
questions of the interview with extracts of Samaahas responses:
Star: You were rejected from the play by the artist Mansur Al-Rahbani Hukm
Al-Ra`ian: any bad feelings?
Samaaha: Not at all. My leaving acting was a personal choice
– nobody forced me to it. I
watched the play and I loved the acting of Latifa in it
Star: It has been said that the play was not as successful as the rest of
Mansurs works.
Samaaha: No on the contrary I liked
the play more than Maluk Al-Tuaif.
Star: If your opinions about the work were negative, would you have been
brave enough to admit it publicly?
Samaaha: I would have said that the
work was good but not the best.
Star: Your new album is entitled I am free. So to what extent are you really free?
Samaaha: To the furthest degree,
because I am not scared of expressing my views and feelings publicly
Star: You always sing about love, so wheres the man in your life?
Samaaha: There is love, but I
always run away from it because men are selfish and art is selfish. And Im worried love will steal me away
from my big artistic ambition. But
I cannot deny that love and starting a family is what Im dreaming of.
 |
Each of the five questions is a
test for Samaaha, and collectively they put her under intense scrutiny and
judgement. The whole basis for
this interview is incompatible with Star
Syria which seeks only to buttress its stars, not to tease and interrogate
them. In this section of LInterview five further aspects of the paparazzi ethic
emerge. First, Star Lebanon is not afraid to accuse the celebrity of
failure as, in this case, Samahaa is reminded of her rejection from a
play. Second, celebrities are
given opportunities, indeed encouraged, to pour scorn on one another. Here, Samaaha is given numerous
opportunities to disparage the director Mansur Al-Rahbani, the man responsible
for her public rejection from Hukm Al-Ra`ian.
Third, Star Lebanon
consistently seeks evidence of hypocrisy in the responses of its
interviewees. In this interview, Star
goes one step further, intimating hypocrisy
in the question, You always sing about love, so wheres the man in your
life? The question implies that
the romance of Samaahas songs does not relate to her actual love life. Hence, it suggests that her songs are
emotionally vacuous or unfelt. The
veiled accusation of hypocrisy is just one more technique for extracting
gossip; it forces Samaaha either to refute the idea that she lacks a man, or to
contest the basis of the question.
Fourth, LInterview posits
hypothetical questions which the celebrity has to resolve. This is yet one more means of
scrutinizing the star, and it proves difficult to escape. Samaaha is asked whether she would
have been brave enough to admit it had she disliked Hukm Al-Ra`ian, leaving her in a no-win situation. Either she refuses to play the game and
comes out as a bad sport, or she accepts the conundrum and puts her future
actions under greater paparazzi scrutiny.
Finally, these questions, as with the financial questions before them,
are deeply personal, and give celebrities no room to hide the awkward or
painful aspects of their personal lives.
Since Star Syria is geared
to presenting its celebrities in a purely positive light, these five aspects of
the paparazzi ethic evident in LInterview – the acknowledgment of celebrity failure, intimations of
hypocrisy, encouragement towards disparaging other stars, and the intrusive
elaboration on problematic hypothetical situations and personal questions
– are incompatible with the central thrust of the Syrian magazine.
One Step Removed: Why Duddlys
Column is
Included in Star News
The
Syrian Star News, composed of pages
borrowed from across the Lebanese magazine, comprises broadly three sections. First, is the unmistakably Westernized Duddlys
Column. Bright, colourful and breezy, these four pages of short
English-language features on Western celebrity gossip are a consistent
component of Star News. That the vast majority of these features
are copied wholesale from celebrity-gossip websites does not diminish the
significance of their selection for the Syrian magazine. Second, there is almost always a
component of between two and six pages in Arabic devoted to news in the Arab
celebrity world. Undoubtedly,
these pages focus predominantly on Lebanese stars. These two distinct elements seem to merge through a series
of pages which fuse both Arabic and English language, Arab and Western
stars. The third Lebanese section
which Star News incorporates into
the Syrian Magazine is a longer feature of perhaps four pages on the career of
a specific Western star.
Of
the three components that comprise Star News, Duddlys Column is the
most tightly tied in to a paparazzi ethic. The features, taken from Western entertainment websites, are
invariably devoted to detailing the private lives of the stars they
present. Indeed, many are
salacious, radically compromising notions of female modesty. Take for example a piece entitled
Helena Christensens lesbian dance:
Helena Christensen reportedly
performed a raunchy dance with lesbians at a gay nightspot. The catwalk queen was at New Yorks
trendy Cubbyhole bar with a group of fellow models when she launched into a
spot of dirty dancing. The 36 year
old supermodel stunned partygoers with her sizzling antics and according
to onlookers Helena was a hit with drinkers at the bar earlier this year, the
Danish born beauty revealed she often goes out without any underwear(Figure
12)
Not only is homosexuality a highly
controversial issue in Syria, as I discovered when I raised the issue of
representing gay and lesbian celebrities in the magazine with Star Syrias writers, but female independence and social
behaviour are intensely contested issues as well. Here we have the image of a woman
drinking, socializing late at night without a male guardian, dirty dancing and
even wearing no underwear, not to mention implications of homosexuality. This feature is not unique; rather Star regularly publishes similarly sensationalist gossip
stories in Duddlys Column. Thus Star turns out stories such as Ellen DeGeneres revealing
her childhood experiences of sexual harassment by her father and her
impressions of her burgeoning lesbian relationship with Portia de Rossi, Goldie
Hawn urging women to accept that infidelity is inevitable and explaining how
to have a fulfilling sex life – put on really pretty clothes and make
love. And do it differently – not to mention Eva Longoria whose extreme
bikini wax is worth the pain considering it improves her prowess in the
bedroom – it makes sex better she informs us.
What renders this
Lebanese material acceptable in Star
Syria, unlike the Lebanese pages in the Got Cha mould, is that it concentrates solely on Western
stars and is written in English.
These two factors combine to perform a distancing effect: it is assumedthat Western stars under no circumstances provide role models to young
Syrians. A similar dynamic has
been observed in the development of popular magazines through the first half of
the twentieth century in Egypt. The racy images that illustrated
magazines began to publish from the 1920s onwards were initially only of
foreign women; over the next three decades a process of import substitution
took
 |
place whereby foreign women were
replaced by Egyptian women. But as far as Star magazine is concerned, the flip side of this dynamic
is that, more than ever, Syrian stars are expected to behave
appropriately. Even if Star shows that values of appropriate public behaviour in
Syria are in constant flux, nevertheless the more Western licentiousness
filters in, the more urgent the need to define and legitimize an alternative
code of public behaviour deemed appropriate for Syrians. Star News and the Syrian material which surrounds it appear
directly opposed and antagonistic, yet in terms of the rationale behind the
magazine, they are counterparts. By opening a window on the West, Star
News allows for a spectrum of public
behaviour and representation that only the Syrian material can filter.
Star in Context: the Motivation for a Magazine of
Opposing Codes
Star News is far from an anomaly in the Syrian version of Star; rather it has an integral part to play in pursuing
the magazines agenda. This is
because Star, as part of a
growing corpus of publications in Syria which seek to generate a modern secular
wealth-generating class who can harness globalization for the Syrian national
benefit, is designed to enable an engagement with Western popular culture on
Syrian terms. That Star Syria is the first magazine of its kind in over
thirty years openly pursuing this engagement is perhaps an indication of how
far the regime of Hafiz Al-Asad was able to tighten its grip on print media and
the public sphere in Syria. Of
course, Syrias print media – particularly magazines – have
embraced a Western-style popular culture before, not least in the democratic
years of the 1950s. Martin shows that popular magazines of
the period regularly published racy images of Western stars, as well as
reviewing entertainment and leisure activities for the young middle classes.
Yet, Ba`thism, the ruling political force in Syria from 1963, pursued a vision
of revolutionary socialism which sought alternatives to Western commodities and
consumer lifestyles, and hence virtually eliminated print as a vehicle for
Western popular culture. Instead,
a number of rhetorically socialist magazines emerged whose purpose was to
further national socialism.
Ba`thist
rhetorical pre-eminence in youth publications was alive and well as late as
1970 when on the first of April, seven months before Hafiz al-Asad launched his
Corrective Movement to take control of the country, a new magazine was
published entitled Youth (Shabiba). In stark contrast to notions of youth
in Star magazine, Shabiba saw the youth as the vanguard of socialist
awakening, claiming that the committed mass of the youth was amongst the
greatest achievements of the new socialist society which could raise the
ideology of the Revolution. The category of youth, as Armbrust has
noted, is a modern category which only came into being with the advent of mass
education intervening between childhood and marriage. Shabiba, then, proclaims the construction of Syrias youth
as the unique achievement of Ba`thist mass education. The magazine, designed as the ideological fuel to drive the
Syrias revolutionary youth as the engine to further progress, is
committed to nationalist socialist
thinking, believing in the goals of the Arabic masses and their revolution, it
will be a revolutionary expression of their aspirations and the fight for our
people and our youth, and to deal with them in the spirit of responsibility and
commitment to the spirit of the Revolution and the People.
This rhetorical bent is almost
completely lacking in Star, although it does seek to shape society by way of
young people in keeping with Shabiba
magazine of the 1970s. Both Star and Shabiba were launched expressly to take a stake in the creation of this new
[young] person. Yet, Shabibas means for achieving this were very different: it
advocated socialist educational efforts as opposed to endorsing
privately-financed routes to academic and professional success. Indeed, unlike Star, it saw no place for consumption lifestyles and
Western popular culture in young peoples lives. The three decades of Hafiz al Asads rule, as those who grew
up in these years attest, saw a near complete decline of publications for young
people under stringent authoritarian conditions. Thus, Star
emerges in a near vacuum for indigenously produced youth publications in Syria
with the only legacy in near view that of magazines absorbed by the rhetoric of
revolutionary socialism. Because
of this, Star comes in for
intense social scrutiny, and those involved in its production know it.
Nevertheless, dealing with the Western popular culture which knocks
increasingly loudly at the door is a pressing task, made ever more urgent by
the spread of new media technologies in Syria.
As the focus of
studies over the last ten years shows, television has become the dominant
medium for engaging in and contesting national representations in the Middle
East. The states extensive role in producing
popular television has been possible for so long because terrestrial television
can be closely controlled within national borders in a similar way to print and
radio. This involves, firstly,
stringent, even arbitrary, censorship powers to control what can be said and to
eliminate uncomfortable news and content, and secondly, the production of
cultural output designed to affirm a sense of national community, which in
Syria means dramatic serials (musalsalat).
Satellite television, which spread rapidly across the Middle East in the course
of the 1990s, poses the most immediate threat to the role the state has enjoyed
in terrestrial television. It has
enabled consumers to choose from a much larger range of external channels and
production, making it virtually impossible to build national audiences around a
single state-backed production.
The thesis that ritualistic consumption of national media plays a
central role in building national identity was most famously made by Benedict
Anderson for print capitalism in the European context. Subsequently, studies of media in the
Middle East have made similar arguments about the ritual aspect of
terrestrial-television consumption in the region, particularly during Ramadan
where the ritual of breaking fast at sunset (iftar) has provided an ideal opportunity for the
transmission of dramatic serials. In Syria, aligning viewers
ritualistically with the transmission of a single national production has at
least succeeded in uniting different social, religious, and sectarian groups around
one national event, although different viewer responses may produce new
schisms and contests in society. Nevertheless, satellite is posing a relentless
challenge to the very possibility of serials as national events. Given enduring beliefs that audiences
are infinitely malleable to state-backed messages
and that television should play a political role,
state producers see losing the ability to build audiences around
national content as a threat to the very role of television in inspiring national
community and cohesion. As
access to foreign audiences and markets has grown, and scheduling time on
satellite has increased, musalsal
production has rocketed. According
to Salamandra, this has obliterated the annual media sensations that once united
the national audience in the act of viewing. The
task of producing this increased output has fallen to private companies rather
than those in the state sector,
again distancing state actors from the role of shaping national representations
and discourse.
Satellite
television poses other threats to those dedicated to the survival of the Syrian
regime. Most notably, satellite renders the task of controlling what people
watch, so long a primary concern of vulnerable governments in the Middle East,
much more difficult. In addition, satellite channels can
bring external ideologies and hostile political messages into the homes of
viewers. Syrian viewers will
remember at least two occasions where this has taken place. On the first occasion during Hafiz
al-Asads funeral in June 2000, the Arab News Network (ANN), owned by the late
Presidents nephew, Somar Rifaat, was used as a vehicle to convey the political
ambitions of Hafizs banished brother (and would be successor), Rifaat. On the second occasion, both the
Lebanese channels, LBC and the Rafik Al-Hariri owned Future TV, used the
international arena of reality TV to direct political anger over the murder of
former Lebanese Prime Minister at the Syrian regime widely deemed responsible. Both Futures Super Star and LBCs Star Academy produced and broadcasted patriotic Lebanese songs in
the immediate aftermath, whilst LBC seemed to revel in the elimination from its
show of the Syrian contestant, Joey.
Above all else, the advent of satellite television heralded an era in which it
became much harder for regimes to dominate symbolic production and control
meaning. Wedeen has argued that
the symbolic production used to generate the cult of President Hafiz Al-Asad
was a central mechanism of the Syrian regimes domination. Alterman has since claimed that such a
mechanism is no longer possible in an era of satellite television, as evidenced
by the more open approach to the media taken by Bashar Al-Asad. Indeed, it has become much harder for
regimes to control the religious and social realms of representation and
discourse. Although the Bahraini
Government succeeded in preventing the complete broadcast of MBCs Big Brother
(Al-Rais) over religious
objections, it could not prevent Lebanese reality television being broadcast
regionally and consumed locally.
Syria is of course different from the Gulf, but the regime is similarly
incapable of guarding against the broadcast of coverage deemed unwholesome and
divisive.
But, scholars
have warned against over-estimating the power and novelty of new media
technologies such as satellite television. Much of the satellite content that commentators claim to be
novel in the Middle East can in fact be traced to a long lineage of media
output through the twentieth century, not least the sexualized images of women
so prevalent in video clips. Another claim frequently made of
satellite television in the Middle East is that it has an unprecedented
capacity to challenge state authority and encourage individual freedoms. Yet, satellite channels are in many
cases financially dependent upon states, or indeed are owned by state actors
and their cohorts.
As such, they have very little interest in undermining the dominant political
elites or threatening possible markets for advertising. These trends have been largely borne
out by ten years of satellite operations within the Middle East. In current-affairs coverage, satellites
may have in fact contributed to a sharpening of the red lines of
censorship. Sakr argues that, by
enabling some criticism to be levelled at governments regionally, satellite
channels have provided national governments with an excuse to overlook
necessary changes to media laws domestically. In terms of cultural production, mass
voting on regional reality TV shows, such as Star Academy, has had little impact on domestic politics, despite
widespread networking through new media technologies. Popular culture is, as Twitchell
argues, so appealing to young people because it takes simple ideas seriously,
because, unlike high culture or politics in the Middle East, it is
authentically democratic and classless, and because it is infinitely
tolerant and ultimately adaptive. Popular culture broadcast by satellite
does not provide some inherent catalyst for political debate, nor does it
necessarily seek to challenge state power even if it drives forward the use of
new, theoretically empowering technologies. The crucial development satellite television, and
particularly Lebanese cultural output, has brought to the Middle East, then, is
not political and social empowerment, nor some kind of novel process of
westernization; rather it has opened a wide and growing space for the emergence
of a genuinely classless popular culture which is capable of standing outside
canons of taste. Cultural shifts
towards an overtly popular
culture unchained by nationalist modernism have been identified before in the
Middle East. Armbrust points to
the advance of mass-appeal vulgarity in Egyptian cinematic and musical
production through the 70s and 80s. But a shift on a scale similar to today
is, I argue, unprecedented.
In order to gain a
more insightful understanding of how new media technologies – satellite
television, the internet, and mobile telephones – are having an impact on
social life in Syria, this thesis argues that an analysis of a new youth
magazine and the experiences and attitudes of those who produce it can be
enormously productive. What do
these young people and the media professionals who guide them perceive as the
threat inherent in popular satellite television formats such as Reality TV and
video clips? And how are these attitudes reflected in the content of the
magazine? This chapter will seek
to answer the second question by showing the very real sense of threat amongst
Syrias cultural producers from the satellite onslaught.
The chief fear is
the fragmentation of audiences and the loss of a cohesive national
identity. To confront this, Syrian
Star sets out to build a canon of
national icons in the one field where Syrian producers are strong – musalsals. Part of this endeavour seeks to combat
the classless adaptability of satellite popular culture by generating a new
national confidence in a kind of national high culture packaged as popular
culture. As Kraidy points out, in
the Middle East cultural production is more contentiously contested as a field
of national identity construction than in the West. In a region where nationalisms are far
from consolidated, and where processes of foreign occupation (the US and its
partners in Iraq), annexation (Israel in the Golan Heights), and colonization
(Israel in parts of the West Bank) are not only vivid in the memory but alive
and well today, defending the national cause remains an existential task which
touches the very core of public identities. For some this national vulnerability demands that energies
be ploughed into the production of a national high culture. As popular Egyptian television preacher
Amr Khaled puts it:
I am sorry to say that the features of our Arab
nation have been obliterated; they are lost to all of the wellsprings of our
culture and art What is needed, then, is that all creative artists employ
their art to drive the wheels of progress in the area.
For Khaled, the stakes are high. His talk of Arab
society being obliterated, of its descent into flaccidity and collapse
through consumption of video clips points to how very seriously he associates
the prosperity of canons of taste with the very existence of the nation. It is pertinent to note that similarly
strident elite views were common in nineteenth century Europe and America,
where high culture was considered the apex of human evolution. For Syrian cultural producers involved
in making musalsals, cultural production perceived to be high art is still
prized as well. The mass popularity of the reality TV
formats harnessed by the Lebanese channels, LBC and Future, has unsettled
Syrian producers, and Star reflects
this. Indeed, Star frames these competing codes – one unashamedly
popular, the other dressed in popular clothes but devoted unflinchingly to the
construction of national canons – in a highly orchestrated way so as to
enable an engagement with popular satellite content on terms which will favour
Syrias national cause.
Star, then, should be understood as new in two specific
ways. Firstly, it marks a radical
departure in Syrian publications, particularly for young people, in that it
openly attempts to engage with the global popular-culture production that
Lebanese satellite channels have harnessed with such success in the Middle
East. Secondly, it has emerged in
a specific context in which Bashar Al-Asads regime, in trying to come to terms
with the global reach of American political and cultural hegemony, is
determined to renegotiate state-society relations and redefine the role young
people are to play in shaping the new order. These two factors combine to infuse the magazines core
agenda: to open up a space in which an entrepreneurial class can come to
harness globalizing formations – media production, technology, services
– without impinging on the regimes political control. Star seeks both to open a liberal space and to contain
it. One of the central components
of achieving this aim is the interplay between the Western-oriented Star
News and the Syrian-produced material which
contains it.
Mobilizing Musalsals to the
Defence of National Canons
Stars Syrian material is geared to bolstering national
confidence. Crucially, the pages
most overtly geared to containing the paparazzi ethic evident in Star
News – Star Interview, Real Star, Sport Star, and Star
Exclusives – are concerned almost
entirely with Syrians and are written in Arabic, in contrast with the Star
News Western- or Arab-world celebrities
dealt with either in English or an Arabic infused with English. This is testimony to their role in
constructing the national within Stars pages. Star
Interview poses highly formulaic questions
to an artist of national relevance about his or her education and career. In the vast majority of issues, Star
Interview is a three- or four-page article
which turns the spotlight on actors who are considered important because they
have appeared in national television productions, particularly musalsals, although directors, a singer, a dancer and
a rock band have made appearances. Real Star is a two-page interview with a successful
professional, again focusing on career and education, while Sport
Star is a two- or three-page piece that
looks each week at a sportsperson involved in sports from table-tennis to
kickboxing, from body building to show jumping. Both these features are highly formulaic from issue to
issue. Finally, Star
Exclusives offer a slightly different dynamic. They often revolve around either
foreigners of note on short stay in Syria or ceremonies in which Star plays a role – for example the magazine has
hosted whole teams from domestic television serials. These four features are central aspects of the weekly Syrian
output.
The crucial aim of
this Syrian content, particularly the flagship feature, Star Interview, is to construct a national canon out of a new
generation of Syrian actors and professionals. In the Middle East, constructing cultural canons is tightly
tied in to the dominant state ideology, modernist nationalism – a concept
that involves an important dualism. On the one hand, modernism involves a
notion of progress: Middle Eastern states and societies are to develop on
parallel lines to Western states and societies in order to compete with
them. On the other hand, modernism
can only be valid if it is authentic; it must be self-generated and tied in to
a modern narrative of national heritage.
This temporal dualism remains important today, inflecting political and
cultural discourse alike. However,
Arab cultural canons are more complex still, often straddling boundaries
associated with national identity, age, gender and elite-mass culture. Two of the outstanding musical icons of
the twentieth century, Umm Kulthum and Fayruz, are both still popular and
respected in Syria because they fulfil these stringent cultural criteria. Fayruz dominates morning
radio, including Syrias first private radio station, Al-Madina FM, where virtually no other musician is aired until
nine oclock. One friend mentioned
how he was not ready to leave for work in the morning unless had heard his fill
of Fayruz classics. Umm Kulthum recordings can still be
heard on radio and television sets most evenings around residential old
Damascus. These two performers are
representatives of the two states which dominated cultural production in the
Middle East through much of the century: Egypt and Lebanon. Both states have had troubled, but
nevertheless intimate, relations with Syria over this time. Lebanon is still seen as a sister state
of Bilad Al-Sham (the former province of the Ottoman Empire that now
encompasses the states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian
territories) and was part-occupied by Syrian troops for over three decades. Egypt and Syria were the only two
states to politically act upon the unifying visions of pan-Arabism, merging to
form the United Arab Republic in 1958.
Despite the rift that developed over Anwar Sadats independent peace
agreement with Israel in the 1970s, Syria and Egypt have since resumed closer
cooperation more recently. As such, it is not surprising that Umm Kulthum and
Fayruz, neither of whom are or were Syrian nationals, are nonetheless taken as
integral to Syrian national culture, not least because both can be tied into
authentic Arab nationalism. In
addition, Fayruz clearly straddles generation and gender divides. She is a
favourite of the sixty-year old head of the Bab Tuma household where I stayed
in Damascus over the summer 2005, just as she is hugely popular among Syrian
female friends in their early twenties.
As for Umm Kulthum, she was able to cross high and low culture divides
by, on the one hand, appealing to classical poetic traditions, exploiting her
talent and training in reciting the Quran and singing the work of established
canonical writers in Classical Arabic, and on the other hand, appealing to folk
traditions in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic. This ambiguity allowed both performers
to extend their popularity and influence.
Yet, despite being popular figures tied to twentieth-century mass media
for their success, they could not be pigeonholed as vulgar in the sense
Twitchell uses to characterize popular cultural output of twentieth-century
America, or Armbrust of some recent Egyptian cinema and music.
Most Syrians would firmly reject the idea that the bottom line for these two
performers is Does it sell? or indeed that their musics purpose is simply
to entertain, not to enlighten. Of course, this is partly because
Middle Eastern popular culture has been on quite a different trajectory from
the American popular culture Twitchell studies even if similarly
mass-mediated. The crucial point
is that Umm Kulthum and Fayruz
were canonized as national and pan-Arab icons through mass media. In other words, their producers were
not simply driven by commercial interests, but by national interests geared
towards authenticating national modernization.
Although Egypt was
for many decades the dominant force in musalsal production, since the 1990s
Syrian-produced serials have been growing in influence and attracting audiences
to such an extent that they may now out-rival their Egyptian competitors. Ironically, the vehicle for this growth
has been satellite television.
Satellite channels from the Gulf proved lucrative buyers of Syrian
musalsals which came to distinction in the mid-nineties. Syrian-produced serials, both
historical dramas and comedies, have become a staple of television content in
the Middle East, due in no small part to the competitive edge private
production companies brought in harnessing new satellite advertising revenues. But this phenomenon has not only been
reflected in the flourishing market for dramatic production in Syria, but in
the creation of a new generation of Syrian acting stars with a potential
– in some cases a very real – pan-Arab appeal. Syrian casts dominate both Syrian and
collaborative dramatic productions, such as the 2004 Road to Kabul. As Dick remarks,
if one is looking for someone to
play a medieval Arab poet or an extra who can say a few lines in classical
Arabic, one goes to Syria.
This development is ideal for the
Syrian regime. Musalsal content
combines regional and local interest and can therefore provide appropriate
output for domestic consumption as well as for sale regionally, building
Syrias national image at home and abroad. The success of serials provides work and stardom for a new
generation of state-endorsed actors, many of whom have been trained at the
state theatre institution and so bring strong values about national canons,
authenticity in cultural production, and classical Arabic to a new generation
of viewers tempted by ever more channels. According to Lindsey, the government
has continued to play a strong role in determining suitable subjects for
musalsals and in vetting the final product before broadcast,
perhaps in part because the most successful production companies are owned by
individuals close to the regime. Indeed, Bashar Al-Asad appears to enjoy
being associated in foreign capitals with the more critical of these musalsals,
particularly the comedy series Maraya (Mirrors),
not least because it allows him to present himself as open and democratic.
Yet, recently he made no effort to prevent the draconian seizure by censors of
two whole episodes of the very same programme. This strategy has allowed the regime to
censor what it does not like in dramatic production whilst conveying its
messages to diverse audiences through private means, as the content of recent productions
attests. Nationally, musalsals for
Ramadan 2005 such as Al-Hawr Al-`Ayn
(Maidens of Paradise) preached against terrorism; regionally, historical dramas
such as Tariq (2004) implied that
Arabs must unite and be tolerant; globally, serials such as Faris
bi-la Jawad (Knight Without a Horse, 2002)
angered US diplomats with their negative stereotyping of Israelis. The approach seems similar to the
strategy Bashar Al-Asad, as President in waiting, pursued for Syrian
involvement on the internet in the late-nineties. He clearly sought to harness the internet for the Syrian
national interest by seeking both to monitor use carefully, on the one hand,
and to develop Syrias virtual resources, on the other.
This dual strategy of harnessing media space whilst simultaneously constraining
it should not be read as the hallmark of a culturally confident nation. Rather, this strategy emanates not from
a position of confidence, but a position of extreme vulnerability in a period
where cultural identity, regime power, and national cohesion cannot be taken
for granted. Nevertheless, the
outlines of a plan emerge.
Cultural production and new media are being harnessed to make the right
messages as loudly and as confidently as possible, whilst the wrong messages are
confronted and constrained.
Stars Mechanics of Canonization
There is little
doubt Star Interview is the flagship
article in the Syrian magazine.
Given central prominence in Star Syria, the feature covers the first three or four pages, in contrast to
LInterview which is tucked away
deep into the Lebanese magazine.
Indeed, the features importance is reflected in the prominence given to
the actor on the magazines front cover.
Dominating the page, the actors image often appears as a figure cut-out
overlaid above pictures promoting other features. With the exception of the
double-spread Backstage feature
which takes a look behind the scenes of a Syrian musalsal (figure 13), Star
Interview is the only Syrian-produced piece
focusing on a celebrity (figure 11). This indicates something of the scant
resources Star Syria is produced
with, but it also shows how important Star Interview is within the magazines broad agenda. It is little wonder, then, that Star
Interview is shot through with the
mechanics of canonization. The
questions, photographs, and format of the piece are all highly deferential and
optimistic, and, in contrast with Star Lebanons LInterview,
work to buttress the reputation of the actor on display. Produced with extensive input from the Star writers themselves, Star Interview displays photographs of the actor and Star staff together, often chatting round a table in an
up-market caf though sometimes outdoors facing the camera. In this way, the celebrity and Star
writers appear as partners – a quite
different relationship from the interrogation in LInterview. Indeed,
unlike the paparazzi photography of the Lebanese Got Cha, here the actor is a figure of respect who, when
captured surrounded by attentive young people, takes on a visible status of
prestige – the reader is given a visual representation of the stars
relevance to young people. These actors are not just performers or sex symbols,
but personalities worth listening to and emulating. In addition, by picturing
the stars in recognizably Syrian locations (at least for Damascenes), the
magazine defines them as locals and insiders.
Star Interview makes no demands on celebrities; on the contrary, it
gives them a chance to show off.
It is unclear whether the interviews highly formulaic questions, which
differ little from issue to issue, are the result of editorial controls or Star
staff input,
but we can be certain that the paparazzi-style dressing-down
Figure 13: Backstage (here called Star Kawalis) is one of four features (Star Interview, Real Star, Double Star) which precede the Lebanese-produced Star News. It cofirms the significance attached to Syrian-produced musalsals in Star.
characteristic
of LInterview is not in view.
The formulaic approach functions as a levelling tactic to reduce difference:
each actor is treated as a national actor rather than a representative of a
particular class or group.
Moreover, there is no pressure on actors to reveal personal details; the
tactics of paparazzi bullying so evident in LInterview are almost completely absent here. Typical questions include:
What are your future plans?
Do you like the cinema? Do you
prefer it to the small screen?
What are your hobbies?
When did you start to dream of
being an actor?
You have played a number of
different parts and characters, what is the role you consider closest to your
heart?
Invariably, the actors are asked to
list their own favourite Syrian actors and suggest which actor they would most
like to resemble. In this way, an
inventory of Syrian actors emerges from the actors themselves. Again in sharp
contrast with LInterview, questions
focus on successes rather than failures, demonstrating that unsettling the
celebrity or creating a scandal is not in the picture. For example, in issue 35 Qais Al-Shaykh
Najib is asked, What in your opinion is the secret of the great success which
the serial Layali Al-Salihia
achieved? Nowhere is
the inverse of this question asked: Why did this serial fail? The unwillingness to tackle any kind of
failure, conflict, suffering, or ignominy should be understood within the
context of feelings of national vulnerability, and can be seen in other
cultural fields. For example, the musalsal Al-Zeer Salim established new ground for its drastically negative
display of a conventional historical hero in Arab folklore, but only after its
producers axed some of the original scenes for being too negative and
controversial. Similarly, in the socially conservative
Gulf, MBC is adapting the American reality TV show The Biggest Loser as The Biggest Winner so as to keep it positive, not to add a negative
twist. Every actor featured in Star
Interview comes out a winner too.
It is important to
remember that the majority of Syrian actors appearing in musalsals have been
trained within the state theatre institute. Versed in the kind of national culture
the Syrian regime supports (for example, they are highly competent in classical
Arabic) these actors are state-endorsed cultural icons. Star Interview provides a forum for actors to promote their own
notions of the national canon. Star selects actors who reaffirm its ethos and whom it
deems worthy of national celebration.
The interview itself is not in fact a news item – again pointing
to a contrast with the Lebanese version which opens with celebrity news stories
from the Middle East – nor is the interview a scoop in the style of the
Lebanese Got Cha. Rather, Star Interview is a statement of national progress in which an actor
is called upon to reflect on his or her role in, experiences of, and ideas
about that national progress. In
return, the actors sense of self-worth is reinforced, not least because they
are registered within Star as
national icons.
Actors stress time
and time again the importance of study in harnessing acting talent. Education, as Armbrust has argued, is a
central component of twentieth-century modernist thinking in the Middle East,
not just because it is seen a powerful state mechanism of producing social change,
but because it is tied both to visions of national progress and to the middle
classes who are called upon to provide the engine room for that progress. Yet more recent changes in Egyptian
cultural production indicate that the value of education for personal
achievement and upward mobility is no longer taken for granted. According to the actors who appear in Star, however, academic training remains highly valuable,
pointing to the continuing relevance of modernism in Syria. Star Interview questions actors most weeks as to whether talent and
experience is enough for an actor to get into the profession or whether he
also needs study and training.
Actors usually profess that an artist fundamentally needs talent but that
this matures through studies.
Qais Al-Shaykh Najib claims that you can learn in four years through college
what takes ten years through experience alone and in a more academic and
better way. The institution which according to most
actors retains the prime position in safe-guarding Syrian culture and ensuring
the development of home-grown talent is the Academy of Higher Learning in the
Performance Arts (Al-Ma`had Al-`Ali lil-Funun Al-Masrahia). The
name of this institution itself indicates the values actors attribute to the
kind of art they partake in producing.
Indeed, the fact that its role in Syrias acting profession gets such
attention in Star Interview demonstrates
that it remains perhaps the only institution of its kind in the country. Its pivotal position for the acting
profession is not just in producing the next generation of actors, but in
ensuring both the quality of cultural output and the notion of high culture in
Syrian drama at all.
As state-trained
icons of national progress, actors invariably articulate their role as one of
producing high, rather than purely popular, art. When asked about the secret behind the popularity of the
serial Layali Al-Salihia, Qais Al-Shaykh
Najib responded:
Because the serial managed a
balance between two things – it had a mass popular underpinning in
addition to being consistently highly artistic on the levels of dcor, costume,
camera work, directing, and acting. Added to this, the subject it addressed is
popular and presents an important moral value.
This demonstrates the enduring
belief that a serial must impart high cultural ideals to its audience in order
to achieve popularity. Just as Umm
Kulthum achieved popularity by fusing high and low traditions, Qais believes
that mass appeal must be combined with high artistic merit which raises the
cultural consciousness of the audience.
High culture is not to be made elite, but employed by those who possess
competence in it to the ends of national affirmation and cultural enlightenment. Becoming a canonical actor depends
first on a process of initiation – learning the know-how in elite
cultural forms and being validated as a cultural icon – then on a process
of guarding cultural standards and instructing others in them. The two processes, initiation in the
tradition and passing on the tradition, are effectively two sides of the same
pattern of regenerating the national canon.
Conclusion
Star demonstrates the emerging response of the Syrian
regime to the perceived combined threats of new media (satellite television, the
internet, mobile telephones) and untrammelled Western-conceived popular culture
which is increasingly accessible.
These threats seem to signal the end of the states role in producing
and broadcasting terrestrial television whose goal is to align national
audiences around national output.
The regime response is as legible in Star as it is within the speeches and policies of state
officials. The energies of young
Syrians are to be put to harnessing new media –satellite television and
the internet in particular – to the national benefit. Devoted to achieving this engagement, Star
opens a space for Western, and particularly
Lebanese, popular culture whilst concomitantly constraining that space with a
mechanics of national canonization.
Thus, Syrian actors in the flourishing sector of musalsal production are
to be moulded as canons to combat the icons of (largely Lebanese) reality
television and video clips who cannot be authenticated.
4
Shaping New Authority
Structures: Carole, Star Writers, and the Privatized Corporatist Consensus
Restricting
freedom means dwarfing it, but regulating its practice means developing it and
making it healthy Freedom and its regulations belong side by side. They do not live apart Like everything
in this universe, freedom needs order. Hafiz al-Asad on freedom at his 1990
Revolution Day address.
Introduction: No Ordinary
Stars
Star magazine is only partly devoted
to buttressing the stardom of current celebrities. A consistent feature of the magazines output and production
is geared to generating stars of a very different kind from an unusual
source. Rather than building
exclusively on the careers, habits and private lives of celebrities in music,
television, and drama, Star sets out to
mould and display a team of young role models – the amateur writers, many
students with no previous experience or training in journalism,
who contribute much of the Syrian
content to the magazine – whose only success is to have confidently
located the right path to personal progress. The path they have found revolves
around the pursuit of higher education, professional ambition and a secular
consumption lifestyle. If these
are the building blocks of national modernity in Syria, then it is the young
middle classes, epitomized by the writers in Star, who are to ensure the safety of Syrias passage to that
modernity. In other words, Stars young writers contribute to the magazines mission
on two levels: first, by taking
part in Stars production they
guarantee their own position within Syrias own evolving modernity; second, as
students of the Star way, they
can be displayed and projected outwards to the reader as role models to be
emulated. This implies that even
the magazines title – Star –
is part of its agenda of engaging with global media on Syrian terms. Taking an English word which is now
widely established in the youth repertoire of foreign vocabulary thanks to the
massively popular Star Academy
and Super Star on Lebanese
satellite TV, the magazine aims to redefine the concept of a star to
encompass the role models and bringers of national success that readers
discover in its pages.
It
is not hard to locate the young writers in the magazine because they are almost
everywhere; they comprise the yarn which weaves the magazines fabric together
and gives coherence to its diverse content. Facing the inside cover is a piece written in English
accredited to one of Stars young
contributors. This piece is
mirrored by a final commentary in Arabic opposite the inside back cover again
written by one of the amateur team.
Turning to Inside this week on page 2, the eye is drawn to a
photograph on the opposite page encapsulated in the red outline of a five-point
star. It shows the team grouped in
front of the UG offices in Mezze Village Sharqia and is entitled Our team
Damascus in English (Figure 14).
Trails of smaller red and yellow stars encircle the picture. In it, more than twenty writers from
the team face the camera smiling and laughing; this is a really positive image
which speaks cheerful youth, confidence, and fulfilment. Females are generally brought to the
front, males to the back, though there is some intermixing. Many of the males have arms around each
other and hands on each others shoulders in an overt display of camaraderie.
Moreover, these young people are dressed up for the occasion. There are no hijabs here; rather the
women display earrings, jewellery, painted fingernails and lipstick. One carries a trendy handbag; another
is wearing sunglasses seated on her forehead. All are wearing jeans and colourful, revealing tops. As for the men, style seems to be
equally significant. One is
proudly wearing sunglasses, another a Les Angels Laker t-shirt. Beneath this photograph is a second,
smaller star displaying four well-groomed young faces. Below, it reads Aleppo. But the display of the young
writers does not stop there. Star Interview and Star Exclusives almost always show members of the team interviewing
a celebrity in a public space, such as a caf or restaurant. Me, my friends and Star, a series of pages displaying young people out
socializing in Damascuss restaurants and bars, often shows Star writers joining in the fun or even as party hosts. Indeed, the Star writers are always on show at official publicity
events for the magazine, not least a promotional concert performed by Nancy
`Ajram and sponsored by Star
(Figure 14). Finally, Star writers contribute much of the
content for the second half of the
magazine following Star News. Often a writers name and picture will
be attached to the article.
Star, then, provides the reader with a text which is only
partly structured around the notion of celebrity. Rather it is designed to elevate the young amateur writers
and authority figures amongst their contemporaries to a position of stardom for
their role in furthering national secular modernity. This chapter seeks to understand the Star writers textual contributions and representational
roles within the magazine. It will
seek to do this through an ethnographic exploration of the contests which
infuse the magazines production process. Thus, the chapter will draw on attitudes and
experiences of key members of the group, as well as their relations with professional
staff. This ethnographic approach
can offer a more contextualized insight into the magazines production process
than a purely interview-based approach because it builds on observations about
how and where the interview took place, and takes account of my own position
within the interaction. Star, it
will be argued, is testimony to the
emergence of what might be called a secular privatized corporatism which
envisions a young generation firmly tied both to the existing political order
and to increasing consumer consumption.
This privatized corporatism, which draws on the discourse of western
individualism, consumerism, and meritocracy for its vocabulary, is being
unleashed to do battle with religious and patriarchal norms with a view to
asserting a secular and productive vision of Syrian modernity. It is, in other words, the discourse of
an authority structure defined by the ability to validate certain lifestyle
practices and norms whilst devaluing others. Like regime-generated corporatism, it is avowedly
nationalistic and devoted to preserving regime continuity because it emerges
from the web of state patronage.
Unlike regime corporatism, it is located in the private sphere and is
chiefly mobilized by those whose primary goal is the creation of capital. Thus, what Star offers both its readers and those who are involved
in its production is a discourse that extols individual freedom as necessary
and virtuous, but similarly insists on a rejuvenated vision of compliance in
modern Syria. Star is designed precisely as the vehicle to an evolving
realm of corporatist control.
The Star Writers
The team of young
amateur writers consists of a pool of perhaps forty young people whom Carole
Ibrahim Bashara, the magazines editorial manager, draws on for content. They are not officially employees of
United Group (UG), but are paid for whatever they have published. Stars managerial team is a small unit of roughly twenty
full-time professional employees in marketing, sales, distribution, public
relations, photography, and design.
The magazine is led by a general manager, but it is Carole as chief
editor who relates most directly to the team of amateur writers. According to Carole, the Lebanese
version is produced by a similarly sized professional team which begs the
question of why Star Syria needs
its team of amateur writers at all. The extent to which they are used to
keep costs low is not clear. It is
clear, however, that the writers are invaluable in furthering Stars core agenda: they are not just there to save money
and render the magazine profitable, but to stand as role models for a new
generation. This much seems clear
from their centrality in the magazine, a centrality acknowledged by Carole and stridently
proclaimed in the first issue of the Syrian magazine. Announcing the magazines arrival with a WOW, the Star
teams front page editorial speaks of its
mission in introducing youth work and loudly pronounces itself The Voice of
the Youth.
The overwhelming majority of these young
writers are university and school students. Many have attended or are currently attending foreign
language schools in Damascus, such as the American and French schools, and
consequently speak either English or French fluently. The majority are undoubtedly middle class and from
privileged backgrounds. These
writers were recruited from a variety of sources. Most, it seems, were brought in through informal contacts
and chance meetings with Stars
professional team. According to Carole, the prospective
writer has first to complete an application form explaining why he or she wants
to work for Star and then pass an
interview with Carole to demonstrate writing ability and willingness to talk.
This process is far from standard practice, however. Ghalia and Lina, for example, had good enough grades not to
need an interview. It is too soon to say how the group
renews itself (certainly no-one has been fired to date and it is unclear
whether Carole could fire anyone), but it appears that some members, having
been involved for some months, have moved on to pursue new interests whilst
others have joined more recently.
Of the forty, ten writers are part-time employed with UG as trainee
journalists. This goes to show the extent to which UG and Star are keen to reinforce their professionalizing
mission for the youth of Syria by offering genuine opportunities for young
people within the company.
The
Star writers involvement in the
magazine broadly comprises producing articles and attending the team meeting,
both of which are managed by Carole.
Having conducted some research, mostly on the internet, and written a
draft article, the Star writers
pass their work to Carole for editing.
She reads the draft article, adds notes to it, and gives it either to a
sub-editor (a full time UG employee) or to the writer again. Thus, the formal text is altered to
meet her requirements. Where there
are major linguistic or stylistic faults in the text, or where the ideas are
not appropriate for the magazine, Carole returns the piece to the writer giving
ideas of how to re-write the text from scratch. As we will see below, editing
is one of the ways in which Star
enforces the bounds of compliance and justifies its corporatist agenda.
The routine is
punctuated by two meetings during the week, except during exam time when the
group meets once-a-week and Carole takes on the greater burden of conducting
interviews and producing content.
Functionally, the meeting allows the group to discuss and make
preparations for the following weeks issue. The ideas tend to come from Carole who asks the writers to
prepare articles on a certain topical subject, such as the cultural celebration
of Christmas, or a certain area of interest, such as love or psychology. In this way, she manages magazine content
and provides the ideological lynchpin for the magazines agenda. As for the standard pages, Carole asks
the writers whether they know anyone appropriate for this weeks piece. So, for example, to find an appropriate
sportsperson for Sport Star, Carole asks
if anyone has a friend who plays the chosen sport. This procedure is central to the magazines pursuit of
content; the groups network of friends and relatives becomes an active
resource for a commentary on the state of modernity in Syria. Thus, members of Stars informal extended network both widen and delineate
the margins of the middle class snapshot Star seeks to portray of modern Syrian youth. Indeed, it constructs stars and role
models from the ranks of the successful, ambitious and productive, drawing a
wide array of young people into furthering Stars core mission: to produce a self-confident
generation of young, middle class Syrians.
The
other, perhaps more significant, role of meetings is less concerned with the
immediate preparation of the following weeks content. This role is an ideological one. Carole, it must be remembered, is
perhaps only five or ten years older than the majority of Star writers, and is therefore able to straddle diverse
roles within a meeting. She can
simultaneously act the manager, the teacher, the role model and the social
peer, fusing messages which might not initially seem incoherent, but on closer
inspection often appear contradictory.
So, as social peer and mentor devoted to the retreat of patriarchy, she
encourages her young team members to challenge the social norms of their
parents by trying everything at least once, right up to drugs (hata
al-hashiish);
yet as a professional authority figure – someone who has achieved a
managerial position in a dynamic company – she encourages the writers to
pursue their professional dreams, often shared by their parents, through study
and work experience. As a social
engineer and modernizer, she encourages greater freedom, saying confidently,
we are free men so we have the right to choose,
yet as manager accorded her role on the understanding that she evades political
controversy, she is a staunch backer of the regime and actively seeks to
relegate politically contentious discussion from meetings and the pages of the
magazine. As a proud Syrian
nationalist she talks of defending our traditions and our pure mind by
knowing our history, and works to introduce a page to the magazine which
explicitly explores Syrian institutional history in the twentieth century (Star
Zaman), whilst as bringer of modernity she
is concerned with opening the eyes of young Syrians to the outside world,
arguing of young Syrians that you should look around you and decide to be what
you want; you cant decide if youre closed. As a Christian she openly refers to
Biblical parables to confirm her point during meetings, as if conducting a
sermon, yet as a manager devoted to Syrias secular modernity she calls on her
writers to avoid using religious phrases in articles, such as Insha
Allah and Masha Allah, threatening to
reject any such pieces that come her way. It is not accurate to claim that there
is some coherent meta-discourse which can even out these inconsistencies. On the contrary, such inconsistencies
may be necessary components of modernist middle class thought in the Middle
East. Armbrust, for example, has mapped the development of the conservative
radical in Egypt where modernism combines a narrative of national progress
with a counter-narrative of seeking an authentic national self through
continuities with the past. The important point is that Carole
believes in the validity of her own ideological role within the Star team and actively pursues it during meetings. As she puts it, Star aims to give the youth information by the light way
for them to accept it [in a light format so that they will accept it]. Not only does Star seek a didactic and corporatist role in the lives of
its readers, but in the social, professional, and educational lives of its
writers as well.
Carole is
undoubtedly proud to work for United Group. Formerly a co-ordinator for the
marketing subsidiary, Concord, she has been in the group since 2002, and cites
its youthfulness and diversity as reasons for its success. Still in her late twenties, she is
young to be in a managerial position, but uses her age to form a closer rapport
with the Star writers who see her partly
as a peer. She is a graduate in
French literature and has travelled abroad, boasting a command of French and
English. Indeed, she is not
unwilling to point out her talents, claiming she is a good communicator and an
articulate Arabic user. In Carole,
Star possesses a confident,
direct, and effusive editor who is not afraid to say what she thinks. Other analyses of power structures in
Syria have used gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation to understand
Syrian society.
Whilst all three categories could provide useful explanations of Caroles
relationship with the team, I argue that it is her class affiliation, pro-regime
stance, and professional experience which are most pertinent, not least for
understanding the corporatist consensus she enables within Star.
The team of amateur writers, as Carole
puts it, represents a small cell of Syrian society,
albeit a highly privileged one.
They are seen by Carole as a resource to provide both content for the
magazine and Stars insight into the social life of Syrias youth. But, as Carole and her professional
team in Star are active in
selecting and shaping the team of writers, there is an inbuilt self-reflexivity
about the insight Star writers
provide. In other words, the broad
consensus of social attitudes which largely characterizes the teams outlook
only reconfirms what Carole and the managerial cadre of Star already thought they knew: Syria is modern, should be secular, and can be as dynamic a
place for social experimentation amongst young people as anywhere in the
West. Star, then, can
be considered an introspective space for experimentation in which external
observations merely reinforce internal certainties and expectations.
The Star Consensus Under Threat from Within
I
was lucky enough to bump into Ahmed again on my second field work visit to
Damascus in December 2005. At first, it came as no surprise to find
him hanging out not far from Bab Tuma in Inhouse Coffee, the most upmarket
chain of coffee shops modelled on Starbucks. He had always struck me as well-spoken and confident, firmly
grounded in Damascuss urban middle class, and not untypical of the clientele
frequenting the Inhouse chain.
When I was first introduced to the Star team of amateur writers at one of their meetings in August the summer
before, it was Ahmed who most proactively responded to my questions in English. The second time I attended a Star
meeting later that summer to conduct an
informal written questionnaire, Ahmed was the only writer who approached me to
comment on my survey. Jotting down his email address on the
back of his form, he said Id like to meet you again, and proceeded to
flatter me with the words in English, I like the way you think. Not long after, again during the
summer, I ran into Ahmed and his closest friend at Star, Aladdin, conducting their own survey about
tourists impressions of Syria in the old town near Bab Tuma. Having filled in their survey as
honestly as I could, I exchanged phone numbers and vowed to make contact
soon. Alas, I failed to meet
either Ahmed or Aladdin again during the summer.
So it was that I
came across Ahmed in Inhouse the following December confident I had found
someone who broadly represented the group of Star writers. But had I considered my exchanges with Ahmed more carefully,
I might have more accurately predicted his relationship with Star, the team and Inhouse Coffee. At my first meeting with the Star
team in the summer, I had been offered the
stage. I joined the group of
writers around an enormous glossy conference table in a long stylishly
furnished room with luxurious swivel chairs and glass panes lining one
side. Dona `Alam, the Public
Relations Manager, allowed me as long as I wanted to ask the team questions
about their work. I attempted this
in English, French and a little Arabic, but such was the general proficiency in
English, I tended to stick with the language I could use most clearly. I asked all kinds of questions about
social issues I thought pertinent – marriage, religion, their role in the
magazine – until I felt comfortable enough to ask something I knew would
be provocative. I asked the team
how they felt about displays of Western singers in their magazine who are
openly homosexual, such as Elton John.
It was Ahmed who responded first, claiming that homosexuality was
totally forbidden in Syria. His
outburst brought a range of responses, but most extraordinarily from a
prospective Star writer sitting
next to me who had come to be interviewed that day. He countered Ahmed directly, saying he had friends who were
openly gay and knew of social haunts where they were accepted. Fast-forward to my second meeting with
the Star team, and Ahmeds
attempt to compliment my intellectual approach. As he left, I looked closer at his responses to my questions
– most of which dealt with trans-national media, reality TV formats, and
social values. The questionnaires,
though provisional, were undoubtedly a failure, but none more so than
Ahmeds. He had refused to engage
with any of the questions on reality TV formats except to say, I hate them, I
hate them all. Ahmed, as I should
have realised early on, had far more unsettled opinions on the project he was
involved in than most of the other writers. When I told Carole that I would be speaking to Ahmed about
his typical experiences of the magazine, she cautioned me against the strategy
obviously fearing the negative spin he would give me, and described him as an
extremist.
Ahmed
is a self-confessed success story.
Hailing from a government school, he considers himself special because
he is a strong learner and self-starter. A second-year economics student at
Damascus University and practising Muslim, he speaks excellent English and is
confident and out-going. Ahmed
lives with his father and sister although he also has two half sisters from his
mothers second marriage to a Palestinian man. His involvement in Star can partly be explained by the fact that he
pre-dates Caroles appointment as editorial manager. He had taken it upon himself, with his close friend Aladdin,
to conduct some research on why students prefer certain English Language
Schools in Damascus over others, and subsequently wrote an article which was
partly published in the national newspaper Tishriin. Whilst Ahmed was working at one such school – Horizon
Language Centre – the manager recommended him to a member of Stars marketing staff who was on business selling
advertising there. Ahmed and
Aladdin received a call from Star
soon after and joined the team.
But Caroles
arrival brought new problems for Ahmed.
He openly admits that she hates him, not least because he challenges
her authority by questioning her social outlook and technical knowledge. For example, he frankly contested her
view during a meeting that digital cameras produce inferior results to
conventional cameras. Similarly,
he argued with her over whether Muslims celebrate Christmas by hanging up
decorations in their houses.
Hearing these stories over an extended conversation at Inhouse Coffee, I
asked Ahmed why he continues to work for Star. He responded with three reasons: first,
he enjoys working as a journalist, second, he is grateful for the income, and
third, he believes he has a message to deliver. When I asked what this message might be, he claimed that his
aim is to give the youth of Syria a role model. Of course, Carole also wants to give young Syrians positive
role models, and indeed, acts that part within Star herself.
The crucial point of divergence between Ahmed and Carole is precisely
who can and cannot be an appropriate role model. As we will see, this contest has crucial implications for
understandings of Syrian modernity, and cuts to the very core of the
competition over social values, visions of national progress, and
interpretations of Syrias youth.
Ahmed
and Carole do, in fact, agree on a number of things. They are both enthusiastic about the nationalist modernist
narrative of twentieth century Syrian history, as their equal pride for Star
Zaman shows. This page, which traces the modern history of institutional
and technological developments in Syria, was introduced as a regular feature by
Carole, yet even Ahmed cites its presence as a reason for him remaining at the
magazine. This modernist bent
inflects their view that Star should
be a secular magazine. Indeed, they both prize high cultural ideals, and
believe firmly in the value of education.
Where they differ is over the role that patriarchal norms should play in
social life and in governing the kinds of mediated representations of young
people magazines like Star can
print. Carole, as a female
professional authority figure, who doubles up as a social mentor for her team
of young journalists, seeks to insert herself into the lives of the Star writers and, to some extent, replace parental
authority. Ahmed contests
this. He views parents as the
ultimate arbiters over the proper social behaviour of their children, and
rejects the claim Carole makes to impose herself irrespective of her managerial
role.
This much became
obvious at a meeting I attended in December in which Carole instigated a
discussion about parental roles. There were twelve writers present,
though some came late and others left early. Due to college exams, the writers were not contributing as
much to the magazine as at other points of the year. Instead, Carole was publishing pieces from a reserve of
articles she had built up over a period of months, as well as contributing more
content herself. Because of this,
the meeting only briefly touched on the actual magazine. Instead, Carole used the time to
conduct a debate. Initially she part-elicited, part-delivered the agenda,
asking What would you like to talk about today shabaab? and writing bullet points on the board.
Figure 15: Caroles bullet
points written on the white board to spark a discussion on young people and
parental roles during a meeting with the Star team. It reads:
Old and dying Customs: The differences between
expectation and young people; Societys view of relationships between guys and
girls; Free time (or when you have nothing to do).
At first, the writers seemed to
lack interest and enthusiasm in the discussion, but as more of them offered
opinions, so the interaction gathered momentum. Despite the active involvement of all present, the meeting
nevertheless revolved around Carole who prodded the writers with questions,
offered ideas for discussion and consistently gave feedback, most of which was
affirmative, to the opinions being expressed. With the discussion in full swing, one of the female
writers, sitting next to Ahmed, spoke up to tell a story about her hair. As an adolescent she had had long hair
that reached down to her legs, but she grew tired of it. So she sought the consent of her
parents to have it cut. When her
father refused to consent to this, she went ahead with the haircut anyway,
prioritizing her own wants over the risk of incurring her fathers wrath. When she arrived home that day from the
hairdressers, her father took one look and said, youve just lost your
future! This story elicited one
of the loudest bursts of laughter at the meeting. With renewed confidence she told of how she had upset her
parents by coming to the Star meeting
that evening in her new pink pyjamas for the first time. In response to this, Ahmed tried to
argue that parents are wiser than young people and should be respected
accordingly. Whereas young people think they know what is right, parents know what is right.
He gave the example of his decision to grow his hair long against the
wishes of his parents. After a
year or two he realised they had been right all along and had it cut, although
he admits that his current beard is not to the liking of his parents. Carole
met Ahmeds defence of parental authority (and in particular patriarchal
authority) with disdain. She
contested his views and mobilized the gathering consensus amongst the Star writers against Ahmeds position. Clearly, Carole felt her authority and
her message of encouragement for youth empowerment within the family to be
under threat. Thus, Ahmed received
a swift rebuke from the girl in the pink pyjamas who insistently asked, Why is
that true? Why is that true? (Leish Sah?).
In
the Middle East, displays of womens bodies often function as the site of
social contests over morality and control. Ahmed deems many of the representations
of women in the magazine as slutty.
There are two implications of this view, as Graham Brown argues: first,
representations of women as sexual objects and symbols of wealth are often
objected to on the basis that they appear to display women escaping male
control over their conformity to the norms of good behaviour;
second, fears are expressed over the corrupting repercussions of such images in
which other, less privileged women could be led astray by aspiring to such
lifestyles. Although the idea that changing norms
of womens representation lead directly to substantive changes in social
relations remains largely unfounded in the Middle East,
Ahmed nevertheless has very little social experience of such images in Syrian
print and he is therefore, as he puts it,
shocked by them.
During our
discussion in Inhouse, he gave me some indication of which images he finds most
offensive by ranking a series of photographs within a single issue on a scale
of one (acceptable) to ten (totally unacceptable) (Figure 16). He found the front cover image of a
Syrian actress, Laila Al-Atrash, perfectly acceptable even though she is
captured from above revealing her bra strap. Perhaps the high-culture role assigned to her by the
magazine as youthful national icon, and the fact that her image does not
overtly attempt to arouse the reader explain his view. But, he was not 100 percent happy
with the picture of the Star team in
which young female colleagues can be seen wearing light, and revealing, summer
clothing. Next, he ranked cat-walk
images of Kylie Minogue, Elizabeth Hurley and Hilary Duff six out of ten. Here the formality of both dress and
occasion appear to lessen the impact of open shoulders and cleavage. He ranked the explicitly sexual image
of Jessica Simpson perched provocatively on the Dukes of Hazard car in short
skirt eight out of ten. But he reserved his greatest ire for
any image of Haifa Wahabi, the Lebanese singer and presenter of the Reality-TV
show, Al-Waadi, ranked ten purely
because of her sullied reputation as he saw it. We guys hate her, he told me, because
she acts like a slut.
Ahmeds feelings
have on occasions bubbled to the surface in Star team meetings. He
described to me how, during a meeting, he argued with Carole over the
appropriateness of the images Star
publishes. She said that Star does not publish bad photos of women, and asked
him to show her any such image from the magazine. Ahmed duly found a photo which he found offensive showing a
Western actress revealing a healthy amount of cleavage and flesh (Figure 16). Unsurprisingly, the picture appears in Duddlys
Column, a Lebanese feature in English at
the heart of Star News. At this
point Carole accused Ahmed of feeling this way because he only ever sees his
mother and sister covered by the hijab.
This, according to Ahmed, was not only factually incorrect – none
of his three sisters wears the hijab – but also patronizing. He rebuked Carole, arguing that he and
Aladdin dont live in a shell, we see, we know what is acceptable and what is
not we cant just leave behind what we learnt.
What
Ahmed has learnt is not simply a religious ethic, but an emotional belief in
the importance of female modesty to underscore male honour. This
social belief, as the literature
on patriarchy in the Middle East often argues, cuts to the heart of family
structure and social control. During our conversation, Ahmed
expounded his opinions on female modesty arguing that it is shameful for a girl
to lose her virginity before marriage.
If this happens, as he put it, her future collapses. He went on to
outline the legal-national grounding for this view, explaining that Shari`a
personal law condones honour killings where male family members murder a female
relative who is sexually promiscuous.
Ahmed fears the magazine because he feels it seeks to undermine his
views, views which he regards not only as vital to the moral health of Syrian
society, but deeply ingrained in Syrias religious and cultural landscape:
Its hard to reform a whole
current thats been flowing for 14 hundred years – a tough job for a
magazine like star. Its a big
thing to change, we cant change. To force youth to dump their religion and
everything they used to know, its like changing the UK into a Republic.
Of
Stars content, it is Star
Zaman that Ahmed points to as appropriate
material for Syrias young generation (Figure 17). The page, which presents a morally unambiguous snapshot of
Syrias modern history, offers young Syrians the right kind of educational
supplement. According to Ahmed, the features didactic message is clear: you
youth, see what you used to have and try to stimulate it. At our meeting in Inhouse, Ahmed went
on to tell me a family story which for him only confirms the message brought
out by Star Zaman that older
generations were more morally upstanding in their defence of the national
cause. Apparently, whilst touring the
country during mandate occupation, his grandfather was caught by the French and
offered a small fortune to work for them.
He refused and fought on until his untimely death in prison. As Ahmed puts it, the moral of the
story is that his grandfather did not pay attention to seductions given to
him. This is a lesson Ahmed would
like to promote amongst todays youth who are now irresponsible and looking
for less
valuable things than they used to. Indeed, it is a lesson he considers
almost totally lacking in Star.
Hence, his confession that he would love to work for one of the other emerging
publications in Syria – Shabablek or Al Ghuerbal – which are
completely divested of any of the slutty images Ahmed detests.
Ahmed,
then, as a middle class male sharing so many of the codes of a middle class
consumption lifestyle – his dress, his accessories, his interest in
basket ball – emerges as a particularly sharp thorn in Caroles
side. He is the anomaly in the
group: the one who openly affirms the formulation of patriarchal values which Star seeks to relegate from its pages and its writers
social outlook. Ahmed, therefore,
has to be sidelined. This helps to
explain both why Ahmed is so isolated in Star meetings and why Carole and Yousef were so severe in
their criticism of him. Thus, for
Carole, Ahmed is an extremist who I should not have sought as a
representative Star writer,
whilst for Yousef, Ahmed is a very old fashioned guy who apparently thinks
his mother will find him his future wife.
That Ahmed explicitly told me during our earlier meeting that he would
find his own partner in life, ask her to marry him directly (rather than asking
her father first), and also make no obligation on her to wear the hijab implies
that the impression of Ahmed as a fanatical defender of outdated values has
been exaggerated within the Star
team. Indeed, on many relevant
issues, he in fact shares in the Carole consensus (though he rarely would admit
this). For example, when I asked
Carole about notions of love and sex in Syria, she responded by claiming her
team of writers accepts that love and sex are one unit, as if this was an
important aspect of the team identity and togetherness. Carole, it seems, would be surprised to
hear that Ahmed agrees with this consensus. In my interview with him, he claimed that love traditionally
followed marriage in Syria, but no longer should. Yet, despite the complexity of his views, Ahmed is
labelled as stubborn by Yousef because he doesnt have the skill of
discussing things. Yousefs view
of Ahmed is testimony to Ahmeds alienation from the group due to the threat he
presents to the core principles of the group consensus. His views are simply too conservative
and his criticism of Carole too unsettling to the Star agenda.
Hence, for Stars
corporatist mechanisms to make headway, Ahmed has to be painted as the dogmatic
patriarch beyond the pale.
Carole
should not be seen as the sole architect of this privatized corporatism, rather
as the vehicle for its growth, consolidation and dissemination. This corporatism should be thought of
as a complex tendency which combines both an authority structure into whose
ranks young people should be urged and a diffuse discourse comprising
principles, rules and legitimations on which that structure is built. Carole herself, whilst deeply involved
in harnessing the operation of this corporatism to certain professed ends, is
not some grand manipulatrice commanding
events from on high, duping those below her so as they consume without
reflexion and partake inexorably in her domination. This equation might characterize the power attributed to the
generals of the culture industry so central to the drastically pessimistic
imagination of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. But it would be a thoroughly misguided
equation in our explanation of Caroles role in Star. Both
Carole and Star magazine are just
small cogs in the machinery that is attempting to accomplish the privatization
of authoritarianism in Syria. As
in all social histories, this machinery is liable to break down, to be
disturbed from within and to produce unresolved outcomes for new contests to
emerge.
Central to this
thesis is the idea that authoritarianism in Syria, compelled by perceived
threats both internal and external, is in the process of transforming the
genesis of its domination. A
regime that had previously sought control of symbolic production, of media, and
of youth itself in order to maintain its power now seeks to regenerate the
basis of its authoritarian rule through private means. Hence, the manufacture and
dissemination of pro-regime national symbols and the production of media output
that can compete regionally and bolster the Syrian national cause is taken up
by private companies. The
corporatism described in this chapter is one more case of the privatization of
authoritarianism. Corporatism is a
word often used in political science literature to define the machinery of the state
in Syria, rather than to consider the role
of private companies. As Hinnebusch argues, the enormous
state institutions and organizations established under Hafiz al-Asad –
the bureaucracy, the Ba`th Party, the army, the many intelligence services, the
popular youth organizations – had the effect of incorporating and
mobilizing large sections of society into the machinery of the state and
created networks of patronage in which individuals and groups competed against
each other rather than mobilizing against the state. But despite their size and apparent
strength, these associations were internally undemocratic and powerless
vis--vis the regime to become effective instruments of mass political
participation. As Perthes argues, they served only to
reinforce regime power. The Ba`th Party, which in the 1970s
boasted a membership of one in thirteen Syrians,
provides two crucial functions to the maintenance of regime power: first, it
channels the upwardly mobile into a structure which focuses their energies on
further refining their commitment to the regime; second, it provides
institutional mechanisms for continuous socialization of citizens along lines
which benefit the regime. This process begins from an early age as
young Syrians are encouraged to join the Revolutionary Youth Organization (Ittihad
Al-Shabiba Al-Thawri) where they attend
training camps, perform infrastructure development tasks, and pursue the
struggle against feudal and bourgeois mentalities.
The tasks facing
the regime today are to generate new wealth and harness new media to Syrias
national benefit. These tasks are
hard to integrate into the system of state corporatism as it stands. Indeed, they are hard to achieve in an
economy which largely avoided the infitah
policies that oversaw the privatization of state-owned industries, like banking
and mining, in Egypt. What is
needed is a privatized corporatism welded from similar networks of patronage
which can reproduce itself for the future. The outlines of this approach have been in the making for
over ten years. As Heydemann
notes, Hafiz Al-Asad sought to enhance the process of capital accumulation
while at the same time minimizing the political instability that disengagement
brought about so that liberalization becomes merely another means to maintain
the existing system. But the approach has been pursued with
renewed vigour in the last five years in the rein of Bashar Al-Asad. With increased threats from foreign
media, a tense regional and international political environment, and domestic
dissidents, and unable to re-establish a cult of personality to match the rule
of Hafiz Al-Asad, Bashars Syria needs more than ever new mechanisms to solve
old problems. The privatization of
corporatism is that new mechanism.
It is my
contention that Star represents the
early stages of a developing privatized corporatist discourse. It is emerging from the tectonic shifts
produced by a strategy which views that authoritarianism must stay, but the
means of its domination must change.
Young people are no longer to be socialized to struggle against
bourgeois mentalities, but are to be encouraged to pursue bourgeois
lifestyles and professions.
Crucially, such lifestyles and professions are not only to be presented
as valuable, but possible and attainable within todays Syria. In other words, the emerging privatized
corporatist discourse discourages any questioning of the regime because it
imagines that all that could be revered or desired is readily available within
the current political framework.
Progress means the invalidation of backwardness coupled with the pursuit
of self-generated middle class modernity.
Young people are to be awarded for being good consumers, productive
industrialists, and regime supporters by working their way up the professional
corporate hierarchy, a hierarchy which at its pinnacle involves close contacts
of blood and patronage between business and regime leaders. Experimentation in the realms of
consumption and work experience is encouraged, but criticism of those devoted
to the system, particularly authority figures within it, is certainly not. Star is both a mechanism for this privatized corporatism
(it works upon the Star writers)
and a vehicle for its dissemination through society (it seeks to work upon Star readers).
The Privatized Corporatism in
Text and Image: the Contours of a Discourse
The
consensus built around Carole is legible in the texts and images of the
magazine. It is this consensus
which provides form and coherence to the discourse of the magazine, and
underscores its corporatist guidelines.
Readers are offered a know-how with which to navigate their professional
and lifestyle choices – a passport enabling them to play their role in
furthering a specifically national modernity. The magazines corporatism has two essential
features: first, it sets limits on what can and cannot be said and questioned,
in part by offering positive models to be valued, and second, it is didactic,
providing cogent but simple answers to adolescent angst, the unintelligibility
of the world, and problems of morality.
In both, it seeks to provide a replacement for parental role models and
constraints, whilst denying politics as a reasonable realm for the exploration
and transformation of social life.
In a sense then, Star magazine
offers the reader the chance to become a modern and successful individual by
way of a discourse of corporatist constraint.
One
of the most striking aspects of the Syrian content is it appears to be almost
entirely devoid of criticism or irony.
The commercial and acting professionals who dominate the early sections
of the magazine – Star Interview, Real
Star, and Double Star – are not only unthreatening, they are
presented, without exception, as successes rather than failures. This can be explained by the fact that
the magazine sets them up as national heroes, role models to be emulated, young
winners making a good job of it. Hence, its portrayal of professionals is
remarkably one-dimensional; there is very little probing into sensitive topics
(as in the Lebanese LInterview)
and stars are allowed to present themselves as positively as possible. In Real Star, for example, questions such as what do you dream
of, what is your slogan in life, and what were the steps to your success
are general and give the business professionals displayed the platform from
which to present themselves as successful, confident, and powerful. Any investigation of professional
inadequacies, social problems, disputes, corruption, and flailing careers (the
bread and butter of provocative journalism, not to mention paparazzi-based
journalism) has to be sidelined.
Indeed, the stars on show, as well as the professions and lifestyles
they represent, cannot be mocked.
This dynamic should in no way be read as some specific Syrian cultural
trait; on the contrary, Syrians showed a huge appetite for the insightful and
cutting irony (Figure 18) of master cartoonist, Ali Farzat, whose short-lived
private newspaper Al-Domari regularly sold out. The lack of irony in Star magazine betrays its unwillingness to interrogate
middle class role models and lifestyles, and demonstrates that the magazine is
geared to promoting an unremittingly positive vision of both.
This has an
important repercussion: displays of youth sub-cultures which might be seen to
threaten the national modernist agenda can only qualify for a feature by being
overtly deferent to Stars
corporatism. An interview with
actor Milad Yusuf demonstrates this dynamic very clearly (Figure 18). Yusuf, who is performing in a musalsal,
Hajiz al-Samat, about a group of
young bikers who are fans of hard rock music, works hard to persuade the reader
that the apparently rebellious sub-culture is not in fact threatening to
society. Claiming that part of
the role of actors and Syrian drama is in correcting prevailing myths in
society, Yusuf makes two arguments about the sub-culture: first, he maintains
that young bikers are just as normal as the rest of Syrian society, describing
them as
students of intelligent behaviour,
who love the country and who cooperate with it fully in every way, all of whom
have specialised work, proven financial security, and are not a burden on
society as some people think;
second, he asserts that the
sub-culture to which these young people subscribe is actually as capable of
originality, skill, and finesse as our Eastern music or any high
culture. Describing hard rock as a
highly developed music demanding high technical abilities since it is a
creative music by distinction,
he effectively claims it can be incorporated into Syrian national culture and
valued within the same terms of reference. Perhaps most tellingly, he vehemently denies that young
bikers are guilty of Satan worship, arguing that as part of our youth these
young people have no connection with such perverted groups. Finally, to prove that such
sub-cultures can be accepted into the fold, Yusuf is pictured in costume on a
Harley Davidson style motorbike wearing black T-shirt and jeans, leather
gloves, and sunglasses. To
guarantee his credibility, he is also pictured in conversation with Star staff wearing a
more acceptable crisply ironed
white shirt. The juxtaposition of
the two images is a metaphor for the article – beneath the exterior
expressions of rebellious youth identity, young bikers are as normal, decent,
and devoted to the national cause as any other. In Star, any
behaviour that cannot be reconciled within the national image is systematically
placed in the category of foreign deviance or in that of local traditional
backwardness. There is no
authentic deviance.
In
addition to rigid norms governing who can be the legitimate focus of a Star feature and how they can be presented, there are
also well-established norms of censorship governing suitable topics for
investigation. The ability of
regime censors to limit discussion in print of sensitive issues is so ingrained
that journalists and state officials alike repeat the tenets of censorship like
a mantra. These tenets have come
to be known in Syria as the three red lines and cover, quite predictably, the
three no-go areas of politics, sex, and religion. Star writers,
Ahmed and Yousef, were equally as versed in the three red lines of censorship
as their editor and manager, Carole.
Indeed, perhaps unsurprisingly, I was again acquainted with the
intricacies of the three red lines during an interview with Ahed Abuzeid at the
Ministry of Media. In each case, although I brought up the
issue of censorship, my interviewee outlined the three red lines entirely
independently. The consistency of
response shown by state official, editor and the amateur writers points not
only to the fact that print censorship is entrenched in Syria, but also to the
active role Star writers play in
enforcing the bounds of what they can write. Star, then, is
itself a mechanism of control on the bounds of speech. Of course, as some Star writers argued, a censored magazine is better than no
magazine at all. Indeed, in the
long-term it may provide a site for contests and voices the regime finds deeply
unsettling. The point is, however,
that so far the magazine has sought to elaborate on, rather than diminish, the
ongoing relevance to public life of the three red lines of state censorship; it
has sought to obstruct and drown out voices emanating through new media, such
as the internet and satellite television, which are deemed threatening to regime control. Star, to borrow from Wedeen, clutters public space
with what it does not say; it is a text deeply loaded in the denial of politics
and the de-legitimization of self-questioning.
It
might be argued, as Twitchell has argued, that popular culture makes no attempt
to engage with politics or religion, rather to sell what sells because it
entertains. Yet, Star is not simply an artefact of the kind of popular culture Twitchell
charts. Rather, it is a
self-confessed manual in youth education devoted to introducing youth work as
it says in its first Syrian-content issue. So it might seem that Stars readers would benefit from pieces examining
religious authorities, answering readers questions about sex, or discussing
possibilities for increasing youth participation in politics. But none of these is possible, not just
because they might contain the seeds of future threats to regime power and its
role in shaping social life, but because they unsettle the very purpose of Star
magazine – to help produce a new generation
of compliant young Syrians who aspire to a middle class consumption lifestyle
and professional achievement within the bounds of sustained regime
authority. The magazine, then,
provides the blueprint for youth regeneration within guidelines of constraint.
Star, whilst largely written by young amateurs, is
nevertheless determinedly didactic.
The features which further Stars didactic function most overtly are Real Star and Double Star which display professionally successful figures, including women, and
detail the secret to their success.
Real Star is a double-page
spread focusing on the personality, education, and career of a different
professional each week, whilst Double Star comprises two full-page photographs of other stars with details of
their hobbies, studies, and career. The questions Real Star asks aim to persuade the reader to aspire to
corporate ideals, to value education, and to understand their personality as a
resource:
What do people say about your
personality?
Why did you study?
What are your next plans?
What are the areas of work that
you have become absorbed by?
What are the areas of work that
you have tackled courageously?
Not only do these questions
reinforce the idea that being fulfilled in life is to be professionally
successful, they also confirm that middle class identity is founded on aspiration. For
male stars, the article uses a font based on handwriting to make the role
model seem as personable and approachable as possible, but simultaneously
establishes him as an authority figure by way of pictures of the star at work
– often in an office environment – answering the telephone, signing
documents, and typing on the computer.
In the office environments I observed space is geared to projecting the
managers centrality in it. Managers
use the office to affirm their position relative to other employees, exploiting
tools at their disposal – buzzers for summoning secretarial staff, telephones,
televisions – to signal alertness and control. By presenting the professional as both powerful and
approachable, Real Star seeks to
persuade the reader not only that it is right and possible to aspire to such a
role, but that self-empowerment requires the reader to emulate the star on
display (Figure 20). Women, though
rarely the focus of Real Star,
are displayed differently. Pictured in their homes, they are seen as role
models because they have succeeded in establishing a warm domestic environment
replete with the paraphernalia of modern bourgeois living – luxurious
sofas, lavish furnishings, candles, and paintings (Figure 20).
Representations of this sort are
not new; rather the construction of women as managers of the domestic space has
a long legacy in the modern Middle East. What Star does is combine two codes – the professional
and the consumptive – which are two complementary sides of the same
know-how in middle class prosperity and achievement.
Other didactic
material is a result of a complex relationship in which Carole commissions and
selects articles but frequently refers to the young writers interests for
ideas. The writers are role models
throughout the magazine; their dress, their enthusiasm, their ambition all
combine to provide the reader with a coherent package in how to be successful
and young in a modern secular Syria.
Moreover, they are responsible for writing the two pieces which might be
understood as the magazines editorial comment. These two pieces are mirrors of one another: the former
opens the magazine in English whereas the latter closes the magazine in Arabic,
yet both deal with the same issues of romantic love, morality and fulfilment in
life. These commentaries
encapsulate the magazine and provide its moral shell. Indeed, they function so unmistakably as small
parables on life to help the reader negotiate lifes traumas and obstacles that
they might strike the Western reader as patronizing in the extreme. Taking the angst of adolescence very
seriously, they are written as if the reader unavoidably shares similar
concerns and problems as Star writers. A
typical formula identifies a problem in life, questions why it should be so,
and concludes by offering the reader a bite-size maxim to take away. For example, one of Aladdins opening
editorial pieces could hardly begin on a more morose note: Is life worth
it? Is life worth our tears? Devoid of context, this rhetorical
gambit could potentially divert the reader to the wrong answer, No. But Aladdin is on hand to provide
reassurance and comfort, cajoling his audience to cheer up, we have to
convince ourselves that this life is great. As is so often the case in Stars editorial pieces, the guidelines offer routes to
contentment which remain ungrounded in social or political action. So we arrive at the moral of the
parable, unmistakably indicated in red print, which reads, Always remember
that we only live once. But if we do it right, once is enough. Aladdin, and by extension Star, provides a resolution to angst, and therefore a
ladder to personal confidence and fulfilment.
Concluding
aphorisms of this kind, highlighted in red, are not uncommon in Star editorials:
Dont be so busy thinking about
how could you be happier and forget the blessings we live every day, hour, or
moment
[Winter] is truly a beautiful
season. Try to live it and think
about it positively for one time only, and you will see how much you will love
and appreciate it.
Kindness is the noblest weapon
which you conquer with.
Raya Saba goes as far as offering
the reader 21 rules 2 be happy which not only seek to build the readers
self-confidence, reminding the reader to spend time alone and remember
respect for self, but also elaborate a secular moral code which can replace
religious codes. Thus, the reader is told to take
immediate steps to correct a mistake and give people more than they expect
and do it cheerfully. And, as if
this wasnt enough to chew on, the reader learns how to be truly fulfilled in
life:
Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but its the only
way to live life completely.
Many of these editorials recycle
slogans and even whole tracts from internet sites. Plagiarism is one way in which the magazine is constraining:
it validates and endorses a process in which the writers look to simple answers
for solutions, rather than self-generated thought and political action, and
recycles them, along with their validation, through society. One of Yousefs English-language
editorials does just this, churning out aphorisms which call on the reader to
have hope and live life to the full:
Work like you dont need the
money, love like youve never been hurt, dance like no one is watching and live
like its heaven on earth
Yousefs aphorisms deny the
acknowledgment of impossibility or failure, and therefore negate practical
lived realities. Moreover, the
aphorisms turn on binaries which do not reflect lived struggles and hardships:
if its good, its wonderful. If
its bad, its experience and everything is okay in the end, if its not ok,
then its not the end. These
binaries (predicated on the idea that all lived experience is positive and
valuable) are not only false, they seek to divert readers from the possibility
of improving their material and social lives through political action. In other words, they remove practical
visions of critique and self-generated change from the map by offering
unattainable goals devoid of local or historical actuality.
This
sloganeering reoccurs throughout the magazine. In Real Star, Double
Star, and Sport Star, professional and amateur successes are asked to
reveal their slogan for life.
These often validate hard work and a sense of social conscience, but
also equip the reader with what seems to be a simple set of maxims which provide
a passport into the world of professional fulfilment. Clearly, they are intended as part of the secular ethical
and social code Star seeks to
give its readers which can replace backward religious moral codes which are
incapable of adapting to the modern world envisioned. Indeed, they are the flip side of a code which dominates the
latter pages of the Syrian content, a code which, on the one hand, encourages
bourgeois consumption as the key to fulfilment in life (rather than religious
observance), and, on the other, points to hidden texts within the natural world
as a secular explanation for why things are as they are. The Syrian content is riddled with
endorsements for consumption, not only in advertising, but also in the articles
Star writers produce. Thus,
readers are informed about types of home gardens, how to keep beautiful, and
how the way they dress can help reduce their defects. In addition, pieces such as Star
Kitchen, Top Music and Top Movies outline the contours of a productive and fulfilling bourgeois
lifestyle. Perhaps even more
common are articles which posit certain invisible meanings in human
interactions and the social world.
Star thus discloses for
its readers the relationship between eye colour and personality, the hidden
meanings of colours, how to discover yourself from your date of birth, how the
way we apologize depends on our star sign, and how our voice points to our
psychological state. In addition, a four-page feature
championed by Carole, Star Elak,
offers readers an explanation of their palm and a detailed account of the
personalities of all children born on each of the days in the week of issue
(Figure 21). By providing readers
with a secular tool kit for understanding the world about them, these texts
seek to subvert and replace religious explanations of meaning. Moreover,
they explain the world as a system
of incontrovertible signs in which outcomes are the products of fate. In this vision, political action is
rendered unnecessary and futile.
Conclusion
Star is testimony to the emergence of a new privatized
corporatism in Syria which endorses a bourgeois professional and consumptive
lifestyle as a means of ensuring regime stability. This privatized corporatism provides an authority structure
(as well as a legitimating discourse) which aims to replace traditional
patriarchal family structures and state-based institutional corporatism. Because this corporatism is wedded to
the regime, cultural practices deemed threatening or incompatible are
marginalized as deviant either for being backward (as Yousef would describe
patriarchy) or for being foreign (as Milad Yusuf describes hard rock). Unlike in the hugely popular satirical
newspaper Al-Domari, the privatized corporatism evident in Star eliminates criticism of middle class authority
figures within the fold. Hence, a
discourse emerges wielding the vocabulary of meritocracy and aspiration towards
new mechanisms of constraint.
5 Conclusion
Down at Inhouse Coffee: Star Magazine in its Site of Consumption
Khalid
was in his element in Inhouse coffee.
Recounting tales of his sexual exploits, he mused energetically over the
motivations for his latest romantic split, his mobile, embedded in the palm of
his left hand, periodically alerting him to yet another music download from his
ex to which he would intermittently text back, his cigarette lodged between
the index and middle fingers of his animated right hand, his strawberry
milkshake in Inhouse-branded plastic cup in front of him, his almost seamless
narrative punctuated only by here a drag, there a swig. By the time I arrived, he had already
been hanging out in the caf with his side-kick Abdul over an hour draining two
ludicrously expensive milkshakes in the process. Having settled at a centrally located table clearly visible through
the stylish glass-paned caf front to evening shoppers looking in on the
meticulously-designed and clinically-organized space that is the hallmark of
Inhouse, Khalid was keen to be seen.
Part of being in Inhouse is being seen in Inhouse, and Khalid, was both
fastidiously groomed and suitably dressed in sharp Western attire plainly
marking him out as one of Damascuss wealthy young. Son of a successful car salesman and brilliantly articulate
in English, Khalid finds in Inhouse the exclusive space in which to be a young
modern Syrian.
Khalid,
indeed, is precisely the target consumer Inhouse seeks to attract. He is within the target age range of 18
to 35, he is wealthy by Syrian standards, and he is conversant in the codes of
global consumer culture having spent three summers in the UK learning
English. I met Khalid first in a
quite different location – the suburban environs of Al-Nabk, a small town
north of Damascus, where I was staying with the religiously observant cousin of
my Arabic language conversation partner.
Al-Nabk does not even boast a single caf. Little wonder then that Khalid only goes there on short
visits to see his family. The
Damascus of Inhouse offers him a much more prestigious environment in which to
pursue his social life. Part of
this is to do with the cafs cosmopolitan feel. As Said Al-Jaafari, its Chief Operating Officer, explained
to me in an interview, Inhouse seeks to attract Western students temporarily
resident in Syria who account for over 20 percent of its sales. These foreigners, of whom I was one,
are not out of place in Inhouse; rather they are seen to have social capital
which adds value to the brand and rubs off on Syrian consumers there. For example, I was often greeted as a
quasi-hero in Inhouse for nothing other than turning up. The staff seemed to love practising
their latest English on me. On one
occasion, a female server gave me a free promotional CD after I had asked for
directions. On another, a group of
four Syrian students observed me for some time before plucking up the courage
to ask a question. Of course,
Western tourists may receive attention wherever they go in Syria, but in
Inhouse, they are seen positively such that a certain social capital is
funnelled into the brand. Inhouse
is where young Syrians, and not just the very wealthy, can go to be transported
to a cosmopolitan world, to feel connected to the pulse of global culture. And everything in the caf revolves
around this, from the stylish modern furnishings to the expensive cappuccinos,
from the predominance of English over Arabic to the ubiquity of the Inhouse
brand, from the consumption-oriented iconography of the Inhouse pictograms to
the endless music videos on MTV.
Moreover, Inhouse
is a place where social norms can be contested. This is partly because the chain itself contests social
norms in Syria. The Western-only
music television brings images fetishizing and eroticizing youth sub-cultures,
thus tagging Western consumerism to visions of youth experimentation and
selling the idea that to be young and connected is to pursue kinds of
consumption incompatible with the previous generation. As Thomas Frank notes, through
developments in advertising in 1960s America, the notion of youth came to be
an attractive consuming attitude, not an age which was pre-eminently defined
by the values of the counterculture hinging on talk of rebellion, and
intimations of free love. In the United States, musical
countercultures endowed with rebellious attitude, in-group identity, and
disdain for conventions have been sought out and cultivated by advertisers and
pop producers. In a world where
individuality is defined by consumer identity, this dynamic makes perfect
business sense. If being young
hinges on a consuming attitude which distinguishes young people from their
parents, then countercultures provide ideal resources to shape what young
people consume. Countercultures
can thus be presented as young, innovative and hip because they unsettle
established norms. Frank describes
this process for 1960s America:
The counterculture seemed to have
it all: the unconnectedness which would allow consumers to indulge transitory
whims; the irreverence that would allow them to defy moral Puritanism; and the
contempt for established social rules that would free them from the
slow-moving, buttoned-down conformity of their abstemious ancestors.
Yet, through the far-reaching
endeavours of global media and mass marketing, countercultures such as rap and
hard rock have become essentially mainstream in the Western youth
imagination. This, however,
is not the case in Syria where such genres are widely seen either as
unacceptable in or incompatible with Syrian culture. But their display in
Inhouse through MTV and VHR1 hints at the emergence of widespread social
changes in Syria allied to the advent of satellite television and the
internet. If ever will be a time
in which countercultures become cool in the Middle East, it could be fast
approaching.
Inhouse is not
marginal, but neither is it a chain devoted to mass appeal in the mould of the
Starbucks and Costa Coffees of the West – the prices are simply too
expensive and the codes of display too hard to attain for most. Rather, Inhouse is high prestige. Some of my student friends would only
need a weekly or monthly fix of Inhouse to feel included in its community,
although others, such as Yousef, would be there most days. Yet, Inhouse clearly sets out to
exclude some and cordially include others. This does not just work through pricing but socially as
well. As I have argued, the clientele in part need somewhere exclusive in order
to represent the vanguard of Syrian modernity and youth culture. For example, during one of my stints in
the caf, a customer sitting near the glass-paned caf front objected to a
homeless boy looking in at him.
Almost immediately one of the numerous members of staff was outside
chasing off the boy. A certain
privilege and social capital pertains from being seen in Inhouse by those who
cannot afford to be there, but this boy was off the scale. His presence – even though
outside the caf – intruded on the customers space and undermined the
logic of prestige accruing from social display. Another aspect of exclusion concerns the elimination of
social codes of public display, religious observance, and political obedience
which are the hallmark of public life in most of Syria. When, for example, I asked Said
Al-Jaafari why he refuses to screen Arabic satellite music channels in all his
cafes – a truly remarkable decision given the popularity of video clip
channels, Rotana and Melody Maker, and reality TV formats, Star Academy and Super Star – he responded by saying you cant put something Arabian into
the caf. Inhouse locates Syria
in the west, seeking to undermine the national modernism which has long
retained a place for preserving the authentic national self.
Indeed, Inhouse
de-clutters leisure space, removing religious and political symbols and
rhetoric, and re-stacking that space with a new iconography and language. Everything is branded - mugs, plastic
cups, tissues, plates, ash trays, menus – to an extent largely unseen in
any other Syrian leisure establishment (Figure 22). Even the servers bodies provide legitimate space on which
to display the brand – each has to wear full green uniform, apron and
cap. Metallic lettering adorns the
bar boldly pronouncing the Inhouse slogan in English, Just a perfect
day. Taken from a Lou Reed song,
this slogan further orients Inhouse towards the West. The three pictograms that form the core brand, an arrow for
in, a house for house, and a mug for coffee, are complemented by a set of
further icons designed to reinforce the central themes of the brand. Thus, images variously depict musical
notes, someone relaxing in a bath, and a heart to communicate that Inhouse is a
place for friends, leisure, and romance. Inhouse branding does not stop
there. The chains slogan is
recycled as part of a brand jingle repeated roughly every hour that says,
Inhouse Coffee day, just a perfect day!
But, Inhouse is less remarkable for what it contains than for what it
excludes. Unlike almost all other
cafes, restaurants and shops in the capital, it resists displaying images of
the President, of the Syrian flag, or of religious verses or icons. The wide glass-paned fronts which are
typical of Inhouse provide for a dialogue of two-way display. It provides Inhouse clientele with a
lens through which to inspect the cluttered world of authoritarian Syria from a
distance whilst simultaneously displaying their social privilege in an active
gesture of social differentiation.
In this way, the glass fronts magnify processes of social exclusion and
further reinforce Inhouses status as a youth retreat from cluttered public
space.
It is into this
politically de-cluttered, Western-oriented world that Star magazine is put, vying with a host of other media
– satellite television, mobile phones, and newspapers – for the
attention of young people. In
Inhouse, unlike the core business of the American coffee chains it is derived
from, most customers spend extended periods of time socializing and
relaxing. Hardly anyone comes in
to grab a quick coffee on their way elsewhere. This presents an excellent opportunity for the consumption
of media products. The centre
piece of the Inhouse media menu is the satellite television shown on stylish
plasma screens. Set to Western
music channels, MTV and VHR1 throughout the day except mornings when Al Jazeera
and Al Arabiya are screened silently to Western music, this television output
provides a window on the West and a set of guidelines for customers to
replicate on how to be young, fashionable, and connected. The music allows for an atmosphere and
continuity which helps sustain the brands potency. But the televisions are also used to broadcast MTV recordings
of live concerts of major pop stars, such as Elton John and Eric Clapton, in
the early afternoon and mid-evening.
These concerts combine the flow typical of MTV music videos with the
display of spectacle. I noticed
the customers of Inhouse to some extent taking part in the drama of these
concerts as if they were there in person.
For example, during a Brian Adams concert, customers tended to turn
towards the television whenever a song finished. Two women sitting near me were visibly astonished by the
camera angles which showed the size of the crowd. One muttered wow.
Later, when Adams finished a song and brought a fan on stage, again
these women were drawn to the television.
They too were spectators to a spectacle. On another occasion, I saw a young man counting his prayer
beads. Every time the music
stopped he would turn to the television and watch still counting. Clearly, the televisions are very
important to Inhouse and are capable of alluring customer attention. But there are other media playing the
game as well, not least mobile telephones. Inhouse clientele seem to pride themselves on displaying
their latest gadgets on the table in front of them. This not only adds social capital to those with enough money
to afford expensive phones, but it also allows Inhouse customers to demonstrate
that they are socially connected.
In other words, even without the latest phone with which to accrue
social prestige, young Inhouse regulars must display their phone to prove
social credibility. Texting,
phoning, taking photographs and sharing music downloads are regular practices
which provide additional means for enhancing a customers social standing
amongst peers as well as amongst other customers in the caf. Finally, it is
not unusual to see groups gathered around a laptop computer, either working or
discussing videos.
It should be obvious
that the print media in Inhouse face very serious competition for the attention
of the young clientele. Star is one of a number of magazines and newspapers made
available for customers to browse for free in Inhouse cafes, but it is the only
one which specifically sells itself as a youth magazine. Nevertheless, print is perhaps the only
medium through which the nationalist, paternalistic pro-regime agenda of Star can realistically access the Inhouse audience within
the caf itself. Star reaches the Inhouse market only because it is
distributed to certain cafes, restaurants, VIPs, and hairdressers for
free. Carole puts the proportion
of magazines distributed in this way at ten percent of the 10,000 print run,
although on the UG website the figure is 5,000. The discrepancy points to the difficulties researchers have
evaluating distribution and sales in Syria and the Middle East more generally
because either the statistics are not collated or they are kept confidential. That Star claims to distribute up to 5,000 copies for free
only reinforces the idea that it is not only a commercial venture, but also a
strategy for conveying a message.
Nowhere is this task more urgent than Inhouse, a veritable hunting ground
for Star magazine.
When I first
encountered Star in Inhouse early in my
summer visit to Syria in 2005, I was convinced the two made ideal
bed-fellows. But, through the
course of my research, I have come to the view that this is misguided. If Star has two young target audiences that it seeks to transform,
they are on the one hand the religiously conservative elements of the middle
class, and on the other hand the Western-oriented bourgeois consumers of
Inhouse. To the first group, Star preaches conformity to a secular, politically
obedient, consumerist society in which patriarchal norms are viewed as
backward. To the second group, Star preaches something quite different: that
professional achievement and a modern, bourgeois lifestyle are not only
attainable in Syria, but alive and well today. It reminds readers in this camp that national icons are
important, that high culture is necessary, and that morality in part stems from
constraining Western influence whilst promoting a self-generated national
modernity.
Although the codes
of Inhouse and Star do align in places
– both are broadly secular, both endorse consumption, and both exploit
derivative hybrid models to local ends – Star seeks to contest some central elements of the Inhouse
vision for young Syrians. Firstly,
Star brings political slogans,
regime rhetoric and national emblems into the politically de-cluttered space of
the Inhouse caf. During the
period of intense political crisis over the Al-Hariri affair through November
and December 2005, the regime moved to reaffirm mass compliance. It propagated
flags and banners in public places; it broadcast overtly political songs on the
radio; it developed websites masking as petitions which encouraged virtual
acts of obedience; and it re-appropriated advertising space for political
sloganeering and symbolic display. Throughout all of this, Inhouse remained
almost impenetrable to the symbolic production of the regime. It was only Star and UGs lifestyle magazine, Layalina, which
successfully breached the fortress of the Inhouse brand to supply messages of
state control. In other words, the
part-privatization of the regimes symbolic production was crucial in
furthering the regimes message into new privately managed spaces.
Secondly, whereas
Inhouse unashamedly orients its customers towards the West, Star seeks to draw them back into the national fold. In the Inhouse vision, customers accrue
social prestige from consuming cultural forms which are globally mediated
through satellite television. In
the Star vision, such forms are
not denied completely, but are constrained into the tight-jacket of nationally
focused, morally didactic content.
Star thus seeks to
convince its young Syrian readers that their task is to consume and further
products bound up in Syrias pursuit of self-generated national modernity. The underlying claim affirms that the
fruits of Syrias secular modernity can be, indeed are, superior to those in the West.
But perhaps
Inhouse and Star are aligned in a
broader respect. Both are part of
a new formulation in private-corporate practice which is energetically blurring
the boundaries between cultural complexes once deemed separate. In other words, the walls which may
once have separated bourgeois culture from, on the one hand, the state and, on
the other, religion have been in both cases decisively breached. The common
factor is the emergence of a powerful privatized corporatism that seems
impossible for any cultural complex to ignore. Thus, the Inhouse advert in figure 22 mixes modern pictogram
branding with authentic religious inscriptions proclaiming Adha Mubarak
(Happy `Id Al-Adha) in a way which parallels the merging of corporate and
regime-national symbols in Star. Merging religious and bourgeois
cultural symbols (a practice which is certainly not new or uncommon in the
Middle East) is useful both to those seeking to encourage liberal consumption around
religious festivals (such as Inhouse) and those seeking to keep society in
check (such as religious preachers who perform on glossy satellite television
channels). A similar dynamic is
true of the fusion of state and bourgeois symbols which apparently seem
antagonistic but can work in harmony.
Because of this, it is becoming increasingly hard to disentangle the
vocabulary of bourgeois liberalism from forces which seek to keep society in
check.
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