Clive Barnett's examination of democracy today is one that privileges its spatially mediated, communicative, and cultural structures as shaped by new telecommunication and information technologies. Democracy is primarily represented in the mediated spaces created by broadcasting technologies whose form and content are geared toward deploying cultural policies and practices. Thus, a communications-cultural analysis of this condition is required. Furthermore, a reckoning with neoliberal conceptions of autonomy and representation is essential in making sense of the current cultural geography of democracy.

In conceptualizing contemporary democracy, Barnett enlists the help of John Dewey, Robert Dahl, Claude Lefort, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. His goal is “a deconstructive affirmation of representation” (p. 32). Democracy is about making present a symbolic regime that represents a sovereign people. Yet the people are an “absent presence” whose existence is dependent upon effective mediation. And in today's high-tech world, this makes the democratic rendering of absence and presence much more complicated. Cable TV and the Internet increase opportunities for new public spaces and at the same time produce a consumerist popular culture that undermines the prospect of a democratic public sphere.

Barnett's intellectuals of choice in dealing with the constitution and deployment of mediated public spaces are Habermas and Foucault. While crediting Habermas with having put the idea of the public sphere center stage in critical discussions on democracy, he points out (as have so many others) that Habermas's thought needs revising and updating. He nicely reconstructs the evolution of Habermas's thought project as well as his critics. Foucault, however, provides a much more useful tool kit. From his account of the disciplinary origins of modern liberalism to his analysis of the “paradox of autonomy” to his later idea of governmentality, Foucault is much more on target than Habermas. Barnett reworks Foucault's governmentality research to provide a convincing critical analysis of the mass media as cultural technologies of governance that provide neoliberal repertories and resources for self-regulation.

Barnett's major concern lies in exploring the “cultural pragmatics of democracy” (p. 95). Cultural power, as deployed by mass media institutions and technologies, is both the dominant means of liberal governance and the source of new types of democratic action. That is why Foucault's redefinition of culture as “governmental” (defined in terms of macro–micro population control) is of so much value for Barnett. The media have become the dominant mode of governance as they shape cultural discourses supportive of neoliberal globalization. These symbolic regimes, disseminated through pop culture, actively shape subjectivities around corporate agendas that have effectively captured formal political power.

Barnett spends the second half of his book demonstrating this understanding of power by examining three very different cases of media policy: First Amendment media law, European Union (EU) media policy, and South African media reform. His look at First Amendment communications law in the 1980s and 1990s predictably reveals the establishment of a hybridized doctrine of libertarian and neoconservative paternalist legality that privileges individual autonomy, private property rights, the free market, and invasive indecency over public forum, fairness, and citizen access doctrines. The idea of broadcasting media as fiduciary entities has been eclipsed by Supreme Court rulings and Federal Communications Commission policies that regard media corporations and technologies as autonomous subjects with free speech and private property rights.

Turning to Europe, Barnett focuses on the EU's Television Without Frontiers initiatives of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which sought to combat American media imperialism, to create a single European media market, and to construct a democratic pan-European public sphere. He does a good job of rendering the complexity of the EU's task of developing a media policy that included different political, economic, and cultural rationales, as well as trying to integrate national, regional, and global spatial frameworks. In the end, the EU found itself driven by the American paradigm of neoliberal globalization, and thus the priorities of deregulation, consumer sovereignty, and market access won out over democratic public sphere concerns.

Barnett is much more upbeat on the opportunities for mediated democratic action in postapartheid South Africa. A combination of factors—from the privatization of state-owned media to the lifting of heavy censorship policies to corporate restructuring to black empowerment initiatives to new technologies to the changed nature of news coverage—have opened up spaces for new democratic movements to take root. A variety of civic and cultural groups have been successful in capturing media attention and securing democratic publicity. This is due to the transitional nature of South Africa, as well as to the fact that both the media and democratic actors need each other. Mass media crave more and more news while civic groups need low-cost coverage. And media-oriented activism must be dramatic in order to be newsworthy. In a mass-mediated society, democracy becomes more and more dramaturgical.

The author covers a lot of ground, effectively integrating the latest in contemporary social theory, democratic political theory, and public policy analysis. His characterization of democracy today as more about the deployment of culture via mass media is largely convincing, as is his use of Foucault's concept of governmentality as a key analytic lens. At the same time, his assessment of the current state of things is not gloomy, for the same type of power seeking to control us is also the means for initiating new modes of democratic action. Paraphrasing Foucault, power is always a combination of sinister dominating presence, resistance, and productive vitalism. Thus, Barnett's theme of democratic autonomy via contexts of mediated communication offers an alternative narrative of hope. This is achieved by reinventing the liberal themes of autonomy, representation, and pluralism for a postmodern network society dominated by media culture.

He also insightfully applies his theoretical framework to his three case studies, all of which conclude that the corporate-governmental-mediated construct of neoliberal autonomy pervades the life-worlds of citizen-subjects in democratic societies. This abstracted utopic imperative to realize private desires through the exercise of market choice and detached from broader relational networks is today's dominant siren song.

I have only a few minor difficulties with Culture and Democracy. Stylistically, the writing is too dense, and one often has to slog through an inordinate amount of jargon. I think Barnett could have done a better job of translating what is complex theoretical material into more accessible and enjoyable prose. It can be done and would increase the size of his audience and readership. Organizationally, the book reads as more of a collection of related essays than as a unified text. The chapters are connected through the use of conclusions that enable the reader to transition to the next chapter. But it still reads like a series of related articles reworked for a book. Finally, Barnett concludes that democracy “is not the name for a mode of being, it is a practical problem of political control” (p. 201). To the contrary, it is the name for both.