The Consequentiality of Communication

Stuart J. Sigman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136688591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

In a bold attempt to redirect the ways theories of communication are conceived and research on communication processes are conducted, this volume questions prevailing communication scholarship that emphasizes the cultural, psychological, and sociological variables that impact on, and/or are impacted by, communication. Instead of focusing on the consequences of communication, this books urges readers to examine the consequentiality of communication -- what it is about the communication process that enables it to play a defining role in our lives. Communication is not a neutral conveyor of meanings derived from culture, cognition, or social structure, and is not explained by correlations with external variables. Meaning emerges from the communication process itself; it is dependent upon what transpires during the real-time moments of communicators behaving with each other. To properly study this new paradigm, a new vocabulary for thinking about the consequentiality of communication is needed and proposed. Four theoretical orientations are used to stake out this new territory: coordinated management of meaning, neo-rhetorical theory, conversation analysis, and social communication theory. While there are points of agreement and overlap on the need to study communication as inherently consequential, there are also differences across the four theories -- in the value of "rules" as an explanatory concept, on the relationship between structure and process, and on the very constitution of a "theory." Thus, this book has the benefit of articulating a new paradigm for communication scholarship without losing sight of the discipline's rich diversity.

I

FOUR PERSPECTIVES ON CONSEQUENTIALITY

1

Coordinated Management of Meaning: The Consequentiality of Communication and the Recapturing of Experience

Vernon E. Cronen

University of Massachusetts

The editor of this book has made a crucial distinction in the book’s title. It is a very different thing to talk about the consequentiality of communication, as opposed to the consequences of communication. The etymology of the different suffixes is illuminating. The suffix ty (after the connecting vowel i) comes from Latin and indicates a state or condition, whereas the suffix ence indicates action or process in addition to, or to the exclusion of, a state. This distinction represents no fine semantic hassle. The choice of title indicates rejection of both the transmission model and the variable analytic tradition of research. I call the confluence of the transmission model and variable analysis the received view of communication. In the received view, communication is a process that has consequences of various sorts (i.e., effects subsequent to it and outside it). The reader of this chapter may be disappointed to find no claims derived from the received view of the following sort: “More communication promotes greater mutual understanding” or “Communication helps us to reach our goals.” In both of these statements, the process of communication is asserted to have consequences outside itself. Such statements are, of course, counterparts of the following, which also come from the received view: “High self-esteem produces more assertive communication” and “High status in a group produces more talking turns.” Taken together, the foregoing statements suggest that various prior factors in the person and situation (usually conceived as variables) determine the content and form of communication, and communication subsequently has measurable consequences for another set of variables.

In the received view, communication cannot be the site of the most important avenues of social inquiry because psychological, sociological, and cultural variables determine it. Moreover, the model states quite clearly that we only care about communication because it can have consequences for other matters that are our real concerns. By contrast, Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), the practical theory that Pearce and I have been developing, takes a different view of communication and the human condition. CMM is a constructionist theory of a particular sort. It is social constructionism in the tradition of American philosophical pragmatism. One undergraduate, who recognized that CMM theory did not identify communication variables that predict consequences outside communication, told his instructor that the theory was “beside the point.” Indeed, from the received view, much social constructionist work seems exactly that. However, from my way of working, the received view is reminiscent of an old story about emigrants traveling by steamship to America:

Crammed onto the lower deck of a ship were two friends from the town of Chelm. Both were very sick and very bored from many days at sea, living on little food, and packed in like sardines with little air. No one was moving around much. Then one day there was a sudden jolt and a crunching noise. An alarm sounded and a voice shouted, “The ship is sinking! Get to the life boats!” People began shouting and crying. They rushed back and forth gathering a few possessions, trying to locate their families, and pushing toward the ladder to the deck. In the midst of all this one of the passengers noticed that his friend was sitting quietly on the deck, watching and smiling. The panicked passenger said to his friend, “What is the matter with you? Didn’t you hear? The ship is sinking!” And his friend replied, “So, why are you so upset? Does it belong to you?”

The calm traveler had not missed the point that the ship was sinking; he had more profoundly missed the point of the relationship between himself and the ship. He talked about the ship as an object whose value to him depended on whether he had ownership of the ship as an object. He did not think of his existence as intrinsically connected to the ship’s survival. The relationship of communication to who and what we are is even more profoundly fused than that of the passenger and the ship. I think Harré (1984) was right when he argued that the primary social process is “persons in conversation.” If communication is the primary social process, it is not something external to us that we are able to do as a consequence of what human beings are. Rather, it is intrinsic to our constitution as distinctively human creatures. This marks a change from the traditional epistemological paradigm focused on individuals understanding objects to people acting conjointly. In the tradition in which I work, individuals and society are not outside of communication, but are regarded as achievements in communicative practices. Dewey (1916/1966) was much ahead of his time when he wrote, in 1916, that social life is “identical with communication” (p.5). For Dewey, cultural forms, institutions, social roles and the like were lived patterns of practice. That is why he said, “society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but may be fairly said to exist in transmission, in communication” (Dewey, 1916/1966, p. 4). Therefore, the kinds of selfhood and identity we have as individuals are not innate, but rather are constituted in and by the process of communication (Dewey, 1916/1966, 1930).

To return to the title of this book, as scholars of communication we must study the consequential character of the communication process, not the supposed correlates of this process with external variables.

PRIMARY COMMITMENTS OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM IN THE TRADITION OF PHILOSOPHICAL PRAGMATISM

What is a social constructionist orientation? Obviously, social constructionism is not a monolithic movement. There is a neo-Marxist orientation and a phenomenological orientation, both well defined. However, outside these better defined orientations, confusion reigns. At the 1993 New Hampshire conference on “Creating Social Realities,” I even heard that Freud was a social constructionist. Other participants consistently confused Cartesian doubt about physical reality with social constructionism.

Despite this confusion, there are ideas that inform a social constructionism in the tradition of philosophical pragmatism, although not all the contributors I identify would prefer that label. Its intellectual ancestry, of course, includes the American pragmatist philosophers, particularly James, Dewey, and Mead. Related to their work is that of the later Wittgenstein and Vygotsky, and the less behavioristic aspects of Batson’s work. Contemporary social theorists within this tradition include Bernstein, Harré, Shotter, Taylor, Sampson, and the CMM group. There are important areas of difference among the foregoing ancestors and contemporaries, and I am quite aware of those differences. However, these ancestors and contemporaries provide orientations that seem related and profitable.

Minimally, my pragmatist “take” on social constructionism involves important commitments about the primary unit of social process, the appropriate unit of observation, the rationality of social life, material reality, and the kind of certainty we can expect to have.

The Primary Social Process and the Unit of Observation

Social constructionists with a pragmatist orientation agree that communication is the primary social process (Pearce & Cronen), 1980), and “persons in conversation” (Harré, 1984) is taken to be the primary unit of observation. Notice that I have treated Harré’s phrase in the singular. These are not three units of observation—two or more persons and their utterances. The distinction is important because it differentiates the “constructivist” positions of Maturana (1975, 1978), von Glazersfeld (1991), Kelley (1955), and others who follow a Kantian orientation from the social constructionist work of Harré (1984), Shotter (1984), Taylor (1985), and others whose commitments are close to later Wittgenstein (1953) and philosophical pragmatism.

It is helpful here to distinguish the constructionist orientation from the constructivist one. In a constructivist orientation (Kelley, 1955; Maturana & Varela, 1988), there is a central place for the Cartesian concept of mind. In the spirit of Kant, constructivists inquire into the fundamental cognitive schemas that humans supposedly use to impose order on their world. Although constructivists talk about individuals as coupled by feedback, communication is primarily of interest to them to the extent that individuals perturb each other’s cognitive operations (von Glazersfeld, 1991). The details of conversation become less important than the ways individuals obtain a “fit between their own condition and the messages they receive (von Glazersfeld, 1991, p. 23). By contrast, pragmatists are concerned with the details of communication. We think there is an answer to the cognitivists’ question—How do individuals think?—but an answer they would not like. The answer is that people can think all sorts of different ways. How people think depends on the ways of thinking they construct in the course of social life. For the social constructionist, there is no need for mind—that mystic substance developed by Descartes, separate from body and the interactional arena. All we need are brain, communication, and the physical world.

There is, of course, a vital need for the term thinking, because that is what persons do as part of the activity of life. But communication does not have consequences for the way we think, who we are, and how we feel. Rather, pragmatists say the consequentiality of communication can be observed in ways of thinking, feeling, and so on that arise integral to the process of communication at the moment of action. By adopting this way of working, constructionists in the pragmatist tradition returned to Dewey’s (1925/1958) distinctive way of reuniting thinking and acting.

Immanent Rationality

Pragmatism generally rejects the postmodern tendency to disparage rationality, although philosophical pragmatists are quite willing to agree that there is no singular, transcendental rationality (Cronen & Pearce, 1981), as was presumed by the Scottish philosophers of the late Victorian age (MacIntyre, 1990). Schrag (1992) observed quite correctly that French philosopher Derrida’s attack on rationality has a peculiar quality shared by those who argue against rationality. Derrida’s proposed means of deconstruction—grammatology—displays its own form of radicalized rationality. We can make the same inquiries of it that we can of any formalized academic practice. Those practices are organized by emergent situated rules, a grammar in Wittgenstein’s terms, for rationally conducting academic conversation. These new conversations extend the range of what Plato taught—new ways to take apart and critique culturally instantiated ways of talking (see Ong, 1989).

The kind of grammar Wittgenstein described is his approach to rationality (Canfield, 1981). It is not simply a matter of creating “correct” sentences, and it is not limited to linguistic materials. A grammar of conversation has to do with the way that feelings, objects, behaviors, and utterances can be organized so that we know how to “go on” in conversation (Wittgenstein, 1953). This Wittgensteinian idea of grammar does not separate the syntactic from the phonologic and semantic aspects of language. Instead, it insists that we learn a grammar in the practice of acting with others. Thus, we may study the grammar of “love” just as we can speak of the grammar of “realism” by exploring how these utterances or behaviors can be sensibly connected to others so that persons know how to go on in conversation.⁵

It is useful to think of this grammar as made up of rules—a term long associated with CMM theory. Dewey preferred the term habits, but that word, although capturing the social nature of rational action, implies a stability that is slowly developed and slow to change. I prefer rule because the term is connected to the way one learns to calculate. Sometimes after many trials, but sometimes in the course of making one effort, one suddenly grasps how to do the problems. Moreover, in Wittgenstein’s usage, rules may come into use and dissolve moments later as action emerges in new directions. The term rule also directs us to a rich set of ideas that Wittgenstein developed around it.

In the pragmatist view, not everything people do makes sense, but one must distinguish between sense and nonsense (Wittgenstein, 1953). For Dewey (1925/1958), Mead (1934), and Wittgenstein (1953), sense is created in communication, not by the adjustment of what we do to a universal grammar or logic. Making sense has to do with “coming into agreement in action” (Dewey, 1925/1958, p. 179), or knowing how to go on (Wittgenstein, 1953). This idea of coming to know how to go on was the key to Pearce’s (1975) initiating the CMM project.

Although this approach to rationality is grammatical, it does not assume that everything that makes sense can be expressed in language. This emergent view of rationality treats using...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Contributors
• Introduction: Toward Study of the Consequentiality (Not Consequences) of Communication
• Part I: Four Perspectives on Consequentiality
• Part II: Reformulating and Critiquing the Four Perspectives
• Author Index
• Subject Index