Communication Yearbook 6

Michael Burgoon, Michael Burgoon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135148799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 2012. The Communication Yearbook 6 publishes a survey of trends at the frontiers of communication's many sub-fields, including: interpersonal, mass, organizational and political communication, and human communication technologies.

I

Communication Reviews and Commentaries

1		The Mass Media and Critical Theory: An American View
		James W. Carey
		University of Illinois—Urbana

THE task of hermeneutics is to charm hermetically sealed-off thinkers out of their self-enclosed practices and to see the relations among scholars as strands of a conversation, a conversation without presuppositions that unites the speakers, but “where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts” (Rorty, 1979, p. 318). In other words, on this view scholars are not lockèd in combat over some universal truth, but united in society: “persons whose paths through life have fallen together, united by civility rather than by a common goal, much less a common ground.”

This hermeneutic intent is nowhere more needed than in theoretical discussions of the mass media. Of all the areas or subareas within communications, that of the mass media has proven to be the most fiercely resistant to adequate theoretical formulation — indeed, even to systematic discussion. The concepts and methods, which if not adequate are at least not embarrassing, when applied to interpersonal communication prove hapless and even a little silly when applied to the mass media. There is more than a matter of complexity involved here, though complexity is part of it. Many matters concerning interpersonal communication can be safely encysted from the surrounding world and treated with relatively simple models and straightforward methods. Not so with the mass media, where questions of political power and institutional change are inescapable and usually render hopelessly ineffective the standard cookbook recipes retailed by the graduate schools.

In this chapter, I would like to make a modest attempt at argument, or at least to make an entry into this perpetually unsatisfying discussion about the mass media. First, let me anticipate a conclusion. In a recent paper on the history of the telegraph I tried to show how that technology — the major invention of the mid-nineteenth century — was the driving force behind the creation of a mass press. I also tried to show how the telegraph produced a new series of social interactions, a new conceptual system, new forms of language, and a new structure of social relations. In brief, the telegraph extended the spatial boundaries of communication and opened the future as a zone of interaction. It also gave rise to a new conception of time as it created a futures market in agricultural commodities and permitted the development of standard time. It also eliminated a number of forms of journalism — for example, the hoax, and tall tale — and brought other forms of writing into existence — for example, the lean “telegraphic” style Hemingway learned as a correspondent. Finally, the telegraph brought a national, commercial middle class into existence by breaking up the pattern of city-state capitalism that dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. The point of repeating conclusions arrived at elsewhere is that here I am attempting to elucidate a theoretical structure that will support and give generality to detailed historical-empirical investigation. But the path from the theoretical vacuity surrounding the media to concrete investigations must proceed by way of a number of detours.

Objectivism Versus Expressivism

The ragged ambulating ridge dividing the Enlightenment from the Counter-Enlightenment — Descartes from Vico, if we need names — has surfaced in contemporary media studies as an opposition between critical and administrative research. The ridge that Descartes’s action and Vico’s reaction carved as an engram in the Western imagination has among its features three peaks.

1. The noncontingency of starting points. There is a given place to begin to unravel any problem and a given place where it is unraveled.
2. Indubitability. In unraveling problems there are available certain concepts and methods of universal standing and applicability, and insofar as there are not, one can make no claim to knowledge.
3. Identity. The world of problems is independent of and accessible to the mind of the knowing observer.

In short, if you begin at the beginning, if you are armed with indubitable concepts and methods, if you stand as an observer gazing upon an independent reality, then there is a path to positive knowledge. Taken together they described and secured the way to positive knowledge, and yielded up an epistemologically centered philosophy. Most importantly, they made science paradigmatic for culture as a whole — discrediting or at least reducing other human activities that did not conform to the Cartesian paradigm.

The reaction from the Italian side of the Alps settled all those divides that are with us to this day: Science versus the humanities, objective versus subjective, Rationalism versus Romanticism, analysis versus interpretation. There are three aspects of Vico’s reaction worth noting and, I will admit, twisting somewhat to the purpose here. First, the world as such has no essence and therefore no real independence. The “real” is continuously adapted and remade to human purposes, including the remaking of man himself. It is this world of human activity we can understand with greatest clarity. Second, Cartesian science ought not be viewed as paradigmatic for culture as a whole, but as one more form of human expression, a new suburb of the language in Wittgenstein’s phrase. Science, on this view, is one more voice in the conversation of mankind, one more device of self-expression, of communication with other humans. It must be understood, as we would say today, hermeneutically, as part of an extended conversation. Third, there are, then, no timeless invariant methods, concepts, or principles by which things are grasped; only the bounded symbols and knowledge, more or less unique to a people, through which the world is rendered intelligible.

I have painted a misleading and exceedingly two-dimensional portrait. The ridge of the Enlightenment does not neatly divide people. Some dextrous scholars try to stand on both sides at once; others are on different sides in different books or at different stages of their careers. Others attempt to save what is valuable in both traditions. Still others, some modern literary critics are examples, assimilate Descartes to Vico and make positive science but one more literary genre; others assimilate Vico to Descartes and scientize all of culture. And finally, some like William James find the whole argument bootless and just walk away from the discussion leaving nothing in its place.

I do not wish to debate any of these issues I have raised but merely to sharpen one of the distinctions, a distinction in Charles Taylor’s (1976) terms, between “objectivism” and “expressivism.”

Taylor characterizes Descartes’ vision as an objectionist one. Descartes saw humans as subjects who possessed their own picture of the world (as opposed to a picture determined by God) and an endogenous motivation. Along with this self-defining identity went an objectification of the world. That is, the world was not seen as a cosmic order but as a domain of neutral, contingent fact to which man was related only as an observer. This domain was to be mapped by the tracing of correlations and ultimately manipulated for human purposes. Furthermore, this vision of an objectified neutral world was valued as a confirmation of a new identity before it became important as the basis of the mastery of nature. Later this objectification was extended beyond external nature to include human life and society (Taylor, 1976, p. 539).

This objectivist view not only collided with deeply held religious beliefs but with secular ones as well. Most people most of the time have felt that reality expressed something; that it was an inscription or a resemblance. Most commonly, this expressiveness was seen as spiritualism or animism; reality expressed spirit, the divine and transcendent. It was the doctrine of expressivism that Descartes most thoroughly discredited. On his view reality expressed nothing. It was neutral, contingent, concatenated.

However, expressivism did not go away merely because Descartes attacked it. It reappeared in various forms of romanticism. More importantly, the notion that reality expressed something reappeared in Hegel as the Geist: the growth of rational freedom. Finally, in Charles Taylor’s useful phrase, “Marx anthropologized the Geist: He displaced it onto man” (Taylor, 1976, p. 546). In Marx and much of Marxism reality is not neutral and independent of man. Rather, it expresses man in the sense that it is a product of human activity. In William James’s lovely phrase, the “mark of the serpent is overall.” Reality expresses at any historical moment the purposes and objectives, intentions and desires of humans. Technology, social relations, and all artifacts are social hieroglyphics. Reality is expressive not because it reveals any nature, human or divine, or any eternal essence of any kind, but rather because it is a product of human action in and upon the world.

It is this distinction between objectionist and expressivist views of the world, not between administrative and critical research, that constitutes the fundamental divide among scholars. But I accept this distinction only as a prelude to modifying it. I agree, at least to a limited extent, that reality is a product of human activity. But the claim is neither philosophical nor meta-scientific but a simple historical one. Reality has been made — has been progressively made — by human activity. This is through a process, celebrated by structuralists, whereby nature is turned into culture, and by a similar, but inverse, process whereby culture penetrates the body of nature. The first process is revealed by the simple Levi-Strauss examples of vegetation transformed into cuisine or animals into totems. The second by the mind ulcerating the stomach, or the more menacing moment when an equation splits the atom. The point is general: The history of the species is simultaneously the history of the transformation of reality. There is now virtually no reach of space, of the microscopic or macroscopic, that has not been refigured by human action. Increasingly, what is left of nature is what we have deliberately left there. But if this is true, then reality is not objective, contingent, and neutral. To imagine such an objectivist science is in fact to imagine a world in which, as Lewis Mumford has argued, humans did not exist. And so did Galileo imagine it (Mumford, 1970, pp. 57–65). But if all that is true, it has a philosophical consequence: There are no given starting points, no Archimedian points or indubitable concepts, or privileged methods. The only basing point we have is the historically varying nature of human purposes.

In presenting the expressionist position I have deliberately glossed over the serious, even fundamental, disagreements within this tradition. The fault line — often described by the terms materialism and idealism — pivots on the question of whether reality should be seen as an expression of the human mind — “the place of the mind in nature,” in Ernst Cassirer’s useful phrase — or of human activity, human labor power. However important the debate on this question, it is possible to agree to the following on either a materialist or idealist reading. The mind — the associative, cooperative mind — its extension in culture, and realization in technique is the most important means of production. The most important product of the mind is a produced and sustained reality.

I want now to leave the savannah of continental philosophy for the rather more secure village of American studies. I shall not refer in what follows to these preliminary matters but, to steal Stuart Hall’s lovely phrase, “their absent presence will lay across the route like the sky-trail of a vanished aircraft” (Hall, 1977, p. 18).

Public Opinion and the Mass Media

I want to locate the distinction between administrative and critical research — now transformed into a distinction between objectivism and expressivism — outside the European tradition and within American studies. Inevitably, when this subject comes up, critical and administrative research are identified with those two emigres from the fall of Weimar, T. W. Adorno and Paul Lazarsfeld. The context of the discussion is thus fixed in advance by the type of research and sponsorship identified with Lazarsfeld and by the research and “Hegelianized” version of Marxism identified with Adorno. Indeed the term “critical” did not so much describe a position as a cover under which Marxism might hide during a hostile period in exile. It is useful, however, to resituate the distinction between administrative and critical research within the conversation of American culture, and, in particular, in an exchange during the 1920s between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. I do this not to dramatize the importance of Lippmann or Dewey, but rather, to underscore the point that you cannot grasp a conversation elsewhere until you can understand one at home. If we accept the contingency of starting points (the time and place where we reside) “we accept our inheritance from and our conversation with our fellow human beings as our only source of guidance” (Rorty, 1979). To attempt to evade this contingency is to hope to become a properly programmed machine, which is what graduate education is so often. In short I turn to Dewey and Lippmann to see if I can grasp their conversation within the tradition we have inherited and shaped. Once having grasped it we can use it as an entrance to other conversations — foreign, strange, and elliptical.

Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) is, I believe, the founding book in American media studies. It was not the first book written about the mass media in America, but it was the first serious work to be philosophical and analytical in confronting the mass media. The title of his book may be Public Opinion, but its subject and central actor is the mass media, particularly the news media. The book founded or at least clarified a continuous tradition of research as well. Finally, the book self-consciously restated the central problematic in the study of the mass media.

In earlier writing on the mass media the central problematic, true to the utilitarian tradition, was freedom. Utilitarianism assumes that, strictly speaking, the ends of human action are random or exogenous. Rational knowledge could not be gained of human values or purposes. The best we can do is rationally judge the fitting together of ends and means. One can attain rational knowledge of the primal allocation of resources among means and toward given ends, but one can gain no rational knowledge of the selection of ends. Apples are as good as oranges, baseball as good as poetry. All that can be determined is the rational means to satisfy subjective and irrational desire. Truth in this tradition is a property of the rational determination of means. In turn, the rationality of means depended upon freedom and the availability of information. More precisely, it was freedom that guaranteed the availability of perfect information and perfect information that guaranteed the rationality of means. In summary then: If men are free they will have perfect information; if perfect information, they can be rational in choosing the most effective means to their individual ends, and if so, in a manner never quite explained, the social good will result. So the problem that concerned writers about the press in the Anglo-American tradition was how to secure the conditions of freedom against the forces that would undermine it. These forces were considered to be political and institutional, not psychological. Once freedom was secured against these forces, truth and social progress was guaranteed.

Lippmann changed this problematic. He argued that a free system of communication will not guarantee perfect information and, therefore, there are no guarantees of truth even when the conditions of freedom are secure. Moreover, the enemies of freedom were no longer the state and the imperfections of the market but in the nature of news and news gathering, in the psychology of the audience, and in the scale of modern life. It is important to note the following: Lippmann redefined the problem of the press from one of morals and pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Overview
• Part I: Communication Reviews and Commentaries
• Part II: Information Systems
• Part III: Interpersonal Communication
• Part IV: Mass Communication
• Part V: Organizational Communication
• Part VI: Intercultural Communication
• Part VII: Political Communication
• Part VIII: Instructional Communication
• Part IX: Health Communication
• Part X: Human Communication Technology
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editor