When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be reestablished only when oral speech begins again. Writing and print isolate. There is no collective noun or concept for readers corresponding audience (p. 75)
There is no way directly to refute a text. After absolutely total and devastating refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before. This is one reason why 'the book says' is popularly tantamount to 'it is true.' It is also one reason why books have been burnt. A text stating what the whole world knows is false will state falsehood forever, so long as the text reader. Texts are inherently contumacious (p. 79).
In fact, as Havelock has beautifully shown (1963), Plato's entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old moral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture (represented by the poets, whom he would not allow in his Republic). The term idea, for, is visually based, coming from the same root as the Latin video, to see, and such English derivatives as vision, visible, or videotape. Platonic form was form conceived of by analogy with visible form. The Platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld at all but utterly above and beyond it. Plato of course was not at all fully aware of the unconscious forces at work in his psyche to produce this reaction, or overreaction, of the literate person to lingering, retardant orality (pp. 80-81).
the first script, or true writing, that we know, was developed among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia only around the year 3500 BC (pp. 83-84).
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Keyworks in Media and Cultural Studies
Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks
Revised Edition.
Edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner.
Contents:
Preface to the Revised Edition viii.
Adventures in Media and Culture Studies: Introducing the KeyWorks ix.
Part I: Culture, Ideology and Hegemony 1.
Introduction to Part I 3.
1 The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas 9.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
2 (i) History of the Subaltern Classes; (ii) The Concept of "Ideology";.
(iii) Cultural Themes: Ideological Material 13.
Antonio Gramsci.
3 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 18.
Walter Benjamin.
4 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception 41.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
5 The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article 73.
Jürgen Habermas.
6 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an 79.
Investigation).
Louis Althusser.
Part II: Social Life and Cultural Studies 89.
Introduction to Part II 91.
7 (i) Operation Margarine; (ii) Myth Today 99.
Roland Barthes.
8 The Medium is the Message 107.
Marshall McLuhan
9 The Commodity as Spectacle 117.
Guy Debord.
10 Introduction: Instructions on How to Become a General in the 122.
Disneyland Club.
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart.
11 Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory 130.
Raymond Williams.
12 (i) From Culture to Hegemony; (ii) Subculture:The Unnatural 144.
Break .
Dick Hebdige
13 Encoding / Decoding 163.
Stuart Hall.
14 On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research 174.
Ien Ang.
Part III: Political Economy 195.
Introduction to Part III 197.
15 Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication 201 .
Nicholas Garnham.
16 On the Audience Commodity and its Work 230.
Dallas W. Smythe.
17 A Propaganda Model 257.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
18 Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era 295.
Herbert I. Schiller.
19 Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, 311.
Feminism, and Political Economy.
Eileen R. Meehan.
20 (i) Introduction; (ii) The Aristocracy of Culture 322.
Pierre Bourdieu.
21 On Television 328.
Pierre Bourdieu.
Part IV: The Politics of Representation 337.
Introduction to Part IV 339.
22 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 342.
Laura Mulvey.
23 Stereotyping 353.
Richard Dyer.
24 Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance 366.
bell hooks.
25 British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity 381.
Paul Gilroy.
26 Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses 396.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
27 Hybrid Cultures, Oblique Powers 422.
Néstor García Canclini.
Part V: The Postmodern Turn and New Media 445.
Introduction to Part V 447.
28 The Precession of Simulacra 453.
Jean Baudrillard.
29 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 482.
Fredric Jameson.
30 Feminism, Postmodernism and the "Real Me" 520.
Angela McRobbie.
31 Postmondern Virtualities 533.
Mark Poster.
32 Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media.
Convergence, and Participatory Culture 549.
Henry Jenkins .
Part VI: Globalization and Social Movements 577.
Introduction to Part VI 579.
33 Disjuncture and the Difference in the Global Culture Economy 584.
Arjun Appadurai.
34 The Global and the Local in International Communications 604.
Annabelle Sreberny.
35 The Process: From Nationalisms to Transnationalisms 626.
Jésus Martín-Barbero
36 Globalization as Hybridization 658.
Jen Nederveen Pieterse.
37 (Re)Asserting National Television and National Identity Against 681.
The Gobal, Regional, and Local Levels of World Television.
Joseph Straubhaar.
38 Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical / Reconstructive.
Approach 703.
Richard Kahn and Douglas M. Kellner.
Acknowledgements 726.
Index 730
Revised Edition.
Edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner.
Contents:
Preface to the Revised Edition viii.
Adventures in Media and Culture Studies: Introducing the KeyWorks ix.
Part I: Culture, Ideology and Hegemony 1.
Introduction to Part I 3.
1 The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas 9.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
2 (i) History of the Subaltern Classes; (ii) The Concept of "Ideology";.
(iii) Cultural Themes: Ideological Material 13.
Antonio Gramsci.
3 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 18.
Walter Benjamin.
4 The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception 41.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
5 The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article 73.
Jürgen Habermas.
6 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an 79.
Investigation).
Louis Althusser.
Part II: Social Life and Cultural Studies 89.
Introduction to Part II 91.
7 (i) Operation Margarine; (ii) Myth Today 99.
Roland Barthes.
8 The Medium is the Message 107.
Marshall McLuhan
9 The Commodity as Spectacle 117.
Guy Debord.
10 Introduction: Instructions on How to Become a General in the 122.
Disneyland Club.
Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart.
11 Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory 130.
Raymond Williams.
12 (i) From Culture to Hegemony; (ii) Subculture:The Unnatural 144.
Break .
Dick Hebdige
13 Encoding / Decoding 163.
Stuart Hall.
14 On the Politics of Empirical Audience Research 174.
Ien Ang.
Part III: Political Economy 195.
Introduction to Part III 197.
15 Contribution to a Political Economy of Mass-Communication 201 .
Nicholas Garnham.
16 On the Audience Commodity and its Work 230.
Dallas W. Smythe.
17 A Propaganda Model 257.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.
18 Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era 295.
Herbert I. Schiller.
19 Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, 311.
Feminism, and Political Economy.
Eileen R. Meehan.
20 (i) Introduction; (ii) The Aristocracy of Culture 322.
Pierre Bourdieu.
21 On Television 328.
Pierre Bourdieu.
Part IV: The Politics of Representation 337.
Introduction to Part IV 339.
22 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 342.
Laura Mulvey.
23 Stereotyping 353.
Richard Dyer.
24 Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance 366.
bell hooks.
25 British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity 381.
Paul Gilroy.
26 Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses 396.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty.
27 Hybrid Cultures, Oblique Powers 422.
Néstor García Canclini.
Part V: The Postmodern Turn and New Media 445.
Introduction to Part V 447.
28 The Precession of Simulacra 453.
Jean Baudrillard.
29 Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 482.
Fredric Jameson.
30 Feminism, Postmodernism and the "Real Me" 520.
Angela McRobbie.
31 Postmondern Virtualities 533.
Mark Poster.
32 Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media.
Convergence, and Participatory Culture 549.
Henry Jenkins .
Part VI: Globalization and Social Movements 577.
Introduction to Part VI 579.
33 Disjuncture and the Difference in the Global Culture Economy 584.
Arjun Appadurai.
34 The Global and the Local in International Communications 604.
Annabelle Sreberny.
35 The Process: From Nationalisms to Transnationalisms 626.
Jésus Martín-Barbero
36 Globalization as Hybridization 658.
Jen Nederveen Pieterse.
37 (Re)Asserting National Television and National Identity Against 681.
The Gobal, Regional, and Local Levels of World Television.
Joseph Straubhaar.
38 Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical / Reconstructive.
Approach 703.
Richard Kahn and Douglas M. Kellner.
Acknowledgements 726.
Index 730
Desire for communication; Introduction, The Problem of Communication
Desire being most intense when the objects is absent, longings for communication also index a deep sense of dereliction in social relationships. How did we get to the pass where such pathos attaches to the act of speaking with another person? How did it become possible to say that a man and woman "are tuned to different frequencies"? How did a term once associated with successful transmission by telegraph, telephone, or radio come to carry the political and intimate aspirations of so many people in this age? Only moderns could be facing each other and be worried about "communicating" as if they were thousands of miles apart. Communication" is a rich tangle of intellectual and cultural strands that encodes our time's confrontations with itself. To understand communication is to understand much more. An apparent answer to the painful divisions between self and other, private and public, and inner thought and outer world, the notion illustrates our strange lives at this point in history. It is a sink into which most of our hopes and fears seem to be poured (p. 2).
The other mode - the one Benjamin preferred, as I do - saw in every at of historical narration a constructivist principle. The historian did not wait for the past to speak its fullness but was an activist who brought ages into alignment with each other. Time, for Benjamin, is not just a continuum; it is full of ruptures and shortcuts-"wormholes." we might say (p. 3)...As Benjamin knew, the present can configure the past so as to open up new points of redevous (p. 10).
The Varied Senses of "Communication"
1. Partaking, Connection or linkage
2. Transmission
3. Exchange
4. Symbolic Interaction, as a blanket term for the various modes of symbolic interaction
The notion of communication theory is no older than the 1940s (when it meant a mathematical theory of signal processing), and no one had isolated "communication" as an explicit problem till the 1880s and 1890s.
Sorting Theoretical Debates in (and via) the 1920s
Three visions
1. Propaganda:
Dispersion of persuasive symbols in order to manage mass opinion (Lasswell, Lippman, Bernays, Carl Schmitt, Lukács)
2. as the means to purge semantic dissonance and thereby open a path to more rational relations (Ogden and Richards)
3. Solipsism:
For Kafka, as I will argue in chapter 5, interpersonal communication is no different from mass communication: both are broadcasts to invisible, absent, or veiled audience. Lukács sees solitary selfhood not as a general existential condition but as a specifically bourgeois plight: the system of private property creates souls who know only the freedom of preying on other isolated individuals. Lukács's analysis give us a way to see 1920s worries about isolation and propaganda as two sides of the same coin (p. 15).
The dream of perfect communication through semantics recapitulates the dream of telepathy, a meeting of minds that would leave no remainder. Again, communication as bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near.
4. Martin Heidegger:
inauthenticity of communication, his disdain for public sphere. Heidegger took politics as a matter of sorting out friends and enemies, not of compromise and discussion. No one in the Heideggerian inheritance has any time for communication as information exchange (p. 19).
5. John Dewey:
as pragmatic making-do in community life. Like Mead, Dewey thought the ability to place oneself " at the stand point of a situation which two parties share" was the distinctive gift of humanity (p. 18). Communication in Dewey's sense is participation in the creation of a collective world, which is why communication for Dewey always raises the political problem of democracy.
Dewey took the disappearance or distortion of participatory interaction as the most alienating feature of the age. Heidegger's notion of the fall from authentic encounter was not entirely different. The notion taht grace is found in dialogue was widely shared in social thinkers of the 1920s: Buber wanted to replace I-It relationships with I-Thour ones; Heidegger called for authentic confrontations: Lukács called for a joyful reconcilation of subject and object (p. 19)...
In sum, five intertwined visions are clear in the 1920s: communication as the management of mass opinion; the elimination of semantic fog; vain sallies from the citadel of the self; the disclosure of otherness; and the orchestration of action. Each captures a particular practice. Heidegger wants uncanny poetry in the woods, Ogden and Richards want universal clarity of meaning, Dewey wants practical participation and aesthetic release, Kafka narrates nightmares of interpersonal asymptotes, and Bernays wants to manufacture goodwill as Hitler wants to manufacture bad will. Heidegger's celebration of language's uncanniness lives on in deconstruction's repeated exposé of the impossibility of communication; Ogden and Richard's project survives in semantics and in the culture of scientific research more generally and informs what is probably still the dominant view of communication, the successful replication of intentions; and Dewey's vision anticipates language pragmatics and speech act theory's interest in language's seemingly modest, but astounding ability to bound people in action. For Heidegger communication revealed our simultaneous togetherness/otherness as social beings; for Ogden and Richards it allowed a clean meeting of minds; and for Dewey it sustained the building of community and the dance of creation (pp. 19-20)...
Today the most influential thinkers about communication are probably Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. Certainly each has much of originality. But their lineages are clear enough. Habermas, like Dewey (though it is Mead he more frequently invokes), takes communication as a mode of action that not only implicates a morally autonomous self but is also a process that, if generalized, entails the creation of a democratic community. Habermas is emphatic that communication is not the sharing of consciousness but rather the coordination of action oriented to deliberation about justice. The term has for him an undeniable normative tint. Levinas, in turn, builds on the phenomenological inheritance of Hussel and Heidegger to understand communication not as fusion, information exchange, or conjoint activity but as a caress. The failure to communicate is not a moral failure, it is a fitting demise for a flawed project. As he wrote in 1947 of modernist isolation: "the theme of solitude and the breakdown of human communication are viewed by modern literature and thought as the fundamental obstacle to human brotherhood. The pathos of socialism breaks against the eternal Bastille in which each person remains his own prisoner, locked up with himself when the party is over, the crowd gone, and the torches extinguished. The despair felt at the impossibility of communication... marks the limits of all pity, generosity, and love... But if communication bears the mark of failure or inauthenticity in this way, it is because it is sought as a fusion. The failure of communication, he argues, allows precisely for the bursting open of pity, generosity, and love. Such failure invites us to find ways to discover others besides knowing. Communication breakdown is thus a salutary check on the hubris of the ego. Communication, if taken as the reduplication of the self (or its thoughts) in the other, deserves to crash, for such an understanding is in essence a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings (pp. 20-21).
Technical and Therapeutic Discourses after World War II
Information theory (Technical):
Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication
Communication theory was explicitly a theory of "signals" and not of "significance"
Some have gone so far as to suggest that all inquiry into human affairs should redescribe itself in terms of a new trinity of concepts: information, communication, and control.
Therapeutic Discourses:
Carl R. Rogers recommended expanding the method of small group understanding to much larger forums, such as the strained relations between the American and the Russians. If both parties attempted to understand rather than to judge, important political fruit might result. An all but messianic vision of therapeutic communication as the balm of souls, couples, groups, and nations pervade the text: putting it to use, he suggested, was worth trying, given "the tragic and well-nigh fatal failures of communication which threaten the existence of our modern world" (p. 27).
Not only the bomb, however, shaped communication theory; as Kenneth Cmiel has shown, the fear of democratic disaffection and the moral enigma of the Holocaust presided over efforts to think through communication in the 1940s. Cynicism and evil were the fundamental problems that Robert Merton, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas faced first in the 1940s, and in each case the resultant vision of communication was some kind of answer to the intractable questions. Merton saw communication as an agency of national community buildings; Arendt as a means of discovering truth and, later, of giving birth to new political orders and Levinas as an ethical obligation to the otherness of the other person. This threefold crossing of modernization, antimodern, and postmodern theorists is fateful for the rest of the century's social thought. Merton saw communication as a kind of Durkemian social glue; Arendt as a disclosure of the political potentials of human association; and Levinas as a respect for the autonomy of others, a respect that made communication in an instrumental sense all but impossible (p. 29).
In the postwar ferment about "communication," then, two discourses were dominant: a technical one about information theory and a therapeutic one about communication as cure and disease. Each has deep roots in American cultural history. The technicians of communication are a diverse breed, from Samuel F. B. Morse to Marshall McLuhan, from Charles Horton Cooley to Al Gore, from Buckminster Fuller to Alvin Toffler, but they all think the imperfections of human interchange can be redressed by improved technology or techniques. They want to mimic the angels by mechanical or electronic means... The therapeutic vision of communication, in turn, developed within humanist and existentialist psychology, but both its roots and its branches spread much wider, to the nineteenth century attack on Calvinism and its replacement by a therapeutic ethos of self-realization, and to the self-culture pervading American bourgeois life. Both the technical and therapeudtic visions claim that the obstacles and troubles in human contact can be solved, whether by better technologies or better techniques of relating, and hence are also latter-day heirs to the angelological dream of mutual ensoulment (pp. 29-30).
The message of this book is a harsher one, that the problems are fundamentally intractable. "Communication," whatever it might mean, is not a matter of improved wiring or freer self-disclosure but involves a permanent kink in the human condition...My emphasis on the debt that the dream of communication owes to ghosts and strange eros is intended as a corrective to truism that is still very much alive: that the expansion of means leads to the expansion of minds (p. 29)
Communication, in the deeper sense of establishing ways to share one's hours meaningfully with others, is sooner a matter of faith and risk than of technique and method (p. 30)/
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
The other mode - the one Benjamin preferred, as I do - saw in every at of historical narration a constructivist principle. The historian did not wait for the past to speak its fullness but was an activist who brought ages into alignment with each other. Time, for Benjamin, is not just a continuum; it is full of ruptures and shortcuts-"wormholes." we might say (p. 3)...As Benjamin knew, the present can configure the past so as to open up new points of redevous (p. 10).
The Varied Senses of "Communication"
1. Partaking, Connection or linkage
2. Transmission
3. Exchange
4. Symbolic Interaction, as a blanket term for the various modes of symbolic interaction
The notion of communication theory is no older than the 1940s (when it meant a mathematical theory of signal processing), and no one had isolated "communication" as an explicit problem till the 1880s and 1890s.
Sorting Theoretical Debates in (and via) the 1920s
Three visions
1. Propaganda:
Dispersion of persuasive symbols in order to manage mass opinion (Lasswell, Lippman, Bernays, Carl Schmitt, Lukács)
2. as the means to purge semantic dissonance and thereby open a path to more rational relations (Ogden and Richards)
3. Solipsism:
For Kafka, as I will argue in chapter 5, interpersonal communication is no different from mass communication: both are broadcasts to invisible, absent, or veiled audience. Lukács sees solitary selfhood not as a general existential condition but as a specifically bourgeois plight: the system of private property creates souls who know only the freedom of preying on other isolated individuals. Lukács's analysis give us a way to see 1920s worries about isolation and propaganda as two sides of the same coin (p. 15).
The dream of perfect communication through semantics recapitulates the dream of telepathy, a meeting of minds that would leave no remainder. Again, communication as bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near.
4. Martin Heidegger:
inauthenticity of communication, his disdain for public sphere. Heidegger took politics as a matter of sorting out friends and enemies, not of compromise and discussion. No one in the Heideggerian inheritance has any time for communication as information exchange (p. 19).
5. John Dewey:
as pragmatic making-do in community life. Like Mead, Dewey thought the ability to place oneself " at the stand point of a situation which two parties share" was the distinctive gift of humanity (p. 18). Communication in Dewey's sense is participation in the creation of a collective world, which is why communication for Dewey always raises the political problem of democracy.
Dewey took the disappearance or distortion of participatory interaction as the most alienating feature of the age. Heidegger's notion of the fall from authentic encounter was not entirely different. The notion taht grace is found in dialogue was widely shared in social thinkers of the 1920s: Buber wanted to replace I-It relationships with I-Thour ones; Heidegger called for authentic confrontations: Lukács called for a joyful reconcilation of subject and object (p. 19)...
In sum, five intertwined visions are clear in the 1920s: communication as the management of mass opinion; the elimination of semantic fog; vain sallies from the citadel of the self; the disclosure of otherness; and the orchestration of action. Each captures a particular practice. Heidegger wants uncanny poetry in the woods, Ogden and Richards want universal clarity of meaning, Dewey wants practical participation and aesthetic release, Kafka narrates nightmares of interpersonal asymptotes, and Bernays wants to manufacture goodwill as Hitler wants to manufacture bad will. Heidegger's celebration of language's uncanniness lives on in deconstruction's repeated exposé of the impossibility of communication; Ogden and Richard's project survives in semantics and in the culture of scientific research more generally and informs what is probably still the dominant view of communication, the successful replication of intentions; and Dewey's vision anticipates language pragmatics and speech act theory's interest in language's seemingly modest, but astounding ability to bound people in action. For Heidegger communication revealed our simultaneous togetherness/otherness as social beings; for Ogden and Richards it allowed a clean meeting of minds; and for Dewey it sustained the building of community and the dance of creation (pp. 19-20)...
Today the most influential thinkers about communication are probably Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas. Certainly each has much of originality. But their lineages are clear enough. Habermas, like Dewey (though it is Mead he more frequently invokes), takes communication as a mode of action that not only implicates a morally autonomous self but is also a process that, if generalized, entails the creation of a democratic community. Habermas is emphatic that communication is not the sharing of consciousness but rather the coordination of action oriented to deliberation about justice. The term has for him an undeniable normative tint. Levinas, in turn, builds on the phenomenological inheritance of Hussel and Heidegger to understand communication not as fusion, information exchange, or conjoint activity but as a caress. The failure to communicate is not a moral failure, it is a fitting demise for a flawed project. As he wrote in 1947 of modernist isolation: "the theme of solitude and the breakdown of human communication are viewed by modern literature and thought as the fundamental obstacle to human brotherhood. The pathos of socialism breaks against the eternal Bastille in which each person remains his own prisoner, locked up with himself when the party is over, the crowd gone, and the torches extinguished. The despair felt at the impossibility of communication... marks the limits of all pity, generosity, and love... But if communication bears the mark of failure or inauthenticity in this way, it is because it is sought as a fusion. The failure of communication, he argues, allows precisely for the bursting open of pity, generosity, and love. Such failure invites us to find ways to discover others besides knowing. Communication breakdown is thus a salutary check on the hubris of the ego. Communication, if taken as the reduplication of the self (or its thoughts) in the other, deserves to crash, for such an understanding is in essence a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings (pp. 20-21).
Technical and Therapeutic Discourses after World War II
Information theory (Technical):
Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication
Communication theory was explicitly a theory of "signals" and not of "significance"
Some have gone so far as to suggest that all inquiry into human affairs should redescribe itself in terms of a new trinity of concepts: information, communication, and control.
Therapeutic Discourses:
Carl R. Rogers recommended expanding the method of small group understanding to much larger forums, such as the strained relations between the American and the Russians. If both parties attempted to understand rather than to judge, important political fruit might result. An all but messianic vision of therapeutic communication as the balm of souls, couples, groups, and nations pervade the text: putting it to use, he suggested, was worth trying, given "the tragic and well-nigh fatal failures of communication which threaten the existence of our modern world" (p. 27).
Not only the bomb, however, shaped communication theory; as Kenneth Cmiel has shown, the fear of democratic disaffection and the moral enigma of the Holocaust presided over efforts to think through communication in the 1940s. Cynicism and evil were the fundamental problems that Robert Merton, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas faced first in the 1940s, and in each case the resultant vision of communication was some kind of answer to the intractable questions. Merton saw communication as an agency of national community buildings; Arendt as a means of discovering truth and, later, of giving birth to new political orders and Levinas as an ethical obligation to the otherness of the other person. This threefold crossing of modernization, antimodern, and postmodern theorists is fateful for the rest of the century's social thought. Merton saw communication as a kind of Durkemian social glue; Arendt as a disclosure of the political potentials of human association; and Levinas as a respect for the autonomy of others, a respect that made communication in an instrumental sense all but impossible (p. 29).
In the postwar ferment about "communication," then, two discourses were dominant: a technical one about information theory and a therapeutic one about communication as cure and disease. Each has deep roots in American cultural history. The technicians of communication are a diverse breed, from Samuel F. B. Morse to Marshall McLuhan, from Charles Horton Cooley to Al Gore, from Buckminster Fuller to Alvin Toffler, but they all think the imperfections of human interchange can be redressed by improved technology or techniques. They want to mimic the angels by mechanical or electronic means... The therapeutic vision of communication, in turn, developed within humanist and existentialist psychology, but both its roots and its branches spread much wider, to the nineteenth century attack on Calvinism and its replacement by a therapeutic ethos of self-realization, and to the self-culture pervading American bourgeois life. Both the technical and therapeudtic visions claim that the obstacles and troubles in human contact can be solved, whether by better technologies or better techniques of relating, and hence are also latter-day heirs to the angelological dream of mutual ensoulment (pp. 29-30).
The message of this book is a harsher one, that the problems are fundamentally intractable. "Communication," whatever it might mean, is not a matter of improved wiring or freer self-disclosure but involves a permanent kink in the human condition...My emphasis on the debt that the dream of communication owes to ghosts and strange eros is intended as a corrective to truism that is still very much alive: that the expansion of means leads to the expansion of minds (p. 29)
Communication, in the deeper sense of establishing ways to share one's hours meaningfully with others, is sooner a matter of faith and risk than of technique and method (p. 30)/
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Any idea where Svalbard is?
"Applies to the whole of Svalbard"
Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean north of mainland Europe. It consists of a group of islands ranging from 74° to 81° North, and 10° to 35° East. The archipelago is completely controlled by the Kingdom of Norway and is part of it. As of 2005, Svalbard has a population of approximately 2,400 people. - drawn and edited from Wikipedia
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Orality and Literacy 2
For anyone who has a sense of what works are in a primary oral culture, or a culture not far removed from primary orality, It is not surprising that the Hebrew Term dabar means 'work' and 'event.'
The fact that oral people commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to eb assimilated to things. 'put there' on a flat surface. Such 'things' are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection (p. 33).
The fact that oral people commonly and in all likelihood universally consider words to have magical potency is clearly tied in, at least unconsciously, with their sense of the word as necessarily spoken, sounded, and hence power-driven. Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to eb assimilated to things. 'put there' on a flat surface. Such 'things' are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection (p. 33).
Orality - Walter J. Ong
Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing the Word (Walter, J. Ong, 1982), Intro - ch2 The modern discovery of primacy oral culture
primary orality
textuality
secondary orality
oral literature
preliterate
text of an oral utterance
formulaic elements
Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possessions of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and its destined to produce writing. Literacy, as will be seen,is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself (Ong, 1982, p. 15).
After being shaped and reshaped centuries earlier, the two epics (Iliad and Odyssey) were set down in the new Greek alphabet around 700-650 BC, the first lengthy composition to be put into this alphabet (Havelock, 1963, p. 115) (p. 23).
Havelock's Preface to Plato has extended Parry's and Lord's findings about orality in oral epic narrative out into the whole of ancient Greek culture and has shown convincingly how the beginnings of Greek philosophy were tied in with the restructuring of thought brought by writing. Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggressive, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis by the interiorization of the alphabet in the Greek psyche. In a more recent work, Origins of Western Literacy (1976), havelock attributes the ascendency of Greek analytic thought to the Greek's introduction of vowels into the alphabet. The original alphabet, invented by Semitic peoples, had consisted only of consonants and some semivowels. In introducing vowels, the Greeks reached a new level of abstract, analytic, visual coding of the elusive world of sound. This achievement presaged and implemented their later abstract intellectual achievements.
His (Marshall McLuhan) gnomic saying, 'The medium is the message', registered his acute awareness of the importance of the shift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media. Few people have had so simulating an effect as Marshall McLuhan on so many diverse minds, including those who disagreed with him or believed they did (p. 29).
primary orality
textuality
secondary orality
oral literature
preliterate
text of an oral utterance
formulaic elements
Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possessions of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and its destined to produce writing. Literacy, as will be seen,is absolutely necessary for the development not only of science but also of history, philosophy, explicative understanding of literature and of any art, and indeed for the explanation of language (including oral speech) itself (Ong, 1982, p. 15).
After being shaped and reshaped centuries earlier, the two epics (Iliad and Odyssey) were set down in the new Greek alphabet around 700-650 BC, the first lengthy composition to be put into this alphabet (Havelock, 1963, p. 115) (p. 23).
Havelock's Preface to Plato has extended Parry's and Lord's findings about orality in oral epic narrative out into the whole of ancient Greek culture and has shown convincingly how the beginnings of Greek philosophy were tied in with the restructuring of thought brought by writing. Plato's exclusion of poets from his Republic was in fact Plato's rejection of the pristine aggressive, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis by the interiorization of the alphabet in the Greek psyche. In a more recent work, Origins of Western Literacy (1976), havelock attributes the ascendency of Greek analytic thought to the Greek's introduction of vowels into the alphabet. The original alphabet, invented by Semitic peoples, had consisted only of consonants and some semivowels. In introducing vowels, the Greeks reached a new level of abstract, analytic, visual coding of the elusive world of sound. This achievement presaged and implemented their later abstract intellectual achievements.
His (Marshall McLuhan) gnomic saying, 'The medium is the message', registered his acute awareness of the importance of the shift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media. Few people have had so simulating an effect as Marshall McLuhan on so many diverse minds, including those who disagreed with him or believed they did (p. 29).
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Historical Materialism & Dialectical Materialism
Historical materialism is the theory of social change, developed by Marx and Engels, in which history is divided into a series of epochs (or modes of production), each characterized by a distinct economy and class structure. Historical change in this view is fueled by the progressive expansion of the productive capacity of the economy, as well as the development of technology and the forces of production. This becomes manifest in class conflicts and revolutions. One of the reasons the historical materialist approach works so well in both Marxism and medium theory is that it shows that ideas actually come from somewhere and gives an agency. Ideas and social change don’t fall from the sky, and the appeal to this is clear in both schools of thought.
Dialectical materialism, in Marxist terms, encompasses those aspects of its philosophy beyond its theory of history (such as metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology). The term wasn’t used by either Marx or Engels, but later became the dogmatic philosophy of the Soviet Union, building on works such as Engels’s Dialectics of Nature. Dialectical materialism, for our purposes here, might be characterized by its materialism and rejection of skepticism. The material world, in this view, is held to have a primacy over the mental, so that the material is a precondition of one’s consciousness (which would seemingly make sense for someone like Innis, McLuhan, or Edmund Carpenter). The material world is then knowable through the realm of empirical studies. Beyond focusing solely on its materialism, the philosophy itself is dialectical, in that it sees reality in its ever-changing state of development, arguing not simply that change exists in the world, but rather that the reality of that world is characterized by varying properties and their emergence.
Leveretter, M. (2007). Spirits in a Material World: Hauntology, Historical Materialism, and Phenomenological Medium Theory, Western Journal of Communication, 71(4), 336-358.
Dialectical materialism, in Marxist terms, encompasses those aspects of its philosophy beyond its theory of history (such as metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology). The term wasn’t used by either Marx or Engels, but later became the dogmatic philosophy of the Soviet Union, building on works such as Engels’s Dialectics of Nature. Dialectical materialism, for our purposes here, might be characterized by its materialism and rejection of skepticism. The material world, in this view, is held to have a primacy over the mental, so that the material is a precondition of one’s consciousness (which would seemingly make sense for someone like Innis, McLuhan, or Edmund Carpenter). The material world is then knowable through the realm of empirical studies. Beyond focusing solely on its materialism, the philosophy itself is dialectical, in that it sees reality in its ever-changing state of development, arguing not simply that change exists in the world, but rather that the reality of that world is characterized by varying properties and their emergence.
Leveretter, M. (2007). Spirits in a Material World: Hauntology, Historical Materialism, and Phenomenological Medium Theory, Western Journal of Communication, 71(4), 336-358.
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