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Theorizing Communication: A History

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Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 12:22:17 -0800 (PST) From: Dan Schiller

Theorizing Communication: A History. By Dan Schiller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hardcover, xviii + 275 pp. $39.95.

Available from Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016-4313. Telephone 212-726-6000.

Today the sweep and import of communication have become virtually uncontained. To study communication, it is now widely evident, is not to be concerned only with the contributions of a restricted set of media, either to the socialization of children and youth, or to buying and voting decisions. Nor is it only to engage with the ideological legitimations of the modern state. It is, rather, to make arguments about the forms and determinants of sociocultural development as such. The potential of communication study, in short, has converged directly and at many points with analysis and critique of existing society across its span.

Theorizing Communication is a sustained effort to trace this extraordinary transit of ideas, by untangling the complex processes of topical engagement, conceptual differentiation, and analytical synthesis, that have structured critical inquiry into the character of communication as a determinate social force. The book provides a detailed intellectual history of communication study, from its beginnings in late 19th-century critiques of U.S. corporate capitalism and its burgeoning wireline communications industry, to contemporary information theory and poststructuralist accounts of communicative activity.

Theorizing Communication identifies a problematic split between manual and intellectual labor that outlasts and informs each of the field's major conceptual departures. From this vital perspective it builds a critical survey of work aiming to understand the nexus of media and culture/ information in a society. Looking closely at the thought of John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Daniel Bell and others, the book maps the key transformations of ideas about communication and culture as issues of corporate power, mass persuasion, cultural imperialism and information-based economic expansion succeed one another in prominence. Bringing the study of communication theory into the present, the work concludes by outlining a unitary model of society's cultural/informational production, one that broadens the concept of labor to include all forms of human self-activity.

Theorizing Communication posits a need to explicate the disparate concepts of society and of social relations that have played an immanent role in the evolution of communication inquiry. What, on one hand, have been the field's chief theorizations of a purported social whole or totality? What have been the schemas through which successive schools have thought to pose the relationship between the communication process and an overarching social field?

Three formal alternatives, it is argued, have been pursued over the course of a century of communication study. First, some thinkers have tried to add communication processes or functions to a pre-existing concept of social totality; conceptions of totality are thereby mechanically modified, via one or another new ingredient. At a certain point, however, we can sense in such claims a second tendency, toward a more thoroughgoing substitution: in this case communication is employed, sometimes quite comprehensively, to supplant or stand in for any pre-existing conception of social totality. To say that "Communication is the fundamental social process," is an example. Finally, there have also been synthetic efforts, whereby "communication" is brought into "society" even as, in consequence, both ideas are altered. To say that "The system of communication exists interdependently with the political and economic systems" provides a nominal instance of such a synthetic mode of address.

These three conceptual frames - supplementary, substitutive and synthetic

What has "communication" to do with "labor"? The answer made here, is Nothing - and, therefore, Everything. Theorizing Communication is, in large part, the story of how their polarization has shaped the fortunes of communication inquiry.

To be sure, a conceptual schism of such magnitude hardly could be confined to formal thinking about communication; the point is rather that it swallowed up social thought more generally. Because it repeatedly proved decisive for this field's development, however, the history of communication study comprises a rewarding site for excavating the intellectual forms applied, over the last century or so, to the ancient fissure between head and hand.

"Communication" was lodged on the ostensive plane of language, ideology, and meaning, only as "labor" came reciprocally to apply to a seemingly remote arena of energy and action. "Communication," that is, became free to demarcate humankind's vast and multifarious potential for symbolic interaction only as "labor" contracted [as it had long since begun to do] around a sharply restricted range of human effort: physical toil or, later, wage work or, most recently, the endeavors that transpire within heavy industry. These two movements of thought were not simply concurrent, however, but profoundly intertwined. At the very moment that the historical separation of of conception and execution was becoming decisive within the social division of labor, communication study began to contribute to the reification of "intellectual" as opposed to "manual" activity.

The difficulties seemed increasingly insurmountable for those who would seek to utilize "labor," contrariwise, as the touchstone of a nondualistic position on the nature of human self-activity. The concept appeared to fall far short of capturing the salient features of contemporary society. How could "labor" be utilized, after all, to take the measure of the cavernous gulf that had apparently come to divide contemporary society from its 19th-century forebears? How could "labor" account for either the new cultural dominants of consumerism and leisure, or the growing economic significance of services and white-collar work, as opposed to manufacturing industry and its allied industrial working class? In this context, even alternative conceptual bases for a nondualistic framework have not been able to constitute a lasting alternative formulation.

Theorizing Communication nevertheless rejects all claims for such a bifurcation of human enterprise, including those that seek to assert dualism as an unchanging and axiomatic ontological condition. Nor does the book look to poststructuralism to try to reunite those seemingly disparate categories, language and action - or, to employ the terms used here, communication and labor - via notions of "discourse" or "discursive practice," notions that seek self-consciously to escape the "productivist" bias seemingly inherent in a now-outdated modernism. Here it is argued, in contrast, that such formulations originate specifically in the same dualism that they purport to surmount; and that, consequently, they ironically avoid as much as they transcend.

Table of Contents

Preface

Communication and Labor in Late-19th-Century America

The Anomaly of Domination

The Opening Toward Culture

The Contraction of Theory

Conclusion ```

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