Vol. XIII [2006], 3 Forgotten Communication Scholars Issue Editor Hanno Hardt EURICOM üDq m II) s > is indexed ß je indeksirana and abstracted in: in abstrahirana v: »□0 Communication Abstracts, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences, International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ), International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), Peace Research Abstracts, Research Alert, Sage Public Administration Abstracts, ScienceDirect, Scopus (Elsevier), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Social SciSearch, Sociological Abstracts. Home page URL: http://www.euricom.si october 2006 ISSN 1318-3222 UDK 3 ĐĐosd Ha •□o fisi (0 articles Hanno Hardt Introduction Bonnie Brennen Searching for the Sane Society: Eric Fromm's Contributions to Social Theory Beverly James Teaching Marcuse Ed McLuskie Hugh Dalziel Duncan's Advocacy for a Theory of Communicative Action Robert Babe Innis and the News Howard Tumber Journalists at Work - Revisited Jorge Alberto Calles-Santillana Ludovico Silva and the Move to Critical Stances in Latin American Communication Studies review essay Anna Lisa Tota Public Memory and Cultural Trauma povzetki 5 7 17 29 43 57 69 81 95 ro O UD o o rN ro o > cn I- LU IO U INTRODUCTION HANNO HARDT This issue of Javnost-The Public is devoted to the notion of a forgotten (or neglected) literature in the field of communication studies. There may never be an exhaustive list of authors lost from memory given the nature and treatment of historical sources and their perceived importance. Thus, the following essays represent a merely introductory and rather modest selection of reminders about authors and their continuing significance. Indeed, their work stands for several generations ^ of intellectual labour in the service of scholarly interests in a more sophisticated understanding of communication as a social, political and cultural process. This issue also reflects the tradition of Javnost-The Public as an independent S scholarly journal, which continues to critically engage the field of communication studies. As such it responds to a commitment to explore dimensions generally ignored by a seemingly unchanging if not monotonous Euro-American journal culture that is nowadays fascinated and preoccupied with issues of new communication technologies. Concerns about communication have a considerable and rich intellectual history - and not only in the Anglo-Saxon culture. Consequently, over the years a ^ number of authors have produced important and relevant contributions to the study ^ of communication. Often these works have been associated with specific periods in the development of communication studies, only to be dropped or neglected after a few years, having served their specific purpose as new and useful insights ^ from a particular discipline or ideological position. Their positions are either taken y at best for granted as historical milestones or overlooked in a rush to embrace yet another insight into the process of communication. This has been especially true for two major reasons, the ahistorical nature of much of the theoretical discussions or research practices and the attraction of change or originality as an accomplishment in itself. Thus, considerations of communication theory retain a strong here-and-now presence without references to the past as a source of insights about the process of communication. £ More recently, however, progressive thought in the humanities and the social sciences, particularly related to the critique of modernism, has provided ample opportunity for engaging in a theoretical or philosophical repositioning of communication studies in a historical context, for instance, from pragmatism to critical theory, and on to postmodernism. The recent resurgence of positivism in communication studies should be watched carefully, perhaps, for references to the early history of quantitative research and its own version of theory. Who is returning to prominence, which ideas are given a new life, and what are the consequences for debates regarding theories of communication? These are relevant questions for a field placed in a wider social and u-j Q. O a i > (R 0 political context and absorbed by larger issues and concerns regarding the study of cultural and economic power and political ideology in society? The contributors to this issue have been asked to identify and comment on the relevant works and to provide an assessment of their continuing relevance as sources of theoretical insight and commonsense understanding of communication. Their efforts are directed at contemplating the power of ideas and raising historical consciousness, particularly in a field that has benefited over the years from the intellectual richness and variety of inter-disciplinary work on communication. S i o £ * 0 C (6 M SEARCHING FOR "THE SANE SOCIETY": ERIC FROMM'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIAL THEORY BONNIE BRENNEN KD Abstract More than fifty years after Erich Fromm's The Sane Society was first published, it remains an important work, surprisingly contemporary in scope, with particular relevance to scholars working in social theory and media studies. Fromm's primary emphasis is on evaluating the sanity of contemporary western societies, which he suggests often deny its citizens' basic human needs of productive activity, self-actualisation, freedom, and love. He suggests that the mental health of a society cannot be assessed in an abstract manner but must focus on specific economic, social, and political factors at play in any given society and should consider whether these factors contribute to insanity or are conducive to mental stability. Ultimately The Sane Society provides a radical critique of democratic capitalism that goes below surface symptoms to get to the root causes of alienation and to suggest ways to transform contemporary societies to further the productive activities of its citizens. Fromm envisions the refashioning of democratic capitalist societies based on the tenants of communitarian socialism, which stresses the organisation of work and social relations between its citizens rather than on issues of ownership. Bonnie Brennen is Professor and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, Temple University, Philadelphia; e-mail: brennenb@temple.edu Q. cp ro O KD o o rN ro £ £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C K Initially heralded as "provocative and brilliant" (Beeley 1956, 172), an "eloquent, powerful and searching" analysis of western society (Schneider 1956, 182), Erich Fromm's The Sane Society offered a formidable critique of capitalist democracy that provided a fundamental contribution to the field of social psychology. At the time of its publication in 1955, Fromm was a leading public intellectual in the United States, a social theorist whose studies of the authoritarian personality, historical materialism, and the psychology of fascism "were hotly debated by sociologists, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists alike" (Brennen 1997, 5). He was a passionate social critic who combined psychological insights with social theory; his socialist humanist theoretical framework was informed by his childhood Orthodox Jewish training, and although he rejected organised religion after World War I, an understanding of the Jewish Messianic tradition continued to influence his work (Pietkainer 2004). Fromm earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Heidelberg and then trained in Freudian psychoanalysis opening his own psychoanalytic practice at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute in the late 1920s (Smith 2002). From 1934 to 1939 he served as the head of the social psychology division of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, and in the 1940s he began to focus on conceptualising collective social structures of groups, classes, and societies. During the post-World War II era, in hundreds of journal articles and more than twenty books, his radical ideas spoke to the middle class who embraced him as a "modern guru" (Coser 1984, 74). Yet, as Pietkainer (2004) explains, by the late 1960s, Fromm's agenda of radical humanism did not resonate with younger intellectuals and academics and they began to reject his theoretical insights. Today, while Fromm's reputation as a revisionist psychoanalyst remains strong, his contributions to social theory are no longer discussed and his work in this area is rarely sited. As a social theorist Fromm may now be seen as a "forgotten intellectual" (McLaughlin 1998); however, it is the contention of this essay that more than fifty years after The Sane Society was first published, it remains an important work, surprisingly contemporary in scope, with particular relevance to scholars working in social theory and media studies. The Sane Society continues Fromm's argument in Escape from Freedom (1941) that totalitarian regimes often appeal to modern individuals who crave security, fear freedom, and therefore willingly submit to the demands of a dictatorial leader or state. Fromm explains that within totalitarian regimes citizens' rights are destroyed and they are taught to submit to the will of the ruler or state. Lacking power and Q feeling insignificant, the "absolutely alienated individual worships at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is known: state, class, collective, or what else" (Fromm 1955, 123). While in totalitarian regimes authority is exercised through direct control, fear, and intimidation, in capitalist democracies people "are governed by the fear of the anonymous authority of conformity" (Fromm 1955, 102). They feel secure when they are just like their fellow citizens and 0 conform to the norms of their culture; craving the approval of others, they resist J standing out or being different. Incorporating insights of both Freud and Marx, in The Sane Society Fromm details fundamental concepts of humanistic psychoanalysis, which insists that basic human passions are not bound to instinctive needs but rather are rooted in the human need 00 to relate to nature within the "specific conditions of human existence" (1955, viii). U S Yet, he faults Freud for his insistence that the requirements of civilization are at odds with human beings' basic sexual instincts, in particular Freud's anthropological C^ view that "competition and mutual hostility are inherent in human nature" (1955, 76). Fromm also takes issue with what he sees as Marx's lack of understanding of human psychological factors, which help to shape human character. He explains that Marx's assumption that the natural goodness of human beings would emerge once they were released from their "crippling economic shackles" is based on the naive optimism of his era. Marx's insistence in the Communist Manifesto that "workers have nothing to lose but their chains" contains, according to Fromm, an important psychological error because: "With their chains they have also to lose all those irrational needs and satisfactions which were originated while they were wearing the chains" (1955, 264). Fromm suggests that while human beings can live under domination, subjugation, and exploitation, that eventually their basic humanity and sanity must deteriorate because of such conditions; he suggests that while on the surface democratic capitalism appears an improvement over totalitarian societies, that as it relates to the sanity of its citizens, that it actually offers just another escape from freedom. Fromm's primary emphasis in The Sane Society is on evaluating the sanity of contemporary western societies, which he suggests often deny its citizens' basic human needs of productive activity, self-actualisation, freedom, and love. His understanding of mental health is based on a normative humanistic framework, which adheres to universal laws and characteristics of human nature and assumes that there are correct and incorrect judgments relating to human existence. Fromm differentiates between individual and societal mental illness suggesting that a person who has failed to attain independence or a genuine sense of self may be said to suffer a "neurosis," while if the majority of a members in a society lack these attributes it should be considered a "socially patterned defect" (1955, 15). Although a given society may be able to accommodate, or may even encourage specific socially patterned defects, he maintains that it is naive to assume that just because many people share similar beliefs, ideas, feelings, or defects that they are somehow proper or valid; he insists that "consensual validation has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health" (1955, 14-15). It is important to note that Fromm's use of terms such as "sane society, "neurosis" and "mental health" are not meant metaphorically; he uses these terms literally, in a medical sense. For Fromm, mentally healthy people have a strong sense of self and are productive and unalienated; they live by "love, reason and faith" (1955, 204) and respect both their own lives as well as the lives of others. He insists that in contemporary societies it is commonplace to encounter an individual who feels and acts like an automaton, who is incapable of experiencing real emotions, "whose artificial smile has replaced genuine laughter; whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech; whose dulled despair has taken the place of genuine pain" (1955, 16). Far from being considered an individual pathology, he suggests that such symptoms now describe millions of citizens living in democratic capitalist societies, and as a result Fromm wonders if it is possible for a sane society to flourish within the contemporary political, cultural, and environment. To understand the incidences of mental unbalance in contemporary societies and to support his concerns regarding the sanity of life within democratic capitalism, in The Sane Society Fromm draws on incidents of alcoholism, suicide, and homicide in Europe and the United States. Combining rates of suicide and murder into what he terms "destructive acts" and comparing them with the rates of alcoholism, he shows that the most prosperous, democratic societies have the highest levels of mental illness. While Fromm concedes that the statistics do not prove mental illness, he maintains that at a minimum they raise questions regarding the social and cultural practices in western societies and he suggests that such practices may be harmful to the sanity of its citizens. Current research supports Fromm's concerns and may be seen to illustrate an ongoing problem of mental illness in the United States: while the combined rate of murder and suicide has remained quite consistent over the past fifty years, the actual rates of murder have risen and suicide rates have declined. Unlike the first half of the twentieth century when information on mental illness was not systematically collected, there is research that now focuses directly on mental illness in the U.S. The American Association for Suicidology (AAS) directly links suicide with mental illness and notes that more than 90 percent of suicide victims have at least one mental disorder (AAS 2006). The National Mental Health Association (NMHA) finds that in any given year, more than 54 million Americans have a mental illness and that depression and anxiety disorders alone affect more than 19 million Americans annually. Approximately 15 percent of U.S. citizens with mental illness also have a substance abuse problem (NMHA 2006). In addition to statistics regarding illicit drug use, information is available on the number of prescription drugs currently used to treat symptoms of mental disorders. A 2005 report by the Department of Health and Human Services compares the number of prescriptions written by U.S. physicians for antidepressants during the years 1995-1996 with those written in 2002-2003. In the 1995-1996 period physicians wrote 14 prescriptions for antidepressants per 100 people while in 2002-2003 they wrote 26.6 prescriptions per 100 people - a near doubling of the number of prescriptions written for antidepressants over a seven year period. Of course this finding does not prove that more Americans are suffering from mental illness; it merely indicates that a larger number of people are being treated chemically for their mental disorders (Health, United States 2005); however it aligns with the NMHA's statistics on mental health and both findings may be seen to raise questions regarding the influence of modern culture on the health of its citizens. Fromm does not use statistics to prove mental illness but draws on this information to go below surface facts to address systemic Q issues and causes related to mental illness. He suggests that understanding larger issues and attempting to change root causes is fundamental to a truly radical reform agenda. More than fifty years after Fromm first raised these issues, the U.S. press routinely reports on a glut of surface statistics yet few attempts are made to go beyond these numbers in an attempt to answer fundamental systemic questions or to address larger societal issues connected with mental illness. Q Fromm suggests that the mental health of a society cannot be assessed in an J abstract manner but must focus on specific economic, social, and political factors at play in any given society and should consider whether these factors contribute to insanity or are conducive to mental stability. In this way he suggests that it is possible to understand the "social character" of traits that are deemed desirable O and are shared by the majority of members of a culture. The social character shapes U S the behaviour of members of a society so that they function purposively within that society and they also find satisfaction in doing so. As Fromm explains: "It is the social character's function to mold and channel human energy within a given society for the purpose of the continued functioning of this society" (1955, 79). In comparison with the nineteenth century social character of western societies that he describes as "competitive, hoarding, exploitative, authoritarian, aggressive, individualistic" (1955, 99), Fromm characterises the social character of twentieth century capitalistic democratic societies as embodying a receptive marketing orientation in which individuals experience themselves, in their economic role, as commodities to be sold on the market. As he explains: Instead of competitiveness we find an increasing tendency toward 'teamwork;' instead of a striving for ever-increasing profit, a wish for a steady and secure income; instead of exploitation, a tendency to share and spread wealth, and to manipulate others - and oneself; instead of rational and irrational but overt authority, we find anonymous authority - the authority of public opinion and the market; instead of the individual conscience, the need to adjust and be approved of; instead of the sense of pride and mastery, an ever-increasing though mainly unconscious sense of powerlessness (Fromm 1955, 99). In 1955 Fromm suggested that the development of capitalism required cooperative individuals, with standardised desires and tastes that could be easily understood, influenced and manipulated and whose consumption desires were ever-expanding. More than fifty years later, this social character still resonates with the requirements of western capitalist cultures. In The Sane Society, Fromm's analysis of individuals' escape from freedom in contemporary capitalist societies is centered on the concept of alienation. He defines alienation as the process of estrangement, in which people cannot relate to themselves as independent, unique individuals who create their own identities and experiences, but instead see themselves as impoverished things, dependent on outside forces and powers apart from themselves. Fromm details the history of the concept of alienation, discussing the thinking of Old Testament prophets who considered the creation of idols representations of human life in alienated forms, as well as Marx and Hegel's nineteenth century use of the term to represent self-estrangement. While he draws on these earlier understandings of alienation, as a psychoanalyst, Fromm ultimately defines alienation in medical terms and suggests that "the insane person is the absolutely alienated person" (1955, 124) who has lost a sense of self and cannot situate him/herself as the centre of his/her own experiences. Fromm suggests that as people become alienated, they lose their dignity and their understanding of themselves and do not see their experiences as being based on their own decisions, judgments, and actions. Rather than existing as unique productive individuals able to use reason to relate to the world, alienated people crave approval from others and fear being considered different because they see it as a danger that threatens their sense of security. Alienated people lead meaningless lives; they are estranged from themselves, others, and society. Fromm considers alienation almost complete in modern capitalist societies, and explains that it pervades individuals' consumption habits as well as their relationships to their work, to their communities, to their fellow citizens, and to themselves. An alienated person lacks a sense of reality regarding "the meaning of life and death, for happiness and suffering, for feeling and serious thought" (1955, 171). In a technological age, machines routinely replace human intelligence and citizens tend to manipulate symbols and other people rather than actively and creatively producing commodities. They are not invested in their work, and find it routine, boring, and dull, which further contributes to a sense of apathy and dissatisfaction with their lives. As Fromm explains, in contemporary society work often can be defined "as the performance of acts which cannot yet be performed by machines" (1955, 180). Within alienated societies consumption is seen as both an individual's right and duty, creating an "orgy of consumption [that] dominates our leisure hours and fills our dreams of heaven" (Schaar 1961, 196). Individuals are consumption-hungry, receiving pleasure from the purchases they make rather than from the actual use of what they buy. Fromm insists that consumption now dominates and defines the culture of democratic capitalist societies. Citizens consume food, drink, news, and entertainment without any active participation or unifying experiences resulting from the consumption. In addition, a continuous, ever expanding need for consumption is encouraged by "artificially stimulated phantasies" (1955, 134) created by advertising and a variety of other psychological pressures that coax individuals into repeatedly buying as much as they can. Fromm aligns with other Critical Theorists in his understanding of the ab-stractification and the commodification of things and relationships within contemporary western societies. He explains that an individual can relate to others or to an object concretely, seeing all its unique attributes and qualities, or a person can relate abstractly, focusing on only those aspects or qualities it has in common with similar objects. Rather than using abstractions only when useful and necessary, Fromm notes that in contemporary societies, everything, even ourselves has become abstractified; when individuals describe their possessions, they focus on their exchange value, rather than their usefulness or beauty. This aspect of alienation invades the interpersonal realm, and peoples' relations with others become that of "two abstractions, two living machines who use each other" (Fromm 1955, 139). Similarly, within the receptive marketing orientation of democratic capitalism, individuals see themselves and others as commodities, with a distinct market value that relates to their socio-economic role instead of their own experiences as thinking and loving individuals. Q The process of abstractification eventually dissolves all concrete frames of refer- ence that help individuals make sense of their society. As Fromm laments: There is no frame of reference left which is manageable, observable, which is adapted to human dimensions. While our eyes and ears receive impressions only in humanly manageable proportions, our concept of the world has lost just that quality; it does not any longer correspond to our human dimensions (Fromm 1955, 119). U S IR 0 C « fN Without material frames of reference, nothing remains understandable or real; science, industry, politics, and economics mean little apart from their statistical abstractions, and everything becomes morally and factually possible. In The Sane Society Fromm suggests that elements of popular culture now serve as cultural opiates for the socially patterned defect, providing escape from the acute anxiety that the process of abstractification creates in alienated individuals in modern societies. He fears that if Hollywood films, television, radio, sporting CO events, newspapers, and other forms of popular culture were unavailable for even ^ a month that neuroses would immediately become manifest in many citizens. Yet Fromm is clear to distinguish between the productive activities associated with reading, listening, and watching various forms of material culture from the alienated form of consuming elements popular culture. He explains that when an individual is genuinely related to and productively participating in an activity, that person is changed by the experience, but within alienated consumption, an individual passively consumes leisure activities without gaining any actual pleasure. Alienated individuals' leisure-time consumption is often manipulated by "powerful propaganda machines" (Fromm 1955, 339), which condition them to purchase and consume entertainment in just the same way that they buy food and clothing. For Fromm, tourist's snapshots provide a striking example of alienated pleasure consumption. Tourists see nothing without the intermediary vision of the camera; they push the button and the camera provides an alienated memory of the trip through a collection of snapshots that substitute for the authentic visual experience. Fromm would reject current postmodern thinking that individuals create their own realities, insisting instead that alienated individuals who passively receive information and opinions lack the reasoning skills necessary to penetrate the surface of the "facts" and therefore are unable to establish a clear sense of reality. People who do not see themselves as powerful active participants in the democratic process cannot distinguish between authentic and manufactured information, needs, beliefs, and desires nor can they evaluate behaviour ethically, because ethics requires the ability to make value judgments based on reason. Fromm notes that people are unable to express their convictions because their opinions are manipulated, just like their product consumption choices, and they do not have any opinions or convictions of their own: "They are listening to the drums of propaganda and facts mean little in comparison with the suggestive noise which hammers at them" (Fromm 1955, 186). Citizens are poorly informed about important national and international matters that they need to understand in order to make informed voting decisions as to who will represent them in the political arena. Fromm explains that the press portrays the entire world as a series of abstractions; readers confront huge, almost incomprehensible numbers without any correspondence to human proportions: billion dollar spending, multi-million dollar deficits, millions murdered or dead from disease, and for individuals who have no frame of reference to make sense of these figures, the issues they represent are impossible to understand. Today, partisan political spin is routinely issued from a U.S. government administration that in 2004 spent a record $88 million for government-funded public relations campaigns (Stewart 2005), and that proliferates misinformation on international, cultural, religious, economic, and political issues. In addition, the field of contemporary journalism in the U.S. provides pointed examples reinforcing Fromm's concerns regarding the inability of citizens to distinguish between authentic and manufactured information while illustrating a climate where authentic information seems to be losing its relevance to American society. On Friday, September 8, 2006, the Miami Herald reported that ten journalists, including two members of their own Spanish-language newspaper, had received more than $300,000 from the U.S. government to undermine Cuba's communist government in their news reports. This was not an isolated incident: in 2005, the Pentagon paid Iraqi newspapers and a consulting firm to plant favourable news articles about the rebuilding efforts and the Iraq war (Wides-Munoz 2006). Federal agencies also paid newspaper columnists to promote marriage to unmarried couples, particularly those having children, and to support the "No Child Left Behind" legislation (Steward 2005). The co-optation of broadcast news by economic interests has resulted in a blending of news and entertainment into infotainment on a local and national scale (Anderson 2004) but now newspapers also are running afoul of traditional distinctions between news content and advertising. The 1999 Los Angeles Times, Staples Center profit-sharing scheme, through which the newspaper published a special magazine, sold advertisements with the help of the Staples advertising staff, and planned to split the profits, showcases the blurring of boundaries between news and advertising and raises significant questions regarding the role of the press (Elder 1999). More recently, after Jeff Probst, host of the CBS reality television show Survivor announced on the CBS Early Show that Survivor: Cook Islands participants would be grouped by race, newspapers, web and broadcast outlets throughout the U.S. carried it as national news. Rarely did the coverage frame the story as a promotional marketing effort and articles instead focused on the possibility there might be racial profiling on the prime-time show. In fact, the Thursday, August 24, 2006 issue of The Philadelphia Inquirer chose the Survivor announcement as its lead front page article and showcased the news with a banner headline that read: "Survive this: A new hue to CBS competition" (Barrientos and Campbell 2006). At the Inquirer, the survivor story trumped a variety of other news reports including a potential stem-cell breakthrough, the first year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, hostages being released in Nigeria, a suicide bombing in Baghdad, Iran's increased nuclear efforts, and the escalating conflict in the Middle East. Overall, the previous examples may be seen to offer more than governmental and newsroom misdeeds; they showcase the manipulation that happens in a thoroughly alienated culture when its citizens are unable to distinguish fact from fantasy. In a post September 11 climate security is a fundamental national concern showcased and perhaps even exploited by U.S. media and government alike. Interestingly, in The Sane Society Fromm finds an increased emphasis on the concept of security as an essential aim of human life as well as a factor fundamental to mental health. He notes that one reason for this belief might be tied to a Cold War mental-Q ity following the end of World War II. However, he suggests that a more important reason for an emphasis on security might stem from alienated individuals' desire for conformity, which makes them feel increasingly insecure. Fromm finds the need to emerge as a reasoning individual "from bondage to freedom" (1955, 27) often conflicts with the desire to return to the security of nature and to the known and he notes that within contemporary capitalist societies that over the years people Q have begun to feel that they should have no problems, no concerns, or doubts and J that if they do not take risks that they should feel secure. He questions this belief and maintains that just as active and engaged people cannot avoid sadness or pain, that the goal for thinking individuals, "is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without panic and undue fear" (1955, 196). Fromm warns that ^ alienated citizens increasingly abdicate their own responsibility regarding issues U S of security and become ignorant regarding domestic and foreign policy which may help to explain the general lack of outrage in the U.S. regarding the current LO administration's international and national policies. 1 Ultimately The Sane Society provides a radical critique of democratic capitalism that goes below surface symptoms to get to the root causes of alienation and to suggest ways to transform contemporary societies to further the productive activities of its citizens. Fromm explains that all of the twentieth century variants of totalitarianism created the dehumanisation of society and with it a greater risk of insanity among its people. Similarly, democratic capitalistic societies have increased the alienation and automatization of its citizens, which has resulted in them becoming servants to the "idol of production" (1955, 277). Fromm envisions the refashioning of democratic capitalist societies based on the tenants of communitarian socialism, through which "every working person would be an active and responsible participant, where work would be attractive and meaningful, where capital would not employ labor, but labor would employ capital" (1955, 283-284). Rather than focusing primarily on issues of ownership, communitarian socialism stresses the organisation of work and social relations between its citizens. Although money, prestige, and power are the main employment incentives of contemporary capitalist societies, Fromm maintains that the satisfaction derived from active participation in purposeful work can provide a sense of collective and personal fulfilment that may help to create a sane society. His vision of communitarian socialism works toward ending the alienation of its citizens, decentralises work and power, envisions shared governance, and the development of manageable communities where individuals will no longer need to escape an atomised society into the security of robotic conformity. Instead of fixating on nationalism and racism, which Fromm refers to as the "idolatry of blood and soil" (1955, 57), he urges the development of a humanistic global identity. Anticipating current concerns regarding the growing disparity in the quality of life between western and developing nations, he insists that industrial nations must limit their unnecessary consumption in order to share limited resources. At a time when millions of people are dying each year from AIDS because they cannot afford medicines to prolong their lives, and when millions of children are starving while excess produce rots in American fields so that prices remain artificially high, rampant consumerism should be challenged. The previous examples illustrate the mental insanity of a consumerist orientation, which encourages an unending craving for new and unnecessary things along with a constant need to buy more and more new things, even though there may be no actual need or desire for the product. When first released, reviewers applauded Fromm's "biting diagnosis" (Nettler 1956, 645) and recommended cure, but noted that alienated consumption was enjoyable for many people and questioned if the creation of sane society was a realistic and desirable goal. More than a half a century later, the alienation of democratic capitalist societies seems complete and his fear that human beings may become robots who destroy their world because they do not find value in a meaningless life seems a frightening but realistic prediction. It's time to reconsider Fromm's vision of communitarian socialism as a realistic road to a sane society. References: American Association for Suicidology (AAS). 2006. Suicide in the U.S.A. www.suicidology.org Anderson, Bonnie. 2004. News Flash: Journalism, Infotainment and the Bottom-Line Business of Broadcast News. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Barrientos, Tanya and Dwayne Campbell. Aug. 24, 2006. Survive This: A New Hue to CBS Competition. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1A. Beeley, Arthur L. 1956. Book Review: Erich Fromm: The Sane Society. Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 37, 2, 171-172. Brennen, Bonnie. 1997. Erich Fromm: From Social Unconscious to Class Consciousness. Javnost-The Public 4, 1, 5-18. Coser, Lewis A. 1984. Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elder, Sean. 1999. Meltdown at the L.A. Times. Nov. 5. Fromm, Erich. 1941/1969. Escape from Freedom. NY: Basic Books. Fromm, Erich. 1955. The Sane Society. New York: Henry Holt. Health, United States. 2005. Prepared by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services for the President and Congress. McLaughlin, N. 1998. How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm. Sociological Forum 13, 215-246. National Mental Health Association (NMHA). 2006. Fact Sheet. Nettler, Gwynne. 1956. The Sane Society. The American Journal of Sociology 61, 6, 644-646. Pietkainer, Petteri. 2004. "The Sage Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself": Psychological Utopianism in Erich Fromm's Work. History of Political Thought 25, 1, 86-115. Schaar, John H. 1961. Escape from Authority: The Perspectives Erich Fromm. New York: Basic Books. Schneider, Louis. 1956. Book Review: The Sane Society. Social Problems 4, 2, 181-182. Smith, Mark K. 2002. Erich Fromm: Alienation, Being and Education. The Encyclopedia of Informal Education. Stewart, Jim. 2005. 3rd Columnist on Bush Payroll. CBS News Online. Wides-Munoz, Laura. 2006. Report: Miami Journalists on U.S. Government Payroll. Associated Press Online. KD TEACHING MARCUSE BEVERLY JAMES Abstract Herbert Marcuse's 1964 classic, One-Dimensional Man, was required reading for that generation of scholars who came of age intellectually in the era epitomised by 1968. The most widely read of Marcuse's sixteen major books, One-Dimensional Man led the New York Times to identify Marcuse as "the foremost literary symbol of the New Left." Over the decades, however, with the dumbing down of American higher education and the commodification of learning, Marcuse fell out of favour. This article argues that One-Dimensional Man is highly relevant to the current generation of students and provides them with theoretical concepts for understanding contemporary problems. The trends Marcuse described in the 1960s have accelerated, so that his basic arguments are more relevant than ever for courses in news, advertising, and contemporary culture. Marcuse relies heavily on examples to advance his arguments, and this article demonstrates for his illustrations can easily be brought up to date. Following the author's background notes on Marcuse and basic Marxist concepts, the article identifies five suggestive themes that can be drawn from the text to consider contemporary problems: true versus false needs, lack of class consciousness, alliance between government and business, militarism, and authoritarian language. Beverly James is Professor in the Department of Communication, Horton Social Science Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham; e-mail: bajames@unh.edu. 00 rN Q. cp ro KD o o rN ro £ £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C K Herbert Marcuse's 1964 classic, One-Dimensional Man, was required reading for that generation of scholars who came of age intellectually in the era epitomised by 1968, "the year that rocked the world" (Kurlansky 2004).1 One-Dimensional Man was the most widely known of Marcuse's sixteen major books (see Kellner 1984, 48182), the work that led the New York Times to identify him as "the foremost literary symbol of the New Left" (Hacker 1968, 1). With the dumbing down of American higher education and the commodification of learning, Marcuse fell out of favour. The official Herbert Marcuse website maintained by his grandson, Harold Marcuse, contains links to courses where Marcuse's writings are still assigned.2 Of the sixteen courses where One-Dimensional Man is either required or recommended, five are in departments of philosophy, four are in sociology, and two are in history. The remainder are single courses in anthropology, German studies, law, and communication studies. The one communication course listed, Seminar in Textual Studies, is taught by Ben Attias in the Communication Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. In addition to Marcuse, readings in the seminar include the works of Marx, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Nietzche, and Gramsci. The course was last offered in 1998. While the Marcuse website's course list is surely not comprehensive, it does give a sense of the marginality of One-Dimensional Man in the careerist climate of American universities today. An informal Google search for other inclusions of One-Dimensional Man in communication syllabi located one other course: Ed McLuskie, professor of communication at Boise State University, assigns One-Dimensional Man in his course on the Frankfurt School. This course was taught as recently as fall 2006. In tracing the trajectory of communication studies in the last several decades, a number of scholars have pointed to the eclipse of politics with the institutionalisation of cultural studies (Bennett 1992; Budd, Entman, and Steinman 1990; Hall 1992; Hardt 1996). This is particularly true in the United States. At the 1990 conference, "Cultural Studies Now and in the Future," held in Champaign-Urbana, Stuart Hall stated, I don't know what to say about American cultural studies. I am completely dumbfounded by it. ... the enormous explosion of cultural studies in the U.S., its rapid professionalization and institutionalization, is not a moment which any of us who tried to set up a marginalized Centre in a university like Birmingham could, in any simple way, regret. And yet I have to say, in Q the strongest sense, that it reminds me of the ways in which, in Britain, we are always aware of institutionalization as a moment of profound danger (1992, 285). ^ Hall's fears were realised as cultural studies became a cottage industry, lucrative for commercial publishing houses as well as universities faced with declining public support. With state funds covering an increasingly smaller proportion of the costs of public higher education, tuition and fees rose from an average of $4,000 a year in 1986-87 to $11,400 in 2004-05.3 At the same time that higher education became an expensive commodity and students became discerning shoppers, the popularity of U S nv/v^/vi IUI V V. WllllllWlll.^ UllV* [JLUU.WII.LJ IL/W.U111V. V*1lJV.VJ.1 111 l^j Ljl HJ^/^/V.1 lJ^ HIV. kAlUi 1LJ VI communication as a field of study soared.4 The false dichotomy between culture and political economy that has plagued communication studies for many years plays into the need to attract students. Political economy and the critique of capitalism fall by the wayside as tiresome, dry, and retro in the worst sense of the word. One of Marcuse's central themes in One-Dimensional Man is the transformation C^ of art and culture from spheres of opposition to modes of domination. Once, he ^ writes, "literature and art were essentially alienation, sustaining and protecting the contradiction [between what is and what could be] - the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed" (1964, 61). Under the conditions of advanced technological society, however, "the intent and function of [classical works of art] have ... fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out" (1964, 64). The administrative rationality that transforms art into reality television and news into happy talk threatens to overtake the classroom, one of the few remaining autonomous spheres. While university bean counters weigh tuition increases against financial aid expenditures and pressure instructors to offer courses that will attract the greatest number of students possible, once the door is shut, the classroom remains a place where young people can be encouraged to imagine alternative arrangements and possibilities. In this article, I wish to argue that Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man offers a way to re-insert politics into undergraduate programs in communication in a manner that is not only palatable but satisfying to students. As the senseless war in Iraq rages on, waged by a president chosen by a politicised Supreme Court, and the melting ice sheet over Greenland threatens to raise the oceans by twenty feet, all but the most comatose students realise that their generation faces enormous challenges. Marcuse is among the writers who provide them with a conceptual apparatus for understanding contemporary problems. The trends he described in the 1960s have only accelerated, so that the basic arguments he advances are more relevant than ever, and Marcuse can be fruitfully used in seminars having to do with the analysis of news, advertising, public relations, and other cultural forms that interest contemporary mass communication and journalism majors. My own approach in assigning dense texts to undergraduates who lack much understanding of social theory is to explain that I am asking the class to walk in on a conversation that is in progress. The students are to try to pick up the threads of the competing arguments, whether explicit or implied. While I expect them to read closely and carefully, I tell them to focus on what they do understand and not to fret about what is beyond their grasp. This is good advice in the case of Marcuse. A New York Times Book Review critic (Hacker 1968, 37) describes his style as "heavy and humourless, Teutonic in syntax, and never easy reading. Indeed," he adds, "without a modest understanding of Hegelian philosophy it is impossible to follow half of what he says." Not withstanding the dense prose, Marcuse relies heavily on examples to advance his arguments, and these illustrations can easily be brought up to date. By way of a foundation to reading Marcuse, I do introduce them to the writer himself and to the basic principles that form the basis of the "conversation." In what follows, I provide my own sketchy class background notes on Marcuse and the Marxist concepts necessary to read One-Dimensional Man. Then, I lay out five suggestive themes that my students and I have drawn from that text in order to think about contemporary problems: true versus false needs, lack of class consciousness, alliance between government and business, militarism, and authoritarian language. The secondary literature on Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, an intellectual movement with which he was associated, is enormous. Two helpful introductions are Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination and Douglas Kellner's Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Marcuse lived between 1898 and 1979, so that in many ways his life was coterminous with the twentieth century. Historians are likely to recall that century as one in which utopian hopes for more equitable, humane, and peaceable societies took many forms as reactions against the growth of corporate, and then global capitalism. However, these dreams were repeatedly dashed through genocide and wars, both hot and cold, that usually had an economic basis. Marcuse directly experienced the turmoil of the twentieth century and was caught up in both its nightmares and their resistance. He was born in Berlin into what he described as a typical, upper-middle class Jewish family. He was drafted into the German Army in World War I, and was involved in the socialist revolution against the monarchy toward the end of the war. In a 1971 interview, he described this experience as formative: "My passion came from my personal experience of the betrayal and defeat of the German revolution and the organization of the fascist counterrevolution which eventually brought Hitler to power" (Keen and Raser 1971, 35). Politically and intellectually, Marcuse aligned himself with the early, humanistic writings of Karl Marx. Marx wrote during a time when capitalism was brutally oppressive to the working class. For Marx, history is driven by shifting modes of economic production and the human relations that grow out of that economic form. The economic arrangement in contemporary society, capitalism, is characterised by the division of antagonistic economic classes: a bourgeoisie in control of all the means of production and a working-class proletariat that has only its labour to sell. Marx forecast an end to the exploitation of the proletariat and the implementation of equitable social arrangements. This radical shift to a society in which men and women would enjoy economic as well as political freedom was to be brought about through revolution by the working class. But as we will see in a moment, what is perhaps most important in relating Marx to Marcuse is the prior necessity for revolutionary consciousness, in which workers as a class are aware of their oppression and can mobilize in solidarity to overthrow the existing social order. With the rise of National Socialism and the election of Hitler in 1933, Marcuse's academic path was blocked, and so he left the country and became affiliated with the exiled Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Better known as the Frankfurt School, this group of intellectuals endorsed Marx's desire for revolutionary social Q change, but was pessimistic about its likelihood under the given conditions. As a result, their main agenda was to offer a radical critique of contemporary society and to keep alive at least the idea of alternatives to the status quo. As socialists and, in many cases, Jews, members of the Frankfurt School had been forced to flee Germany. Together with a number of his colleagues, Marcuse found refuge first in Switzerland and then, as of 1934, in the United States. During World War II, he worked for the 0 forerunner of the C.I.A., and after the war, for the U.S. State Department. Marcuse J began his career as a professor of political philosophy in 1952, teaching briefly at Harvard and Columbia, and then at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965. He then taught at the University of California in San Diego until he retired. Marcuse's name was practically a household word in the decade after the pub-O lication of One-Dimensional Man, an unusual claim for a philosopher. As a rough fN U S indication of his fame, his name appears in 271 articles in the New York Times published between 1964 and 1974.5 Together with figures such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, and Che Guevara, he was recognised, especially by young people, as a hero of the New Left (Abel 1968). The New Left was a political and social movement in the 1960s. While communism never had great traction in the U.S., there were periods in American history when it was relatively strong; one such period was the "Old Left" of the Depression-era 1930s. The term "New Left" was used to distinguish the later movement from the more rigid, orthodox communism of the Old Left. A cluster of historical events gave rise to the New Left in the 1960s: reactions against the Cold War and the burgeoning nuclear menace, impatience over the slow pace of racial integration, and growing unease over American imperialism, especially in Vietnam. In the popular imagination, the 1960s are associated with student unrest, including marches, sit-ins, and riots in protest of the war in Vietnam, civil rights, and the irrelevancy of an education aimed at placing students into a sick society marked by excessive consumerism and militarism. As a professor in the Boston area and then in San Diego, Marcuse was in the thick of the turbulence. Unlike most people of his generation, he enthusiastically endorsed student riots and other forms of civil unrest. He presented a bitter critique of advanced industrial society through his writings and teachings, articulating the anger and disgust felt by a generation of disenchanted young people. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse uses Marx as a jumping off point to offer a way of thinking about advanced industrial society and a model for the critique of contemporary culture. Like Marx, his ideas are based on a view of human nature in which men and women are potentially creative, reflective, and capable of directing their own political and economic action. Similarly, society is potentially a sphere in which mankind can exercise these abilities. Ideally, people organise themselves into pluralistic societies that nurture the full and free range of human expressive and productive capacities. But like Marx, Marcuse argues that capitalism has suppressed and distorted authentic human nature. Marcuse goes further: His basic argument in One-Dimensional Man is that men and women are no longer conscious of their own oppression. The main reason has to do with technological progress, with the ability of science and industry to deliver the goods, to satisfy "needs" through the mass production of commodities. As the title of the book suggests, the heart of the problem is one-dimensionality. Marcuse uses this term to describe a historical condition in which individuals have lost their critical abilities and in which opposition to an oppressive status quo is thereby liquidated. The result is the elimination of political and social dissent and a numbing conformity to inhumane ways of living. Kellner (1984, 235) gives us a good definition of the term: One-dimensional is "a concept describing a state of affairs that conforms to existing thought and behaviour in which there is the lack of a critical dimension and the dimension of alternatives and potentialities which transcend the existing society." In other words, one-dimensional man can no longer resist domination. He has lost his revolutionary consciousness, he identifies with the powers that be, and he willingly submits to his own oppression.6 He has lost the ability to transcend the present, to negate it, either in his individual thought and actions or in concert with others through political actions. Marcuse distinguishes between true and false needs, those things that people actually need to live, and those that we have been programmed to believe we need through the mass media, advertising, and other forms of persuasion. He defines false needs as those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. ... Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs (Marcuse 1964, 5). In other words, commercial media and other social forces not only shape our beliefs, hopes and dreams, but our "needs" as well. Having convinced us that we are in some way deficient, the media then offer ways to fulfil us, usually through the consumption of commodities and services. The creation of false needs is central to the integration of one-dimensional man into the social order. Through advertising, through a sea of mass-produced images of affluence, he is harnessed to a wasteful, materialistic culture through promises of a share in its riches. In this way, consumer goods became a main form of social control over the course of the twentieth century. Marcuse writes (1964, 9), "The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment." What surprises students is how little the broad categories of commodities have changed in the last fifty years. Specify BMW for generic automobile and Viking stainless steel appliances for kitchen equipment; substitute iPod for hi-fi set and McMansion for split level home, and you have today's dream list. Through reading Marcuse, students recognise that such devices, and the overwhelming desire to own and display them, are repressive in the sense that they bind men and women to a corporate work environment that now demands their souls. One-dimensional man is forced to work long hours to pay for the excesses that have become "necessary," and he must conform in all respects to the corporate culture from which he draws his paycheck. Freedom to live otherwise - to explore less lucrative but more satisfying job possibilities in the public or non-profit sector, to take time fi off to travel, learn a new language, read art history - is severely restricted. The BMW and the Viking range, in other words, are also repressive in the sense that they restrict people to their role as consumers, limiting their ability to explore and nurture other aspects of their identity - environmental activist, musician, citizen, and father. Even such activities as volunteering to work on community projects have become a public relations ploy, as corporations give their employees "time off" to participate in organised, feel-good "community service days" that further jg strengthen their corporate loyalty. In thinking about their own entry into the full-time work force after getting their degrees, students insist on the importance of achieving a balance between work and leisure that will allow them to satisfy their more authentic needs, which they > define as spending time with their families, relaxing, engaging in sports, attending to their fitness and health, pursuing hobbies, and expanding their horizons through activities such reading or travel. However, they recognise that they face a harsher reality. A Harris Poll revealed that the number of hours worked per week in the United States rose from about 40 to about 50 from 1973 to 1997. This 25 0 fi percent increase in working hours, together with technological developments, led to dramatic growth in productivity, but that has not translated into an increased 3 standard of living for employees. Instead, as Stephen Roach (1998) observes, we 2 have witnessed "a dramatic shift in the work-leisure trade-off that puts increasing stress on family and personal priorities." Not only are people working longer hours, but real wages are at best stagnant. Meanwhile, the inequity in income distribution is wider than ever before. In an efficiently administered one-dimensional society, the conflicts, contradictions, and oppositions that Marx predicted would give rise to revolutionary change have been ironed out so that competing interests have been assimilated and potentially disruptive elements have been neutralized. This false harmony is evident in a number of spheres: the cultural assimilation of blue- and white-collar workers, the merging interests of labour and management, political bipartisanship, and the mediated opening of private spheres of existence to public voyeurism.7 But perhaps most visible is the consolidation of the government and business. Marcuse (1964, 19) writes, "The main trends are familiar: concentration of the national economy on the needs of the big corporations, with the government as a stimulating, supporting, and sometimes even controlling force." Countless examples of this alliance are available for classroom discussion. The transportation sector, in particular, illustrates the selective nature of governmental subsidies to large corporations. In 1979, Chrysler, the weakest of the Big Three American automobile manufacturers, was losing $6 to $8 million a day, partly because of the Arab oil embargo of the mid-1970s and Detroit's insistence on turning out oversized vehicles. In an arrangement that united not only the government and Chrysler but the upper echelons of the United Auto Workers as well, Congress came through in the form of a $1.5 billion loan that was contingent on $500 million in wage and benefits concessions by labour and $125 million by management (Miller 1979). Similarly, the airline industry has repeatedly benefited from the government's largesse. After the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, Congress awarded the airlines $5 billion in cash to cover their immediate problems and established the Air Transportation Stabilization Board to administer a $10 billion loan program. According to a group that monitors the federal budget, the industry got more than triple what the four-day shutdown of air traffic actually cost them, and responded by firing 70,000 employees and drastically reducing service (Taxpayers 2002). The government's position vis-à-vis passenger rail travel is another matter altogether. While highways - by far the most expensive transportation network in the United States - are almost entirely supported by taxpayers, Congress repeatedly insists that travellers should pay the full costs of rail service. Amtrak has been chronically underfunded ever since its establishment in 1971, as the government has tried to pressure the organisation to "wean" itself from public support. In 2005, President George Bush proposed eliminating Amtrak's $1.2 billion subsidy and letting the railway go bankrupt.8 Upon leaving office in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the "the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry." He identified the military-industrial alliance as something "new in the American experience" (Eisenhower 1961). Yet just three years later, Marcuse (1964, 32) pointed to the permanent defence economy as a central factor in the enslavement of one-dimensional man, as military and industrial experts hide behind a "technological veil," making decisions about life and death, personal and national security, over which the ordinary public has no control. Quoting Stewart Meacham, he writes, "As the productive establishments rely on the military for self-preservation and growth, so the military relies on the corporations 'not only for their weapons, but also for knowledge of what kind of weapons they need, how much they will cost, and how long it will take to get them' " (Marcuse 1964, 33-34). The link between Halliburton and the Bush administration through its former head, Vice President Dick Cheney, is an example familiar to students of the partnership between government and business. When they are provided with some of the details, they are able to see the magnitude of the problem. A House Minority Report on government contracting under the Bush administration reveals that Halliburton has been the fastest-growing federal contractor during the Bush years: "In 2000, Halliburton was the 28 th largest contractor, receiving $763 million in federal dollars. By 2005, the company had leaped to the sixth largest federal contractor, receiving nearly $6 billion.9 This is an increase of 672% over the five year period" (United States House of Representatives 2006, 6). But Halliburton is just representative of the larger problem. That same report shows that under the Bush administration, government contracts with private companies have soared. Between 2000 and 2005, such spending rose 86 percent, to reach $377.5 billion annually. Most of the contracts have gone to support Bush's three main initiatives, homeland security, the war and rebuilding in Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina recovery. In all three areas, federal spending has been marked by waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse. The report identified 118 contracts costing taxpayers $745.5 billion that have involved such problems as overcharges, lack of competition, vague contract requirements, and corruption (United States House of Representatives 2006, Appendix A). Marcuse saw the tension created by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union as a further source of unification, a powerful tool for controlling and containing any form of dissent. In the West, "class struggles are attenuated and 'imperialist contradictions' suspended before the threat from without. Mobilized against this threat, capitalist society shows an internal union and cohesion unknown at previous stages of industrial civilization" (1964, 21). Additionally, a permanently mobilized economy meant sustained growth, high employment, and high standards of living. Nuclear arsenals and constantly airborne, fully armed Q B-52s were justified by the concept of deterrence at the time Marcuse was writing, with U.S. foreign policy characterised by George Kennan's policy of containment. The break up of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States with the dubious status of the world's only Super Power. Like a Super Hero that has just destroyed the last source of kryptonite, the United States entered into a qualitatively different and much more dangerous phase of militarism with the invasion of Iraq in 0 spring 2003. Executed in the name of disarming a rogue, trigger-happy country of g "WMDs" - weapons of mass destruction - the attack was based on the doctrine of pre-emption. Engineered by Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz and policy advisor Richard Perle, pre-emption is grounded in the belief that the U.S. is justified in taking unilateral military action against any nation that poses a ^ perceived threat to national security. fN U S Marcuse observed that our imagination of peace is limited by our massive, economically-motivated organisation for war. Following his lead, students have LO noted that the "peace dividend" that accrued to the political changes in the Soviet ^ bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s was short-lived. The replacement of deterrence with pre-emption, a doctrine that asks the citizenry to trust a small cadre of policymakers to determine if and when a threat is sufficiently grave to warrant a first strike, is a further consolidation of the power of technical "solutions." A much saner way of working toward a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world, students have suggested, would be to redirect the "defence" budget toward aid programs along the lines of the Marshall Program. The communist threat, then, has been replaced by an even more nebulous Enemy, "terrorism," where there is no longer much distinction between external and internal Enemies. Marcuse (1964, 52) argued that for the powers that be, the real enemy was neither Soviet communism nor Western capitalism, but the possibility of real liberation. Now, the insanity of making "rational" calculations about how many millions of people will be annihilated in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union has given way to a society in which no pretence of democracy remains, in which the line separating citizen and foreign enemy has disappeared. The suppression of individual rights to liberty and privacy is embraced in the name of security, as witnessed by the renewal of the Patriot Act in 2006 and by the illegal wire taps that the Bush administration began conducting in 2002. Ignoring restrictions mandated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Bush repeatedly authorised the National Security Agency to secretly monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of hundreds and perhaps thousands of U.S. citizens, legal immigrants, and foreign tourists without obtaining a warrant. In a stunning lack of understanding of democracy, when the New York Times broke the story of the wire taps on December 16, 2005, Bush responding by attacking the press, claiming the actions of the media in publishing the information were illegal. But regardless of the fact that the story was heavily reported, almost half of adults surveyed in a recent poll stated that they were unfamiliar with the National Security Agency's monitoring program. This ignorance about current events and their constitutional implications is clearly part of the reason why over two-thirds of the public believe Bush is justified in authorising wire taps without first getting a warrant, thus signalling their willingness to concede to the suppression of their own freedom ("Majority of U.S. Adults" 2006). Public acceptance of the administration's actions is also tied to nativistic, anti-immigration sentiments, where not only the taxi cab driver, but the convenience store clerk or the political volunteers are apt to be "aliens."10 Following the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), communication students today are often taught to conceive of language as a means by which reality is socially constructed. Without adequate attention to the material conditions under which reality is fashioned and history is made, this is an essentially conservative approach to the understanding of the generative power of language. Marcuse's observations about language are extensions of his social critique and offer useful correctives to an abstract, idealist approach. He argues that the language of "the defence laboratories and the executive offices, the governments and the machines, the time-keepers and manager, the efficiency experts and the political beauty parlours ... orders and organizes, ... induces people to do, to buy, and to accept" (1964, 86). In an authoritarian setting, language itself is authoritarian, directing our thoughts and limiting our imaginations rather than serving as a means of autonomous expression and the exploration of alternative realities. "In the prevailing modes of speech," Marcuse writes (1964, 85), "the tension between appearance and reality, fact and factor, substance and attribute tend to disappear. The elements of autonomy, discovery, demonstration, and critique recede before designation, assertion, and imitation." One-dimensional language, in other words, extinguishes conceptual, critical thought, which depends upon sensitivity to nuance, ambiguity, and contradiction. Furthermore, Marcuse argues, authoritarian language is "radically anti-historical" in that it reduces a phenomenon to its present manifestation, and in so doing, it cuts off other possibilities. He writes, "Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights ... Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of 'mediation' which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts" (1964, 98). Similarly, the ability to imagine a future that breaks with the present is dangerously subversive to the established society. The suppression of critical, historical consciousness and the constriction of meaning are carried out through a variety of methods (1964, 87-94): the reduction of words to clichés, Or-wellian inversions of meaning (rigged elections called "free," despotic governments called "democratic"), the unification of contradictory terms (clean bomb, luxury fall-out shelter), the hypnotic coupling of specific adjectives and nouns (unwanted fat, strong defence), and hyphenized abridgement (nuclear-powered submarine). It is not difficult for students to locate contemporary examples of language that is intended to channel or restrict understanding. In political discourse, old people and poor people are "special interest groups." Conservative Christian abhorrence of divorce, single-parenthood, and homosexuality translates into "family values." In the nuclear power industry, an explosion is an "energetic disassembly," a fire is "rapid oxidation," and a reactor accident is an "event." When the State Department deals with human rights in other countries, killing is "unlawful or arbitrary deprivation of life." The CIA doesn't assassinate people, it "neutralizes" them. However, year in and year out, the Pentagon is the chief offender, with such terms as "peacekeeper missiles," "collateral damage," and "pre-emptive strikes." In the 1970s, the neutron bomb was defined as "an efficient nuclear weapon that eliminates an enemy with a minimum degree of damage to friendly territory." During Q the Persian Gulf War, "weapons systems" (jet fighters) "took out" "hard" and "soft targets" - vaporized buildings and human beings. Under Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, "body bags" became "transfer tubes," and the torture at Abu Ghraib "the excesses of human nature that humanity suffers."11 Students anticipate landing a well-paying job after graduation, but fear that the price will be too high to bear - limited time to live their lives in satisfying, self-Q fulfilling way, and relentless pressure to fit into a corporate culture at odds with J the critical values they have developed as students. While Marcuse's assessment of one-dimensional society provides them with a challenging vision of the forces that restrict their horizons, he is not altogether pessimistic. In the final section of One-Dimensional Man, "The Chance of the Alternatives," he argues that other historical (^O arrangements are possible, in that they are the result of "determinate choice, seizure fN U S of one among other ways of comprehending, organizing, and transforming reality" (1964, 219). A rationality that involves the free development of human needs and r^ the pacification of existence serves as a criterion for exercising such choices. Having developed into young adults "who comprehend the given necessity as insufferable pain, and as unnecessary" (1964, 222), students of Marcuse are prepared to pursue real human freedom, to imagine a world in which the Pentagon, rather than schools, is forced to hold bake sales. Notes: 1. That year, students and workers around the globe - in Mexico City, Czechoslovakia, Paris, Berlin - clashed with police in response to authoritarian power structures and their militaristic policies. In the U.S., Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago were met with violence, and the anti-war movement gained tremendous momentum when the Johnson administration launched the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. 2. Harold Marcuse is a professor of Modern German History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 3. These figures include the costs of room and board. The corresponding figures at private universities are $10,000 in 1986-87 and $26,500 in 2004-05 (National Center for Education Statistics n.d.). 4. In 1970-71, 10,000 B.A. degrees were awarded in communication and journalism. By 2003-04, the figure had risen to 71,000. As a point of comparison, math majors declined from 24,000 to 13,000 over the same period of time (National Center for Education Statistics n.d.). 5. This figure is based on a word search through ProQuest Historical Newspapers' database. 6. I will use the pronoun "he" in a gender-neutral sense throughout this paper when the antecedent is "one-dimensional man." 7. Regarding the disappearance of class distinctions, the New York Times recently ran a seven-part series called "Class Matters," which puts the lie to upward mobility and classlessness in U.S. society. The following articles, together with some side bars and commentary, make up the series: Janny Scott and David Leonhardt, "Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide," May 15, 2005, sec. 1, p. 1; Janny Scott, "Life at the Top in America Isn't Just Better, It's Longer," May 16, 2005, sec. A, p. 1; Tamar Lewin, "A Marriage of Unequals," May 19, 2005, sec. A, p. 1; Laurie Goodstein and David D. Kirkpatrick, "On a Christian Mission to the Top," May 22, 2005, sec. 1, p. 1; David Leonhardt, "The College Dropout Boom," May 24, 2005, sec. A, p. 1; Anthony DePalma, "15 Years on the Bottom Rung," May 26, 2005, sec. A, p. 1; and Jennifer Steinhauer, "When the Joneses Wear Jeans," May 29, 2005, sec. 1, p. 1. Regarding the merging interests of labour and management, the latter has been stunningly successful in convincing the American work force that unions are no longer in their best interest. A 2005 Harris Poll found that even though the public credits unions with improving workers' wages and working conditions, about two-thirds of all adults judge labour unions negatively (Negative Attitudes 2005). 8. The automobile and airline bail-outs pale in comparison to the costs of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. As of the end of 1999, fraud, mismanagement, and poor policies had cost taxpayers $124 billion, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (Curry and Shibut 2000, 33). While the S&L crisis bears mentioning in class, the transportation industry is a more concrete and interesting example for students. 9. The top contractor, Lockheed Martin, received $25 billion of federal money in 2005, a figure that exceeds the gross domestic product of 103 nations. The other leading recipients are Boeing, Northrop, Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. 10. Recent manifestations of this attitude include Senator Joseph Biden's remark that "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent," and Senator George Allen's racial slur at a campaign rally. Referring to S. R. Sidarth, a Virginia-born 20-year-old of Indian heritage and volunteer for the opposition, Allen stated, "Let's give a welcome to Macada here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia" (Leibovich 2006). Apart from the implication that Sidarth is not American, the term "macada" refers to a genus of monkeys. 11. Some of these examples are drawn from the annual Doublespeak Award of the National Council ofTeachers of English. See "NCTE Doublespeak Award" at www.ncte.org/about/awards/ council/jrnl/106868.htm?source=gs for a list of recipients. References: Abel, Lionel. 1968. Seven Heroes of the New Left. New York Times, May 5, Sunday Magazine section, 30-31, 128-33, 135. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Bennett, Tony. 1992. Putting Policy into Cultural Studies. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, 23-37. New York: Routledge. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Budd, Mike, Robert M. Entman, and Clay Steinman. 1990. The Affirmative Character of U.S. Cultural Studies. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7, 169-84. Curry, Timothy and Lynn Shibut. 2000. The Cost of the Savings and Loan Crisis: Truth and Consequences. FDIC Banking Review 13, 2, 26-35. Eisenhower, Dwight D. 1961. Military-Industrial Complex Speech. Eisenhower Papers, Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Hacker, Andrew. 1968. Philosophy of the New Left. New York Times, March 10, Book Review section, 1, 33-35, 37. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Hall, Stuart. 1992. Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler (eds.), Cultural Studies, 277-94. New York: Routledge. Hardt, Hanno.1996. British Cultural Studies and the Return of the "Critical" in American Mass Communications Research: Accommodation or Radical Change? In D. Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 102-111. London: Routledge. Keen, Sam and John Raser. 1971. A Conversation with Herbert Marcuse. Psychology Today, February, 35-40, 60-66. Kellner, Douglas. 1984. Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kurlansky, Mark. 2004. 1968: The Year that Rocked the World. New York: Ballantine. Leibovich, Mark. 2006. Voters Hearing Countless Ways of Saying "Sorry." New York Times, A1, 13. Majority of U.S. Adults Feel President is Justified in Authorizing Wiretaps Without Court Approval to Monitor Suspected Terrorists. 2006. Harris Poll #18, February 23. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon. £ Miller, Judith. 1979. Congress Approves a Compromise Plan on Aid to Chrysler. New York Times, December 21, A1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. ^ National Center for Education Statistics. n.d. U.S. Department of Education. www.nces.ed.gov Negative Attitudes to Labor Unions Show Little Change in Past Decade, According to New «Harris Poll. 2005. Harris Poll #68, August 31.< www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index. asp?PID=598> Roach, Stephen S. 1998. Is Information Technology Creating a Productivity Boom? Issues in Science J and Technology, Summer. Taxpayers for Common Sense. 2002. Airlines. June 7. «United States House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform - Minority Staff Special Investigations Division. 2006. Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration. Prepared for Rep. Henry A. Waxman, June. HUGH DALZIEL DUNCAN'S ADVOCACY FOR A THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION ed mcluskie Abstract During the 1960s in the United States, Hugh Duncan produced several accounts of a forgotten theory of communication, accounts in turn forgotten in the theory's country of origin. There, American communication studies well before the twentieth century drew to a close knew of its label, "symbolic interactionism," but its perspective and sensibility were largely forgotten, at least twice during the century. Duncan's thesis of communication and social order was not generally recognised for its sustained effort to bring the study of authority, hierarchy, and power into the centre of communicative interaction. A way to develop a communication theory of society, Duncan's work became a critique of communication research in the wake of the forgotten tradition he attempted to resurrect. The field had conceptually forsaken the idea of communication to disconnected concepts, for which Duncan equally faulted seminal European scholars who, nevertheless, offered the best explanations for the ordering of society until the arrival of symbolic interactionism and its cousin, philosophical pragmatism. This essay highlights Duncan's communication theory as a theory of society, and proposes a critical appropriation of this alternative in the history of ideas, one that warns of assumptions risked whenever communication is theorised without and with attention to power. Ed McLuskie is Professor at the Department of Communication, Boise State University; e-mail: emclusk@bigfoot.com. rN ■ rN si ro KD o o rN ro £ £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C K fN u S During the late 1960s, in the United States, what often passed for textbooks on communication theory were atheoretical compilations of topics rather than sustained articulations of the idea, communication. For the most part, "communication" was treated as a vehicle with attention to pathways and their contents, carriers of "messages" sent and deposited without regard for their symbolic ties to interactive experience. Yet in the academy, nothing circulated that approached a sustained case for a communication theory. Instead, "communication" had its territories set as strategic and tactical interplays of professions and abstracted processes, where message-bullets, if softened at all during the parallel rise of influence-industries (Schiller 1973), were hardening categorical divides between interaction and meaning: Nearly everywhere, Wilbur Schramm's Process and Effects of Mass Communication (1954) enjoyed a two-decade lifespan introducing new graduate and undergraduate students to a topic set of obsessions with "effects" of "messages" through distribution systems, even to the point of making people part of the strategic stream (Katz and Lazarsfeld). Nothing had really changed, it turns out, since the days of psychological warfare (Simpson 1994), when WWII "senders" were out to manipulate "receivers," however circuitous the route(s), however acceptable the practice then or now. Power was described as influence owing to efficiencies of dissemination and receptiveness, administrative interests concealed behind dispassionate descriptions that knew nothing, it seemed, of the dramas of societal interaction that, in an earlier time in the United States, were rather the point of communication theory when George Herbert Mead's social psychology, John Dewey's philosophical pragmatism, and Kenneth Burke's rhetorical theory attempted to "get inside" the human conditions shaping urban experience amid frontiers turned to farmland. The time when a sociological sensibility was developing a theory of society grounded in communicative interaction radiated from Chicago during the earliest decades of the twentieth century—and then. . . didn't. Hugh Dalziel Duncan noticed. Duncan's Account of Forgotten Communication Theory Duncan knew of a cast of intellectual characters who made differences at least since the early 1900s. He reminded his readers that the English-speaking world had a heyday of theorising that, "by 1925," had created the possibility of "a social theory of communication." A compilation, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Park & Burgess 1969), had become the "standard work used widely by Ameri-Q can sociologists from 1921 to 1940." The Park and Burgess reader was a powerful candidate for a communication theory textbook in Duncan's view. It placed symbolic action at the theorist's centres of attention, by analysing "communication as a constituent factor in society" (Duncan 1969, 193). The text's orientation was summarised by Duncan via a now-famous quotation supplied by Dewey: "Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication. There is more than a verbal 2 tie between the words common community in communication" (1916, 4-5). Like ^ many quotations made famous, it had ceased to make a lasting difference - this time, for communication theory. The sentiment and sensibility was in the air until the 1940s. Duncan informs us, though, that it was virtually a dead sensibility and O research practice after 1940 in the United States: ro The frame of reference in American social theory before Parsons's adoption of an equilibrium model was an action frame, and it was an action based in communicative experience, or what we now call "symbolic action." For reasons which must concern the historian more than the theoretician, the social and cultural contextualism of Dewey and Mead was abandoned by American sociologists from 1940 to 1965.... [T]he belief that symbols constituted social relationships, was rejected (Duncan 1969, 197). Duncan aimed to bring it back to life, through efforts that re-charted the history of ideas as the emergence of theorists of society who, one way or another, would be joined - even across oceans - to the program of Chicago School sociology and pragmatism where "symbolic interactionism" had its coalescence. During a seven-year period between 1962 and 1967, he produced a series of essays (Duncan 1967a, 1967b, 1967c) and books (Duncan 1962, 1964, 1965, 1968, 1969) that spoke of sociologists as communication theorists whose work had been forgotten. Throughout these years, Duncan articulated threads of "symbolic analysis" as the relation of "form to social content," of the structures of society known and cultivated through symbolic interaction. The symbolic experience of structure and authority in society included for Duncan even the aesthetic, in general (often via Dewey 1958), in particular, a range from music (Zuckerkandl 1956) to film (Kracauer 1947). "Symbolic interaction" in Duncan's hands aimed to bring story and medium into the "history of a nation producing it," to speak of the symbol always in the same breath as power. Thus, for example, Kenneth Burke's best-known Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives (Burke 1945, 1950) are juxtaposed to his lesser-known Attitudes toward History (Burke 1959), just as George Herbert Mead's Mind, Self and Society (Mead 1968) and The Philosophy of the Act (Mead 1938) were seen as the culmination of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Mead 1936). "My debt to Kenneth Burke is a heavy one," Duncan wrote (1969, vii), especially because "Burke stresses that social interaction is not a process, but a dramatic expression, an enactment of roles by individuals who seek to identify with each other in their search to create social order" (Duncan 1962, 5). The theme of social order was Duncan's contribution to a symbolic interactionist principle that Mead had helped clarify: "In the uniqueness of the present are born the past and futures of all history" (Duncan 1969, 213). Because we had at our disposal a theory that "placed the act squarely in time," a communication theory of society was positioned to explain the social as "both temporal and spatial," but emphasising finally in the history of social thought itself "the temporal quality of the act" that made any social self possible. "Sociality," Duncan would always insist, borrowing the term from a European (Simmel 1968) this time, "emerges in the present," not "simply a moment of time cut off from passage, but a moment of becoming in which temporally real events occur." Correcting Simmel, as Duncan frequently did, he faults "Simmel's forms of sociation" for their derivative status, as though sociality itself were "determined" by "social forces that are "like atoms'" (1962, 2). History and self both are events in Duncan's inherited theory of communication, "emergent" inside, instead of derivatives of, abstracted "processes of change, continuance, or disappearance" (1969, 213). Thanks to Burke, sociality can now be explained as a "form of symbolic experience ... a dramatistic form which is determined by the resources of language (Duncan 1969, 259-260). The revision was typical of Duncan's work, and it was applied to virtually every European theorist of society who contributed to the role of symbols in society-- from Simmel to Dilthey, Weber to Marx, Mannheim to Freud. Duncan saw European social theory to be more concerned "with the social function of symbols" while sharing "a singular lack of congruence between structure and function in their models and images of society." European theory "never makes clear just how the structure of 'existential' thought functions in communication. The Freudian libido, like the actor in Parsons' system, cathects, but does not communicate" (Duncan 1962, 2). Yet Duncan is attracted to these European sociologists for their attention to "authoritarian order" and the interest in themes of equality that animate such theoretical attention. Nevertheless, he considers them blinded by notions that elites keep "their people under control through fear of force, or by the kinds of mystifications common to religious belief." Symbols and power interact, but only within a framework where "order functions through a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors." In Duncan's view, Burke offered a better analysis, where even "equality is a form of authority, comparable in power to social order determined by elitist conceptions of superiority and inferiority." We need to redirect European analyses of authoritarian order in order to make even authoritarianism a feature of socia-tion itself. Only then, Duncan writes, can we "know what kinds of social bonds sustain relationships among equals," and face the idea, which "I have pointed out in my previous writings, [that] some moments of equality are necessary to social order, even in authoritarian states (Duncan 1969, 284-285). Lest this be regarded as a reflection of American romanticism, Duncan cautions against the image of social actors as harmonious actors. He argues that in complex societies we move from old to new, and finally replace the old with the new. We do the first through such symbolic processes is as "desanctification" and victimage; the second we do through metaphor (and all kinds of bridging devices) by which we pass from one set of meanings to another; and finally, we sanctify symbols we believe are necessary to uphold community order. But we do this under y conditions where many institutions are in open conflict. Symbols are, for modern man, both positive and negative, and the "content of situation" is characterized by recurring argument, disputation, joking, ridicule, cursing, blessing, obscenity, blasphemy, disagreement, competition, rivalry, conflict, and war. At best, in our society, agreement is a resolution, and a precarious one at that, of deeply conceded difference, hostility, and hate (Duncan 1969, 231-232). Still, optimism survives this rebuff of romanticism, where conflict and power do not "mould" communication. Communication for Duncan was resistant to all the variations of "correspondence theory" that would have symbolic life conditioned by ids or systems, dominant ideas or natural processes such that "impressions and things correspond to each other" (p. 233). Duncan's revisions of European theories of society and communication must lose all inner and outer mysteries for the theorist, to be replaced by dramatic action as the struggle to define one's and others' shifting roles in society. Thus history and social change are seen always from inside the movements of constantly emergent selves as the drama of symbolic acts passing through time and through roles, the roles of the inferior, the superior, the equal. Duncan resituates 0 C power in that stream of human experience and drama. He thereby outlines his preference for the American "Chicago School" of sociology, just as he had, during his fO dissertation years, favoured the "Chicago School of Architecture" and the reshap- ^ ing of the Chicago literary world centring on the University of Chicago. For him, "Between 1895 and 1910, the University of Chicago was a creative literary environment" where "the relationship of the campus to creative artistic life in America was probed constantly" (1964, 119). In a revision of his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago (1953), in an essay titled "Struggles for Control of the Chicago Image," Duncan already was looking to his alma mater as the producer of what "William James called a 'Chicago School' of philosophy, and the social thought of Dewey who came to the University in 1894 (Duncan 1964, 69). As an introduction to Duncan's republished story of Chicago architecture (1965) saw Duncan's orientation, a city was "inventing architecture for democratic man"; cities were "stages on which the drama of democracy was lived out," and "the building was an act whose function was to be a scene, a stage, for other actors to use" (Greer 1989, xv). By the time of Communication and Social Order, Duncan would stress "Scene as the symbolization of time and place, the setting of the act which creates the conditions for social action," where all people have the status of Burke's "Agent," that "name for the kind of actor groups selected to carry out specific social functions," "chosen [or] barred, [or] not eligible to enact certain roles (for whatever reason), [which] tells us much about a society." Their "Roles" are the kind of actors felt necessary to community survival," "honoured in all kinds of community presentations" (Duncan 1962, 433). Democracy itself was the playing out of these dramas for Duncan Communication as the push for social order was also the competition of roles enacted symbolically. By 1967, Duncan had virtually codified his blend of European social theory through the Chicago theoretical lens, with a decisively literary bent indebted to Burke. All such figures contributed to his "The Symbolic Act: Basic Propositions on the Relationship Between Symbols and Society" (1967c). If the European traditions "taught us how to think about the structures of social experience," he wrote, Dewey, Cooley, Mead and Burke taught us to think about how the structures function in communication within the act" (1969, 202-203). Each theorist had by then been brought into the project to theorise modernity as a symbolic theory of society with concepts inviting entry into psycho-social dramas among inferiors, superiors, and equals. Attempting to recover this forgotten literature, like all such attempts, culminated as a kind of partisanship for irreducible principles of communication. Behind the formalities of scholarship, but always at the edge of scholarship, Duncan's was an effort to recover a forgotten sensibility with which to interpret human communication and the limits systematically demanded of it. The major theoretical knot was to grapple with structures of power and not confound our understanding of them with the power of symbols alone, even though we really have no choice, he argued, but to see all human experience as symbolic experience. To grasp power as the symbolic acts of authority and hierarchy demanded that theorists avoid both romantic celebrations of a symbol's power and a divorce from power to analyse communication. His works constitute a massive annotated bibliography of symbolic theorists, but with a case made throughout to view all social phenomena through the idea of the act with persistent attention to its forms and consequences in action. Via a section titled "The Emergence of the Act in Pragmatic Theory," Duncan poses this question: If we say that symbolic action takes place informs, the forms of interaction in society we call communication, what is the structure of such action? What is the function of the structure, and how does the structure function to create and sustain social integration? In the present state of [scholarship] is it possible to develop a theory of symbolic action? Has enough been said on the social nature of symbols, and the social structure of symbolic action, to warrant confidence in the development of a sociological theory of symbolic action? (Duncan 1969, 203). His short answer would probably be "yes," so long as we sustain the link between communication and power and be clear about it. Duncan's Critique of Communication Studies Now forty years after Duncan's contributions, his own work joins the ranks of the forgotten theorists he once complained about. No doubt due some revision as well, thanks to efforts since the 1960s by many to uncover symbolic interactionist conceptualisations for theories of communication and of society, it is worth pausing a moment to recall the situation of Duncan's introduction to the American scene of symbolic interaction during the 1960s. The reduction of meaning to message had, in Duncan's eyes, overtaken symbolic interactionism since the 1940s. Symbolic interactionism was now an "alternative" perspective on communication in need of resuscitation. While we may say in 2006 that symbolic interactionism did enjoy something of a revival in U.S. communication inquiry, thanks especially to its connections to philosophical pragmatism (cf. Dickstein 1998; Joas 1993), its status for living generations remains an "alternative" against the background of reductive moves that Duncan himself was describing decades earlier. Among them were free-floating celebrations of textuality, reflected in content analysis without form, a reification of symbols that would confuse dynamics of power for our understanding of communication. The analysis of culture as an approach to communication risked reductions into pure ritual, disconnecting past, present and future. Effects of messages missed the lives of those actors whom we all are. "Static" concepts "so prevalent" should be abandoned, because, "if culture is symbolic it has both form and content, and neither can be studied without the Q other. It is in the realm of the social that form and content meet in communication" (Duncan 1969, 139). Symbolic interactionism, according to Duncan, should be an answer to such travesties committed against the concepts "symbol" and "form" by any sort of reductionism. Many had been committed in communication studies during his lifetime. Elsewhere, too, communication had been reduced to, as Duncan put it, "message tracks," a reduction to "some power 'beyond' ... which 0 is then used to explain." In the context of an analysis of Max Weber's works on J art, Duncan points to Weber as one of the few major social theorists who, unlike communication theorists even within the dramaturgical tradition of Burke and others, refused to "reduce art to a message track through which sex, magic, ceremony, politics, economics, or religion 'flows,' 'manifests itself,' 'realizes itself,' <šf and so forth (Duncan 1969, 89)." Europeans were enlisted to help stem the reduc- m U S i tive thinking wherever Duncan could find aid. Duncan was complaining about a variety of reductions that took the heart out of interaction in the name of processes LO and disembodied meanings. Thus he advocated for a "sociological model of com- ^ municative action," understood "as a symbolic act" defined through structures "of dramatic action" (1962, 433). Ultimately, though, Duncan pressed against the loss of the sensibility that a symbolic act was dramatic action shaping society in the present through structures intersecting with the past. His review of major social theorists in Symbols and Social Theory includes his several "plays" on another of his book titles, Communication and Social Order. In the chapter on Weber we find the subtitle "Convention and Social Order," to be followed in a chapter on Tönnies that begins with the subtitle, "Custom and Social Order" (p. 49). A subsequent chapter, though, warns against "The Reduction of Aesthetics to Ritual" (p. 80) in the attempt to bring cultural analysis to the study of symbolic action as the creation of order in society. Duncan's diagnosis was, then, theoretical fresh air during the 1960s when, five years after Communication and Social Order, a compilation of essays emerged as a new offering for students of communication theory against the fare supplied by "the dominant paradigm" of effects research. Human Communication Theory: Original Essays (1967) aimed to redirect the theoretical landscape with alternatives mindful of that pre-WWII history now relegated to pre-history. From the philosopher John Searle (1967) to the cultural anthropologist Dell Hymes (1967), Duncan was the sole author accorded two pieces in a volume much less than half the size of usual textbook predecessors: "The Search for a Social Theory of Communication in American Sociology" (1967a) and an annotated bibliography (1967b) for those whose memories or research training began after the 1940s. Dance's compilation appeared about the time Duncan had recalled the loss of symbolic action theory that he urged theorists of communication to remember. Now 40 years later, the Dance reader comes off the shelf as a roster of forgotten theorising as well, with perhaps only one of its authors (Gerbner 1967) recognisable to the youngest among a communication professoriate whose own mentors never heard of it. With that loss of memory, in the context of a century that had seen pragmatism become vulgar pragmatism (Kaplan), professors and scholars no longer profess or include communication as a theory of social action informed by power and its drama in human experience. From forgotten annual reviews of the literature to textbooks with sometimes less than a theory chapter, we face unarticulated decisions to wrap up the range of conceptual practices and possibilities. Perhaps crossroad works like Dance's, and Park's & Burgess's before that, create threads, if only thin threads, from one academic generation to the next as industry and their symbiotic relationships with Ph.D. programs heavily invest in administrative, corporate research. Even as they may have attempted to maintain that critical distance vital to owning the means of inquiry (Schiller 1989; Smythe 1981), the "power academy" re-remembers through its own lenses, forsaking independently generated theories of communication for literally rewarding reproductions of prevailing norms and practices. There, "critique" within acceptable limits engraves the power of symbols and limitations on their power. Hugh Duncan's work was a consistent reprise of that fact as it professed a theory of communication that would take symbolic interactionism into a recurring articulation of power in society. It remains, of course, purely an agenda item to associate the range from philosophical pragmatism to symbolic interactionism with a communication theory capable of addressing issues of power in society. Duncan's word is not the last word, of course, and it is a controversial set of claims, to say the least. The significance of the idea of "communication" did not for the pragmatists and original symbolic interactionists depend on a discipline or a field of study, itself a refreshing situation. The general orientation was an effort to account for the ways in which society re-creates itself within the confines of, or with the burdens of, or, as Duncan would have it, through the making of history. His reviews of symbolic interactionism managed to situate the question of symbols within a framework of the genetic production and persistent reproduction of order as the contest of power among hierarchically connected individuals and groups, including those he considered enjoying equality with one another. Why that effort to bring power to acts of communication should have been forgotten as a symbolic interactionist's desideratum is itself an interesting matter for the intellectual historian of communication studies. That may help explain Duncan's status today as a forgotten or, at best, minor theorist of communication in the American symbolic interactionist tradition. Critically Appropriating Duncan's Critique Today While we should revisit Duncan's work to reincorporate a discussion of power, a critical appropriation is worth pursuing. Duncan himself would approve, of course, insofar as he did the same. Today, the project to understand communication in relation to power is, actually, well underway, with the aid of some of Duncan's favourite sources, but in Europe more so than in America. Where Duncan discovered eyes blind to "form" emergent in the symbolic act, others might well see Duncan retreating from power on the score of sheer expressibility. For Duncan insisted that "our knowledge of the systems of expressions" is limited to those expressions (1962, 4). He distrusted reductions to non-communicative realms "so familiar in the work of Freud, Marx, Frazer, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Pareto, ^ and Durkheim" (Duncan 1962, 90). He closed the door on the possibility that symbolic practices can be levelled or systematically suppressed by processes beyond our ken, beyond our ability to symbolise what's happening or has happened. In this, Duncan joins a range of theoretical perspectives adhering to the principle that we can tell all that we know, including, ironically, the logical positivist. In the end, Duncan, too, remains the optimist in a forgotten strain of American communica-Q tion theory. But he is a wiser optimist than most: Power must never be confused with symbolic content. Symbolic form - its structuring of relations - is Duncan's key. Yet the forms of power appear to require more than this to become available to the symbol by any account. Moreover, Duncan's communication theory restricts ideas of democracy to the American experience. This is to be expected, since power is truncated to the culture of its articulation. Other theorists of democracy who are, arguably especially to S American ears, also theorists of communication and democracy - Marx and even ^ Lenin (Lenin) - find their status as "enemies of democracy," through faint praise: "Pareto, like Marx, Engels, and Lenin, have more to tell us about the ills of democracy than do our friends (Duncan 1969, 113). The point resonates to contemporary ears in ways Duncan no doubt had anticipated, but, as is the life of the dramatic CO A symbol, it redefines in history. Then and now, Duncan typified one strain of the American symbolic interactionist and pragmatist traditions in spite of efforts at times to the contrary: a horizon limited by the culture of reproducing symbolic practices already underway, contests notwithstanding. It is the progressivists' blind spot on the matter of power. To invite reading all perspectives, but to be suspicious of the notion that symbolic life can at the same time be systematically constrained life outside our symbolic view underplays, among other ineffables, sheer economic and political power exercised, so to speak, outside the purview of - or, as Habermas (1970) put it when introducing the theory of symbolic action for the first time in English, "over the heads of" practices of participation and other forms of experience. One wonders what Duncan would have made of efforts to link American pragmatism and symbolic interaction from the direction of German theories of society, where one major work seems already to have taken a cue from Duncan without mentioning him. There, social structure is not only symbolic expression and action, but is often beyond symbolic veils. There, "system complexity ... outflanks traditional forms of life, it attacks the communicative infrastructure," requiring "a reflexive sociology" that, because it is required, shows that there is much we do not and cannot see, that, in order to bring into symbolic view the hiddenness of power in history and in daily symbolic actions, meaning without consequence to power is a real experience, too (Habermas 1987, 375). The role of symbols in social order still required a larger circle of theoretical friends than Duncan seemed willing to allow, and it required a revision of roles inside, so to speak, the interactionists' conceptual universe. As we remember Duncan's call to bring power to the theory of communication, this revisiting no doubt will insist that all action is not communicative action. The argument to embrace a symbolic interactionist framework is mediated today from outside and within American culture. Themes of power stand alongside reductions of all societal dramas to literary forms (see Bernstein 1990, for this debate). Still, the argument can benefit from remembering Duncan's criticisms against as well as affirmative arguments for the communicative act as a constituent of hierarchy. Above all, Duncan taught us to use American symbolic interactionist theory and philosophical pragmatism to treat power as a central focus of communication theory. Such an effort, he always maintained, was the communication theorist's claim to the analysis of democracy from an interaction point of view. The argument on behalf of a view of democracy is not only a forgotten dimension of Duncan's communication theory; that argument reminds us of the vast disparity between this communication theory and the practice of democracy in Duncan's preferred country of origin. As he complained about the loss of an interactive dimension to the study of communication, he no doubt today would extend the complaint to the erosion of democratic participation. These are the starting points for communication theory. On the score of participation, symbolic interactionism may discover that Marxist analysis has been "friendly" all along to an understanding of symbolic action in relation to social order. The last line of Duncan's Communication and Social Order expresses what Duncan attempted to unpack in several volumes: "We must return the study of man in society to a study of communication, for how we communicate determines how we relate as human beings" (Duncan 1962, 438). In 2006, such a return will not be sufficient given developments in what remains a set of marginalised theories of communica- tion which attempts to connect democracy to communication and communication to power. Habermas brought Mead and Dewey into the German rationalist and Marxist traditions to include, rather than to exclude (Habermas 1991, 2002); Hans Joas was pivotal for the recognition in German sociology of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey as philosophers providing conceptual correctives to some of the excesses that even Duncan had mentioned in his own work, while stressing themes of authority, hierarchy, and democracy (Joas 1997, 2000); Karl-Otto Apel was significant for shifting the debates over forms of reason and the conduct of metascience, through analyses of Piece's symbolic analyses tied to human interaction (Apel 1975). All attempt to remind us that the history and evolution of societies is part of the story of form and symbol, a story that systematically for all of us lies outside the purview of experience even as experience is inevitably interpreted symbolically in the course of one's biography. These developments suggest again that, to deal with power systematically and more historically, another specific relation besides the relation of symbol to form must be incorporated into interactionist theories of communication: The relation of symbol to the unoverviewability of history is a real experience in the lifeworld, the wider society, and in academic efforts, to supply meaning. To the extent that part of our experience is due to the hiddenness of history, we find that all symbolising activity is not, in Dewey's word, "consummated" (McLuskie 2001). Rather than reject Freud or Marx for their assertions that the human experience includes states or acts of ignorance - expressed but never fully enough as reflections on compulsion beyond the symboliser's control and understanding - theirs is a rich explanation for Dewey's and Duncan's valuable insight that experience yearns and tends toward consummation. Duncan was quite correct to assert that in the experience of consummation, in the ordering of communication, authority is exercised and maintained. The question is always on behalf of whom. The tougher question is who get to become aware. The even tougher question is whether awareness has, in a favourite word of the pragmatist, "consequence." Symbolic Interactionism and Democracy: An Unsettled Legacy Duncan declared his work to have worked "in favor of democracy as the best form of hierarchy, because it minimised the power of priestly mystification which so often arises when authority is grounded in some kind of supernatural power" (Duncan 1962, 437). In 2006, a century after an inaugural movement to be known as "symbolic interactionism" offered a theory of society, friendly critics might well argue that a symbolic perspective on communication and society has, with Duncan and his American predecessors, imprisoned the notion of hierarchy within the symbolic act. That is itself a reduction, a powerful strain in the history of social theory. As Duncan spent much of his time criticising reductionism for the automatic fAitiirAC it'Cirmnn fA mfurA mimi-n mtiirA i-n -niturA'c 1 rvi n (YA ir»n in Hi A-nfc frATY» U 0 C features assigned to nature, human nature in nature's image, and in flights from nature into mysterious idealisms that Duncan saw leading to fascist utopian ideals, a reductive move is difficult to shake off here. Theorists of communication may return to Duncan's work for one of the few examples of suspicion within symbolic ß interactionism on the question of power and how to approach the notions of form and order as symbolic acts. The idea that communicative interaction is the expression of democracy - both 00 ro factually and counterfactually - is today's pragmatist legacy. Duncan is a significant contributor, thorough in his presentation of the intellectual-practical story of an C^ experiment yet really to be run by any country on the planet. That fact is both within ^ and outside the purview of symbolic action, even as political movements demand - symbolically - otherwise. A key test for the pragmatic theory of communication is realising the consequences of actions, plans that, even if unrealised, spur the interaction called "communication." Yet the pragmatists warned that habit is the face of failures to see and to attempt to see, that blind action is a dimension of the human condition. There, the blind spot requires both the light of Duncan's work and the critique of pragmatism that brought the communication theory of society to a critical theory of society, by demanding a central role for communication in theories ranging from Marx to Dewey. Its defining notions are participation and action as interaction. The challenge is to take Duncan and Burke's human drama more decisively into theories of democracy. The price may well be treating, as Duncan did, equality as hierarchy. To give up that required notion inherent in an American progressivism that flourished in the Midwestern United States where Duncan studied and did his work would be a major shift. To move symbolic interaction beyond progressive politics may be the key problem, and requires taking lessons from, for example, Freud's idea that the struggle to bring into view that which was systematically hidden is primary (see the discussion of Freud in McCarthy 1978). Even Burke, Duncan said but let drop, held that "a communicative context . . . is not wholly verbal," allowing for a non-communicative set of actions or processes that "have a nature of their own" (Duncan 1962, 109). One of his students tried to remind sociologists and communication scholars of Duncan's work, especially because his communication theory of society "deals directly with the influence of power on symbolic interaction" (Malhotra 1979). That was his contribution and may be seen as his albatross, now the risk of a nevertheless sympathetic debate within a symbolic theory of society cast as a critical theory of society. Whether the European analysis incorporating symbolic interactionism and pragmatism survives in both Europe and America; whether the next wave of academic textbooks features them and the debates that accompany such attempts at cross-fertilisation; and whether anyone beyond the academy takes an interest; these, too, are conditions of the relation between acts of communication to hierarchy, authority, and power. References: Apel, Karl-Otto. 1975. From Kant to Pierce: The Semiotic Transformation of Transcendental Logic. In Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, 1970, 90-104. Dordrecht: Reidel. Bernstein, Richard J. 1990. Rorty's Liberal Utopia. Social Research 57, 1, 31-70. Burke, Kenneth. 1945. A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall. Burke, Kenneth. 1950. A Rhetoric of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall. Burke, Kenneth. 1959. Attitudes toward History. Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications. Dance, Frank E.X., ed. 1967. Human Communication Theory: Original Essays. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan. Dewey, John. 1958. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn. Dickstein, Morris. 1998. The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1953. Language and Literature in Society; a Sociological Essay on Theory and Method in the Interpretation of Linguistic Symbols, with a Bibliographical Guide to the Sociology of Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1962. Communication and Social Order. New York: Bedminster Press. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1964. The Rise of Chicago as a Literary Center from 1885 to 1920: A Sociological Essay in American Culture. Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1965. Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West During the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1967a. The Search for a Social Theory of Communication and American Sociology. In Frank E.X. Dance (ed.), Human Communication Theory: Original Essays, 236-263. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1967b. Short Bibliography of Works on Symbolic Analysis That Relate Form to Social Content. In Frank E.X. Dance (ed.), Human Communication Theory: Original Essays, 310-332. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1967c. The Symbolic Act: Basic Propositions on the Relationship between Symbols and Society - a Theory That How We Communicate Determines How We Relate as Human Beings. In L. Thayer (ed.), Communication: Theory and Research, 194-227. Springfield, IL: Thomas. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1968. Symbols in Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. 1969. Symbols and Social Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Gerbner, George. 1967. Mass Media and Human Communication Theory. In Frank E. X. Dance (ed.), Human Communication Theory: Original Essays, 40-60. New York: Holds, Rinehart and Winston. Greer, Scott A. 1989. Introduction to the Transaction Edition. In Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West During the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan, xiii-xix. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction. Habermas, Jürgen. 1970. Toward a Rational Society. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. T. McCarthy, Trans. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. A Reply. In Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas's the Theory of Communicative Action, 214-264. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2002. Reflections on Pragmatism. In M. Aboulafia, M. Bookman and C. Kemp (eds.), Habermas and Pragmatism, 225-229. London: Routledge. Hymes, Dell. 1967. The Anthropology of Communication. In Human Communication Theory: Original Essays, 1-39. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Joas, Hans. 1993. Mead's Position in Intellectual History and His Early Philosophical Writings. In Pragmatism and Social Theory, 2-86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joas, Hans. 1997. G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of His Thought. R. Meyer, Trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Joas, Hans. 2000. Philosophie der Demokratie: Beiträge zum Werk von John Dewey. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kaplan, Abraham. 1969. The Life of Dialogue. In Communication: A Discussion at the Nobel Conference, 87-108. Amsterdam: North Holland. Katz, Elihu and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. 1955. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Glencoe, NY: Free Press. U (R Kracauer, Siegfried. 1947. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1972. Lenin About the Press. A. N. Burmistenko and M. Saifulin, Trans. Prague: International Organisation of Journalists. ^ Malhotra, Valerie. 1979, April. Critical Dimensions in Symbolic Interaction Theory: Mead, Duncan, Burke, Habermas and Klapp. Paper presented at the Midwest Sociological Society. O McCarthy, Thomas. 1978. The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas. Cambridge: MIT Press. McLuskie, Ed 2001. Communication as Consummation: Revisiting the Aesthetic Theory of John Dewey. Paper presented at the International Communication Association, Washington, D.C. _| Mead, George Herbert. 1936. Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, George Herbert. 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mead, George Herbert. 1968. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Robert Ezra, and Ernest W. Burgess. 1969. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schiller, Herbert I. 1973. The Mind Managers. Boston: Beacon Press. Schiller, Herbert I. 1989. Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford University Press. Schramm, Wilbur. 1954. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Searle, John R. 1967. Human Communication Theory and the Philosophy of Language: Some Remarks. In Human Communication Theory: Original Essays. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Simmel, Georg. 1968. On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture. K Peter Etzkorn, Trans. In The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays, 27-46. New York. Simpson, Christopher. 1994. The Legacy of Psychological Warfare. In Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960, 107-117. New York: Oxford University Press. Smythe, Dallas W. 1981. Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Zuckerkandl, Victor. 1956. Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. W. R. Trask, Trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press. CALL FOR PAPERS Communication and Peace 2007 EURICOM Colloquium on Communication and Culture In cooperation with World Association for Christian Communication Piran (Slovenia), September 13-15, 2007 U S i 0 £ * 1 * IR 0 C « fN Communication and Peace is the topic of the September 2007 EURICOM colloquium in Piran, Slovenia. In a world divided by ideological, ethnic, and economic conflicts, communication functions as a vital means of exchanging ideas, addressing frictions, and settling hostilities. The colloquium invites participants to consider forms and functions of communication in the process of negotiating peace, to question the role of media in the (re)production of conflicts and their resolutions, and to reflect on the importance of dialogue in making sense of disharmony and producing closure. Who are the partners in communication and how do they use language (or imagery) to succeed or fail in their quest for peace and how does the process of communication unfold in local, national, or international arenas of human conflict? The colloquium is dedicated to the memory of Michael Traber, a co-founder of Euricom and Editor of Media Development, who devoted his life to the idea of peace and communication. Suggestions for papers are invited until January 15, 2007; final papers are due by July 15, 2007. Send abstracts or any requests for further information to: Hanno Hardt (hanno.hardt@fdv.uni-lj.si) Slavko Splichal (slavko.splichal@guest.arnes.si) INNIS AND THE NEWS robert e. babe Abstract Long neglected internationally, the media scholarship of Canadian economic historian and political economist Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) has in recent years been taken up, largely without attribution or acknowledgment, by writers focusing on media as a key factor in social/political/cultural evolution, by dependency theorists (media or cultural imperialism writers), and (ironically) by post-modernists/poststructuralists. This article first provides an overview of Innis's two main fields, his staples thesis of Canadian economic development, and media thesis as it concerns world history. This section also relates the media thesis to contemporary media and dependency theories and postmodernist discourses. The second focus of the article is on Innis's critical analysis of press systems. The discussion not only integrates his staples and media theses, but also extrapolates Innis's analysis to the present to show the deep concerns he would express regarding the present-mindedness of contemporary media and culture. Throughout there is an emphasis on Innis's materialist understanding of culture and social relations. Robert E. Babe is Jean Monty/ BCE Chair in Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada; e-mail: rbabe@sympatico.ca. KD LO i cn si ü ro KD o o rN ro £ £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C K m et In Canadian media studies, Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) is no forgotten man. Arguably, he remains the country's most esteemed scholar. Less famous certainly than his compatriot and self-avowed "disciple," Marshall McLuhan, Innis - subject of a new, magisterial biography (Watson 2006) - has remained for forty years a continuing subject in Canada of scholarly analyses, interpretation, and speculation (Heyer 2003, 85-100). Outside Canada, however, Innis is seldom read or acknowledged (Berland 1999, 282), the American media theorist James W. Carey (1934-2006) being the most notable and prolific exception to that rule. One might well ask, therefore, whether the enthusiasms of Canadian media scholars are perhaps unduly biased (a favourite Innisian term), on account of their self-identification with Innis's nationality, or whether Innis's lack of contemporary recognition internationally is perhaps due to the fact that he resided in a country at the margins. (Would John Kenneth Galbraith, like Innis an economist of Scottish ancestry, born in close proximity to Innis, have attained international acclaim had he chosen a teaching position at, say, the University of Toronto instead of Harvard and advised Canadian Prime Ministers rather than American Presidents?). To be considered, too, is the fact that Innis was a political economist, always mindful of asymmetries in the distribution of communicatory and other power - a theme noticeably absent from, and seemingly objectionable to, mainstream American media scholarship (Babe 2006a). Issues like these could be topics for endless speculation, but here I propose instead to turn to Innis's scholarship itself, and ponder whether his contribution deserves contemporary international recognition. In the first main section I provide an overview of Innis's work, and at the conclusion suggest three major areas in which he was an innovator, whose positions were taken up years if not decades later by others, often without acknowledgment. In the second main section I address in greater detail one aspect of Innis's seminal work - his analysis of the press. Overview of Innis's Life and Work Life1 Innis was born in a small agricultural community in southwestern Ontario in 1894. For primary education he attended a one room school. He graduated from £ high school in 1912. At McMaster, then a Baptist university in Toronto, he specialised in history and political economy, and encountered philosophy professor, James Ten Broecke, who used to ask, "Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?" - a question Innis ruminated on for the rest of his life (Innis 1971, xvii). Upon graduating in 1916, he enlisted in the armed services. He was injured at Vimy Ridge in July 1917, and after a time recuperating in England returned home, by his own account, "a psychological casualty." During his convalescence he completed ^ a M.A. thesis, "The Returned Soldier." Innis took up doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. His PhD thesis (1920) on the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway was published in 1923. In 1920 he joined the faculty of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto, where he served as Chair from 1937 until his death in 1952, and as Dean of the Graduate School (1947 to 1952). By all accounts Innis was a select member of the inner circle governing the University (Drummond and Kaplan 1983, 81-107). Innis was appointed to three Royal Commissions and elected president ^ of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Economics Association. He 0 £ C > lectured overseas and received honorary degrees from several universities. Always sceptical of concentrations of power and eager to lash out at abuses of privilege, at LO the end of his life Innis, in a sense, returned to the "margin" (Havelock 1982, 25) ^ to explore themes and issues taking him well beyond the security of his previous work on Canadian economic history, breaking new interdisciplinary ground in media/communication studies.2 Work3 Innis's major post-dissertation scholarship comprised two distinct, but interrelated stages: his staples thesis of Canadian economic development, and his media thesis. Staples Thesis. Running through Innis's writings is the theme that cultures, including thought systems and modes of social organisation, affect and are affected by the material environment. Innis first applied this principle to his history of Canadian economic development where he identified three features as paramount - Canada's trading dependence on other countries; her geography, particularly the inland water systems and the pre-Cambrian shield; and the unique character of her natural resources or "staples." Innis saw technological developments, particularly in the fields of transportation and communication (roads, canals, shipping, railroads, telegraph, postal systems), as interacting with geography and staples to disrupt established patterns of social interaction. According to Innis, the rise to predominance of each new staple (first fish, then fur, followed by lumber, wheat and mining), in combination with technological change, produced a period of crisis. Groups controlling the new staple and the associated technology ascended to power, whereas the influence of the group associated with the old staple and the old technology waned. Innis was ever-mindful of centre-periphery relations, and argued that the export of staples to imperial centres caused a truncated ("biased") development in the colony. Innis's first staples book, The Fur Trade in Canada (1930), revolutionised the writing of Canadian economic history by making cultural factors central to economic development and highlighting disparate power relations in international trade. It was followed by The Cod Fisheries (1940/1954). Although Innis did not complete a book on the timber trade, he did publish several papers centring on forest products, including lumber, pulp and paper, and journalism (Innis 1937; 1946; 1949; 1956, 242-251; 1971, 156-189; 1972, 141-170). According to Innis's historiography, timber supplanted fur as a key staple for export. Like fur "it was adapted ... to the cheap water transportation of the St. Lawrence." It contrasted to fur, however, in terms of weight, bulk and value (Innis 1956, 242). Whereas the manufacture of fur products, such as hats, was undertaken largely in Europe, timber's bulk and weight meant that manufacture "took place close to its source" (Innis 1956, 243). Canada consequently exported square lumber instead of raw timber to the United States, and her trade realigned from Britain to the USA. We will pursue further Innis's analysis of the lumber trade in the next major section. Media Thesis. In the final decade of his life Innis shifted from staples in Canadian economic development to communication media in world history. His media writings are concentrated in two books Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951). Both volumes are comprised mostly of essays or speeches from previous years, and both have enjoyed many reprintings and several editions. In this article I refer to the 1972 and 1971 editions respectively, both containing introductions by Marshall McLuhan. In summary, Innis claimed: "Western civilization has been profoundly influenced by communication and ... marked changes in communication have had important implications," particularly with regard to "the character of knowledge" (Innis 1971, 3, 4). Innis proposed that over time "a monopoly of knowledge [associated with a given medium of communication] is built up to the point that equilibrium is disturbed" (Innis 1971, 3-4), whereupon new media, aligned with other power interests, challenge the vested interests. "Inventions in communication," he proposed, "compel realignments in the monopoly or the oligopoly of knowledge" (Innis 1971, 4). In support of this media thesis Innis presented details from the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle East, and from 18th century England and modern North America. For Innis the physical properties of a medium help explain the nature of the concomitant monopoly of knowledge. In particular, a medium's weight or mass, its durability, its tractability, and its capacity for storing and transmitting messages facilitate either control of society through time or over space, but seldom both (Innis 1971, 33). Media that are intractable, difficult to transport, durable, and possessing limited capacity, he termed time-biased or time-binding as they tend to support time-bound cultures, characterised by Innis as emphasising continuity, ceremonial, communitarian, hierarchical, traditional, religious, and geographically confined. Media that are easy to use and transport, that are not durable, that have abundant capacity, and that are easy to work with, he called space-biased or space-binding; they support space-bound cultures, which are secular, present-minded, individualistic, intent on territorial expansion and administration of vast territories (Innis 1971, 33-64). A medium predominant in a society at any given time, Innis maintained, is by definition controlled by that society's elite. Time-bound societies are controlled by elites who exert control by means of "time;" i.e., they are "custodians" of time, and invoke tradition, sacred texts, natural (or divine) laws, and make appeals to the collectivity as an organic whole. Space-bound societies, by contrast, are controlled by secular elites exercising influence over "space;" these are the "administrators" or the military who frame and enforce secular laws, who engage in and control markets and the price system, who advertise, and who educate for the exigencies Q of ever-changing job markets. Any given medium of communication, Innis believed, favours either control over space or through time, but seldom both. In ancient Egypt, for example, hieroglyphics carved in stone favoured a priesthood ruling time-bound society, whereas papyrus benefited the scribal class and encouraged mathematics and science. Likewise, in the modern period, newspapers - being light, disposable, and published daily - support Q changes in fashion, current affairs, marketing, and administration over a wide area, J and hence empower business leaders and regional/national governments. The arrival of new media, according to Innis, engenders a struggle for ascendancy, not only among groups of people, but among types of knowledge. He viewed as powerful those who inculcate in people's minds one or another concep- U S (^O tion of time, and one or another conception of space - even to the point that these become the common sense of an era. Society's conceptions of time, and of space, Innis believed, form the base upon which the relative significance and meaning of the day's events are constructed. Specifically, Innis proposed at least three markedly different conceptions of time: social or organic (cyclical) time; differentiated or punctuated linear time, and undifferentiated mechanical time. The organic, cyclical conception of time particularly characterises oral cultures. Knowledge in oral society is handed down through poetry, song, story, and myth from generation to generation. Such knowledge is meant to apply to all times. In such societies there is "a time to be born and a time to die; ... a time to plant and a time to reap." Likewise stone inscriptions endure for centuries, and in societies relying on this medium, knowledge changes but slowly. According to Innis, time-bound cultures and time-binding media can support an array of practical knowledge. He wrote: "The discovery of periodicity in the heavens [in Babylon] enormously strengthened the position of religion in its control over time and continuity" (Innis 1971, 99). Innis was particularly enamoured with the oral dialectic as practised in ancient Greece, as transcribed in Plato's dialogues. More tractable (easy to use) forms of writing - parchment and paper, for example - helped modify the cyclical conception of time. These newer media facilitate the inscription of many more messages than the carving of stone, and that in turn leads to a much larger proportion of messages concerning temporal (or fleeting) matters, as opposed to enduring ones. The medium used, in brief, "selects" the time horizon of messages, thereby helping endow a society with its characteristic conception of time. The Romans, who used parchment, posited a unique day (the founding of Rome) as being of extraordinary importance, thereby fostering the belief that time is comprised not just of cycles but also of sequences of single, sometimes extraordinary, moments (Innis 1971, 69). This conception, Innis added, "contribute[d] to the growth of Roman law notably in contracts" (Innis 1971, 69) and differed markedly from mythic or cyclical time as eternal recurrence. As the emphasis on unique events increased and that on recurrences diminished, time came to be conceived as an unstoppable sequence punctuated by distinct moments - what philosopher George Grant has termed "time as history" (Grant 1969). This conception continued for many years, but eventually gave rise to time as undifferentiated sequence. According to Innis, commerce requires that time be understood as a "ceaseless flow of mechanical time" (Innis 1971, 74); the length of contracts, the number of hours worked, the interest accruing, and the rents due are all based on durations of time irrespective of differentiated "moments" that might take place within the specified intervals. Space, too, for Innis is polysemous. For people in time-bound cultures space is where the community lives, where its roots are, and how it maintains its connections with the past, and where its future will unfold. Land is to be cared for as a gift (Hyde 1979) that has been inherited and that will be passed on. In space-bound cultures, however, land is viewed quite differently. There the desire is to conquer new territories, create larger markets and organise land into efficient configurations (factories, assembly lines, territorial divisions of labour, and so on). The "wilderness" is to be tamed and the land's utility extracted. Space, like time, becomes a commodity in space-biased cultures. Innis had grave misgivings with regard to what he perceived to be an uninter- rupted flow since the late nineteenth century of increasingly space-biased media. Whereas he interpreted much of the course of human history as time- and space-binding media oscillating with one another in influence and hence achieving a certain balance, in the modern era, he believed, media have become ever-increasingly space-biased. He termed the " present-mindedness" of our day an "obsession," and exclaimed that "the balance between time and space has been seriously disturbed with disastrous consequences to Western civilization" (Innis 1971, 76).4 Although Innis has been characterised as being a technological or media determinist, this is incorrect. Innis always took pains to use words such as "emphasise" and "implies" when referring to media bias. Innis's Prescience and Legacy. Innis is a founder of communication and history, that is the practice of placing media of communication at the centre of historical analysis. Innis certainly inspired Marshall McLuhan in this regard, and together they gave rise a still burgeoning literature (Angus 1997; Altschull 1990; Beniger 1986; Deibert 1997; Eisenstein 1979; Ong 1982; Crowley and Heyer 2003). Innis founded "media theory" (Heyer 2003, 52), insisting that the means of communication affects society's shared/contested system of meanings. There in fact exists a voluminous literature on the "social construction of reality," "symbolic interactionism," and "the sociology of knowledge," all contending that reality is not objectively given but is a product of the interaction of the knower and the known in the context of social consensus. One of Innis's major contributions to this literature was his claim that the means whereby signs, symbols and messages are diffused and exchanged have a significant bearing on this cultural ecology, and in broadly predictable ways. A second mode of media analysis that can be traced to Innis is dependency theory, or media imperialism. James Carey declared unambiguously that Innis "founded the modern studies that now exist under the banner of media imperialism," adding "but his sense of the complexity of that relationship was considerably more subtle than that of most contemporary scholars" (Carey 1981, 80). Control of media for many present-day political economists is basic to the possession and exercise y of power. Innis again inspired a vast literature (for example, Schiller 1969, 1976; Smythe 1981; Barnet and Müller 1974). Through his construct, "monopoly of knowledge," furthermore, Innis arguably foreshadowed the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model. Third, Innis presaged certain aspects of postmodernism/poststructuralism (Charron 1999; Wernick 1999): he saw space binding media as more thoroughly commodify-ing life, for example, and in the process eroding hitherto enduring meanings and £ distinctions. According to Innis, mechanical means of diffusing information put into question the reliability of that information. He mused: "As modern developments in communication have made for greater realism they have made for greater possibilities of delusion" (Innis 1971, 82), a sentiment worthy of several postmodern writers (Baudrillard 1981, for instance). Poststructuralist Mark Poster, whether inadvertently or not, based his typology of the "modes of information" upon Innis (Babe and Comor 2006). Due to a superfluity of information in what is often now termed the Information Age, moreover, there is a lessening in the value of informa-ß tion,5 a sentiment Innis again shared with many postmodern writers.6 However, whereas present day postmodernists like Jacques Derrida, Jean Bau-QQ drillard and Mark Poster view the devaluation of discourse as liberating because (R 0 it reduces the power of privileged groups hitherto controlling thought, Innis saw this as a tragedy, presaging the end of Western civilization. Innis, with his abiding C^ faith in reason and his quest for truth through oral debate, in these respects was ^ the very antithesis of postmodernism. Moreover, as Jody Berland remarks, unlike postmodernists who emphasise representations and interpretations, Innis contex-tualised these interpretations and representations as they come into play with the various media of transportation and communication and monoplies of knowledge (Berland 1999, 290). She concludes: "Innis reveals the limits and inadequacies of analyzing power in terms of representation" (Berland 1999, 290). Innis and the Press Paper as a Medium of Communication Innis declared that "we can conveniently divide the history of the West into the writing and the printing periods" (Innis 1971, 7). The former comprised the use of such media as clay tablets, papyrus, and paper prior to the onset of printing. The latter, specialised in the use of paper, was likewise differentiated - by changes in the technologies of paper manufacture (wood pulp replacing rags in the second half of the nineteenth century) and advances in various printing technologies (In-nis 1971, 7-8). Paper was first manufactured from textiles by the Chinese beginning about 105 AD (Innis 1971, 124). According to Innis, the Chinese pictograph required "extraordinary skill to serve as a medium of communication for a great diversity of spoken languages" (Innis 1971, 18). This complexity, in turn, "emphasised the importance of a learned class, the limited influence of public opinion, and the persistence of political and religious institutions" (Innis 1971, 18). Compared to oral communication, however, the inherent space bias of writing became evident at an early stage (Innis 1971, 139, 18). According to Innis, Chinese script, understood throughout the empire, "bridged enormous gaps" attributable to marked variations in oral dialects, and hence was an important factor in territorial unification. Innis added, however, that "the emphasis on space concepts in imperial organisation implied a neglect of time concepts and inability to solve dynastic problems" (Innis 1971, 125). According to Innis, the manufacture of paper in the Middle East began in 751 (Innis 1971, 126). In Europe, however, several more centuries lapsed before paper began to replace parchment. Compared to parchment, paper is relatively space-binding and Innis linked its manufacture in Europe, beginning about 1275, with the onset of the commercial revolution (Innis 1971, 128, 136, 52): "Paper facilitated the growth of credit in the use of documents for insurance and bills of exchange; with Arabic numerals it enormously enhanced the efficiency of commerce" (Innis 1971, 128). As the use of paper spread, "monopolies of knowledge" enjoyed by the monasteries succumbed to those of the copyist guilds (Innis 1971, 53). Innis detailed technological steps toward improved quality of paper (Innis 1971, 128-9), adding that "the long apprenticeship and training necessary for paper-makers meant that skilled labour had a monopoly" (Innis 1971, 129). Innis detailed too factors explaining the differing time-space biases of parchment vs. paper: a scribe using parchment could produce only two to four pages a day, and required from ten months to over a year to copy a Bible (Innis 1971, 138). By contrast, paper was much less costly for transmitting thought, and hence facilitated the diffusion (and authorship) of variegated works (Innis 1971, 137, 19). Paper increased the importance of the vernacular, again eroding the Church's monopoly of knowledge which was based not only on parchment (Innis 1971, 50) but also on Latin (Innis 1971, 130). The rise of vernacular literatures in turn, "hastened and was hastened by the growth of nationalism" (Innis 1971, 136). Slowly paper replaced parchment even in the universities, churches and monasteries (Innis 1971, 137). Paper became even more significant as a medium of communication, however, with the invention of the printing press. This took place in Germany where copyists' control was limited (Innis 1971, 23, 53). Presses required substantial capital investment, resulting in significant economies of scale, which in turn escalated demand for manuscripts and the quest for new markets. Again there was an increase in the types of books published, including an "extension to the production of the classics in Greek, the use of more compact type for smaller portable volumes in italic, and the emphasis on the vernacular." Innis concludes: "An enormous increase in production and variety of books and incessant search for markets hastened the rise of the publisher, an emphasis on commerce at the expense of the printer, and a neglect of craftsmanship" (Innis 1971, 23). He added, "By the end of the sixteenth century the flexibility of the alphabet and printing had contributed to the growth of diverse vernacular literatures and had provided a basis for divisive nationalism in Europe" (Innis 1971, 55). The Forestry Staple As noted previously, Innis viewed staples as linking, albeit asymmetrically, imperial centres and colonial margins. Of greatest relevance for this article was his analysis of the forestry staple, which provides the most obvious connection between the staples and media theses. By Innis's account, lumber supplanted fur as a key staple for Canadian export. Paper is of course a major product of timber and in eastern Canada a large number of lumber companies began manufacturing pulp and paper in the 1800s. Due to high fixed investment, paper manufacture was characterised by significant economies of scale, resulting in a concentrated industry with few production centres (Innis 1956, 136-7). Exports of paper to the United States had a large impact on the development of the American newspaper industry. Newspapers in the American commercial centres had developed prior to 1812 in response to the needs of business, the first 0 daily journal in the USA being The Pennsylvania Packet and General Advertiser (1784), nrn'l,, A Itaf fT-n-nio 1 Q71 1 Uo„ U £ joined the following year in New York by the Daily Advertiser (Innis 1971, 158). They ran "a large number of small advertisements," often legal notifications, and enjoyed "Y circulation only in the hundreds. These "broadsheets" endeavoured to conserve paper by reducing font sizes and trimming their physical dimensions (Innis 1971, 158). According to Innis, however, by the 1830s, increases in supplies of wood pulp dramatically reduced the price of newsprint (Innis 1972, 161) which, accompanied by technological advances in printing, gave rise to "a new type of paper," namely the penny presses, focused on mass circulation, on sensational news, and sustained by advertising directed toward "consumers" (Innis 1971, 160). For Innis, supply usually precedes demand, and in this instance, expansion of the pulp and paper industry fostered a growth in news organisations, hastened the development of the lo telegraph to relay the news, spawned growth in advertising, and contributed to a > « O revolution in marketing (Innis 1972, 161). Innis noted that in St. Louis newspapers between 1875 and 1925 reduced space allocated to news from 55.3 to 26.7 per cent, with a concomitant increase in the space devoted to advertising. For Innis news for the "cheap papers" was little more than "a device for advertising the paper as an advertising medium" (Innis 1971, 162). "Freedom of the press," as guaranteed by the US Constitution, Innis observed ironically, narrowed the "marketplace of ideas" as the industry began, of necessity, to accommodate the interests of its advertisers, even while itself growing into large, oligopolistic enterprises (Innis 1971, 139; 1972, 167; 2004, 11). Innis's coupling of freedom of the press with the growth of monopolies on the face of it seems strange and so warrants further scrutiny. Innis had several things in mind here. First, freedom of the press according to Innis's interpretation meant, in part, freedom of press owners to do as they chose - even to combine into the monopolistic Associated Press news system and to enter into restrictive covenants with Western Union telegraph; in other words, freedoms enjoyed by press systems included, for a time, the freedom to engage in monopolistic business practices. Second, press freedom, coupled with large economies of scale, served to reduce the number of smaller, independent voices while simultaneously inducing the large presses to seek out the lowest common denominator in terms of readers (Innis 2004, 80-3). As Innis explained, "Hearst resorted to new devices to increase circulation, ranging from larger headlines to sensationalism in the Spanish-American war, large salaries to attract staff from Pulitzer, features, and comic strips" (Innis 1971, 179). Third, to increase circulation, and thereby increase the utility of newspapers to advertisers, prices charged readers were lowered, with advertising making up the shortfall. This meant in turn that advertisers came to exert significant (monopolistic) control over editorial content. Muck-raking in the financial field disappeared from the pages of the daily press, according to Innis, as advertisers were concerned, rather, "with constant emphasis on prosperity. ... In the words of Chesterton, a journalist became one who wrote on the backs of advertisements" (Innis 1971, 187, 186). Fourth, newspapers attained the freedom to "own" the news. "News became a vendible commodity" (Innis 1971, 143). The establishment of a property right in the news strengthened the Associated Press's news monopoly. Finally, and most importantly in Innis's view, the press helped promote a space-biased monopoly of knowledge, to the neglect of time (duration): The type of news essential to an increase in circulation, to an increase in advertising, and to an increase in the sale of news was necessarily that which catered to excitement. A prevailing interest in orgies and excitement was harnessed in the interests of trade (Innis 1971, 77-8). [Newspaper] bias culminated in an obsession with the immediate. Journalism, in the words of Henry James, became a criticism of the moment at the moment (Innis 1971, 187). In the United States the dominance of the newspaper led to large-scale development of monopolies of communication in terms of space and implied a neglect of problems of time (Innis 1972, 170). Time has been cut into pieces the length of a day's newspaper (Innis 1995, 388). Media and Public Opinion Innis wrote: "Inventions in communication compel realignments in the monopoly or the oligopoly of knowledge" (Innis 1971, 4). He quoted David Hume on the continuing endeavour and necessity of those possessing the means of force to capture public opinion: "And this maxim," wrote Hume, "extends to the most despotic and the most military governments as well as to the most free and popular" (Innis 1971, 4). To this Innis added, "The relation of monopolies of knowledge to organized force is evident in the political and military histories of civilization . The success of organized force is dependent on an effective combination of the oral tradition and the vernacular in public opinion with technology and science" (Innis 1971, 4, 5). In bringing together technology and science on the one hand, with the art and practice of controlling public opinion on the other, Innis coupled control over the technologies of armaments with control over the means of communication. Both classes of technology are essential to power. Technological advance in the means of communication, according to Innis, assisted military power in controlling space both through "a narrowing of the range from which material is distributed and a widening of the range of reception, so that large numbers receive, but are unable to make any direct response" (Innis 2004, 89). For Innis, resistance against propagandistic pressure requires reinvigoration of oral dialogue and scholarship, both of which have waned under the barrage of mechanised communication. Mechanised knowledge is space biased, and obscures questions pertaining to duration and continuity. "Success in the industrialized newspaper," Innis wrote, "depends on constant repetition, inconspicuous infiltration, increasing appeal to the subconscious mind, and the employment of tactics of attrition in moulding public opinion" (Innis 1952/2004, 79). Scholarship, for Innis, in contrast, retains a concern for time, but since questions concerning duration and meaning inevitably challenge the authority and policies of the military, of governmental administrators and of business leaders - think of the antitheses, for example between market forces and environmental well-being(Babe 2006b) - there y is a concerted effort on the part of space-biased authorities to suppress or subvert true scholarship: "Force is no longer concerned with [the scholar's] protection and is actively engaged in schemes for his destruction" (Innis 1971, 31). Witness the selective funding of university programs and the infiltration of corporations into the classroom. Innis exclaimed, Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult. Even science, mathematics, and music as the last refuge of 'Y the Western mind have come under the spell of the mechanized vernacular. Commercialism has required the creation of new monopolies in language and new difficulties in understanding (Innis 1971, 31). 0 £ 0 C > And again, As modern developments in communication have made for greater realism they have made for greater possibilities of delusion.... We are under the spell of Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The shell and pea game of the county fair has been magnified and elevated to a universal level (Innis 1971, 82). il r\i LO Innis's historical, critical analyses of press systems set in relief concerns of our day. His insights and historical parallels are worth recounting as we contemplate fO contemporary issues such as embedded journalism, media concentrations, "in- ^ fotainment," advertiser influence, simulacra and pseudo-environments, public relations, the media-military-industrial nexus, and war-related propaganda. In a way, it is comforting to read Innis today, and understand that these issues, in one form or another, have long characterised press systems, that we are not necessarily in the midst of a grand deterioration in our news; rather, in a sense, it is just more of the same. Indeed, Innis's history and commentary may well serve to increase our critical stance toward media generally, and press systems in particular, which is certainly a healthy occurrence in the midst of so much media attention afforded the "war on terror." Notes: 1. Portions of this section are based on the Innis chapter of Babe (2000). Innis is subject to two biographies: Creighton (1957), and Watson (2006). Innis also prepared an incomplete and unpublished autobiography addressing his life until 1922. 2. Innis's biographer, John Watson describes this stage of Innis's scholarship as one of "intellectual isolation," explaining: "Given the radically new departure implicit in this final phase, it is not surprising that not one of Innis's economic-history colleagues followed him in his jump to the application of this methodology to altogether different domains of study. ... [Moreover] this loneliness [was] unmitigated, for to join in the discussions of other scholars already active in these new areas of his personal concern would have entailed a prior acceptance of paradigms forged in the metropole. This in turn would have implied abandonment of the belief in a novel hinterland perspective" (Watson 2006, 15). 3. Portions of this section are derived from Babe 2000. 4. Andrew Wernick explains Innis's position in these terms: "Western culture was beset by a communication bias that chronically favoured synchronous over diachronic linkage, so that an omnipresent present overwhelmed the past and precluded contact with the future" (Wernick 1999, 265). 5. Innis wrote: "The printing press and the radio have enormously increased the difficulties of thought; ... freedom of the press and freedom of speech have been possible [i.e. have been tolerated] largely because they have permitted the production of words on an unprecedented scale and have made them powerless" (Innis 1946, vii). 6. Many postmodernists agree that the over abundance of messages, often contradictory, diminishes the value of each one, and on that account they urge that we abandon all search for truth and rather celebrate difference. Poster 1990; Webster 1994). References: Altschull, J. Herbert. 1990. From Milton to McLuhan: The Ideas Behind American Journalism. New York: Longman. Angus, Ian. 1997. A Border Within. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. Babe, Robert E. 2000. Canadian Communication Thought: Ten Foundational Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Babe, Robert E. 2006a. The Political Economy of Knowledge: Neglecting Political Economy in the Age of Fast Capitalism (as Before). Fast Capitalism 2:1. Babe, Robert E. 2006b. Culture of Ecology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Babe, Robert E. and Edward Comor. 2006. Poster Meets Innis: Poststructuralism and the Possibility of Political Economy. Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 13. Barnet, Richard J. and Ronald E. Müller. 1974. Global Reach: The Power ofthe Multinational Corporations. New York: Simon and Schuster. u S 5 0 £ * 1 * IR O C (6 LO Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St Louis: Telos Press. Beniger, James R. 1986. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Berland, Jody 1999. Space at the Margins: Critical Theory and Colonial Space after Innis. In C. R. Acland and W. Buxton (eds.), Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 281-308. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press. Carey, James. 1981. Culture, Geography, and Communications: The Work of Harold Innis in an American Context. In W. H. Melody, L. Salter and P. Heyer (eds.), Culture, Communication, and Dependency: The Tradition of H.A. Innis, 73-91. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Charron, Ray. 1999. Postmodern Themes in Innis's Work. In C. R. Acland and W. Buxton (eds.), Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflections and Refractions, 309-321. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. Creighton, Donald G. 1957. Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar. Reprint 1978. Toronto: University ofToronto Press. Crowley, David and Paul Heyer. 2003. Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Deibert, Ronald J. 1997 Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. New York: Columbia University Press. Drummond, Ian and William Kaplan. 1983. Political Economy at the University of Toronto: A History of the Department 1888-1982. Toronto: Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, George. 1969. Time as History. Massey Lectures. Toronto: CBC Learning Systems. Havelock, Eric. 1982. Harold A. Innis: A Memoir. Toronto: The Harold Innis Foundation. Heyer, Paul. 2003. Harold Innis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Hills, Jill 1994. Communication, Information, and Transnational Enterprise. In R. E. Babe (ed.), 293320. Information and Communication in Economics. Boston: Kluwer. Hyde, Lewis. 1979. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage. nnis, Harold A. 1930. The Fur Trade in Canada. Reprint 1962. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. nnis, Harold A. 1937. The Pulp and Paper Industry. In W. S. Wallace (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Canada, 176-185. Toronto: University Associates of Canada. nnis, Harold A. 1956. The Lumber Trade in Canada. A speech delivered in 1938 at the University of Maine. In H. A. Innis, Essays in Canadian Economic History (edited by Mary Q. Innis), 242-251. Toronto: University ofToronto Press. nnis, Harold A. 1940/1954. The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. nnis, Harold 1946. The Newspaper in Economic Development. In Political Economy in the Modern State, 1-34. Toronto: The Ryerson Press. nnis, Harold A. 1949. The Press: A Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century. Stamp Memorial Lecture. London: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in Harold A. Innis 2004 Changing Concepts of Time, 73-103. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. nnis, Harold A. 1950. Empire and Communications. Oxford University Press. nnis Harold A. 1951. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. nnis, Harold. 1952. Changing Concepts of Time. Reprint 2004. Introduction by James W. Carey. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. nnis, Harold A. 1956. Essays in Canadian Economic History. Edited by Mary Q. Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. nnis, Harold A. 1962. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, based on the revised edition, prepared by S. D. Clark and W. T. Easterbrook, with a Foreword by Robin W. Winks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. First edition 1930. nnis, Harold A. 1971. The Bias of Communication. Introduction by Marshall McLuhan. First edition 1951. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. nnis, Harold A. 1972. Empire & Communications. First edition 1950. Revised by Mary Q. Innis. Foreword by Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Innis, Harold. 1995. The Concept of Monopoly and Civilization. Paper originally read in Paris in 1951. LO In D. Drache (ed.), Staples, Markets and Cultural Change: Selected Essays, 384-89. Montreal: McGill- LO Queen's University Press. Mattelart, Armand. 1994. Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture. Translated by S. Emanuel and J. A. Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen. Poster, Mark. 1990. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Poster, Mark. 1994. The Mode of Information and Postmodernity. In D. Crowley and D. Mitchell (eds.), Communication Theory Today. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schiller, Herbert I. 1969. Mass Communications and American Empire. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Schiller, Herbert I. 1976. Communication and Cultural Domination. New York: M. E. Sharpe. Schiller, Herbert I. 1989. Is there a United States Information Policy? In W. Preston, Jr., E. S. Herman and H. I. Schiller, Hope & Folly: The United States and UNESCO 1945-1985, 285-311. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smythe, Dallas. 1981. Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Watson, Alexander John. 2006. Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Webster, Frank. 1994. Theories of the Information Society. London: Routledge. Wernick, Andrew. 1999. No Future: Innis, Time Sense, and Postmodernity. In C. R. Acland and W. Buxton (eds.), Harold Innis in the New Century: Reflection and Refractions, 261-280. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. u S 5 0 £ * 1 * IR O C « UD LO JOURNALISTS AT WORK - REVISITED Howard tumber Abstract This article takes the opportunity to look in more detail at one of Jeremy Tunstall's seminal works - Journalists at Work published in 1971. It was the first major social science study of specialist journalists in the UK. Tunstall began the research in 1965 at a time when no single social science study of British journalism existed. Tunstall's study of British journalism set out to investigate specialist news gatherers on national newspapers constituting approximately fifteen per cent of the personnel in those organisations and representing about two percent of all British journalists. Three aspects of Tunstall's study are discussed - news organisations and their goals, the source-media relationship, and the occupation of journalism - in addition to some comments about the context and the methodology of the research. Howard Tumber is Professor of Sociology and former Dean of Social Sciences at City University, London; e-mail: h.tumber@city.ac.uk. 00 ■ rv. LO si ro KD o o rN ro £ £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C K LO In 2000 I edited a collection of essays in honour of Jeremy Tunstall (Tumber 2000). In the introductory essay to the book I was only able to provide a rather brief summary outlining Tunstall's contribution to media and communication studies.1 In this article I want to take the opportunity to look in more detail at one of his seminal works - Journalists at Work.2 Journalists at Work, published in 1971 by Constable,3 was the first major social science study of specialist journalists in the UK. For Tunstall, at that time, media sociology was "a field of considerable intrinsic fascination, importance and intellectual challenge" (1970, 38). Tunstall began the research in 1965 - hard to comprehend now that this was over forty years ago - and at the time no single social science study of British journalism existed. As Tunstall himself wrote at the time in the introduction to the book: "There was no study of any type of specialist journalist, no study of a communications organisation, and no study of recruitment to the occupation. Nor was there any general history of Fleet Street that could satisfy a sociologist or a social or economic historian. The several scholarly studies of specific historical topics were mainly written by American historians" (Tunstall 1971, 5). Tunstall also pointed to the limitations of the American literature. Most studies dealt with journalism at the local or state level rather than at the national level and there were no adequate organisational studies of typical newspapers or broadcast stations. Tunstall added that there were no satisfactory broad social science studies of the occupation of journalism in the US. Tunstall's influence is hard to exaggerate. In the UK it was largely through his efforts that the academic study of journalism took shape as the expanding field of media studies (Zelizer 2004, 19). In commenting about journalists and their occupational settings, Zelizer adds: "Tunstall, almost single-handedly, developed the literature on the occupational life of journalists, where his examination of the patterns of entry and maintenance among a variety of specialist journalists . showed the shared attributes of occupational and professional life regardless of specialisation" (2004, 56). Stephen Hess, for example, claims that Tunstall became his teacher after he read The Westminster Lobby Correspondents and Journalists at Work using Tunstall's work as a methodological and spiritual guide for his own study on Washington reporters (Hess 1981; and see Tumber 2000, 9).4 In this article I want to discuss three aspects of Tunstall's study: news organisations and their goals, the source-media relationship, and the occupation of journalism. But first a few comments about the context and the methodology. The landscape of the British media in 1965, when Tunstall began the project, Q was remarkably different to what it is now. The economic and political climate is now unrecognisable from that time when globalisation and the development of new technologies hardly were on the horizon. In 1965 British broadcasting was characterised by the duopoly system of public broadcasting represented by the BBC (two terrestrial channels), financed then and still today by a license system, and ITV (one terrestrial channel but divided into regional franchises) financed Q then and now by advertising. BBC 2 introduced colour transmissions in 1967 and J from 1965 the Intelstat series of satellites enabled satellite transmissions for up to eighteen hours a day. Apart from the brief intervention of pirate radio stations, the BBC enjoyed a monopoly of radio broadcasting. There were nine national newspaper titles in 19655 compared with ten in 20 066 but the ownership structure 00 now with its increase in concentration is very different to what it was forty years LO U S ago. At the time of writing Tunstall identified five major features of the national media industry in Britain. The first was the national dominance of provincial media C^ - with provincial media mainly London owned and with the bBc and ITN both ^ London dominated. The second was that national newspapers and TV were the two dominant media in Britain with the specialist correspondents of both found in the groups of nationalist specialists. Thirdly Tunstall recognised that multi media organisations were becoming increasingly important. Fourth was the fact that the daily media dominated the British media industry to an extent not known elsewhere. Tunstall viewed this with concern because it narrowed the number of voices. Lastly he predicted a further decline in the number of national newspapers and a further consolidation of a few multi-media organisations (1971, 281). In the conclusion to Journalists at Work, Tunstall warned of these dangers and urged social scientists involved in mass media research to take up the task of redefining the criteria used to judge the level of competition or degree of monopoly (ibid, 282). In the intervening period it has become virtually impossible to ignore the media's role in either public or private life. The media in all their guises has become pervasive and intrusive. They are both global and local and its convergence has led to new areas of research including that related to public policy.7 Journalism as a cultural practice has also undergone large changes in the last forty years relating to "shifting notions of work, technological advancement in the workplace, and the predicaments of a volatile market economy, as media interests have merged with the politics of mass society" (Hardt 2000, 210). In what has been called the third age of journalism, from the 1980s onwards - the "information age" - aspects of professional journalism are being challenged with a blurring between the public and journalists. There is a widening of professional practice and an incorporation of new channels of communication and interactive communications enabling the public itself to be a distributor of information. The characteristic features of the "new media" and the changes in political and social processes are having a major impact on the role of journalism in two different ways. Firstly the flow of information from a proliferation of sources involving the public challenges the role of the journalists as "experts" in the dissemination of information. Secondly, journalistic culture itself is transformed in a way that further unsettles the public/journalistic distinction. We may be witnessing the de-professionalisation of the practice in a manner more familiar during the "first information age" from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century and before the professionalisation of the field from the mid-nineteenth to the 1980s. Tunstall's study of British journalism set out to investigate specialist news gatherers on national newspapers constituting approximately fifteen per cent of the personnel in those organisations and representing about two percent of all British journalists. The intention behind Tunstall's original proposal for funding from the Leverhulme Foundation was to conduct a study about the occupation and profession of journalism but he then hit upon the idea of looking at specialist correspondents. In planning the study Tunstall was influenced by previous sociological studies of occupations.8 In particular Tunstall was impressed by Everett Hughes' irreverent approach to medical students in his book The Boys in White. This was in contrast to his views of Robert Merton's work on the medical profession which came out at the same time but was much more reverential referring to the doctors as physi- cians. Tunstall has described his research as an unmasking of an occupation albeit a relatively sympathetic kind of unmasking (Tumber 2000, 13n2). Bernard Cohen's The Press and Foreign Policy (1963) was also influential.9 Tunstall was fascinated by the manner in which Cohen had talked to foreign and diplomatic correspondents in Washington10. He was also influenced by the survey studies conducted in the US by Leo Rosten particularly The Washington Correspondents (1937) (Tumber 2000, 2). One of the marked features of Journalists at Work is the way Tunstall linked it to previous sociological literature. Boyd-Barrett suggests that Tunstall, draws on the tradition of political communication introduced by Rosten, extending this to a range of different journalistic specialisms, retaining Mer-tonian functionalism11 but going further with it in looking at how specialist roles are influenced not just by their own "reference groups" of fellow specialists (characterised by intriguing competitor-colleague ambivalencies) and their respective networks of news sources, but also by the different cultures of different news media, the different kinds of contribution which different specialisms make to news media (in terms of their relative importance to media for sales revenue, advertising revenue, or for "prestige" goals ) and by their part in a wider journalistic culture with common understanding of the relative status of different specialist groups within that culture. A significant revelation of the Tunstall study, by contrast with generations of journalistic memoirs which had preceded it, was the extent to which news was not an unpredictable and chaotic universe of events but was the steady and reliable prediction, preparation and routine management of "institutionalised" news, a finding which has been confirmed in a number of succeeding studies (Boyd-Barrett (1995, 273-274). The study was neither about the whole occupation of journalism in Britain nor about news organisations. Tunstall described it as "primarily an exploratory one" and he set out four objectives. The first was a statement and an affirmation of the sociological nature of the research. The majority of previous mass media research had either a social psychology or political science grounding and Tunstall, himself a sociologist, was eager to indicate ways in which sociology could contribute to this field. Establishing a familiarity with the subject matter was the second objective and the use of more than one research method was employed to exploit this. Developing hypotheses and a conceptual framework for future communications studies comprised the third and fourth objectives (1971, 6). Methodology ^ Tunstall decided to concentrate on specialist journalists thereby allowing for comparison of categories. Together with Oliver Boyd-Barrett who joined him on the ^ project as a research assistant, he conducted a survey of more than two hundred journalists employed by national British news media in 196812 and undertook direct observation13 and unstructured face to face interviews with a total of 430 newspaper editors, advertising and circulation managers, sub editors and provincial journalists.14 The idea was to cover all of the specialists who existed in the selected fields.15 Tunstall piloted the survey by testing on one person in each of the specialist fields. Despite the length of the questionnaire most of the respondents U C (6 o completed it although some of them sent it back complaining that it would take up too much time to fill in. Tunstall, as a pioneer, "caught" journalists at a time when they rarely, if ever, received these enquiries. Nowadays of course media workers are inundated with requests for interviews and survey responses from students as well as academics and consequently are not as cooperative as they were forty years ago. Tunstall and Boyd-Barrett chased their respondents relentlessly- writing to some of the recalcitrants three times to elicit a response.16 For the interviews they used a guide, but did not tape the interviews - instead they provided a commentary onto a tape recorder immediately after the interview. The lack of computing facilities available at the time meant a long and slow process for analysing the completed questionnaires but the advantage was that Tunstall was able to engage in a very close reading of the data. It meant, for example, that he discovered how most specialists swapped material with their competitors. Tunstall related17 that there were several clues scattered around and by actually reading the questionnaires over and over and then comparing them, in some cases he could do a detective job of discovering the various partners. News Organisations and Their Goals One of the important areas of the research project which Tunstall examined empirically was the goals of news organisations. News organisations, he wrote "do not fit neatly into any of the established sociological goal classification systems" (Tunstall 1971, 49). Eschewing Parsons' (1960) fourfold classification (adaptive, implementative, integrative and pattern-maintenance), Etzioni's (1961) dual organisation structure, and Blau and Scott's (1955) "prime beneficiary" approach, Tunstall instead suggested that news organisations should be seen neither as unitary nor dual but instead as having several types of goal: "A continual process of bargaining takes place as to which goals should be pursued" (p. 50). Tunstall combined the approach of Yuchtman and Seashore (1967) who preferred the concept of bargaining within the goal concept together with that of Robert Park's (1922) emphasis on revenue. This led Tunstall to outline three main types of goal that are present in all news organisations - audience revenue, which exists because a news organisation that operates on a commercial basis must have an audience,18 advertising revenue, which inevitably becomes one of the goals of both news organisations and media organisation, and non-revenue (p. 51). This three fold classification could be applied at a number of levels: popular (revenue goals) and quality media (non-revenue goals); news organisations and journalists (non-revenue goals) as against media organisations and non journalists (revenue goals); news processing (revenue goals) and newsgathering journalists (non revenue goals); and different specialist fields within newsgathering journalism (revenue and non-revenue goals; p. 53).19 Tunstall's goal bargaining approach emphasised that no type of news gathering is rigidly tied to just one type of goal and that all specialist newsgathering fields include an element of each of the three goals with some fields lacking a predominant goal (p. 54). For this type Tunstall suggested a fourth goal - describing it as a "mixed goal" and involving a mixture of the other three types of goal. He provided the example of aviation correspondence to illustrate his point: advertising revenue goal since there is aviation related advertising, audience revenue goal since aviation is strong in news values and non revenue elements of various kinds are also present (p. 54). One final point Tunstall made here was that despite goal bargaining "the combination of goals pursued by a news organisation will usually alter only a little from one year to the next and that a coalition goal tends to develop - namely the audience revenue goal which tends to receive the greatest support from the various bargaining (or conflicting) interests involved" (p. 54). Tunstall argued that this coalition audience revenue goal is a common denominator to which most agree while bargaining about the other goals continues. The reason for this, he proposed, was because small changes in total audience size are accepted as the prime indicator of a news organisation's success. "Journalists, as well as advertising, circulation and marketing men, accountants and printers - and the national audience - are all broadly united in recognising this as an acceptable indicator. Both news values and total audience size - which may appear to outsiders to receive an irrational and excessive emphasis - assume such importance because, while goal bargaining continues, the audience revenue goal is the only possible coalition goal" (p. 55). That media organisations are characterised by mixed goals "is important for locating the media in their social context, understanding some of the pressures under which they are placed and helping to differentiate the main occupational choices available to employees" (McQuail 1987, 144). Sources The source-media relationship has been a feature of the empirical sociology of the media for decades but the emphasis of examination has tended to be from the journalists' perspective rather than that of the source. Recent work on the empirical sociology of news production and journalism has concentrated on or re-emphasised the role of sources in the "manufacture" of news. One of the most interesting developments has been an examination of the relationship between different sources - "official" and "non official" - and between sources and the media. Over the last twenty years source-media analyses have become an important element in understanding the kinds of news we receive. The part played by sources in the media production process has been explored recently in various different representations including crime, the environment, politics, business, and war and conflict (see Anderson, 1997; Bennett, 1990; Ericson et al., 1989; Hallin, 1986; Miller, 1993; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994; Tumber, 1993). Various scholars, whether media or source centric, have attempted to generalise about the relationship between journalists and their sources. Tunstall provided a Q formulation suggesting that journalists and news sources are engaged in an "exchange of information for publicity" (1970, 43-4). A few years later Gans characterised the relationship as "a tug of war" in which "sources attempt to 'manage' the news, putting the best possible light on themselves and journalists concurrently 'manage' the source in order to extract the information they want" (1979, 117). To some extent this view implies an interaction based on an instrumental economic 0 calculation with each side conducting a cost benefit analysis of the activity in order J to maximise satisfactions or utilities (Schlesinger and Tumber 1994, 24). In looking at "information subsidies" Gandy (1982) provides the most fully developed version of this position. An explanation in terms of the coincidence of self-interest on both sides of an exchange relationship is of importance, though it is not the complete story. Journalists and sources are engaged in a social process and often U S need to appeal to norms other than those of the purely economic. Relations are not just simply conducted between individuals. "They operate at the interface fO between news organisations and news sources, who almost invariably are them- ^ selves members of organisations with collective goals to pursue" (Schlesinger and Tumber 1994, 25; see also Tunstall 1971, 185-6). To illustrate this Tunstall provided the example of the routinised provision of information such as public relations and press conferences. This "is clearly not a simple exchange between an individual source and an individual specialist. There is a strong collective element here - the transactions are between groups of specialists and press relations divisions within news source organisations" (p. 186). Tunstall added that this interaction encompasses contractual and quasi-legal elements with neither side able to withdraw wholly from this "information-publicity" exchange: "There is no open market and no directly alternative suppliers or consumers of the service in question" (p. 186). Overall then, Tunstall eschewed the "simple" exchange model involving an exchange of information for publicity, seeing it as omitting too many variables: "Most exchange models ignore the instability of news, the loosely structured (or chaotic) character of the social interaction, and especially the lack of time for care, gradualness or full communication about the dispositions of different parties relevant to the rapidly changing 'current' story" (p. 201). Finally with regard to critical coverage Tunstall raised questions regarding the kinds of control that sources have over journalists and those that journalist have over their sources (p. 203). In this regard Tunstall linked the goal classification of news organisations with the behaviour of news sources. Occupation Classifying the occupation of journalism has always been a difficult endeavour. From the nineteenth century, when the processes of professionalisation began, until the present, debate has reigned about whether journalism is a craft, a trade or a profession. When attempting classifications comparisons are frequently made with the professions of medicine and law. The people working in these occupations are considered to be a select group of high-status practitioners administering specialised services to members of the community. They generally undergo a lengthy period of tertiary training in their speciality and when admitted to practice normally enjoy a share in a monopoly in the performance of their work (Henningham 1979, 15; see also Tunstall 1973, 87). Unlike the classical professions, the depth of abstract knowledge on which the practice of journalism was based was both limited and less clearly defined, while the emphasis on practical skills brought journalism closer to a craft than a profession. Although journalism has had to face a set of very specific problems inherent in its practice, the sociology of professions and occupations has juggled with providing some stable guidelines on how to characterise professions in general (Tumber and Prentoulis 2005, 58). Jeremy Tunstall described journalism as an indeterminate occupation. Comparing it with both law and medicine which are relatively compact, uniform, and sharply defined, he described "journalist" as a "label which people engaged in a very diverse range of activities apply to themselves" (Tunstall 1973, 98; Tunstall 1971, 69). This diversity has increased considerably in the last thirty years and Tunstall's suggestion that "only occupations which are fairly determinate have any chance of becoming professions" (Tunstall 1973, 98), probably relegates journalism's position even further nowadays from professional status. Using Greenwood's five attributes of a profession - systematic theory; authority; community sanction; ethical codes; and a culture - as a yardstick, Tunstall writing thirty five years ago, doubted that journalism "could ever acquire professional attributes to the extent of, for instance, medicine. A more realistic objective, if the occupation wished to pursue it, would be to make journalism into a semi profession - in the way that teaching, for instance, is a semi-profession" (Tunstall 1971, 69).20 At the same time Tunstall pointed out that law and medicine, while scoring much higher than journalism, might well score below full points (Tunstall 1973, 89). Finally in regard to this question of occupation Tunstall characterised journalism as weak but that certain categories (four) of journalist do appear to have very considerable influence - the first group are leading individual figures in national journalism (for the US - columnists and commentators; for the UK - editors of major publications. The second group are the senior executives who in Britain comprise night editors of national newspapers, those in charge of major factual television programmes, and the editors of a few influential magazines. The third category is the news gatherers particularly the Lobby correspondents who play an important part in the evolution of rivalry within the British cabinet and in the definition of political crisis. The fourth are what Tunstall defined as journalist/politician/public figure (1971, 276). Overall though, these categories taken together add up only to a few hundred men.21 The Legacy Tunstall's work since the publication of Journalists at Work has concerned itself primarily with media power, industries, organisations and occupations (see Tumber 2000, 1-15). At the same time he has always been fascinated about the relationship between social scientists, particularly sociologists, and journalists.22 He argued that despite differences between places of work, conceptual frameworks and methods of gathering data, and time perspectives there is more in common between sociologists and journalists than either side admits (1971, 277). Noting the mutual suspicion (based on ignorance) between the two groups, he has often emphasised the dependency they have on each other. Journalists' dependency is exhibited through the frequent use of stories and news items reporting on or based Q on surveys, studies, reports and investigations produced by social scientists (ibid). But, as Tunstall wrote in Journalists at Work: "journalists who produce the stories sometimes show a startling ignorance of the simplest conventions of such work, and a failure to search for the most easily available published sources. Many journalists - despite their professed hostility to government organisations - when faced with government publications and statistics often accept them with complete credulity" Q (1970, 278). He argued that journalists would be less dependent on public relations (spin as we often now term it) and major source organisations (spin doctors) if they knew how to find and use social science evidence. Tunstall was even more scathing about sociologists' ignorance of journalism criticising them for their lack of curiosity of how news gets into newspapers or onto television screens: "When ^ sociologists do venture opinions about journalism these opinions often reveal KD U S ignorance of the most elementary details" (ibid). Tunstall, in effect, was offering a challenge to both groups to engage more fully. For the academy he issued a call: LO "Within social science during the last decade or two (1950s and 1960s), research on ^ the mass media has tended to carry low status. In the case of journalism little recent sociological research of a reasonable standard exists. In consequence several broad areas of sociological theory and research have not taken the media into account. The existing sociological literature in such areas as organisations, the professions, and small group exchange is the weaker for this neglect" (ibid). In particular Tunstall was concerned that future mass media researchers should continue to benefit from importing theoretical perspectives from neighbouring fields and offered organisational theory, conflict theory, linguistics, disengagement theory, and collective behaviour, as examples of those with the potential to offer something. Tunstall also called for the use of additional research methods alongside those of laboratory experiments, content analysis, and random sampling already in vogue (1970, 37). Forty years on from Journalists at Work, the landscape (and the research agenda) has changed considerably, not only has the world of journalism been turned upside down through changes brought about by the globalisation of the media industries and the development of new electronic communications technologies but the academic setting for communications research and teaching has changed as well. The "old" discipline producers - sociology, political science and social psychology - of communication research have been displaced and replaced in the main by "new" departments of media, communications, cultural studies, and journalism. At least in the present day academy, media, communication and journalism research have achieved some degree of respectability - at least with students. Sniping at so called "Mickey mouse" courses still occurs at regular intervals from sections of the media industry, politicians and also from some elite universities who are at pains to distance themselves from these new endeavours. Columbia University's well established School of Journalism, Media at LSE and the recent setting up of the Reuters Institute for the study of journalism at Oxford University suggest there are pockets of enlightenment taking a differing view. It took the academy, though, until 2000 to establish concrete forums for the study of journalism. Two new journals were set up - Journalism (see www.sagepub.co.uk); and Journalism Studies (see www.tandf.co.uk) providing forums for debates around the theory and practice of journalism. In addition, reflecting the increasing autonomy of journalism as a field of enquiry as well as of education, a new interest group (Journalism Studies; www.icahdq.org/divisions/JournalismStudies/jsigweb4/index. html) was set up in 2004 (and given divisional status in 2006) within the International Communications Association with the intention of promoting journalism theory and research as well as professional education in journalism (Tumber 2005). Thus, in many aspects Tunstall's challenge was accepted and run with by social scientists and humanities scholars. So what is the legacy of Journalists at Work - or indeed that of the whole body of Tunstall's work? The reflections of James Curran sum it up better than I could: "He will be remembered primarily as a sociologist and one of the founding fathers of British media studies whose many books became key texts for teaching and research. But he has also a wider public significance. Jeremy Tunstall is one of the very first people to examine systematically the organisation, public policy and content u S 5 O £ of the British press. He is a pioneer of that critical tradition whose absence has been one of the reasons for the failure of press reformism in Britain. His importance lies not only in what he has achieved but it also lies in what he has begun" (2000, 51). Notes: 1. For a discussion and details of Tunstall's other works see Tumber (2000, 1-15.) 2. Before proceeding I should confess a personal interest. I was fortunate to be appointed as a research assistant in 1979, by Jeremy Tunstall and David Morrison, at City University, London to work on a study of foreign correspondents based in the UK. 3. This was the first book in a new (and what turned out to be influential) series, Communication and Society, edited by Jeremy Tunstall which ran from 1971until 1984. 4. It is important and worth recalling here that a series of studies were conducted in the UK and US in the 1970s and 1980s following Tunstall's Journalists at Work.This period is sometimes referred to as the golden age of media production studies. Some of these studies were based on PhD research or research grants and involved interviews with news organisation personnel and observation in newsrooms. They provided insights and observations of the production of news with the emphasis on the operation of organisational constraints and the social construction of reality in social systems. See Sigelman 1973; Burns 1977; Tracey 1977; Schlesinger 1978; Tuchman 1978; Golding and Elliot, 1979; Gans 1979; Gitlin 1980; Fishman 1980; Hetherington 1984; Silverstone 1985; Hallin 1986; Ericson, Baranek and Chan 1987. 5. Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Sun, Daily Telegraph, The Times, Guardian, Financial Times. 6. Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Sun, Daily Star, Daily Telegraph, The Times, Guardian, Financial Times, Independent. 7. It is worth noting that Tunstall was one of the first UK academics to look at comparative media policy (see Tumber 2000, 5 & 13). 8. For a good account of the sociology of journalism see Zelizer 2004, ch. 3. 9. Cohen conducted over 150 interviews with people in staff or policy positions in the Executive branch, and in the Congress and also with former holder of these positions (1963, 11). 10. Tunstall was critical of the studies by US political scientists Cohen (1963), Warner (1968) and Nimmo, (1964) because of their concentration on overtly political areas of news. For sociologists like himself, interested in a wider range of news, including 'non-political news, this was a serious weakness. He saw these political scientists as having ignored the complexity of news, of journalism and of news organisation goals. 'By concentrating on overtly political areas of news, the revenue goals of news organisations - more apparent in areas such as sport or fashion - are excluded (1972, 261). 11. Tunstall's work on Television producers (1993) abandoned Merton's functional approach in favour of one 'which develops its categories largely in terms which the participants themselves would recognise and which are grounded in the evidence of interview and observation' (Boyd-Barrett 1995, 275). 12. This was a mailed questionnaire of some twenty two pages long which Tunstall designed. 13. These varied from a day to ten days in length and were carried out inside seven national and four provincial news organisations (1971, 292). 14. Tunstall seemed proud to remark that the interviews together with the direct observation sessions, produced approximately one million words of typed notes (ibid, 295). C 15. The research intended to collect data from all the full time specialist journalists who worked in ß certain selected fields for all twenty three general news organisations at the national level in the UK. These included Politics, Aviation, Education, Labour, Crime, Football, Fashion and Motoring. Foreign ^ correspondents working for London news organisations but stationed abroad in Bonn, Rome, New KD York and Washington were also included (Tunstall 1971, 1). Tunstall wrote a separate book about one of these groups of specialists - see the Westminster Lobby Correspondents (1970). jv^ 16. The overall response rate was 70.2 per cent comprising London based specialists 76 per cent ^ (207 respondents) and foreign correspondents 58 per cent. In the great majority of cases the mailed questionnaire was preceded by an unstructured interview. In addition direct observation took place inside eleven news organisations (Tunstall 1971, 8). 17. In conversation with author 1999. 18. Tunstall included daily and weekly newspapers and broadcast organisations whether financed by advertising or licence fee. 19. Foreign correspondence would emphasize non-revenue; motoring correspondence would emphasize an advertising revenue, and crime correspondence an audience revenue (p. 53). 20. For further discussion of journalism and professionalism see Tumber and Prentoulis (2005, 5874). 21. It is interesting to note that in defining these categories Tunstall refers to men who of course were the overwhelming majority of specialist correspondents working in Britain at that time. It is interesting to note here that, in his introductory essay to the Media Sociology reader he edited in 1970, Tunstall advocated research on women and the media as one of three areas he identified for future research and exploration (p. 36). 22. The relationship between journalists and social scientists was a topic taken up later by a number of scholars including Golding and Elliot (1976 Ch. 1), who reviewed some of the contemporary debate between newsmen and sociologists and Schlesinger (1980) who discussed the reception of his own and others' work in an article entitled 'Between Sociology and Journalism'. References: Anderson, Alison. 1987. Media, Culture and the Environment. London: UCL Press. Bennett, W. Lance. 1990. Toward a Theory of Press-State Relations in the United States. Journal of Communication 40, 103-125. Blau, Peter M. and W. Richard Scott. 1963. Formal Organisation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Boyd-Barrett, Oliver. 1995. The Analysis of Media Occupations and Professionals. In O. Boyd-Barrett Oliver and C. Newbold (eds.), Approaches to Media. London: Arnold. Burns, Tom. 1977. The BBC: Public Institution and Private World. London: Macmillan. Cohen, Bernard. 1963. The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton University Press. Ericson, Richard V., Patricia M. Baranek and Janet B. L. Chan. 1989. Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources. Open University Press. Cantor, Muriel G. 1980. Prime-time Television. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Etzioni, Amitai. 1961. Complex Organisations. New York: Free Press. Fishman, Mark. 1980. Manufacturing the News. University of Texas Press. Gandy, Oscar Jr. 1982. Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Co. Gans, Herbert J. 1979. Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Pantheon Books. Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World is Watching. Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press. Golding, Peter and Philip Elliot. 1979. Making the News. London: Longman. Hallin, Dan. 1986. The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press. Henningham, John. 1979. Journalists and Professionalisation, Australian Journalism Review, July, 1520. Hess, Stephen. 1981. The Washington Reporters. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Hetherington, Alastair. 1984. News, Newspapers and Television. London: Macmillan. McQuail, Denis. 1987. Mass Communication Theory. London: Sage. Miller, David. 1993. Official Sources and "Primary Definition": The Case of Northern Ireland. Media, Culture and Society 15, 3, 385-406. Nimmo, David. 1964. Newsgathering in Washington. New York: Atherton. Park, Robert E. 1922. The Immigrant Press and Its Control. New York: Harper. Parsons, Talcott. 1960. Structure and Process in Modern Societies. Glencoe: Free Press. Rosten, Leo. 1937. The Washington Correspondents. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Schlesinger, Philip. 1978. Putting "Reality"Together. London: Constable. Schlesinger, Philip. 1980. Between Sociology and Journalism. In H. Christian (ed.) The Sociology of Journalism and the Press, 341- 369. (Sociological Review Monograph 29). Schlesinger, Philip and Howard Tumber. 1994. Reporting Crime: The Media Politics Criminal Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sigelman, Leon. 1973. Reporting the News: An Organisational Analysis. American Journal of Sociology 79, 1, 132-51. Silverstone, Roger. 1985. Framing Science: The Making of a BBC Documentary. London: BFI Publishing. Tracey, Michael. 1977. The Production of Political Television. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tuchman, Gaye. 1978. Making the News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Free Press. Tumber, Howard. 1993b. Selling Scandal: Business and the Media, Media Culture and Society 15, 3, 345-362. Tumber, Howard, ed. 2000. Media Power, Professionals and Policies. London: Routledge. Tumber, Howard and Marina Prentoulis. 2005. Journalism and the Making of a Profession. In H. de Burgh (ed.), Making Journalists: Diverse Models, Global Issues. London: Routledge. Tunstall, Jeremy. 1970. The Westminster Lobby Correspondents. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Tunstall, Jeremy. 1970. Introduction. In J. Tunstall (ed.), Media Sociology: A Reader. London: Constable. Tunstall, Jeremy. 1971. Journalists at Work. London: Constable. Tunstall, Jeremy. 1972. News Organisation Goals and Specialist Newsgathering Journalists. In D. McQuail (ed.), Sociology of Mass Communications. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Tunstall, Jeremy. 1973. Journalism as an Occupation. The Medico-Legal Journal, Part Three, 87-101. Warner, M. 1968. Decision Making in TV News. Television Quarterly 7, 60-75. Yuchtman, Ephraim and Stanley E. Seashore. 1967. A System Resource Approach to Organisational Effectiveness. American Sociological Review 32, 891-903. Zelizer, Barbie. 2004. Taking Journalism Seriously: News and the Academy. Thousand Oaks: Sage. U 00 KD LUDOVICO SILVA AND THE MOVE TO CRITICAL STANCES IN LATIN AMERICAN COMMUNICATION STUDIES JORGE ALBERTO CALLES-SANTILLANA Abstract Despite his intellectual impact in the field of communication studies during the 1970s, Ludovico Silva is hardly remembered today even in his native country, Venezuela. Showing a singular intellectual honesty, Ludovico Silva worked on a general theory of ideology, challenging the official Marxism and leftist political forces of the age. Based on Marx's difference between use value and exchange value, Silva argued that the Marxist category of surplus needed an equivalent in the symbolic realm; hence he developed the concept of ideological surplus in order to reject mechanical interpretations of ideology. Thus, Silva, among other scholars, contributed to Latin American communication studies by incorporating power and domination as structural forces in the making of social relations. The ideological power of media became the ultimate concern in media studies, questioning the explanatory value of the functionalist and quantitative studies focused on media effects, which were dominant at that time. Silva's work is recovered here in a historical perspective, stressing his intellectual commitment to the truth, and his contribution to move Latin American communication studies from a conventional academic stance to a critical one. Jorge Alberto Calles-Santillana is Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences, Universidad de las Américas, Puebla; e-mail: jocasa56@yahoo.com.iTix. O 00 I si ro KD o o rN ro £ £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C i & KD Critical analysis of communication nowadays is a reality in Latin America as much as in any other part of the world. Media systems and communication processes are currently analyzed from different critical perspectives, e.g., from macro perspectives of political economy, micro analyses of reception and consumption, or case studies of media and news production. The work of dominant transnational corporations - on foreign images, and discourses on race, gender, geography, sexual differences and preferences - and their encounters with local commercial and independent media forces, imagery and cultural practices of consumption, are normal concerns these days among scholars in the fields of communication and culture. These interests emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the incorporation of a Marxist critique into these fields, in which a conventional and functional approach had prevailed in regional research and teaching of communication. A number of thinkers and scholars were key factors in the move from an approach focused on media effects to a critical stance, in which the ideological consequences of media uses became new sites of inquiry. However, Armand Mattelart and Ludovico Silva were particularly important, because by extending Marx's preoccupation with ideology to the field of media analysis, they claimed to understand media work as an active force in the making of social relations. They argued that the power of media could only be grasped through their connections with other parts of the social structure. Mattelart's and Silva's texts became popular in Latin American universities, where professional programs on journalism and media production had begun to be developed. Unlike Mattelart, however, who continued working and contributing texts to the field, Ludovico Silva's leading role declined. His work stopped being important as a result of abandoning his concern with ideology and communication alongside the extensive production by new authors and the emergence of new topics and texts. While Mattelart's work is still retrospectively analyzed, Silva's accomplishments are not even remembered. His name and contributions faded unfairly. This essay will explore Silva's concept of ideological surplus and its relevance for Latin American ^ communication studies. Ludovico Who? Ludovico Silva is almost unknown, even in his native country, Venezuela. Although David Sobrevilla (1994) places him among the most relevant Latin American Marxist thinkers in the twentieth century, and although his intellectual career was Q important not only in philosophy but also in literature, there is no visible influence of Silva on the current Venezuelan cultural milieu. His situation has been so remarkable that in October, 2004, the Venezuelan National Assembly agreed to an homage on the occasion of the 16th anniversary of his death, on December 4, 1988. In the session one of the speakers, Eddy Gomez, agreed that "no other writer in Venezuela has reached such a universal dimension and has produced such intellectual work as Silva had." He added that the country was indebted to fi Silva, "because his work must be known for all the academic groups and for all the ^ Venezuelan people ... we must spread his work because this is an avid-for-culture country" (Morillo at www.asambleanacional.gov.ve/ns2/noticia.asp). The biographical information on Ludovico Silva is scant. An internet search O produced two documents containing identical information. His real name was Luis (R José Silva Michelena. He was born in Caracas on December 12, 1937, where he died almost 51 years later, on December 4, 1988. Ludovico is a nick name given to him by Spanish students while studying philosophy and literature in Madrid during the mid-1940s. Its meaning is not clear, since it is not a Spanish word. It could be related to the noun, ludribio (mockery, derision) or the verb, ludir (rub). Possibly, those words described Ludovico's personality. However, there is not indication in the biographical document that his nickname was related to these words or that the name referred to Silva's personality. He was the son of Hector Silva Urbano and Josefina Michelena and had at least two brothers, Héctor and José Agustin, a poet and a sociologist, respectively. After finishing his basic education at the Colegio San Ignacio, a private school in Caracas, Ludovico travelled to Europe, where he studied philosophy, literature and philology in Spain, France (the Sorbonne) and Germany for four years. In 1969 he obtained the most important honours for a student in the school of philosophy at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. During the 1960s his literary career took off. He produced an extensive poetic oeuvre and founded and was a member of the editorial boards of some of the most important literary magazines of that time (Papeles, Cal). From 1964 through 1968, he was the head of the Ateneo of Caracas, a public institution, where the most important poets and writers of literature gathered to discuss cultural politics and literature. He also founded the magazine, Lamigal, with his relative, Miguel Otero Silva, another of the most conspicuous Venezuelan authors. From1970 to 1986, Ludovico was a professor of philosophy at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (www.literaberinto.com/vueltamundo/minibiosilva.htm). In that year, Ludovico was committed to a mental hospital because of his loss of lucidity. Ammonium, an acid produced by his liver as a result of drinking problems, caused his brain to grow; seriously altering his mental and verbal coherence. Ludovico stayed at that institution for 33 days, when he wrote, Papeles desde el amonio (Papers from ammonium), describing the inferno of his experience (www. letralia.com/98/caraqcol01.htm). Although his work on ideology was widely used in Latin American schools of sociology, journalism, and communication studies, Silva was not cited, unlike Mattelart, in the academic literature of the 1970s, according to my research, which produced an insignificant number of entries. However, the few mentions by other academics suggests the relevance of his work Only recently an extensive essay on Silva was posted in a blog of Movimiento 13 de Abril, an alternative Venezuelan political group identified with President Hugo Chavez. There, Nelson Guzman (2005) posts a panegyric paper about Silva and his philosophical work on Marx. He refers to Silva as probably the most lucid philosopher of modernity in Venezuela; his prose has the peculiarity of being neat, conversational, and sparkling. Unlike the manual-based style of the Soviet writers, the academic style of Marxists, and the fragmentary writing of Althusser, Ludovico resorted to poetry, novel, and the great literature critics to illustrate his reasoning... Ludovico claims that Marx, but not the Marx of Soviet idolatry, but the one who - to use Althusser's word - had accomplished a theoretical revolution (Guzman 2005). Jorge Gómez Jiménez (2006), chief editor of Letralia.com, a Venezuelan blog on literature and art, draws on Guzman's essay to recover Silva's concept of ideological surplus to slip in criticism of the role of some intellectuals in contemporary Venezuela. Alicia Entel, Victor Lenarduzzi and Diego Gerzovich (2000) highlight Silva's work in a recent book on the impact of the Frankfurt School in Latin America. Although the category ideological surplus is not found to be highly productive by these authors, they mention Silva and Antonio Pasquali, both Venezuelans, as important contributors to a critical understanding of mass communication in Latin America in the 1970s. The Ideological Surplus Ludovico Silva contributed to the development of a critical analysis of Latin American communication and media studies by rejecting the official version of Marxism, and by establishing a dialectical relationship between the theoretical frameworks of ideology and communication. His contribution is contained in two books, published by Silva, Plusvalia Ideològica (Ideological Surplus) (IS) in 1970 and Teoria y Practica de la Ideologia (Ideology: Theory and Practice) (ITP) in 1971. Both books are reviewed here with my translation of the original Spanish texts IS is a theoretical text aimed at offering a general theory of ideology. As Marx identified the historical specificity of capitalism through the concept of surplus, Silva pursues a similar contribution in the symbolic realm by developing the concept of ideological surplus. He argues that the specific spiritual alienation that made possible capitalism needed to be defined on the basis of the difference Marx found between use value and exchange value. "The spiritual work force has become merchandise and the regular man in capitalism does not see a use value in it, but just an exchange value" (1977, 208). Silva mixes a historical analysis of the development of the concept of ideology with a philosophical inquiry into texts by Marx, Sartre, Gramsci, Ortega y Gasset, Freud, and Althusser. ^ Silva rejects the on-vogue theory of ideology as a reflex of the economic structure of society by proposing a psychological approach in which sub-conscious forces and language play an important role in the process of alienation. Thus, Silva defines ideology as a "system of representations, beliefs, and values unconsciously imposed to men in the social relations of production that work on his mind as idols" (1977, 33). It is, an "expression of the historical reality, that is, the language the men use to Q express what they think, feel, or wish about their material conditions" (p. 58). Opposing mechanical interpretations of alienation, Silva sustains that men, willingly participate on their own process of oppression. Ideology is a social formation, "something occupying a precise place in society that is determined by the material structure of that society" (p. 185). There is a dialectical relationship between structure and ideology: the material basis of the relations of production determines ideology but, at the same time, ideology can 2 also determine the material structure. Following Althusser, Silva situates ideology ^ in places and accords it active social power. The relevance of Silva's text lies in his attempt to find a specific content for the concept of ideology. His opposition to the official interpretations of ideology CN emerges from his refusal of all types of self-contained philosophical discourses, A but also from his philological and logical formation. Since ideology, as a discourse, needed a specific definition, according to Silva, he advances the concept of ideologi- ro cal surplus to help identify the place and the way in which ideology is produced ^ and works: It is possible to think that as in the capitalist workshop of material production surplus is a specific product, in the capitalist workshop of spiritual production an ideological surplus is produced with the ultimate goal of strengthening and enriching the ideological capital of capitalism in order to protect and preserve the material capital (Silva 1977, 190). Silvas concern is to confer upon ideology an independent status so that its understanding becomes a matter of historical analysis. Ideology is, Silva insists, an expression, a language, and not a simple reflex. Consequently, he takes on the psychological processes by which men reproduce ideology, the products of the cultural industry and their alienating effects. Not surprisingly, Silva ends with understanding ideology as a false consciousness. Silva's main concern in this book is to find answers to these questions: How is the ideological expression of the production of material surplus constituted in today's capitalism? What should be its name? How does capitalism proceed to justify itself in men's minds? Through rational arguments? Or through pressures exerted on unconscious mental layers, which are a fertilised ground for making men believe they justify the system and not that the system justifies itself in their minds? How do men make theirs the ideological belief that the world is a merchandise market? (Silva 1977, 193-194). ITP is a text in which Silva synthesises his theory of the ideological surplus by adding a comment on the specific importance of the concept of ideology and the role of the mass media to better understand the monopoly stage of capitalism. Silva takes on Paul Baran's challenge to the value of a theory of ideology. As ideology has become universal and rules human needs and wishes, inequality, injustice, and exploitation are seen as natural states in contemporary society. There is no general interest anymore in fighting those phenomena, according to Baran. Silva rejects the discrediting of ideology as a valid concept. Ideology has grown and reached almost every field of social life, but its essence remains the same. It is still a set of false representations and values that unconsciously move men to reproduce capitalism (Silva 1971, 80). The mass media are the most important ideological instrument in this particular historical age: The capitalist ideology, as such, has not changed: it is always a system of values aimed to ideally justify the material exploitation. What happens is that in the monopolist stage of capitalism, alongside the total internationalisation of capitalism, a global nerve system of mass media has grown to ideologically work parallel to the economic system. If exploitation has reached an international level (development vs. underdevelopment) its ideological justification has reached it as well. This fact explains the presence in Latin America of a powerful American television empire, which has rightly been called the U.S. media empire in Latin America. In that empire all old ideological forms (religion, metaphysics, judicial and moral norms) have converged and melted with that invention of our time, which is the scientific control of unconscious loyalties to the merchandise market (Silva 1971, 79). Based on Vance Packard, Silva finds that the mass media's essential function is to spread commercial propaganda (1971, 200). Through a series of psychological tools of manipulation, Silva follows Packard and suggests that advertisers persuade people to be engaged in consumption processes, which are more beneficial to the economic system than to themselves. By choosing merchandise irrationally rather than seeking to satisfy their real needs, people not only contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist system but they are also caught in the trap of ideology. The book includes brief analyses of some of the comics Latin American children were exposed to in the 1970s, when comics were still popular and had large audiences of children, since television industries were in their first phase of development. Most comics were translations of U.S. comics, resulting, according to Silva, in a subtle way of an ideological gravitation of the United States over Latin American countries (1971, 123). Ideology is present in those comics, Silva argues, following Adorno, as a hidden message (p. 124). The Critical Sense of Marxism In the early 1970s, Latin America was experiencing a special political moment. Cuba's status as a socialist state in Latin America was consolidated by that time. Salvador Allende's victory in the Chilean electoral process of 1971 had not only injected enthusiasm and brought hope to leftist forces in the region, but also contributed to overcoming the frustration and sense of defeat produced by the assassination of Ernesto Che Guevara by the Bolivian army in 1967. This political success occurred when the relevance of Marxism in the social sciences had reached Latin America. Althusser's interpretation of Marx from a structuralist perspective had brought debates on ideology to Latin America with a special emphasis on the character of its relationship to the economy. A dominant topic was whether Marx and Engels had developed a theory of ideology. Thus, analysts were entangled in thoughtful and meticulous reviews of their texts, pursuing to decipher precise meanings or the sites of concepts. Few scholars developed their analyses assuming as a premise the social character of knowledge; instead, most of Marx's texts were read as if they contained ultimate and definitive truths. This academic style coincided with the authoritarian mode by which the left political forces defined both, what the unchallengeable economic and social goals were and through which unique processes they should be reached. Therefore, correctly interpreting Marx and Engels and adjusting political action to the interpretation "J" were an intellectual challenge and a political need. In that context, most intellectuals focused on proving their theoretical purity ^ and denouncing deviant interpretations of Marx. Ludovico Silva defied that way of proceeding by brilliantly rejecting the existence of a fully-elaborated theory of ideology in Marx and Engels and by recovering the work of idealist thinkers. Thus, Silva makes what Zemelman (2004) calls critical use of theories of Sartre, Ortega y Gasset, Freud, and Pavlov. In his attempt to develop a general theory of ideology, Silva reviews various approaches to the concept, including Sartre's. In this process, he shows a singular 0 £ > (6 intellectual involvement with texts and authors. Contrary to others, Silva does not develop his argument only on the basis of authors and theories close to his own thoughts, but on ideas. He was a good reader, who examined minutely the relevant 5 texts with an unusual critical commitment: theoretical disagreement does not mean ^ epistemological rejection. Although he agrees with Henry Lefebvre on his critique of Sartre's interpretation of the concept of ideology, Silva does not disqualify the entire work of the French philosopher: I want to show that although there is not concordance between the Marxist theory of ideology and the Sartrean approach, Sartre, guided by his intellectual instinct rather than by a theory, guesses the genuine meaning of ideology (the Marxist, for me) in some particular analyses. Put simply: Sartre engages in a right use of the concept when he is not theorising it (Silva 1977, 102-103). Some paragraphs below, he adds: I state that Sartre has a frankly Marxist spirit, even though his existentialism betrays him. It is enough to consider him a Marxist spirit just because he is the contemporary thinker who has done the greatest effort to think dialectically. That is what to be a Marxist means, no to make faith protests, or ideological confessions. Besides, Sartre has contributed to the development of the Marxist science in particular ways like in the case of ideology as language (pp. 103-104). Silva recovers a number of theoretical propositions from Sartre which, according to him, are useful for understanding ideology in contemporary industrial society. First, Sartre points out the social existence of practical objects that constitute a collectivity and are defined by an absence, such as the mass media, for instance. Media audiences are groups that become a collectivity at the moment of consumption. At the same time, they have a social relationship through absence. There is no communication between senders and receivers, or among them. Second, the mass media produce in human beings a unity outside of them. They keep people segregated and secure their communication through the other. The relationship between a program anchor and his audience is not a human relationship (1977, 115). Third, the voice of this collective object is mystifying and represents official points of view. Media users are subordinated as an inorganic materiality to the work of the voice and its discourse on what is socially accepted as valid truth. Fourth, the mass media fuse men's identities into a collectivity. Consequently, every individual rebellion against the object is condemned to loneliness. Fifth, the origin of this otherness is a knowledge produced by a language. "It is a knowledge that has become a fact, that has become independent of human life and is imposed on it from outside—repression—until it becomes part of the unconscious life of everybody—repression" (1977, 116-117). Silva connects these ideas, clearly influenced by Adorno, with the thought of Jose Ortega y Gasset, a thinker, whose ideas, for many, would be considered beforehand non-compatible with Marxism. Silva himself warns about any visceral reaction to the name of the Spanish philosopher: There is a kind of reader who turns around and goes when Ortega is mentioned, as if he has heard about the evil. In this country (Venezuela) I have found several Ortega enemies, most of them enemies avant la lettre, that is, without having read carefully his books ... as a result of these attitudes, nobody has made an impartial inventory of all of his intellectual findings, which were too many and delicious. Nobody either has developed a criticism from inside his work, but from outside, from pre-existing opinions, which most of the time are nothing but political opinions (Silva 1977, 158-159). Without embarking on making such an inventory, Silva takes on Ortega's concern about the difference between ideas and beliefs. This is, according to Silva, the problem of ideology in contemporary society. Silva's ideas coincide with Ortega's understanding of the suspicious nature of people's most settled beliefs. Following Ortega, Silva asks himself whether we must call ideas those representations, beliefs, and convictions that are part of ourselves as if they were organs of our vital system and in such a way that we never challenge their value (p. 162). Those beliefs do not belong particularly to anybody; they exist in every historical age and in every society. They are the basis of human social action. Silva brings Ortega's ideas into his argument to reinforce his theory of ideology: all what is said or thought in a society is ideology. With extraordinary lucidity for that time Silva builds a bridge between Marxism and non-Marxist thoughts. He shows that his rejection of official versions of Marx is not a political reaction, but an act of intellectual honesty, arising from a commitment to critical thinking. He believes in the truth as a result of scientific inquiry rather than political agreement. Thus, joining Althusser's idea of ideology having a material existence within institutions, Sartre's critique of mass media as an alienating force, and Ortega's denunciation of the power of socially accepted knowledge, Silva finds a way to develop a theoretical approach to ideology which includes the human psyche as a part of the process of alienation: In the capitalist relations of production, the material work is a value from which surplus can be extracted. Likewise, in the production of conscience (Marx) there are values at work from which it is also possible to extract surplus. The capitalist takes possession of a part of the work force's value, which really belongs to the owner of such a force; in the same way, capitalism - through its control of massive communications and the cultural industry - takes possession of a good part of men's minds by inserting in it all ^ kind of messages seeking to preserve capitalism (Silva 1977, 198). U Ideology and a Critical Approach to Mass Media ^ In 1978, Ludovico Silva participated in a series of courses organised by the Universidad Nacional Autònoma de Mexico that focused on communication and dependency in Latin America and Mexico. The event brought together academic researchers and professionals to discuss the status of the mass media in the Latin American region. Researchers from the most important Mexican universities presented specific analyses on the press, radio, the film industry, television, comics, and advertising. In addition, a number of Latin American academics offered juncture ^ analyses of their countries. Silva was in charge of an overview on ideology and mass media in Latin America. In his speech, Silva made a comprehensive presentation of his theory of ideo-<>0 logical surplus, emphasising that the mass media—particularly television—are 0 (R 0 (6 n expressions of a dependent capitalist ideology (1980, 15-16). Clearly influenced by the critical vocabulary of the time, Silva substitutes here underdevelopment (used in ITP) for dependence. In another part of his text, he explicitly rejects historical causal- ^ ity: "historical reality does not causally determine the ideological formations." Equally important, Silva refers the relationship between structure and ideology as reversible and multivocal (1980, 23). Those references can neither be found in IS or ITP. The event and Silva's speech are clear demonstrations that the study of the mass media in America Latina had taken a critical path. By that time, debates on Latin America's economic and cultural dependencies were not unusual, and critical thought was present in the teaching of the social sciences in a good number of universities. Students of mass communication were used to critically analyze the mass media. But there was a very different panorama in the early 1970s, when Silva developed his concept of ideological surplus. The first university schools and research centres of communication in Latin America date back to the 1960s. Most of them were located within the institutional divisions of the social sciences, where the integration of social theories and methodologies into the curricula was considered necessary. By that time, functionalist approaches to the social sciences and empirical quantitative techniques of analysis were dominant. Thus, the phenomenon of mass communication was first approached from a functionalist perspective. Wilbur Schram's model of communication was broadly used to illustrate the phenomenon of mass communication as a process with an emphasis on the effects of messages on individual receivers. Studies on media effects based on a number of psychological theories became popular, most of them replicas of previous work in the United States. Since underdevelopment was a concern in the area, there were some attempts to link research on media effects and development policies. Everett Rogers' model of diffusion of innovations was a perfect fit. A remarkable shortcoming of these studies was the omission of power relations as a relevant force determining communication agendas. Thus, when Armand Mattelart, Ariel Dorfmann, Héctor Schmucler, Antonio Pasquali, and Ludovico Silva and others challenged both the theoretical foundations of the functionalist approach to communication and the epistemological principles of its methodology, they were promoting a very important shift in the way the relationship between media and society was perceived, studied, and taught. Mattelart, Dorfmann, and Schmucler would denounce the increasing presence of foreign media products in Latin America as cultural imperialism, questioning the relevance of effects studies and the epistemological obstacles to the analysis of ideology and domination set by quantitative analyses. Pasquali and Silva, taking on the critical approach of the Frankfurt School, would point out the alienating nature of the media system feeding the needs of an anti-human capitalist order instead of human wants. Indeed, Silva finds a theory of ideology incomplete without a theory of communication: ... without a theory of communication it is impossible to elaborate a theory of the ideology of the capitalist-imperialist world, from a Marxist point of view.Too much has been written on the theory of communication and most of it is subtle metaphysics—for example, functionalism, with just a few excep- u o C tions. But almost nobody has attempted to analyze, for instance, the empire of North American television (CBS, NBC, Time-Life, etc.) in Latin America as the mode of ideological production that works as support and in loyalty to the system that causes underdevelopment (Silva 1977, 214-215). The challenge for communication research focused on effects was clear: what really matters is the ideological consequences of the pre-conscious language of the media. Silva was questioning, in a non-explicit fashion, the level of the psychological inquiry of a media effects approach. Concerned with the social learning of receivers, the effects studies were not paying attention to the process by which men unconsciously absorb domination as natural and unquestioned. Silva adopts Adorno's concept of cultural industry to stress the alienating sense of media (1977, 223). Its major cultural contribution is the amount of images, values, idols, beliefs, and representations that maintain the workings of the ideological machinery of the capitalist system (p. 226). Thus, Silva casts doubt on the relevance of quantitative studies of communication and contributed to setting a different research agenda for media studies. A critical perspective of an analysis should be focused on exposing the connections between the economic system and the cultural production rather than on exploring the superficial learning effects of messages. By 1978, this agenda was underdevelopment in many Latin American countries. Carlos Villagran's comments on Silva's speech on that occasion in Mexico show the path of the preoccupation and what issued had received priority: It is through the mass media that the dominant classes today adorn and embellish the conditions of their society model imposing on the dominant classes a false consciousness, which induces them to make theirs the world vision of the dominant classes. This constant supply of ideology will take different forms in every social formation, depending on the level of confrontation of the class struggles. During calm periods, the broadcast of ideological messages will be subliminal, covered, disguised; but in moments of crisis, when the class struggle is open, ideology will take an explicit, direct, fierce form, in other words, openly doctrinal (Silva 1980, 33). The critical agenda eliminated the receiver-oriented research focus, since it was taken for granted that the real media effect was an ideological one. The new concern would be the language through which ideology expresses false views and leads people to misinterpret their social reality. Some of the other speakers at that event exposed the workings of different media on behalf of capitalist reproduction regardless of their specific languages and contents (Silva et al 1980). Silva himself, in ITP, had followed that path. Phantom, Mandrake, Donald, Duck, ^ Tarzan, and Superman are fiercely criticised by Silva, because they offer ideological «representations of development and underdevelopment, the capitalist obsession, and the schizophrenic economic system. Likewise, the critical emphasis on ideology and domination would push the analytical inquiry towards media ownership. It was a consequence of the Marxist emphasis on production as the key process of the capitalist system and highlighted ß the fact that the owners of the means of material production were also the owners of the means of spiritual production. Thus, Herbert Schiller, who was also present in Mexico, pointed out that the commercialisation of radio and television in the 00 rv United States was linked from its inception to businesses and exports (1980, 41). More importantly, Schiller added, "all the information-communication activities C^ agglutinated in the term "communication means" are now an increasingly vital ^ part of the advanced capitalism and the contemporary imperialism" (p. 42). Along the same lines, a study of the most important Mexican newspapers by Fatima Fernandez (2004) in 1979 would support Marx's thesis of the structural connections of ownership in the economic system. Newspaper owners were industrialists and entrepreneurs who had found it attractive to invest parts of their capital originally earned elsewhere in the economy in media. By the time Fernandez conducted her study, all of those businesses were still owned by them. Final Words Even if nowadays a critical analysis of communication and cultural studies in Latin American is widely shared, few scholars remember that three decades earlier, power struggles and class domination were not dominant concerns of communication studies. The shifting focus was a historical phenomenon. The economic dependency of Latin American countries on a central economic centre, the United States, the advances of socialism in the region, the presence of a large number of U. S. media products, the popularity and academic impact of critical literature, influenced by Marxism, and the interest of a number of academics and professionals in creating a world where exploitation and alienation are not its defining features, combined to promote this critical endeavour. A number of philosophers and social scientists collaborated on communication research in Latin America as a site of critical analysis. Some of them are still making significant contributions or are subject of retrospective reviews in regional schools of communication. Ludovico Silva, however, has become an obscure intellectual contributor to the field, in part because he had returned to his intellectual roots, philosophy and literature, in the latter part of his life. But in part also, because his idea of ideological surplus was not pursued by others, although it deserved a better treatment. Ludovico Silva demonstrates in his work a deep intellectual honesty. He confronted religious interpretations of Marx and carefully read non-Marxist literature. He constructed knowledge instead of repeating it. In addition, alongside other critical researchers—he pushed for a critical agenda in a time when identifying with leftist thoughts and political stances could have serious professional and personal consequences. In 1971, when he embarked on his adventure of developing a general theory of ideology, the field of mass communication was an incipient area of research, dominated by theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches not useful for making a more equal and fairer society. Nonetheless, he did not hesitate pioneering the endeavour. Silva challenged the theory of ideology as a reflex of the economic structure and worked hard to show that individuals participate—even in an unconscious way—in their own process of oppression. He found in Althusser, Sartre, Ortega y Gasset, Freud and Adorno a theoretical basis for rejecting the idea of ideology as an automatic phenomenon and proclaimed, instead, its reversible nature. Certainly, he was trapped by the concept of ideology as false consciousness. However, the beginning of the 1970s was too early a time to come up with a different approach. One of the most important challenges by the end of the 1970s came from Birmingham and Stuart Hall as a result of critical readings of Marx, Gramsci, Lacan, and Foucault. In Latin America the questioning of ideology would also appear by the end of the 1970s and be fully developed during the 1980s. The works of Jesus Martin Barbero and Néstor Garcia Canclini are particular relevant in this process. For example, the 1980s would be a decade when reception studies would transform the theoretical conception of consumption, suggesting that receivers are not the docile victims of media as presumed by Silva (Guardia 2006; Fuenzalida 2006; Martin Barbero and Téllez 2006; Checa 2006; Alfaro 2006). The contribution of Ludovico Silva to the field of communication research in Latin America is, nonetheless, significant albeit not recognised or even remembered. He was committed to critical thinking and, therefore, it is time to read him again. He was an excellent reader and, consequently, a great researcher, a feature Latin American researchers of communication must recover from him. His respect for Marx included showing the limitations of his work. Likewise, we must show respect for Silva by recovering his commitment to authentic thinking even though his theories may not fit current problems and times. References: Alfaro, Rosa Maria. 2006. Declives en la investigación a favor de la vigilancia ciudadana. Estudios de recepción mediatica en Peru. Dialogos 73, 89-98. Checa, Fernando. 2006. Los estudios de recepción en Ecuador: Paradojas, vacios y desafios. Dialogos 73, 71-80. Entel, Alicia, Victor Lenarduzzi, and Diego Gerzovich. 2000. Escuela de Frankfurt: Razón, artey libertad. Buenos Aires: EUDEBA. Fernandez, Fatima. 2004. Los medios de difusión masiva en México. México, DF: Juan Pablos Editor (15th edition). Fuentes, Raul. 1992. Un campo cargado de futuro. El estudio de la comunicación en América Latina. México, DF: FELAFACS. Fuenzalida, Valerio. 2006. Estudios de audiencia y recepción en Chile. Dialogos 73, 47-56. Gómez, Jorge. 2006. Guardia, Marcelo. 2006. Irrupción y proyección de los estudios de recepción en Bolivia. Dialogos 73, 27-36. Guzman, Nelson. 2005. Martin Barbero, Jesus y Maria Patricia Téllez. 2006. Los estudios de recepción y consumo en Colombia. Diàlogos 73, 57-70. ^ Morillo, Carlos. 2005. Schiller, Herbert. 1980. Medios de comunicación e imperialismo. In L. Silva et al (eds.), Medios de comunicación, ideologiay estrategia imperialista. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Q Silva, Ludovico. 1980. Ideologia y medios de comunicación en América Latina. In L. Silva et al. (eds.), Medios de comunicación, ideologiay estrategia imperialista. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Silva, Ludovico. 1977. La Plusvalfa Ideológica. Caracas: Ediciones de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela (3rd edition). ^ Silva, Ludovico. 1971. Teoriay practica de la ideologia. México, DF: Nuestro Tiempo. (1st edition). Silva, Ludovico et al, eds. 1980. Medios de comunicación, ideologiay estrategia imperialista. México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Sobrevilla, David. 1994. <.sisbim.unmsm.edu.pe/BibVirtual/publicaciones/Logos/1994_n1> Villagran, Carlos 1980. Ideologia y medios de comunicación en América Latina (comentario). In L. Silva et al (eds.), Medios de comunicación, ideologiay estrategia imperialista. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Q Zemelman, Hugo 2004. Necesidadde conciencia: Un modo de construir conocimiento. México, DF: Anthropos. 00 U REVIEW ESSAY PUBLIC MEMORY AND CULTURAL TRAUMA anna lisa tota Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Anna Lisa Tota is Associate Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka: Professor at the University Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: Rome III; ,1, University of California Press, 2004, 304 pp., e-mail: tota@uniroma3.it. $ 65.00 (hardback) ISBN: 0 520 23594 0, $ 24.95 (paperback) ISBN: 0 520 23595 9. Q. ro Kendall R. Phillips (ed.): Framing Public Memory. o Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004, 288 pp., ^ $ 42.50 (hardback) ISBN: 0 8173 1389 3. o rN ro i—i 5 £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C i i—i 00 Since the original studies by Halbwachs, we are witnessing an increasing scholarly interest in the study of collective memories. Different terms have been elaborated to better focus on the analytical distinction between the types of memories: individual versus collective, collective versus social (Halbwachs 1968; Namer 1991), communicative versus cultural (Assmann 1992). Most of the literature dealing with collective memories attempts to address the question of the socially constructed nature of the past directly, by examining the social processes that literally affect and shape different representations of the past, and it considers the implications of its social nature as a strategy for understanding how contrasting versions of a certain event, sustained by different social groups, compete within the public arena. Social scientists have provided several definitions to investigate how societies remember and forget. The past has been defined as "a foreign country" (Lowenthal 1985). The future has been conceived as "Vergangene Zukunft" (Koselleck 1979). The tradition has been considered as "invented" (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983), the memories as "contested" (Zolberg 1996). Many studies in the sociology of memory have documented how negotiation and competition between different social groups, actors, and institutions represent a crucial key to understanding the making of collective memories (Schwartz 1982; Middleton and Edwards 1990). In this process the limits are established by the competition between conflicting and contrasting representations of the same event (Schudson 1993). Several studies have been focused particularly on the relation between cultural symbols and collective memories, and in the last two decades, the cultural perspective has consolidated in the field. Studies concerned with remembering at the cultural level have focused generally on documenting the extent of cultural symbols in shaping the content and the meaning of a historical event. Each representation of the past corresponds to a narration, whose images and symbols derive from the broader social and cultural context. The main focus has been on the poetics and politics implied by the emerging representations of a certain historical event, and it analyses the role played by commemorative genres (Wagner-Pacifici 1996). Why the dedication of a week rather than of a tangible monument originally appeared as the best way of commemorating the Vietnam War (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991)? Why to commemorate the Hiroshima bombing a stamp seemed to be more adequate than a public display (Zolberg 1996)? In these studies, like in other relevant approaches to the analysis of memory, the past has been viewed as a very controversial terrain, and public discourse has been analysed as arena where Q the conflicts over different versions of the past are articulated or composed. £ Public Memory: A Controversial Definition Over the last decade the term "public memory" has entered into the debate. It has become rapidly a very used term to studying the processes that make possible the social inscription of the past in the public discourse. Even in the variety of perspectives, public memory has been analysed by several scholars (Norkunas 1993; Bodnar 1993; Bodnar 1996; Jedlowski 2002; Tota 2005) with a shared focus on ^ the publicness of the past. The study of public memory has grown across different disciplines leading to a renewed interest on the formation of collective and national identities. According to this perspective, the public definition of controversial CN past might represent a key to understanding how power relations are articulated U S and composed within a social or national context. It is not suggested here that the dimension of social power was excluded or undermined in the previous works on CO collective memory. On the contrary, most studies generated within the collective memory paradigm have considered issues of power as central (e.g. Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983; Middleton and Edwards 1990; Bodnar 1993). However the term public memory seems to add a more specific focus on the relation with the public sphere, and the capacity of memory work to intervene and affect the public discourse of a nation. In this sense the volume edited by Phillips offers a useful contribution to promote a broader reflection on the current state of public memory studies. However, this volume does not succeed in providing a unique and clear definition of the distinction between public memory and the other terms used in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, as one would expect. On the contrary, for example, the first chapter (Casey's essay on "Public Memory in Place and Time") seems to contribute new definitions without positioning itself in the whole spectrum of previous works. Casey's definition of collective and social memory does not consider and contrasts Halbwachs' one and its further elaboration by Namer (1991), without explaining why we should abandon it. This reformulation of two basic concepts of the sociological analysis of memory does not contribute to clarifying the very distinction between public memory studies and the collective memory paradigm, leaving to the reader the impression that the use of terminology in the field is much more unclear and ambiguous than it should be. In this case the most problematic distinction is not that between public and collective memory, but on the contrary that between public and social memory. Framing Public Memory is composed by two main parts: the first on the memory of publics, and the second on the publicness of memory. "To speak of public memory must be to simultaneously speak of certain groups of individuals remembering together (the memory of publics) and to speak of those memories appearing before or perhaps simultaneously with these groups (the publicness of memory)" (Phillips 2004, 10). How can we define public memory? According to this preliminary definition, public memory should be located in the semantic space between the two concepts of collective memory and social memory, defined on Halbwachsian terms. Casey's essay underlines its instable and mutable nature: public memories need a space of enactment, they always need spatial anchorage. The sites become part of the memories in their making. However, as already underlined, those characteristics do not provide a clear cleavage between the Casey's concept of public memory and Halbwachs' notion of social memory. Moreover it remains also a potential overlapping with the notion of cultural memory introduced by Assmann (1992). For those reasons the most interesting chapters of the book are not the theoretical ones, but those related to empirical case studies. The essays contained in the volume illustrate many aspects of the American public memory: Rosa Eberly analyses the Texas tower shootings of 1966 and how the local officials succeed in minimising this past. Her contribution offers useful insights in institutional practices used to privatise the memories of these events and deny their public inscription in the public identity of the university campus. Charles Morris considers public reactions to Larry Kramer's declaration that Lincoln was homosexual and analyses its effects for the queer public discourse in general. By analysing the overreactions of the guardians of Lincoln's public memory, he illustrates "mnemocide at work" (the process of erasing and suppressing memory). Why would anyone care if a known gay extremist delivered a fantastic rendering of an American icon's homosexuality at a gathering of Midwestern collegiate queers, a tale only repeated by the end of spring 1999 by the gay press, Madison's Capital Times, and the online magazine Salon.com? ... Given the magnitude of Lincoln's memory in forging our collective, national identity . conviction of his homosexuality . elicits not only fear of homosexual complicity but perhaps more consequentially that of normalizing and centralizing queerness as a national value (Phillips 2004, 99). The public memory of another American President is analysed in the essay by Amos Kiewe. By doing a discourse analysis of the final speeches of Ronald Reagan, the author documents Reagan's attempt to affect and literally create his own eulogy: "Reagan ended his political life with a series of addresses that suggest a preferred historical accounting ... he sought to influence those who would look back at him after his ultimate departure. The Great Communicator was concerned about communicating his version of America's story" (Phillips 2004, 264). Again by dealing with different frames and tales of memory, we are confronted both with the publicness of memory and the memory of publics. Cultural Trauma Theories and Different Meanings of Having a Common Past The relation between memory and trauma represents a very central focus in the memory studies and has been analysed by several scholars (Caruth 1995; Caruth 1996; Laub 1995; Felman 1995). The cultural trauma model proposed by Alexander et al. further investigates the relation between memory, identity and public discourse, as it questions the ways of analysing how and to what extent hegemonic and counter-memories become constitutive basis for the formation of collective identities. This model explores the ways in which crucial events mark forever memories and identities of the collectivity. Eyerman's study (2001) on slavery as cultural trauma ^ and the volume by Alexander, Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser and Sztompka (2004) represent an attempt to document the relevance and systematise cultural trauma theories. Smelser (Alexander et al. 2004) provides a formal definition of cultural trauma: "a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation that is a) laden with negative affect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening a society's existence or Q violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions." Alexander ^ (Alexander et al 2004, 1) argues that "cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways." The main hypotheses proposed by the book are that, firstly, trauma is not something naturally existing, but on the contrary it is constructed by the society; and secondly, individual and social traumas are very different. Smelser (Alexander et al 2004, 38-39) in his contribution to the volume specifically addresses this question: "a ß cultural trauma differs greatly from a psychological trauma in terms of the mechanisms that establish and sustain it. The mechanisms associated with psychological ^ trauma are the intra-psychic dynamics of defence, adaptation, coping, and working A (R 0 through; the mechanisms at the cultural level are mainly those of social agents and contending groups." LO What does it mean that trauma is cultural? There is a gap between the event and its representation: this gap is the trauma process. As Alexander points out, for trauma to emerge at cultural level a new master narrative has to be successfully established by a carrier group who "projects the trauma claim to the audience-public." A successful process of collective representation of the traumatic event has to deal with the following questions: (a) the nature of the pain; (b) the nature of the victim; (c) relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience; (d) attribution of responsibility. The cultural trauma model refers also to the institutional arenas where the trauma's meanings are produced. Six different types of arena are considered: religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, mass media, and state bureaucracy arena. Alexander's essay offers the analytical framework to study theoretically and empirically the process through which the trauma is taking its shape in the public discourse. Through the trauma process the collective memories and the national identities are also affected. However, the theory of cultural trauma raises some questions which deserve to be further investigated: in some national contexts it might happen that the access to one institutional arena is systematically denied (for example, the aesthetic codes are the only ones available to represent traumatic events). What will be the consequences of the systematic exclusion of the legal or the mass media arena in terms of public sphere? Moreover how does the concept of power enter into this model? Alexander clarifies that different social networks will provide different access to the distribution of material and symbolic resources: "the constraints imposed by institutional arenas are mediated by the uneven distribution of material resources and the social networks that provide differential access to them" (Alexander et al. 2004, 21). A very critical point has to do with the generalisability of the theory: a "middle-range theory," as it is defined. However Alexander clarifies that "It would be a serious misunderstanding if trauma theory were restricted in its reference to Western social life" (Alexander et al. 2004, 24). The author mentions the example of the rape of Nanking, whose memories have never extended beyond China. According to his perspective, the lack of recognising traumas and inscribing their lessons into the public sphere would depend on an inability to carry through ... the trauma process. In Japan and China, just as in Rwanda, Cambodia and Guatemala, claims have certainly been made for the central relevance of these "distant sufferings" .... But for both social structural and cultural reasons, carrier groups have not emerged with the resources, authority, or interpretive competence to powerfully disseminate these trauma claims (Alexander et al. 2004, 27). However, Alexander's conclusion does not refer at all to a middle-range theory: Collective traumas have no geographical or cultural limitations. The theory of cultural trauma applies, without prejudice, to any and all instances when societies have, or have not, constructed and experienced cultural traumatic events, and to their efforts to draw, or not to draw, the moral lessons that can be said to emanate from them. The proposed generalisability of the theory to non-Western societies represents a very complex issue. The inability to carry through the trauma process seems to be a misleading concept when applied to non-Western societies. The first condition to meet in order to carry through the trauma process is to have the collective (and national) power to do it. It is difficult to imagine that it would be possible, for instance, in some African societies where the victims are still victims, where the destiny of the entire population is not decided within the national context, but on the contrary depends on the international exploitation of the national resources. Moreover after the post-colonial debate it seems very problematic to consider theories elaborated on Western societies as a model to generalise, without setting any specific cultural and geographical limits. In this respect, it is highlighting the essay by Bradford Vivian published in Framing Public Memory. It refers to the Gipsy collective memory, arguing that the "relationship among place, history, and community assume a different character in the context of Gypsy collective memory" (Phillips 2004, 191). For the Gypsy the experience of passing time is dramatically different: they have no history, they live in a permanent present. The essay aims at documenting "the fragmented and dispersed mnemonic conditions - the lack of a transcendent origin, the distrust of archival memory, the highly mutable and often elliptical nature of cultural folktales - that prevent Gypsy identity, culture, or memory from achieving the stable or uniform sense and value that such phenomena acquire in Western communities" (p. 195). Gipsy communities lack an evident investment in the power of the past: "not even the horrors of the Holocaust could induce a lasting commemorative consciousness in Gipsy culture" (p. 197). When there is no tradition of commemoration, when forgetting is not a form of defeat or resignation, but on the contrary represents a politics of remembering different from that we are used to, we have to reconsider the relation between cultural trauma, past and national identities. Even if the idea that we have to remember the past to avoid its coming back is very central to the democratic societies, we cannot take it for granted when we are referring to other cultures. "The Gipsy art of forgetting ... suggests a political response to a democratic politics of memory, which, in labouring to remember the past so as not to repeat it, reproduces familiar forms of exclusion by endowing particular kinds of memory with political priority" (p. 198). The cultural trauma theory becomes a powerful framework of analysis, only if it is able to consider its own limits of generalisability. To carry through the trauma process implies certain definitions and conceptions of time (viewed as dynamic relation between past, present and future) and memories. However, definitions of time and memory differ a lot between different societies: they are unstable, fragmented, and nomadic. Alexander and Vivian (Philips 2004) offer to the reader two different ap-^ proaches to the problem of how social memory works in different cultural settings. While Alexander's position pretends to be "universalistic," but seems to extend the Western model of work memory to non-Western societies, Vivian position raises the unsolved question of the multicultural meaning of memory. For example, the question of collective debt is frequently raised in international settings and adjudicated in international courts. If the collective meaning of sharing a common past differs widely across culture (as in the case of Gipsy culture, studied by Vivian), to what 0 £ C > extent such international institutions might represent valid and adequate means to intervene in the memory work of a minority? And how might these international institutions become more culturally sensitive?1 il KD 00 The Public Memory of Shoah: German and American National Identities The structure of the volumes considered here (a multi-authored book and a reader) indicates that a variety of interesting case-studies on very different topics are presented. However, for reasons of brevity it is necessary to focus on specific cases which authors of both volumes have dealt with. The two main topics considered here will be the public memory of Shoah and its interpretation in terms of cultural trauma in different national contexts, and the case of American national identity constructed in relation to its two most relevant cultural traumas: slavery and September 11. In both volumes several essays deal specifically with Shoah as traumatic reference for national identities. Bernhard Giesen in his essay "The Trauma of Perpetrators," published in the Cultural Trauma volume, analyses what happens when national and collective identities have necessarily to refer to very traumatic pasts rather than to national triumphs, like in the German case. He stresses the necessity to investigate not only the trauma of victims but also that of perpetrators. How was it possible after the Shoah to construct German national identity? The public inscription of the Shoah in the German national identity went through different phases. The postwar Germany responded to the disclosure of the Shoah by a denial of the trauma: "A tacitly assumed coalition of silence provided the first national identity after the war. Everyone assumed that the others, too, had supported the Nazi regime and would therefore agree to be silent about their common shame" (Alexander et al. 2004, 116). However, as not everyone could be co-opted into the coalition of silence, the German public discourse required quite soon a new narrative, which was based on the demonisation of Nazism: Hitler was transformed into a monster. An interesting part of the essay refers to the role played by different German generations in carrying through the trauma process: when the generation born after the war entered the political stage, they faced their families with annoying questions. They identified themselves with the victims persecuted by the Nazi regime and wanted to know about the guilt of their parents. The generational conflict was a necessary resource to construct a credible moral distance to the guilt of previous generations who had supported the Nazi regime. The notion of guilt itself was questioned: "Diese Schande nimmt uns niemand ab" was the slogan of a whole generation. The kneeling of Willy Brandt in Warsaw in 1970, during the visit to the monument for the Jews victims of the ghetto, became a symbol of recent German history. As Giesen points out, "Brandt took the burden of the collective guilt of the nation although he was innocent as a person" (Alexander et al. 2004, 131). As Willy Brand had no personal interests or involvements with Shoah, his humiliation represents the first step in the process of reconciliation between the nation of the victims and the nation of perpetrators. After Brand's gesture the public confession of guilt has become a new pattern of constructing national identities. The politics of apology and the rituals of public confession of guilt provide nowadays a way of getting the recognition of national identity. Also Barry Schwartz and Horst- Alfred Heinrich in their essay deal with the politics of regret and apology. They note that during the last decade this pattern of constructing national identities has been very widespread. To apologise for past atrocities is destined to become a new mode of international relations between nations. The two authors have carried out a survey among American and German university students "to determine how different combination of culture and historical experience lead to different perspectives on personal responsibility" (Phillips 2004, 117). The results of the survey are interesting and methodologically accurate2: the way in which German and American students deny and affirm their responsibility for very shameful and dishonouring pasts (such as slavery and Shoah) are very different. While German students tend to recognise more often their collective responsibility for the past, American ones do not tend to feel guilty. "I wasn't born yet" reflects more the American way of dealing with responsibility for past atrocities rather than the German way. The context of regret depends on cultural pattern and this study documents how these patterns are rooted in national identities. Alexander in his essay "On the Social Construction of Moral Universals," published in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, further analyzes the ways in which Shoah became transformed into a symbol of moral evil. His analysis is focused on the narratives used to code the Holocaust in the American public discourse after the discovery of the Nazi atrocities committed upon Jews. As he points out, no trauma interprets itself; before trauma can be experienced at the collective (not individual) level, there are essential questions that must be answered, and answers to those questions change over time. ... For a traumatic event to have the status of evil is a matter of its becoming evil. It is a matter of how the trauma is known, how it is coded. ... Becoming evil is a matter, first and foremost, of representation (Alexander et al. 2004, 201-202). The necessary condition to construct this representation of Nazi atrocities in terms of evil is that the means of symbolic production were controlled by the triumphant America, and not by a victorious post-war Nazi regime. The culture structure was created by representing Nazi as the Absolute Evil. Alexander clearly documents the role played by the American public's reactions to the Kristallnacht anti-Jews violence. The idea to fight against Nazi becomes transformed into the anti-anti-Semitism: in other terms, to fight against the evil means to fight for the Jews. The author analyses the emergence of different narratives used to frame the Shoah in the American public discourse. The first is called the progressive narrative, and its principal carrier group is "the nation that in the immediate post-war world most conspicuously took the lead in building the new world upon the ashes of the hold. Q ... The goal was focused, not on the Holocaust, but on the need to purge post-war society of Nazilike pollution" (Alexander et al. 2004, 221). The second narrative is the tragic code, which represents a new cultural configuration. The new culture structure differs from the previous one mainly because of its attempt to deepening the evil: "In the formation of this new culture structure, the coding of the Jewish mass killings as evil remained, but its weighting substantially changed. It became Q burdened with extraordinary gravitas ... as evil on a scale that had never occurred J before. The mass killings entered into universal history" (p. 222). The author suggests that the Jewish mass killing become a sort of sacred-evil in Durkheimian terms: something so radical that it should be set apart from any other traumatising event. Another trait of this new cultural configuration of Shoah is the inexplicability, 00 the mystery and the irrationality of what happened. Within this new narrative the 00 U S trauma is renamed to point out its absolute difference from any other war atrocity. The terms Holocaust and Shoah become part of the contemporary language. While C^ in the progressive narrative the mass killings were conceived as the beginning of a new era, where those atrocities would be no more possible, in the tragic narrative the Jewish mass-killings become an event out-of-history and out-of-time. The trauma drama of the Holocaust has a kind of mythical status and its message is that: "evil is inside all of us, and in every society. If we are all the victims, and all the perpetrators, then there is no audience that can legitimately distance itself from collective suffering, either from its victims or its perpetrators" (p. 229). The author documents how during the following decades Western democracies were forced to loose control of the means of symbolic production in the telling of this story: during the 1960s and the 1970s with the Vietnam war and particularly with the My Lai Massacre in 1968 (where civilians and children were killed by the American soldiers in Vietnam) America could no more present herself as "the purified protagonist in the worldwide struggle against evil ... the morality of American leadership in World War II came to be questioned in a manner that established polluting analogies with Nazism" (p. 239). The last step in the cultural transformation of the Holocaust is represented by its transformation into a bridging metaphor: the trauma drama of Shoah is generalised and it is linked to universal human rights. In the last paragraph Alexander raises an important question on the relevance of the Holocaust trauma as symbol of universal rights in non-Western areas. The lessons of post-Shoah morality are very central in the foundation of Western democracies, but what about non-Western societies? The author asks himself: "Can countries or civilizations that do not acknowledge the Holocaust develop universalistic political moralities? ... It might also be the case that non-Western nations could develop trauma dramas that are functional equivalents to the Holocaust" (p. 262). Even if this answer is very reasonable, it seems to not consider a relevant point. As already argued, the cultural trauma model and its interesting application to the empirical case of the Holocaust implies specific (Western) politics of memory and forgetting, and specific (Western) definitions of time that cannot be taken for granted. They are also culturally defined, and we cannot sociologically imagine to generalise them to non-Western cultures without running the risk of the imperialistic fallacy, as the essay by Bradford Vivian (Phillips 2004) points out. Also Biesecker's contribution, published in the Public Memory volume, deals with Shoah and World War II: the point of view is that of the American winners who still in 2004 refer to their victory against the Nazi regime as a positive element for the constitution of their national identity. Barbara Biesecker, by analysing the construction of the World War II Memorial on the sacred ground between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument (the memorial has been dedicated on May 29, 2004), studies the contemporary World War II formation and its role in renovating the American identity. In 2004, when the memorial is dedicated, the successful victory against the Nazi brutality and the triumph of American soldiers against German ones during the World War II becomes a renewed reference for the American national identity, and functions as a "veiled conservative response to the contemporary crisis of national identity, to our failing sense of what it means to be an American and to do things the so-called American way" (Phillips 2004, 238). Cultural Traumas in American National Identity The relation between cultural trauma and American national identity is further explored by referring to two other crucial events: the public memory of slavery and September 11. Ron Eyerman in his essay "Cultural trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity," published in the Cultural Trauma volume, synthesises the different steps in the process of formation of African American identity: "The notion of a unique African American identity emerged in the post-Civil War period, after slavery had been abolished. ... Slavery formed the root of an emergent collective identity though an equally emergent collective memory ... . It was the memory of slavery and its representation through speech and art works that grounded African American identity and permitted its institutionalization in organizations." The author analyses the interconnection between the emergence of the African American identity and the ways in which public memory of slavery is inscribed into the American public discourse. The representation of slavery in public discourse, the cultural shapes of this public memory (such as literature, music, the plastic arts, and movies) are crucial in the memory work necessary to elaborate the cultural trauma. Also in this case, like in the German trauma of perpetrators analysed by Giesen, the role of generations and the cycle of generational memory play a very relevant role. The memory of slavery is at the beginning a counter-memory in Foucaultian terms: "In the 1880s, as the dreams of full citizenship and cultural integration were quashed, the meaning of slavery would emerge as the issue of an identity conflict" (Alexander et al. 2004, 76). In this perspective slavery is a point of origin, a common past that grounds the constituency of the black community. Over the decades the progressive and the tragic narratives represent two different codes to interpret this cultural trauma. Several generations of American blacks have rediscovered their blackness and their slave past, by reworking the cultural trauma. The collective identification "African American" can be accepted nowadays without denying the distinctive and relatively autonomous collective history of black Americans. While the authors of the Cultural Trauma volume were finishing the last chapters, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 occurred. The publication of the book was postponed to include the chapter "September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma" written £ by Neil Smelser on this actual drama. Sztompka in his essay "The Trauma of Social Change" published in the same volume, defines trauma as "sudden, comprehensive, fundamental, and unexpected." September 11 had all these ingredients, and Americans perceived it from the beginning as the greatest trauma in the American history. There is an immediate sense of the indelibility of the trauma: the world's history will be divided into pre-September 11 and post-September 11 period. The terrorist attacks in Manhattan have altered American national identity forever and this circumstance is acknowledged from the beginning by the most relevant public yj interpreters of the event. The burst of solidarity is the national response to the attacks: "We are all New Yorkers" is the symbol of the public reactions of American citizens. The two main questions to raise, according to Smelser, are: "What insights about the events of September 11 can be generated in light of what we know about cultural trauma in general? What implications do the national reactions to September 11 have for our theoretical and empirical understandings of the notion of cultural trauma?" (Alexander 2004 et al., 265). The essay is written four months ^ after September 11, and it is very complex to interpret an event with so little tem- 0 £ C > poral distance. However, the cultural trauma model is positively verified also in the case of the attacks to the Twin Towers. The author reconsiders his hypothesis according to which "It is not possible to derive the nature of a traumatic response from the 'external' characteristics of the traumatizing event. The character of the traumatic response must also be found in the context . into which it comes to be embedded" (p. 270). Smelser documents how the specific narratives used to carry the trauma process depend on the American context, where the trauma has occurred ("The reactions to similar events in other national contexts would have unfolded differently"). As in the case of Pearl Harbor, America has gained after September 11 a newfound innocent national identity that will be used to frame the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. However if one considers the succeeding steps of this public memory, the photographs coming from the prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have changed a lot the worldwide narrative of September 11. The American moral superiority among nations and people is again under question and will provoke a reworking of the narratives used to carry through the trauma process, a trauma whose means of symbolic production will not be controlled for any longer only by a unique antagonist. The essay "The Voice of the Visual in Memory" by Barbie Zelizer published in the public memory volume, also addresses the drama of September 11, but not as its central topic. The author raises the question on how images work: the relation between camera and memory is very complex and has been analysed by Zelizer also in her previous work (1998). When photographs shape the past, difficulties arise: "At best photographs are arbitrary, composite, conventionalized, and simplified glimpses of the past. . 'Voice' offers a useful way of making sense of the image's role in memory ... voice helps explain how the image takes on an already provided meaning upon its initial appearance. In this regard, voice can be seen as an assist that help us understand both the image's third meaning and the role of contingency in visual memory" (Phillips 2004, 160-162). The about-to-die moment images are analysed by Zelizer as typical ways to address death using the subjective voice of camera: "By freezing the representation of death before people actually die, we mark the moment before death, rather then after, as the most powerful and memorable moment of representation in the sequencing of events surrounding human demise" (p. 165). The about-to-die image reflects our irrational hope that something different may happen and the death may not occur. Among others, the author analyses some images of people about-to-die in the World Trade Center. The first is a photograph taken by Richard Drew where an unidentified man jumps to his death from one of the towers, and the second image is taken by Jeff Christiensen and shows people hanging out of the World Trade Center: they are poised between death by fire and death by jumping. These kind of images were reprinted widely only during the first few days, and are soon replaced by images of the burning towers. As Zelizer points out, The substitution of buildings for people as the preferred representation of the about-to-die moment in the World Trade Center attacks makes sense when considering the role of the subjunctive in the popular imagination. Viewing the raw horror of bodies tumbling to their death was clearly problematic because their harsh depiction overwhelmed the subjunctive possibility of muting the finality of death for viewers. The buildings, by contrast, prolonged that subjunctive response, softening the reality of the response with the improbable - but comforting - sense that time might have thwarted death's intention (in Phillips 2004, 179). Conclusions Framing Public Memory and Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity represent two relevant contributions to the analysis of the relation between collective memories, public discourse, and collective identities. The Cultural Trauma book presents a high theoretical coherence between different essays, which articulate the cultural trauma theory in its relevant dimensions and apply it to different empirical cases (slavery, Holocaust, postcommunist societies, September 11). The main risk of the volume (especially in the first Alexander's essay "Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma") seems to be the potential imperialistic fallacy of the cultural trauma model, if extended and applied to multicultural contexts, without considering for example the different meanings of having a common past across cultures. Phillip's book is based on the proceedings of an interdisciplinary conference held at the Syracuse University. Even if several essays are highly interesting, at the end the book seems to lack of a powerful theory of the functioning of public memory. The relation between memory and public discourse is analysed in details with reference to specific case studies, such as the journalists' use of images to represent the drama of the World Trade Center. The inter-disciplinarity of the book has an unexpected outcome: while the empirical studies are carried out within sociological, anthropological and communication frameworks, the more theoretical chapters are written by philosophers. Casey's distinction between individual, collective, social and public memory is not convincing, as it subverts Halbwachs' and Namer's more consolidated definitions. His chapter provides only partially a general theory of public memory that the volume would deserve. However, the book represents an important contribution to our understanding of how public memory is framed, and will be framed. As regards the future of this concept, several questions remain open and will y need to be further investigated; one of them is related to the role of new technologies. Historical websites and memories on line represent an increasing trend in most European and Western societies, providing a sort of "hand-made history" with several problems deriving from the controversial quality of the sources and historical data. To what extent commemorative and historical websites will challenge the current notion of public memory? Will they change the relation between memory and public sphere? To what extent will they affect the processes through which the past is inscribed into the public knowledge of our societies? During the last decade public memory has become a very used concept in the study of the past and it seems that it will be destined to keep its centrality for longer. The main problem is that we need to define this concept in a more accurate way, so to better clarify its semantic distance from more consolidated concepts, such as social memory and collective memory. Notes: ß 1. I wish to thank anonymous referees for all their comments and especially for this example. II fN 2. The research is based on a survey in which the authors found out that "German responses to the question about American responsibility depended on question order. When the question about American responsibility for slavery appeared before the question about German Holocaust responsibility, four percent of German students agreed that Americans are responsible for historical f^ wrongs. When the question about American responsibility appeared after the question about ^ German responsibility, the percentage of German students agreeing that Americans are responsible rose to 13.5 percent" (Phillips 2004, 132). However, it could be also argued that the comparison between the two different pasts is problematic. The immigration processes in USA at the beginning of the last century have radically changed the composition of the population. A relevant portion of American citizens were not American at the time of slavery. This might be another reason for the minor sense of personal guilty of Americans in comparison to the German case. References: Assmann, Jan. 1992. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. München: Beck'sche. Bodnar, John. 1993. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Bodnar, John. 1996. Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in Cleveland. In J. R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations. The Politics of National Identities, 74-90. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Exploration in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eyerman, Ron. 2001. Cultural Trauma. Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Felman, Shoshana. 1995. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes ofTeachers. In C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Exploration in Memory, 13-60. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1968. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hobsbawn, Eric J. and Trevor Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jedlowski, Paolo. 2002. Memorie. Temi e problemi della sociologia della memoria nel XX secolo. Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 3, 373-392. Koselleck, Reinhard. 1979. Vergangene Zukunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Laub, Dori. 1995. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle. In C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Exploration in Memory, 61-75. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middleton, David and Derek Edwards, eds. 1990. Collective Remembering. London: Sage. Namer, Gérard. 1991. Memoria sociale e memoria collettiva. Una rilettura di Halbwachs. In P. Jedlowski, M. Rampazi (eds.), Il senso del passato. Per una sociologia della memoria. Milano: Angeli. Norkunas, Martha K. 1993. The Politics of Public Memory. Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schudson, Michael. 1993. Watergate in American Memory. New York: Basic Books. Schwartz, Barry. 1982. The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory. Social Forces 61, 2, 374-402. Tota, Anna Lisa. 2005. Counter-Memories ofTerror: Technologies of Remembering and Technologies of Forgetting. In M. Jacobs and N. Hanharan (eds.), Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin. 1996. Memories in the Making: The Shapes ofThings That Went. Qualitative Sociology 19, 3, 301-21. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin and Barry Schwartz. 1991. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past. American Journal of Sociology 97, 2, 376-420. Zelizer, Barbie. 1998. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zolberg, Vera. 1996. Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair. In S. Macdonald and G. Fyfe (eds.), Theorizing Museums. Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, 69-82. Oxford: Blackwell. 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Checks should be made payable to EURICOM. American Express, MasterCard/Eurocard, Visa, and bank cheques are accepted. Send subscriptions to: EURICOM, Kardeljeva pl. 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija, fax: +386 1 5805 106, or use the subscription form at our web site http://www.euricom.si i 0 £ * i * (R 0 C « Javnost—The Public ORDER FORM Please enter our/my subscription for the following year: 2006 2007 2008 •EHZrtt^Č Name/Institution_ Address 1 g S City__________ Zip/Postcode_ Credit Card No. Exp. Date _____ State_ Visa QJ Mastercard | | _Signaturei___ American Express □ -J ISKANJE ZDRAVE DRUŽBE: PRISPEVEK ERICHA FROMMA K TEORIJI DRUŽBE BONNIE BRENNEN Več kot 50 let po prvi objavi je Frommova knjiga Zdrava družba še vedno pomembno in presenetljivo sodobno delo, posebej relevantno za raziskovalce na področju teorije družbe in medijskih študij. Frommov glavni poudarek je na ocenjevanju duševnega zdravja zahodnih družb, ki državljanom pogosto odrekajo temeljne človeške potrebe po produktivnem delovanju, samoudejanitvi, svobodi in ljubezni. Meni, da duševnega zdravja ni mogoče ocenjevati abstraktno, ampak z vidika specifičnih ekonomskih, socialnih in političnih dejavnikov v dani družbi ter njihovega prispevka k duševni zmedenosti ali stabilnosti. Zdrava družba predstavlja radikalno kritiko demokratičnega kapitalizma, ko razkriva korenine odtujitve in razkriva poti za transformacijo sodobnih družb v smeri spodbujanja produktivnega delovanja državljanov. Fromm si zamišlja preoblikovanje demokratičnih kapitalističnih družb na temelju komunitar-nega socializma, ki poudarja organizacijo dela in družbenih odnosov med državljani namesto lastninske pravice. COBISS 1.02 STUDIRATI MARCUSEJA BEVERLY JAMES Marcusejevo klasično delo Enodimenzionalni človek (1964) je bila obvezna literatura generacije študentov, ki jih je intelektualno zaznamovalo leto 1968. Zaradi nejgovega najbolj branega dela je New York Times označil Marcuseja za "najodličnejši literarni simbol nove levice". V kasnejših desetletjih sta zaton ameriškega univerzitetnega študija in poblagovljenje izobraževanja Marcusejevo priljubljenost močno zmanjšala. Članek ugotavlja, da je Enodimenzionalni človek zelo relevanten za sodobno geenracijo študentov, ker daje teoretske pojme pomembne za razumevanje sodobnih problemov. Trendi, ki jih je Marcuse opisoval v šestdesetih letih, so se pospešeno nadaljevali, tako da so njegovi ključni argumenti bolj relevantni kot kdajkoli, ko gre za študij novinarstva, oglaševanja in kulture. Marcuse navaja številne primere v prid svojim argumentom in članek kaže, da je njegove ilustracije zlahka mogoče posodobiti. Članek predlaga pet osnovnih tem, ki so posebej relevatne za sodobne razmere: prave in neprave potrebe, odsotnost razredne zavesti, zavezništvo politične oblasti in kapitala, militarizem ter avtoritarni jezik. ^^ o LO COBISS 1.02 I- LU N PRISPEVEK HUGHA DALZIELA DUNCANA K TOERIJI KOMUNIKATIVNEGA DELOVANJA ED MCLUSKIE V šestdesetih letih je Hugh Duncan v ZDA vrnil v življenje pozabljeno teorijo komuniciranja, njegovo delo pa je potem spet šlo v pozabo. Perspektiva in senzibilnost simboličnega inter-akcionizma sta v ZDA utonili v pozabo vsaj dvakrat v 20. stoletju. Duncanova teza o komuniciranju in družebenem redu ni doživela priznanja zaradi prizadevanja, da bi proučevanje oblasti, hierahije in moči postavil v središče komunikativne interakcije. Duncanovo delo je bilo kritika raziskovanja komuniciranja; izhajal je iz pozabljene tradicije, ki jo je poskušal oživiti. Disciplina se je odrekla ideji komuniciranja v prid nepovezanim pojmom, za kar je Duncan krivil evropske učenjake, ki so sicer ponujali najboljše pojasnitve družbenega reda do prihoda simboličnega interakcionizma in filozofskega pragmatizma. Članek predstavlja Duncanovo teorijo komuniciranja kot teorijo družbe in predlaga njeno kritično vključitev v zgodovino idej, ki opozarja na pomembne predpostavke, ki jih ima teorizacija komuniciranja, kadar ga obravnava ali ne obravnava v odnosu do moči. COBISS 1.02 INNIS IN NOVICE ROBERT BABE ^ Medijska spoznanja kanadskega ekonomskega zgodovinarja in političnega ekonomista Harolda Adamsa Innisa (1894-1952) so po dolgoletnem zapostavljanju v zadnjem času privzeli avtorji, ki obravnvajo medije kot ključne dejavnike v družbenem, političnem in kulturnem razvoju, teoretiki medijskega in kulturnega imperializma ter (ironično) postmodernisti in poststrukturalisti. Članek najprej ponuja pregled dveh Innisovih temeljnih področij proučevanja - vloge surovin v kanadskem ekonomskem razvoju ter vloge medijev v svetovni zgodovini. Slednja se povezuje s sodobnimi teorijami medijev in odvisnosti ter postmodernimi diskurzi. Drugi del članka obravnava Innisovo kritično analizo tiskovnih sistemov. Razprava povezuje obe njegovi osnovni področji in ekstrapolira njegovo analizo v sedanjost in tako pokaže globoko zaskrbljenost, ki bi jo najbrž izražal zaradi omejenosti sodobnih medijev in kulture na sedanjost. Članek tudi (R poudarja Innisovo materialistično razumevanje kulture in družbenih odnosov. 0 UD 0 £ COBISS 1.02 JOURNALISTS AT WORK - PONOVNA OCENA HOWARD TUMBER cn Članek obravnava pomen enega izmed najustvarjalnejših del Jeremy Tunstalla - knjige Journalists at Work, ki je prvič izšla leta 1971. To je bilo prva pomembna družboslovna študija novinarjev v Veliki Britaniji. Tunstall je raziskavo začel leta 1965, ko ni bilo še niti ene študije britanskega novinarstva. Njegova študija je proučevala specializirane odbiralce novic v nacionalnih dnevnikih in zajela okrog petnajst odstotkov novinarjev teh časopisov oz. dva odstotka vseh britanskih novinarjev. Članek obravnava tri vidike Tunstallove študije: novičarske organizacije in njihove cilje, odnos medijev do virov ter novinarsko profesijo, poleg tega pa še kotekst in metodološko zasnovo raziskave. COBISS 1.02 LUDOVICO SILVA IN PREMIK H KRITIČNI DRŽI V LATINSKOAMERIŠKIH KOMUNIKACIJSKIH ŠTUDIJAH JORGE ALBERTO CALLES-SANTILLANA Kljub velikemu intelektualnemu vplivu v sedemdesetih letih 20. stoletja je Ludovico Silva skoraj povsem pozabljen celo v lastni domovini Venezueli. Njegovo osnovno področje je bila teorija ideologije, kjer je oporekal uradnemu marksizmu in levičarskim politikom tistega časa. Izhajajoč iz Marxovega razlikovanja med uporabno in menjalno vrednostjo je Silva dokazoval, da potrebuje marksistična kategorija presežne vrednosti ekvivalent v simbolnem svetu in je razvil idejo ideološkega presežka, da bi zavrnil mehanične interpretacije ideologije. Silva je prispeval k razvoju latinskoameriških komunikacijskih študij z vključevanjem moči in dominacije kot strukturnih sil v oblikovanju družbenih odnosov. Ideološka moč medijev je postala najpomembnejše področje medijskih študij, ki so problematizirale vrednost tedaj prevladujočega funkcionalističnega in kvantitativnega raziskovanja medijskih učinkov. Članek v zgodovinski perspektivi ponovno odkriva njegovo delo in poudarja njegovo intelektualno zavezanost resnici ter njegov prispevek k odmikanju latinskoameriških komunikacijskih študij od konvencionalne akademske drže v smerii kritičnega raziskovanja. COBISS 1.02 RECENZIJA JAVNO SPOMINJANJE IN KULTURNA TRAVMA ANNA LISA TOTA Prispevek ocenjuje naslednji knjigi: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka: Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004; Kendall R. Phillips (ur.): Framing Public Memory. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004. COBISS 1.19 £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (R 0 C i 00 NAVODILA ZA SODELAVCE Rokopisi Opremljenost besedil. Besedila pošiljajte na 3,5-palčni disketi v ASCII kodi in v programu WordPerfect, Word ali WordStar ter v treh iztiskanih izvodih. Zaradi anonimnega recenziranja naj bodo imena avtorjev le na posebni naslovni strani pod naslovom prispevka, skupaj s polnimi naslovi avtorjev s telefonsko številko ter z izjavo, da predloženo besedilo še ni bilo objavljeno oz. ni v pripravi za tisk. Dolžina besedil. 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Urednik lahko brez zunanjega recenziranja zavrne objavo neustreznega članka. Reference, opombe in citati Reference v besedilu. Osnovna oblika reference v besedilu je (Novak 1994). Za navajanje strani uporabite (Novak 1994, 7-8). Če je več avtorjev citiranega besedila, navedite vse (Novak, Kolenc in Anderson 1993, 67). Za citiranje več referenc hkrati uporabite podpičje (Novak 1994; Kosec 1932; Kosec 1934a; Kosec 1934b). Opombe. Opombe so v besedilu označene z zaporednimi številkami od začetka do konca besedila, nadpi-sanimi na ustreznem mestu v rokopisu, in po enakem vrstnem redu razvrščene na koncu besedila pred referencami. Opombe uporabljajte tudi za neobičajne vire. Opomba o avtorju in zahvale vključujejo informacije o organizacijski povezanosti avtorja (avtorjev), ki so relevantne za obravnavano problematiko, o finan-čnih in drugih pomočeh pri pripravi članka. Seznam referenc Seznam referenc iz besedila sledi opombam in je urejen po abecednem redu priimkov avtorjev. Reference knjig in prispevkov v zbornikih: Novak, Janez. 1982. Naslov knjige: Morebitni podnaslov. Kraj: Založba. Novak, Janez in Peter Kodre. 1967. Naslov knjige. Kraj: Založba. Novak, Janez. 1993. Naslov prispevka. V P. Koder (ur.), Naslov zbornika, 123-145. Kraj: Založba. Reference člankov: Novak, Janez. 1991. Naslov članka. Ime revije 2, 265-287. NOTES FOR AUTHORS Manuscripts Manuscript Preparation. Manuscripts must be submitted in triplicate, in English or Slovene, together with an IBM compatible computer disk copy (3,5") in Word-Perfect, Word, WordStar, or ASCII. To facilitate blind re-view, names and affiliations of authors should be listed on a separate title sheet. Length. Maximum length of articles is 50,000 characters, other contributions may not exceed 25,000 characters. Titles. Titles of articles should be concise and descriptive and should not exceed one hundred characters. 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Use "et al." when citing a work by more than three authors (Novak et al. 1994). The letters a, b, c, etc. should be used to distinguish different citations by the same author in the same year (Kosec 1934a; Kosec 1934b). Notes. Essential notes, or citations of unusual sour-ces, should be indicated by superscript numbers in the text and collected on a separate page at the end of the article. Author Notes and Acknowledgements. Author notes identify authors by complete name, title, and affi-liation. Acknowledgements may include information about financial support and other assistance in preparing the manuscript. Reference List All references cited in the text should be listed alphabetically and in full after the notes. References to Books or Part of Books: Novak, Janez. 1982. Title of the Book: With Subtitle. Place: Publisher. Novak, Janez and Peter Kodre. 1967. Title of the Book. Place: Publisher. Novak, Janez. 1993. Title of the Chapter. In P. Koder (ed.), Title of the Book, 123-145. Place: Publisher. References to Journals: Novak, Janez. 1991. Title of Article. Name of Journal 2, 265-287. the1! l &n (O Izdajatelj: Fakulteta za družbene vede Univerze v Ljubljani za Evropski inštitut za komuniciranje in kulturo Published by Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, for the European Institute for Communication and Culture Editor Slavko Splichal Glavni urednik Cover Design Slavko Splichal Miran Klenovšek Medja Karlson Oblikovanje naslovnice Miran Klenovšek Typesetting Medja Karlson Karmen Zahariaš Računalniški prelom Karmen Zahariaš Tisk LITTERA PICTA d.o.o. Rožna dolina c. IV/32-34 Ljubljana Printing LITTERA PICTA d.o.o. Rožna dolina c. IV/32-34 Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia 2006 Ljubljana 2006