Crafting Society

Ethnicity, Class, and Communication Theory

Donald G. Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780805832730
• eBook ISBN: 9781135706241
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

The study of communication, language, and discourse is at once simple, elegant, and complex. Each of these areas is informed by "micro" subjective experiences of individuals and the "macro" processes of a culture. Communication itself is thoroughly modern yet it seeks anchorage in the traditions of the humanities and social sciences. All of this creates a significant challenge.

In this monograph, Ellis considers the study of communication as he discusses three key issues in communication theory: (1) the growing emphasis on meaning, (2) the importance of a mediated culture, and (3) the links between micro communication activities and macro social categories such as ethnicity and social class. In response to these three issues, this book deals with the way people use language and communication to construct their world; this world is not constructed purely but is influenced by attitudes, ideologies, and biases. In the modern world the medium of communication has an impact on consciousness and society, and Ellis shows how the media are responsible for some of the fault lines in society. The book also explores principles of medium theory and documents the impact of media on psychological and sociological phenomena. Finally, work of Goffman, Giddens, and Randall Collins is extended to show how micro communication behaviors are implicated in and by social conditions.

ADDITIONAL COPY FOR MAILER
Expanded features:
* The chapters work out a logic connecting real communication patterns with the broad principles upon which societies are explored. Thus the title "Crafting" Society--the crafting is purposefully active to indicate the dynamic processes involved in creating what we call society. Society and culture have their roots and empirical bases in communication; that is, in the daily struggles of interaction.
* Two chapters on two of the most important and controversial issues of the day--ethnicity and class. These two chapters are clear illustrations of the new theoretical principles discussed throughout the book.
* A chapter on social class is very unique for a book devoted to communication processes. Communication theorists do not usually write about class, even though it is a highly symbolic process and rooted in communication patterns. Class is a difficult concept in America since so few people, other than sociologists, care to talk about it.
* A chapter on medium theory takes the bold step of experimenting a little by summarizing basic causal statements and propositions. This device underscores the goal of a theory which is to come to grips with testable statements. The focus is on medium theory and how the media influence consciousness and social structure.
* A unique chapter takes up the issue of how communication processes are constitutive of social structures. It draws on work by Giddens and others to return to a concept of structure based on actions that produce and reproduce structure.

1
Constructing Commumcation Theory

A statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

—Ezra Pound

The goal of this volume is to continually patrol the boundary between more microindividual processes and macrosocial processes. Human communication is at the root of social categories and structures. The experiences humans have in their past contacts with one another become the subjective attitudes and intentions of the future. As people talk, argue, and persuade one another, they realign resources and thereby restructure their relationships so that social groups and processes get renegotiated and reformed. This is the basis for social change and reality. This chapter demonstrates that language cannot be separated from social life, and is logically connected to it. It is critical of constructionist tendencies in communication and suggests a realist science of communication.

Since the Enlightenment, understanding, both lay and scientific, has been a process occurring in the mental world. This perspective surfaces in present times as logical empiricism. Interestingly, social scientists have been so quick to hinge their theories to observables that a language of mental representational states has not been forthcoming, and what is postulated is quite hypothetical. Although theorists such as Piaget and Chomsky are associated with the cognitive revolution, their constructs and assumptions about cognition are easily reduced to a computational metaphor.

The traditional “mental world” position has three assumptions, each of which is problematic. There is the correspondence assumption that the active cognitive agent reflects and corresponds to the external world in some substantial way. Knowledge is carried around in the cognitive system, and understanding is more or less “correct” to the extent that it matches the objective world. Next is the generative assumption. This is the notion that cognition directs behavior. Learning is very important because as you increase the quantity and quality of your cognitive content, your behavior becomes “better” or more “correct.” The third assumption is the linguistic representation assumption. This is the implication that language is directed by cognition and therefore reflects the external world. Correct, true, and accurate communication is possible.

It is certainly the case that simplistic traditionalist views of cognition and reality have been supplanted by more sophisticated theories that account for the development of “subjective” reality. In Groeben (1990), for example, the argument is made that the cognitive structure of a scientist is the same as a lay person. Language is seen as a guide to knowledge such that it is possible to make accurate inferences from language to cognitive structure and content. Everyone must make everyday assumptions about understanding, and some are better at it than others. The traditional relationship between language and cognition assumes pictures of reality that are more accurate than others. This leads to the obvious conclusion that one view of the world (e.g., a scientific view, or the view of a “smarter” person) is better than another and should be privileged by being accepted or taught in the schools. Those claiming a superior picture of reality are obligated to defend and articulate that picture, thereby continually testing it, and rendering it yet again more accurate and legitimate.

It is not much of a leap to conclude that one’s picture of artistic, cultural, educational, and creative reality are also better and more deserving. Certainly, technical language and the cognitions it points to are subject to measures of accuracy, predictability, and explanatory power. But the domains of art, education, and government also have fields of language that “point” to certain realities that are predominant and “first among others.” Such fields of language become “capital,” in the Bourdieu sense, and therefore have power.

The title of this book and the first chapter draw on some active verbs, namely, to “craft” and to “construct.” A key argument throughout this volume is that communication is a constructive process, but that construction relies on a public accessible reality. This reality is independent of representation but influenced by it. In the following sections I critique a “strong” constructionism, which holds that language is the only reality, and therefore, all of our conceptions about the world are completely discursively created subject to all linguistic limitations, even unstable and variable meaning. I elaborate on this issue in more detail in chapter 3. Searle, in his book The Construction of Social Reality (1995) offered the clearest and most eloquent defense of how I am using the notion of communication as constructive. When people encounter one another, or text, they assemble or “construct” meaning, but they do not do this out of thin air. They do not do it casually. They do it on the basis of rules (e.g., “Statement X counts as Y”), and background, or sets of preintentional capacities, strategies, tendencies, or cultural predispositons. (see Searle, 1995, chap. 6). These assumptions form the foundation of the issues on which I try to build in this volume.

A field of language is a structured space whereby positions in the structure (e.g., language) are determined by a set of relationships. A field of language under the management and control of an individual acts as a resource or capital, in the Bourdieu sense of the term. It is a form of cultural capital (knowledge, skills, technical qualifications). What is interesting about cultural capital is that it can be cashed in for other forms of capital, such as symbolic capital (status and prestige). These all, of course, convert to employment and financial resources.

These types of capital form fields of thought and emotion and they are developed and sustained in interaction. This chapter and the remainder of this volume are devoted to detailing this perspective with respect to a number of sociological levels of structure and interaction phenomenon. We will see that it is possible to ground social structure in the linguistic experiences of humans. The only way that “structure” can be empirically meaningful and explanatory is if it bubbles up from the real experiences of humans. This experience cannot be separated from the linguistic system, although it is not isomorphic with it. I take the special symbol using capacity of humans as a given. Humans are animals, like so many others, but they are a special eruption on the evolutionary scene because of their linguistic ability to transcend the here and now. That language can be considered capital—either cultural or symbolic—and used in power relationships is fundamental to how language bisects structure. The language-as- “capital” metaphor is important because it draws attention to how symbolic forms are practical and conspicuous displays of actions and interests. This economic metaphor is not, of course, used in the narrow reductionist sense of material gain, but to show how there is an economic logic between language and structure. If a teenager speaks and dresses in a certain way to increase the chances of attracting the opposite sex, then he or she is using a symbolic capital to negotiate an outcome.

It is equally important to underscore the limitations of an “economic” metaphor. It in no way implies that human communication is the result of conscious calculation and deliberation: a result of a cost-benefit analysis. If we are going to correlate communication patterns with social structure, then it is certainly the case that some people have undesirable linguistic deficits and positions in the social structure. Their access to and use of cultural capital cannot be premeditated and calculated, otherwise they would not choose their current station. No, a theory of communicative practice that accounts for the vacillation between structure and action must result from an encounter between one’s communication code (see Ellis, 1992b) and a context or field that intersects with that code in some way. For example, an African American who finds himself in a White suburb. Or an educated professional who must manage poorly educated and unskilled workers. As communication codes develop— including their experiential and stylistic peculiarities—along with the individual, they become habitual and naturalized. Of course, linguistic capital is distributed in a related manner to economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1991), so all aspects of language, from the technical details of structure (e.g., phonetic form, syntax) to the subtleties of meaning, announce social position.

LANGUAGE AND PRESENCE

To make clear the sinews that connect communication with social structure, we must demonstrate how language and communication are social in nature and cannot be definitionally removed from social life. For some people, this is an obvious enough point and does not require restatement. But there remains disagreement and interesting controversy over some fundamental assumptions about the relationship between humans and nature.

At the core of this problem is the question of whether or not human cognition is detached from objective reality. In some theoretically ideal scientific domain, there is an objective world and a human processor that maps that world. The closer the fit between cognition and reality, the more accurate and better our understanding. Science is pitted against common sense, and ultimately science wins. Although science can claim a privileged understanding of certain phenomena, it is increasingly difficult to defend the separation of cognition from reality. Skinner (1957), of course, represented such a position by arguing that learning language was a simple modeling and learning process whereby the environment was copied onto the cognitive system. But Chomsky (1959) convincingly and compellingly demonstrated that inputs from the empirical world could not adequately explain language. The great complexity and productivity of language is dependent on congenital cognitive apparatus.

This line of thinking—that people bring dispositions and strategies to the linguistic process—was important and inviting because it meant that we have the ability to organize, select, and act on the environment. Therefore, the environment did not determine meanings and understandings, but the penchant of the individual. Chomsky, and this general line of reasoning, put to rest the dream that there is an empirical world that could perfectly match the cognitive dispositions of human organisms. Still, the problem of the relationship between language and the social world remained. Certainly human consciousness did not “build up” from minuscule empirical stimuli, but neither was consciousness “given” by cognitive predispositions. An overreliance on a pure “cognitive” perspective makes communication little more than matching up cognitive systems. Moreover, it leads to the extreme solipsistic position that some idealized cognitive world is predominant. Such a perspective is also inconsistent with evolutionary theorizing that would predict that human organisms must respond to environmental variations.

There is also the interesting question of the relationship between language and mind. Chomsky (1968) maintained that language was the mirror of the mind, and that structure could be revealed through language (the “presence” of language). The larger question here is simply how informative and reliable language is. On the one hand, we must assume that ideas, thoughts, and values are present in language and recoverable from language. A theory of language and social stratification requires such an assumption because the theory must have language anticipating stratification, and stratification anticipating language. We must be confident that language use carries reference. Yet these presumptions are not without problems. It is certainly not easy to determine whether a speaker understands his or her own mental state and whether he or she can explain it. And it is perhaps impossible to establish standards of interpretation for first’, second-, or third-person observers of communication.

I do not concern myself here with the philosophical debates about the independent existence of mind and nature (see Rorty, 1979). Rather, I work with an alternative explanation of understanding that is a modification of the cognitive view, a social cognition perspective, but one that is critical of the extreme social constructionism of Gergen and Semin (e.g., Gergen & Davis, 1985; Semin & Gergen, 1990). This perspective, on the one hand, does not view humans as socially-disembodied cognitive organisms that are essentially universal and transhistorical. On the other hand, I do not make the argument that cognitive categories are only social and created by sociocultural circumstances. As one might imagine, it is not possible to suggest that class, ethnic, or gender consciousness is possible without sociocultural processes being fundamental to everyday understanding. I take it as evolutionarily determined that humans must orient themselves to a particular material world, and moreover, develop a rigorously ratifiable communication code that facilitates naming, classifying, and understanding objects and processes in the world. This communication code is only possible because of the biologically evolved cognitive capabilities of the human organism. Pure cognition is the structural process that accounts for the executive management of consciousness and understanding (e.g., recall, memory, organization), but everyday meanings and understandings are grafted onto cognition. It is important to state a position on these issues because my coherency and code theory of interaction depends on it.

Extreme constructionists (Miller & Holstein, 1993; Semin & Gergen, 1990) never leave language. For them, this automatically implies a reality that is limited, conditioned, fashioned, and subjective. The role of the scientist loses its privileged status as the keeper of reality, and putative, scientific knowledge presumably only reifies cultural understanding. For the constructionist, all social problems and conditions are a matter of definition. Constructionists draw from the intellectual traditions of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty to suggest that separating the individual experiencer from the object of experience is impossible or artificial, at best. This means that there is no understanding of reality that is not conditioned by the human experiencer. Communication problems, then (e.g., confusion, misunderstanding, power, conflict, information quality) are in no way distinctive and have no inherent conditions; rather, they are problems only of definition and orientation that respond to supposed situations that are rhetorically constructed. In sociology, Spector and Kitsuse (1987) argued that social problems (e.g., alcoholism, violence, poverty, class consciousness) result from the “politics of claims making,” and forms, letters of complaint, political speeches, press conferences, editorials, advertisements, and government policies are all responsible for the “construction” (in the strong sense) of social problems.

This strong sense of constructionism has been appealing in the social sciences and communication (Deetz, 1994; Schneider, 1985; Shotter & Gergen, 1994). Yet, many still feel that the question of the relationship between language and mind is unresolved. Certain cognitive activities and structures are at the essence of humanness, and although much concept formation is surely sociocultural and therefore interesting and important, others are endemic to the species. Certain problems persist. For example, if the mind is purely social in origin, then how do initial inputs from the environment get processed and categorized in the first place? If the mind and consciousness are purely social, how does an infant learn language at all, because he is not taught, and there are no known social categories to produce this learning? There must be some congenital conditions.

Still, many scholars insist that understanding truly human communication means that only the reality of the experiencing agent is important. This has stimulated the phenomenological perspective in which the subject and object are fused and the scientist must gain access to the lived experience of the individual. But again, this phenomenological tradition of blending the subject and object fails. There has yet to be an acceptable explanation of how a scientist, or anyone for that matter, proceeds once his identity is inseparable from another’s. Just what can you conclude about the other person when you finish? What has a scientist accomplished if he assumes there is no reality outside his own? You might say the scientist brings his unique representations to the situation, but then he could not communicate them.

One problem with strong constructionists’ accounts of reality and scholarship is that few people take them seriously. That is, they may claim that all reality is discursively created, but they do not behave that way. This is because it is possible to have a strong reading or a weak reading of constructionism. A strong reading of constructionism means that any knowledge claim is inextricably mired in language and socially embedded. But this amounts to programmatic relativism that leaves any analyst in the untenable position of the hermeneutic circle. We are left in the trap of recognizing that knowledge claims are socially embedded, and if we ignore this, then we are taking this social embeddedness for granted, and thus granting it ontological status. Arguing that social problems such as AIDS or the existence of cults, and interpersonal terminology such as meaning, understanding, or intimacy are socially constructed (Shotter & Gergen, 1994), leaves these concepts to the whims of culture and a historical period. A strong reading of social constructionism leaves no criteria for recovering meaning or adjudicating knowledge claims. An analyst ends up trapped in his own Self-contained theoretical system.

Strong social constructionism cannot provide any justification for how any claim to understanding, knowledge, or praxis is defensible beyond the confines of a self-defined theoretical system that makes it all a tautology. Shotter and Gergen (1994) tried to patch up this problem by suggesting that understanding is contested but negotiable. They tried to have it both ways. They wrote:

Further, such contests and negotiations are not of an “anything goes” kind, but they are not grounded in any predetermined, outside, systematic standards either. They are “rooted” in the developed and developing conversational contexts within which the practical negotiations take place (p. 28)

This passage suggests some of the problems that plague a constructionist analysis. Constructionists try to describe what they do as empirically based (“rooted”) in interaction, but they actually push analysts away from empirical research. Instead of studying how communication constructs emerge, which might provide an empirical foundation, they offer up their own analysis of “conversational context” and “practical negotiations” without explaining how they were derived. Moreover, even when derivative explanations are proffered, they are subject to the same limitations of time, space, individual, and culture. Constructionists make statements denouncing unwarranted assumptions about the world, but one finds evidence of such assumptions having been made. Ironically, when the implications of constructionism are pushed, one ends up in a mess of abstractions about humanness, language, and dialogue. The study of communication began with the assumption that it could help people and improve the world; constructionism peddles this dream for epistemology.

LANGUAGE AND EXPERIENCE

Strong social constructionism is too much of a language game that removes agency from communication (Pearce, 1994). Communication is a practical activity that accomplishes something as well as creates something. The constructionist tradition replaces God with conversation. Even though it claims to move beyond the models of unified knowledge that came with the Enlightenment to account for diversity and alternative epistemologies, constructionism ends up replacing one master narrative with another. They are actually trying to create a “pure” theory, and in the process, neglect the gritty role of political, economic, ethnic, and moral assumptions in real communication (Schudson, 1997). Moreover, a communicators assumptions, desires, concerns, and influences are so fundamental that individuals do not recognize them as anything other than facts. These conditions, then, are not matters of reflection and debate.

We will leave the airy realm of strong constructionism’s epistemological abstractions and proceed in the tradition of quantitative researchers by staying close to data, evidence, and argument (cf. Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The role of language will remain central and we will build a theory of language and communication. But the linguistic symbol will be neither godlike in its ability to “construct” reality, nor mistaken for the fundamentals of experience that language both captures and influences. We will focus on a world of social action that leads to sociological theories that are empirically grounded. The lives, interactions, and class experiences of people are related to real social conditions that are reflexively related to real communication. The rest of this chapter is devoted briefly to our experiences as animals in the evolutionary scheme, and then to the relationship between language and experience. This provides the groundwork for a theory of communication that is consistent with a coherentist epistemology. Such an epistemology avoids the problems of foundationalism, but allows for progress in communication science. I use a “weaker” sense of the verb “to construct” to describe the linguistic and cognitive assembly process that occurs during communication. The meaning of an interaction is discursively created, but it is not a substitute for reality.

Pragmatics and Biology

That humans are biologically endowed with language capabilities is not controversial (Chomsky, 1968). But the relationship between pragmatics and biology needs to be reestablished. Context or situation is at the core of pragmatics. Pragmatics comes from the relationship between language and its users. Where a linguist would note the phonetic or grammatical structure of an utterance, a pragmatist would note how and why that person or group uses the utterance. What function does the utterance or word serve? How is it meaningful to them at that time? Pragmatism is analogical and context dependent. The traditional distinction between biology and culture is misguided. There is not opposition between them; culture is an expression of biology, and different cultures are different expressions of the same biology. Culture is a form that biology takes. How could it be anything else?

Pragmatics is a “variationist” way of thinking that is in opposition to an “essentialist” way of thinking. Early intellectual history was essentialist and described humans in a Plato...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Constructing Commumcation Theory
• 2 Medium Theory
• 3 Meaning, Discourse, and Society
• 4 Principles of Interdependence and Structuration
• 5 Ethnicity and Its Shadow
• 6 Class: The Presence that Dare Not Speak Its Name
• References