Communication Matters

Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks

Jeremy Packer, Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, Jeremy Packer, Stephen B. Crofts Wiley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136589591
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.

Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences.

This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.

The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Part I

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Orientations media/materiality

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Pantry Ghost (White chair, onto which cadaver slices are projected). Francesa Talenti.

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Introduction

The materiality of communication

Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley

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What could be less material than communication? Signs and symbols, messages and meanings … the rhetorical strategies of logos, pathos, and ethos … the ethereal transmission of signals and the glow of vacuum tubes … the ephemeral quality of thought itself … the superstructural insubstantiality of ideology and culture. These conceptualizations of communication suggest a realm of intangible phenomena that mediate our embodied human experiences of the concrete world. In many ways, the immateriality of communication is the ontological assumption for mainstream theory in the fields of communication, rhetoric, and media studies. Within this familiar ontology, communication is always inadequate, an imperfect, or even manipulative attempt to represent the real or connect with others through various mechanisms of signification. Critical theory, too, has been predicated on textualist, narrative, semiotic, or ideological paradigms, and the epistemological quandary that this ontological assumption creates has led numerous scholars over the past two decades to identify a poststructuralist impasse that needs to be escaped. Such discontent has often led to a turning away from “mere communication,” toward materiality as a corrective.

The chapters in this volume comprise a series of such correctives, although their strategies for materializing communication are diverse. One such strategy is to figure materiality as physicality. Infrastructure, space, technology, and the body become the focus, a move that situates communication and culture within a physical, corporeal landscape. Another move is to examine the materiality of communication itself, focusing on discourse as inscription in the material strata of sound, optical media, the built environment, and the brain. In this view, which draws on both posthumanism and medium theory, discourse itself (including thought as self-communication) is a material process, whether it is physiological, mechanical, or digital. A set of relays and traces moves across the sensorium and its milieus – across the neural networks that thread through the body, increasing in density inside our heads, and through the infrastructure that envelops the planet. As John Durham Peters says in this volume, reflecting on the recent convergence of media studies, cognitive science, and brain imaging, “Our brains are quite literally on fire.”

The move toward materiality in the fields of communication and rhetoric appears to be part of a broader shift toward a new materialist realism that spans the humanities and social sciences. The authors in this volume draw upon and engage with critical geography, cognitive science and neurobiology, communication history, mobility studies, philosophy, neo-Marxism, media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies to enliven and ground materialist approaches. Following a long period of focusing almost exclusively upon the problematics of language, meaning, and representation, there has been a renewed interest in establishing means for making claims about the real. Where critical theory had been oriented toward the problematic relationship between discourse and reality, leading to deadend debates over truth and falsity and a textual politics of deconstruction and ideological critique, there are now attempts to set aside epistemological debates in order to compose new ontologies that enable theoretical innovation and political intervention. As Katherine Hayles notes in her interview, the recent philosophical move into speculative realism is one such attempt.

This book assembles the results of one recent effort to think through the implications of a materialist approach to communication and rhetoric. We gathered the authors of this volume for a two-day symposium at North Carolina State University in September of 2009. That event confirmed our belief that scholars investigating media and communication have much to add to an understanding of materiality. We would suggest that scholars in other fields will also benefit from the work presented here, which demonstrates the constitutive role of communication and media in the production of the real. Five materialist thematics emerged at the symposium and became more pronounced as the authors completed their chapters: economy, discourse, space, the body, and technology. The authors rarely focus on only one of these themes. Rather, their approaches to materiality are grounded in differing configurations of two or more of these thematics: technology and body; space and economy; body, technology, and discourse, and so on. While we do not suggest this list is exhaustive or even epistemologically hermetic, it does encompass an important array of considerations that need to be accounted for if the field wants to move beyond the immaterial impasse.

Economy

The recent turn to materiality entails a number of ontological and phenomenological concerns that range far beyond the classical historical materialism of Marx and Engels, yet the lens of “economy” continues to be rooted in a Marxist sensibility and remains a key optic for examining the materiality of communication and culture. The authority of economic theory, whether Marxist or neoclassical, has often rested on a depth model in which the economic is figured as an underlying, more fundamental structure in relation to which the less tangible, and less determining superstructure – communication, culture, ideology … in short, the realm of the symbolic – must be understood. One can and should produce alternative readings of Marx, particularly by focusing on the most empirical and historical of his analyses, but the fact remains that most neomarxists (the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School as well as present-day political economists of communication) have relied on the dualism of the base–superstructure model to figure “economy” as the more material, more real, foundation of communication. Gramscian and Althusserian analyses sought to complicate the dualism of the model, arguing for a more constitutive concept of culture as ideology or hegemony, yet in many ways contemporary thinkers have retained a notion of the economic as a realm of the real, over which or upon which culture is constructed. As John Durham Peters notes in this volume, this approach to “economy” (as well as a similar position that is often articulated around the concept of “technology”) can be seen as “a kind of rhetorical blackmail in being more materialist than thou … a kind of bullying that goes along with claiming to be a materialist.”

Attention to “the economic” is thus a classical move within materialist traditions of social theory, but the contributors to this book endeavor, in various ways, to move beyond the conceptual frame of base and superstructure. Here, the economic is not seen as a separate realm of the real underlying communication and culture; rather it is understood as a specific logic of social, material, and cultural organization expressed in a range of different contexts, including the production of urban space (Hay), the composition of geographical regions as fields of social interaction (Parks and Sheller), the role of technical media in the everyday practices of laboring subjects (Greene, Packer and Oswald, Sharma, Sloop and Gunn), and the assembling of new translocal social spaces via networked social relations (Wiley, Moreno, and Sutko). In these materialist analyses, the present authors draw substantially on the work of Foucault, Lefebvre, and Deleuze to examine the economic logics at work in two key contemporary processes: the production of space and the production of subjects.

For a number of the authors in this book, the objective is to rethink the production of social space as a response to, and perhaps a struggle over, historically situated projects for the capitalist (re)organization of production, labor, technical infrastructure, the built environment, and social practices. Mimi Sheller’s essay on the airport as a site of surveillance and control of mobility reveals the ways in which differential mobilities – of bodies, of capital, of images – constitute the Caribbean as a region that is opened up, on the one hand, to the inward flows of investment and tourism, and regulated, on the other, to manage or block unwanted outward flows of migration. Lisa Parks’ analysis of the destruction and rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan reveals these campaigns as projects for the restructuring of space in which military and economic logics govern both the dismantling of older communication infrastructures and the (commercially contracted) building of new infrastructures for communication, remote sensing, and surveillance. Steve Wiley, Tabita Moreno, and Dan Sutko, like James Hay, draw on Lefebvre’s (1991) approach to social space as the production of the social relations of production. Given the context of globalization, they argue that social space must be rethought from the standpoint of social networks, mobilities, and translocal media.

For Hay, the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault provides the conceptual foundation for a new analytical framework – spatial materialism – in which urban space may be understood as a reorganization of both the built environment and networks of technical media in ways that enable the production of neoliberal subjects. As Hay notes, neoliberalism is here understood from a Foucauldian framework within the long history of the “reason of State” where “political economy” was instrumental to “governmental rationalities” concerned with the limits and capacities of the Modern liberal State. In this sense, economy is both produced by differing and competing forms of governmental reason and productive of new forms of subjects. Economy is not only productive “in the last instance”; it is itself produced by power/knowledge relations and the activation of “free” subjects. Some of the present authors follow this Foucauldian line of enquiry, situating communication within such economic programs. Ron Greene examines the YMCA’s use of film and rhetorical training as pastoral techniques of power. These strategies were evident in the struggle to minimize class conflict, in part by forming rhetorical subject/critics at the behest of capital during the 1920s and 1930s. As Greene suggests, “To recognize textual commentary less as a generalized art of rhetorical interpretation, and more as a technology of the self is to pay closer attention to the institutionalization of textual commentary and modern criticism.” Kathleen Oswald and Jeremy Packer suggest that the production of “free subjects” via mobile media screens allows for the reorganization of flows of people, goods, culture, and capital in alignment with the potentialities, freedoms, and dictates of a neoliberal rationality.

Discourse

One of the most difficult questions for a materialist theory of communication concerns the ontological status of discourse itself. We noted at the beginning of this introduction that communication is often seen as immaterial – as a layering of human perception, thought, language, and symbol over the real or, in a thoroughly phenomenological view, the social construction of reality itself in language and culture. This dualist ontology can be traced through Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel to phenomenology (Heidegger, Husserl, and Schutz); structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser) postmodern and poststructuralist theory (Baudrillard and Derrida); and present-day “mainstream” theories of communication, culture, language, and rhetoric. A dualist ontology places the analyst in an apparently irresolvable paradox: any attempt to think “the real,” including theory itself, is inevitably a discursive construction trapped within historically specific languages and worldviews. Taken to its logical extreme, ontological dualism led to postmodern relativism and a textual politics of deconstructionism.

The current turn to materiality may be, as the editors of New Materialisms note, largely a reaction to the exhaustion of that text-centered, social-constructionist paradigm (Coole and Frost, 2010). This was already clearly evident among German media scholars as early as the late 1980s, as manifested in the collected volume Materialities of Communication (Gumbrecht and Pfeiffer, 1994, originally published as Materialitat der Kommunikation in 1988). As its coeditor, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, noted, “The point then … is not a search for the reality of the material or the materiality of the real. We are looking for underlying constraints whose technological, material, procedural, and performative potentials have been all too easily swallowed up by interpretive habits” (p. 12). Here, we identify three strategies for materializing discourse – three ways in which recent work, including that of the contributors to this book, has sought to move beyond the text-centered (or message-centered) approach to communication that has prevailed during the last few decades. As noted above, political-economic analysts attempt to recuperate the materiality of discourse by focusing attention on the economic, spatial, technological, or corporeal context within which meaning is constructed. Others have turned the base–superstructure model on its head, noting the discursive or rhetorical properties of embodied, physical reality. And finally, a number of theorists have built on the ontological monism and posthumanism of Foucault, Deleuze, and others to analyze the materiality of discourse itself.

A familiar materialist move is to locate culture or meaning within an economic, physical, or embodied context. In this approach, the turn toward materiality is a turn away from textuality, meaning, and deconstructionism in order to grasp the real – economy, technology, physical space, the body – as hard external ground. Characteristic of this approach is arguments in favor of political economy as a kind of realpolitik of communication. Yet such an approach to materialism reproduces a dualist ontology in which the move toward materiality is simply a corrective that functions by “going back” to the physical, the infrastructural, the corporeal, or the economic “base” as a recuperation of what really matters. Such an approach reifies and takes for granted discursively or rhetorically constructed “hard” realities such as technology, money, the economy, policy, and corporations (i.e., it accepts given realities too quickly, failing to recognize their status as historically situated discursive regimes), and it fails to recognize the materiality of discourse itself, the material properties of statements that determine a number of important capacities: Are they reproducible, processable, translatable, transmittable, transportable, and physiologically effective?

A second strategy for recuperating the materiality of discourse is one that is employed by a number of the contributors to this book. Working one vein of the tradition of material rhetoric (see, e.g., Biesecker and Lucaites, 2009), these theorists see physical reality itself (embodied practices, physical sites, and urban spaces) as rhetorical and communicative. As Victoria Gallagher, Kelly Martin, and Kenneth Zagacki note in their study of Chicago’s Millennium Park, “scholars in rhetoric have taken materialistic principles and, by applying them to artifacts and structures within urban spaces, shown how they function to encourage and evoke interaction and feeling.” William Balthrop and Carole Blair focus attention on the rhetorical properties and effects of commemorative sites themselves, including the spatial practices of visitors. Jeff Rice develops a rhetorical performance to reveal – or even produce – the networks of decision making that compose urban space.

A number of contributors to this book develop a third strategy of materialization – one that seeks to grasp the materiality of discourse itself. One means for moving beyond both hermeneutics and structuralism as a means for understanding the materiality of discourse has been in circulation at least since Foucault proposed a new form of discursive investigation in The Archeology of Knowledge (1972). Foucault attempted to address the presence of statements – the brute fact that one statement exists as opposed to others. Kittler added media to Foucault’s concerns by showing how specific media, as elements in discourse networks, make certain statements possible, even probable – statements that were impossible prior to the invention of media such as film or the phonograph (1999). Such an orientation toward media inscription highlights technological storage and processing. However, Bernd Frohman’s explanation of documentality opens up the possibility for thinking all material as potentially discursive. In Frohman’s terms, everything, including an antelope, has the potential to communicate, to become a statement, but it must be made to speak. Building on DeLanda (2006, 2007), Frohman argues that such potentiality can only be realized within specific “assemblages.” Byron Hawk also employs the concept of assemblage to rethink rhetoric as an incorporeal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• PART I. Orientations media/materiality
• PART II. Communication time/space
• PART III. Communication assemblages/networks
• PART IV. Communication mobility/immobility
• Index