A Theory of Communication and Justice

Klaus Bruhn Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317614449
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book outlines a theory of communication and justice for the digital age, updating classic positions in political philosophy and ethics, and engaging thinkers from Aristotle through Immanuel Kant and the American pragmatists to John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Amartya Sen.

In communication seeking to define justice and call out injustice, there is such a thing as the last word. The chapters in this book trace the historical emergence of communication as a human right; specify the technological resources and institutional frameworks necessary for exercising that right; and address some of the challenges following from digitalization that currently confront citizens, national regulators, and international agencies. Among the issues covered are public access to information archives past and present; local and global networks of communication as sources of personal identities and imagined communities; the ongoing reconfiguration of the press as a fourth branch of governance; and privacy as a precondition for individuals and collectives to live their lives according to plans, and to make their own histories.

The book will be of interest to students and researchers in media and communication studies, cultural studies, political philosophy and ethics, and interdisciplinary fields examining the ethical and political implications of new information and communication infrastructures.

1

The end of communication

Communication is one of the most ordinary of human practices – people talk, type, and text their way through everyday life. Communication is also an extraordinary resource for public deliberation about the ends and means of various kinds of community, increasingly from the local to the global level. Over the last century, communication has emerged as a special source of high hopes and deep disappointments – utopias and dystopias < – when people consider differences and disagreements regarding the conditions of their coexistence. But communication cannot guarantee ideal processes of interaction, let alone ideal outcomes – justice – for the individual or for the collective. In this volume, I reexamine the potentials as well as the limitations of human communication for collective reasoning about the common good; I refocus attention on the end of communication and its translation into other human actions and social interactions. Even when survival or the good life is at stake, our communications must and do end.

> utopias and dystopias of communication – p. 7

Certainly, the capacity to communicate in signs and symbols is a unique feature of the human species. It enables us to transcend ourselves in elaborate make-believe, and to organize ourselves for social revolution. We repeat ourselves, and we resume discussions. Communications end, however, whether by explicit procedure or as contingent outcome. In several of the key institutions where communication today serves to anticipate, motivate, and legitimate collectively binding arrangements – in parliaments, law courts, scientific committees, and other agencies of knowledge and power – the end of communication is to end. Both in principle and in practice, there is such a thing as the last word.

Questions of communication and justice constitute an intersection of classical philosophy and modern communication studies. Surprisingly, this intersection has mostly been neglected in both fields of inquiry. Neither political philosophy nor ethics have traditionally considered the universal human practice of communication as central in either defining or practicing what is good or just. Contemporary communication studies, in their turn, have mostly shied away from normative questions of how to say and do the right thing. Before revisiting, in the middle part of this introductory chapter, some of the roads not (yet) taken by philosophy and communication research, in the following section I briefly map some of the questions they share. Communication theory is heir to what are commonly considered eternal questions of philosophy: How can individuals know about reality through perception, cognition, and communication with others? And how may communities, societies, civilizations, and the human species as such articulate and negotiate different understandings of reality with a view to collaboration and coexistence?

What is, what ought to be, and what could be

A great divide in the history of ideas has separated questions of what is from questions of what ought to be: facts as opposed to values, and current states of affairs compared to future prospects. Aristotle had introduced a distinction between theoretical sciences that produce true knowledge of reality as it is and for its own sake, and practical sciences that offer guidance for human action in reality and along with others, further noting a third kind of productive sciences that help people to act on reality to make things (Lobkowicz, 1967; Shields, 2014). < At the beginning of modern philosophy, David Hume (2010/1739) reemphasized that humans might never be able to justify deriving any specific ought from any particular is. Ever since, this boundary has troubled the proliferating range of sciences and scholarly fields, leaving them with profound intellectual doubts about the practical relevance and appropriate applications of the growing masses of knowledge they continuously produce. Nevertheless, as institutions and infrastructures, science and scholarship evidently and inevitably serve a wide variety of human purposes and social interests. The study of communication, increasingly through complex and interconnected technologies, is a case in point, having been recruited since the mid-twentieth century as an administrator as well as a critic of communicative practices as they currently exist (Lazarsfeld, 1941). The media as we know them would grind to a halt without continuous measurement and monetization of who says what to whom.

> theoretical, practical, and productive sciences – Chapter 5, p. 130

A third question – what could be – begins to complicate the classic is–ought dichotomy. The question recalls Aristotle’s further distinction between potential and actual events in and states of the world. < All research relies on different kinds and degrees of experimentation – thought experiments, in vitro experiments in laboratories, and in vivo experiments on nature as well as culture – in order to explore and represent what might be in theory, and what could be in practice. In this regard, science and scholarship are special instances of human communication. Since the seventeenth century, the natural sciences have prepared unprecedented means for humans to transform material reality for their own purposes by describing and experimenting with it in increasingly granular detail. From the atomic to the planetary level, concerted and cumulative research programs have enabled ways of life that represent so much more than a side effect of studying what is. Social and human sciences have documented equally complex levels of social organization and cultural expression around the globe. In doing so, they have identified, and advocated, alternatives to social systems and cultural practices in their present form. By offering indications of what could be, the natural, human, as well as social sciences feed into wider public and political deliberations about what ought to be, and what should be done.

> Aristotle on potential and actualization – Chapter 5, p. 137

Communication offers the most generic resource for raising and addressing all these questions – in specialized sciences, public media, and in the interchange between public, private, and professional communications. Communication configures society. Communication also prefigures society, addressing what is not (yet), what could be, and what ought (not) to be done. Communication supports great leaps of the individual imagination and grand collective projects. Communication articulates alternatives and choices. Communication represents the capability of humans to jointly consider whether and how things could be different. Human communication constitutes a window of opportunity between chance and necessity. <

> the window of opportunity between chance and necessity – Chapter 2, p. 23

Consider climate change, which raises the stakes of communication to the global level of the species and the planet. Unless humans conclude their deliberations about this question and translate the answers into timely political and personal actions, we may be done for prematurely. What is the present state of planet Earth, and what could be its future? The answer to the question of what ought to be, might appear self-evident: survival and sustainability for the planet and its peoples and species. But the capacity of scientists, politicians, and citizens to weigh the more specific answers with due diligence depends on the institutions, technologies, practices, and discourses of communication available to them. Communication is a necessary, if far from sufficient, condition for the production and dissemination of knowledge that may help people solve environmental and other practical problems in common. The record shows that, at least in such matters, the answer to the familiar question, ‘Can’t we just talk about it?’ is: No.

Analysis box 1.1 Climate and justice

Climate change – how to understand it, what to do about it – places communication in long perspectives of natural evolution and human history. Unlike just a couple of generations ago, it is now meaningful to communicate, and to disagree, about the natural environment as a public issue:

[D]‌own to about 1960, it was generally assumed that for all practical purposes and decisions climate could be considered constant […] In any case, many people now know that there have been significant shifts of climate during the twentieth century: at first, a more or less global warming to about 1950, then some cooling. More recently, a notable increase in the incidence of extremes of various kinds in almost all parts of the world has hit agriculture and created difficulties for planning in many fields.

Lamb, 1995: 2

The assessment of climate change as a human and social problem that invites collective action depends on geological and meteorological evidence and, to a degree, written sources from historical time. Both kinds of information exist for the so-called Little Ice Age – a period of unusually cold weather around the middle of the last millennium. The dating of the Little Ice Age is subject to some disagreement; its earliest beginning is normally set around 1300, its end around 1850. The disagreements bear witness to conflicting interpretations of both natural evidence and cultural sources as well as to different theoretical conceptions of the relationship between climate change and human civilization – nature and culture. In addition to analyses of ice cores and tree rings, the empirical materials include documentation on the changing prices of grain, following good, bad, and disastrous harvest seasons. A classic contribution by the historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1972/1967), charted “the history of the climate since the year 1000” as a backdrop to the living conditions of ordinary people during the period; his study relied, among other things, on a detailed documentation of the dates of wine harvests. Another study, joining meteorology with art history, showed how, over the centuries, the Little Ice Age affected the color and style of nature paintings (Neuberger, 1970). And the hard times of several centuries gave rise to all manner of both practical and religious reflections, a small portion of which was put into writing by “country clergymen and gentleman scientists with time on their hands.” In 1316, one of these sources noted that the mass of rain “seemed as though it was THE FLOOD” (Fagan, 2000: xiii, 38).

the Little Ice Age

Neither environmental determinism nor social determinism is tenable when it comes to recognized problems and potential solutions on the scale of global warming. The natural environment, as found and increasingly modified and made by human societies through tools and technologies, is intertwined with historical developments and social changes:

Consider, for instance, the food crises that engulfed Europe during the Little Ice Age – the great hunger of 1315 to 1319, which killed tens of thousands; the food dearths of 1741; and 1816, “the year without a summer” – to mention only a few. These crises in themselves did not threaten the continued existence of Western civilization, but they surely played an important role in the formation of modern Europe […] Some of these crises resulted from climatic shifts, others from human ineptitude or disastrous economic or political policy; many, like the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, from a combination of all three – and a million people perished in that catastrophe. Its political consequences are still with us.

Fagan, 2000: xv

Perhaps most famously, a catastrophic wheat harvest in France in 1788, and the resulting shortage of grain and bread, was among the factors contributing to the revolution of 1789.

It is generally accepted that, at least since the nineteenth century, human activity has come to affect the natural environment in fundamental ways and with long-term consequences. In a contemporary perspecti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Analysis Boxes
• Preface
• Note on the Text
• 1 The end of communication
• 2 A brief history of justice
• 3 The structural transformation of Jürgen Habermas
• 4 John Rawls behind the veil of communication
• 5 The long legacy of pragmatism
• 6 Media of justice
• 7 The communicative position
• 8 Justice – measure for measure
• 9 The future of justice
• References
• Index