changing guards: communication studieses

Music: Drive-By Truckers: The Big To-Do (2010)

This week I received the new issue of Communication and Critical/Communication Studies, a new-ish journal in "my field" dedicated to an interdisciplinary, humanities-style approach to critical work. I'm using "scare quotes" here because I'm not so sure this journal, sponsored by my professional organization (the National Communication Association), will retain the character of its first six years. That character has been "speechy" in orientation: the articles published in most its pages to date have been penned by folks reared in departments formerly known as "speech communication," departments like the one I was reared in. But owing to the strange slash in the title (a signifier of something to be sure) the journal's audience and mission are larger than speech. There are many "communication studies" in the United States. And there are many "cultural studies" here and abroad. With this inaugural issue edited by J. Macgregor Wise, the journal is journeying into other pastures of the communicative and cultural that are bound to cause confusion in the disciplinary imaginaries of many.

Ok, so, what do I mean?

My answer is, "I'm not sure." I'm not playing coy here, I mean it. I think the shift in the editorship of this journal means there is a genuine opportunity to widen our intellectual and institutional networks (perhaps part of the vision of the journal creators, I'm not sure). Perhaps this marks an opportunity to converge the "communication studieses" of North America, an opportunity to unite us!??! But for folks who work and study in my area (rhetorico-cultural studies), Wise's editorship of the journal is a new moment, because he comes out of a different communication studies.

Ok, so, what do I mean?

There are many "communication studies" in the United States, but (if my history is correct), all of us came from the same root [later edit: not true; there is no institutional common root; see comments below by Gil Rodman]. I have been professionalized under the banner of the National Communication Association. I hail from a discipline that was built largely in the 1920s over the object of "speech." My field advanced public speaking and debate and "discussion" as its service to the community (since our field was a consequence of the land-grant and adult education movements). My understanding of the field's history gets murky in the 1940s-1970s, frankly. But I gather it was during this thirty-year period that some folks stuck with speech, some folks pioneered communication technologies (known as "mass media" and, for some old timers, as "telecom"), and, of course, there are the speech sciences that branched into various directions for "communication theory." Then, there was the introduction of "cultural studies" into the mix in the 1970s and, as best as I gather, this was inflected in different ways in the 1980s. Feeding into this was the Canadian version of communication studies, which many of us today would associate with media ecology [later edit: Again, wrong; see comments]. This journal titled Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies seems to jam all of this together under one banner, and deliberately. This journal is forcing a conversation.

And this is the problem, of course. C&C/CSis deliberately yoking many different humanistic communication traditions, which means that it's bringing together a "promiscuous audience." While our professional affiliations may be rooted in the same 1920s folks, the fact is that in the twentieth century different trajectories developed with different inflections, resulting in a number of different brands of communication studies.

As best as I can figure it, in the United States there are two different expressions of critical communication studies: the speechies and the media folk. The speechies break down into the social scientists and the rhetoricians (with Organizational Commies playing the middle ground), while the media folk have similarly broke down into the media effects/mass comm folks (sometimes associated with journalism) and the cultural studies folks. This is hard to keep straight in one's brain, but I think the best example of the "two" communication studies traditions is found and formally institutionalized at the University of Illinois: the speechies are in the Department of Communication, while the media folk are in the Institute of Communication Research. It doesn’t help, of course, that these two programs have swapped faculty a lot in the past decade. Nevertheless, I think if one wants to understand the predicament of a journal like Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, one can look to the University of Illinois. Here is a journal that seems to be trying to bridge the institutional and disciplinary divide---in some sense literally across these departments.

I would really like to see someone write an article or book that breaks down this disciplinary history. Hell, I'm sure it's already out there and I've simply missed it (and if so, it should be required reading). Provided this monograph does not exist, I'm so bad at archival work I'm not the one to do it. I think, however, a scholar who takes on this task should be knighted, or given lots of beer, or something. What I can contribute is simply this: the journal C&C/S addresses two audiences who read and see things differently, two audiences who attend different conferences (I think), and two audiences who run in different cliques. I've blogged about this problem of two audiences before, with the exchange between my friend Dana Cloud and a scholar whom I don't know, Jennifer Slack. I don't envy Wise's challenge of editing a journal that addresses multiple audiences, with different ways of arguing, and different argots.

Evidence of the challenge is in this first issue. With perhaps the exception of Ted Striphas, whose work "walks the line" between these two audiences, the current issue replicates the divide. It's really weird to realize that the authors of all the featured essays are friends of mine, from the speech side of communication studies (I think I've had a drink at a conference bar with every one), while those contributing to the forum are strangers. I don't say this to brag or to create division, but simply to say that I get the argot of the lead article writers and less so those of the forum writers. I can only suppose the article writers were in the pipe-line with the previous editor, John Sloop, a Speechie. We were disciplined in the same kind of departments, and we write with the same habituated turns of phrase (for example, speech-comm writing is fiendishly clear, often with enumerated points). One the other hand, the "forum" section of the journal is written by scholars associated with mediated communication studies, a different tradition.

Insofar as the journal's audience is not united under a habituated writerly gesture, the challenge is more formidable than simply communicating ideas---the ideology that motivates the journal's title. As a rhetorician, I want to point out that this ideology---or idealism, take your pick---is going to be a problem for the new editor(s). It comes right down to writerly style, the way of making arguments. For example, the forum introduction by Briankle G. Chang opens thus:

Labor matters. It cuts and cuts into matter (mater, materia [line over the a---wordpress does not let me code for this])---the mother of all. To labor is to affirm life which begins with labor. "A child is born," says Hegel in his Phenomenology; like a decision, the newly born cuts into being and begins to be. [cut paragraph] To the extent that labor labors on itself, labor is inescapably historical. It creates a past, and it promises a future. . . .

This kind of writing is poetic-philosophical in its orientation---a kind of writing I cotton to myself, but which is generally discouraged in speech-style communication studies journals. I can imagine folks bristling at the statement that "labor labors on itself." So, too, can I imagine Speechies mystified by the opening paragraph of Jonathan Beller's forum essay:

For more than two decades, the multitude, who ought, to some extent at least, be us, have been rewriting the social contract. I emphasize writing here because writing is, perhaps, the only other system of accounts legible as a direct and antagonistic response to those numerical methods that reassure capitalists that the vast social changes which they endeavor to manage are on track for next quarter's profits. The escalating critique of an emergent sovereign order oft referred to as "Empire," the locutions around new modalities of labor and value transfer including "immaterial labor," "the attention theory of value," "cognitive capitalism," virtuosity," the shift from the "mass worker" to the "socialized worker," the "social factory," the "deterritorialized factory," the "world-media system, and the "score," along with the refurbishing of Marx's terms "social cooperation," "general intellect,' and "sensual labor" are nothing less than the products of a new poesis, an endeavor at the world-making that at once critically analyzes the logistics of capital and asserts the possibility of another world.

The values informing the readerly habits of the two audiences of this journal are very different. I know if I had written an opening paragraph like Beller's thatI would be raked over the coals for the abstraction by blind reviewers.

The most notable and widely read labor theorists/critics of my communication studies are Dana Cloud and Ron Greene, but neither were asked to participate---nor are they cited---in the recent forum on the topic of labor. I am absolutely convicted this has nothing to do with deliberate omission. It has everything to do with different audiences and different institutional affiliations and conceptual pieties. I don't envy Wise's (or the past editor's) position here. But the recent issues wildly divergent modes of address between the articles and the forum suggests to me a profound need: we need to map our common topoi; we need an account of our different histories; and we need a forum for an open discussion of our relationship. We need more than journaled butt-sniffing. We did the butt-sniffing with Critical Studies in Mass Communication and it resulted in the see-saw problem. We need a scholar to help us to understand our common heritage and history, and perhaps we need a conference to work out our common history and purpose.

Or, to put this crudely: Dana Cloud and Jennifer Stack's exchange was like two ships of Communication Studies passing in the prose. How can we unite the cultural/critical folks over the aegis of communication studies?