more on communication studieses

Music: And Also the Trees: Silver Soul (1998)

This past week in "The Object" seminar we read from James W. Carey's influential tome, Communication as Culture, which collects a number of influential essays that helped to forge the communication/cultural studies relationship in the United States. Owing to the shout-out from my friends at The Critical Lede, I thought it might be good to report on what I've learned in the weeks since I originally posted about my disciplinary confusion. Thanks to Gil Rodman's helpful prodding and Diane Keeling's reading suggestions, I think I've come to a much better---albeit complex and not-very-elegant---understanding of communication studies in the United States. I've always been annoyed with the "studies" half of my field's title, but I now have a newfound appreciation for the plural. We are communication studies, I find myself in those fields. My childish "communication studieses" is simply meant to emphasize why we went with a plural title in the first place.

But first, a wind-up (so as to convince my graduate student readers why understanding and learning disciplinary histories is crucial to a scholarly career). Since graduate school I've always known there were many forms of "communication" in the United States, but I had never really been motivated to figure them out. As a graduate student I figured that I had my interests and I was convinced I would study those interests and think about them using whatever theoretical perspective or outlook seemed to help me. For example, such an attitude led me eventually to psychoanalysis, despite what I would describe as a formidable disciplinary push-back; my relative ignorance about the history of the field only made it worse. Freud is such a liability in so many of the communication studieses . . . but the more I learn about the many histories of my disciplines, things are starting to make a lot more sense. Reading theory in context does not simply mean in respect to its historical situatedness and problematic; it also means reading theory in its proper institutional context. It was abundantly clear to the seminar last week, for example, that understanding Carey's work meant that we had to understand what was happening to the University of Illinois in 1947. I'll explain.

In retrospect, I was a big fat dummy to think the utility or power of a good idea was enough to escape the pressures of contextually disciplined framing. Neither theory nor perspective comes free. With a degree in philosophy, I should have known that, since my training taught me that you are supposed to pick a philosophical approach and stick with it for the rest of your career (which sucks for you Objectivists out there, I suppose). With training in rhetorical studies, one would think I understood the importance of knowing one's audience. In my early publishing career I got battered around quite a bit, but if I think I knew more about institutional contexts and pieties, my journey would have been much easier. (So, if my students reading this are wondering why I put so much disciplinary history into my seminars, here comes a rationale.)

Ok, so here's what I am learning: our current communication studies comprises five different research trajectories spread across three different kinds of departments. None of these are mutually exclusive and have much cross-pollination, so to speak. Here we go:

1. The Speech Tradition: in the tradition most familiar to me---and this because my teachers were all trained in this tradition---communication concerned oral communication. Created as a consequence of the Land Grant institution, the working or "industrial" classes were coming to college in the late 19th century, and many of them adults. Extant textbooks for existing colleges were too advanced and difficult, so new textbooks were written and new classes were formed, many of them teaching the basics of writing and speaking. Around these new exigencies sprang new collectives, teachers of writing and speaking, situated in English departments. Oral rhetoric folks gradually split off and became departments of speech in the 1920s and 30s (the writing folks stayed and are now know as comp or rhetoric or writing studies programs). These departments further split into the speech sciences and humanities foci (crudely focused around the "Midwestern" and "Cornell" schools). Debate programs are focused here, as well as small group, interpersonal, etc.

The shift to identifying as "communication" came in the 60s, for the most part, and this after much discussion and hand wringing. There is much to say here about the way in which the formation of the International Communication Association reflected a pressure to get rid of "speech" as a master term---and how a number of ICA folks come from the other trajectories below. There is also much to say here about whether or not to identify with communication technologies, how "speech" represents in some sense a conviction in the humanities and how the "s" in "communications" signifies such technologies. In fact, there's a lot to say here, but this post is already running long.

2. Mass Communication: Thanks to David Beard's lead on the previous post on this topic, I now understand Paul Lazarsfeld's role in communication studies. According to the ICA encyclopedia entry by Simonson and Peters, the Diaspora of Jewish intellectuals in the 30s and 40s led one of the first scholars to take radio seriously to move to the United States, first to Newark and then to Columbia. Funded by Rockefeller money, Lazarfeld's outfit was concerned with the effects of mass media on populations and pioneered what is largely identified now as "mass comm." I take propaganda studies is located here, as well as the origin of media effects. Adorno had a brushing with these folks, too. The affiliation, however, was with journalism programs (later, departments) because the outside funding came from those folks. To this day most "mass comm" folks are affiliated with journalism departments. However, to complicate matters it should be mentioned many journalism departments started off with speech departments---and some programs today still have both journalism and speech in the same department (one can see how the speech sciences and media effects have methodological affinity).

3. The Canucks: Dudes like Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan (and Jacques Ellul too) up yonder in North America's chillier regions also helped to establish a communication tradition in Canada. The focus with these folks was on communication technology and what has come to be known as "media ecology." The interest that gradually developed in this trajectory concerns the way in with forms of mediation create different environments and alter human epistemologies. To make matters more confusing, McLuhan also claimed "rhetoric" as an area of expertise, which is nicely melded in the work of Walter Ong---a stateside guru of rhetoric and communication technology (then there's Neil Postman and the list extends from there). This trajectory also intersects with television studies, which has ties to the next group . . .

4. Communications: This tradition is a Midwestern approach closely identified with media technology and the work of Wilbur Schramm, who was an English professor and short story writer at Iowa. Convinced that mass media was becoming a dominant force in society, Schramm started the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois in Chambana, a deliberately interdisciplinary program that courted multiple methodologies to investigate mediated communications. This program was located in a different college than was the speech program, and both were independently inaugurated in 1947. To this day Illinois has two communication programs. James Carey earned his doctorate at the ICR and stayed (well, until he went to Columbia; see #2 above)---and, he was heavily influenced by two strands of thought himself: the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey (which also had a profound impact on the speech folks) and the work of the Canadians (see #3 above). I'm starting to feel the need for a map with arrows pointing every which-a-way to indicate intellectual influence and institutional/trajectory affiliation; by the 1950s I think the map is starting to look like spaghetti.

5. British Communication: This tradition also goes by another name: "cultural studies." Communication was also a buzz word across the pond, and figures like the Leavises, Hoggart, and Williams were studying mass communication and "culture" in different ways---ways that would travel to the states though Carey and others. Later, Grossberg (who studied with Hoggart and Hall) would bring that influence to the states via Illinois, and John Fiske would take up shop at the University of Wisconsin . . . er, in a speech department that also incorporated elements of the communications tradition too.

Confused yet? Me too. But less confused than I was just a few weeks ago.

I suppose what is most confusing to folks entering the field of "Communication Studies" is that their program may reflect one or all of these different trajectories today---and this also depends on the type of college the program is situated in. For example, my department of communication studies is housed in a college of communication formed in the late 1950s, which brought together the speech folks and journalism, and which subsequently split off into different departments (radio, television, and film was spread across theatre, English, and speech but formed into one unit in the new college).

Now, even more confusingly, "Communication Studies" can also be mapped across different professional organizations. In my department, faculty and students attend both the National Communication Association as well as the International Communication Association. I'm just now starting to learn about the history of ICA, so I cannot speak to its composition much, but I know it reflects these different trajectories. NCA, because it is a large organization, houses all five of the above trajectories, and you'll find scholars from all of them attending the conference. One of the largest and newest divisions of NCA, the Critical and Cultural Studies division, seems to be a meeting place for the qualitative folks of the communications and speech (now "rhetoric") traditions.

So, when I earlier posted that the new editorship of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies reflected a changing of the guard, I was beginning to hone-in on the different institutional trajectories I've discussed above. I did not yet realize when I first published in that journal that the audience was much, much more diverse than any other journal in the communication field. Because pieties and investments---stylistic, argumentative, philosophical, and conceptual--- are so different among the journal's audience, I am deeply sympathetic to the editors' challenge. My inner optimist---a rare persona, I know---does come out here, though, in the hope that a number of us might come together to think through a way to bring our different trajectories together with some common self-understanding. Perhaps a many-authored précis on the many communication studieses would help---an essay length thing, to be submitted to that journal---that attempts to discern a common thread to our projects, under the aegis of "communication?"

What I'm trying to muddle through here is probably obvious to those have lived through the formation of the Critical and Cultural Studies division of NCA, for example. But younger generations of scholars are not aware of this history---I was not, until recently, at least---and it seems to me we need some way to introduce this complex history to newer generations of scholars, especially as we continue to specialize into our own interests.

Frankly, I'm not sure why I've taken such an interest in disciplinary history as of late. Well, I am and I am not. Some of my interest has to do with visiting different communication departments around the country, delivering the same paper, and getting wildly divergent responses. And I'm sure it's no doubt inspired by the scholarship of my friends Pat Gehrke, Ron Green, and Bill Keith, who have opened my eyes to the history of the speech tradition. It's also inspired by publishing in my field and being mystified by blind reviewers who have very different reading backgrounds, different conceptual habits---and unforeseen hostilities. I'm sure what I've said here is incorrect in many places (careful history is not my forte, but I'm trying to learn!). Still, if I hope to impart anything with this post, it's the necessity of knowing our history---not only to make publishing scholarship in communication studies easier, but also so that we can, you know, communicate.

PS: Ted, I appreciate your question about The Quarterly Journal of Speech and its direction toward the critical. More on that score, I hope, in a future post.