Key

Concepts
in Critical
Cultural
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Studies
EDITED BY LINDA STEINER
AND CLIFFORD CHRISTIANS

THE HISTORY OF COMMUNICATION

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The History of Communication

Robert W. McChesney and

John C. Nerone, editors

A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Key Concepts
in Critical
Cultural Studies
Edited by Linda Steiner
and Clifford Christians

University of Illinois Press

Urbana, Chicago, and springfield
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 © 2010 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Key concepts in critical cultural studies /
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

edited by Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians.

p. cm. — (History of communication)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-252-03506-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-252-07695-4 (pbk. : alk. apper)
1. Culture—Study and teaching.
2. Communication and culture.
I. Steiner, Linda. II. Christians, Clifford G.
gn357.k49   2009
306.071—dc22   2009029973

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Dedicated to the memory of
our mentor and colleague
James W. Carey
7 September 1934 – 23 May 2006
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Contents

Part II Culture
Culture James W. Carey and the Conversation
of Culture Lawrence Grossberg 73

Popular Culture Asking the Right Questions Joli Jensen 88

Oral Culture Oral Culture as Antidote to Terror

and Ennui Mark Fackler 103

Ritual The Dark Continent of Journalistic Ritual

Catherine A. Warren 115

Identity The Politics of Identity Work Lana F. Rakow 128

Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Part III Consequences

Professionalism Journalism without Professional Journalists?
Stuart Allan 145

Politics Media Power, Status Politics,

and Partisanship Frederick Wasser 158

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction: Working the Hyphens in
Critical-Cultural Conversations
Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians ix

Part I Contexts
History Looking for the Subject of
Communication History John Nerone 3

Education Critical Pedagogy Norman K. Denzin 17

Space The Possibilities and Limits of the

Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Conversation Model
Angharad N. Valdivia 26

Religion Faith in Cultural Studies

Quentin J. Schultze 40

Community Community without Propinquity

Linda Steiner 54

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Ethics Communication Ethics in
Postnarrative Terms Clifford Christians 173

The Public Philosophical Foundations and Distortions

in the Quest for Civitas Robert Fortner 187

Technology The Digital Sublimation of the

Electrical Sublime Steven Jones 199

Globalization Counterglobalization and Other Rituals

against Empire Jack Bratich 212

Epilogue How Scholarship Matters Barbie Zelizer 227

Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments 239

Works Cited 241

Editors and Contributors 261

Index 266

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction

Working the Hyphens

in Critical-Cultural
Conversations
Linda Steiner and
Clifford Christians

This volume addresses the ways and extent to which key concepts
in critical and cultural studies remain useful to scholars, to policy
makers, and to citizens—or the ways they need to be rethought
and reconsidered if they are to continue to be viable. The essays,
individually and taken as a whole, engage in debate about culture
and communication and about cultural and critical studies. In re-
sponding to emerging political, social, and cultural problems, the
field has changed over the years. Thus the meanings, significance,
and interrelationships of its central concepts have changed, as the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

authors here show. Nonetheless, these terms are consistent and re-
main at the fore and center.
This book’s title signals its inspiration from Raymond Williams,
whose various editions of Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society underscored the importance of recording and investigating
problems of meaning but also emphasized how meanings change, as
do the social formations and practices in which those meanings are
embedded. Others using the genre of Williams’s Keywords offer, as

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 he did, an encyclopedic but necessarily abbreviated alphabetized list of many
words. We have chosen instead to trace the intellectual and historical trajectories
of the major terms defining the field. Moreover, we use the term keywords, but
we do so in a slightly different way. First, we use the term to refer to significant
concepts, not to refer to search terms used for targeting and retrieving relevant
information in a database. Second, our concern here lies more with the relation-
ships among literatures rather than with the historical origins and evolution of
individual dictionary entries. Carey, for example, listed culture, communication,
technology, community, time, and space as “the key words” of Communication as
Culture (1989, 243). As Barbie Zelizer observes in the epilogue, using keywords
in the Williams tradition enables us to juxtapose ideas. This allows the concepts
individually to provoke a variety of trajectories, while collectively they suggest
interlocking patterns for productive scholarship. Each concept points to its own
projections of meaning; at the same time composites of these terms open new
vistas. Meanwhile, as Williams (1983, 15) noted, each provokes ways of both
discussing and seeing many of our central experiences.
As critical-cultural studies enters what might be called its middle age, it be-
comes important to take stock of key terms and see the extent to which consensus
has emerged on the meanings and usefulness of the central concepts. We want
to figure out how and when these concepts work. We want to evaluate how far
these concepts take us and determine where they cannot take us. To what trade-
offs—with more or less self-consciousness of the deals struck—do they point?
Indeed, as the epilogue notes, keywords in Williams’s sense not only provide a
guidebook showing us how to navigate a world but also help us imagine new
worlds where we have not traveled. This book responds to a call for a coherent,
consistent volume that establishes the form and substance of critical-cultural
studies and takes stock of an increasingly influential body of work.
An oft-cited remark from Kenneth Burke describes how these chapters deal
with the crucial concepts in critical and cultural studies:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion
too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the
discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no
one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.
You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of
the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him;
another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either
the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the
quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The

x Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion
still vigorously in progress. (Burke 1974, 110–11)

Thus we enter into that ongoing and lively context. We pay particular atten-
tion to the way these crucial terms were developed and elaborated in the work
of James W. Carey, arguably the founder of cultural studies in the United States.
We consider the evolving understandings of these terms, including Carey’s own
engagement with them. Thus, we continue a conversation with Carey, who exited
both far too early and well before it was over. Having listened to often heated
debate, we recognize that we cannot, even together, capture it all. Nonetheless,
we believe we have caught the tenor of the argument. Notably, Philip Selznick
(1992) insists that definitions in social theory be kept weak, value neutral, and
uncontroversial. Nonetheless, he urges us not to eliminate controversy but to
transfer it to the formulation of theories, which should be normative. So, in
offering arguments about the status of dynamic concepts and claims, we fully
invite and welcome the discussion that will continue, as it should.
The authors here agree on the importance of grounding scholarship in spe-
cific practices, experiences, and communities. Just as the contributors call for
scholars individually to be politically and intellectually embedded and engaged
with the nitty-gritty of life, so we try to connect scholarship to real problems—
problems in democracy, urban life, and popular culture. Certainly these essays
are grounded in a sense of ethics, for, as Clifford Christians says in his essay,
our field understands morality not in terms of an apparatus of neutral standards
but as a cultural domain that unfolds dialectically in human interaction. Moral
commitments are embedded in the practices of particular social groups, and
they are communicated through a community’s stories. Nor do we neglect the
importance of understanding these concepts. We address their real-life conse-
quences—political, social, or moral.
The essay here by Lawrence Grossberg—who has edited a “new” keywords text
(Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris 2005)—features the role of culture in cultural
studies, directly examining how the changing geo-historical context challenges
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

cultural studies today. Grossberg sets Carey’s work in the historical context
of British cultural studies. Carey relied on John Dewey’s pragmatism and the
Chicago school of social thought but also engaged in dialogue with his “British
cotravelers.” Other terms in Carey’s version of cultural studies have a Canadian
context. The notions of time and space, empire and bias, and technology fa-
mously emerge from serious consideration of Harold Innis and the University
of Toronto’s Program in Culture and Technology. Keywords establish a field’s
always shifting and uneven terrain. Yet, as a whole, the field has a recognizable

i n troduction xi

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 shape. This book provides a distinct opportunity to engage these concepts across
their history and geography and to present them alongside one another as an
overview of critical-cultural studies today.
Just as Carey criticized Marshall McLuhan not for the questions he asked but
for “weaknesses in the way he framed and presented his arguments in answering
these questions” (1997m, 41), so we consider the strengths and deficiencies in
various arguments resting on these concepts. In contrast to McLuhan, who was
inattentive to the political dimension, the essayists here are acutely sensitive to
politics. Lana Rakow, for example, takes issue with Carey’s critique of identity
politics and uses the campaign rhetoric of 2004 and 2008 to show the importance
of “identity work.” The authors represented in this volume are also attuned, as
Carey (2005) put it, to the brittleness of the economy and the vulnerability of
the new world order. Not merely technology but everything must be embedded
in the vital world of politics, economics, religion, and culture. Technologies are
never autonomous in their origins or unidimensional in their consequences. So
it is with all these concepts.
Some of these terms are enormously difficult to break open. All are complex.
One early anthology on “community studies” described the term community as
a “god word”: “we are expected to abase ourselves before it rather than attempt
to define it” (Butterworth and Weir 1970, 58). Precisely because several of the
concepts in cultural and critical studies have tended to operate as god-terms,
the intention here is to demystify them, although certainly without thinning
out their richness. Indeed, noting that cultural scholars have an abiding “faith”
in cultural investigation, Quentin Schultze traces that faith to specific religious
narratives; he sees this motivating and operating in at least three ways in cul-
tural studies: a faith in diversity, a sense of realistic hope, and a commitment to
sacrificial love.
Jack Bratich has offered the notion that keywords can be used to unlock
new doors. Making the metaphor even more contemporary, he suggests under-
standing cultural studies terms as passkeys or passwords—not in the sense of
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

monopolizing (i.e., unlocking secrets otherwise never shared) but in the sense
of allowing thresholds to be crossed, allowing unfettered access to worlds of
meaningful possibility. These essays are not keys to closed-ended puzzles; rather,
they evoke an open-ended set of debates and arguments.
More concepts from both cultural and critical studies could have been in-
cluded. Including news, for example, would provide an opportunity to rethink
how the concept of news as a social practice has changed (or not) over time
and space and in the context of access enabled by new technologies; indeed,
important negotiations continue over the meaning and uses of news. One also

xii Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 thinks in this context of the terms narrative, memory, audience, modernity, au-
thority, governance, regulation, and colonialization. Carey himself might have
objected to the inclusion of such words, given his growing distress with the
overly theorized pretentiousness of cultural studies. Moreover, some of those
themes and concepts come into greater visibility at certain times, receding into
the background at other moments. A few essays here respond to specific troubles,
issues, or problems that plague us at certain “key” moments before fading from
view (without ever being fully solved). For many of the authors here, choices
about which literatures to foreground reflect our intellectual homes in media
studies, albeit an interdisciplinary approach to media studies, rather than in more
traditional humanities. As a result, different essays use terms in ways that reflect
contemporary dilemmas and even, sometimes, professional and academic fads.
Some ideas respond to new directions in communication, as well as in history,
sociology, philosophy, and literature.
One constant here is the complexity of terms. Alan Durant (2006) notes how
Williams’s entries typically asserted that the word in question was difficult. Wil-
liams began his research when he realized just how complicated culture was.
Many words were called “the most complex,” or “among the most complicated,”
or at least “among the most difficult” to use in the English language. Durant’s
point is that such difficulties partly reflect historical changes in meanings. It is
also a matter of polysemy; under political and social pressures, people extend
or transform meanings such that words acquire multiple senses. On the other
hand, or perhaps in response to that complexity, all the contributors here see
both critical and cultural studies as having been considerably transformed over
the years. While once these two areas were regarded by many scholars as separate
fields, networks of flexible but robust bridges run between them.
As a result, this book is about critical-cultural studies, and we continue to
posit, nurture, and work that hyphen. We should also note that the title of
this book refers to critical cultural studies (without a hyphen), pointing to the
emergence and continuing evolution of a “critical” version of cultural studies.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The title of this introduction, however, recalls the challenge Michelle Fine (1998)
issued to ethnographers to reject the notion of a singular, unified identity and
explode fixed categories and boundaries. Fine describes “working the hyphens”
as thinking about “how we are in relation with the contexts we study and with our
informants, understanding that we are multiple in those relations” and “creating
occasions to discuss what is and what is not ‘happening between’” (135). Our
introduction’s title, then, recalls that “play” in a mestiza consciousness.
Various critics and defenders of these concepts have taken off in many direc-
tions. The articulation of the concepts is responsive to critique. So, returning to

i n troduction xiii

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Burke’s language, in dipping our oars into the never calm, always roiling seas
of cultural studies, we respond not to static ideas but to moving targets. For
example, take Carey’s ritual model of and for communication, the centerpiece
of several essays. Conceding the compelling elegance of Carey’s description of
the ritual model, one critic notes the theory’s assumptions about consensus and
its corollary inattention to discord (Ettema 1990). At the time, this observation
was a fair critique. Yet Catherine Warren uses ritual to understand the furor
over Seymour Hersh’s exposé of the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib and over
the “news” of photographs of those abuses. Arguably Carey’s (1998b) essay on
rituals of shame and degradation—discussed at length by Frederick Wasser in his
chapter on democracy and politics—itself addresses the complaint that discus-
sions of ritual inherently overemphasize consensus and ignore conflict. Carey
had used the 1987 hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork
to discuss how both official, sanctioned ceremonies and the customs of daily
life can render—perhaps unfairly—a sentence of permanent exile. Carey’s point
was that such “episodes of high, systematic and sanctioned misanthropy[,] when
the power of the state, public opinion or both is inscribed on the body” (42–43),
did not conform to the model of communitas, reconciliation, and reunification
suggested by an understanding of media events as providing consensual symbols
and promoting solidarity (Dayan and Katz 1992). But this was a mere suggestion.
Several chapters here underscore both the misuses of claims to community and
the ways that symbols can fail. And, of course, there is more to be done with
such provocative and productive terms.
Not surprisingly, these essays intertwine. Each discussion refers to other con-
cepts. Each references an overlapping set of key figures plowing the cultural
studies field: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, John Dewey, Raymond Williams,
Walter Lippmann, and Stuart Hall. Carey himself continued to pose questions
about the ways various key concepts worked together—or did not. He put glo-
balization, democracy, and communication in the title of a 2003 speech, asking
whether we can have all three. His answer, by the way, was that desires for these
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

three complex goods are not mutually supportive; furthermore, the nation-state
forms an important but otherwise undisclosed fourth term that would be neces-
sary to close the analytic loop but also sets the terms of the contradiction. This
book addresses those four terms as well as several other notions mentioned
in that speech, including transportation, space, time, empire, technology, and
specific technologies.
Consistent with this, then, John Nerone’s chapter on history references no-
tions of professionalism—the concept elucidated by Stuart Allan—to underscore
how, at least in the nineteenth century, professional historians both erected

xiv Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 formidable barriers around their field and, even more controversially, insisted
on grounding historical narratives in the emerging archives of nation-states—
Nerone also, of course, describes various scholars’ interest in the history of
technology and histories of technologies. Meanwhile, Allan uses the history of
journalism education—centering on Joseph Pulitzer’s vision for the Columbia
Journalism School, where James Carey taught after some decades at the Univer-
sity of Illinois—to consider a journalism without professional journalists. Thus,
in asking what can or should be taught about journalism, Allan also raises issues
of pedagogy, which Norman Denzin critiques in an essay on radical pedagogy
that also asks questions about culture and politics.
Mentioning nearly every concept addressed in this volume, Bratich’s essay
on empire and globalization properly ends this anthology by noting how com-
munication technologies can dissolve regional boundaries and solidify national
ones, thus producing a delocalized identity, expanding sovereignty across space.
Whether or not globalization necessarily expands democracy, one might wonder
if ritual itself might be globalized, although perhaps affecting ritual’s temporal
quality in the process. Angharad Valdivia’s essay on space describes how culture
transforms place into space; she demonstrates how globalization affects national
spaces by drawing on the distinction between time-binding and space-binding
cultures and exposing the problems modern space-binding technologies pose for
democracy. Likewise, in revisiting the assumed differences between territorial
and affective communities, and in asking how on-line communities function,
any discussion of community necessarily raises issues of space and territory, as
well as technology, addressed in essays by Wasser and Steiner and by Steve Jones,
who reminds us how broad and wide our concept of technology ought to be.
If we had room for one additional concept, we might have included conversa-
tion. Jim Carey both learned and taught through conversation and had always
noted the importance of thinking of news as conversation, well before that
phrase became faddish. Among other ideas, this notion rendered journalists a
conversational partner—no more and no less: “All journalists can do is preside
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

over and within the conversation of our culture: to stimulate it and organize it,
to keep it moving and to leave a record of it so that other conversations—art,
science, religion—might have something off which they can feed. The public
will begin to awaken when they are addressed as a conversational partner and
are encouraged to join the talk rather than sit passively as spectators before a
discussion conducted by journalists and experts” (1987a, 17). Not surprisingly,
then, Grossberg offers his essay on culture in the spirit of Carey’s comment about
life as a conversation. As Joli Jensen notes, Carey approached popular culture
forms as occasions for shared reflection: often we watch television, read novels,

i n troduction xv

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 or attend movies because we look forward to the conversations they provoke.
Such rituals lie at the heart of a cultural approach to communication. Providing
just such an example, Mark Fackler begins his essay on oral culture by noting
how, the day after spectacles such as the Academy Awards, we in the audience
remake the celebrities on stage as engaged in conversation, and our conversations
are about them. Shifting to Africa, Fackler highlights the concept of the village
palaver—roundabout, overlapping, redundant, inefficient but also celebratory;
it’s talk that unifies a communal vision.
Professor Carey died in 2006, before he could write the final chapter for this
book. Whatever difficulties some of the authors may have faced drafting chapters
before his death, doing so afterward became even more difficult. Perhaps the
problem was that it would imply, in contradiction of his wise words, an attempt
to end the conversation and provide the final thoughts. “No one has the last word.
There are no final thoughts; there is no end to the conversation” (Carey 1991).
Certainly many of the seventeen contributors to this volume began their par-
ticipation in serious discussion of these critical-cultural questions as graduate
students at the University of Illinois. All but five earned their doctorates from the
Institute of Communications Research while James Carey was there: Christians,
Fackler, Fortner, Grossberg, Jensen, Jones, Rakow, Schultze, Steiner, Valdivia,
Warren, and Wasser (who then worked with Carey as a postdoctorate research
fellow at Columbia University). Bratich also earned his Ph.D. from Illinois.
Christians (who served as the director of the institute from 1987 to 2001 and
from 2007 until 2009), Denzin, Nerone, and Valdivia teach there and overlapped
with Carey, and Jones is now an adjunct professor at the institute.

* * *
Finally, a note about the citation system in this volume. Some of Carey’s most-
cited essays were reprinted in two collections. Carey himself collected essays
written over an eighteen-year span in Communication as Culture: Essays on Me-
dia and Society (1989); Catherine Warren and Eve Munson edited James Carey:
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

A Critical Reader (1997). Contributors here occasionally make reference to the

original year or context of these essays, but because the original sources are often
difficult to find, and the edited collections are easy to find, we cite essays from
these two collections. A new edition of Communication as Culture, published
in 2008, includes a foreword by G. Stuart Adam and a bibliography listing all
Carey’s published work. The chapters for our volume were written before this
revised edition appeared and so continue to refer to the 1989 edition.

xvi Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Part I    Contexts
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 History

Looking for the Subject

of Communication History
John Nerone

The term history refers simultaneously to a dimension of the human

past and the representation of that past. Both uses of the word con-
tain ambiguities, and the dissonance between the two produces an
additional layer of ambiguity. Moreover, the dimension of the human
past that is called history is distinguished from other dimensions.
Depending on who is parsing the historical from the rest of the
past, nonhistory might be called “prehistory” or “everyday life” or
the personal or the spiritual. The distinction between the historical
and the nonhistorical is always contested. Perhaps the bottom-line
distinction between the historical and the nonhistorical past is that
the former can be represented: it can be made intelligible in some
sort of narrative form. In this way, history as the past is inextricably
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

bound up with history as the representation of the past.

As a literary mode of representation, history shares the elements
of other modern literature: character, setting, plot, and theme. His-
torically, the element of character has been tied to the nation-state.
When history was invented as a professional form of knowledge in
the nineteenth century, historians barricaded their position within
the much larger field of representing the human past by claiming
jurisdiction over the plotlines that state institutions lent themselves

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 and by insisting that these stories be grounded in the newly forming archives
that the nation-states created. Left outside the walled city of professional history
were many styles of representing the past, both academic and nonacademic,
that have retained considerable vitality, among them the “natural histories” of
geology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, economics, and radical politics.
Professional historians claimed primacy over these nonhistories by invoking
the distinction between “idiographic” and “nomothetic” sciences. Unlike the
scientists and social scientists who collected data in order to explain them away
with covering laws, the historians embraced the particularity of historical knowl-
edge. Rejecting the setting of lapidary evolutionary time, in which long periods
of stability are interrupted by rapid revolutionary shifts, professional historians
embraced a universal empty time in which deliberate human action unfolded.
Rejecting mechanistic causal explanations, historians embraced a notion of
individual choice, producing narratives that could be said to have moral mean-
ing. The theme of professionalized history, then, might be summarized as the
long struggle between freedom and tyranny.
These elements of character, setting, plot, and theme were institutionalized
in a set of practices centered on the “philological” method—the close study of
singular historical documents. One became a professional historian through a
rite of passage that featured a long journey into and out of a guarded archive.
In this journey, the aspiring historian rescued arcane knowledge from oblivion.
Both the research process and its result provided romance, understood in a
literary sense.1
This professional mode of history has always had its dissidents. The twentieth
century produced a number of “new histories,” embracing (in order) “social
and intellectual history,” “economic and social history,” radical history, history
from the bottom up, the linguistic turn, and the cultural turn. Nonetheless, the
dissidents have characteristically retained the distinction between history and
the nonhistorical past and the set of practices, including the romance of the
archives, that maintains it.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The history of communication draws promiscuously on histories on both

sides of the profession’s boundaries. From inside come the classic liberal nar-
ratives of freedom of the press (using state archives to trace an intellectual and
institutional history of individual freedom) and of journalism history (using
the archive of news organizations to trace the history of independence from
governing authority). From outside come the political-economic narratives of
Marx, the narrative of communication systems of Innis and McLuhan, the related
grand narrative of postmodernism most popularly rendered by Baudrillard and
Foucault, and the spatial histories of David Harvey and Edward Soja.

4 John Nerone

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 James Carey’s historical work is exemplary in this regard. In straddling the
boundaries separating the protected domain of professional historians from the
broader terrain of the representation of the past, it resembles three other forma-
tions that combine various influences: the history of technology, the history of
the book (or print culture), and the history of the public sphere. The history of
technology is assembled between the two poles of the natural history of tools
and their effects, which tends toward triumphalism and technological determin-
ism, and the specific histories of the adoptions and social construction of these
tools. In communication history, these poles are represented on the one hand
by Wilbur Schramm’s grand narrative of communication technologies and on
the other by Daniel Czitrom’s ironic narrative of the capture of the telegraph,
radio, and movies in Media and the American Mind (1982). The history of the
book, which is the somewhat outgrown name for the interdisciplinary study
of the social history of print culture, combines a McLuhanite sense of print
literacy’s formative impact on modern mentality (filtered most influentially
through Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work on the printing revolution) with both the
social-historical attitude of historians such as Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon
Davis, and Roger Chartier (typically associated with the kinds of intense social
and “total” history promoted by the French journal Annales) and the detailed
accounts of reading experiences in Jonathan Rose’s history of working-class read-
ers in England or Ron and Mary Zboray’s studies of U.S. readers. The history of
the public sphere combines the grand narratives of Jürgen Habermas, Hannah
Arendt, and Richard Sennett with the detailed analysis of media and politics in
Michael Warner’s work, which emphasizes textual practices, or in Richard John’s
studies of the postal system and telegraph, which emphasize institutions.
This condensed genealogy and canon of communication history underscores
a simple point, put mischievously: there is no such thing as communication
history. In the nineteenth-century formation of professional history, scholars
assumed that archival work properly executed would yield solid, specific chunks
of history, bricks whose larger meanings and purposes would not be evident until
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

later, when all the bricks would have been fashioned and would then assemble
themselves into a grand cathedral of historical intelligibility—god’s plan, as it
were. This faith succumbed to the very plenitude of history. Too many bricks and
brickmakers working at cross-purposes, ever more straw and clay, producing not
a cathedral but a big pile of bricks. In the history of communication, the loss of
faith in the eventual wholeness of the past is not as evident, for the simple reason
that the history of communication never was all that integrated. The varieties of
history on which it has drawn are incommensurable. They presuppose different
subjects and processes of communication.

history 5

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The broad field of communication history cannot be unified. Nevertheless, it
need not be idiotic. The varieties of communication history do have things to say
to one another and can be brought into intelligent dialogue. One thrust of James
Carey’s historical approach is to accomplish that. At the same time, varieties of
communication history often intersect at interesting objects of study. A second
thrust of Carey’s work is to provide some tools for doing specific histories at these
intersections; after describing his integrative historical approach, I’ll discuss his
contribution to developing these strategies.

A Dialogue among Traditions

Carey’s historical work mingles three streams of scholarship. It proposes to

integrate a tradition of liberal historiography associated with the generation
that taught him at the University of Illinois with the culturalism of the Chicago
school of sociology and a form of materialism coming out of the Canadian
school, especially Innis. Carey combines these three approaches in various ways
in a series of essays on various topics: the history of journalism, the history of
the public sphere, the history of technology, and the history of communication
scholarship.
That these essays approximate an integrated approach to the history of com-
munication is the result less of their conceptual consistency than of a kind of
faith commitment. In what follows, I will try to identify the sources of the various
strains in Carey’s work, explain how they do and don’t fit together, and show why,
despite the tensions in his work, his center seems to hold, why it harmonizes his
diverse ensemble of histories. Part of the integrative force in Carey’s histories
comes from his unique and charismatic voice and personality (difficult to ex-
plain to those who never saw him perform). Part of it comes from tradition, and
another part, from ritual. The tradition is a style of history associated with his
teachers at the University of Illinois. The ritual is the conduct of citizenship.
The Illinois tradition of communication history was formed by three of Carey’s
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

teachers: Fred Siebert, Ted Peterson, and Jay Jensen. Siebert and Peterson are
familiar as two of the authors of Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Schramm,
and Peterson 1956), but their most important work was quite different in nature.
Siebert’s signature book was his Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776 (1952),
a magisterial narrative of the various systems of press control (royal, parliamen-
tary, judicial) based on painstaking archival research. Peterson’s signature book
was his Magazines in the Twentieth Century (1956), which displays an encyclo-
pedic grasp of the entire range of periodical publication in the United States.
Both masterworks continue to be used by specialists half a century or more

6 John Nerone

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 after their publication, but their impact on the field of communication is slight
by comparison with that of Four Theories—ironically so, because, by contrast,
Four Theories seems thin in substance and imprecise in conceptual framework,
a point a later generation of Illinois scholars drove home in Last Rights (1995),
which I edited at Carey’s instigation.
The importance of Four Theories to the field of communication comes not
from its substance or concepts but from its foundational attitude: that the history
of communication is properly understood as philosophical. The book’s histori-
cal snapshots are caricatures and its theoretical constructs are chimerical. But
this criticism of Four Theories, as Carey might say, is not so much wrong as it is
wrong-headed. It fails to honor the importance of the little book, which, like the
archaic historians’ metaphor of the cathedral of knowledge, is really a kind of
act of faith. Four Theories means something because of its faith that, at the end
of the day, all the specific practices of press regulation and censorship signify
philosophical foundations. Four Theories believes that media systems are about
ideas, not about power or profit.
Jay Jensen’s major point was much the same. His influence is a little harder
to trace, given his slender publication record. Jensen’s magnum opus was his
unpublished 1957 doctoral dissertation, “Liberalism, Democracy, and the Mass
Media.” Jensen’s main argument mirrored the approach of Four Theories, pub-
lished the year before. Using the term Weltanschauung, he argued that the struc-
tures and practices of media systems were determined in the first instance by
the basic philosophical assumptions of an age or society. Jensen’s history of the
media, again, was thus a history of ideas, not of ideologies: the ruling ideas of
any age, which are best expressed by the brightest philosophers, scientists, and
theoreticians, cut across all fields of human activity and explain a full range of
practices, including communication. As a teacher and mentor, Jensen was by
all accounts magnetic, erudite, passionate, eclectic, and supremely acidic when
discussing banalities or stupidities. Carey’s histories can be read as well-tempered
amplifications.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

It is by now a cliché to explain the idealism of this approach as an expression

of long-superseded racial, gender, and ideological homogeneity and hegemony.
Liberalism, triumphant over the authoritarianism of the Right in World War II
and involved in a long twilight struggle with the autocracies of the Left in the
Cold War, could confidently assert that history concerned ideas and freedom.
A half century later we hear the same totems in the political realm, but scholars
recognize that their usage is at best nostalgic, at worst cynical. This is because the
content of these words has changed for scholars as well as for thinking people
in politics. Ideas, considered ends in themselves by the postwar generation,

History 7

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 are today treated as instruments; their meaning is found not in contemplation
but in action: they mean what they do. And freedom is the freedom of private
individuals to do whatever, not the freedom of public citizens to make a com-
mon life. Living in a disenchanted age, we find it hard to honor the impulse that
produced this liberal historiography.
Carey’s histories respond directly to this sense of decline of the republic. His
concern for the rituals of citizenship is a second factor that joins the various
historical approaches and literatures he deploys. Again, this is an act of faith.
Carey believes in both the value and the practicality of republican citizenship.
He believes in the public sphere as a norm, he believes that public discourse
has at various times supported and embodied deliberative democracy, and he
believes journalism can play a fundamental role in the deliberations of a free
citizenry. These are articles of faith inasmuch as the historical record cannot
prove their truth to a skeptic’s satisfaction, even though it offers many signs of
them to a believer.
The Illinois tradition and the centrality of the rituals of citizenship might
yield a simple progressive journalism history. That is not Carey’s history. He
complexifies this narrative by melding it with Dewey and Innis. From Dewey
and the Chicago school he takes a particular approach to culture as rooted in a
conversational community, best explained in his essay “The Chicago School and
the History of Mass Communication Research” (1997b). From Innis he takes a
specific approach to the materialities of communication and to the spatial and
temporal dimensions of communication.
These various borrowings and inspirations do not yield a smooth master nar-
rative. Rather, three different registers of history emerge. The first, inspired more
by Innis and Lewis Mumford, seeks to explain how technologies autonomously
make specific kinds of social realities. The second, inspired by Dewey, Mead,
and Park, studies how humans in communities actively create their own reality.
The third, in dialogue with the traditions of journalism history and the history
of freedom of the press inspired by Siebert, Peterson, and Jensen, studies the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

emergence of a professionalized news discourse. In the first mode of history,

the subject is a technological system, and the unit is a civilizational epoch. The
second mode locates historical action within interpretive communities—usually
academic or intellectual communities. The third mode locates history in the
life of the nation-state. The first mode studies “the media”; the second studies
“communication”; the third studies “journalism.” Over the course of his career,
Carey’s inclinations moved from the first mode to the second and then to the
third, I think, as his histories came to dwell on the changing fortunes of national
politics and public spaces in a globalizing world. In his best essays, two or more

8 John Nerone

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 of the modes of history do battle with one another. In much of his recent work,
journalism battles to maintain its distinctiveness from the media.
The rise of “the media” takes place against the impersonal play of the temporal
and spatial biases of communication technologies. Often considered a fourth
member (along with Innis, McLuhan, and Ong) of the Canadian school, Carey
announced his partiality toward Innis’s geographical and economic approach
to communication technologies in one of his first important essays, “Harold
Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan” (1967). Innis explains the interconnec-
tions between politics, economics, and communication in a fashion “designed
to uncover the reason and order underlying historical events” (Carey 1971, 3),
a pursuit that Carey calls “logos.” McLuhan moves to “mythos”: “an affective
and symbolically ordered representation of events which attempts to escape
the limitations of literal meanings” (Carey 1971, 3). McLuhan’s work amounts
to “a secular prayer to technology, a magical incantation of the Gods designed
to quell our fears that the machines may be taking over” (Carey 1967, 35). Innis,
by contrast, seeks to return some measure of agency to the policy decisions and
political processes of the moments of constitutive choice in communication
history. In Innis, Carey sees a materialism that takes technology seriously but
that avoids the things he abhors in Marxism: the foundational nature of class
struggle, the emphasis on exploitation over community, the recasting of ideas
as ideology and politics as illusion, and the investment in teleology.
Innis does offer a materialism friendlier to liberalism than Marx’s is, but even
Innis’s version is often reductionist. Complex historical phenomena disappear
into absurd monocausal explanations—for instance, when the failure of the
papyrus supply dooms the Roman Empire—and media tools swallow their con-
tent. Carey avoids reductionism more in the subjunctive than in the indicative.
His histories are not triumphalist. In fact, they often suggest damnation. They
also propose happier endings, however: we should revive public space, invent
new republican sociabilities, and support more mindful and more democratic
journalism. The media do oppress us, but they ought not to.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

What saves us from the media is, among other things, communication. Carey’s
attention to communication as culture offers in part a counterhistory to Innis’s
account. Lurking beneath the surface of his discussions of successful commu-
nication is a rejection of the spatiality that Innis discerns in the media. More
often than not, however, as my previous paragraph suggested, this rejection
takes the subjunctive. So Dewey countered Lippmann with a plea for the public,
just as Innis himself countered the military-industrial-educational complex
with a plea for the university tradition—both cases of history in the hortatory
subjunctive.

History 9

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Communication, in Carey’s most famous formulation, should be understood
as ritual. Media transmit messages, goods, and services to individuals isolated
in their own containers. Communication occurs when groups of people com-
munally create meaning. Communication as ritual has a temporal rather than a
spatial bias. The most promising site of communication in Carey’s essays seems
to be the university—ironically so, considering how much of his career was spent
in academic administration. The most consistent form of communication in
Carey’s thinking is journalism—also ironically, because it came into existence
and must live within the media.
Carey’s histories of journalism depict a struggle to keep citizenship alive in the
face of advancing markets and tools. We can see this tension at work in most of
his histories, beginning with his programmatic essay “The Problem of Journalism
History” (1997i). A fragment, really, of a longer work that remains unfinished
and abandoned, this essay diagnoses the common form of journalism history as
Whig history, the history of the triumph of independent journalism as a Fourth
Estate. This history emerged from a particular political and educational agenda
and works as a myth of origins for professional journalism. Carey finds Whig
history insufficient. It fails to ask interesting questions and thus produces little
that will surprise or stimulate a student of journalism. He proposes instead two
variants of a cultural history of journalism. The first is a history of “conscious-
ness,” in which journalism as an institution acts as the sense-making apparatus
for the society. The parallel scholarship he had in mind is the Annales-inspired
histories of reading done by Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Darnton. The
subject of that history would be the community of news readers, and the his-
torians who have done the most to answer Carey’s call are David Paul Nord,
Thomas C. Leonard, Charles Clark, and Ron and Mary Zboray, all of whom are
associated with the “history of the book” formation. The second variant Carey
calls for is a history of “the report,” a literary history of journalism, in which
the journalists themselves are the subjects, developing normative positions and
textual strategies in changing contexts.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

In Carey’s mind, these two histories are dialectically related. In the field of
journalism history, however, they exist as two different traditions, one an in-
ternalist history in which the meaning of journalism comes from the meanings
encoded in journalists’ narratives, the other an externalist history in which
meaning comes from the ensemble of relations into which the news media enter.
Subsequent scholars have generally chosen one of these traditions as founda-
tional and treated the other as expressing it.
A second essay, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph” (1989
[1983], 201–29), does just that by explaining storytelling conventions in journal-

10 John Nerone

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ism as a product of its mode of production. The essay begins with a history of
tools, specifically the railroad and telegraph system, treating them in the fashion
of Innis and following historians of business such as Alfred Chandler and histo-
rians of technology such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch. It then turns to the history of
the information industries, including both financial information and news. Here
Carey makes the not unusual observation that the telegraph dictated aspects of
literary style that became foundational to journalism as literature. Although this
is perhaps Carey’s most fully realized piece of historical research, it falls short
of achieving the synthesis of externalist and internalist history that his earlier
essay intimates. Take the development of telegraphic journalistic styles. Carey’s
argument seems wrong-headed, in that it performs the kind of reductionism
that Carey abhors. At the same time, it’s simply wrong, in that nothing in the
telegraph required telegraphic diction or objectivity. In fact, both those textual
practices came from elsewhere in the practice of professional communicators.
(There is a longer argument about technology and cultural form that I won’t
rehearse here, but I’ll imply it by pointing out that no one has explained why
the nation’s political parties did not set up their own partisan wire services.)
In other essays, especially “The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse:
On the Edge of the Postmodern” (1997h), Carey offers a different narrative of
journalism, one in which a first dispensation of news culture as politics is re-
placed, in the 1890s, by a culture of news professionalism. Here it is not the
technology of the telegraph but an ensemble of innovations in the larger society
and in the media industries that led to changes in journalism. The industrial
revolution, the growth of national industries and national bureaucratic organi-
zations, the rise of national magazines and other mass media, all combining to
create a national public, called forth a new journalistic subject, a kind of super-
citizen who would fight corruption and plutocracy by occupying a position of
independence and detachment and relentlessly unveiling the hidden agendas
of the powerful. This narrative is less technologically determined than the essay
on the telegraph, but it is no more redemptive. In the several essays in which he
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

deploys it, the outlook for democracy and the public is bleak.
In all his journalism histories, Carey frets over the evacuation of the public
sphere by professional journalists. His most eloquent expression of this senti-
ment appears in “A Plea for the University Tradition” (1978), which also served
as his presidential address to the Association for Education in Journalism. Be-
ginning with a point from Innis, Carey defines a particular kind of discourse
and interaction as vital to the life of the university—the slow and deep discus-
sion of fundamental issues, a discourse moving at the rhythms of orality and
offering modern societies both a temporal bias and a centripetal force. At least

History 11

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 since World War II, however, the university has been colonized by professional
discourses working to extend the forms of control and efficiency associated
with the bureaucracies of the industrial corporation and the managerial state.
Journalism education has not been immune to this assault on the university
tradition. As journalists sought to professionalize, they gradually abdicated their
responsibility to provide space and support to public discourse. The corruption
of journalism was rooted in the material realities of modern communication
and the modern state, and most particularly in a much larger privatization of
previously public space. In this essay and elsewhere, Carey offers a narrative,
drawn from Habermas, Richard Sennett, and Raymond Williams, of mobile
privatization, in which ever newer technologies capture pieces of public space
and install them in the privatized home. Telephones, televisions, refrigerators,
and automobiles all displace previously public spaces: the town square, the the-
ater, the marketplace, public transportation. Because his plea for scholarly tra-
dition is a jeremiad on journalism education, Carey sketches out a redemptive
path. But how can journalism educators’ determination to halt the drift toward
professionalism overcome tendencies overdetermined by technology, economics,
sociology, and the by now essentialized consumer subjectivity?
The tensions among the modes of history in Carey’s work often succeed in
the essays read individually but look different when his historical work is aggre-
gated. Each individual essay wants to rescue the space of the republic, but read
together, the essays aren’t . . . well, uplifting. They constitute a grand narrative
pitting a moral exhortation (“Let’s recover public space!”) against an inexorable
technologically determined transformation. Innis defeats Dewey every time.
This makes a loser, too, of the historiographical mode that takes the nation as
its unit, community building as its plot, rational citizens as its subjects, archival
resources as its raw material, and democracy as its theme. If Carey’s historical
vision retains coherence and optimism because of its faith commitment, his
actual histories have not kept the faith.
Does it follow that Carey’s historical work is incoherent? No. Carey’s faith
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

may quite well reflect the truth. Those who heard him bear witness recognize
the power his voice and persona lent to it. His faith may also be useful, in which
case it might as well reflect the truth. Still, for most scholars, the faith that would
give coherence to Carey’s work as a system has moved beyond reach.

Communication History in a Skeptical Age

This situation has an upside. If communication history understood globally and

theoretically is impossible, histories of communication understood locally and

12 John Nerone

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 practically are possible and can at least contingently combine the ultimately
incommensurable registers of communication history. To those attempting such
histories, Carey offers an interesting toolkit.
The most alluring tool is Carey’s distinction between ritual and transmission
models of communication. My own work with Kevin Barnhurst (2001) invokes
the ritual model of communication to explain the development of news forms—
not exactly the “history of the report” that Carey called for in the “Problem of
Journalism History” but in the same ballpark. The history of the construction
of forms of communication is evident in much of the historical work that Carey
has influenced. Of particular note are Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies
Were New (1988), Daniel Czitrom’s Media and the American Mind (1982), Susan
Douglas’s Inventing American Broadcasting (1987), and much of the work of
Michael Schudson. Although occupying different positions on a spectrum of
theoretical and political commitments, all these works share a commitment to
a social and cultural history of media that combines internalist and externalist
impulses. All acknowledge the significance of the largest histories of social devel-
opment to the specific histories of media forms and technologies. All emphasize
the interaction of technological developments with social and cultural forces and
the innumerable dreams of entrepreneurs, regulators, and citizen users. Few of
them have happy endings; when they do, they achieve it by accepting as viable
a republic of mobile privatized individuals.
These media histories implicitly move communication crabwise away from
journalism. The media history impulse undermines the specialness of journal-
ism, which comes to be understood as serial assemblages of forms contingently
constructed at particular times. David Mindich’s history of objectivity (1998),
for instance, disaggregates the practices that compose journalistic objectivity—
detachment, balance, neutrality, and the inverted pyramid—arguing that each
has its own history. This narrative coheres with Carey’s own analysis of the
creation of the professional journalist amid the social changes of the 1890s. But
it renders the ideals of journalism accidental.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

If the journalist is epiphenomenal, however, so too is the citizen. Instead of

citizens forming the public, the form of the public constructs a subjectivity for
citizens. Habermas’s approach to the public sphere, which influenced scholarship
enormously in the 1990s, continues to work its way through media history. One
impulse is to see media history as a narrative of virtual spaces, an impulse furthered
by contemporary analysis of the Internet and other new media. Habermas’s norma-
tive notion of publicness is used as an ideal type in some of this scholarship—for
instance, John Brooke’s explorations of the public sphere in early national U.S.
history (e.g., 1998) and many of the media essays in the multivolume History of

History 13

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the Book in America. Many of the scholars pursuing this line of research have
declared themselves fans of publicness (Pasley 2001, McGerr 1986). They propose
a narrative of decline not unlike the narrative one finds in Carey’s essays.
A counterpoint comes from studies such as Schudson’s Good Citizen (1999)
and Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin’s Rude Republic (2000). Contrary to the
fondness for the oral tradition that Neil Postman sees in the Lincoln-Douglas
debates and Lawrence Levine sees in the popularity of Shakespeare, they find
the public historically inattentive—and suitably so, because politics was then
and is now humbuggery. Citizens then were as self-consciously selfish as they
are now. It’s a good thing, too.
Both versions of this history of public spaces cite Benedict Anderson’s Imag-
ined Communities (1991) more than they cite Carey’s work. Perhaps this is be-
cause the term imagined community is so easily appropriated to do whatever
work one wants. For most media scholars (e.g., Leonard 1995), the term describes
how print media allow individuals to posit a national community via “pictures
in their heads.” Others (E. White 2004) argue that Anderson is really referring
to a space of imagination opened up by the combination of print and capitalism,
a space that allows for the representation of a national community even if no
individual really imagines it. One could argue that it was exactly this combina-
tion of print communication and global navigation that Carey referred to in his
essays on Innis. The creation of a smooth, uniform space of the nation becomes
for Armand Mattelart (1996) the main trajectory of the history of the idea of
communication, just as the transnational history forms the main trajectory of
Manuel Castell’s monumental trilogy.
In the space of the nation, the virtual and the geographical blur into each
other. Carey’s own work always draws on geographers, especially G. R. Taylor’s
(1951) and Schivelbusch’s (1986) work on the railroad and Allan Pred’s (1980)
work on city systems. The histories of the various networks that form the in-
frastructure of modern media periodically resurface as objects of scholarly
attention: for the telegraph, for instance, Richard Schwarzlose’s work is now
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

being recovered and replaced by scholars such as Menahem Blondheim (1994),

Richard John (1995), and, most magisterially, Paul Starr, whose Creation of
the Media (2004) is a kind of summa for liberal pluralist institutional history.
Another school of critical scholarship on space draws inspiration from David
Harvey, whose classic text The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) has little to
say about media but still may be taken as the Marxist version of Innis’s Empire
and Communications (1986 [1950]).
All these advancing streams of historical scholarship on communication extend
aspects of Carey’s thought. Most of them do so without noting direct influence or

14 John Nerone

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 paying sustained attention to the ways their projects might constitute a coherent
history of communication—perhaps, again, because there’s no such thing.

Conclusion

Anyone who knew James Carey knew that he was always working on a book.
The book was usually a history. His “Problem of Journalism History” (1997i),
first published in 1974, was taken from a book project that, he told me, reached
about one hundred pages of manuscript before he put it aside. When he left Il-
linois for Columbia, he was working on a book about the creation of a national
audience in the age of industrialization. This too, apparently, peaked at about
one hundred pages. He was often recruited to write books. Blackwell recruited
him to write a book on Innis and McLuhan for its Key Contemporary Think-
ers series, and Carey did considerable work on it, to the point where (as of this
writing) Blackwell listed it on Amazon.com with a 2007 publication date, but
with his son, Daniel, as the author. It was never published. At his death, he was
working on a book about U.S. history for journalists and journalism students—
“the history that a journalist needs to know,” he said. None of these book projects
went to print, and Carey left a long series of jilted editors.
Carey himself had an explanation for his essay writing. They were explora-
tions, a way of playing with certain notions as tools. They were attempts. The
essay form allowed him to revisit key themes and rework key arguments, to
continually fiddle with notions. Carey’s explanation for his attachment to the
essay form, though, doesn’t explain why he was always writing a book. That itch,
perhaps, came from the grand narrative impulse that’s common to communica-
tion scholars.
Communication scholars have an appetite for grand narrative in their his-
torical work. This feature, more than any other, repels traditional historians.
Professional history depended on an indefinite deferral of the completion of
large-scale narrative to justify its valorization of the archival work of the brick
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

makers. Why bother entering the archives if you already know that the answer
to any question you pose will be something along the lines of “spatiality” or
“people want to be free”?
But communication scholars have been lured into the archives nonetheless. It
is because their grand narratives conflict. Communication as a field is ready for
its historical turn, by which I mean not a turn to grand narrative but a turn to
well-crafted bounded narratives: bricks. James Carey’s corpus is symptomatic in
this regard. I suspect that the reason he abandoned his book projects once they
had reached a certain length involved more than lost interest. A finished book

History 15

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 would have to make narrative choices that simply were not satisfying. To say
“the center will not hold” in an essay still allows the possibility of redemption;
to construct a finished grand narrative around that plotline might undermine
one’s faith.
Instead, we have the essays. Like the best monographs that have been inspired
by his work, Carey’s essays gesture toward disparate grand narratives without
committing to any one. The dissonances in Carey’s work, which after all only
express the dissonances in the broader field of communication history, which in
turn only express the dissonances of human history itself, have been immensely
productive. Carey will continue to influence historical work that combines a
grand narrative thrust with careful research. Carey can be our Moses. He will die
on Mount Nebo, overlooking this particular Canaan, not entering it himself. He
died without writing a book like Chandler’s Visible Hand or Darnton’s Business
of Enlightenment. But he inspires others to do so.

Note
1. Take, for example, Robert Nisbet’s Social Change and History (1969), Peter Novick’s
book That Noble Dream (1988), and Bonnie Smith’s Gender of History (1998).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

16 John Nerone

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Education

Critical Pedagogy
Norman K. Denzin

Informed by James Carey’s theories of democracy and his ritual

model of communication, I enter a conversation that interrogates
the place of critical pedagogy in a free democratic society (Carey
1989, 1997j, 1997l; Rosen 1997). Critical pedagogy is a key component
in Carey’s intellectual project. A master teacher, Carey taught us
how to think critically, to think and act in ways that linked critical
pedagogy with a politics of hope. With Carey I seek a democratic
pedagogy crafted for life in America since September 11, 2001 (Den-
zin 2007).
A genuine democracy requires hope, dissent, and criticism. Criti-
cal pedagogy is a strategic means to these political ends. As Carey
puts it, “critical pedagogy and democracy are really names for the
same thing. . . . In our present predicament all terms of the political
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

equation—democracy, public opinion, public discourse, the press—

are up for grabs” (in Rosen 1997, 192, 196).

Democracy and Pedagogy

The democratic character of critical pedagogy is defined largely

through a set of basic assumptions (Giroux and Giroux 2006). These
assumptions include the following: (1) Educational and everyday

17

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 realities “are constructed in and through people’s linguistic, cultural, social and
behavioral interactions”; these both shape and are shaped by social, political, eco-
nomic and cultural forces (Fischman and McLaren 2005, 425). (2) It is not enough
to understand any given reality. There is a need to “transform it with the goal of
radically democratizing educational sites and societies” (ibid.). (3) Critical peda-
gogy disrupts those cultural practices that instill hegemonic ways of seeing and
thinking. As transformative intellectuals, educators actively shape and lead this
project. As advocates of critical pedagogy, they are aware of the many ways that
popular culture functions as a form of political education (Kincheloe 2004).
Finally, (4) pedagogical practices are always moral and political. The political
is always performative. The performative is always pedagogical. Critical peda-
gogy subjects structures of power, knowledge, and practice to critical scrutiny,
demanding that they be evaluated “in terms of how they might open up or close
down democratic experiences” (Giroux and Giroux 2005, 1). Critical pedagogy
scholars hold systems of authority accountable by offering critical reading of
texts, creating radical educational practices, and promoting critical literacy; in
turn, critical pedagogy encourages resistance to the “discourses of privatization,
consumerism, the methodologies of standardization and accountability, and the
new disciplinary techniques of surveillance” (Giroux and Giroux 2005, 3). Criti-
cal pedagogy provides the tools for understanding how cultural and educational
practices contribute to the construction of neoliberal conceptions of identity,
citizenship, and agency.
Democratic public life in America is under siege. A culture of fear has spread
around the world. The reactionaries and neoliberals have all but overtaken the
languages and politics of daily life, locating Americans in a permanent, open-
ended war against faceless, nameless terrorists. A radical democratic imagination
enters the spaces of this new public sphere. It serves to redefine the concept of
civic participation and public citizenship. This imagination turns the personal
into the political. Struggle, resistance, and dialogue are key features of its peda-
gogy. The rights of democratic citizenship are extended to all segments of public
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and private life, from the political to the economic, from the cultural to the
personal. This pedagogy seeks to regulate market and economic relations in the
name of social justice and environmental causes.

Hope, Pedagogy, and the Critical Imagination

The critical imagination is democratic, pedagogical, and interventionist. Building

on Freire (1998, 91), this imagination dialogically inserts itself into the world,
provoking conflict, curiosity, criticism, and reflection. Extending Freire, critical

18 Norman K. Denzin

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 pedagogy contributes to conceptions of education and democracy as themselves
pedagogies of freedom. As praxis, performance ethnography and indigenous the-
ater constitute dynamic ways of changing the world. In enacting a performance-
centered ethic, dialogic performances provide materials for critical reflection on
radical democratic educational practices. In so doing, performance ethnography
enacts an ethical and moral theory of selfhood and being. The particular type
of relationality we call research ought to enhance moral agency, moral discern-
ment, critical consciousness, and a radical politics of resistance (Christians 2002,
409; 2000). In these acts we contribute to a public conversation, to a dialogue
that puts into play the very notions of democracy and freedom, of citizen and
patriot (Carey 1997l, 208, 216).
As an interventionist pedagogy, the critical imagination seeks and promotes
an ideology of hope that challenges and confronts hopelessness; it understands
that hope, like freedom, is “an ontological need.” Hope is the desire to dream,
the desire to change, the desire to improve human existence. Hopelessness is
“but hope that has lost its bearings” (Freire 1999, 8).
Hope is ethical. Hope is moral. Hope is peaceful and nonviolent. Hope seeks
the truth of life’s sufferings. Hope gives meaning to the struggles to change the
world. Hope is grounded in concrete performative practices, in struggles and
interventions that espouse the sacred values of love, care, community, trust, and
well-being (Freire 1999, 9). As a form of pedagogy, hope confronts and interro-
gates cynicism, the belief that change is not possible or is too costly. Hope works
from rage to love. It articulates a progressive politics that rejects “conservative,
neoliberal postmodernity” (10). Hope rejects terrorism. Hope rejects the claim
that peace comes at any cost.
Carey extends these notions of hope, arguing that he was always drawn to John
Dewey and the American pragmatists because he and they were a group of people
who lived with hope and that hope shines through their writing (1997j, 115).

* * *
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The critical democratic imagination is pedagogical. First, as a form of instruction,

it helps persons think critically, historically, and sociologically. Second, as critical
pedagogy, it exposes the pedagogies of oppression that produce and reproduce
oppression and injustice (see Freire 2001, 54). Third, it contributes to an ethical
self-consciousness that is critical and reflexive. It gives people a language and
a set of pedagogical practices that turn oppression into freedom, despair into
hope, hatred into love, doubt into trust. Fourth, this self-consciousness in turn
shapes a critical racial self-awareness that contributes to utopian dreams of racial
equality and racial justice.

Education 19

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 For persons who have previously lost their way in a complex world, using
this imagination is akin to being “suddenly awakened in a house with which
they had only supposed themselves to be familiar.” They now feel that they can
provide themselves with critical understandings that undermine and challenge
“older decisions that once appeared sound.” Their critical imagination enlivened,
people “acquire a new way of thinking. . . . In a word, by their reflection and
their sensibility, they realize the cultural meaning of the social sciences.” They
realize how to make and perform changes in their own lives, to become active
agents in shaping the history that shapes them (Mills 1959, 8).

A Performative Communication Studies

I am attempting to retheorize the grounds of critical communications studies,

redefining the political and the cultural in performative and pedagogical terms.
The discourses of postmodern (auto)ethnography provide a background against
which are judged all other forms of writing about the politics of the popular
under global capitalism.
In this model, performative, pedagogical cultural studies becomes autoethno-
graphic. The autoethnographer becomes a version of McLaren’s (1997a, 1997b)
reflexive flaneur/flaneuse, a critical bricoleur, the “primordial ethnographer”
(McLaren 1997a, 144), who lives within postmodern, postorganized, late-cap-
italist culture and functions as a critical theorist, an urban ethnographer, an
ethnographic agent, a Marxist social theorist (McLaren 1997a).
The radical, performance (auto)ethnographer functions as a cultural critic,
a version of the modern antihero. The critical autoethnographer’s conduct is
justified because it is no longer to be found in just one individual’s case history
or life story. Within the context of history, the autoethnography becomes the
“dial of the instrument that records the effects of a particular stage of civilization
upon a civilized individual” (Spender 1984, ix). The autoethnography is both
dial and instrument.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The autoethnographer functions as a universal singular, a single instance of

more universal social experiences. This subject is summed up and for this reason
universalized by his or her epoch; we resume it by reproducing ourselves in it as
a singularity (Sartre 1981, ix). Every person is like every other person but like no
other person. The commitment, as McLaren argues (1997a, 170), is to a theory
of praxis that is purposeful, “guided by critical reflection and a commitment to
revolutionary praxis.”
A commitment to critical performance pedagogy gives performance studies
a valuable lever for militant, utopian cultural criticism. In Impure Acts (2000)

20 Norman K. Denzin

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Giroux calls for a practical performative view of pedagogy, politics, and cul-
tural studies. He seeks an interdisciplinary project that would enable theorists
and educators to form a progressive alliance “connected to a broader notion of
cultural politics designed to further racial, economic, and political democracy”
(128). This project anchors itself in the worlds of pain and lived experience and is
accountable to these worlds. It enacts an ethic of respect. It rejects the traditional
denial by the West and Western scholars of respect, humanity, self-determination,
citizenship, and human rights to indigenous peoples (Smith 1999, 120).

Participatory Performance Action Inquiry

Drawing on the complex traditions embedded in participatory action research

(Fine et al. 2003), critical performance pedagogy implements a commitment to
participation and performance with, not for, community members. Amplifying
Fine et al. (2003, 176–77), this project builds on local knowledge and experience
developed at the bottom of social hierarchies. Following Smith’s (1999) lead,
participatory performance work honors and respects local knowledge and cus-
toms and practices and incorporates those values and beliefs into participatory
performance action inquiry (Fine et al. 2003, 176).
Work in this participatory, activist performance tradition gives back to the
community, “creating a legacy of inquiry, a process of change, and material
resources to enable transformations in social practices” (Fine et al. 2003, 177).
Through performance and participation, scholars develop a “participatory mode
of consciousness” (Bishop 1998, 208) and understanding. This helps shape the
participant-driven nature of inquiry and folds the researcher as performer into
the structures of narrative and moral accountability of the group.
This project works outward from the university and its classrooms, treating
the spaces of the academy as critical public spheres, as sites of resistance and
empowerment (Giroux 2000, 134). Critical pedagogy resists the increasing com-
mercialization and commodification of higher education. It contests the penetra-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

tion of neoliberal values into research parks, classrooms, and the curriculum.
A commitment to critical pedagogy in the classroom can be an empowering,
dialogical experience. The instructional spaces become sacred spaces. In them
students take risks and speak from the heart, using their own experiences as
tools for forging critical race consciousness. The critical discourse created in
this public sphere is then taken into other classrooms, into other pedagogical
spaces, where a militant utopianism is imagined and experienced.
Pedagogically and ideologically the performative becomes an act of doing
(Giroux 2000, 135), a dialogical way of being in the world, a way of grounding

Education 21

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 performances in the concrete situations of the present. The performative be-
comes a way of interrogating how “objects, discourses, and practices construct
possibilities for and constraints on citizenship” (Nelson and Gaonkar 1996, 7;
in Giroux 2000, 134). This stance casts the cultural critic in the identity of a
critical citizen, a person who collaborates with others in participatory action
projects that enact militant democratic visions of public life, community, and
moral responsibility (Giroux 2000, 141). These pedagogical spaces embrace nei-
ther leaders nor followers but only coparticipants, persons working together to
develop new lines of action and new stories, new narratives, in a collaborative
effort (Bishop 1998, 207). Kittredge (1987, 87) says: “We must find a new story
to perform. . . . We must preserve a model of free democratic society.”

Homegrown Democracy

I felt great excitement when I saw Garrison Keillor’s book Homegrown Democrat
(2004). I thought, here is a man who thinks deeply about democracy and the
troubling times in which we live. He’ll pull me out of my depression. He’ll help
me address Kittredge’s challenge. I want to live in a new story. So I bought the
book. To my delight, I felt right at home. Keillor dedicates his book “to all of
the good Democratic-Farmer Laborites of Minnesota.” These are my people,
farmers from the heartland. Democrats.
Homegrown Democrat is a short version of Keillor’s autobiography. It is also his
attack on George W. Bush, the Iraq war, neocons, and conservative Republicans.
At its center Keillor celebrates the very values that mean-spirited Republicans,
corporate shills, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, and gun fetishists have at-
tacked. The Republicans have broken the civic compact, the simple code of the
Golden Rule that underlies midwestern civility. The politics of kindness. The
obligation to defend the weak against the powerful. “I didn’t become a Democrat
because I was angry,” he writes. “I’m a Democrat because I received a good educa-
tion in the public schools of Anoka, Minnesota, and attended a great university
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and when I was 18, John F. Kennedy ran for president” (Keillor 2004, 58).
This is my story! I attended excellent public schools in Iowa City, Iowa. I at-
tended a great university, the University of Iowa. And, much to the ire of my
Republican grandfather, I voted for John F. Kennedy for president. As did Keillor,
I worked to put myself through college. I discovered classical music, lecture halls,
libraries, concerts, plays, opera, modern art, jazz, Dave Brubeck, great books,
sociology, classic literature, professors who cared about teaching, all-night cafes,
coffee shops, existentialism, Marxism, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway, C. Wright
Mills, folk music, and the civil rights and antiwar movements.

22 Norman K. Denzin

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Keillor’s last chapter addresses 9/11, reading it as a rare moment of shared
community, pain, and suffering in New York City. Anticipating the Republican
National Convention, which celebrated Bush and 9/11, Keillor invokes the men
and women who died that day, writing, “They deserve better than to be the
platform for intolerance.” Then he catches himself: “I refuse to be furious. I am
a happy Democrat living in a great country, at home in St. Paul, Minnesota,
where no matter what, there is a lot of satisfaction going on a good deal of the
time” (Keillor 2004, 233).
In contrast, I’m an angry Democrat. I’m angry at the Democrats who sup-
ported Bush’s war. I’m angry at politicians who wait to see which way the wind
is blowing before they commit a political act requiring honesty and courage. I’m
angry at Democrats who think the good Democrat is homegrown. I’m not sure
“homegrown” works any longer. The home that grew me was narrow, provincial,
and white. In my Lake Wobegon the Golden Rule, the politics of kindness, and
the obligation to defend the weak and the poor extended only to those folks
like the rest of us.
I agree we have a moral obligation to bequeath to our grandchildren a world
better than the one we inherited. But it is not only our grandchildren to whom
this world is bequeathed. This is a global project. I know it must be local, but
I do not think it can be built entirely from the values that circulate in Keillor’s
imaginary pastoral utopia. And this saddens me, because for a long time I have
liked going to Lake Wobegon at the end of a hard week. I’m not so sure I can
do this any longer.
I must look elsewhere for my alternative model of democracy. “I envision a
democracy founded in a social justice that is not yet” (Weems 2002, 3).

* * *
James Carey notes that the bicentennary anniversary of the Bill of Rights coin-
cided with the war in the Persian Gulf, Bush 41’s war. America entered that war
without a real conversation about our foreign policy and our domestic policies.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Nor was there a debate about life after the cold war and the end (we thought) of
internationalism (Carey 1997l, 226). The second Bush’s war coincided with the
Patriot Act and massive assaults on the First Amendment and the rest of the
Bill of Rights. We find ourselves in a new version of internationalism, and again,
there has been no large-scale public conversation. Dissent has been repressed;
antiwar protests, ignored. An Orwellian space has taken over public discourse in
America. We have yet to have serious conversation about America’s place in the
new global order. Joan Didion (2004) calls it life under the “new normal” and
quotes George Orwell’s 1984, “‘The Enemy of the moment always represented

Education 23

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was
impossible’” (Orwell 1949, 33–35). Didion (2004, 71) responds: “Such was the
state of mind in which many of us discovered ourselves at one point or another
during the recent past: our memories were not satisfactorily under control. We
still possessed ‘pieces of furtive knowledge’ that were hard to reconcile with
what we heard and read in the news. We saved entire newspapers, hoping that
further study might yield their logic, but none emerged.”
To invoke William Kittredge (1987, 87), today, in a post-9/11 America with
Patriot Acts, the Homeland Security Administration, and until far too recently a
president who performed scripts of fear written by others, we are struggling “to
revise our dominant mythology . . . , to find a new story to inhabit, to find new
laws to control our lives, laws designed to preserve a model of a free democratic
society based on values learned from a shared mythology.”
The ground upon which we stand has dramatically shifted. The neoconser-
vatives have put into place a new set of myths, performances, narratives, and
stories, a new set of laws that threaten to destroy what we mean by freedom and
democracy. I need to act. Like Joan Didion, I found that little in my life within
the “new normal” under Bush any longer made any sense.

* * *
Scholars in critical communication studies must ask a series of questions. How
can we use the aftermath of 9/11 as a platform for rethinking what democracy
and freedom mean in America today? Can we revise our dominant mytholo-
gies concerning who we are? Can we fashion a post-9/11 narrative that allows
us to reinvent and reimagine our laws in ways that express a critical pedagogy
of hope, liberation, freedom, and love? Can performance studies help us chart
our way into this new space?
As we attempt to take back what has been lost, the “frightening thing” (to use
Orwellian language and sentiments) is this: if the Bush Administration could
thrust its hand into the past and say, this or that event, it never happened—that,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

surely, is more terrifying than mere torture or death (Orwell 1949, 35).

Conclusion

Critical pedagogy offers transformative intellectuals a method, a theory and a

set of practices, for putting the critical sociological imagination to work. This
project involves constructing and enacting pedagogies of hope and freedom,
ways of keeping the idea of a radical democracy alive. On this, let James W. Carey
have the last word, even as he paraphrases Benjamin Franklin:

24 Norman K. Denzin

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey and Franklin:
“We have a government;
a republic,
if you can keep it,”
If you can keep it (1997l, 207).

Chorus:
Can we keep it?

Note
This text is intended to be performed, with a rotating set of speakers who function as a
chorus as well as spokespersons for James Carey, William Kittredge, Mary Weems, George
Orwell, and Joan Didion.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Education 25

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Space

The Possibilities and Limits

of the Conversation Model
Angharad N. Valdivia

When I was asked to write on the keyword space in relation to Jim

Carey’s work, I had two somewhat contradictory reactions. One was
of flattery. The second was panic and insecurity. Do I know enough
to write about Carey and space? I certainly have vivid memories
of the courses I took with Professor Carey, who was no ordinary
teacher or scholar. Coming straight out of undergraduate studies, I
was mostly one of those lost souls barely making sense of what now
seems perfectly obvious and, of course, totally brilliant. I envy those
who took his courses with the full knowledge and anticipation of
his corpus and influence.
Carey insisted that intellectual traditions and academic works
are a long ongoing conversation—a trope of scholarship as a space
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of conversation. Mentoring incoming students as new scholars, he

urged us to choose our site in that conversation. This choice was
based on respect and rigorous grounding, on previous scholarship
and conversations and a sense of one’s intellectual relationship to
others, present and past. It was not an adversarial location, as in
other models that propose to obliterate the opposition, but more of
a conversation that had to be carried out and sustained in civility
and mutual respect, with room for differences but commitment to

26

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 continuation. That metaphor of conversation as a space for interaction reaffirms
Carey’s notion of the ritual mode of communication, a mode highlighting oral
culture and time-binding rather than space-binding processes. The shorthand
account of Carey’s canonical essay is that it contrasted a ritual, time-bound,
conversational model to the space-bound transmission model. The former
leads to community, communication, and the formation of a public. The latter
foregrounds the coverage of distance and ability to control and leads to top-
down, linear communications at the expense of community and ritual. This
shorthand, however, underestimates the sophistication of Carey’s contribution.
Grossberg asserts that “the binarism between the ritual and transmission has
almost been fetishized” (Carey 2006a, 200). Carey responded that he had not
intended that binary, adding that his essay was “trying to find a way to say what
was neglected and left out” (ibid). Carey did not reject the transmission model
but rather infused it with history and culture so as to bridge the gap between
space and time.
In his daily and professional interactions, Carey deployed conversation as a
way to carry out communication and intellectual exchange, as witnessed in his
tale of becoming part of the Institute of Communications Research at the Uni-
versity of Illinois. As a young assistant professor he joined major scholars such as
Charlie Osgood, George Gerbner, and Dallas Smythe. He remembered: “You join
a program like Illinois and everyone’s got a seat staked out at the table. In some
sense, every assistant professor feels the same way. But there was no chair for
me. You walk into a room, and everyone sits down, and there’s no chair. Where
can I sit? And someone says, you can sit on my lap. But no one was quite the
voice” (in Munson and Warren 1997, xiv). The metaphors are so vivid: the lack
of space for a new voice, the reluctance to sit on someone’s lap, and having to
stand while others are sitting. These questions of location, space, belonging, and
relationality remain important throughout Carey’s work. Although he is seldom
referenced in contemporary discussions about space, he certainly grappled with
the concept since his early scholarship, beginning with his original—albeit never
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

submitted or published—dissertation on Innis and McLuhan.

Space, Carey, and Cultural Studies

Space is an elusive and packed concept. As dictionaries define it, space is an

unlimited expanse upon which everything is located: an empty area, a blank
character used to separate words, distance, the interval between two times, place
at intervals, a mathematical term. We often think of space in relation to its use
in astrophysics, as in “space, the final frontier,” the remark that begins every Star

Space 27

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Trek episode, announcing the voyages of the starship Enterprise, to “boldly go
where no man has gone before!”1 In fact, if one types space in a search engine
or a major library database, most of the top-ranked results will be linked to the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This underscores how, as Carey
noted long ago, discourses of science and technology have dominated the no-
tion of space. In addition, space is often used in relation to time, as in analyses
of media that are either space- and time-specific, such as theater, or not linked
to space and time, such as films and the Internet, and in relation to space-time
compression, as discussed in the work of geographers David Harvey and Doreen
Massey. Similarly, if one scrolls down the University of Illinois on-line library
catalog, the fifteenth item is “space and time” and currently bears hundreds of
hits, soon followed by more treatments of the theme, such as “space and time
in literature.” Most of these books have been written in the past twenty years,
bearing witness to the recent and contemporary attention to issues of space
and time.
This connection of space and time seems inevitable given recent technologi-
cal developments and deployments. The relation between communication and
technology remains important when considering the expected and unexpected
ramifications of space-time compression (Sterne 2006). Take, for example, the
Concorde flights. Shortening the transatlantic crossing to one hour and fifty-nine
minutes meant that highly paid and valued executives could literally commute
between London and New York. The Concorde’s $10,000 round-trip cost of the
flight could be afforded only by the highest-paid celebrities, businesspeople,
and global cosmopolitan elite. The rise of other communication technologies,
however, especially computer-assisted teleconferencing with face-to-face real-
time capability, reduced the demand for business trips. Coupled with the twin
disasters of the Concorde’s only crash, in July 2000, and its unfortunate return to
business on 9/11, the Concorde’s subsidized flights ended in November 2003. The
time-space compression allowed by aeronautical engineering was made obsolete
by Internet connections. Virtual community replaced grounded community.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Distance becomes less relevant through Internet access, although whether space
is similarly less important remains contested.
Space is a contemporary keyword in cultural studies. Although it did not ap-
pear in Raymond Williams’s canonical Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society (1983), it has its place in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture
and Society (2005), edited by three major figures in the contemporary cultural
studies world, Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. Other
new keywords in this volume—including place, home, the West, and globalization,
among others—indicate the importance of place and space to contemporary

28 Angharad N. Valdivia

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 discussions of culture. The journal Space and Culture: International Journal of
Social Spaces bears the influence of Carey’s vision. Interdisciplinary in nature
and sociological in bent, the journal foregrounds, according to its mission state-
ment, “sociology, in particular, qualitative sociology and ethnography; commu-
nications, in particular, media studies and the Internet; [and] cultural studies,”
thus echoing Carey’s approach to space within the study of communication and
culture. Carey’s use of space as a signified location stands in stark contrast to
other approaches that treat space as emptiness or absence.
Carey’s theorization of space anticipates most contemporary cultural stud-
ies scholars’ approaches to the key concept. Michel de Certeau’s (1988) often-
referenced definition of space as a practiced place implies that place is to nature
as space is to culture, thus piggybacking on existing binary categories. Henry
Lefebvre (1991, 84) reminds us that spaces are produced (both strategically and
politically). In fact, Giles and Middleton (1999, 104) urge us to consider the ways
in which “the role and meanings of place” shape “individual and group identities”
and devote an entire chapter (“Spaces and Places”) to the issue in their Studying
Culture: A Practical Introduction. Space foregrounds geography and location’s
importance to the study of culture—what some call a cultural geography. In fact,
the revised version of Studying Culture (2008) renames the “Space and Place”
chapter “Location, Location, Location: Cultural Geographies.” A culture is such
partly because it can be traced to a location: culture takes a place and transforms
it into a space.
For James Carey space remained eminently important, from his older work on
Innis, dealing with spatial and temporal biases, to more recent material on the
globalizing world, the contradictions between the space of global commerce and
the space of national politics, and public space generally. What comes through in
various essays, especially in his “Space, Time, and Communications: A Tribute
to Harold Innis” (1989), is the need to contextualize our study of culture and
communication. That his work is treated as a clarion call to U.S. and Canadian2
communication and cultural studies, often juxtaposed or compared to the Brit-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

ish cultural studies movement, speaks to the spatial rootedness of his analysis,
to his insistence on place and space. His insightful reading of both the U.S. and
the Canadian situation, following careful readings of Harold Innis and Marshall
McLuhan, extending the former and criticizing the latter, centralized the impor-
tance of place and space in the study of culture. As he put it: “The significance I
am after derives from Innis’s place in North American communication theory
and, in particular, in relation to work in the United States” (Carey 1989, 143).
Carey was not making universal claims about culture but explicitly extend-
ing work on Canada to the analysis of the United States. In fact, he constantly

Space 29

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 reminds us of the particularities of the United States and why we should keep
its size in mind when theorizing about culture and communication. Distance,
scale, and size are also relevant, especially, to the formation of the United States
as a coherent nation. Munson and Warren (1997, x) rephrase this concern as a
central question for Carey’s work and indeed to U.S. intellectual history: “How
does one make democracy work in a vast country that spans a continent?” Partly
in response to criticism of parochialism and exceptionalism, Carey noted that
since all nations are constructs, all national histories are exceptionalist. That is
one way of forming an imagined community. Carey drew on a wide array of
scholars, ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Karl Marx, who wrote about
exceptional characteristics of the United States, the former in an awestruck tone
and the latter in relation to capital and labor. Carey always made the sheer size
of the nation the key to its exceptionality, however, thereby both grounding and
explaining away the nation’s claimed cultural exceptionality. A cynic might say
he got to have it both ways, something he also accomplishes in relation to na-
tion and transnationality.3
Given his insistence on national specificity and exceptionalism, Carey’s con-
ceptualization of cultural studies is related to, although not synonymous with, the
British model. Contemporary canonizations of the Birmingham Center for Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) that universalize the intellectual movement
associated with it as the cultural studies suffer from the amnesia of history and
location—the temporal and the spatial. The CCCS emerged in a particular loca-
tion and historical moment to deal with issues such as working-class education,
reinvigoration of previous Marxist models, the role of intellectuals, the decline
of the British Empire, and the demands from “others.” These two cultural studies
projects are related; they speak to each other as intellectual sites, and therefore
we must resolve to understand what is essentially a conversation. Nonetheless,
they are not the same. In fact, when both Carey and Grossberg were on faculty
at Illinois, doctoral students were told to wait for Grossberg’s lectures to get the
British cultural studies perspective. Both their sameness and difference are im-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

portant, for both are inflected by place and space. Recent volumes, such as Italian
Cultural Studies (Forgacs and Lumley 1996), French Cultural Studies (Forbes and
Kelly 1995), and Australian Cultural Studies (Frow and Morris 1993), to name but
a few, as well as book series and journals by those names, attest to the importance
of location in the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural stud-
ies. Interestingly, or ironically, neither the U.S. nor U.K. version announces its
national rootedness explicitly.4 The political act of naming, through the practice
of unmarked specificity, suggests a certain tinge of superiority and hegemony.

30 Angharad N. Valdivia

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 History informs cultural constructions of space. Consequently, Carey says,
we cannot understand the North American context if we do not acknowledge
the European settlers’ efforts to duplicate their homes or spatial origins in their
settling of the “New World” and to recode it as their previous European loca-
tions. Thus we have New England, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New Amster-
dam, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and so on, all flagrant attempts
on the part of European settlers to reinscribe their places of origin onto the
North American continent. Consider a city named London, in Western Ontario,
Canada: not only is it traversed by its own Thames River, but many of its streets
are named after their British counterparts, such as Oxford and Piccadilly; the
city center even has a Covent Garden. Naming, as we know, is one major way of
asserting ownership, authority, and existence over space. Naming after another
place is an overt way of asserting a connection of identity, history, and thus
community and communication and culture.
Drawing on Innis (1956), Carey reminded us that patterns of trade were also
heavily influenced by demands from the home country. For example, the fur
trade in Canada was precipitated and sustained by French styles of fur-adorned
clothing, not necessarily by what was most easily available in the French Ca-
nadian region. Independence movements aside, our identity as an American
continent and as the United States—the nation—is still very much connected
to those imperial expansions of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. As
such, the history anchoring that identity foregrounds certain homes, locations
of origin, and backgrounds while simultaneously erasing or misrecognizing
others. The European experience is highlighted to the exclusion of slavery and
other exploitative modes of forcefully moving people from other locations. The
resulting space that is the Americas cannot be understood outside those miss-
ing histories and patterns of trade in human bodies. In relation to contested
histories, Carey warned about the expansion of the curriculum in response to
these uncovered histories. “Political Correctness and Cultural Studies” (1997g)
is an impassioned call to arms to remember the bonds of community even as we
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

add the nuanced lessons from ethnic and gender studies. Carey proposes addi-
tive rather than replacement strategies, for only through a “common culture”
can corporate incursions into the educational sphere be resisted. Otherwise, to
paraphrase Todd Gitlin in a depressingly prophetic warning, we’ll be left fight-
ing over the English department while the Right takes over the White House.
Surely there must be some form of compromise position between asserting a
“common culture” and losing political power because of symbolic conflict.

Space 31

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey, Innis, and Space

Carolyn Marvin (1997, 119–20) explains time-bound and space-bound approaches

as “differences in message transportability among media [that] make all the social
and cultural difference in the world” to Innis. Time-binding involves “media in
which the message does not change much over time” but becomes distorted if
it travels any distance. With space-binding, “messages are not distorted much
across distance but cannot last long.” The former are tied to community and
oral cultures, while the latter are tied to contemporary media such as print and
journalism but can also be extended to newer electronic media, such as mobile
telephones and the Internet. In other words, time is a matter of “communica-
tion” and space is a matter of “media.” Carey’s later work tackles the promise
of the digital. Technological fixes, he mused, beginning with the telegraph and
continuing up to the Internet, will not get us out the morass in which we find
ourselves now.
To discuss issues of old and new technologies, Carey returned to Innis, who
proposed that “wherever time-binding and space-binding technologies flourish
together, powerful political states emerge, long-lasting and broadly executed
across extended territory” (Carey 1989, 120). Thus the concern, in both Innis and
Carey, is always linked back to the public sphere and nation building. Innis noted
that modern institutions were thoroughly infected by the idea of space. Carey
extended this analysis to the United States’ nearly exclusive policy of improving
communications over long distance as an effort to use transmission to assert
power. Innis represented an early voice for a discourse of Canadian cultural sov-
ereignty that remains relevant in contemporary U.S.-Canadian relations. Carey
(1989) summed up Canada’s dilemma: the United States demanded freedom of
trade to import raw print materials from Canada and then invoked freedom of
information to send back printed materials. Presaging debates about the free
flow of information that would occur in the 1970s and 1980s in international
bodies ranging from UNESCO to the nonaligned nations movement, most often
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

called the “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO),

Innis turned from the study of the relations between time and space to the
relationships between routes of trade and routes of culture. Carey maintained
this emphasis on trade and international imbalance. Given that the nation is
the most important space in relation to culture and democracy, Carey repeat-
edly foregrounded the incursions made by commodity forms, commercialized
technologies, privatization, and corporate culture—all of them space-binding
signifiers of a transmission model—as threatening democracy, journalism, and
public education.

32 Angharad N. Valdivia

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Both Innis and Carey characterized the development of modern space-binding
communication technologies as negating the promise of democracy. Distance-
covering technologies separated communication from transportation. For ex-
ample, previously the Pony Express carried people, letters, and news. Modern
space-binding communication technologies, rather than enable a liberatory po-
tential in their ability to disseminate information over space, lead to a monopoly
of both knowledge and ownership. Innis, after all, entered intellectual circles as
a political economist, and much of his analytic framework foregrounds classic
political economy of communications right down to his horizontal versus vertical
integration model, with the horizontal standing for community, stable through
time, while the vertical stands for transmission and control across space. Thus
a culture that prioritizes space as an interest will tend to privilege, said Carey
(1989, 160), “land as real estate, voyage, discovery, movement, expansion, empire,
control.” In contrast, a ritual model of communication favors “history, continuity,
permanence, contraction[,] whose symbols were . . . intimate ties and a shared
historical culture” (160). The former are more portable and amenable to exten-
sion but not as durable. What space gained in distance, it lost in memory and
continuity. Creativity was sacrificed for the sake of dissemination. Thus Carey’s
intervention in mainstream communication theory was to lay the groundwork
for a U.S. model of cultural studies. Space as a concept tied to national identity
was Innis’s impetus to make claims about Canada and Carey’s impetus to make
claims about the particular space that is the United States. Innis and Carey
concluded that the responsibility of the social polity in a place where time- and
space-binding coexist is to prevent the excesses of one over the other.
Extending this model from the nations of Canada and the United States to
the very particular notion in the latter of the First Amendment, in a view that
widely diverged from the common interpretation, Innis wrote that freedom of
the press as institutionalized in the United States was actually power of tech-
nology. It led to monopoly, to control over space. Print’s spatial bias meant it
could assert power over distance and location and thus consolidate newspapers’
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

monopoly of knowledge. Innis prophetically feared the expansion of the values

of commercialism, industrialism, and postindustrialism. As Carey (1989, 163)
put it, this would eventually sacrifice “the right of the people to speak to one
another and to inform themselves” and reify “the abstract right to be spoken to
and to be informed by others.” This is precisely the point made by contemporary
political economists of communication, including Robert McChesney (1999),
among many others. Issues such as syndication, chain ownership, synergistic
marketing across media and broader marketing platforms, regional editions in
multiple markets, corporate control of intellectual property, and transnational

Space 33

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 conglomerate media holdings all form intermediate steps in the contemporary
communication situation, wherein democracy takes a backseat to commercial-
ism, consumerism, and commodification for the sake of transnational profit.
Carey’s ongoing engagement with journalistic practice charts a concern with
the tendency of contemporary media technologies to conceptualize citizens as
consumers and to preclude democratic engagement and discussion in favor of
centralized transmission. Similarly, Innis’s association of literacy and print with
exclusion occurred squarely within the context of commercialization. Innis and
Carey eschewed facile distinctions of the cultural versus the political-economic
model and saw them both as mutually informing.
Keeping in mind that Innis’s book The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduc-
tion to Canadian Economic History (1956) was written from 1930 to 1955, and
that Carey’s essays in Communication as Culture (1989) were written from 1970
to 1986, note that Carey continued to assert emerging issues related to space,
which had deep historical and geographical roots. He remained committed to
space as a concept in relation to nation, as can be seen in his remarks about the
“postmodern”: “But if space has imploded so that what was once out there is now
in here (next door, around the corner, in the next office, on Channel 51), so has
time. The differences in generations have grown more rather than less substantial,
and the young adopt the culturally exotic without reference to space, time or
circumstance. Still, even with those temporal differences, national groups, not
to speak of religious and ethnic ones, remain stubbornly identifiable over time”
(Carey 1997a, 328).
Prior to the 2008 global economic meltdown, many thought that although
globalization is corporate, only corporations could go bankrupt. The fact is that
many nations have indeed gone bankrupt, thus precipitating the intervention of
such supranational bodies as the World Bank. In the present situation, however,
even First World nations are on the brink of bankruptcy in a globally intercon-
nected process that has required concerted action among the so-called G-20
nations, as demonstrated in the March 2009 meetings in London. Nonetheless,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Carey’s definition of the “postmodern” crisis is tied to the nation.

For Carey, nation remained the spatial context for identity and culture. If
space and time have imploded, difference remains “identifiable.” He again rode
the internal contradictions between the modern and the postmodern by linking
cultural studies to contemporary theories of the nation-state. He asked, what is
“the natural home of cultural studies?” and replied decisively, “the nation state”
(Carey 1997a, 311). Whereas globalization is corporate, and corporations can
go bankrupt, nations cannot or do so only metaphorically. Even his definition
of the “postmodern” crisis is tied to the nation: “We are living, in short, in the

34 Angharad N. Valdivia

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 midst of a crisis of representation in a nation whose culture is like a bonfire on
an ice floe, particularly prone to recurrent but intense periods in which society
and social relations go opaque” (326). The crisis of representation is linked to the
assertion of difference and the endurance of the nation-state. How can a space
accommodate fragmentation and endurance, difference and common culture?
Carey’s notion of space is rich, contradictory, and thus theoretically transgres-
sive, refusing all facile demarcations or binary divisions.
For instance, whereas both dictionaries and library cataloging systems treat
“time and space” as a construct different from NASA space, Carey saw the lat-
ter as an extension of the former. True to the influence of Innis, Carey (1997f,
160) contextualizes electronic communications and telecommunications as “a
faster yet analogous way to gain control over distance with disastrous effects
for democracy.” The difference is that the reach is now global yet always linked
back to national struggles and identities. He discusses the global in symbiotic
relation to the national.
In “A Plea for the University Tradition,” tracing his conversation back to In-
nis, Carey (1978) argued for the countervailing power of substantive rational-
ity, democracy, and time to balance professional tendencies within journalism
education. This important essay, originally delivered as a presidential address
to the Association for Education in Journalism, might seem less than central
here. Nonetheless, it addresses the tripartite relationship among the press as a
profession, journalistic training as an academic and intellectual pursuit, and
connections between the state and academic journalists. In essence, the plea
connected the state to journalism and the academy, cautioning against the reach
of the former into the latter as yet another disastrous influence on democracy.
Beyond the global, or perhaps in concert with it, there is cyberspace. Certainly
we need a corrective or at least an intervention into the hallucinogenic argu-
ment that the Internet and cyberspace render location irrelevant. In fact, similar
arguments have been made about the body—how the Internet provides for a
disembodied experience rendering the body irrelevant. Neither is true, as Naka-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

mura (2007) amply documents. Carey’s work on technology has been extremely
influential, as demonstrated by students such as Carolyn Marvin, Joli Jensen,
and Mary Mander, in historicizing and spatializing the discourse around the
introduction of so-called new technologies. His essay on the telegraph remains
surprisingly relevant. Much of the New World Information and Communica-
tion Order debates revolved around issues of imperial lines of communication
and transportation, precisely the topic at hand in Carey’s work ten years earlier.
Many of those arguments ought to be repeated with the “new” technologies,
which nonetheless follow familiar patterns of expansion and space coverage. A

Space 35

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 critical examination of the Internet is absolutely essential, for it is still attached to
locations of power, technology, and wealth and a predominant effort to transmit
rather than to share and commune. To begin with, the overwhelming use of Eng-
lish as the cyberspace lingua franca belies its supposed deterritorialization and
contributes to the location of the Internet within the U.S. national imaginary, or
at most the Anglosphere of influence. The difficult inclusion of non-Eurocentric
locations remains a testament to the forces of power circulating throughout the
deployment of this currently dominant technology.
The tumbling of the Soviet Union also fits within the purview of Carey’s time-
space analysis. In “A Republic, If You Can Keep It!” (1997l) Carey noted that
in Soviet Europe the public must exist outside government censorship. In the
contemporary United States the public is precluded by mass media. Unfortu-
nately, in the former people must arm themselves against censorship, and in the
latter the press disarms the people. Carey’s analysis ran against the mainstream
grain, which celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union as successful partly because
it adopted the U.S. press ethos. Carey proposed quite the opposite: our press
system is similar to censorship systems in Eastern Europe, such as in Poland.
Presumably the expansion over space of our mode of press freedom will negate
the hard-won gains of the former Soviet republics. These are sobering analyses
that counter ahistorical celebrations equating capitalist formations with demo-
cratic tendencies, which are so prevalent in our press today.

Reservations

For a transnational scholar who draws extensively from border theory, the in-
sistence on nation is both problematic and surprisingly coherent. Transnational
capital is the often unnamed but most powerful diaspora—broadcasting and
reconstituting itself according to absolute self-interest without regard to national
identities or communities. At the same time, most people are rooted in one or
more nations. As Herbert I. Schiller constantly asked his students, on whom are
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

we to make claims if not the nation? We are subject to transnational forces, yet
we must carry a passport to cross national boundaries and can make claims only
in the space wherein we hold citizenship. Transnational capital demonstrates
extreme mobility and ease of transmission, whereas bodies, at least most bodies,
must abide by that modernist construct, the nation. We as bodies and people are
rooted in a modern cultural nation space, yet capital is not. Therein lies the resolu-
tion to the seemingly internal contradiction. Recent (late 2008) global economic
debacles underscore the fact that nations and individuals within those nations
must respond to transnational capital’s overexuberance if not outright insanity.

36 Angharad N. Valdivia

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The acknowledgment of difference is also profoundly destabilizing. Calls for
“common culture,” whether in a national or transnational space, must therefore
be balanced against the erasures and obfuscations of previous decades and cen-
turies. If “the young adopt the culturally exotic without reference to space, time
or circumstance” (Carey 1997a, 328), and space has so imploded that there is no
“there” here, why do we continue to use the word exotic? The relationality of us
versus them continues in both time and space, despite arguments for a com-
mon culture. The identity—in terms of ethnicity, national origin, and religion
of many of these “exotics,” not to mention those in the “common culture”—can
be explained by dynamic and long-standing transnational flows of populations
and cultures. Harking back to “common culture” does not resolve demands by
the exotics.
Conversely, there is no shedding the imperial mantle. Thus, when most U.S.
citizens travel abroad, regardless of their race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
and physical ability, they still exude that “Americanness” that is nearly instantly
recognizable by those in other countries. For example, in response to a recent
Time magazine article that wrongfully claimed that homosexuality is discouraged
in Barbados, a queer Bajan5 indignantly remarked that Barbadian authorities
may have been reacting to U.S. homosexual travelers who both performed an
identity not culturally appropriate in that country and expected U.S. codes of
behaviors to be universal. In sum, the local authorities’ restrictions on gay tour-
ist behavior that Time covered may have resulted from a display of imperialism
on the part of U.S. travelers rather than homophobia of the host country. The
insistence on nation seems warranted in this case, for what makes U.S. gay citi-
zens recognizable is that they are of the United States—wearing that imperial
mantle over even their sexual difference as they travel transnationally.
Notions of external and internal borders are also at odds with border theory.
Border scholars have recognized the nation as signifier of space and identity to
be an imperfect construct. What do we do with Tijuana and San Diego, standing
adjacent to each other on the Mexico-U.S. border, 40 percent of whose popula-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

tions cross back and forth at least once a week? Indeed, what are we to make
of California or the entire Southwest, where much of the population identifies
as belonging to a nation geographically located south of the border? And that
is just the United States. The reason Canadians, including Innis, are eternally
preoccupied with issues of national sovereignty is that 80 percent of them live
on the border, where back-and-forth flows of people, products, and culture
are nearly inevitable. Broadcast signals do not stop at the borders, so the bulk
of the Canadian population has easy access or is exposed to U.S. broadcasting
signals. Those are but two examples of the many contemporary borderlands.

Space 37

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Alejandro Lugo (2000) brilliantly reminds us that for marked bodies, the brown
in the United States, for example, the border follows them into their everyday
lives. Having crossed the national border, whether in their lifetimes or many
centuries ago, does not guarantee them a belonging in the national space. While
Gloria Anzaldúa repeatedly asserted that the border crossed “us” (i.e., U.S. Chi-
canos), we did not cross the border; Alejandro Lugo adds that the border is never
crossed but continuously inspected—thus changing the paradigm from stasis to
process, from noun to verb. Adding the mobility of the border as material and
metaphorical fact to the already mentioned imperial mantle results in a dynamic
model that positions nation as hybrid, permeable, unstable, and yet powerfully
constricting. How to account for this within a model that nearly equates space
and belonging with nation?
Furthermore, the notion of common culture and belonging cannot encompass
the multiplicity of allegiances that many hold in this period of forced and volun-
tary mobility, not to mention that memory is a powerful vessel of belonging, so
that one’s sense of nation can antedate one’s birth and generation. In this both
Carey and Innis passionately argue for face-to-face conversation and the role of
memory in ritual. Memory speaks of many belongings, such as the keys to the
houses still held by many of those expelled from Spain by the “common culture”
nation-building Catholic rulers Isabella and Ferdinand in the fifteenth century.
Ella Shohat (1999) describes how families still treasure their keys to houses in that
Spain of long ago, keys that retain a symbolic value of ownership and belonging,
even as these families have dispersed throughout the globe and assumed a range
of other national identities coupled with ethnic and religious identities.
Locating memory in the ritual yet singling it out as a more powerful and
portable transporter of history than even print is, as Carey does in “A Republic,
If You Can Keep It!” (1997l), generates a theoretical tension. The ritual of narrat-
ing the atrocities of the Gulag Archipelago and the jolt of being forcibly exiled
from a homeland to memory, in verse no less, worked hand in hand with the
eventual mobility of the formerly detained prisoners. The exile communities
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

were able to externalize into print and other media forms their experiences
and histories. This apparent inconsistency compels us to examine the ritual in
relation to the transmission model, time-binding in relation to space-binding.
There is no nation, or even community, whose affairs are discussed and decided
purely in oral conversation. Implicitly, Carey challenges us all to strike a balance
between the ritual and the transmission tendencies of nearly all contemporary
communications systems so as to promote civility and democracy. Carey’s fa-
vored metaphor is the conversation, which can happen only in conditions of
civility and democracy. The kind of knowledge that positivists value and regard

38 Angharad N. Valdivia

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 as objective seems to be stacked against the holders of memory. Nonetheless,
memory still functions as a significant component of a sense of identity, belong-
ing, nation, and space, and that is precisely the warning sounded by Carey and
introduced as a core component of both communication as a field and of U.S.
cultural studies as a place-specific intellectual formation. The complexity of
memory and allegiances complicates the conversation model, given that indi-
viduals and communities need to participate in conversations in many nation
spaces. In sum, the ritual model has global implications far beyond the concrete
national analysis deployed by James Carey.

Conclusion

All Carey’s work is inextricably embedded in “space.” Fully persuaded by the

benefits of a conversation model of life, and wishing fervently it existed in more,
or even one, of the realms of my life, I see the paucity of civility in government,
the media, and academia as clearly bearing out the warnings Carey proposed
three decades ago. The critique of a myopic transmission model, proposed by
Carey followers and detractors alike, has impeded neither transmission research
within communication nor the wide-scale deployment of that model across
all arenas of daily life. The disappearance of conversational spaces and their
co-optation, indeed colonization, by privatized, commercial, and corporate en-
terprise remain at the forefront of critical communications studies (Davis 1999;
Klein 2000). Much is at stake in “space.” Belonging is a life-or-death issue, and
at this point the nation remains a major, but not the only, arbiter of belonging.
And we must have belonging to participate in a conversation. Still, extranational,
multinational, and transnational identifications and conversations challenge
the nation-space model, as much as conversation and mutual respect remain
an ideal. To foreground the latter at the expense of the former is to silence yet
another set of participants in a global conversation.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Notes
1. This language gendered space masculine.
2. This essay uses the word American in its correct, continental sense. That is, America
refers to a continent, not a country. United States will be the term used to refer to the
United States of America.
3. I am indebted to my colleague John Nerone for this observation, as well as many
others.
4. I am indebted to Linda Steiner for this insight.
5. Bajan is the word for a person from Barbados.

Space 39

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Religion

Faith in Cultural Studies

Quentin J. Schultze

In a study of early American anthropologists, Gillian Feeley-Harnik

(2001, 144) discovered that scholars sought to escape from “transcen-
dental philosophy and theology” by adopting new, presumably less
ethnocentric ways of understanding cultures. Nevertheless, these
researchers still held a “teleological dynamic” based on their un-
derstanding of the Christian metanarrative (152).
Those of us who study culture today might be in the same bind.
We affirm the existence of competing ways of life. We seek to avoid
academic as well as religious exclusivism in favor of noble goals
such as justice, freedom, and openness to the other. Continuing the
attitude of early anthropologists, we still hold a “faith” in our work’s
value for the future of society.
I would like to explore this academic faith by probing the ancient
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Western myths that continue to animate our work, implicitly if not

explicitly. I suggest that we are still bound to a faith in cultural inves-
tigation that can be traced to Hebrew and Christian metanarratives.
Relying partly on the work of James W. Carey, whose ritual view of
communication is one of the most theological theories of and for
cultural study, I will explore three credos within cultural studies:
a faith in diversity, a sense of realistic hope, and a commitment to
sacrificial love.

40

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Faith in Diversity

Thomas Cahill (1998, 60) asserts that the Jews invented Western culture’s faith
in chronological progress. Even as a small nomadic tribe, the Jews broke from
a cyclical view of history and adopted the belief that the “new” emerges benefi-
cially from the “old.” Acting on such faith, Abraham “went forth” to establish the
Promised Land. Although he did not know exactly where he was going (Heb.
11:8), Abraham imagined a better world. Similarly, says Cahill, the West believes
that “out of mortal imagination comes a dream of something new, something
better, something yet to happen, something—in the future” (63).
This is not the end of the story, however, for in ancient Western religious
thought such optimism is tempered by the recognition of human arrogance.
God promises progress, but human beings repeatedly try to create heaven on
earth on their own terms. In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11),
the Babylonians skillfully erect a tower into the heavens, but the monument’s
grandeur reveals its builders’ hegemonic motives; Babylonians arrogantly sought
to “make a name for themselves” by proudly erecting a self-glorifying monument.
With wonderful irony, God “comes down” (Gen. 11:5) to look at the puny tower
that the Babylonians foolishly believed was their stairway to heaven. Rather
than destroy the tower itself, however, God dismantles the empire that created
it. God creates linguistic and presumably cultural diversity to restrain human
pride. This counterhegemonic scattering of people becomes a symbol of God’s
faithfulness in the context of human arrogance.
Perhaps humans need cultural diversity because we tend to be prideful em-
pire builders. Maybe we tend to become so busy expanding our rhetorical and
geographic terrain that we have trouble recognizing, or at least admitting, our
conceited faith in ourselves and our projects. Referring to Christopher Colum-
bus, Wes Jackson (1994, 15) suggested that conquerors “are seldom interested
in a thoroughgoing discovery of where they really are.” Jackson enjoined us to
beware our self-delusional faith in our abilities to guarantee a promising future.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Instead, he said, we should accept “our profound ignorance—that we will never

know more than a small part of what we need to know. Beginning with this . . .
assumption, we are forced to remember our past, to hope for second chances,
to keep the scale of our projects small, and be ready to back out when things
go sour” (24).
Up to now, those of us in the academic borderlands of cultural studies seem
to have learned this lesson. By researching dynamic cultural forms and practices
rather than erecting a static metatheology, we have remained relatively humble
about the field’s contributions to academy and society. We generally admit that

R eligion 41

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 cultures, like their animating religions, are best considered from diverse angles,
not from a single, narrowly limited perspective. “Because religion involves, by
definition, the transcendence and reconstitution of boundary, it occupies the
border between the imagined and real, the historical and universal, and known
and unknown” (Mizruchi 2001, 56). This border territory is where subjectivity
and diversity are most obvious and where we all dwell during moments of doubt
and dilemma. Theological pride, whether premodern, modern, or postmodern,
whether liberal or conservative, generally shares a disdain for everyday experi-
ence and practical reason. Perhaps the best way for us to remain humble is to
stay close to daily life, where alternative ways of knowing are most useful and
where people tend to be neighborly despite their differences. In this border
region, religion, too, is not “confined to extremists or extremes,” and there is a
“continuum between intellectual work and ordinary life” (ibid. 57).
Much of Carey’s work warned about empires seeking to eliminate borderlands,
reduce cultural diversity, and fashion society into their own hegemonic, often
self-centered images. For instance, Carey (1989, 34) rejected the “transmission
view” of communication largely because of its manipulative, hierarchical bias.
He castigated the public opinion industry that subverts everyday discussion and
demeans citizens (1997h, 246–48). He especially criticized Lippmann’s idea that,
because citizens presumably cannot think for themselves, an elite group should
tell citizens what to believe (1997k, 23–24). Carey also rejected mass mediated
consumerism, which treats human beings as malleable buyers (1997c, 66). He
instead advocated everyday conversation, which “implies social arrangements
less hierarchical and more egalitarian than its alternatives. While people often
dry up and shy away from the fierceness of argument, disputation, and debate,
and while those forms of talk often bring to the surface the meanness and ag-
gressiveness that is our second nature, conversation implies the most natural
and unforced, unthreatening, and most satisfying of arrangements” (1997l, 217).
Carey upheld cultural diversity not as an end in itself but as a means to healthy
conversation that can prevent externally imposed monopolies of knowledge.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Conversation suggests listening, learning, and interpreting, not just talking.

Paraphrasing Clifford Geertz, Carey (1989, 61–62) argued that the purpose of
interpreting cultures is not to dominate them but to “understand the meaning
that others have placed on experience” and thereby “enlarge the human con-
versation.” Listening to others, extending the range of discourse, is humbling
and usually self-reflexive. Without romanticizing dialogue, which itself has
become a kind of “god-term” in some scholarship, those of us in cultural studies
should listen across the range of conversation beyond our own, ever-emerging
academic empires.

42 Quentin J. Schultze

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey’s view of cultural diversity includes listening to voices of the past. His well-
known notion of “communication as culture” notably defined communication
as the process in and through which human beings create, change, and maintain
culture (Carey 1989). According to this view of cultural processes, every society
and tribe, simply to survive, let alone flourish, needs to extend its conversations
not just across geographic space but also backward through generational time.
Carey partly borrowed this insight from the Canadian economist Harold Adams
Innis, who recognized that excessive social change can destroy the continuity that
a people needs to make sense of such change. As a means of broadening diversity,
respecting age-old cultural understandings is, in Carey’s view, one of the most
significant contributions that cultural studies can make to the maintenance of
social life in the age of communications. In fact, he argued that cultural studies
at the outset was an attempt to affirm a common rather than a novel culture—to
affirm what we have in common as human beings rather than to hold only to
those tribal convictions that might separate us from one another (Carey 1997k).
After all, we humans are cultural as well as communicative beings. We are rooted
in a common createdness, a material as well as experiential reality, that extends
far back in human history. The voices of the past can thereby gain contemporary
relevance as conversation partners in our understanding of ourselves.
Cultural studies’ faith in diversity, then, is not particularly new. It borrows
from long-standing religious critiques of earthly empire. This might be why
cultural studies’ evangelists sometimes sound like antihegemonic Old Testament
prophets. John Hartley (2003, 2) contends that cultural studies seeks “nothing
less” than “to rethink received truths and remake inherited frameworks of expla-
nation.” At its best, cultural studies is a mode of humble listening that expands
the range of discourse to include historical as well as contemporary discourse.
The field then welcomes distant voices from the horizons of past cultures (Hans-
Georg Gadamer 1975). G. K. Chesterton (1990, 48) dubbed such dialogue with
the past a “democracy of the dead.” As Carey (1988, 13) put it, scholars should
consider “those forms and practices, most durable features, that could withstand
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

the vicissitudes of modern life.” If such historically inclusive diversity offers

more hope for the future, Carey’s conversational affirmation of past and present
understandings of culture ought to give us greater faith in the possible social
benefits of cultural studies.

Realistic Hope

Augustine’s Confessions, which launched the autobiographical genre in the

Western world, was also one of the first major self-reflexive studies relying on

R eligion 43

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 participant observation. Rather than write as a dispassionate outsider, Augustine
recalls his experiences with various groups—first as a skilled teacher of rhetoric,
next as a Manichean, and eventually as a Christian, priest, and North African
bishop. Despite his success in rhetoric prior to becoming a prelate, however,
Augustine increasingly lost faith in the art, its practitioners (including himself),
and the various social institutions, from government to law, that depended on
“phrase salesman” (Wills 1999, 45). “I had become to myself a vast problem,”
Augustine wrote self-critically (1991, 4.3.9). He then turned his critical skills
on the academic community, becoming an “antirhetorical rhetorician” (Wills
1999, 144). Cultural studies’ critical edge—its concerns about oppressive power,
injustice, and institutionalized inequality—reflect a similar skeptical view of the
way human beings use symbols to manipulate others.
The Jewish and Christian traditions taught Augustine such antirhetorical
rhetoric. They still articulate counterutopian, sobering insights into the hu-
man condition, especially human beings’ selfish tendencies. The Augustinian
critique of human nature, for instance, holds that conflict underlies the social
order (Wolterstorff 1983, 20). No matter how much they agree with one another,
individuals and social groups will seek different, often contradictory, and some-
what self-interested ends. Also, people will try to force their own, sometimes
even well-reasoned desires on others. For instance, Enlightenment philosophers
tried to liberate human reason “from specifically religious forms and theological
systems” (Hewitt 1995, 208), but in the process they contributed to new social
schemes—such as Marxism-Leninism—that functioned as religions. They re-
placed hope in God or religious institutions with hope in secular charismatic
leaders and political institutions. Heaven became liberation from class oppres-
sion or personal freedom from traditional forms of authority. No matter how
revolutionary the new social movements claimed to be, however, evil persisted
in them. Understandably scholars throughout the twentieth century continued
to examine the nature of human evil. They wondered whether evil is endemic
to the human condition or merely a social construct that could be eliminated
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

through behavioral conditioning or the right political strategies and participatory

institutions. Paul Ricoeur (1967), a theological philosopher if not a philosophical
theologian, described the ways that human beings define and use symbols of
evil, but he offered no means of eliminating the symbols, let alone evil itself.
In the 1950s, recognizing human imperfection, including the corruption of
social institutions, theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr developed a tempered
vision of social progress (Thomas 1959). When it interprets history nontrium-
phally, admitting the oppressive as well as liberating nature of social institutions,

44 Quentin J. Schultze

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 cultural studies implicitly affirms two doctrines of a theological nature (i.e., de-
rived from reasoned discourse about God or religion): (1) that human beings are
finite creatures, never omniscient and omnipotent, and (2) that human beings’
wills are distorted, especially by excessive self-interest. The ancient Hebrews and
Christians spoke of the results of depravity as sin, or misdirected and disordered
human wills in action, precipitating an ongoing “fall” into personal and social
oppression. According to this premodern understanding of human nature, sin
is an across-the-board unraveling of peaceful relations between each person and
other persons, between human beings and God, between human beings and the
environment, and between each human being and him- or herself.
In a foreshadowing of contemporary understandings of humans’ defective
intersubjectivity, the book of Genesis portrays the fallen Adam and Eve as the
first symbol misusers. Having lost their shared innocence, they descend into
self-seeking, self-protective skepticism. Because they now are unable to bind
the meaning of their lives to its life-giving source, God, they can no longer
commune fully with each other, care selflessly for the environment, and look
honestly at themselves. Martha Malamud (2002, 329) conceives this doctrine of
“original” sin as an acknowledgment of the “schism between language and truth,”
an exegetical and hermeneutical corruption of human intersubjectivity. By mak-
ing themselves the center of meaning, Adam and Eve reduced their capacity to
know perfectly, to be fully virtuous, and to act responsibly for the good of each
other. The good news is that they cannot easily sustain a new hegemony; they
represent a pre-Babel cultural diversity predicated on both dialect and idiolect.
The bad news is that they replace innocence with pride, and they cannot always
discern which is which. This confusion became an unending source of conflict in
the Scriptures, leading the jealous and self-interested Cain to kill his brother.
As a result of such symbolic disintegration, says the ancient faith, human
beings need to relearn communication for the purpose of renewing relation-
ships. They must continually rediscover how to commune peaceably with one
another, the environment, and themselves—let alone with their creator God. In
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

short, they must intentionally become religious by putting an other-directed,

humble faith into imperfect action. The Latin roots of the word religion mean
“rebinding” or “binding together.” Religion is not just belief in God or adher-
ence to various moral values. Nor is it merely the institutions that nurture such
beliefs and values. Instead, religion is an ontological orientation toward life
evident in the specific beliefs, practices, and institutions that human beings
believe will help them to rebind their broken relationships among God, people,
the physical world, and their individual selves. Eastern religions generally seek

R eligion 45

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the symbolic resources for such rebinding from “within” the person, whereas
Western religions usually search for them outside the individual, particularly
from God and community—such as in the cases of the monotheistic faiths of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Once again, the Jewish contribution was first
and remains foundational in the West, since it shaped the faiths that grew out
of ancient Hebrew culture. Jews viewed religious practice as social action (i.e.,
social rebinding), not just as the individual pursuit of happiness. In fact, the
Jewish aim of “good” communication was not merely self-expression but collec-
tive peace and harmony, or shalom (Wolterstorff 1983, 78). “What does the Lord
require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with
your God?” asks the prophet Micah (6:8). Intersubjectivity is the flawed but vital
means of becoming reoriented toward shalom and putting shalom into practice
with others. Faith in God and obligations toward others were inseparable.
Although God had promised Abraham ultimate victory over injustice, his
and later believers’ participation in this promise depended at least partly on
their response-ability—on humans’ faithful response to the message of shalom.
Throughout biblical history, Jewish and Christian scholars studied sacred docu-
ments to learn how to be true to the social as well as personal demands of their
faiths. Theologians and preachers became social critics precisely because they
were attuned to human beings’ responsibility for the lack of peace and justice
in society.
At the triangular nexus of teleological hope, theological criticism, and social
engagement is a realism that, because it balances hope with a sober assessment
of the human condition, is neither utopian nor dystopian. This form of realism
admits human corruptibility even as its adherents imagine and work responsi-
bly toward a better future. Discussing how Eastern European citizens faithfully
overcame their communist oppressors in the name of democratic freedom,
Carey (1997l, 215) remarked that these brave dissidents “did not have a public
life; they simply acted as if they had one.” He cited the Czech dissident Václav
Havel’s theologically oriented prison letters to his wife as one of the great pub-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

lic philosophies of the twentieth century. In contrast to communists’ utopian

rhetoric, Havel’s political realism is grounded in the ontological “givenness”
of life and humans’ resulting sense of responsibility for others. The civil rights
movement in the United States owes much to the realistic hope emanating from
African American churches. As Stuart Hall argues, religion serves an “extraor-
dinary diversity of roles” and has given “extraordinary cultural and ideological
vitality” to popular movements (in Grossberg 1996, 142–43). Although some of
these movements are oppressive rather than shalom-serving, realism ties hope
to responsible, reflexive social criticism and tempered social engagement.

46 Quentin J. Schultze

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 From the perspective of such theologically informed realism, freedom is the
liberty to pursue the common good, not just the elimination of restraints on
individuals. Personal choice is hardly virtuous if individuals employ it merely to
further their private interests. Carey (2002b, 221) argued, for instance, that when
the idea of personal choice became the “sacred term of communication,” the goal
of attaining individual goods overshadowed the liberty of seeking the common
good. Biblical realism cautions us about our tendency to confer goodness on
individual interests rather than shared, public interests. Despite his Christian
beliefs—or perhaps because of them—Augustine (1991, 12.24.35) even called
truth a “public possession.” John Calvin (1960, 1.3.3) rejected Cicero’s claim that
“errors wear out by age, and that religion increases and grows better day by day”;
he advocated instead the idea that all human “gifts” are to be used for “a kind
and liberal communication of them with others.” These God-given abilities to
cultivate the world are “divine deposits entrusted to us for the very purpose of
being distributed for the good of our neighbor”(1.3.5). Without freedom, humans
cannot pursue such noble purposes. But even a free people can hope selfishly.
Freedom needs more than liberty if it is to lead to social goods. Here Roman
Catholics and Protestants are somewhat divided, with the former being more
hopeful about the goodness of human nature and the latter emphasizing the
need for personal regeneration (or “conversion”) as well as community-based
(“church” or ekklesia) nurturing of virtue and mutual accountability.
In any case, the preconditions for democratic forms of government are essen-
tially ancient Hebrew structures: “The forces opposing aristocracy in medieval
and early modern Europe turned not to the model of Pericles in their editions of
Thucydides, but instead looked to Genesis, Exodus, the Judges, and the Proph-
ets—even to the structure of the Jewish communities in their midst—for their
inspiration. Accordingly, threatened elites viewed the Bible as a dangerous text
that lent itself to subversive, heretical readings” (Landes 1993, 67). The roots of
isonomia (the principle that all should stand equal before the law) are essentially
religious: literacy, free speech, and manual labor. Landes contended that these
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

elements tended to be present wherever democracy emerged. Champions of

democratic reform “leaned heavily for their support on the existence of a class
of commoners who could read or cared about the contents of texts and debated
them openly” (68).
Traces of this kind of biblical realism appear regularly in cultural and criti-
cal studies. Critical theorists from Terry Eagleton to Jean-François Lyotard,
Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou have appropriated such theological resources
(Griffiths 2004). They believe that human beings might be capable of govern-
ing themselves if they are not oppressed and if they seek a common vision of

R eligion 47

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the good life even as open discourse challenges and alters that vision. Humans
form society through political negotiation, but cultural forms and meanings
are not reducible to politics. Cultures can carry worthy visions of the future as
well as critical discussions of themselves. Grossberg (1993, 16) says that cultural
studies needs “a different conception of political identity and of politics: the
politics of commitment, of affect, of identification and belonging.” He and other
leading scholars of culture are enchanted by the possibilities for communal as
well as intellectual regeneration. Grossberg even argues that cultural studies
“is to be judged by whether and how it opens up new possibilities and enables
new political strategies” (12). Where does such extrapolitical hope emerge, as-
suming that “new possibilities” are not reducible to political intentions, actions,
and outcomes? Why should scholars be optimistic as well as critical? Why is
individual freedom insufficient for the “new” future envisioned by Grossberg
and others? Perhaps because biblical realism is one of the most foundational,
seemingly incontrovertible assumptions in Western culture.

Sacrificial Love

The transition within cultural studies from faith in diversity to realistic hope
suggests an underlying commitment to self-sacrificial love as an antidote to
excessive self-interestedness. Alexis de Tocqueville (2000, 482–87) discovered
the importance of self-sacrifice while studying America in the 1830s. Hoping
to discern what kept American democracy from falling into unrestrained indi-
vidualism, he observed the beneficial role of voluntary associations, including
religious groups. In his view, such associations nurture “habits of the heart” that
predispose persons and institutions to do what is good for others, not just for
themselves. Carey similarly called for “compensating mechanisms” to limit or
contain state and corporate power (2002b, 203).
According to Jewish and Christian tradition, human beings are called to serve
their neighbors as themselves—to treat others as they would want to be treated.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Although human beings are free to act merely on the basis of self-interest, the
higher standard is sacrificial action. The Apostle Paul says that people are called
to be living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1). Self-sacrificial love—using one’s talents and
resources on behalf of others—is itself a form of worship, since it matures shalom
by rebinding relationships.
For example, scholars daily decide what to give to others—knowledge, insight,
time, effort. Sometimes we spend time developing a better lecture to serve our
students. Other times we conduct research and write manuscripts in the hope
of advancing human understanding. We always face the temptation to serve

48 Quentin J. Schultze

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ourselves rather than others, however, even as we pretend to practice the “real
work” of scholarship free of selfish motive. George Grant (1969, 81) contended
that perhaps nothing is “phonier in our present universities than the exaltation of
scholarship as if it were an end in itself.” Fearing that scholarship could become
just as self-serving as other careerist practices, Carey argued essentially the same
point. He decried faculty who were concerned only with garnering such things
as lower teaching loads and more support for travel and conferences (1997k). If
those of us who critically study culture are not careful, we, too, will seek academic
resources, privileges, and prestige instead of teaching and learning for the sake
of student and society.
Of scholars in all academic fields, perhaps those of us in cultural studies should
be most attuned to monitoring our own agendas and seeking to love our students
and colleagues as ourselves. We know and admit that scholars are “interested”
in their work; there is no interest-free research. All research is at least implicitly
perspectival. Carey (1989), for example, contrasted the ritual and transmission
views of communication, respectively, as largely Catholic versus Protestant ways
of understanding the relationship between culture and communication. In his
view, Protestants historically sought cultural change, or conversion, whereas
Catholics worked toward cultural continuity, or community. Surely the growth
of the two views is historically much more complex. Perhaps Carey’s own Catho-
lic perspective led him to oversimplify Protestant views of communication in
particular. For instance, some Protestants, such as Anabaptists, became highly
sensitive to the need for cultural continuity and conservation, virtually cut-
ting themselves off from the outside world in order to maintain holiness. They
persuaded outsiders only by loving example. Moreover, long before the rise of
Protestantism, various Catholic empires crusaded against other cultures and
faiths to evangelize them and subvert their native cultures. Nevertheless, Carey
no doubt correctly assessed the contrasting general communicative tendencies
in the two Christian traditions. He realized that foundational scholarly commit-
ments are like religious convictions and that academic and nonacademic cultures
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

orient people to such convictions and accompanying practices. For him, cultural
rituals were the most “religious.” “If you can’t understand religion,” Carey (2002c)
told a gathering of communication scholars, “you can’t understand culture.”
Like Raymond Williams (1983, 87), Carey traced the concept of communica-
tion to religion, especially cult or “cultivation.” This idea that human beings
employ communication to cultivate ways of life extends back to early Hebrew
creation myths. In the book of Genesis, God mandates Adam (humankind) to
cultivate (re-create) the created world. God gives humankind the capacity to
“name” things—to use language to identify, reorder, and thereby serve the created

R eligion 49

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 world. Two short creation narratives in Genesis suggest that the religious life is a
language-based, all-encompassing, stewardly cultivation of the original creation.
Over the centuries, the Christian church corrupted this calling, reinterpreting
Genesis as a mandate for selfish domination of the world. In theological terms,
the fall from grace distorted human beings’ understanding of their created pur-
pose. Humans selfishly began trying to control creation, God, and one another.
Religion should thus continually reorient human culture and society toward
sacrificial love—or re-create the most life-affirming relations so that peace and
justice prevail not merely in a utopian afterlife but amid the unfolding, imperfect
here and now. “Religion is a means of constructing a sacred world within a fallen
world,” Carey said (2002c).
Carey winsomely reclaimed this premodern understanding of culture as the
implicitly religious restaging of social sacrifice. He gently warned us not to
reduce communication to messaging but instead to see it more broadly as the
ritualistic cultivation of ways of life—of sentiments, meanings, attitudes, hopes,
and the like—in addition to various self-interests. Carey also reminded us that
we scholars participate in such communicative rituals; we, too, cultivate various
meanings and actions for better or for worse. In short, we cultivate academic
culture that can be just as other-serving or self-serving as everyday culture.
Communicative ritual induces the “dispositions it pretends merely to portray”
(Carey 1989, 18).
To the modern mind, religious ritual might seem primordial at best and
senselessly magical at worst. But the postmodern turn in scholarship reminds
us that we all live by communicative rituals. We scholars, too, are hermeneuti-
cal creatures bent on finding meaning in the “texts” of life. We re-create from
existing creation. As we do so, we ritualize our meanings and cultivate resources
of and for hope. In short, we worship something or someone by making it most
meaningful, most sacred. A hectic life without worship—without focused, self-
denying, other-loving, participatory ritual—becomes incoherent, promiscuous,
and ultimately purposeless. Dorothy Day, who with colleagues launched the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, recalled, “I get so busy doing the things
I want to do, love doing, but I forget to ask myself the why at all; and I forget
to ask myself what might be, what ought be, because I’m in the midst of doing,
doing. Thank God for this wonderful secular life—but thank God for giving us
a mind that can turn to Him, to ask ‘why’ and ‘wherefore’ as well as spend itself
to exhaustion getting things done” (in Coles 1999, 6).
Carey even suggested that the sabbath (sustained periods of rest designed to
counterbalance excessive busyness and pride) is one of the Jews’ greatest con-

50 Quentin J. Schultze

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 tributions to Western culture. The sabbath is a “region free from control of the
State and commerce where another dimension of life could be experienced and
where altered forms of social relationship could occur”—a “major resistance to
state and market power” (1989, 227). For both Jews and Christians, the sabbath
is the primary day of worship, not just a day set aside for a short period of wor-
ship. On this day of rest, people are called to sacrifice the pretense of selfishly
getting ahead and to re-create the spirit of thankfulness that will equip them to
transform all of life into a living sacrifice in the service of others.
Because there is no foolproof method for cultivating loving, self-sacrificial
ways of life, however, we humans still create idols. (The Greek root eidos suggests
a phantomlike appearance, whereas the corresponding Hebrew word denotes
a “thing of naught.”) We have the capacity to turn just about anything into a
god, even ourselves. The best we can do is to listen to and to learn from one
another, hoping that we will discover better ways of life and more just social
arrangements that help both others and ourselves to flourish. As Carey (1988,
15) put it, we can receive “the experience of others in the light of our own and
our own in the light of others.” Responsible citizenship depends on “enlarging
the human community with which we identify, of seeing not only that we are
men and women but that every woman is a man and every man a woman; that
there is no human experience so foreign or so alien that we cannot, at the least,
identify with it” (1997j, 100).
This kind of empathic hospitality might be cultural studies’ primary call-
ing. If so, we might want to define our role in the academy partly as being
hospitable lovers of culture and communication. In this role among others, we
would seek to be listeners before actors, open-minded before close-minded,
and grateful for the opportunity to sacrifice our time and energy on behalf
of our neighbors as ourselves. Elie Wiesel (1990, 71) recalled that the ancient
Jewish concept of hospitality requires a virtuous attitude toward the stranger.
The host became righteous by willingly learning from the other, even by being
influenced by the other, with the only exception being the rejection of a stranger
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

whose aim was to annihilate the host. After all, “a society without strangers
would be impoverished; to live only amongst ourselves, constantly inbreeding,
never facing an outsider to make us question again and again our certainties
and rules, would inevitably lead to atrophy” (73). In the New Testament, Jesus
reminds the emerging community of faith not to reject the stranger, since the
stranger might be God incarnate (Matt. 25:31–46). So followers of Christ are
called to love others unconditionally, making space for them in their hearts,
minds, and homes.

R eligion 51

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Conclusion

Just as the first American anthropologists’ liberating ideas came from the same
religious worldview that they hoped to transcend, those of us in cultural studies
borrow notions of faith, hope, and love primarily from Western religious tradi-
tions. We might not like particular religious practices or institutions, but there
is much to be gained by exploring our own theological assumptions.
The postmodern academy generally recognizes that belief and knowledge are
not easy to distinguish. Our work is a mixture of many ways of knowing, from
developing formal theories to collecting data, and from pursuing hunches to
exploring cosmic metanarratives. In a sense, cultural studies has brought schol-
arship back to the rudimentary origins of human understanding, to a kind of
premodern, religious outlook. Staring into the mirror through the miracle of
intrasubjectivity, we can see ourselves in our extraintellectual skins as creatures
of the very cultures that we sometimes pretend to be able to transcend.
For the ancients, knowing involved both ratio (rational differentiation) and
intellectus (holistic comprehension) (see Pieper 1998, 11). This combination of
parsed abstraction and common experience constituted spiritual knowing—a
knowing more like open-minded contemplation than close-minded explana-
tion. Life, in turn, was viewed as a kind of pilgrimage of knowing that required
both immersion in the world and reflection on that world. As Augustine put it
in On the Trinity, we cannot truly know anything without also loving it or love
it without also knowing it (2002, 10.1–2). As we become intimate with the social
world, however, we also discover that humans are members of an imperfect species
“given to defining itself relentlessly in terms of the disparagement of human dif-
ference” (Gunn 2001, 82). Any cultural resources—any rituals, habits of the heart,
democratic processes, or social institutions—that can help us in a given time and
place to know how to empathize with and love others are worth considering.
James W. Carey rediscovered what those monks from Augustine to St. Patrick
already knew: there is a “there” there. The “there” is culture, and we get there
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

through the gift of communication. Although we can attempt to peek behind

the veil of culture, the shrouded mysteries cannot be explained away by scien-
tific analysis or philosophical speculation. Instead they are matters of everyday
life embodied in the intersubjective rituals that we frequently take for granted.
Life itself is a sacramental activity bursting with more meaning than we can
ever discover, let alone create. We best participate in this gift of life by humbly,
self-critically cultivating shalom. Preserving this apparently theological mystery
might seem intellectually insufficient to moderns and postmoderns alike, but
it still could be a noble if imperfect calling for the times ahead. As Alasdair

52 Quentin J. Schultze

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 MacIntyre (2007, 263) suggested, we may indeed be entering a new Dark Ages
when we all will need a St. Patrick to keep the religious vision alive so it can
be rediscovered by curious new students of culture. “The ‘old’ culture of locale
and tradition does more than merely resist the new,” wrote our own St. James. It
“transforms it. The process runs not only in fast-forward but in reverse as well”
(Carey 2002b, 234).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

R eligion 53

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Community

Community without
Propinquity
Linda Steiner

Wildly inflated, if not oxymoronic, versions of community—the

intelligence community, military community, self-help community,
and international business community—began proliferating a few
decades ago, and such references continue apace. Communities
have emerged around various diseases. They produce jobs, such
as community literacy work. Although these may lack the thrill of
“ecstatic communities,” “singular” communities are identified for
academicians (the scholarly community), lawyers, artists, scientists,
and various other professions and occupations. We can study a host
of interpretive communities and in doing so form an interpretive
community. The term has even been stretched to refer to momentary
aggregations of people with at best temporarily shared interests, such
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

as watching video diaries posted on YouTube.

Especially in assessing whether the Internet reinvigorates pub-
lic life or fragments it, scholars use the term casually, often inter-
changeably with “social groups” (Ignacio 2005; Baym 1995); “Web
communities” are prominently, and again casually, invoked. Adver-
tising and marketing scholars often treat consumers or customers
as communities. Kozinets (2002, 61), for example, defines on-line

54

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 communities as “places in which consumers often partake in discussions whose
goals include attempts to inform and influence fellow consumers about products
and brands.” The Internet also reconnects people of a shared ethnic or national
background who have been geographically dispersed, some recently and some
having migrated from print. Community Connect, for example, hosts large
ethnic communities through AsianAvenue.com and BlackPlanet.com.
Not surprisingly in a consumerist society, brand communities are the loudest
claimants on the term. Highly loyal consumers seemingly form communities
around brands, even if this means—and it does—that marketers use them to
promote a product or service. “Liberated” from geography, two marketing schol-
ars assert, brand communities represent a structured set of social relationships
among brand admirers, who maintain the community by retelling the brand’s
history (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001). This produces “a dynamic win-win associa-
tion where brand engages consumers emotively and consumers reward them
with increased wallet share and peer recommendations” (www.sky-intermedia
.com). This imagined community is marked by shared consciousness and legiti-
macy (true members oppose competing brands), rituals and traditions, moral
responsibility, communal self-awareness, and self-reflexivity.
It is worth briefly recalling Ferdinand Tönnies’s concerns about the erosion of
intimacy, constancy, and rootedness of blood and neighborhood relationships
that had articulated and reinforced morality. His book, originally published in
1887, contrasted Gemeinschaft, where people “remain essentially united in spite
of all separating factors,” to Gesellschaft, where “they are essentially separated in
spite of all uniting factors” (Tönnies 1963, 33). The depersonalized, rationalized,
instrumental relations that served industrial “society” kept shifting according
to specific and often contractual requirements of the moment. That is, a major
problem for social theorists was the loss of community, assumed to be some-
thing good and also to be connected to locality. Only after 1915 did a variety of
sociological definitions of community per se appear.1
The eclipse of the local community did not dismay all classic social thinkers:
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Herbert Spencer welcomed the destruction of coercive, Old World communal

patterns. A century later, feminists of various strains remain suspicious of com-
munity sentiment, albeit for different reasons. Some do not want to politicize the
private. Postmodernists such as Iris Marion Young (1990) worry that people who
seek relationships of mutual identification, intimacy, and comfort—expressed
in the dream of community—both suppress differences among themselves and
exclude persons with whom they do not identify. Young criticizes the ideal
of community as overly and even undesirably utopian. Those who argue for

Com m u n it y 55

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 communities of difference object both to liberals’ penchant for universalizing
and privileging the individual and to conservative communitarians who ignore
racism, nationalism, and chauvinism.
Miranda Joseph (2002) rejects the romantic narrative of community (as the
relationships destroyed by capitalism and modernity) in order to read com-
munity as enabling the circulation of capital and state power. International and
U.S. nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, she says, complement and
supplement capitalism. Slightly less suspicious of community, Jane Mansbridge
(1995) looks to feminist theorizing to show how a polity can strengthen both
community ties and respect for individualism, but she points out the way lo-
cal communities and their human relationships tend to be women’s domains,
making the term communal nearly synonymous with feminine. The devaluation
of what is associated with women, then, privileges the notion of free, unencum-
bered individuals and thus hampers democratic communities. Feminists harshly
criticize liberalism’s self-interested, autonomous individual. They generally agree
that community is necessary to life and to feminist survival. Nonetheless, femi-
nists and communitarians “have not been, are not, and perhaps cannot or should
not be” consistent allies (Weiss 1995, 161).
One problem with much cultural studies work may well be its assumption
that community loyalties and bonds are always, obviously, and wholly ethical
goods; this ignores communities’ failures to confront diversity and conflict
and to live up to moral and political expectations. James Carey (1997e, 2) may
have been right in observing that we are “a people who are forever creating
new communities and then promptly trying to figure a way to get out of town.”
That said, with the exception of feminists, finding pessimistic images of com-
munity is far harder than Carey acknowledged. Perhaps it was because the word
nearly always evokes warm and fuzzy feelings that the highly cynical Ambrose
Bierce did not include it in his Devil’s Dictionary (1980 [1911]). Raymond Wil-
liams (1991, 76) called it a “warmly persuasive word” that “seems never to be
used unfavourably.” If home or local community is now a necessary retronym,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

utopian community is nearly redundant. Not surprisingly, given the concept’s

religious association, metaphors of religion and redemption show up in fantasy
and science-fiction communities as well as in the “faith community” itself.
Although ancient sacred communities, integrated by sacred languages such
as Latin, were gradually fragmented and territorialized (Anderson 1991), con-
sumers now apparently hybridize brand narratives in order to resacralize and
sustain community. People yearn for a “remystified community,” according to
the political scientist Benjamin Barber (1995, 161). Indeed, noting that scientific
inquiry lacks ceremony and communion, a planetary scientist (Porco 2006)

56 Linda Steiner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 predicted that science and religion will eventually play similar roles, namely,
providing “brotherhood of communal worship.”
The breadth of these references suggests that dramatically different under-
standings of community are in play, although Benedict Anderson’s (1991) widely
cited discussion of the emergence of nation-states and national ideology as
imagined communities seems to demonstrate the truth of W. I. Thomas’s no-
tion that if people define situations as real, “they are real in their consequences”
(Thomas and Thomas 1928, 571–72). Again, early thinkers assumed communi-
ties were constituted geographically. Some others retained a territorial sense
but insisted that community both requires and produces shared values: par-
ticipation, coherence, and solidarity (inspiring loyalty through mutuality and
cooperation in relationships) (Butcher, Glen, and Henderson 1993). Amitai
Etzioni (2001), a leader of a communitarian movement, is quite comfortable
with definitional vagueness; he merely asserts that communities are marked
by a web of mutually reinforcing affect-laden relationships (bonding) and his-
torical identity (culture), as well as commitment to shared values, norms, and
meanings. (Writing with his son, a computer scientist, he finds on-line com-
munities increasingly plausible.) All this fails to specify, however, how members
ought to be responsible to communities, how communal institutions should
be supported and regulated in ways that allow members to actively engage in
community-oriented services. This conceptual vagueness can make analyzing
and repairing communities difficult.
Basing his pragmatic “communitarian liberalism” on John Dewey, Philip
Selznick (1992) took seriously what communities and their members owe one
another. He saw a set of interacting variables (ideally, the mixture of these ele-
ments is rich and balanced) at stake in community: a shared history and culture;
a sense of distinctive identity and loyalty; the experience of interdependence,
reciprocity, and mutuality; plurality; autonomy (since plurality and group au-
tonomy do not guarantee individual well-being); participation of multiple kinds;
and integration through supportive institutions and practices. For Selznick, the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

weakening of community results from the dynamics of modernity: separation of

spheres (including the separation of religion and community), secularization, at-
tenuation of social ties to the point of atomization, and rational coordination (e.g.,
bureaucratically). That said, each of these trends has some moral benefits.
Still, the ambiguity (whether, for example, the community is primarily psy-
chological or political, affective or behavioral) leaves as an open question the
extent to which the seemingly limitless communications via virtual or other
kinds of mass mediated communication offer satisfying and effective substitutes
for face-to-face communication and for local communities. Potentially riding

Com m u n it y 57

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 on the answers, with respect to media issues, are standards for evaluating “com-
munity media,” the possibilities for intervening in efforts to exploit markets, and
policies about spectrum allocation, local ownership, and professionalization.
Such issues help us assess, for example, the Knight Foundation’s recent call for
proposals that would use new technologies to help build and bind “communi-
ties.” The foundation stipulated that it meant “physical, geographic communities
. . . because our democracy is organized by geography. . . . Online communities
don’t need our help” (http://www.newschallenge.org). But perhaps on-line and
geographic communities are not rivals. If so, both could be restructured and
strengthened along similar dimensions.
Looking at claims made for and by communities, therefore, helps us assess
what can legitimately be understood as a community. This is necessary to as-
sess what members can expect from communities, as well as what communities
can expect of members. Since marketers have so enthusiastically embraced the
discourse, the discussion will begin with branded communities.

Branded Communities

“Cult brands always create customer communities,” goes one rule for creating a
successful cult brand. “Customer communities work” (Ragas and Bueno 2002,
83). Academicians speak no less enthusiastically. Muñiz and O’Guinn (2001,
428) say, “We believe brand communities to be real, significant, and generally a
good thing, a democratic thing, and evidence of the persistence of community in
consumer culture.” A management professor insists that great branding is about
community: “Trust, authenticity, and intimacy of relationships often trump ratio-
nal economic decision making. . . . A branded community is a growing ecosystem
of participants who come together for common interactive, informational, and
advocacy purposes” (Harari 2005). Since community members willingly take
on responsibilities to maintain the community, a branded community “is about
enabling, and expecting, members to contribute their ideas and input—to be
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

equal problem solvers” (ibid.).

Around the world, corporations have taken this to heart. In a campaign that
seamlessly blended religion, sports enthusiasm, and profit goals into the language
of community, one of India’s first beer companies created a “community” of beer
customers by leveraging Formula One (F1) racing fans. Would-be “converts”
received an e-mail picturing Kingfisher beer but reading, “If F1 is your religion
. . . get baptized!” Kingfisher continues to communicate with its converts, send-
ing various personalized holiday greetings that marketing experts claim bond

58 Linda Steiner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 members into a community. Most branding campaigns similarly promote no-
tions of status and exclusivity by limiting access to registered members.
An entire industry has emerged to help produce and sustain branded commu-
nities. Sky Intermedia promises “tools and methodology for building ‘symbiotic
brand community’ sites where enthusiasts feel welcome and are delighted to
channel their creativities in various symbiotic exchanges with the brand” (www
.sky-intermedia.com). Enthusiasts of a brand are assisted in evangelizing other
consumers. Likewise, Prospero describes itself as “the leading provider of com-
munity content management solutions” with its “CommunityCM platform” (see
http://www.prospero.com). References to community unmistakably dominate
Prospero’s promise to provide “community applications” that “create communi-
ties and develop community-based content.” These applications include blogs
and discussion boards (where visitors interact with one another and respond to
polls but are supervised by moderators able to lock out disruptive users); chat
rooms; and moderated interviews with celebrities and experts. A feature that
helps on-line publishers collect consumer feedback is billed as a “collaborative
environment for community members.” Prospero’s clients include Fortune 500
news and entertainment companies, magazines, television networks, cable sys-
tems, and Internet publishers.
Many “real-world” niche communities take as fundamental a position for or
against consumption or a defining style of dress or hair, from nineteenth-century
feminists’ adoption of “bloomers” to Orthodox Jewish women’s continuing re-
quirements of modest, below-the-knee skirts. Communities may be defined
by what they refuse to eat (meat) or what they must ride (Harley-Davidsons).
Among the gay community, responses to particular brands may be based on
whether these were consistent with or antithetical to the community’s normative
and political needs; it rewards ones that advertise in the gay press but boycotts
brands it deems insulting (Kates 2004). Moreover, community relationships to
goods vary along a continuum. “Deadheads” actively market T-shirts honoring
the Grateful Dead. Fans of certain television shows try to help improve them
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

by submitting advice to producers. Consumers may interact through products,

come together through shared loyalty to “dead” (no longer manufactured) prod-
ucts, extend and redesign products, or create parallel networks by spinning off
from purchased products. They may move to physical, albeit gated, enclaves that
meet all consumption needs. Or they may renounce consumerism.
In sum, branding radically tilts the Latin verb communicare—to share, im-
part—toward its religious reference to receiving (Holy) Communion and its
root (found in community but also in immunity) mun, meaning “gifts” (Shipley

Com m u n it y 59

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 1945). The best of the branded communities at most supply a veneer of identifica-
tion with symbols and rituals, and perhaps even acceptance of some principles
for governing membership and behavior. They lack, however, commitment to
mutual aid, to respectful communication, to mutual learning, and to respect
for difference. Literally produced by marketers to connect the corporate world
and consumer practices, commodified communities at best have a couple of
the variables at stake in community: shared history and culture and a sense
of distinctive identity and loyalty (Selznick 1992). They lack the experience of
interdependence and reciprocity. Nor do they enjoy or promote autonomy, par-
ticipation of multiple kinds, or integration through supportive institutions and
practices. Although the discourse itself demonstrates the idea’s continuing hold,
branded communities, including physically located ones, show no evidence of
deliberation toward elaborating either difference or consensus. By this standard,
they do not function as communities.

Branding in Proximity

Branding has also invaded territories, but reversing the original assumption that
people who share space therefore share activities. The real estate industry has
married geography and sentiment in inventing adult, retirement, golf, resort, and
leisure communities (some are “spa lifestyle communities”), as well as gated and
nongated “bedroom communities.” In 2006 Martha Stewart and a major home
builder unveiled their first “cobranded community.” The next wave of retirees,
builders predict, will want to live among peers with shared interests rather than
in the towns where they grew up and knew everybody: “The whole concept of
community has changed dramatically in the last few decades, and now people are
looking for ways to socialize” (in Neville 2007, B8). Critics say intentional com-
munities are marked by internal homogeneity in people and thinking, perhaps
bordering on cult thinking, with little privacy or autonomy. But RainbowVi-
sion, whose New Mexico and California “resort communities” cater to gays and
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

lesbians, claims, “Every aspect of RainbowVision is a celebration of community.

We are a place where your neighbors are your family and everyone belongs. The
experience of people being together and sharing in the same values and activi-
ties is what creates a community” (http://www.rainbowvisionprop.com). One
Rainbow resident says, “It’s so wonderful for me to live someplace where I’m
not shunned. . . . This is a real community” (in Neville 2007, B8).
University-linked retirement communities, such as corporate-built communi-
ties at Dartmouth, Cornell, and Oberlin, are now enjoying enormous growth.
A $125 million community two miles from the University of Florida describes

60 Linda Steiner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 itself as a “life fulfilling community” that focuses on learning, fitness, and pre-
ventive health, “all wrapped up in a resort-style environment with intellectually
stimulating and interesting neighbors” and with privileges, such as access to
campus libraries, athletic facilities, and cultural activities, that offer “a sense of
community” (Word 2004). No wonder Castells (1996, 341) says “we are not liv-
ing in a global village but in customized cottages globally produced and locally
distributed.”
Intentional communities are proliferating in numbers and types: ecovillages,
cohousing (i.e., intentional neighborhoods consisting of private homes but with
an emphasis on shared common facilities and neighborliness), residential land
trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, and other sites.
Indeed, the Communities Directory for 2006 listed over seven hundred commu-
nities, with several for aging hippies and vegetarians. Like the famous historical
communities of Amana and Oneida, others define themselves along spiritual or
religious dimensions, from Christians to neopagan anarchist pansexuals. Co-
housing projects, around since the mid-1980, are organized around a common
vision, allowing members to carry out their common purpose. Silver Sage claims
“community, purpose and mindfulness merge and emerge” in its participatory
senior cohousing community. Its Web site posts questions “meant to help you
consider whether our community will be a good fit for you now and as you
continue to age” (http://www.silversagevillage.com/). Those who are likely to be
a “good fit” apparently are open to change, appreciate diversity in a community,
will help maintain a community, and “respect other spiritual paths.” More rare
for their intergenerational and noncommercial ethos are the nonprofit planned
communities, whose houses are arranged in clusters so that when people leave
their homes they can interact with others. This enables foster parents to care for
children with the active support of “honorary grandparents.”
Megachurches are resort, mall, extended family home, and town square all
in one territorial form. For example, the 200-acre Lutheran Community of Joy
(many megachurches have community in their names) in Arizona has a 1,800-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

seat worship and conference center, two schools, a bookstore, and a cemetery
and mortuary; housing, a hotel, and a water-slide are planned. These “sheltering
cocoons” have their detractors, and not merely because of intensity of use. A
religion professor acknowledged that these “24/7” churches reflect desire for
rootedness but added, “It’s an attempt to create a world where you’re dealing with
like-minded people. You lose the dialogue with the larger culture” (in Brown
2002, F6). A professor of English at the University of Florida, however, sees
megachurches as reconstituted communities at the intersection of the sacred
and profane; their “comfy brand of religion lite . . . inspires reverence, awe, and

Com m u n it y 61

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 commitment” (Twitchell 2004, 108, 278) and simultaneously mimics village
life, with plenty of free parking. Twitchell is uncritical: “Word that once came
from on high now comes from the felt needs of the consumption community”
(274). Although megachurches fetishize the very objects of community—such
as a coffeepot that serves 5,000 cups an hour to its 22,000-person “family”—
Twitchell notes that a metaphysical or religious program informs most utopian
experiments.

Tribes and Mobs

While such rhetoric suggests that libertarians’ privileging of the individual has
not undermined the continuing hold of the concept, a few people have aban-
doned the concept. Having waxed enthusiastic about the pleasures of on-line
participation in The Virtual Community (1993), Howard Rheingold (2002) has
moved on to “smart mobs.” Smart or flash mobs are highly emphemeral mo-
ments of collective action enabled by new technologies, especially cell phones.
Rheingold originally regarded the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), which
he helped found, as a community.2 He eventually grew bored with the WELL.
While people in communities know each other and so have relationships, he
concedes, mobs do not. The French sociologist Michel Maffesoli (1996) pro-
poses tribes as inherently unstable, ephemeral, nontotalizing, and “affectual”
social groupings. Tribal disciplinary authority is weak, but while it lasts, group
solidarity is strong.
Tribal etymology is pronounced explicitly in the organization of social-net-
working sites such as Friendster and MySpace, where users define their own
friendship networks, or “tribes.” Tribe.net is privately owned but enjoys venture
capital financing and partners with the Washington Post and Knight-Ridder. In
2005 Tribe.net announced its own branded communities. Scion, for example,
the first advertiser to use Tribe.net “to create a credible, branded online com-
munity,” promised that its virtual communities would “have the same look and
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

feel of communities created by individuals with common interests” (Tribe.net

2005). And Cova and Cova (2002) cite Maffesoli in contrasting the individual-
ized, segmented, “Northern” view of consumers to their “Latin” view of tribal
marketing or “societing,” which understands consumption as an effort to link up.
Cova and Cova see postmodern tribes as held together by shared passion—not
despite but because they are temporary. They complain that the (English) concept
of community ignores nonrational, archaic bonds and lacks blood bonds.
The ghetto is Maffesoli’s archetype for both territorial and affectual sharing.
Perhaps the contemporary tribal archetype is Burning Man. After the 25,000 or

62 Linda Steiner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 so participants leave their annual gathering space in Nevada, no trace remains.
Thus, this tribe has neither spatial nor temporal dimensions. The Burning Man
Web site eschews rules about behavior: “it is up to each participant to decide how
they will contribute and what they will give to this community.” The community
does, however, have ten principles that partly endorse and partly contradict
conventional notions of community. In the name of “Radical Inclusion,” the
principles begin with “No prerequisites exist for participation in the commu-
nity.” Yet other principles include communal effort (“Our community values
creative cooperation and collaboration”) and civic responsibility. At the same
time, Burning Man emphasizes self-reliance and self-expression. “Second Life”
has community standards even more specific than Burning Man’s. Harassment,
hate activity, and derogatory language about race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or
sexual orientation are forbidden and result in suspension or expulsion from the
Second Life Community.3

Is Propinquity Required?

Tribal rhetoric notwithstanding, the current debate is not whether community is

desirable but whether it requires propinquity and face-to-face communication.
Proximity is not sufficient, as gated communities show. Nor is shared lifestyle.
A lifestyle enclave links to consumption and leisure, bringing together people
with distinct shared patterns—socially, economically or culturally. Nonetheless,
“they are not interdependent, do not act together politically, and do not share a
history” (Bellah et al. 1985, 335). Perhaps we can understand community in terms
of “what people do for each other and not where they live” (Wellman 1999, xiv).
Already in 1963, in the face of transformations of cities (but noting that only cities
can offer lower communication costs), the pioneering urban designer Melvin
Webber (1963, 29) noticed that “Americans are becoming more closely tied to
various interest communities than to place communities”; his essay, subtitled
“Community without Propinquity,” conceded that interest communities need not
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

be spatially concentrated. Instead they could be organized through and around

economic and social networks. Attacking the “sociological naïveté” and “gross
exaggerations,” of such thought, Bell and Newby (1972, 18) argued that interest
communities lack the necessary “multi-stranded (multiplex) relationships.” Bell
and Newby emphasized that sixty-nine of the ninety-four definitions of com-
munity compiled in 1955 agreed on social interaction, area, and shared ties or
bonds, with ecologists arguing that the solidarity and shared interests were a
function of (i.e., resulted from) shared space; some made no mention of social
interaction. More recent scholars have also asserted that communities without

Com m u n it y 63

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 propinquity rarely enjoy the multiplexity of relationships characteristic of local
communities (Calhoun 1998). The virtual commodified community highlights,
by what it lacks, the conditions present in so-called final communities, which
“require the fullness of reality, the bodily presence of persons, and the com-
manding presence of things” (Barney 2004, 47–48).
In deploring the erosion of civic virtues and community values, communi-
tarian-oriented philosophers and sociologists likewise imply reference to a local
community. Properly emphasizing the political angle and rejecting romanticized
notions, Carey (1997e, 4) took seriously the view of political philosophers, com-
mon until the end of the eighteenth century, that “the range of the foot and the
power of the tongue” were natural limits on democracy. Carey (1997e, 4) defined
community not in terms of shared identities or universal participation but as that
place where people understand that their lives depend on the “uncoordinated de-
cencies and actions of others,” since awareness of interdependency mitigates the
bias of individualism and cultivates respect for the capacity of ordinary people.
“Citizenship is a term of space,” he said (1997l, 208), and citizens of republican
communities live “in real neighborhoods with real neighbors” (1997e, 13). Just
as democratic participation requires more than political debate and voting, the
sharing of culture requires a kind of commitment to communication as listen-
ing, deliberation, and sharing.
Anyone interested in what forms promote or constrain community must
be mindful of the way technologies of transportation and communication
affect social life, as Carey used Innis to point out. John Dewey, of course, is
often quoted for highlighting the connection of community and communica-
tion, saying in 1916 that people “live in a community in virtue of the things
they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to
possess things in common.” He added, “Persons do not become a society by
living in physical proximity. . . . A book or a letter may institute a more inti-
mate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from
each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof ” (1966 [1916],
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

4–5). Anderson (1991) emphasized the silent “mass ceremony” of newspaper

reading as precipitating people’s ability to imagine themselves as living in a
nation. (Calhoun [1998] put this in a slightly different register: nineteenth-
century newspaper readers escaped intellectual isolation but could not escape
incorporation into emerging national and world systems.) By 1927, however,
when he fundamentally insisted on democracy as the idea of community itself,
Dewey (1954 [1927]) required face-to-face communication for community, at
least in its deepest and richest sense.

64 Linda Steiner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Are These Communities?

Carey rejected nongeographic communities—however earnestly they search

for roots based on race, gender, or ethnicity—as utopian, ahistorical, and built
on rigid psychic or structural borders. Intentional territorial communities can
be rejected on identical grounds. Notably, however, as advocates go to pains to
emphasize, disagreements are common in intentional communities: “The object
of community is not so much to eliminate conflict as to learn to work with it
constructively” (http://www.ic.org/pnp/myths.php). Likewise, while communi-
ties with specific religious or spiritual lifestyles might afford limited privacy and
autonomy, in others the degree of privacy and autonomy “is nearly identical to
that of mainstream society.” In 1996 two-thirds of these communities apparently
were run democratically, with decisions made by some form of consensus or
voting; only 20 percent had an authoritarian structure or combined democratic
and hierarchical principles. Cohousing magazine regularly discusses how to deal
with conflict, how to build consensus, and other democratic processes, includ-
ing “sociocracy”—an alternative decision-making process involving “consent”
as opposed to consensus.
Considering how community is used and figuring out how community, as a
process, can be done better remains important. Notably, what now is blamed for
attenuating tightly bounded local communities is not urbanity but communica-
tion among, and therefore relationships to, groups without proximity. Few would
doubt Carey’s insistence that community emerges in communication (although
Chicago school sociologists were more inclined to study the reverse, how com-
munity attachment led to newspaper reading). Nonetheless, the communica-
tions (and industrial) revolution has enabled communication across space and
thus, perhaps, new communities. For Selznick (1992, 358) the basic criterion of
community is “that one’s life may be wholly lived within it . . . , that all of one’s
social relationships may be found within it.” He acknowledged, however, that
this formulation’s overly demanding comprehensiveness ignores how “com-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

munity can be treated as a variable aspect of group experience” (358). Instead,

then, “the emergence of community depends on the opportunity for, and the
impulse toward, comprehensive interaction, commitment, and responsibility”
(359). These are variable but important outcomes. That is, instead of asking how
to reorient personal and group commitments back to the local, we might ask
how to promote civic processes and civic responsibilities to communities along
a range of dimensions. Processes effective in neighborhoods may not work in
affective communities.

Com m u n it y 65

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 On its face, community journalism might seem responsive to Dewey’s and
Carey’s stipulation that a republican community’s institutions nurture citizens’
moral, political, and intellectual capacities. Carey (1997l) called for republican,
cacophonous conversation and saw the press as able—if not always willing—to
amplify outward the conversations emerging in particular spaces. Community
journalism advocates quote Carey to support their claim that, unlike cities, small
communities share a common frame of reference. Definitions of community
journalism assume a limited orientation in size and geography: locally owned,
with relentlessly local news of a small “market.” Ironically, while the corollary
concern to rehabilitate small newspapers against chains and broadcast rivals
goes unspoken, community journalism has been embraced by advocates of
microradio, local and public access television, and “Indymedia,” as well as many
other volunteer-led nonprofit efforts that emphasize participation and access.
Deeming on-line communities as living parasitically off geographical com-
munities, Carey doubted cyberspace could solve community problems. Likewise
convinced that the “common world of things” is what gives a community mean-
ing, Borgmann (2004, 47–48) worries that the Internet provides “commodious
communication” but in so doing undermines habitation of a material world.
These critics rightly challenge the radical reinvention and redefinition of the self
that affective communities typically indulge (whether they operate in cyberspace
or other mediated forms) and the conflation of personal relations and self-
expression with community. Acting in concert with interest groups or political
coalitions may not guarantee long-run satisfaction. Affective communities do
not necessarily or consistently develop the ability to live with people perceived
as different. Nevertheless, we clearly do not live in the geographical communities
we once did, nor did these always provide rich, thick interdependence and trust
among diverse citizens. This history calls for new standards for communications
and communities.
Community journalists argue that readers of small and weekly newspapers are
interested only in local news. This backward logic underscores the weakness of
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

reliance on proximity in helping to understand how we—including urbanites—

shall manage to live together. The famous connection between communion and
community never meant that boosterism and preservation of homogeneity are
the goals of community or democratic processes. Hypothetically, the language—
literally—of oral communities prohibited intercommunity discourse. Nonethe-
less, intercourse among those who are putatively different is required to promote
thoughtful, enriched understandings of culture or community. Altschull (1997,
152) wrongly asserted that “there is no such thing as the Black community or the
gay community.” Such communities do exist. They are no more (or less) united

66 Linda Steiner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 than geographic communities. Moreover, although feminists may no longer be
geographically isolated or physically vulnerable in the public sphere, gay men and
lesbians are literally at risk in some places, especially small towns. Conversely,
communities of subordinated groups are safest in, and sustained through, their
own media. Activists in many social justice movements emerge from and rely
on a nonspatiated community. Black, gay, and feminist presses are sustaining
communities, although they are not necessarily more (or less) successful than
local weeklies in doing so. Such news media should take up their responsibilities
to those communities, in part by promoting deliberation, including self-critique
and criticism.
Ultimately, community is a fundamentally normative reference to a valued,
useful social process directed at maintenance of culture over time. It has memory
(Bellah et al. 1985). Because it works at the collective level, not the individual,
communities require some form of news institution, whether local newspaper,
webzine, or low-power radio. A processual notion of community requires, among
other things, that a community’s news media help sustain the community over
time (rather than episodically within space), not by ignoring internal and exter-
nal conflict (as so-called community journalism does), but by engaging citizens
in literally provocative discussion of their heterogeneity and diversity. That is, all
communities, even those of subordinated groups, must be to some extent diverse
and “multicultural.” More needs to be known about how conflict works and com-
munities or their media can deal with contentious issues or contentious people.
Still, communities make room for pluralism, heterogeneity, “otherness,” and the
“play of difference” (Dallmayr 1981, 143). This is the opposite of the manageable,
controlled environment produced when corporations start a “community” from
scratch as well as when they colonize preexisting communities. This potential
for regulation is realized in iNation, which promises customers that its private
and branded instant messaging and small group systems put “you in control of
immediate communication channels in your community” (http://toronto.vc/
site1/business.html).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Mansbridge (1995) helpfully defined community as a group whose members

trust one another more than they do strangers not to “free ride”—trust them,
that is, to further the perceived needs of others rather than personal needs. This
trust derives from ties of love and duty that sustain mutual obligation, vulner-
ability, and understanding and sympathy. By this token, most virtual groups may
ultimately fail as communities. Calhoun (1998, 392) suggested that the Internet
tends to enhance, not undermine, existing power structures; it does not help
people come to know others in the “multiplicity” of their different identities and
so cannot replace “real” communities. Again, though, it behooves us to consider

Com m u n it y 67

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 how to remake the Internet and other inevitable nonlocal media processes so
that we can engage people in civic processes and enlarge our political capacities.
The point is to define community processes politically rather than emotionally
or expressively. This is not to deny the importance of affective notions; after
all, we live in communities, not in publics or even in public spheres. The limits
of community, however, are not those of sociability or materiality but rather
of these political, democratic processes. Communities—whether defined by
locality or interest—must nurture such media to maintain themselves as viable
communities, and members must invest in such media.
Conceding that people never are purely engaged in wholly undistorted delib-
eration on public matters does not require abandoning the aspiration. Rather,
precisely because community is an unfinished and ongoing project, we must
interrogate the loose mantras about community and take seriously the interstruc-
tured technological and political structures that either promote or inhibit such
processes. Wellman (1999) used descriptive data to conclude that community
ties are narrow and specialized, with people “maneuvering” in fragmented, un-
stable networks. Significantly, though, his admission that private intimacy has
replaced public sociability shows that his notion of “personal community” is
personal and thin rather than thick and political, lacking the civic relationships
still required.
The point here is not to tolerate lazy “localities,” to apologize for news insti-
tutions that work against civic virtues or civic participation, or to discourage
neighbors from working (or playing) together. Nor is it an apology for lazy
institutions that boast of serving sexual minorities or ethnic or political groups
but instead commodify them through a parochial patrolling of boundaries.
The challenge is recognizing the political dimension and then strengthening
ties to communities at various levels and of various kinds. Referring to com-
munities working for social change and justice, albeit ultimately on behalf of
a global feminist community, Ferguson’s (1995, 373) model of empowerment
works through many overlapping relational networks rather than a single “pool
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of energy”: “our fragmented subjectivities require support by a number of op-

positional communities that provide alternative meanings and material support.”
The goal is to encourage local and nonlocal news organizations to help citizens
resist exploitation and colonization through commercial, administrative, and
managerial manipulation. Over generations, threats to community have been
conceived as, in turn, cities and modernity, individualism, virtual attractions,
and consumerism. Rejecting these bifurcated boundaries challenges us to ask
how we can live together, how we can nurture—through new institutions—the
political and social virtues of both affective and geographic communities. What

68 Linda Steiner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Dewey and Carey understood is that community requires not psychological
unity (unlike McLuhan’s global village, unlike the commune) but a political and
social formation embracing multiple activities.

Notes
1. For example, Robert MacIver, a Scottish-born sociologist and political philosopher
who was president and chancellor of the New School for Social Research, published
Community (1928) in 1917.
2. A spirited debate about the WELL as community, with 177 responses, Rheingold’s
included, is archived at http://www.well.com/conf/vc/7.html.
3. Second Life claims to be an on-line “global community” bridging cultures and wel-
coming diversity: “We believe in free expression, compassion and tolerance as the
foundation for community in this new world” (http://secondlife.com/community/).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Com m u n it y 69

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Part II    Culture
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Culture

James W. Carey and the

Conversation of Culture
Lawrence Grossberg

Cultural studies is going through one of those rarely acknowledged

or analyzed “crises” common in the life histories of intellectual for-
mations. Recent attacks on cultural studies, on first glance, echo
earlier criticisms: cultural studies stands accused of paying too much
attention to culture and not enough to the state and economics, too
much to cultural differences and not enough to social common-
alities, too much to popular resistance and not enough to political
domination. Yet the current discomforts are not the same as ear-
lier ones. Earlier criticisms were often hostile to the very project of
cultural studies, whereas the most trenchant of the contemporary
criticisms come from within the project and challenge its main-
stream formations. To deflate the sense of crisis, I consider the place
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of culture in “mainstream” British-influenced cultural studies and

in James Carey’s version of it and then consider how the changing
geo-historical context poses new challenges to the field.

Mainstreaming Culture in British Cultural Studies

No single discipline has responsibility for culture (the way sociology

became the study of society or political science, the study of the

73

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 state). Instead, the investigation of culture is dispersed among the humanities
and the social sciences, each taking a particular aspect or definition of culture
for granted, with little self-reflection. It was left to cultural studies to struggle
with the concept of culture in something approaching its full complexity. There,
the field has been constituted by the necessary descriptive and normative am-
biguity of the concept of culture as it emerged as a crucial piece of the puzzle
that is modernity. Descriptively, “culture” is simultaneously transcendental,
particular, and social. Transcendentally, it describes a universal condition of
human existence: the necessary mediation of something—meaning—“between”
consciousness and reality. The Kantian premise at the root of modernity is that
unlike (“lower”) animals, humans lack an instinctual apparatus adequate for
interacting with the world. The mind copes by adopting a semiotic or symbolic
function; reality takes on a symbolic organization. The meaningfulness of the
world—the constitution of experience (Kant’s phenomena) in the place of reality
(Kant’s noumena)—is the third space, within which humans exist in a world of
their own creation. Understood transcendentally, culture is an aspect of all hu-
man activity; human action presupposes thinking and imagination, the creation
of meaning itself.
Furthermore, culture describes a particular subset of activities privileged in
modernity because of an assumed special relationship to the construction of
meaning in general and to creativity specifically. The question is just how narrow
and how privileged is a culture’s particular set of practices and objects. Since
culture is a transcendental, these practices and objects are the concrete existence
of the universal. There can be only one culture. Every artist speaks from a par-
ticular time, place, and language but, in both geographical and historical senses,
transcends particularity by speaking of humanity’s universal possibilities.
This second definition inscribes the limitation of culture to “art,” to the aes-
thetic, to “the best that has been thought and said.” This understanding of cul-
ture both embodies and potentially contradicts the first definition. At the very
least, the first meaning of culture requires that, judgments of quality aside, all
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

our symbolic activities are specific instances of the transcendental mediation of

meaning. Culture as a set of objects and activities thus includes popular culture
and even the commercial culture. All such activities are concrete embodiments
or particularizations of the transcendental practice of mediation. Here culture is
equated with the symbolic, with sign-using behavior and often, commonsensi-
cally, with language and communication. This second notion of culture, then,
as a set of uniquely symbolic activities, contradicts the apparent universality of
cultural mediation acknowledged in the first, transcendental definition, which
portrays all human activities as world making (mediating and mediated). The

74 Lawrence Grossberg

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 productivity of culture extends to the entirety of social life itself, the whole way
of life of a people.
Cultural studies emerges at the point of contradiction between these under-
standings of culture. Consider how these ambiguities play out in Resistance through
Rituals: “The culture of a group or class is the peculiar or distinctive ‘way of life’
of the group or class, the meanings, values, and ideas embodied in institutions, in
social relations, in systems of belief, in mores and customs, in the uses of objects
and material life. Culture is the distinctive shape in which this material and social
organization of life expresses itself. . . . Culture is the way the social relations of a
group are structured and shaped; but it is also the way those shapes are experi-
enced, understood and interpreted” (Hall and Jefferson 1976, 10). Here, culture
operates on several dimensions: (1) a distinctive way of life and the organization
or structure of that social life; (2) the meanings, values, and ideas embodied in
that way of life or how the way of life expresses itself; (3) the distinctive shapes of
the meanings, values, and ideas described in (2); (4) the ways (1), (2) and perhaps
(3) are experienced or understood; and implicitly (5) the forms of expression and
representation articulating those meanings, values, and ideas.
Although so far I have focused on apparently “descriptive functions,” I have
not totally avoided normative questions, whether involving judgments about
the superiority of culture over nature, of the aesthetic over the popular, and at
least implicitly, of the modern over the traditional (or primitive). Raymond Wil-
liams (1958, 1961) argued that the concept of culture—which originally referred
to agricultural practices—was transformed into its modern form precisely as a
category of judgment. Culture was meant to offer critics a position from which to
describe and judge historical changes—in ways of life, the structure of that social
life, the forms of expression, and the meanings, values, and ideas embodied in
these—brought about by the processes of modernization. Williams argued that
the modern concept of culture emerged as a result of attempts to confront pro-
found transformations of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The notion of culture involves a double articulation: on the one hand, the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

projection of a position, constituted by a temporal displacement (e.g., from

tradition or working life) from which change can be comprehended; on the
other hand, equating that position with a standard of judgment grounding a
“total qualitative assessment” of such changes. “The idea of culture is a general
reaction to a general and major change in the conditions of our common life”
(Williams 1958, 295). The very act of producing the concept of culture involves
constructing a place that allows one to describe and judge changes in everyday
life. It requires a “court of human appeal” or locatable “higher” standard to be
set over the processes of practical social change. Culture is simultaneously the

Cu ltu r e 75

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 standard and the position from or against which one can judge those changes.
The variety of assumed standards is inseparable from the polysemy of culture.
In judging the changes that the forces of modernization produced, what was at
stake was the very nature of human social life, of the forms of association and
communication, of the way the various specific activities of life were integrated
into a coherent and meaningful totality.
Modernity took on different forms in different places, so the claim should be
that “culture” as a distinctively “modern” concept was distinctive to the particu-
lar modernity of the North Atlantic capitalist and industrializing nation-states.
North Atlantic modernity describes a contradictory project to construct a new
kind of individuality (and a new relationship between both the individual and
the social and the individual and the world). It involved economic, political,
social, and cultural changes brought on by the power of and interactions among
forces such as capitalist versions of market and commodity economies, the En-
lightenment displacement (but not replacement) of the authority of religion by
science and individual reason (or in opposition, imagination), the industrial and
technological redefinition of material labor, globalism and colonialism (with
its attendant racisms), the redefinition of social relations around a particular
version of the family (and relatedly, specific forms of gender and generational
relations), and the rise of democratic state politics (including the extension of vot-
ing rights). It also involved new ways of controlling populations and individuals
(what Foucault describes as governmentality, disciplinarity, and biopolitics) and
new forms of cultural expression and agency, some of which were more broadly
available as a result of increasing literacy and education and of the industrializa-
tion, technologization, and capitalization of culture (communication) itself.
Even as the concept of culture defined a perspective for critics of moderniza-
tion, however, it needed to support particular forms of social and political life
emerging as a part of European modernity. In particular, culture was closely
bound to the nation-state’s emergence as the form by which a particular people
could be tied to a particular geography and apparatus of governance. Culture is
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

“linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as producer, protec-
tor and inculcator of an idea of national culture” (Readings 1996, 3). Culture is a
regulative idea linking the people (ethnos) or community (popular will) with the
national state. Thus, culture provides unique insight into our universal identity
as humans and into our particularity.
Not surprisingly, then, the rise of the concept of culture ties to the emer-
gence and legitimation of new forms and agents of power. On the one hand is
the emergence of a new class of professional, middle-class intellectuals whose
power is defined by their guardianship of the domain of culture, meaning, and

76 Lawrence Grossberg

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 interpretation. On the other hand is the possibility of a new form of power—the
space of ideology or rule by consensus. Culture is the ideology of ideology. It
provides modernity’s power with a new kind of legitimacy opposed to traditional
forms of control based on violence and spectacular state power (as in public
hangings and torture). The emergence of the modern concept of culture was
closely linked to the very forms of modern power it sought to criticize. Therefore,
some authors, following Foucault, argue that culture should be understood not
as production of meaning (or representation and ideology) but as systems of
regulation—techniques and resources—aimed at controlling forms of conduct.
Culture is a set of particular “technologies of the self.” The concept of culture is, in
any case, a complex structure: an epistemological concept resting on a normative
and ethical ground, providing sustenance to a historically and geographically
specific political project.
Still, why was this conceptual ambiguity establishing the domain of culture as
a relatively autonomous realm of human life embraced as the basis for a new field
of investigation after World War II? Williams’s concept of culture as a descriptive
and normative concept is derived from his creation and reading of “the culture
and society tradition” of British literary and social criticism. Within this criti-
cal tradition, the concept of culture invoked “a practical separation of certain
moral and intellectual activities from the driving force of a new kind of society”
(Williams 1958, xvi). Yet Williams refused to locate himself within that uniquely
British way of constituting the separation of culture and society as a founding
moment of modernity. He refused to take the separation of culture and society
for granted. Cultural studies would reinsert culture into the practical everyday life
of people, into the totality of a whole way of life. Moreover, his version of cultural
studies was not driven by a vision of a total transformation of society (e.g., from
the traditional to the modern, or from community to mass society). Rather, it
expressed concern for the consequences of new forms and degrees of change and
mobility. Yet Williams never escaped the separation of culture and society—both
in his privileging of certain forms of culture (literature and, later, language) and
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

in his continuing desire to equate culture with some ethical standard.

James Carey and the Concept of Culture

Unlike that of his British cotravelers, Carey’s theory of culture (and cultural stud-
ies) is firmly grounded in pragmatism and the Chicago school of social thought.
Carey’s version of cultural studies, however, also depends on his historical work,
especially of technology, although describing Carey as a historian of technology
also oversimplifies, since he considered technology to provide a privileged insight

Cu ltu r e 77

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 into the social totality. Anchored in Harold Innis’s theory of media technology,
his work connects to Geddes, Mumford, and Ong.1 Understanding Carey at the
intersection of these two traditions offers clues about the current crisis. Carey
saw culture as uniquely and essentially human:
This particular miracle we perform daily and hourly—the miracle of pro-
ducing reality and then living within and under the fact of our own pro-
ductions—rests upon a particular quality of symbols: their ability to be
both representations “of ” and “for” reality. . . . as “symbols of ” they present
reality; as “symbols for” they create the very reality they present. . . . All
human activity is such an exercise (can one resist the word “ritual”?) in
squaring the circle. We first produce the world by symbolic work and then
take up residence in the world we have produced. Alas, there is magic in
our self-deceptions. (1989, 29–30)

Here Carey’s approach looks much like that of British cultural studies: we live in a
symbolic reality of our own making. Carey’s concept of culture has the polysemy
and polyvocality then characteristic of anglophone cultural studies. “Culture
. . . is never singular and univocal. It is, like nature itself, multiple, various, and
varietal” (Carey 1989, 65). It is a “chaotic reality” opposed to symbols (1997a, 314).
It is “qualitatively distinct zones of experience” (1989, 66) and experience itself
(64), as well as a mode of human activity (65). The different terms describing
what culture produces are not necessarily equivalent: culture constitutes a form
of life; culture produces meanings “by embodying and acting out the claims
symbols have on us”; culture “creates the forms of social relations into which
people enter as opposed to the processes occurring within those forms” (1997a,
314). Finally, it is an ethical term: “For Dewey communication was a principle
of ethics, not merely a form of action” (315).
Such ambiguity is not a problem. Rather, it defines a particular formation of
cultural studies. It is the very complexity—the miracle—at the heart of culture
as the essential human practice. But pragmatism’s attempt to meld these different
effects into a unity cannot hide the distances among them. In fact, those distances
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

are re-created in Carey’s attempt to see culture and symbols as simultaneously

process and form. This latter emphasis on symbols as forms, rather than as
content, distinguishes Carey from mainstream cultural studies.
Other significant differences emerged over time, as the “mainstream” of cul-
tural studies became increasingly unresponsive. Carey was often read—not rea-
sonably—as theorizing the cultural production of commonality and consensus,
despite his insistence on multiplicity. Over time he increasingly foregrounded
culture as “a process of struggle and conflict, at once agonistic and antagonistic”

78 Lawrence Grossberg

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 .

(1997g, 272). Despite his early willingness to view culture and even human ac-
tion as a text, he later explained he was not trying to substitute a literary, textual
model for economic analysis: “Rather it was directed toward the constructions
of the forms of social relations into which people enter rather than the mes-
sages transacted within those forms. The choice of ritual over text points to
practices and practical reason against poststructuralism’s reduction of society
to discourses” (1997k, 12). Furthermore, Carey rightly criticized treating culture
as if it were equivalent to ideology. Culture cannot be “reduced” to questions
of representation (ignoring signification) or to matters of power and difference
(ignoring the social possibilities of community and unity). Carey refused the
encoding-decoding model of communication, which reproduces a “transmission
view” of communication and ignores how the cultural construction of reality
happens through ritual communication.
Sometimes Carey discussed ritual and transmission as contrasting forms or
practices of communication; the latter fails as a political and ethical model of
human life. At other times he discussed ritual and transmission as competing
views. Here he rejected a transmission view, first, because it shelters scientis-
tic and positivist definitions of knowledge. This inevitably leads to the second
problem: it renders ritual communication invisible. That is, the real enemy was
always the causal and functional theories that a transmission view enabled: “The
task of cultural studies was, then, simultaneously intellectual and political: to
contest a body of theoretical and empirical work carried forward in the name
of positive science and to contest the project of social reconstruction carried
forward, implicitly or otherwise, in the name of positive knowledge” (1997k, 3).
Carey treated “transmissive” communications as a debased version and negation
of ritual communication.

Culture as a Challenge to Cultural Studies

Several critics argue that cultural studies fails to address the changing nature and
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

operation of culture in the structures of experience and politics. More radically,

critics say cultural studies misunderstands the relation of culture and power from
the very beginnings of modernity. The first argument suggests that the concept
of culture, if not culture itself, is in trouble, because culture has been emptied of
all content (except its very plasticity), because culture has become ubiquitous,
because culture has replaced reality or at least the difference no longer matters,
or because culture itself no longer matters.
Cultural analysts confront, paradoxically, both the omnipresence of culture—
what some have called the culturalization of society, politics, and economics—

Cu ltu r e 79

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 and the apparent weakening of long-standing modern forms of cultural power.
On one hand, across a range of public and private discourses, culture has moved
to center stage. Culture has become inescapable, whether the reference is to
culture as an economic sector; the culture of economics; the role of culture in
constructing images, experiences, and expectations of the economy; or the in-
creasing importance of culture in both domestic and international politics. The
link between culture and identity has asserted itself not only as a new dominant
axis of power but also as the basis of paradoxical claims for equality, autonomy,
and freedom. “The role of culture has expanded in an unprecedented way into
the political and economic at the same time that conventional notions of culture
largely have been emptied out” (Yudice 2003, 9).
Meanwhile, national cultures are declining in importance, partly because
of globalization and diasporic movements, although this has not reduced the
power of national identities. Readings (1996) argues that as global culture re-
places distinctive national cultures, the institutions and values of the modern
conception of culture give way to new, neoliberal constructions of culture. Even
the value of cultural capital is declining—whether as something to be possessed
and exhibited by the wealthy, as something valued in itself, or as a democratized
means of mobility. Culture no longer has specific content: “Everything, given a
chance, can be or become culture” (Readings 1996, 17). Thus, “culture no longer
names a metadiscursive project . . . from which we might be excluded” (103).
For Readings the new global system of power, located so clearly in the global
system of capitalism, is no longer concerned with modern citizen-subjects and
no longer requires cultural content to manage subjects.
Power seems less reliant upon culture; ideology and consensus have been
replaced by structures of subordination based on explicit—administrative
rather than cultural—strategies of economic and political subordination.
The sorts of surveillance and control that Foucault described as disciplinar-
ity seem to be giving way, in the name of religion and “law and order,” to a
juridico-discursive system based in violent, spectacular forms of punishment,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

incarceration, and military power. The visible ideologies of contemporary life

are greeted with cynicism. Instead of Marx’s formulation of ideology—“they
don’t know what they are doing but they are doing it anyway”—the exposure
of ideology evokes a different logic: “they know what they are doing and they
are doing it anyway.”
A new formation of culture is emerging, evident in both neoliberal appropria-
tions and in the tendency to blame national and institutional problems, even
failures, on “the culture.” This offers up culture as a malleable—almost willed—

80 Lawrence Grossberg

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 set of behaviors and conduct. Culture is a plastic medium to be molded at will
by social elites, who assume they can change people’s conduct by reconstructing,
among other things, the modalities of identity and unity to which individuals
and groups lay claim. This malleability is visible in new managerial practices,
technical strategies for refashioning the behavior and thinking of employees in
accordance with organizational goals. This new apparatus of culture has also
explicitly entered the political sphere as a program to transform, in Tony Blair’s
terms, the caretaker state into a cultural state.
The second argument attacks the semiotic theory of culture, arguing that this
misunderstands the actual working of culture and confuses the modernist ideol-
ogy of culture (the ideology of ideology) with its actual power. This more direct
challenge to cultural studies derives from an idiosyncratic reading of Foucault’s
concept of governmentality in relation to the liberal state. Although not limited
to the state, governmentality invokes questions of cultural administration and
technical social management. Some argue that the political effects of culture
result from the ways cultural practices have been “governmentally deployed.”
Consequently, culture becomes a set of resources, specific knowledges, pro-
grams, technologies, all aimed at managing populations, changing their habits
of conduct, feeling, and thought. Ironically, then, culture is about a way of life,
about producing and transforming it. Culture is a means of managing the social,
accomplished by using cultural practices to shape conduct in order to refashion
behavior and produce new forms of individuality.
Tony Bennett (1998) calls on cultural studies to shift from a conception in
which culture serves power by embodying or representing it to a view of culture
as a resource for programs aimed at the transforming conduct. He assumes a
stark opposition between governmentality and ideology as theoretical descrip-
tions of the effectivity of culture in modernity. To Bennett, governmentality
suggests that cultural practices are always deployed in multiple ways. The gov-
ernmental practice of culture always accommodates a plurality of means and
ends, each defined by specific desired projects and directions and each a response
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

to a specific problem. All cultural practices work by arranging and rearranging

things and bodies in ways aimed to achieve specific goals. Governmentality is
not so much a radical departure as it is the flipside of the first set of critiques of
cultural studies. Governmentality offers the possibility of both opening up and
historicizing the concept of culture as a tool for critical analysis. This argument
on the multi-effectuality and multilocationality of cultural practices is not far
from Frow and Morris’s (1993) notion of culture as flexible enough to respond
to significant changes in its very mode of operation.

Cu ltu r e 81

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 What Is This “Culture” in Cultural Studies?

It is common enough to acknowledge how cultural studies is a response to “expe-

rienced” changes, to changing political challenges and demands, and to emerg-
ing theoretical debates. Carey regarded cultural studies as a conjuncturally or
contextually defined formation emerging “as a particular project within a given
social formation” (1997k, 15). I want to suggest why the concept of culture, and
even a particular hierarchical structuring of its ambiguity, might have been a
compelling strategy for confronting the particular contexts of postwar social
change and struggle and simultaneously an effect of the contexts it purported to
analyze. Why was escaping the modernist separation of culture and society so
hard for cultural studies? Why did cultural studies foreground the narrow sense of
symbolic culture rather than a broader notion of the creativity of ordinary life?
I suggest that the privileging of culture and the emergence of cultural studies
were built on a correct assumption about context: culture, both specifically as
aesthetic or expressive texts and more generally as language or communication,
emerged historically as a crucial domain in which history was being made and the
possibility of resistance was being organized. “Popular culture is one of the sites
where . . . socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters.
Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it” (Hall 1981, 239).
Aesthetic culture was where people lived and gave meaning to the historical and
political changes and challenges of their lives. In Williams’s terms, culture was
the constitutive and constituted locus of the emergent structures of feeling.
The importance of culture was evidenced in postwar academicians’ growing
concern with language and culture as what Foucault and others might call con-
trol (or effectivity) at a distance and in the growing governmental and public
concern for questions of propaganda, subliminal messages, the mobilization of
ideas, the dispersion of education, and so on.2 This period was marked by the
growth of education, of the media or popular culture, and of public investment
in culture. This was the moment when communication and culture moved to the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

center of intellectual and public life, a time of growing concern for the politics
of mass culture, the cold war politics of ideology, and flirtations with, panics
around, and investigations of sub- and youth cultures. To say that culture was
dominant is not to say that it was determinant. The new visibility and role of
culture undoubtedly resulted from the particularities of the postwar settlement
in political and economic terms as well as from developments in the material
forms of economic and political power. But even the contestations (from popular
anticommunism and the reconstitution of conservatism to the counterculture
and identity politics) were played out in cultural spaces.

82 Lawrence Grossberg

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 In making culture both central and omnipresent, and by identifying it as the
primary locus of the experience of historical change and struggle, the discourses
of this period have profoundly shaped our understandings of power and politics:
these discourses emphasized the mediated nature and the representational as-
pects of power. They “discovered” the cultural construction of political economy
(state and economics). Unfortunately, they too quickly and for too long brack-
eted these material and discursive condensations, only to have them return as
nightmares. Decentering the state pluralized the sites of power, so that power,
like culture, was everywhere. Too often it disembodied and disconnected power
from the material relations of inequality and domination anchoring it. Yet it also
pluralized the dimensions and domains of politics. It made visible the politiciza-
tion and politics of culture (e.g., ideology and the culture wars) as a necessary
complexity and contingency in trying to answer a fundamental question: why
do people act against their apparent interests?
Nonetheless, understanding the particular ways culture mattered requires
a more complicated story of the changing problematics of cultural studies. A
sense of the complexity of cultural studies is necessary to avoid identifying
all cultural studies with a single vision.3 David Scott (1994, 7) suggests we see
contexts as “problem spaces,” with different historical conjunctures constitut-
ing different conceptual-ideological problem-spaces. These problem-spaces are
less “generators of new propositions than . . . generators of new questions and
new demands.” Contexts must be understood as posing specific questions and
demands. The way that Williams, Hoggart, and especially Carey took up culture
was not in the terms associated with cultural studies since the 1970s and 1980s
(agency, resistance, subjectivity, identity) but as an epistemological contestation
with the growing authority and dominance of science and positivism. The British
project of cultural studies is to contest reductionism, whether in behaviorism,
functionalism, utilitarianism, political economy, or more recent forms such as
cognitive theory, chaos theory, network theory, aesthetic formalism, or religious
fundamentalism. The problem is the tendency to universalize its own logics and
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

realities and to reduce complex realities to a single dimension.

Reacting slightly differently to the dominance of science, Carey elevated the
ethical over the epistemological. Carey demanded a nonpositivist understanding
of science, which he found in authors such as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend,
and Nelson Goodman, who saw science in part as a symbolic system. But that
epistemological response was insufficient, for positivism reduced the ethical pa-
rameters of human life itself. Carey was frightened by the “culture”—the forms
of social life and interaction—embodied in such discourses. Innis’s two forms of
technological bias—of social life and power—roughly translate into Carey’s two

Cu ltu r e 83

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 models of (and for) communication. Transmission as a model of and for social life
is aligned with Innis’s space bias and the control of distance. Ritual as a model of
and for social life is aligned with Innis’s time bias. Yet Carey, like Williams, refused
to give equal value to time and space biases; time bias and ritual communication
directly linked to Carey’s symbolic understanding of a common culture.
The particularity of Carey’s identification of communication and culture al-
lowed him to move back and forth between the material world of technology
(and all the economic, political, and sociological materiality surrounding it) and
the performative world of symbolic forms. Carey connected, without reducing,
the worlds of cultural meaning and experience with the spatio-temporal organi-
zation of society. The way ethics and culture intersected is clear in Carey’s (1997c,
73) project “to revitalize our understanding of communications independent
of economics and to revitalize, as a consequence, the political possibilities of
the civic republican tradition.” Carey argued that “economics as practice and
discipline is devoted to the suppression of communication” (67):
Economics is the practice of allocating scarce resources. Communication is
the process of producing meaning, a resource that is anything but scarce—
indeed, is a superabundant, free good. It is hard to apprehend and take full
account of this contradiction because the practice of communications, like
all other human practices (religion comes to mind)[,] has itself been so
transformed by the theory and practice of economics that the former (com-
munications as a practice, meaning as a resource) can hardly be recognized
given the dominance of the latter. (64)
Carey did not deny that economies are partly cultural or that cultures partly
depend upon economies. Indeed, “capitalism is not only an economy but a
culture” (Carey 1997k, 5). (We should also think about politics, the state, and
economies as inescapably cultural.) Carey was concerned with the ways symbolic
and ritual systems constitute the possibilities of material ways of life. Carey,
unlike his British counterparts, was never quite willing to displace the question
of ethics and judgment onto culture, choosing instead to see the ethical ques-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

tion as a challenge to culture, just as it was a challenge to capitalism or science,

rather than a question of culture. This commitment to culture is a commitment
to a concept and a vocabulary that can ground an ethical, democratic, and civil
vision of the possibility of collective life.

Conclusion: Somewhere between the Old and the New

Carey believed that the problematic to which cultural studies responds changed
significantly over time. This recognition is marked by his changing attitude

84 Lawrence Grossberg

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 toward postmodern claims of rupture. The introduction to his first collection
(Carey 1989, 2) argued that “a melodramatic modernism or postmodernism, one
that underscores the revolutions and ruptures that come with electronic com-
munication, is not particularly helpful and is pretty much based on an illusion.”
In the 1997 Munson and Warren collection, however, he conceded that “cultural
fragmentation and postmodern homogenization are two constitutive trends of a
single global reality. We are living . . . in a period of enormous disarray in all our
institutions and in much of our personal life as well” (1997a, 324). His imagery
was Hegelian: “We are living amidst a cultural meltdown, to be hyperbolic about
it, a displacement and transgression of the symbolic, but it is unclear what will
replace the terms with which we have navigated our sense of the world and our
own nature for at least the last hundred years. . . . Something will be invented to
do the cultural work of mapping the social, but that something is at the moment
not repressed but merely undiscovered” (326). Later he wrote, “the world seems
to be imploding and exploding at the same time, experienced imaginatively as
simultaneously coming together and falling apart” (Carey 2002b, 224–25). De-
spite this pessimistic assessment, however, Carey held on to an optimism rooted
in the democratic nationalism of his time bias: “the persistence of the underly-
ing forces in American culture remains the most impressive phenomenon, and
nothing has diluted their power to absorb new members into the community.
. . . Americans appear to be learning again how to live together by experimenting
with new ways of living apart” (1997a, 328–39).
A part of the contemporary crisis of cultural studies is signaled by the trans-
mogrification of the operation of culture itself. Instead of the universal becoming
particular, the particular has become universal. Culture is crucial, but whether
it will still be dominant in struggles over the shape and direction of modern
societies is unclear. Culture no longer enjoys the same centrality. It is not where
change is being organized and experienced. It is certainly not where resistance
is being viably organized. The disparity between the apparent vectors and ef-
fects of “culture” and the leading edge of political transformation and historical
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

change is growing. Although I am tempted to say that the significant locus of

the constitution and experience of change is in politics and economics them-
selves, I do not want to create such a stark opposition. The rupture may not
relegate culture to a secondary role. Moreover, we should stop reproducing this
vision of separate domains. Rather, we are in the midst of what Gramsci called
a conjunctural shift, an organic crisis, in which culture itself is rearticulated
and relocated. The “center” of culture itself has moved, a moment not entirely
unlike earlier moments when changes rearticulated the category of culture.
Thus, while the emergent structure of feeling is being constituted within and

Cu ltu r e 85

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 is constitutive of the domains of politics and economics “directly,” these are
absolutely inseparable from culture (largely understood in technological terms
these days), increasingly foregrounding matters of that which we have to call
political and economic culture.
Although we are still working out the terms of a new settlement or realign-
ment for the long-term organic crisis, it is not some epochal rupture in which
everything corresponds and everything can be described in or ascribed to a single
logic. It is a war of positions. Changes have to be articulated together. Different
changes and struggles begin at different times, have different speeds, emerge
from different projects, encounter different resistances, operate at different social
locations, and involve different active fractions and coalitions of the population.
In fact, this set of struggles marked much of the twentieth century, at least in
the United States, reaching temporary settlements at particular moments and
then later being overturned, throwing the nation into a tumultuous search for
a new settlement.
The present conjuncture involves a unique articulation of a longer struggle
over the nature, configuration, and formation of modernity itself. If culture—in
the sense of textual (including media and popular) culture itself—is no longer
the primary medium through which people experience historical change, if
people are experiencing politics and economics as the primary field of change
and as the primary experience of change itself without suggesting that politics
and economics exist independently of culture, then how is cultural studies to
rethink its conditions of possibility? We must treat the economy as Carey treated
the railroad and understand material practices both as a complex set of social and
political relations and as inseparable from, deeply embedded in, and saturated
by—in fact, simply as—forms of culture. The articulations of culture, econom-
ics, and politics are the material process of historical transformation, the site of
culture itself.
The challenge, then, is to seek out other traditions and to invent new pos-
sibilities for thinking culture otherwise. The vocabulary that sustained cultural
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

studies, that sustained our hopes and political struggles, may no longer have the
power to do all that is required of it. We may need to reinvent the concept and
discourse of culture in order to retheorize the relations of communication and
culture to political and economic life and institutions. We may need to rethink
social conditions in a way that grounds an ethical vision of democratic and civil
life. Carey clearly identified the challenge facing cultural studies today: where
do we locate the foundation of our ethical and political struggle? This challenge
is, for me, why culture still matters.

86 Lawrence Grossberg

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Notes
This is an expanded version of Lawrence Grossberg’s article “The Conversation of Cultural
Studies,” Cultural Studies 23, no. 2 (Mar. 2009): 177–82. The author is grateful to Daniel
Carey for his comments on an earlier draft.

1. This tradition, often described in Canadian intellectual circles as medium theory, sees
media/culture as an environment within which life is organized. Technologies set the
shape, pace, rhythms, and topography of social life; they define the space and time of
sociality itself. This looks to the modalities of articulation that constitute an affective
environs, within which certain logics of representation become allowable and others,
impossible.
2. I am grateful to Charles Acland for this insight.
3. Mulhern (2000) fails to understand that the cultural studies project, while drawing
on Williams and Hoggart, attempted to escape their legacy. For example, Williams
argued that understanding any practice demands re-placing it into a reconstituted
social totality.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Cu ltu r e 87

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Popular Culture

Asking the Right Questions

Joli Jensen

The questions we ask determine the answers we get. That simple

truth is one of the many things I learned from Jim Carey during my
years at the Institute of Communications Research (1977–84), when
I took every course offered on popular culture. Those courses intro-
duced me to C. Wright Mills, Dwight Macdonald, Lewis Mumford,
Hannah Arendt, and Edward Shils. These writers, as well as other
participants in the mass culture debates, puzzled over some version
of the question that mattered most to me: how are the mass media
shaping American life?
For those social critics, and for Carey, questions about media
effects pointed toward answers about the quality of mass medi-
ated culture. Mills and Macdonald were worried about a new kind
of social order, mass society, and a new kind of cultural category,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

mass culture. Nonetheless, because these critics assumed that culture

comes in levels (high, middle, and low) or in categories (fine arts,
folk arts, popular arts), their answer to the question of “media ef-
fects” was usually to bemoan the ways mass culture corrupts mass
taste. From questions of media effects came claims about a once-
lively public becoming narcotized, distracted, and atomized. In the
1950s mass culture debate, questions about popular culture ended

88

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 up with answers about the populace, answers that challenged the very possibility
of modern democratic life.
A cultural studies approach to popular culture proposes that the mass culture
debaters were worried about the right things—media, culture, and democra-
cy—even if they painted themselves into an unproductive corner by assuming
that public tastes were being ruined. In his essay “Mass Communication and
Cultural Studies” Carey noted the recent tendency to dismiss the mass culture
debate on popular culture as at best “an aberrational prelude” to subsequent
critical and more serious theoretical work: “I resist that fashion because I have
become more convinced that the protagonists in the mass culture debate were
on the hunt of the real goods. If anything the pertinence of the arguments
they set forth has grown over the years (of happiness and despair we still have
no measure) for they collectively grasped, however much they differed, how
modern societies were put together and the major trajectories of their develop-
ment” (Carey 1989, 38–39).
Carey argued that the understanding of American life found in C. Wright
Mills’s Power Elite (1959) and work on mass society by William Kornhauser
(1959) had not been superseded by writers working the terrain of critical theory,
postmodernism, or even “effects” research: “Indeed, as our understanding of
culture has grown, our understanding of social structure has dimmed” (Carey
1989, 39).
One major question that animated Carey was “How can we create and sustain
modern American democratic life?” His many essays on journalism and tech-
nology addressed this concern more directly and thoroughly than did his few
essays on popular culture. Overall, popular culture was not a focus of his work,
even if he had a lively personal interest in versions of it. Nonetheless, when Carey
asked questions about popular culture, it was always to urge us toward a better
understanding of the relationships among particular cultural forms (news and
entertainment), the social order, and democratic possibility. Carey helps us ask
the right questions—and thus get better answers—about popular culture, so
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

here I describe how and why the mass culture debaters were onto what Carey
regarded as “the real goods” and why current considerations of popular culture
too often ask and answer the wrong questions. Our methods for studying popular
culture have done far too little to address how we experience popular culture
and what those experiences imply for our common life, that is, to address ques-
tions that Carey (1989, 67) described as both simple and profound: “What is the
significance of living in the world of meanings conveyed by popular art? What is
the relationship between the meanings found in popular art and in forms such

Popu l a r Cu ltu r e 89

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 as science, religion, and ordinary speech? How, in modern times, is experience
cast up, interpreted, and congealed into knowledge and understanding?”

Terms and Trajectories

The study of popular culture still struggles with terminological confusion. In

itself this is interesting. Why is it so hard to figure out what to call the various
kinds of cultural forms that modern life offers? Why do we still disagree about
the words to use for talk about the fine arts, the mass media, indigenous culture,
and past cultural projects? What is truly popular—meaning “the culture of the
populace”—in a mass mediated age? If the high arts, media fare, architecture,
industrial design, and traditional crafts are all versions of culture, can or should
they be divided into levels or kinds? Why or why not?
Questions of cultural typology and cultural levels bedeviled the intellectuals
of the 1950s, who perceived danger and loss in the increasing dominance of
mass-mediated culture. Their essays, collected in edited volumes such as Culture
for the Millions (Jacobs 1961) and Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America
(Rosenberg and White 1957), argued that the new mass mediated culture was
not truly popular culture but in fact a less authentic and therefore untrustworthy
mass culture. A majority of the participants assumed that fading folk culture and
the threatened high arts were all that remained of truly popular (and therefore
worthy) cultural fare in the Television Age.
In an allegedly postmodern age of cultural leveling and blurring of genres,
the mass culture debaters’ obsession with the differences among high, popular,
mass, and folk culture feels quaint and wrongheaded. Nevertheless, embedded
in these distinctions are issues of authenticity, democracy, modernization, and
media influence that remain central to both critical and cultural studies, as well
as to everyday people. The emergence of something called “cultural studies” in
the 1960s and 1970s continued many of the deeper concerns of the mass culture
debates but left behind the abstract discussions regarding how and why distinc-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

tions among categories could or should be deployed. Instead, cultural theorists

such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams began to describe the effects of
media on culture and society in personal and political terms—addressing what
was at stake for particular social groups given the still relatively recent advent
of the mass mediation of cultural forms.
In British cultural studies, the Leavisite legacy of defining “good” culture
was dismissed to better address—directly or indirectly—issues such as in-
dustrialization, capitalism, modern democracy, and the public. In American
cultural studies, the mass culture debate legacy continued, and both British

90 Joli Jensen

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 and American traditions described media fare using terms such as capitalist
culture, mass mediated culture, culture industry, consumer culture, commercial
culture, and media culture. My sense is that—whatever the term chosen—a
pluralistic focus (more about audiences and content) characterized American
cultural studies, while a focus on ideological influences (origins, motives, and
influence) characterized critical studies. In general, the concerns of critical
scholars have come to stand for a “cultural studies approach” to media fare,
as evidenced in overviews such as Kellner and Durham’s Media and Cultural
Studies: KeyWorks (2001).
If we want to locate the origins of the academic study of popular culture, we
can begin with Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1961). This seminal book
treated popular culture as connected to lived experience, in contrast to material
circulated by the mass media. From his perspective, popular culture is linked
to earlier forms of community and is thereby more genuine and valuable. In
distinguishing popular culture from mass culture, and in expressing concern
about the loss of authentic communal cultural forms, Hoggart allied himself with
the American tradition, even if he did not explicitly incorporate its claims.
Like Hoggart, American mass culture critics were making interesting and im-
portant claims about cultural worthiness. Both were making value distinctions—
attributing more aesthetic, social, cultural, or political value to some cultural
forms over others. Hoggart, along with most social critics in the twentieth cen-
tury, assumes that mass mediation alters or transforms cultural worthiness. Why
should this matter? Because these critics make the crucial connection between
cultural forms and cultural worlds—we are what we watch, listen to, spend time
with. We are shaped by, in Wayne Booth’s terms (1989), the “company we keep”;
in modern times “the people” keep increasing company with (the presumed to
be debilitating) mass media and decreasing company with (the presumed to be
worthy) folk or high arts.
So what are we to make of the fact that so many people are “keeping company”
with cultural forms that intellectuals and critics mistrust? This is the concern
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

that keeps “popular culture” from reliably referencing “mass mediated culture.”
Critics inside and outside the academy still seek to protect at least a conceptual
space for authentically “of the people” cultural forms. Few intellectuals from the
Right or Left believe that commercial, industrial culture production (via the mass
media) can offer anyone authentic culture. Deciding whether this is true, and
then working out what characterizes valuable or worthwhile culture, remains
(at least to me) an abiding interest. The continuing confusions in terminology
are not only revealing but intellectually fruitful. They show us the fault lines in
the worlds we are imagining while we do our intellectual work.

Popu l a r Cu ltu r e 91

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The serious study of media content began when the mass media were perceived
as threats to the cultural forms they were replacing. For early commentators,
new communication technologies—film, radio, and television—were displacing,
if not corrupting, earlier, more authentic forms of culture. Thus older cultural
forms such as vaudeville and minstrelsy, barn dances and home singalongs, or
Yiddish theater and Irish dancing—culture connected to recent rural, working-
class, or immigrant life—became celebrated as something called “popular cul-
ture.” In other words, popular culture was invented when it was perceived to be
disappearing. What was supposedly being lost when these forms were displaced,
absorbed, or diluted by newer, mediated forms?
“Authenticity” was also a key theme of a range of critics in the early twen-
tieth century. Progressives allied with the short-lived Seven Arts magazine
(1916–17)—including Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and
the young Lewis Mumford—called for a lively new modern popular American
culture that was “in between” the sterile genteel tradition and the emerging
commercial options. The idea of folk and ethnic culture that informed the in-
novative cultural researcher Constance Rourke, as well as various participants
in the Harlem Renaissance, was about salvaging authentic meanings found in
disappearing folk communities. More radical or Marxist American social critics
such as Floyd Dell, Granville Hicks, Mike Gold, and other supporters of pro-
letarian literature hoped to create an authentic form of revolutionary popular
culture, one that was also not commercial or genteel. And in something of a
backlash, New Humanists such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More called
for a restoration of classic and high culture in the name of the people. They saw
authentic culture as the classic Western canon, which can serve as a counter-
balance to commercial and modern art forms. From all these political stances,
“authentic” popular culture is presumed to be under siege from commercially
successful mass forms.
The hope of these social critics, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is to find a solu-
tion to the bad effects of media and modernity, possibly through the presumed
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

salutary effects of “genuine” culture (Jensen 2002). Critics from very different
political perspectives hold out hope for a truly popular culture coming from,
and responding to, the felt needs and experiences of everyday people.
The key belief in the mass culture debates, no matter what terms are chosen,
was that commercial or mass mediated culture is never truly of the people, which
means that its origins, motives, and influence are always suspect. The public
(in whose name the intellectual is speaking) is allegedly being cheated by the
products offered it, and academic study describes and analyzes aspects of the
swindle. The study of contemporary culture is, therefore, often about the loss

92 Joli Jensen

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 of authenticity, with the linked assumption that authentic culture is liberating
and restorative, and inauthentic culture is imprisoning and debilitating.
From a British perspective, much could be made of the “border crossings” of
Williams, Hoggart, and later Stuart Hall and the ways such crossings informed
a similar sense of cultural loss and deformation. Second-generation American
Jewish intellectuals have a comparable story to tell about mass culture polluting
or displacing folk or ethnic culture and leaving people atomized members of a
mass, without a genuine cultural heritage. Both American and British cultural
and social criticism has been shaped, I believe, by the personal experience of
“deracination,” the generationally experienced loss of cultural forms that previ-
ously constituted social class and ethnicity.
Concern with deracination is congruent with deeper concerns about modern-
ization in general. When German-born Jewish émigré Frankfurt school critics
such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer discussed culture industries,
they were discussing emerging modern forms of consciousness, in particular
atomization and alienation. Most significant, therefore, are the origin, motives,
and influence of media fare. For Frankfurt school critics—and their contem-
porary heirs, such as de Zengotita (2005) and Gitlin (2002)—contemporary
media fare deepens the hold that the worst elements of modernity have on our
consciousness.
Critics from Adorno to C. Wright Mills to Gitlin believe that critical scholar-
ship should alert us to this process of mystification, so that we, the public, can
recognize and free ourselves from the ideologies that trap us. This makes for
useful synergies between critical scholarship and political economy perspec-
tives, since both are centrally concerned with the links between media fare
and capitalism. The ownership, control, and content of culture industries are of
interest because those industries are presumed to operate as arms of the state.
The media are seen as operating as industries to subvert resistance to capitalism
in ways that may not be obvious to the casual observer. Donald Duck comics
may look like mere entertainment to the masses, but Dorfman and Mattelart
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

(1984) argued these are “really” about naturalizing the logic of capitalism.
The question haunting all these commentators is why “the people” fail to act
in their own best interests. One explanation—one that allows critics to main-
tain faith in “the people” while deploring the actual tastes of audiences—is to
imagine mediated culture as powerful, spurious, and deforming. Perhaps “the
people” act so unwisely, and choose such banal, trivial culture, because they are
being lulled or hypnotized or diverted by inauthentic culture. This imagines
cultural forms—both authentic and inauthentic—to have tremendous potential
for social change. It is this unexamined (and in my opinion, unwarranted) faith

Popu l a r Cu ltu r e 93

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 in the power of cultural forms that has shaped both cultural and critical studies
approaches to popular culture.

Concurrent Perspectives

A contrasting American academic perspective on mass communication emerged

in the 1960s. The critical cultural heritage emerged as the brash “critical” chal-
lenge to the stodgy “administrative” tradition of mass communication scholar-
ship. Administrative research was statistical and quantitative, using experimen-
tal methods to understand “who says what to whom with what effect.” This is
not the place to retell that story; I’ll simply note that in the sender-message-
receiver model, popular culture becomes the “message.” In this way, surpris-
ingly, both critical and political economy issues and the more traditional social
science methods are concerned with the influence of particular messages on
the populace.
The differences, of course, are in motives. The administrative perspective
characterizes “senders” as merely trying to find effective ways to communicate
their messages (advertisers, for example, merely inform and persuade), whereas
the critical perspective portrays culture industries as creating meanings as part
of a hegemonic process. Clearly, the uses and gratifications research that domi-
nated mass communication research in the 1960s and 1970s was better suited to
designing marketing campaigns than to fostering the ideological disenchantment
of students.
Researchers who found ways to turn messages into quantifiable meaning units
could conduct empirical research that measured various components of meaning
effects. In this way, Gerbner’s work on cultivation (2002) could simultaneously
inform critical, cultural, and administrative traditions. Researchers who could
measure effects could also hypothesize about those effects’ origins—the so-called
uses and gratifications perspective, which imagined that various types of mes-
sages were appealing because they fulfilled various audience needs or purposes.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

While this more quantitative style of research continues to be influential in

communications research in general, it has been only partially useful in under-
standing popular culture. Social science methods seem more appropriate to the
study of the transmission of bits of information (as news) in relation to changes
in attitudes or opinions. Popular culture is usually understood as something
other than, or different from, transmitted information—entertainment. The
news/entertainment distinction, refigured in Carey’s work, nonetheless remains
deeply embedded in our field.

94 Joli Jensen

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 In the more quantitative and administrative traditions, research questions
are more about audience and influences than about origins and motives. What
kinds of psychological and sociological purposes were being served by these new
commercial, popular cultural forms? Why did so many people like them, what
needs were they meeting, and therefore what good were they doing contemporary
society? Empirical study from uses and gratifications perspectives could define
demographic groups and hypothesize about the meanings that soap operas or
romance novels or mud wrestling might hold for them without necessarily study-
ing “the message” or the meaning of the form to actual audience members.
As Carey (1989, 54) argued, the strategy of invoking “latent functions” or
“false consciousness” ends up “dissolving the content of the experience—the
particular ritual, prayer, movie or news story—into something pre- or proto-
logical without ever inspecting the experience itself as some ordered system
of meaningful symbols. . . . There is much talk about escape, finding symbolic
outlets, or solidarity being created, but how these miracles are accomplished is
never made clear. In such analyses one never finds serious attention being paid
to the content of experience.”
During the 1970s, the content of cultural forms—whatever their origins, mo-
tives, or influence—became the main focus of a celebratory approach to popular
cultural study associated with Ray Browne and the Popular Culture Association
(PCA), which he founded in 1967. In early PCA meetings, “lowbrow” cultural
forms were analyzed as texts of intrinsic interest and merit. This more exuber-
ant, egalitarian approach delighted in the meanings and possibilities scholars
found in particular forms of (and later, fans of) media fare. The association
quite consciously challenged hierarchical cultural categories, even refusing to
referee papers accepted to its meetings. It is here that the term “pop culture”
was most likely to be used, as part of a cheeky questioning of the regime—and
rigamarole—of academic legitimation. Of course, this marginalized the PCA
in academic circles: as a young scholar I was advised, in no uncertain terms, to
avoid the PCA if I ever wanted to be taken seriously in academic life.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

At the same time, U.S. English departments initiated their still uneasy relation-
ship with film studies and began to apply analytic techniques to popular culture
(mostly movies and books) that were originally developed to illuminate canonical
literary fiction. With the much discussed “turn to theory” in the 1970s and 1980s
came terms and concepts that could be used to explore and explain not only the
novel but also (at least at times) contemporary popular cultural fare.
Seen from a more poststructuralist perspective, the purpose of the academic
study of popular culture is to excavate and delineate explicit and implicit mean-

Popu l a r Cu ltu r e 95

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ings of popular culture texts, a process carried out by trained critics. These mean-
ings were presumably available to be “read” by audiences, but the interpretations
of actual audience members were rarely of direct interest to those trained in
literary and film studies.
In American studies, and to some extent in rhetorical studies, a “myth and
symbol” school developed, wherein popular culture texts were seen as bearers
of wider cultural themes that could illuminate the times, or social groups, or the
national mood. In the more sociological versions, popular culture texts reflect
the values and beliefs of particular groups. In the more interpretive version,
popular texts give us stories to live by. Meanwhile, speech communication, with
its long traditions of analyzing political speech, began to apply rhetorical analysis
to various forms of television and sometimes film, as well as popular music.
This rhetorical tradition drew on terms and ideas formed around questions of
persuasion and public address rather than on the role of media in society. There
was surprisingly little overlap between the canonical works in speech commu-
nication and those in mass communication.
Television studies and popular music studies followed film studies into uni-
versity curricula, so from the 1980s on, the scholarly examination of media fare
became a motley assortment of techniques, traditions, and subject areas—linked
by a focus on “culture that was popular” but not necessarily using the terms or
addressing the issues that so energized mass culture critics in the 1950s and 1960s.
The question that Carey took to be key—“what kinds of cultural experience sup-
port and sustain democratic life”—was largely left unasked, except among those
of us shaped by the Institute of Communications Research and the associated
emergence of American cultural studies.
Our kind of cultural studies focused on two aspects of popular culture. First
was how particular popular culture forms develop and circulate—especially
“how they mean” to particular social groups. Second was how particular cultural
forms and social groups were connected with new communication technologies
such as the telephone, telegraph, and phonograph, as well as the more traditional
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

print and broadcast media. How popular forms develop, circulate, and “mean”
in relation to new technologies has implications for democracy—and Carey’s
example told us it was our job to figure out what those implications might be.
We cared about the relationship between culture and democracy.
This Carey-esque perspective had very little in common—methodologically
and conceptually—with a uses and gratifications perspective, had a bemused
but engaged relationship with the earlier mass culture perspective, was partially
compatible with the myth and symbol school, was uncongenial to literary theory

96 Joli Jensen

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 strategies of text explication, and was in creative tension with a political economy
emphasis. It was—as I argue in the rest of this essay—more interested in cultural
experience and democratic possibility than in cultural origins, motives, and
audiences.

Academic Terrain

During the 1980s the study of popular culture began, gradually and with some
difficulty, to establish niches in the overall university curriculum. Unfortunately,
the contempt that scholars of popular culture face has shaped the field far more
than have concepts or evidence. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences
are exquisitely sensitive to charges of being trivial, or lightweight, or frivolous
compared to the “hard” sciences. To welcome the study of cultural forms that
most intellectuals take to be trivial, lightweight, and frivolous—media fare—is to
risk even more status loss and the dilution of whatever reputation for rigor and
worth had been painstakingly accrued. There remains an uneasy interrelation-
ship among popular culture, communication studies, and the academy.
By the 1990s, however, it was clear that undergraduates wanted courses in
popular culture and that graduate students in a number of disciplines were eager
to specialize in the study of it. No one could deny that the media had become
significant elements in society and that communication study was becoming a
legitimate discipline, even if it was (and continues to be) seen as less legitimate
than, say, philosophy, English literature, anthropology, sociology, or psychology.
As any member of a communication department who teaches popular culture
can attest, we spend an inordinate amount of time justifying the value of what
we do, because so few of our colleagues consider media fare “the popular arts”—
rather, they see it as (all too often) “trash.”
In 1988, in a paper called “Fear of Trash: Popular Culture Study in the Acad-
emy,” I brashly argued that popular culture study is acceptable in academic life
only when it becomes, via the jargon of “high theory,” unrecognizable to its
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

actual audiences. I indicted my colleagues, charging that they secretly believed

that popular culture is trash and therefore sought to decontaminate it—via the-
oreticization—into something else. I was far too self-righteous in my attack, and
I won’t remake that case again here. The attack came from my own intellectual
prejudices, which I sketch briefly to demonstrate what seemed to me to be at
stake. I am impatient with the baroque (yet predictable) poststructuralist textual
analyses that so appealed to my graduate students in the radio-television-film
department when I taught at the University of Texas in the early 1990s. The

Popu l a r Cu ltu r e 97

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 poststructuralist approaches to textual analysis that dominated the humani-
ties in the late 1980s may have been effective in legitimating media studies in
mainstream university life, but they were singularly unsatisfying to me.
Similarly, the rhetorical perspectives I learned in the mid-1980s as a newly
minted Ph.D. in the (since dissolved) University of Virginia’s Department of
Rhetoric and Communication Studies drew on a speech and rhetoric canon
that seemed to me to miss the whole point of popular culture. The experience
of popular culture is not (from my perspective) best imagined as that of persua-
sion, myths, or symbols. As a graduate student I had already chosen the more
cultural, less critical perspective for myself—less about political economy, more
about cultural meaning.
So while popular culture studies of various kinds proliferated from the 1980s
on, a perspective treating popular culture as meaning and analyzing it with
informal and narrative interpretive techniques still lacked a clear institutional
home. This remains the case. Most literary approaches to popular culture ad-
dress questions of textual decoding; most rhetorical perspectives focus on tech-
niques of persuasion; and most critical perspectives focus on the maintenance
of power relations, as if this is the only “political” question worth asking. These
are all, of course, interesting and important theoretical approaches, with their
own questions determining their own answers. Nonetheless, these perspectives
avoid dealing directly with the nature of cultural experience and the worth of
particular culture forms—which are what matter most to me about popular
culture. They also evade direct consideration of the ways American popular
culture can support democratic possibilities—the consideration at the heart of
Carey’s life work.

Audiences, Democracy, and Popular Culture

So the academic study of popular culture has proliferated and found a variety
of disciplinary homes and professional venues since the 1960s. In its success,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

however, it has lost touch with the concerns that mattered most to early twen-
tieth-century pragmatists, mass culture critics, and cultural and critical studies
founders such as Williams, Hoggart, and Hall, as well as Carey.
Why do we now have an ever-increasing number of textual analyses of popu-
lar culture figures and instances? The bulk of popular culture scholarship now
consists of relatively interchangeable “readings” of particular figures or particular
television shows or movies. These readings usually make passing reference to
concerns with political economy or hegemonic processes, but the scholarly en-
ergy is in decoding the presumed actual meaning of the cultural text. This occurs

98 Joli Jensen

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 partly because textual analyses are easy to do in the comfort of one’s own office.
It occurs also because literary and rhetorical perspectives are now legitimated
modes of scholarship in a number of different departments and professional
organizations.
But it occurs too, I suspect, because very few scholars believe that they need
to explore what actual audiences make of actual media fare. They do this in part
because few of the previously discussed perspectives make audiences problem-
atic. Ironically, it is mostly the uses and gratifications perspective—the one most
distant from a cultural approach in methods and beliefs—that cares most about
what particular cultural groups might make of particular cultural messages.
Literary, rhetorical, and critical perspectives imagine an audience (Jensen and
Pauly 1997) in ways that make theorizing and research easier but don’t illuminate
interpretive worlds.
Why don’t more of us find out firsthand why particular people like particular
cultural forms? Why aren’t we out there interviewing real, live fans and partici-
pating in focus groups and hanging around in subcultures? Again, analyzing texts
and offering hypotheses about power are easier than spending time interviewing
popular culture fans. As I have written elsewhere, academicians have more in
common with fans than we care to admit; the ways we refuse to acknowledge
our own obsessive qualities suggests we do not easily acknowledge how much
we have in common with the populace for, to, and (mostly) past whom we speak
(Jensen 1992).
To do ethnographic audience study, even in a relatively cursory or explor-
atory way, is to challenge a number of our own conceits—plus, it takes a lot of
time and effort. Nevertheless, the rich and complex results from people such as
Ang (1985), Hebdige (1979), Radway (1984), Katz and Liebes (1990), and Bird
(2003) suggest that such efforts are well worth it. These admirable interpretive,
audience-oriented perspectives demonstrate the usefulness of understanding
popular culture not as texts or industrial products but as experience. These
studies show that cultural experiences of all kinds (popular, mass, high, folk)
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

can be deeply surprising, rich, contradictory, and meaningful.

“What culture means” is always inflected by our cultural, social, and his-
torical context, and we scholars can’t predict or guess the ways that media fare
becomes part of other people’s interpretive worlds if we stay barricaded in our
own academic worlds. Cultural and critical studies are at their best when they
actually study cultures, when they critique cultural worlds from the perspectives
of participants rather than from the vantage of theory. Engaged, participatory,
audience-oriented cultural perspectives on popular culture are needed in cur-
rent political and social thought. If we start with theory rather than experience,

Popu l a r Cu ltu r e 99

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 we never see how real, live people make the interpretive, social, economic, and
political worlds in which they (and we) live. Nowhere is this more evident than
in current discussions about cultural globalization.
When I listen to claims about the globalization of American culture, I find the
worst elements of the mass culture debates reconstituted. According to today’s
commentators, the media are polluting authentic folk culture, brainwashing
people into capitalism, or pushing to make the world “safe for democracy.”
Contemporary public concerns about the origins of, motives behind, and influ-
ences of media fare are virtually identical to those that operated at midcentury;
only now developing nations, not the worlds of our fathers or our children, are
supposedly under siege.
The mass media, as bearers of American culture, are imagined as having
tremendous power to transmit capitalism or democracy (the hope of many
on the Right) or pollute authenticity (the fear of many on the Left). In either
case, the assumption is that global peoples are passive and vulnerable to media
messages—that they can and will be transformed (for good or ill) through ex-
posure to “outside” cultural influence. We are back to imagining the media as
evil pollutants that are failing to become redemptive messengers. It’s high time
for us to reconfigure this heritage. We need to understand modernization in
ways that do not assume the media to be autonomous forces that transform all
that they touch.
When we talk about the globalization of popular culture, we seem to be draw-
ing on the worst elements of a combination of administrative research and criti-
cal theory, defining communication as the transmission of messages to helpless
and vulnerable victims. We need instead to find our way back to Carey’s—and
American cultural studies’—key concerns: democratic talk, interpretive worlds,
the problems and possibilities in changes in “whole ways of life.”
The most important element in my American cultural studies heritage is its
potential ability to respect audiences. The simplest way to reference this is to
note that, at least in cultural studies terms, the audience is “us.” What I like best
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

about this academic tradition is that it presumes that we who study the media
are also we who participate in the media. All of us create, sustain, repair, and
transform reality. It’s a collaborative process. From this more participatory and
egalitarian perspective, we seek to understand (and at certain junctures, per-
suade or dissuade) others who see the world differently. We know that modern
life is about living with, and finding common purpose with, those whose beliefs
and purposes may be very different from ours. It is increasingly important—
nationally and internationally—to remember that others may have something
to teach us, just as we may have something to teach them.

100 Joli Jensen

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Audiences—national and global—are not lost souls who need to be redeemed
by our scholarship, nor are they children who need to be protected or led to
the right understandings, thanks to our presumed intellectual maturity. This is
true (alas) even when they are making what seem to be appalling choices and
dangerous interpretations. I have argued that American social critics believe the
media to be powerful because they can’t bring themselves to blame “the people”
for such bad taste and lousy beliefs (Jensen 2002). In other words, blaming and
praising imaginary intervening variables—the arts or the media—is always easier
than doing the hard work of democracy.
What is the hard work of democracy? It involves understanding and respecting
the lived experiences of others, without stigmatizing or valorizing the so-called
Other. It is, as Carey argued, about understanding the symbolic worlds that
people use to give their lives orientation, meaning, and status. It is, as Carey
further argued, about choosing which worlds are worth inhabiting and then us-
ing talk—expressive cultural material of our own—to sort out with one another
why some worlds might be better than others.
In suggesting that media operate as a cultural forum, Hirsch and Newcomb
(2000) imply that modern media fare is full of contradictory worlds and that
in watching television, going to movies, surfing the Internet, and listening to
music we are imaginatively comparing and contrasting worlds. From this per-
spective, the media smorgasbord is pluralistic and contradictory and therefore
offers “modernity via media.” To live in a mass mediated culture is to become—
inescapably—modern in outlook. To live in a mass mediated world is to shed
provincialism and embrace cosmopolitanism, at least imaginatively. This has
costs and benefits, as both Right and Left agree. And it may not be so simple—
media effects never are. But we need to talk about these various possibilities
directly rather than continue to blame popular culture for failing to be and do
what we most desire.
In these times, when the world seems increasingly divided into provincial and
cosmopolitan, when many of us seem to be choosing provincialism, rejecting
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

pluralism, and choosing tradition over modernity and ideology over reason,
this may well be too cheerful a view. But now is not the time to blame the media
or to demonize those whose taste and beliefs are repugnant to us—blame and
demonization are symptoms of, not cures for, what is ailing us.
I have ended up a convinced culturalist because I value the ways that it takes
people’s cultural choices seriously. It assumes that other people know what they
are up to, even if I disagree with them wholeheartedly. It assumes that others
are not being duped or drugged into submission and that their cultural choices
(no matter how appalling I might find them) are not automatically unworthy.

Popu l a r Cu ltu r e 101

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Instead, it is up to me to explore and explain why I think what they like, do, and
believe is so wrongheaded. It is up to me to engage in debate, in free and open
discussion, in persuasion, face to face and via the media, about what is good and
bad, right and wrong, worthy and unworthy. In other words, it is up to each of
us to act like democratic citizens, not moral or aesthetic arbiters. And modern
culture gives us various venues and modes of doing just that.
This is why—especially today—we should no longer treat media as messages
or texts (the dominant academic perspective) or popular culture as debilitating
or polluting (the globalization perspective). We need to remember our heritage
and believe (or hope) that democracy works best when we have access to rich,
contradictory, trustworthy stories from the various cultural worlds in which
people live. It may be time to return to—or at least to remember—Dewey’s (1935)
notions of social intelligence, Mead’s (1935) faith in taking the position of the
other, and Cooley’s (1909) faith in enlarged and enlivened discourse. These are
the best responses to the zealous, Manichaean views that have dominated recent
political discourse. There are many different ways of understanding the world,
and it is important to protect our rights to express and speak and live those ways
as richly as possible. That is the pluralistic possibility of modern cultural life.
As Carey’s work has taught us, popular culture study can be one more vehicle
of and for democracy.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

102 Joli Jensen

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Oral Culture

Oral Culture as Antidote

to Terror and Ennui
Mark Fackler

This essay began to take shape on the night of Hollywood’s annual

Academy Awards. Half the nation is in Los Angeles, via television,
on stage with beautiful, talented people. It’s their conversation we
listen to, their ritual of affirmation we hear, their stumbling thanks
and scripted affection for nuanced sound engineering and whiz-bang
special effects. We listeners, even if the spectacle is only ambiance,
are part of the filmmaking family, whether we share their politics or
like their looks. Our conversations tomorrow will be about them. We
will remake our favorites in our own image through a million oral
encounters on the Monday following. With James Carey’s ritual view
as overlay, awards night—like the Superbowl, political primaries, or
CBS’s launch of its anchor Katie Couric—becomes a cultural and
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

personal marker, a moment of significance. Awards night is social

reality in countless oral and mediated forms.
Students of oral culture usually refer to Walter Ong as the subject’s
patron expounder. Ong’s approach to orality was nearly reverential:
life expressed itself in voice and sound, prior to sight and smell. His
famous reference to buffalos—as dangerous when heard—evoked
oral images of primal culture as surely as did his literary exposition
of the Gospel of John’s “Word made flesh.” For Ong, sound was

103

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 more than decibel or signal. Oral culture, whose communicators specialized in
sound, emphasized poetry, agonistic confrontation, and memory. Ong’s Orality
and Literacy (2002) drew distinctions between the modern West and an era before
the mediated film image and rapid transportation. Ong described communities
that rehearsed values in couplets (enchanting evening, healthy body) and songs
that everyone memorized and sang as community recreation. The Roman priest in
Ong was not quick to separate pastoral insight from scholarship. Marshall McLu-
han (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988) elaborated on Ong’s distinction, generating
in his work a reverence for the visual, but he too found succor in the Mass nearly
every day of his adult life. McLuhan cited Jacques Ellul’s (1985) work on hearing
and sight and their relation to social organization: “Images fall into a pattern with
respect to each other, but sounds do not. Instead, sounds contradict each other
and cancel each other. . . . I am listening to a Mozart concerto, and suddenly near
me someone speaks. . . . Sounds produce incoherence. The noises I hear form no
panorama of the world” (McLuhan and McLuhan 1988, 13).
Harold Innis (1964, 105) sought a balance between sight and sound, reach-
ing for appropriate extensions of time-biased and space-biased media: “In oral
intercourse the eye, ear, and brain, the sense and the faculties act together in
busy co-operation and rivalry, each eliciting, stimulating, and supplementing
the other.”
Not so for Jack Goody (1968), the esteemed British anthropologist, whose
study of the influence of writing led him to seek a preserve for orality rather than
to honor it as premier medium. Goody cites as a major influence for his work a
dyslexic daughter who developed an early “aversion to school,” where reading
and writing dominated the curriculum (Pallares-Burke 2003). Goody subse-
quently referred to writing as a technology of the intellect. Humans categorize
and interact with the world based on syllogisms and listing behavior. Literacy
enables humans to categorize and to interact with the world based on syllogisms
and lists; oral culture does not. Goody’s research distinguished pristine oral cul-
ture from writing cultures with an oral component. In the former, being alone,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

eating alone, or communicating with oneself was regarded with suspicion, a

prelude to nefarious activity, possibly witchcraft (Goody 2000, 24).
Like Goody, Ong conducted much of his research on oral culture in West
Africa, where communal life was a given and Western market efficiency never
a serious barrier to people’s connecting by sound and gesture. “Sound unites
groups of living beings as nothing else does,” wrote Ong (1967, 122) soon after
colonial powers had vacated Africa and regional democracy took its first faltering
steps. Ong recalled from one of his visits to Cameroon “the most exotic feature”
of a tribal liturgy. It was not the setting, the homilies, or the vestments but the

104 Mark Fackler

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 oyenga, “the drawn-out, piercing shriek, . . . high-pitched, . . . sustained as long
as breath holds out . . . piercing through the choir.” Voiced only by women, the
oyenga made listeners attentive to the importance of the present. For Ong (1974,
150) this was the equivalent of bells in the Roman liturgy, “but more insistent
and demanding” because it was voice.
Little wonder that radio became the medium of national unity throughout
sub-Saharan Africa, extending a conversation from capital plaza to bush village,
more one-way than reciprocal, but a start (Van der Veur 2002). Little wonder, too,
that despite the region’s dismal record of tribal warfare, tyranny, and genocide
(Ayittey 1988), an indelible oral culture sustained its many ethnic groups and
remains Africa’s strongest contribution to Western communication theorizing
(Fackler 2003). Pandemonium, poverty, and predatory regimes may be the writ-
ten record of Africa, but its oral side is the more durable and therefore the more
hopeful (Schwab 2001).
In the West, the right to express one’s beliefs emanates from a doctrine of the
individual as moral center, free and autonomous. The Enlightenment taught that
economic and political servitude is wrong and contrary to human nature. Slaves
in any form cannot promote their human, teleological right to fulfill a destiny,
to express themselves, to shape the world and gain wealth and security from it,
or to enjoy the formal protection of law and the richer emotional protection of
close relationships. When William Ernest Hocking (1947) drew up his framework
for the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press, he identified a “duty to
speak” that no person can ignore and no other person may rightfully suppress.
Slaves do not speak. Slaves are like beasts that yelp, chirp, signal danger, and
dance the map of food reserves but never posit a claim or a right, never stipulate
an idea. If Hocking was right and humans must speak, oral culture as human
environment makes an unabashed moral appeal to Kant’s “community of ends”
as sine qua non (Sullivan 1994, 65).
The classical liberal theory of the press emerged in seventeenth-century Brit-
ain as John Milton (1961) struggled to prove his case for divorce, saw his tracts
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

burned, and wrote the famous Areopagitica. “Who ever knew truth put to the
worse” still carries a visceral ring that appeals deeply to democrats convinced that
speech must not suffer state intimidation. On such words as these, intellectual
leaders of the liberal West have championed bureaucracy but also championed
free and unfettered discourse. If intellectual defense of personhood and public
space were to join the roster of Olympic events, Carey would hold a wreath for
advocacy of these plain truths.
Plain truths they are, but not pure. The open marketplace, it turns out, arose
on notions of Enlightenment perceptions no longer held: that human nature

Or a l Cu ltu r e 105

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 is a grant from the divine and that human community can find its source and
center in notions of the good likewise granted and guaranteed (Christians, Ferré,
and Fackler 1993, 16). To the academy, divine grants and intrinsic reason are
now dim memories of a past era. The classical liberal notion of free speech and
press is shredded by a new realism of conflicting market forces and a vacuum
of persuasive ideas concerning the nature of the self, the irrepressibly word-
producing, sound-making, meaning-grasping techno self of the first decade of
the new millennium (Schultze 2002).
Ong looked toward the place characterized as a “continent in chaos” (Ayit-
tey 1998, 7) but nonetheless a most fruitful place for experiential, social, and
time-tested foundations for a theory of word and self that points human sound-
making toward hopeful ends: the village palaver, talk that unifies a community’s
vision and resources and thus binds the community as such. The African theo-
logian Benezet Bujo (1998, 56) describes the palaver—what he calls an African
philosophical Other—as open, continuous interpretation of communal norms,
ready “to pay attention to past experiences of the ancestors . . . and to confront
them with the claims of modern times.” Palaver is roundabout, overlapping,
redundant, inefficient, celebrative, and agonistic. Its participants must be embed-
ded in communal history and committed to promoting life. Such rules of order
governing the palaver never stop debate until the last story is rehearsed, the
last parable expounded. This is not the Western sense of palaver as idle prattle,
insincere cajoling, or rapid chatter. Bujo’s palaver calls for long pauses, time
for reflection, the slow gathering of consensus that takes a turtle’s pace toward
decision. Oral culture in Africa resembles a collage of opinion and narrative
enjoyed for its own sake in open-ended time.
Does this southern mode of discourse make any sense in the technology-
driven West? African academic and social reflection fixes human worth at a
different point, not at the self, but in the relation between selves. Theological
reflection starts with community, encompasses the grounding of persons, and
returns decisively to its case for communal health and wholeness. The Nigerian
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

A. O. Ogbonnaya (1994, 69) argues that divine essence is communal; the grant
to humankind is thus a community akin to that of the biblical Trinity—funda-
mentally related and ontologically equal while distinct in person and function.
This plurality in unity provides moral ground for communitarian caregiving
and mutual accountability.
Using secular foundations, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu (1996)
situates African communitarianism in the immediate life-world of harmonized
interests and mutual well-being. Had the ancient Akan people written a classic
ethics, mutual aid would have been their keynote, not rationalist appeals to

106 Mark Fackler

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 duty or injunction revealed by special circumstance. Ubuntu, a Zulu term for
humanness that signifies a cluster of ideas native to southern African ontology,
looks to the space between persons as the first reality, the “relations between,”
as the definition of the self (Christians 2004). Ubuntu is a decision to live made
against an environment not eager to grant life. This decision fixes a community’s
resources toward prospects of people and animals surviving. It signals ongoing
process, resilience, communal sacrifice, and sustained identity. One’s ancestors
will not have lived in vain. Today we may capture a glimpse of that sense when
we signal an intention to sustain communication over time or distance, as Jay
Rosen remembers in his essay “We’ll Have that Conversation.” Rosen’s promised
conversation is a mutual act of long-term wisdom building centered on strategic
points of community well-being and conducted among people who trust one
another for honesty, protection, and mutual aid.
In the West, these notions reappear in communitarian scholarship (Bracci
and Christians 2002). Its law recognizes that voice distinguishes identity and
that by the voice one is situated socially (Midler 1988). Cigarette advertising
was ordered off television screens in 1968 because broadcast messages could be
“heard even if not listened to” (Banzhaf 1968).
As human community bends its common resources toward promoting life,
so human sound making bends toward making sense of life promoted. Reasons
for life emerge from the palaver, and reasons congeal into norms and rituals. If
by day the people till their soil and beat back the locusts, by night they gather to
celebrate the imagination, the passing of time, and the complexity of creation.
This mandate to discern the meaning of things is James Carey’s segue to the
significance of the web of communication and the din and rumble of authentic
orality in the contemporary West. Ong (2002) grasped that durability and cel-
ebrated it. Carey brought orality into mainstream cultural studies and gave it
political footing.
Yes, Carey (1989, 199) insisted, we have the means of moving the conversation
along; media institutions can help build the social maps that provide gridlines
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

for the public sphere. Palaver is now largely mediated and professionalized, of-
ten subverted by profit. Nevertheless, it is redeemable when people understand
that good conversation is measured not in ratings won by snarling TV pundits,
but in coming to see the “point of view of another, to expand the boundaries
of understanding” (203). Orality is value based from the start, for human com-
munity is value dense always and everywhere.
For Ong (1996, 4), orality was voice based and amplification, a diminish-
ment. Carey embraced technological change but warned of technicity. Carey’s
lessons are best understood as they play out in places where communal orality

Or a l Cu ltu r e 107

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 has been tradition. What if this communitarian impulse is brought face to face
with Western readings of the person and culture? What if our profit-hungry
media empires, for instance, met the African communitarian, who has never, as
a first order, considered neighbor as market? What happens if communication
dominated by instrument and mass meets communication celebrating relation
and Other?
Both Democratic and Republican parties tried at their 2004 conventions to
whip these thorny questions of human wholeness and mutuality into slogans
and sound bites that would resonate with headlines and resound in talk radio.
“Hope is on the way” became a mantra, echoing the other’s 2000 “Help is on the
way.” Neither convention drew television viewers, who prefer the great pacifiers
of quasi-reality dramas or professional sports. Neither convention was described
as exciting or dramatic; news coverage of both depended on comic interludes
disguised as political commentary. Even Larry King got help from court jesters
who tried to cut through the rhetoric and bring hopeful viewers back to cynical
reality. Commentary on the speeches devolved into the overlapping, garbled,
off-point roundtable “debates” that caused most viewers, their duty to speak
notwithstanding, to clam up. Who can compete with those chipper pundits?
Is this good for democracy? Demographers gasp at the poll data: young voters
just don’t care. Since 1972, each national election has drawn fewer young voters
than did the previous one (Pew Trusts 2004). A spectacle of talk, a national
palaver intended to present policy that will guide a nation for four years, a rally
of words like none other on earth, and young adults don’t care. Nor do they
watch or listen. Not even the jesters can reverse their disinterest. Universities,
too, have become bumble-hives of grants, contracts, agencies, rhetoric, and
quick baths of data, no longer grounded by tradition and ever less able to hold
a focus on inquiry over income. Universities are businesses, professorships are
entrepreneurial opportunities, and students are a means of cash flow, however
inconvenient they may be in every other respect. Not stupid, students soon learn
what is important.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Might a redeemed orality—the genuine dialogue, the honest question, the hard
issue hammered out, the joke that reveals pretension and relieves pressure—
reverse our ennui? Humans are storytelling creatures. From the beginning, we
paint our stories on limestone walls, turn them into ballad or rhyme. Thus we
maintain, repair, and transform the web of culture that makes human life dis-
tinctive. Other species communicate; only humans reflect on the process. We
are constant interpreters of the tales we tell.
Our stories celebrate our values. By creation and revision we memorialize and
reshape the culture by which we understand our places in the world. Our ap-

108 Mark Fackler

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 petites are as ready for stories as for meat and wine. We are as eager for meaning
as for security and shelter. We learn to use the symbol from our first awareness
that reality is malleable and not quite right. Every spoken word is a small drop of
rain wetting the field we traverse not as farmers or game players but as meaning
seekers and expositors, hungry for a more fecund harvest. Another poem awaits
invention; another song will sound tomorrow.
The Greeks have their Odyssey; the British, their Paradise Lost; the Portu-
guese, their Lusiad. Americans favor shorter poems, epics of somewhat tighter
scope. A two-hour motion picture is the common portion, or for even smaller
budgets, a twenty-two-minute televised drama with twenty-odd minidramas
promoting consumption of life-enhancing products. Fox TV’s Paradise Hotel
can take us to another universe at less intellectual cost than Paradise Regained
would impose. The context of the former is immediate; the dramatic tension,
transparent. The latter needs explanation and contextual analysis, investments
more suitable for the literary sage than the tired, anemic viewer who wants
to believe that life is not so constricted as it appears. Keep the action simple.
The culture of secondary orality, or the turn from print-based communication
to broadcast and Internet, finds conversation easier to watch than to make.
Gradually, however, laughter at the easy one-liner turns to yawning at the
sheer boredom of mass-marketed storytelling. Even Paradise Hotel, exploit-
ing humankind’s most fascinating topic, went off the air for lack of thrill and
innovation. Our mass entertainments offer distractions from work and stress,
but more people working less and bored silly with the leveled life of modernity
increasingly seek to be distracted from distractions.
Wendell Berry (1990, 158) recalled an older social pastime called “sitting till
bedtime.” When the day’s work was over, neighbors would meet for stories,
memories, chatter, eating apples (minimal food preparation), and handcraft.
“But most of us no longer talk to each other, much less tell each other stories.
We tell our stories now mostly to doctors, lawyers, and psychiatrists, insurance
adjusters or the police, not to our neighbor for their (and our) entertainment.”
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Sensitized concepts from James Carey’s works help communities identify and
recover elements of the oral tradition. One such concept is that of “acts of resis-
tance.” Carey’s public platform was not the small-town meeting of friends but
the large public university. As an insider, Carey knew its potential and promise.
As an observer, he understood the rare opportunity a university provides to
catch and engage minds and passions at formative life crossings. Carey (2000a,
13) urged universities to “widen the bonds of sympathy within . . . and renew
emphasis on the education of students not as consumers but as co-participants
in the community of learning . . . in order to produce a joyful academy that

Or a l Cu ltu r e 109

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 might actually contribute to a joyful society.” Carey said: “The task is to engage
in ‘acts of resistance’ against the dominant discourse whatever its political origin
or leaning” (11). The West recognizes such acts as contrary to the grain, redemp-
tion of talk from mass mediated silliness. To ancients folded in oral community,
such acts are the elementals of social growth.
Yet another sensitized concept in Carey‘s arsenal is “exceptionalism,” a term
for national self-understanding. A people understands itself in contrast to its
neighbors. America is exceptional, Carey (1989, 310) said, for its hyperindividual-
ism, racism, and politically disorganized working class. Its oral culture as well is
exceptional. Efficiency drives interaction, the task is completed, the interaction
is broken off, and still the actors are strangers. We calculate that risk is lower and
privacy preserved when interactions are exclusively instrumental. Successful cor-
porate innovators are now training employees in conversational skills to recover
social connectedness with customers. We are so careful with time that a common
first response to an unplanned oral encounter is apologetic. The formulas of mass
entertainment are based on serendipitous oral culture—the conversational break-
through that opens relationships to personal knowledge and demands investment
of time, emotion, and risk. Yet this kind of “exceptionalism” is apparent only in
contrast to oral cultures less efficient or guarded or individualistic.
In Ong’s African village, for instance, even casual greetings may go on for sev-
eral minutes, including queries about health, family, farm; responses explaining
that all is well; and careful responses masking the hardness of farming the land
and one’s vulnerability at every effort to shape it. Such greetings convey care,
connection, and continuity. Relations are renewed; briefings fill gaps since last
meetings. But even in Africa that communal impulse is changing in patterns
that Carey, perhaps more than Ong, might have found both paradoxical and
hopeful. The change agent is the mobile phone. Cellular-phone usage doubles in
Africa every year, with prices falling such that farmers and taxi drivers—as small
businesspersons operating on narrow margins—are frequently at their GSM
talking box (“Mobile Revolution” 2004, 18). In Uganda, Foodnet feeds maize
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

prices to MTN Cellular, so farmers can use latest grain quotations to get their
best prices from middle-level brokers. Charles Nguku’s cab, normally parked
at Hurlingham Plaza, in Nairobi, is likewise an office on wheels: he lines up his
regulars on the mobile, and patrons schedule errands to his taxi’s schedule. Yet
the price of technology may be high indeed. Gone are the extended, cordial,
and informative greetings. “Mobile-speak” replaces long greetings with the curt
American “Hi” followed by business and click. More words require more shil-
lings. Time calculates to cost. Reports one observer in Nigeria: “No exchange
of pleasantries. . . . If at the end of an exchange you introduce the traditional

110 Mark Fackler

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 friendliness, you may find that the conversation is ended abruptly. Who wants
to pay fifty Naira to ask about anyone’s family?” (ibid., 24). Not only phone con-
versations are now gauged to efficiency. Changing media patterns are creating
new habits everywhere.
The same soulless attitude is destroying face-to-face conversation. Everyone
wants to keep conversation to the bare essentials and the shortest time—just as
they do on the GSM (“Mobile Revolution” 2004, 24).
Surely, in the many places where technological development trails that in
the West, we who are part of the Western tradition cannot wish the catch-up to
spoil ancient patterns our own cultural critics are urging we recover. Conversa-
tion, for all its redundancy and misdirection, is surely an artifact of the more
gemeinschaftlich era when people felt connected and communities, while not
always peaceful, knew who they were.
Carey celebrated the oral encounter, inviting conversation and embracing
technologies that generated good business and enabled a large, complex na-
tion access to political engagement. For Carey, print extended orality. No other
scholar matched the delight with which James Carey cited these poignant turns
of phrase capturing the musical notes on which the symphony of a constructed
public order is being created, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Perhaps
John Dewey was the only writer who figured strongly in Carey’s pantheon of
public intellectuals yet whose writing was never called elegant or lovely. Carey
served as an interpreter of Dewey, given the latter’s admittedly painful obtuse-
ness when put to the task of capturing thought in print. Perhaps the greatest of
Carey’s writings are best viewed as exegesis of Dewey’s enigmatic phrase “the
conjoint life of the polity” (Carey 1989, 200). Otherwise, consider his focus on
language when citing others’ texts: “in William James’ happy phrase,” “in Rorty’s
splendid phrase,” “in Stuart Hall’s lovely phrase,” “in Charles Taylor’s useful
phrase,” or “as Geertz elegantly summarized.”
In older places and times, the epitome of public recognition was the chief
elder calling one’s name; later, it was to be quoted in the New York Times. Among
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

communications scholars in the cultural tradition, no honor—none so worth

repeating among small groups of friends—is greater than being cited as the
source of a splendid or elegant phrase by the one who has made public con-
versation thick, entertaining, and fertile by his own coarse, exquisite, nuanced,
original, and happily received words. With intellectual explorers who can also
bend a thought in a prism their own adventures are creating, the conversation
is always good.
Intellectual progress happens when explanatory paradigms engage. Intellectual
leaders become that when the paradigm they champion ascends in public vis-

Or a l Cu ltu r e 111

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ibility and usefulness—and even the caprice of entertainment value. Under the
radar of the academic royalty who work these spheres, however, are vagabond
prophets stirring the hinterlands, exploring the interstices, generating local
change. Between dominant paradigms, the intellectual prophet—with no power
except the cogency and timeliness of his or her message—raises the challenge,
unmasks the secondary assumptions, links poetry to the critique of power, urges
resistance in the name of something better gained by transformation than by
status quo. These prophets are voices in the wilderness, outside the walled cities
and shorn of the kingdom’s loudspeakers. Only by the authenticity of voice are
prophets amplified. Carey admired such thinkers and extolled their inquiry. He
opposed empiricist reduction, the capitalist contrivance that gave social science
its centered cultural position in the early twentieth century. He opposed the
Lippmannesque hegemony of a ruling intellectual class whose harvest of objec-
tive knowledge becomes social policy without a murmur of dissent from citizens.
He spurned the dichotomies of Plato and Descartes but cheered delightfully the
integrated analyses of Dewey, Weber, and Williams. Knowledge and ideology,
democratic participation and power, freedom and class hegemony—the prophet
sees the connections and knows the cost of ignoring them.
Prophets are underprivileged technologically, using what humans have always
used: voice. Empires capture technologies. Prophets prove again, in every age
and place, the priority of the most primitive technology, the most contentious.
In the print age, Milton wrote that the voice may be silenced but one must never
burn the book; pyres destroy the transcendence of thought. Prophets, however,
know that scrolls or DVDs may bind thought in time, but oral presence is the
stream of energy and bedrock of continuity. Orality is a democratic medium. The
ideal, as Carey put is, is that everyone speaks in a social order directed toward
open inquiry and purposeful justice, with institutions serving as magnets for
developing useful knowledge.
Institutions capable of working these ideals are too rare and nearly always
local and underpublicized. In Nairobi, on the campus of the Nairobi Evangelical
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Graduate School of Theology, is the Institute for the Study of African Realities
(ISAR). The institute’s creator was weary of education in the developing world
that simply echoed Western patterns, syllabi that mimicked Western pedagogy,
and classrooms that imposed Western solutions. The institute grants no degrees
or certificates and employs no expert faculty from the privileged First World.
Rather, it gathers Africans to talk together about persistent local problems, so
that, as it says, the church can respond biblically and compassionately to issues
facing modern Africa; after such discussions, mutually encouraged, participants
can gather local consensus and organize local labor for health, sanitation, literacy,

112 Mark Fackler

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 honest government, and social services in churches. The Institute for the Study
of African Realities challenges Western hegemony while it reinvigorates local
institutions.
Rejecting the rhetoric of the technological sublime and neo-Luddite primitiv-
ism, Carey (1989, 139) opted for the time-bound, space-bound media balance of
Harold Innis and others who advocated broad-based participatory democracy
and urged intellectuals to “deal with realities and speak to the living concern of
the populace.” Carey’s strong call to “reconcile immense power and wealth with
the ideals of liberty and equality” (ibid.) is a call for something like ISAR, that
is, an institute for the study of American realities, where disconnected com-
munities and fractured publics might find a much-needed dialogic engagement,
recovery from stunted and dislocated orality, and energetic public conversation.
This is a call, too, for an ISAR-Newspaper, for vitally important institutions of
journalism, and an ISAR-Motion Picture, for film producers and a public nar-
rative of empathy, values fortification, pluralism, and hope. The conversation
would engage prophets from many districts bent toward serviceable knowledge
grounded in human dignity and care.
The conclusion of this essay was put together at Addis Ababa University. There,
an ancient culture—which as part of its own mythos claims to hold the Ark of the
Covenant in the northern caves of Axum—moves grudgingly toward democracy.
Ethiopia has no internal precedents for such a political choice. Nonetheless, it
enjoys the unusual honor of never having been subjected to colonial rule. None
of its regional neighbors can say that. Except for a brief occupation by Musso-
lini’s army, Ethiopia has been its own boss—and some might add, its own worst
enemy. The Meneliks were both good and bad as we judge kings today. Haile
Selassie was such a paradoxical figure that the judgment of history on his regime
is still years away. Selassie’s lion statues still appear everywhere in this city, but
his former palace is now the administrative center of the university. In that sense
he prepared the landscape well. In the 1980s and 1990s, Dergue leaders brought
guns and intellectual treason to this same patch of ground. During that era, Addis
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Ababa professors carried cyanide tablets to work in case a gunner was their first
appointment. The 1991 overthrow of the Dergue ended, to some degree, the fear
of speaking out, dread of who might be listening even if speech were private,
and the quick disappearance of thousands whose words were overheard. Human
rights trials of Dergue leaders are ongoing, back-page news.
Front-page news, if only for a day, is the opening of Ethiopia’s first academic
program in communications and journalism. It will be all about public discourse,
power, community, and transformation of culture, as well as how to practice
the craft. First on the syllabus is Nega Mezlekia’s sociopolitical essay Notes from

Or a l Cu ltu r e 113

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the Hyena’s Belly (2000). Nega Mezlekia, an Ethiopian, was published in the
West, a rare and risky book-house decision, but in his case a successful one.
Nega is intellectual kin to Carey. His narrative is communicational insight into
a culture with its own unique alphabet and language, a culture that has emerged
into the second millennium c.e. trying to build a republic out of a past sparkled
with grand egos and inflated tyrants. Nega uses hyenas as a metaphor for the
contested and dangerous social environment in which writers, speakers, civic
discoursers—citizens—use communicative gifts. So in this newly minted aca-
demic program, Nega’s stories introduce Carey’s ideas. Thus Carey’s voice belongs
here with Dewey, Ong, and others; they share place and time in the forming of
a new democratic consensus, stumbling but everywhere evident. Technology is
rippling through all social levels. Generals and parliamentarians and journalists
are talking. And at the university, ideas rooted in this unique place, given their
English expression elsewhere, bound in books and brought back in boxes, then
discussed openly in class, may well become the tools of a public process that no
one here has yet experienced. At night the hyenas controlled Nega’s village. They
prowled dark streets and ate whatever flesh foolishly challenged their passage.
They scattered speech and made the streets absent of human voice.
Now, today, at places bristling with change, do these hyenas understand that
engagement, bonds of sympathy, exceptional differences, and global commonali-
ties, a truthful word spoken as an act of resistance—do these smiling carnivores
know that the fright they inspire is point one at the village palaver tonight and
in public discourse tomorrow?
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

114 Mark Fackler

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Ritual

The Dark Continent

of Journalistic Ritual
Catherine A. Warren

We have entered into a Conradian heart of darkness in Iraq. The

dark continent of American journalism is darker than ever. The
world seems on the verge of imploding. Indeed, it might, although
as James W. Carey has pointed out, “the shadow of the Apocalypse
is cast across all our sophisticated imaginings” (Carey 2002b, 196).
At this moment in history, it seems particularly appropriate—and
critical—to return to Carey’s formative insights about the role of
ritual in media: “Media events are often exercises in social cru-
elty that teeter on the edge of legitimacy and bear dangers beyond
purely ritual ones. They threaten civil society because they suture
the audience into systematic cruelties and institutionalize civil
discord” (218).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Ritual is a particularly appropriate tool for examining the in-

terstices where brutality, whether scripted or unscripted, and the
excesses of empire intersect with media and journalistic practices.
Moreover, while most news media outlets have been collaborating
with an administration bent on silencing dissent and containing
information, there are moments of surprising challenges to, and dis-
ruptions of, ritualized narratives of the United States and its citizens
as exceptional, generous, and peace loving.

115

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 A central thread in Carey’s work, ritual ties together a host of interrelated
concepts and practices: media routines, media events, news as drama, conversa-
tion and community, the nation-state and the media, and sacrifice. Carey’s now
elegiac lines about ritual came in a 1975 piece entitled “A Cultural Approach to
Communication”: “A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the
extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time;
not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs”
(Carey 1989, 18).
In the years since, those lines have morphed and become increasingly multi-
dimensional. They have been quoted countless times—often ritualistically. They
have been occasionally critiqued as underdeveloped in that essay (although
Carey went on to develop the concept in much greater detail, bringing more
darkness to the concept), misused, and well-used in countless lectures and
publications, expanded and expounded. They stand as a foundational moment
for communication studies. They also age well. Despite the huge changes in
journalism and its technologies, despite the disappearance of some forms of
journalistic practice and the emergence of others, viewing certain kinds of news
stories through the lens of ritual helps explicate the creation and consumption
of journalism. At the heart of journalist practice, ritual thrives and butts against
journalism’s claims of truth and objectivity. “Under a ritual view, then, news is
not information but drama. It does not describe the world but portrays an arena
of dramatic forces and action; it exists solely in historical time; and it invites
our participation on the basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social roles
within it” (Carey 1989, 21).
Much changed—in Carey’s work, in the work of others influenced by him,
and in the world—during the thirty-one years since Carey first published those
words. The shared beliefs of those early lines, their seeming benevolence and
integrative appeal, have given way to tensions and ruptures and cruelties. None-
theless, those early terms continue to exert a gravitational pull: other media
scholars have called them an “imaginative meditation” (Czitrom 1990, 679)
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and “some of the most elegant and influential lines ever written in our field”
(Ettema 1990, 309). They have appeared as a foundational insight in numerous
communication journal articles, as well as articles from Advertising Age to The
Nation, from the Hastings Center Report (devoted to biomedical ethics) to the
International Journal of Geographical Information Science, and even in weblogs,
such as PressThink, dedicated to journalism and politics.1
The importance of that essay did not derive merely from applying to com-
munication a term associated with anthropology and religion. The essay also
shifted the emphasis from a view that Carey termed the “transmission view” of

116 Catherine A. Warren

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 communication, the only coin of the communication realm at the time, thereby
opening a space for an interpretive approach that broke through the walls of
empirical research then dominating and impoverishing the field. Nonetheless,
three decades later, it can still be argued that, as Carey himself wrote in 1975 in
an excess of understatement, “The ritual view of communication has not been
a dominant motif in American scholarship” (1989, 19).
In 1990 the mass communication scholar James Ettema critiqued Carey’s
framework for not going far enough; while “elegant,” it did not articulate the
discordant, dramatic, and conflictual notion of media ritual (327). But Carey
didn’t linger long with the notion of ritual as a neo-Durkheimian integrative
ceremony. That development of media ritual as ultimately creating societal
cohesion fell to communication theorists such as Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz
(1992) or played out in numerous essays on national or Olympic sports as in-
tegrative ritual.
Ritual and journalistic practice, Dayan and Katz notwithstanding, has not
been developed as fully as it deserves to be within communication theory. Part
of the problem has been what Barbie Zelizer (2004, 100) describes as the “uneasy
coexistence of journalism and cultural studies.” While Carey’s work has done
much to transcend the divisions between cultural studies and the “dark con-
tinent of American journalism,” Carey’s work on journalism practices has not
been as widely read or considered as have his essays on communication theory.
Carey’s work on ritual is most articulated and insightful when it is applied to
journalistic practices, although even those practices are increasingly difficult to
define as boundaries blur: “To see journalism as a form of culture is to see it as
a practice of world making, of the making of meaning and significance” (Carey
1997a, 331).
As early as 1974, in “The Problem of Journalism History,” Carey had already
started to make the arguments for studying journalism as a culture, a structure
of feeling. In “The Dark Continent of American Journalism” he detailed the links
among storytelling, drama, and media production (and the professional ideology
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of journalism’s close relation to ritual), from the concrete daily boilerplate of

familiar tropes and metaphors to the larger understanding that American jour-
nalism is deeply and unreflectively reflective of American culture. Carey himself
later pointed out that many of his essays about journalism were a development
of the contrast between the transmission and ritual views of communication
(1997a, 313).
One of the most recent and sustained developments of media ritual comes
from Nick Couldry of the London school, whose book Media Rituals: A Criti-
cal Approach uses a critique of Durkheim, plus Bordieu, Bloch, and Carey, to

R itua l 117

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 examine ritual power in the media. Couldry (2003, 35) notes, as Carey had, that
while the need to communicate and the need for connection are universal, media
rituals are nonetheless as much about division as they are about social unity: “I
am not concerned to argue that contemporary societies actually do hold together,
even in very complex ways, around a shared world-view and shared values.
My interest is how in large societies the pressures to claim that society ‘comes
together’ increase, especially, perhaps, as their basic plausibility decreases.”
We are certainly teetering on that verge, especially as we look at media cov-
erage of Iraq—and most specifically, coverage of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Ritual, as Carey and others have developed it, can help
us understand—or at least start to puzzle through—a multitude of media events
and practices that we see today. These are practices in which symbolic violence
and violence itself are melded: from the grotesqueries of prison photographs
from Iraq to the more scripted moments of ritual political shame and degrada-
tion that constitute the bread-and-butter of nationalism.
When Carey first wrote (in 1975) about communication as ritual, it was to
elucidate how communication also serves the purposes of a sacred ceremony of
“fellowship and commonality” (1989, 18). It was not merely control. That kind of
ritual still exists; nonetheless, Carey went on to expand on the darker purposes
served by ritual communication, especially as it relates to media practices. Draw-
ing on work by his former student John Pauly, he noted that to begin from ritual
is to situate the inquiry “in a world of contingency, doubt, and chaos” (Carey
1997a, 314).
The chaos and contingencies that have accompanied the post-9/11 forays of the
United States across the globe, and the media depictions of those activities, are
far from unique in U.S. history, even over the past few decades. What might be
questioned at this point is the degree to which American society is committed to
the avoidance of cruelty. In 1998, following the cultural anthropologist Kai Erik-
son’s early insights about the many moments of both official and casual cruelty
found in almost every society, Carey (1998b, 42) noted, “These are dangerous
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

moments, particularly in the life of democracies committed to the avoidance of

cruelty, for they are episodes of high, systematic, and sanctioned misanthropy
when the power of the state, public opinion or both is inscribed on the body.”

Abu Ghraib as Media Ritual and Mechanical Reproduction

Photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib first

appeared on the April 28, 2004, broadcast of 60 Minutes II. Two days later the
New Yorker magazine halted its relentless fact checking and posted the longtime

118 Catherine A. Warren

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh’s exposé on its Web site, subsequently
publishing it in its print version (Hersh 2004), too. That devastatingly complete
account included the now-iconic image of the hooded Iraqi prisoner balanced
on a box, wires attached to his limbs and penis. “For a long time—at least six
decades—photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are
judged and remembered,” writes Susan Sontag (2004, 25); “the Western memory
museum is now mostly a visual one.”
Hersh’s account was a complex journalism of explanation, which was missing
from the vast majority of news accounts. Most of the news media reproduced (re-
plete with warnings, the ritual genuflection to the sensibilities of their audiences)
dozens of pictures of brutality—mostly remarkably contextless, but nonetheless
horrifying and infuriating. The photographs of U.S. soldiers and “contractors”
grinning broadly, thumbs up, posed in front of terrified, injured, and suffering
prisoners briefly disrupted the frames that news media use—especially in times
of war—to create and sustain nationalism. Portraying the explicit violence of
U.S. forces was a direct violation of long-standing formulations of American
media. Such explicit violence belongs to other countries’ citizens and soldiers,
not ours. Jessica Fishman and Carolyn Marvin’s study of twenty-one years of
front pages from the New York Times found that non-U.S. agents are explicitly
said to be more brutal and violent. Images of U.S. violence “suggest order with-
out cruelty”: “Front-page images in The New York Times effectively sanitize U.S.
violence, concealing it from the inspection of citizens who might find its most
graphic forms disturbing. Conversely, these representations de-legitimize the
violence of non-U.S. states, repeatedly rendering it in brutally explicit terms”
(Fishman and Marvin 2003, 32, 42).
Nonetheless, the photographs also fit perfectly into the pigeonhole that jour-
nalists define as “news”—partly because they were disruptive. News organiza-
tions write about difference because difference is seemingly inherent to who and
what the media are. Difference is written into the very meaning of the word news.
It is one of the five standard values traditionally said to make the news news:
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

timeliness, proximity, impact, conflict, and unusual nature. Thus, the familiar
newsroom adage—“Don’t bring me a story about a dog biting a man; bring me
a story about a man biting a dog”—is overdetermined. Difference automati-
cally can and often does become news on its own, and the onus is on the media
to show how different and newsworthy an event is while they simultaneously
contain that event and comfort the audience.
Ultimately, a kind of double jeopardy is engaged when a story such as Abu
Ghraib attracts the attention of the media. The event has to embody newsworthi-
ness in its difference, but ultimately the media have to contain and explain it in

R itua l 119

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ways that seem familiar. Journalists had to both maintain the standard frames of
patriotism and “supporting the troops” while simultaneously trying to explain
why the images themselves clearly showed the U.S. troops as brutal oppressors
rather than as liberators.
As Carey (1997f, 163) noted, this particular media habit of wanting the news
to be new also discourages reporting in-depth news of institutions, with their
complexities and their need for explanation: “More than the organization of the
newsroom, the nature of journalistic investigations and the professional ideol-
ogy of journalism suppress a journalism of explanation. The basic definitions
of news exclude explanation from the outset. News focuses on the unusual, the
non-routine, the unexpected. Thus, it necessarily highlights events that interest
us precisely because they have no explanation. . . . Much of journalism focuses
on the bizarre, the uncanny, the inexplicable.”
The inevitability of Abu Ghraib was, sadly, all too explicable. But thoroughly
explaining it would have both undermined the story’s shock value and mounted
too serious a challenge to nationalism. Hersh and the New Yorker called it for
what it was—“Torture at Abu Ghraib”—and showed why it was neither bizarre
nor uncanny, nor even particularly puzzling, but instead an outgrowth of post-
9/11 xenophobic administration policies, poor planning, and routine violations
of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. Army regulations. Most media outlets did
not even try to play catch-up with Hersh and the New Yorker; one of the less-
charming rituals of journalism, especially among the elite press, is to downplay
the scoops of other elites who are too far ahead on a story. So a front-page story
in the Washington Post, even one with enormous national or international im-
portance, may well play on an inside page in the New York Times.
Most mainstream news media eagerly showed the photographs but repeat-
edly used the terms mistreatment, abuse, and sexual abuse scandal unless they
were directly quoting the New Yorker article.2 The Washington Post’s stories, a
frame analysis showed, offered “torture” as a primary frame in only 3 percent of
the stories about Abu Ghraib, while 81 percent the time, “abuse” served as the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

primary frame (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2006, 474).

Instead of working on the story of torture, a number of media organs simu-
lated covering the story by making Hersh himself a central character, essentially
writing the story of Hersh’s story. Hersh became the “who” of a story that didn’t
have easily accessible scapegoats (with the possible exception of Private Lynndie
England, featured grinning broadly in a number of the photos). As Carey had
noted nearly two decades earlier, “If journalists cannot find a representative
individual, they more or less invent one” (1986, 180). Numerous press accounts
portrayed Hersh, if not literally “the closest thing journalism has to a terrorist,”

120 Catherine A. Warren

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 as the former assistant U.S. defense secretary Richard Perle described him on
CNN in 2003, then certainly as someone who was such an angry, passionate,
edgy, scary, and less-than-objective journalist that he could not be part of the
real profession. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter Sharon Schmickle (2004,
17F), who had been “embedded” in Iraq, sniffed, “If Hersh were a scientist, his
work would be discredited because there would be no way for others to verify his
findings. In journalism, as in science, independent corroboration and probing
peer review are the most convincing proofs of discovery.”
A witty San Francisco Chronicle headline said it all: “Want to Get Seymour
Hersh Excited? Ask Him Why Abu Ghraib Is Important. Then Take Cover”
(Benson 2004, 1E). The cynical detachment, on the one hand, and strangely
Lippmanesque pontification about “probing peer review,” on the other, repre-
sented simple ideological rootlessness and mostly served as a cover for being
so far behind on the story. Fragments of the abuse at Abu Ghraib had appeared
and disappeared like poisonous flotsam in the mainstream media after the U.S.
Command in Baghdad issued a one-paragraph press release in January 2004
about an investigation into abuse at a coalition detention facility (Ricchiardi
2004, 24).
What became clear, however, as the front pages of mainstream newspapers
and the network news were flooded with images of either “mistreated,” “sexually
abused,” or simply “humiliated” Iraqi prisoners, was not just that the photographs
were central to this story but that the photographs were the impetus for doing
any story. So the press, even the elite press, repeated to itself and to anyone who
would listen what Carey (2003, 5) describes as “the prescribed script of a ritual of
atonement.”3 Editors fell over themselves explaining that the photographs were
the reason the news media started to cover the story of U.S. soldiers’ treatment
of prisoners in Iraq.
“Any honest editor will give you the same answer. It’s the pictures; that’s what
did it. But it shouldn’t require visual drama to make us pay attention to something
like this,” said the New York Times executive editor Bill Keller (in Ricchiardi 2004,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

26). The New York Times Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, noted, “‘We
didn’t do our job until the photographs appeared on CBS’” (in ibid., 25). Said
Loren Jenkins, the foreign editor for National Public Radio, in the same article:
“It took the pictures to say, ‘This is undeniable’” (26).
Perhaps. Also interesting, however, is the way these photographs, because of
who took them—the soldiers themselves—were able to maintain their status
as “posed,” as reproductions of reality rather than reality itself. In what was
ultimately a self-serving, self-protecting, and disingenuous move, media outlets
continually called attention to the pictures of abuse as images rather than as im-

R itua l 121

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ages of reality. The truth value of the photographs was undermined, as it might
not have been had the photographs been taken by photojournalists. Also at play
here was a disruption of the ritualized practices of news media. Again, portraying
the explicit violence of U.S. forces directly violated long-standing formulations
of American media. Such explicit violence belongs to other countries’ citizens
and soldiers, not ours.

Containment—Technology, Pornography, and Psychology

Three abstract themes circulated and recirculated through both the so-called
conservative and liberal media, themes that help elucidate how—barring reason-
able individual scapegoats—journalists found ways to simultaneously explain,
contain, and dismiss Abu Ghraib as a media event threatening national boundar-
ies. “The principal power among men and women, like it or not, is still national-
ism. . . . Nations are not merely textual communities. . . . they are embodied in
their citizens or subjects and the sacrifices they are periodically called upon to
make, in body and imagination, to the gods of the nation” (Carey 2002b, 229).
The first ritual theme that the media outlets used to contain the story was
that new technology, not torture, was both the why and the how of Abu Ghraib.
Somehow, Abu Ghraib would not have occurred without new means of me-
chanical reproduction. “The war in Iraq may be the first war to be won or lost
in cyberspace,” noted a Dartmouth philosophy professor (Brison 2004). There
was, numerous commentators argued, something unique about these photos,
whether the “new technology” of digital cameras and computers used to capture
and transmit them or the way in which they arrived at the media’s doorstep. Not
because of the media, but despite the media. Indeed, standard news practices
would never have brought this story to light, according to a number of accounts.
A journalism professor noted in the Seattle Times: “Historians will someday rank
digital technology with the printing press and television as landmark inventions
affecting the news media. We are already seeing in Iraq the evidence of this
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

revolution” (McKay 2004).

Even Susan Sontag (2004, 27), in the last piece she published before her death,
falls into this strange sort of salvation, or indeed, explanation, by machine: “A
digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photograph-
ing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are
all photographers—recording their war, their fun, their observations of what
they find picturesque, their atrocities—and swapping images among themselves
and e-mailing them around the globe.”

122 Catherine A. Warren

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Technology—even used for these dark purposes—is portrayed as miracu-
lous and creates an interesting kind of ritual of technological democracy. Carey
(1997a, 316) noted, “Technology, for us, is more than an assortment of artifacts
or practices, a means to accomplish desired ends. Technology is also the cen-
tral character and actor in our social drama, an end as well as a means.” In this
particular case, technology has managed not only to replace good old investi-
gative journalism but actually to surpass it. The media have, in their wholesale
abdication of real reporting on the war, leapt upon this ritualized frame as both
excuse and as story. These photographs would not have existed, and by extension,
the abuses might not have taken place, without the miraculous combination of
digital cameras and the Internet. This is not torture; this is one big, happy wiki.
And as Carey has pointed out on numerous occasions, while technology may be
our national faith, its purpose has never been to help reconstruct democracy.
What the vast majority of media ignored in this account is the long history
of soldiers or other organized groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, memorial-
izing their torture photographically, posing in front of their victims, smiling
broadly, somehow assuming or realizing that their audience would approve. The
war correspondent John Pilger recalls visiting the Saigon offices of American
newspapers and television stations in the 1960s and seeing numerous photos
pinned on bulletin boards showing American soldiers holding up severed ears
and testicles. Why weren’t these photographs widely disseminated in newspapers
and on television? Because, those Saigon editors argued, it would be considered
“sensationalizing,” and the American public wouldn’t stand for it (Pilger 2004).
Similarly, as Seymour Hersh discovered when he reported on the My Lai Mas-
sacre, one highly touted colonel, George S. Patton III, the son of the famous
general, celebrated Christmas in 1968 by sending cards reading, “From Colonel
and Mrs. George S. Patton III—Peace on Earth”; the cards were “decorated” with
a color photograph of dismembered Viet Cong soldiers stacked in a neat pile
(Hersh 1970, 9).
The photographs of Abu Ghraib were perhaps even more directly reminiscent
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of the seven decades of lynching photographs that ultimately became postcards,

collectibles across the South, pictures in photo albums of racist families. “The
proud gaze of the white mob in the photographs assumes a white audience that
will recognize the virtue of their deed, an audience that regards the lynched
blacks, not the white mob, as criminals” (Apel 2003, 462). Why weren’t journalists
reminded of lynching? Because the rhetoric of racial and ethnic hatred driving
whites to torture and murder blacks is unacceptable as a ritual frame for U.S.
soldiers—just as it had been unacceptable for journalists to run photographs of

R itua l 123

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the atrocities committed against the Vietnamese. Nevertheless, the broad smiles,
the up-raised thumbs of the soldiers gazing proudly at their unseen audience,
have happened repeatedly in past conflicts. There’s nothing new about them
at all. There’s no technological breakthrough and nothing especially puzzling.
They’re smiling because they expect the viewers to side with them.
The new technology argument in the media melded almost seamlessly with
the second major ritual theme that helped contain Abu Ghraib: these pictures
were not just the equivalent of pornography; they were pornography, pornog-
raphy facilitated by new technology. Ordinary and generally naïve soldiers, who
would not otherwise have been exposed to what was essentially S/M bondage and
torture, were only too familiar with it through the Internet. This argument was
deeply resonant across the mainstream media but also within both conservative
and liberal publications—from the National Review to Salon. The pornography
argument allowed several simultaneous moves: to lessen the implications of
torture and make it posed torture or mock torture; to implicate the Arab world
as particularly sexually phobic; and also, within conservative media realms, to
blame a corrupt liberal society for the portrayals of pornographic images. Using
pornography as a ritual frame also removed race, class, ethnicity, and of course,
war. It allowed other arguments focusing on the torture victims’ identities—
Arabs, Muslims, Iraqis, our purported enemies—to remain unchallenged.
The perpetrators of these pornographic images were not like our enemy—
hate-filled fanatics—but essentially very ordinary and very American men and
women whose major crime was to surf the Net and download porn that they then
ultimately reenacted because they were young, impressionable, and a bit out of
control. What is ritualized here? Indeed, the entire posing of prisoners is in itself
a ritual of degradation. The news media, in trying to contain that degradation,
created a version of that degradation as being like pornography. That version
helped normalize it, diminish it, and also tap into the notion of delicious scandal:
“You can sense the sexual disturbance in the minds of the soldiers responsible for
this. It’s a disturbance exacerbated by the months away from home, but created
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

by a lifelong familiarity with porn—its cynical humor, cheap patriotism, crude

vocabulary of submission and prevarication” (Camon 2004).
Scandal taps into the contradictory feelings of the readers, who were fasci-
nated by the secrecy, sexuality, and transgression and by the flouting of moral
codes. This, of course, is far from flouting the Geneva Conventions. For the
purposes of this media event, most media outlets played the role of tabloids:
essentially conservative politically while pushing the boundaries of the moral
order, continuously using scandal to redefine those boundaries. The pictures
were disturbing to conservative publications and readership, but they didn’t have

124 Catherine A. Warren

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 to even momentarily abandon their nationalism and support of the troops—they
found another way to explain the pictures: “These similar images are what the
young American soldiers from the Internet generation have grown up with and
learned to call ‘adult entertainment’” (Hughes 2004). The pornographic elements
in these photographs are undeniable, but accounts of seemingly every conflict
since the rape of the Sabine women just after the founding of Rome have linked
sexuality and death. What the media chose to ignore was that the photographs
were also deeply racist and xenophobic.
The third and final ritual frame arches, as does technology, broadly over both
the media and academe. This final theme was already quite familiar and deeply ir-
ritating to Carey in his original essay “Communication as Culture.” He abhorred
the overarching dominance of psychology as an explanatory model for human
contact and interaction—indeed, as the best explanatory model for communi-
cation itself: “Our existing models of communication are less an analysis than
a contribution to the chaos of modern culture, and in important ways we are
paying the penalty for the long abuse of fundamental communicative processes
in the service of politics, trade, and therapy” (Carey 1989, 34).
In the case of Abu Ghraib, the mainstream media needed to understand this
violence as something ordinary, and best understood using psychological mod-
els, rather than as something extraordinary, because as we all know, U.S. soldiers
don’t torture. They leapt eagerly upon the prison experiments of Philip Zimbardo
of Stanford University. After all, those Stanford students were already the social
crème de la crème, and indeed chosen for the study because of their emotional
stability (if not for their convenient location); if they found themselves happily
torturing their fellow students after a few days of experimental stimulus, no
wonder ordinary soldiers in hot, dusty climes were pushed to these extremes. The
APA helpfully hosted a site explaining why ordinary people torture: “Americans
were shocked by the photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, and now
many want to know why ‘seemingly normal’ people could behave so sadistically.
Psychologists who study torture say most of us could behave this way under
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

similar circumstances,” wrote the American Psychological Association’s (2004)

public communications office.

Conclusion

Media events, as Carey (2002b, 218) noted, “include drama without rest or
resolution, drama without catharsis or consensus, drama that divides people
more sharply and intensifies the perception of social difference, drama involving
confrontation that spills outside its ritual frame to contaminate and reconfigure

R itua l 125

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 social relations at large.” We have no resolution on Abu Ghraib; indeed, photo-
graphs released in mid-February 2006 only reiterated the pervasive nature of
torture in this global “war on terror.” We have a deeply divided and nonetheless
deeply passive polity. We have a promiscuity of images without any insistence
on the importance of what is real and why it matters. The most recent photo-
graphs from Abu Ghraib, revealing more brutality and the probable murder of
detainees,4 have in fact been downplayed by the mainstream media as “more of
the same”; they are no longer news, except to the degree that they may inflame
that ever-irrational and unstable “Arab street.” As Carey (2003, 6) noted sadly,
journalism rewards not the achievement of its professed ideals, “truth, thorough-
ness, context and sobriety,” but instead “prominence, the unique take, standing
out from the crowd and the riveting narrative.”
Abu Ghraib does not represent just the systemic failure of the military; it also
represents the systemic failure of journalism and an entire set of ritualized prac-
tices on which journalists have depended for far too long without interrogation.
Although Carey noted the disappearance of the public back in 1987, American
journalists were nonetheless still continuing to invoke it: “The public is totem
and talisman, an object of ritual homage. . . . But for all the ritual incantation
of the public in the rhetoric of journalism, no one quite knows any longer what
the public is, or where one might find it, or even whether it exists any longer”
(1987b, 5).
In this story, however, the U.S. mainstream media didn’t bother to invoke the
American public even ritualistically; it appeared only linked arm-in-arm with
the word outcry in a number of stories.
Yet in the case of Abu Ghraib even that impoverished ghost of the public,
“public outcry,” was only a ritual incantation, at least in the United States. Abu
Ghraib has mostly disappeared from both political and journalistic view. Not
a single officer has been found guilty; in August 2007 a military jury acquitted
the one officer charged with crimes related to the torture and abuse of prisoners
(Von Zielbauer 2007).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Notes
1. En route to the Democratic Convention, Jay Rosen noted: “I re-read—for maybe the
fiftieth time—[Carey’s] most famous essay, ‘A Cultural Approach to Communication,’
where he identifies two alternative views of what communication is all about” (Rosen
2004).
2. I’m omitting the (in)famous and discountable reactions from some far-right media
outlets and journalists such as Rush Limbaugh, who said, “I’m talking about people

126 Catherine A. Warren

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever]
heard of need to blow some steam off?” (said on May 3, 2004).
3. Carey described such paroxysms, in his piece on the Jayson Blair case, as part of “the
prescribed script of a ritual of atonement” dating back to when Janet Cooke fooled
the Washington Post with her invented eight-year-old heroin addict, “Jimmy” (Carey
2003, 5). Will it change reporting and editing methods? Probably not. The ritual of
atonement has deep roots, and pretty slippery ones. “This ritual of confession, absolu-
tion and penance inadvertently hides as much as it discloses,” Carey noted (6).
4. A report by Human Rights First, released in February 2006, has documented that only
twelve of ninety-eight deaths of detainees in U.S. custody resulted in any punishment
for implicated U.S. officials, military or civilian. Five months in jail was the harshest
punishment for those deaths that resulted from torture.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

R itua l 127

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Identity

The Politics of
Identity Work
Lana F. Rakow

Does identity matter? If so, whose?

For those of us in the United States who are immersed personally
and professionally in issues of race and gender, the answer is obvious.
Our work in the academy, undertaken against the grain of tradi-
tion in our disciplines and departments, has exposed historically
and culturally bound assumptions of self and other, untangling and
revealing connections between group identity and the social forma-
tion. We argue for changes in content, pedagogy, and methodology
to shake up settled assumptions about the human condition (see,
e.g., Blum and Press 2002; McRobbie 1997; and Steiner 2002). Out-
side the academy progressive political movements, with our overt
or tacit support, continue struggles that have spanned the history
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of the country since Western imperialism altered the physical and

social face of the continent. Using various legal and political argu-
ments (e.g., women’s right to choose abortion, gay people’s right to
marry, race-based affirmative action admissions to higher education,
Native American sovereignty), activists affirm rights that are based
on group identities. Those whose identities and politics are bound
up with these struggles—in and out of the academy—believe in the
importance of this identity work.1

128

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Of course, not everyone agrees. Critics of so-called identity politics can be
found in the academy among those who count themselves in the Left. Meanwhile,
the Right exerts its pressure both on the academy and outside it. In the climate
of the George W. Bush presidency, the Right’s efficacy in challenging “liberal”
professors on campus and in eroding legal gains made by progressive groups may
have given credence to the arguments of some scholars that attention to identity
politics had given the Right the upper hand. The 2008 U.S. presidential election,
won by a black man in a contest featuring two white women, produced popular
and academic debate about the place of race and gender in the contest and the
possibility that the country had reached a turning point signaling transcendence
of identity politics. If we have reached that point, are so-called identity politics
an annoying, even dangerous, distraction from understanding the real political
problems and real material conditions of contemporary societies? Have global
changes and the election outcome reduced contemporary identity differences
to the unremarkable, even trivial? Do critical scholars who attend to identities
of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and age simply have a selfish axe to grind,
clinging to a concept that stands in the way of progressive politics and a refor-
mulation of a class-based movement?
These are not hypothetical criticisms of identity-based politics but objec-
tions that come from American cultural studies scholars as well as political
economists. For example, Todd Gitlin (1997, 28), critical of a brand of cultural
studies that valorizes popular culture, attributes the failure of cultural studies
to the state of social movements after the 1960s, when the Left lost its political
project and gave way to an identity politics: “The general student movement
was finished, leaving beyond a range of identity-based movements, feminist,
gay, and race-based, each vigorous, in its own right, yet lacking experiences
of everyday practices which would amount to embryonic prefigurations of a
reconstituted world.”
Echoing Gitlin’s critique, Robert McChesney (2002, 91) criticizes a postmod-
ern abandonment of politics. Acknowledging racism and sexism in traditional
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

leftist politics and theory, he nonetheless calls identity politics a “nonrevolution-

ary movement at best, a reactionary movement at worst,” one whose pessimism
and defeatism he predicts will be replaced with the reemergence of the Left.
He maintains that “it is only through class politics that human liberation can
truly be reached” (80). Nicholas Garnham (1997, 69) argues that understand-
ing the economic formation of capitalism is necessary to understanding racial
domination and patriarchy, criticizing the move of cultural studies “away from
a concern with organized class-based party politics, redistributive justice and
the State and their relationship to solidarity and a ‘common culture’ to an almost

Iden tit y 129

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 exclusive concern with the shifting coalitions of identity politics, with rights,
with the validation of ever more fragmented ‘differences’ and with the local and
the single issue.”
Critical of the Left’s inability to develop a political program, James Carey
levied sharp criticisms against identity politics and “political correctness.” He
variously placed the greatest significance on nation, generation, and religion as
axes of difference (Carey 1997g, 2002b) while downplaying other differences
as trivial although generating more intense conflicts: “There seems to be no
end to the delicacy and invidiousness with which we can describe, impute, and
elaborate human difference” (2002b, 231). Carey’s disdain for race and gender
studies in the academy was not disguised. Acknowledging the limitations of
reifying Western culture, he pointed out that “it is an equal disaster to reduce
that culture to race and gender (and to treat class and ethnicity as if they were
vanishing movements), as if these were universals of Western culture rather than
concrete manifestations of identity formed within American culture” (1997g,
275). He accused cultural studies of finding itself without a constituency in the
public arena because race, class, and gender do not explain Americans’ “real”
differences of politics and values.
According to these critics, the issue is not the way identity matters for any seri-
ous understanding of contemporary societies, which is the concern of identity
scholars, but the overemphasis that identity scholars have placed on it. I want
to propose a different explanation. Those who made too much of identity were
not gender and race scholars but their political foes, who tried to turn back the
clock, reasserting traditional definitions of self and citizenship to preserve sys-
tems of power and privilege. These foes are not just on the Right in the public
arena but may reside in the ranks of critical and cultural scholars threatened
with the loss of their own identity status in the academy.
I want to make the case that considerations of identity not only matter to
those of us with these “minority” identities, but they also ought to matter to
those committed to a radical transformation of economic and social relations,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

creating the bonds of genuine community and common purpose envisioned by

John Dewey (1954) and the American cultural studies project that followed him.
In other words, identity politics is not a distraction from the significant work
of reinventing social democracy but the key to it. I keep my argument in the
public arena for the time being. After saying a few things about the parties to the
conflict, I take up what is at stake in various claims about identity. Finally, I want
to suggest the need for those scholars who espouse a communitarian agenda to
find common ground with identity scholars. On this, critical scholars should
be in agreement with Carey’s (1989, 88) conclusion: “A critical theory of com-

130 Lana F. Rakow

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 munication must affirm what is before our eyes and transcend it by imagining,
at the very least, a world more desirable.”

Who Cares about Identity?

Identity is by no means an issue restricted to the halls of the academy. Conser-

vative and progressive coalitions in the United States are battling over identity
issues, as the 2008 presidential election revealed. The extent to which the fight
has spilled over into public consciousness can be found no further away than a
newspaper syndicated cartoon. “Other people think about me,” observed Ernie,
the disheveled bum in a Frank and Ernest syndicated cartoon (Thaves 2003),
“therefore I am.” Ernie, cheerful despite or because of his spot on the bottom
rung of status, may be revealing something significant about American notions
of identity. But what? Is Ernie’s creator, Bob Thaves, simply offering a clever, not-
to-be-taken-seriously spoof on Descartes’s rationalist line, “I think, therefore I
am”? A sign that ideas about the postmodern constructed self have made their
way to American living rooms? An overdue political commentary on the class
structure of modern society? A reification of the quintessential Western self as
the lone male outsider, albeit affable rather than angry?
Thaves’s cartoon can be read in all those ways, given the polysemic nature of
texts; regardless of the interpretation, however, the cartoon points to the ubiq-
uitous presence of identity issues in public discourse. Identity issues play out
in state and federal politics and in the courts, where conservatives have clashed
with coalitions of critical and progressive scholars and activists. The 2004 and
2008 U.S. elections saw Republicans using abortion and same-sex marriage
as lightening rods for motivating conservative voters at the same time that,
ironically, they courted the votes of women, African Americans, Hispanics, and
American Indians.
Who’s playing identity politics now?
While Carey (see 1997k) criticized the Left for lacking a political agenda able
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

to counter the Right, and other critics (e.g., McChesney 2002) have criticized
identity scholars for not aligning with the Left, their arguments are disingenu-
ous. First, a progressive agenda has not been a complete failure. Surely it has
been successful enough to have given conservatives a list of changes to overturn.
The development of a contemporary antiwar movement, growing despite ef-
forts to silence dissent in the name of national security, has demonstrated that
dissidence can be galvanized at opportune political moments. Second, those
who are effectively disfranchised from political decision making should not be
blamed if they cannot carry the day in a fight to gain access to the processes

Iden tit y 131

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 from which they are excluded. Structural inequities are designed to prevent
participation, not facilitate it. The Right and the Left (which I take to include a
variety of political agendas) do not share the same playing field. The ascending
conservative movement to rid university classrooms of “liberal” professors and
their speech, as well as to control K–12 curricula and textbooks, speaks to the
enormous disparity of power between those who control institutions such as
education (through policy and financial strings) and those who work in them.
Third, the critique fails to account for ideology, which I am referring to here as
prominent and accepted explanations of social conditions that justify social and
political practices. Where, after all, do people get the meanings they ascribe to
their own experiences and to “the other”? Should we expect people to invent
critiques of the social order without access to alternative meaning systems? It is
not necessary to fall prey to the disreputable notion of “false consciousness” to
point out that each of us has at best limited access to the ideas and experiences
of others in different times and places and often lack alternative explanations of
our experiences. Feminists in the United States use “consciousness raising”—
even for themselves—to give new political interpretations to circumstances
otherwise viewed as personal and isolated. When some explanations are given
public legitimacy and alternative explanations are silenced or made into straw
dogs to be easily dismissed or reviled (e.g., fabricating something called a “gay
agenda” by which a host of groups and ideas can be connected as a conspiracy
and shouted down), the success of the conservative agenda is not surprising.

What Is at Stake?

U.S. conservatives clearly have been galvanized over recent years. Ironically, it
is not government spending that raised Republican ire, since the Democratic
era of Bill Clinton produced a balanced budget, while the Republican Bush
era produced staggering deficits, joblessness, and stock market and banking
disasters. Instead, “rank-and-file” conservatives increasingly seem motivated
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

by a desire to regulate behavior in the mold of a particular ideological view of

human identity. The desire to preserve a system of economic privilege has not
been lost. Rather, the focus is now on returning groups—women, gays, cultural
minorities, people with disabilities—to their social place. Nothing less than a
reversal in hard-won legal rights has been undertaken. On the surface, it may
appear that regulation of all individual behavior is at issue. In fact, restrictions
on abortion, on sexual education for teenagers dealing with anything other than
abstinence, and on same-sex marriage are intended to constrain certain individu-
als, while a libertarian approach to gun ownership, environmental deregulation,

132 Lana F. Rakow

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the privatization of social security, and private gain at public expense accrues
benefits to others. Whose behavior is regulated and whose is unconstrained?
Identity matters to conservatives very much. To accuse scholars of the Left—or
more specifically, scholars of race and gender—of politicizing identity is to mis-
take effect for cause. Identities have always been political. What is reviled is our
insistence on making an issue of it.

What Are the Positions?

At the risk of caricature, I want to summarize major theoretical positions on

identity; other historical accounts (such as found in Friese 2002; Porter 1997;
and Sampson 1989) provide greater detail and a more sophisticated rendering of
the topic. Each position highlighted here explicitly or implicitly raises a question
about the subject that indicates how locating identity is the subject of concern.
My explanation is intended as a heuristic device to illuminate assumptions and
consequences of various lines of reasoning.
Contemporary scholarly discussions of identity commonly begin with the
Enlightenment, but pre-Enlightenment thought forms the basis for notions of
identity held by modern conservative Christians, the Right’s base of support.
In a social order ordained by God and enforced by the church and the feudal
system, identity in pre-Enlightenment times was not much in doubt. The answer
to the (unspoken) question “Who are you?” was provided to the addressee: “You
are your place,” an answer that asserted the assigned nature of identity. To get
free from this definition, Enlightenment rationalism provided a foundation for
the modern concept of identity by posing the question “Who am I?” which had
been answered with the now-clichéd response by Descartes, “I think, therefore
I am.” The rationalist position put “thinking man” at the center of the universe, a
shift from subject to object, staking claims on a new sense of identity that freed
elite males from a destiny predetermined by the church, nature, or the state. The
answer explained the ontological status of the self (“What is the status of my
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

existence?”) with an appeal to the self ’s epistemological function (“I am by my

knowing”) without apparent self-interest in the ideological consequence (“What
does it matter that I believe this?”). The question posed and answered thus ideal-
ized a particular notion of human identity as a set of abstract qualities inherent in
the individual worthy of citizenship (merit), qualities that needed to be enforced
by society (“inalienable rights”). This subject position became the basis for the
citizen of U.S. liberal theory, the individualistic European American male, free to
compete for rank and privilege in a hierarchical system of gender and race masked
as a merit system of intellect and ability. The identities of European American

Iden tit y 133

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 women, slave women and men, Native Americans exterminated or consigned
to reservations, Mexicans on the borderlands, and Asians useful for their work
on the railroads were handily defined as partial or dependent humans without
full rights to the primary basis for the determination of identity, citizenship.
After the Enlightenment came ideas about identity in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries that crystallized as positivism, by which I mean the set of
ideas influential in creating a science of society that captured the U.S. academy
in the twentieth century. Underlying positivism has been an implicit question
about identity, “Who are they?” The question suggests the citizen/man was joined
by the scientist/man in crafting a new social order out of the social flux of post-
slavery migration, immigration, populism, and women’s rights. The reply, “They
are the collective other,” cemented social relations until the present, explaining
and accounting for the behavior and predilections of new groups shouting for
enfranchisement in a U.S. cultural landscape around the turn of the last century.
The ideal citizen of rationalism could neither explain nor contain the political
newcomers’ insistence on personhood. Differences of nationality, class, gender,
and race set this collectivity apart from those who presumed themselves to have
the superior ability and training to accurately describe and predict social as well
as physical phenomena.
Thus in the United States were the “masses” born, the individualized collective,
each human unit countable and universalized as moldable by various influences
on her or his behavior—instinct, psychological imprinting, or the structure of
the unconscious—and otherwise undifferentiatable except by what became codi-
fied as “demographic variables.” These identities required observation because
behavioral differences needed monitoring and ameliorating by those with edu-
cational and moral superiority. All people could be viewed as having the same
ontological status but differing epistemological ones: some make knowledge
and others are to be known. This new ideological notion of identity led to a nu-
anced justification of a system of structural and political inequality purported
to be democratic. If rationalism justified the modern “self ”—absorbed with
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

self-interest and self-fulfillment—positivism invented the modern “other,” in

need of observation and containment. It is no coincidence that this construction
of the “other,” instead of leveling the playing field for citizens, clears it for those
who control the competition.
Having summarized three historical positions, I turn to two other positions.
The first has been advanced by some American cultural studies scholars who
raise by implication the question, “Who are we?” The question shifts attention
back from object to subject. The answer, “We are meaning makers,” highlights
the making of human community as a collective enterprise requiring an un-

134 Lana F. Rakow

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 derstanding and appreciation of the human experience in its cultural varieties.
The central problematic, unlike that for earlier notions of identity, is not how
to reconcile the self with society, or how to integrate differentiated groups into
a democracy, but instead how to map cultural community onto political soci-
ety, ritual onto democracy, conversation onto public discourse. Differences of
identity are minor or irrelevant to the task. Carey (1997g, 270) described this
model: “I haven’t given up the quest, typically if idealistically American, for an
open, nonascriptive basis of community life: one in which neighbors help one
another out—you know, lend the lawn mower, come to the funeral, take part in
the town meeting—but do not ask one another too many questions about their
private lives and pretty much ignore the color of skin, the shapes of noses and
eyes, and the distribution of X and Y chromosomes.”
What Carey considered physical features that mark individuals are among
the differences that he finds trivial, politically distracting, irrelevant to the work
of democracy. Carey (2002b, 213) contended that significant differences be-
tween cultures that exist across space were declining, while a preoccupation
with struggles over other differences within society were ascending. His answer
to the question “Who are we?” lay not in understanding what he regarded as
physical differences but rather in finding commonality across broad cultural
groups in the experience and practice of ritual and symbol. Cultural mean-
ings, various as they are, give us a common humanity, more important than
differences within a cultural group. The individual is assumed to have a moral
status as social subject that transfers unproblematically to a political status as
speaking subject. Here the ontological status of the individual is essentialized
rather than universalized, even while the epistemological understanding of the
position is made more complex. That is, all individuals regardless of cultural
membership are presumed to have an essential, stable identity (whether inflected
by or inhering in their physical variation) capable of taking up and participat-
ing in a fascinating variety of cultural meaning systems. Significant differences
thus lie in the variety of distinct, geographically separated cultures made pos-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

sible through the human capability of making meaning. Reducing differences

between cultures—once hailed by Marshall McLuhan as the happy result of
technology’s new global village—while highlighting differences within cultures
(e.g., gender, race, and class) evokes a sense of loss and irritation to those, such
as Carey, who are intrigued by cultural variety. What a cultural group does in
making meaning is presumed to have legitimacy. Cultures don’t make mistakes;
therefore conflicts over race and gender identity cannot stem from problems in
a culture’s underlying system of social relations but represent petty disturbances
of the social peace.

Iden tit y 135

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The final of five positions presented here, in contrast, takes a critical approach
to identity by pressing the question “Who wants to know?” Cultural legitimacy—
who has the authority to know and be known, ask questions and give answers,
determine and contest meanings—is very much at stake. Ideological explana-
tion is not taken for granted (as with rationalism), slipped in under the cover of
scientific logic (as with positivism), or overlooked (as with American cultural
studies); it is central to the question. Here we find feminist and critical race
scholars, queer theorists, and postcolonial theorists turning the question back
to the questioner and highlighting the relational nature of status as subject and
other, knower and known. Those of us, like our cartoon character Ernie, who
have group identities accorded less power and prestige than others, who struggle
for rights as citizens and moral agents, cannot escape the cultural meanings that
ascribe and inscribe who we are, even if we embrace our identities or reject or
chafe under them. Jill Johnston (1973, 68), writing when “identity politics” began
its most recent ascent, summarized the tension succinctly: “Identity is what you
can say you are according to what they say you can be.”
Critical theorists have used their vantage point as the other to question the
previously idealized, universalized, and essentialized notions of identity, replac-
ing them with one that sees identity as contested. It is now commonplace to find
descriptions of identity as fluid and unstable, as an ongoing process of negotia-
tion involving allegiances to various groups and making sense of experience
with available and contradictory meanings. The subject is decentered because
it no longer has an ontological status that precedes its entrance into discourse.
Such a move has not been without its critics from the very groups with the most
to gain from a new conceptualization of identity. The black feminist theorist
bell hooks (1995) reports suspicion from the black community over giving up
essentialism when gaining an identity and hence a voice has been seen as the
antidote to colonization and domination. Far from being the selfish preoccu-
pation of an intellectual elite, however, the work of understanding identity has
a deep significance for understanding social and political life. From this work
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

grows the possibility of constructing new, just political communities that might
approximate Dewey’s idealized community in a rapprochement of critical and
American cultural studies.

What Is the Analysis?

Rapprochement is possible only if an analysis of identity exposes the blind spot

of American cultural studies—its inability to understand gender and race. While
critical cultural scholars will recognize what follows as a rudimentary review of

136 Lana F. Rakow

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 some aspects of identity formation, critics of gender and race scholarship may
need a primer. In short, (1) humans categorize other humans; (2) a potentially
infinite variety of category systems is possible; (3) category systems have con-
sequences; and (4) these systems are messy and political, sometimes resulting
in overthrows of meaning.2
Let’s take these steps one by one. First, as Carolyn Marvin (2002, 192) says
succinctly, “society organizes bodies,” making identity cultural through and
through. A critical approach to identity recognizes that humans create orderly
worlds by creating patterns of similarity and difference, sorting into the sacred
and the profane, significant and irrelevant, “us” and “other.” Kinship systems,
divisions of labor, and rituals marking changes in time and space are established.
While Western contemporaries continue to believe chromosomes make women
and men and genes make races of them, historical and anthropological inquiries
into cultural category systems in other times and places set us straight. Neither
biology nor metaphysics can provide us an “accurate” mapping of human differ-
ences. How groups are created, by whom, and using what basis of differentiation
and justification are questions concerning a profoundly cultural activity. Gender,
race, ability, and age require cultural definition to achieve meaning. Given the
wide range of biological differences that might be used to sort human beings,
the ones that are used as markers should be seen not as inherent but rather as
cultural and hence not essential or immutable.
Meaning systems are created and put into play on a number of levels in com-
plex societies. Official systems provided by institutions of science, politics, and
religion in Western societies exist alongside the vernacular. Hence in the United
States we have an elaborate and formal coding system of animate and inanimate,
plant and animal, healthy and ill, edible and inedible, legal and illegal, existing
along with religious and folk category systems. This causes consternation among
political and scientific authorities. The official scientific system supported by the
political system insists on classification of female and male, requiring an assign-
ment at birth supposedly stemming from natural and inevitable physical differ-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

ences interpreted as superiority of male over female (aggressiveness, competition,

and logic purported to be greater in men than in women and only naturally and
accidentally the more valued qualities of human potential). Religions reinforce
the differences by attributing greater moral value to men than to women (women
come in second as the carrier of the sign of both sex and sin). Heterosexuality
supposedly maps accurately onto this system of gender, such that all women do
or should have a desire for men and all men should desire women, but only one
matched and unequal pair (different in height, division of labor, temperament,
interests, and brain configuration, for starters) is permissible at a time.

Iden tit y 137

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Category systems for race are notoriously fickle, whether using ancestry (the
amount of “blood” determining group membership), physical features (looking
like a member of a group), or cultural knowledge (“acting like one”). The vagaries
of these systems reinforce my point that racial groups are cultural and political
rather than biological ones. In a complex society such as the United States, the
presence of multiple racial and ethnic groups with conflicting meaning systems
for group inclusion or exclusion demonstrates the foolhardiness of believing an
accurate map—on the basis of genetics or any other grounds—is possible or even
desirable. Yet the stakes can be high. American Indians know the significance
of having a tribe officially recognized by the federal government, qualifying the
tribe for treatment as a sovereign nation, and of an individual’s recognition as
a registered member of a tribe, qualifying her or him to be a “real” Indian.
To make contemporary identity matters even more interesting, racial ancestry
is undergoing a radical revision with the extended capabilities of genetic analy-
sis, realigning conceptions of biology and ancestry and promising to change
the racial identities of many. The February 6, 2005, issue of Newsweek touted
advances in DNA analysis that can now trace X and Y chromosomes back to
their origins from the African ancestral “Adam” and “Eve.” No less than Henry
Louis Gates Jr., the well-known African American scholar, had to rethink his
black identity after DNA analysis showed he is as much European as African
(Kalb 2005, 48). Evidently our identities can shift with the cultural winds, and
most of us will be swept along.
Similarly, the valuation we put on groups is political rather than natural or
inevitable. It is no accident that mathematics, which is associated with men, is
more valued than nursing, which is associated with women. Or that European
notions of domination trump Native American philosophies of balance and
integration. Or that militaristic metaphors animate public discourse about topics
ranging from sports to politics. Or that sexual metaphors are used in contexts
ranging from construction to the courts. Cultural category systems are not only
about assigning group identity to individuals but also about holding together an
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

entire—if leaky, contested, contradictory, and multilayered—meaning system.

Consequently, when critical scholars pose the implied “Who wants to know?”
they are contesting the call and response of identity formation. They are chal-
lenging a social formation that structures social relations of power and meaning.
One example of the value of such analysis is found in work by R. W. Connell
(2002, 245), who constructs a sweeping and generally compelling history of
European and American masculinity, demonstrating that “masculinities are not
only shaped by the process of imperial expansion, they are active in that process
and help to shape it.”

138 Lana F. Rakow

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 What Is to Be Done?

To review, the pre-Enlightenment position asks “Who are you?” and responds,
“You are your place.” This position assigns identity based on the assumed innate
fit of the individual for preordained roles in a hierarchical social and economic
order. The rationalist asks “Who am I?” and responds, “I think, therefore I am.”
The rationalist idealizes a model individualistic subject fit for citizenship and
private self-fulfillment. The positivist asks “Who are they?” and responds, “They
are the collective other.” The positivist universalizes a generic individual, identi-
cal across all time and place, who is predictable and controllable if sufficiently
understood. The American cultural studies position asks “Who are we?” and
responds, “We are meaning makers.” It essentializes humans as interpretive crea-
tures for whom identity is unproblematic and meaningful to the individual. The
critical position asks, rhetorically, “Who wants to know?” By circling the question
back on itself, the critical scholar contests the notion of identity as a stable and
unvarying natural category without political or material consequences.
Now let’s turn back to consider how this survey of positions might be useful
for understanding our current political situation. From a critical perspective,
recent events in the United States suggest a heated contest over inroads made in
attempts to change rigid identity systems and the privileges that are accrued or
denied on the basis of them. Barack Obama may have won the White House, but
the quintessential citizen, “Joe the Plumber”—white, male, and working class—
evoked by the losing party and the rising incidences of hatred and threatened
violence in response to Obama’s election make it clear that the politics of gender,
race, and class are far from over. It is possible to see the contested and arbitrary
nature of identity categories, as well as what is at stake in the power to define and
enforce them. Conservatives seek to reinscribe the individual’s social standing
in a pre-Enlightenment model of assigned place with a rationalist inflection of
private, economic self-fulfillment (of those positioned to take advantage of it).
Hence controls over some behaviors are tightened and others loosened. Reli-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

gious meanings are winning out over scientific ones in some instances (e.g.,
proclaiming evolution as a theory equivalent to creationism or homosexuality
as moral depravity). Attacks on affirmative action programs in universities, sex
education in the schools, availability of abortion, and legalization of same-sex
marriage have in the recent past in the White House and some state electorates
been aligned with the priorities of Christian conservatives. The power to police
identity categories and their meanings is being wielded with a heavy hand. Can
anyone really now say that identity politics is irrelevant to these pressing politi-
cal conflicts? Can anyone really now say that identity politics is being played

Iden tit y 139

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 by academic gender and race scholars, when it is the Right that has launched a
concerted attack to shore up a rigid binary sex/gender system enforced by con-
trol of sexuality and marriage, an aggressive military agenda built on masculine
bravado, and a floundering economic system that depends on marginalized and
expendable workers who most often belong to minority cultural groups? Can
anyone really now say that if we all just overlooked our physical characteristics,
we could work out our (real) differences?
Despite a changing White House, hard political labor lies ahead, between this
current cultural landscape and a different one where identity matters are ones
more of choice than of compulsion or denial, where subordinated identities
can be valued and those that oppress others can be challenged. Perhaps critical
theory will flourish in this new repressive environment, although Paul Piccone
(1976, 142) thirty years ago too optimistically pronounced that in America, “the
system is rapidly discovering that it is too repressive for its own good.” Unfortu-
nately, repression is not dead, and repression of strongly held identities can lead
to violence. Amin Maalouf (2000) reminds us that identity battles can make
murderers of people, as evidenced by butchery around the world. The solution
is not to insist that identity does not matter but to recognize that it matters very
much. Our task is to figure out what to make of it, how to weave our differences
into a political theory, and to sketch for others what this world might look like.
But which differences, defined how and by whom?
It is time to return here to the challenge posed at the beginning of this essay. Is
it possible to envision new communicative processes that would produce Dewey’s
great conversation, a new public finding its voice around issues of political im-
port? If so, we must imagine how our identities can be acknowledged and played
out in these new spaces. Whether our multiple identities result from assignment
or adaptation, are read by others as physical or sexual difference, are built from
distinct experiences as members of groups, or involve allegiances to location or
principle, they cannot simply be set aside. They are what we bring to the table. As
Schrag (1986, 142) says, “The being of the subject is an implicate of communica-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

tive praxis—not a foundation for it.” It is in communication that we become who

we are. Our knowledge of ourselves and of our social location is precisely what
must be represented in our new conversational communities. Carey’s notion
of communities built on neighborliness and town-hall participation can work
only with a radical rethinking of the “who” of discourse. We cannot ignore that
pre-Enlightenment, rationalist, or positivistic notions of identity ensure that
town-hall meetings exclude or silence the participation of some identities. To
change the conversation is to change the meanings of identities. Maureen O’Hara
(1995, 155) offers the tantalizing prospect of something new that derives from the

140 Lana F. Rakow

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 realization that our identities are not fixed and that experts with absolute truth
cannot rescue us: “If I am who I am because you are who you are and we both
are who we are because others are who they are; if we accept that when we enter
into dialogue we both change; if it is true that we co-create reality, which in turn
creates us—then we are called to a new kind of community.”
Can we as scholars—those with the communitarian impulses of John Dewey
and the critical impulses of postmodernism—dream of a new kind of commu-
nity built from liberating notions of identity and imaginative communicative
practices? If we can, we have something to offer as a replacement to a vision of
society and identity that currently holds sway over the United States, one that
threatens to reverse what we have accomplished. We have the opportunity now
to create a new politics of identity, or we will remain captive to the tricks of
identity politics currently being played in and outside of the academy.

Notes
1. Heyes (2002) offers a useful history and discussion of identity politics in the United
States.
2. Rakow and Wackwitz (2004) explicate this process of identity production.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Iden tit y 141

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Part III Consequences
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Professionalism

Journalism without
Professional Journalists?
Stuart Allan

The English word journalist can be traced back at least as far as the
end of the seventeenth century, meaning broadly, “one whose work
is to write or edit public journals or newspapers.” Matters quickly
become complicated, however, when one seeks to determine the
professional role that the everyday use of this term has prescribed
over the years.
More than a question of semantics, the nature of the proper iden-
tity to be affirmed by journalists continues to be contested. Indeed,
nowhere else have the tacit assumptions informing a collective sense
of identity been more openly challenged than in the emergence of
the “citizen journalism” movement. In championing the virtues of
“amateur” reporters—especially their freedom from professional
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

complicity in the gatekeeping machinations of Big Media—citizen

journalism has rattled the foundations of the craft. Reactions to it,
from journalism’s inner circles and a wide range of journalism edu-
cators, have tended to range from the condemnatory to the dismis-
sive. For example, Samuel Freedman (2006), a Columbia University
journalism professor and columnist for the New York Times, despairs
over the movement’s current cachet, when “traditional, reportorial
journalism seems so besieged.” Despite its wrapping in idealism, he

145

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 argues, “citizen journalism forms part of a larger attempt to degrade, even to
disfranchise journalism as practiced by trained professionals. . . . To treat an
amateur as equally credible as a professional, to congratulate the wannabe with
the title ‘journalist,’ is only to further erode the line between raw material and
finished product. For those people who believe that editorial gate-keeping is a
form of censorship, if not mind control, then I suppose the absence of any medi-
ating intelligence is considered a good thing” (Freedman 2006). For critics such
as Freedman, an appreciation of the differing capacities of “the amateur, however
well-meaning, and the pro” is in serious danger of being lost. The implications
for traditional journalism, they fear, may well prove detrimental, hence their
calls to shore up the crumbling defenses of journalistic identity.
My exploration of professionalism begins by considering its modern forma-
tion at the start of the twentieth century. I argue that the newspaper proprietor
Joseph Pulitzer’s efforts to personally finance a journalism program for Columbia
University—in the face of considerable opposition—threw into relief the norma-
tive criteria informing the journalist’s proclaimed professional identity in the
eyes of advocates and critics alike. Against this historical backdrop, I return to
the current scene via an intervention by Nicholas Lemann, the current dean of
Columbia’s Journalism School. Like his previously cited colleague Freedman,
Lemann defines journalistic identity in sharp contrast to citizen journalism. His
attempt to reaffirm certain precepts informing traditional conceptions of such
an identity is notable on its own terms, but especially so given the responses it
generated—including, not surprisingly, ones from a wide array of commentators
in the blogosphere.

Journalists Made, Not Born

In describing the contradictory tendencies in the communications revolution un-

derway in the United States by the 1890s, James Carey (1997d) pinpointed three
particularly salient dimensions. First was the rise of mass media at a national
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

level, including modern newspapers and national magazines; the ascendancy

of press services; and the birth of forms of electronic communication. Second
was the development of specialized or minority media—defined, for example, in
relation to ethnic, occupational, class, regional, or religious identities. Important
here were the ways in which these minority media linked local milieus (for-
merly dependent on face-to-face contact) to the larger social structure, thereby
creating national communities of interest. Third was a newly emerging social
role: the professional communicator, who “mediates between two parties by use
of a skill at manipulating symbols to translate the language, values, interests,

146 Stuart Allan

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ideas, and purposes from the idiom of one group into an idiom acceptable to
a differentiated speech community” (Carey 1997d, 132). This last dimension is
particularly relevant here.
The role of the professional communicator as a “broker of symbols,” Carey
suggested in this essay, which was originally published in 1969, finds its place
in a wide range of occupations, including advertising, public relations, science
communication, and journalism, among others. In the 1890s all these fields
were transformed, albeit in different ways, by the development of new forms of
training (mainly through universities and colleges) as well as by the growth of
collective associations. Professional codes of conduct were gradually set down,
conferring a distinct role identity and elements of a vocational ideology. Be-
fore typically regarded as a literary genre, journalism rapidly became a form of
technical writing defined, to a considerable extent, by this task of translation.
“Journalism was not characterized merely as reporting that put the words and
actions of others into simpler language, but as a fluid interpretation of action
and actors, an effort to create a semantic reality that invested the ordinary with
significance. Journalists traditionally induced their audiences to come to terms
with old realities in new ways” (Carey 1997d, 137). A crucial factor in this trans-
formation was the growing commitment to “objective reporting.” By the end of
the nineteenth century journalists experienced a conversion downward; their
role was effectively “de-intellectualized” and simultaneously “technicalized.”
No longer were journalists independent interpreters of events; as professional
communicators they were increasingly inclined to become proficient in tech-
nical skill at writing rather than “intellectual skill as critics, interpreters, and
contemporary historians.” Valued here was the ability to translate specialized
languages into “an idiom that can be understood by broader, more amorphous,
less educated audiences” (137).
This “fetish” of objectivity, previously circumscribed by the commercial ad-
vantages to be accrued by nonpartisan reporting, was promptly becoming “ra-
tionalized into a canon of professional competence and ideology of professional
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

responsibility,” according to Carey. “It rested on the dubious assumption that

the highest standard of professional performance occurred when the reporter
presented the reader with all sides of an issue (though there were usually only
two), presented all the ‘facts,’ and allowed the reader to decide what these facts
meant” (1997d, 137–38). Traditional roles of advocacy and criticism were largely
relegated to a subordinate status in light of these new norms, procedures, and
conventions. The journalist as professional communicator was encouraged to
assume a passive stance with respect to reporting the claims of sources. To the
extent that journalists found themselves dependent on these sources for infor-

Professiona lism 147

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 mation, and thereby inclined to internalize their attitudes and expectations, the
creative work of reporting—to say nothing of its independence—was severely
compromised. At the same time, however, long-standing anxieties about what
should constitute the proper identity for the journalist were gradually becoming
reconciled to the institutional dictates of professional communication.
The vast research on the ascendancy of professionalism recognizes the for-
mative influence of institutions such as press clubs and trade unions, as well as
editor and publisher associations, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Equally pertinent are essays by journalists themselves during this period. In 1875
the editor of the New York Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, remarked:
Our greatest newspapers are carried on rigorously upon the idea that jour-
nalism is a profession, and that they are not anxious to use ’prentice hands
in any except its less responsible presses. The preliminary education of the
mass of journalists in New York is much better now, I fancy, than that of
the corresponding classes in the profession ten or twenty years ago. I know
in the Tribune, about which there has been a popular idea, once falsely at-
tributed to its editor, that “of all of the horned cattle he least liked to see a
college graduate in his office,” there is scarcely a writer who is not a college
graduate; while, indeed, two-thirds or more of its reporters are . . . men of
liberal education. (Reid 1875, 30)

This alignment of education with professionalism (counterpoised with apprentice

labor) is a recurrent feature of such accounts. Less attention, however, is devoted
to the inscription of corresponding conceptions of identity in “liberal education”
curricula. Particularly noteworthy in this context was Joseph Pulitzer’s initiative
to establish a school of journalism, a project propelled by his fervent desire to
secure the basis for a radically different conception of professional identity. At
stake, in his opinion, was nothing less than the future of democratic life.
Biographies of Joseph Pulitzer tend to focus on his remarkable role in re-
inventing popular journalism at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York
World. His impassioned commitment to human-interest reporting, served up
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

with large dollops of scandal and sensationalism, lifted circulation figures to new
heights. By the age of forty-three, however, Pulitzer had stopped editing. He was
virtually blind; a hearing problem meant that the ordinary noises of everyday
life were almost unbearable, and so he retreated from public life. Nonetheless,
he maintained near-daily contact with the Post-Dispatch and World via coded
messages. Evidently the idea of a school of journalism first occurred to him
around this time, although it evolved only slowly into a plan of action. In 1892
Pulitzer tentatively approached Columbia, proposing that he help it establish

148 Stuart Allan

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the country’s first full-fledged college of journalism. The university declined, but
he was not to be deterred. The impetus to push ahead appeared to have gained
momentum as the Pulitzer name became increasingly associated with yellow
journalism following the sensationalistic reporting of the Spanish-American War
of 1898. His paper and William Randolph Hearst’s competing New York Journal
had both stooped to new lows in their efforts to outdo each other. Exaggerated
reports of atrocities, intended to mobilize popular opinion in favor of national
intervention, had led Congress to censure both papers for inflaming public
emotions.
A chastened Pulitzer set about improving the quality of his papers. Mean-
while, in 1902, Columbia University’s new president, Nicholas Murray Butler,
was willing to reconsider Pulitzer’s proposition for a college of journalism. The
two agreed on a formal plan in early 1903 but immediately encountered difficul-
ties with a committee overseen by Columbia trustees. Alterations were made
before its principal tenets were endorsed. Even so, serious reservations remained
about both the nature of the university’s association with a press baron and the
very legitimacy of journalism as a subject for an Ivy League university. Intense
negotiation ensued over the conditions for Pulitzer’s endowment of $2 million.
The announcement of the agreement was delayed by Butler’s worry that some
journalists would be “antagonistic, or at least cynical, toward the proposal” (in
Boylan 2003, 15). Eventually, however, Butler sidestepped the last-minute conces-
sions Pulitzer demanded and released a statement. The story, with little reference
to the discord, made the World’s front page on August 16, 1903.
Not surprisingly, as Butler and the trustees had anticipated, the very idea of
a school of journalism was disparaged by a wide array of commentators; most
were scathing in their criticism. Among those prepared to offer a more con-
sidered opinion was the newspaper owner and editor Horace White. Declaring
his inability to perceive a need for such a school, he argued, “The university
has nothing to teach journalists in the special sense that it has to teach lawyers,
physicians, architects and engineers. It can teach the technique of those profes-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

sions. It cannot teach the technique of journalism” (White 1904, 25–26). Only in
the newsroom could journalists learn “technical requirements,” including, and
easily most important, in his view, a “nose” for news:
In this phrase are included the recognition, the valuation, the collection
and arrangement of news. Every experienced journalist will agree that a
nose for news cannot be cultivated at college. Some other kinds of noses
may be, but the one which perceives immediately what kind of news the
public is most eager to read, and knows offhand how to get it and present

Professiona lism 149

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 it in an attractive way—that is something which can be trained only in a
newspaper office. There are differences of scent between trained newspaper
men as marked as between different breeds of dogs, and the demand for
journalists who are both highly gifted and highly trained in this particular,
is great and increasing; but such men have never been made at college, and
never will be. (26)

The other “technicalities” of journalism included phonography (a system of

shorthand), typewriting, and proofreading—hardly the fruit of a university’s
tree of knowledge. Columbia “would no more think of embracing these things
in her curriculum than she would of establishing a chair of head-lines, a chair
of interviews, or a chair of ‘scoops’” (26).
The gauntlet thrown down, Pulitzer picked it up—at the urging of the editor of
the North American Review. “In complying with this request,” he stated, “I have
enlarged the scope of the reply to include all other criticisms and misgivings,
many honest, some shallow, some based on misunderstanding, but the most
representing only prejudice and ignorance” (Pulitzer 1904, 1). Pulitzer offered a
passionate defense of journalism’s importance for democracy, in general, and of
the pressing need to elevate its status as a profession. From the outset, then, he
challenged the assertion that a “newspaper man” must rely entirely upon his (or
her) “natural aptitude,” that is, that such individuals must be born, not made.
Pulitzer objected to the claim that “news instinct must be born” and the cor-
responding claim that it therefore cannot be taught within a university context.
However great the journalists’ gifts may be, if news instinct as born were turned
loose without the sound judgment bred by experience and training, the results
would be much more pleasing to the lawyers than to the editor: “One of the
chief difficulties in journalism now is to keep the news instinct from running
rampant over the restraints of accuracy and conscience” (Pulitzer 1904, 5). On
a related charge that “moral courage cannot be taught” (7) Pulitzer again could
only partly agree. “Adherence to convictions can and should be taught by pre-
cept and example as not only high principle but sound policy,” he maintained;
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

students will experience a “moral tonic” when shown how “inflexible devotion
to the right” underpins journalism (8).
Pulitzer expressed skepticism that anyone at a newspaper has the time or in-
clination to teach raw reporters what they ought to know, so properly informed
journalists will be assets from the start. He thereby confronted the complaint
that a school of journalism would establish an invidious class distinction of the
few who had the benefits of college training against the many who had not. So
much the better, said Pulitzer: “I sincerely hope it will create a class distinction

150 Stuart Allan

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 between the fit and the unfit. We need a class feeling among journalists—one
based not upon money but upon morals, education and character” (1904, 11).
The school of journalism, then, represented nothing less than the start of a
movement that would “raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession,
growing in the respect of the community as other professions far less important
to the public interests have grown” (Pulitzer 1904, 19). This was crucial, given
the harm an ethically compromised news organization can wreak on the com-
munity: “Nothing less than the highest ideals, the most scrupulous anxiety to
do right, the most accurate knowledge of the problems it has to meet and a
sincere sense of its moral responsibility will save journalism from subservience
to business interests, seeking selfish ends antagonistic to the public welfare”
(22). Pulitzer’s vision of journalism as a public service thus necessarily called
into question the commercial imperatives of the press. He sought to disen-
gage the school from a narrow market-based conception of its purpose while
simultaneously recognizing the relative independence commercial prosperity
affords. Journalism, once redefined in these terms, cannot be directly aligned
with the priorities of profit making, the corporate ethos of the bottom line, and
this would be taught: “Above knowledge, above news, above intelligence, the
heart and soul of a paper lie in its moral sense, in its courage, its integrity, its
humanity, its sympathy for the oppressed, its independence, its devotion to the
public welfare, its anxiety to render public service” (32).
While such sentiments may seem at odds with the language of the market-
place, for Pulitzer they captured something of the values he trusted would be
instilled in the college’s classrooms. The teaching of journalism as a learned pro-
fession would lead to better journalists entering the workplace, he was certain.
Moreover, they in turn would improve the quality of their news organizations,
which would better serve the public. The making of journalists corresponded
directly to the making of citizens. Hanging in balance of this process was the
future of democracy itself. Pulitzer stated this conviction in his essay (it was later
inscribed—albeit with the word corrupt mysteriously removed—on a plaque
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

just inside the door of the Columbia School of Journalism): “Our Republic and
its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press,
with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve
that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.
A cynical, mercenary, demagogic, corrupt press will produce in time a people
as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the
hands of the journalists of future generations” (48).

Professiona lism 151

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The Rise of the Amateur

Nicholas Lemann was appointed dean of the Graduate School of Journalism in

2003 after a task force convened by Columbia’s then president Lee Bollinger reas-
sessed the school’s mission and curriculum. “To teach the craft of journalism is a
worthy goal,” Bollinger had declared, “but clearly insufficient in this new world
and within the setting of a great university” (in Arenson 2002, B7). While quick
to acknowledge the value of instruction in the craft of journalism, he stressed
the necessity of balancing it with the rigors of the academic study of substan-
tive issues across disciplines, not least in the realm of mass communication
systems. There “is a role at the university for skills training, but it should not be
the dominant position” (in Farrell 2002). Evidently inspired by Pulitzer’s vision,
he made plain his commitment to realizing its promise. Largely left implicit in
this reorientation away from “training” toward “education,” however, was the
thorny question of the best way to reconfigure the terms of journalistic identity
embedded in the school’s professional ethos. Answers to it, not surprisingly,
continue to defy easy consensus.
The Columbia debate echoed around the world. Significantly, the issues it
highlighted have resonated even more sharply in subsequent years, in large part
because of the Internet’s growing impact on journalism. Prospective students,
for example, might ask why, in an era of citizen journalism, when everyone is
a reporter, they should attend a journalism school. Lemann (2006, 49) spelled
out the implications of amateurism and “journalism without journalists” in the
New Yorker:
Reporting—meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occu-
pational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to
go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and
impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to
a general audience—is a distinctive, fairly recent invention. . . . It is a power-
ful social tool, because it provides citizens with an independent source of
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

information about the state and other holders of power. It sounds obvious,
but reporting requires reporters. They don’t have to be priests or gatekeepers
or even paid professionals; they just have to go out and do the work.

On-line citizen reporting, he argued, risks blurring this “distinct occupational

category” such that journalism itself suffers: “The Internet is not unfriendly
to reporting; potentially, it is the best reporting medium ever invented. . . . To
keep pushing in that direction, though, requires that we hold up original re-
porting as a virtue and use the Internet to find new ways of presenting fresh

152 Stuart Allan

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 material—which, inescapably, will wind up being produced by people who do
that full time, not ‘citizens’ with day jobs” (49). This stark dichotomy between
the traditional journalist producing original reporting and “citizens” with day
jobs clarified Lemann’s definition of journalistic identity. Internet cheerleaders
had the rhetorical upper hand, while traditional journalists often sound either
clueless or apologetic; still, “there is not much relation between claims for the
possibilities inherent in journalist-free journalism and what the people engaged
in that pursuit are actually producing” (49).
Lemann was convinced that the reportorial achievements of citizen journalism
were too modest to warrant the “soaring rhetoric” associated with them, a view-
point that he presumably knew would ignite a powerful reaction in the blogo­
sphere. This is precisely what happened. The main points of dispute revolved
around his claims about amateur reporting’s replacing professional journalism
(as opposed to complementing it), the relative amount of original material be-
ing produced, and whether the movement was living up to its hype (in the eyes
of critics) or promise (in the opinion of advocates). Lemann’s status as an elite
member of the “journalistic establishment” frequently attracted comment, with
some objecting to his “patronizing attitude.” Among the more even-handed
responses, I believe, was a post by Mitch Ratcliffe (2006) on his blog Rational
Rants: “What must be embraced by the citizen journalists out there is the rigor
and self-criticism that journalism represents. Where Nicholas Lemann’s critique
of citizen journalism falls down is his lack of critical reflection on journalism
itself. Yes, most citizen journalism today looks like church newsletter writing
[a claim made in the essay], but so does a lot of ‘real’ journalism. The celebrity-
and-spin mechanism has taken such thorough hold of the mainstream that good
journalism is the exception there, too.” Jeff Jarvis (2006), writing on his blog
BuzzMachine, was angrier. He chastised Lemann for setting up bogus concerns
in order to “tear them down” with “lazy argument.” Taking issue with Lemann’s
view that professionals set journalism standards, he argued that standards are
set, as always, “by the public who have always decided every day whom to believe
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and whom to trust—only now, we get to hear their decision process.” Lemann, he
said, defined journalism by the people who perform it—and by their training—
rather than by the act itself. Challenging Lemann for limiting “journalism to
journalists,” Jarvis called for a collaboration between journalists and their citizen
counterparts, for the identification of new opportunities—in both journalism
and journalism schools—and for the formalization of this partnership into a
collaborative, networked endeavor (see also Allan 2006).
Given the conceptual tensions implicit in Lemann’s defense of the “tradi-
tional journalist,” especially in the light of Carey’s (1997d) account of the rise of

Professiona lism 153

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 professional communicators, one cannot avoid noting its reliance on familiar
assumptions about identity—that is, the insistence that journalists must always
uphold proper reportorial standards, even in the face of great personal sacri-
fice. Nonetheless, the evaluative criteria by which these standards are defined
recurrently elude codification and are regarded as self-evident (exceptions in-
cluding libel or slander). Indeed, it is their perceived violation by “amateurs”
that is much more likely to render them visible; rules tend to be more clearly
understood when they are broken. The correlative commitment to the strictures
of “objectivity” is similarly left unspoken but is nonetheless discernible in the
espousal of ostensibly dispassionate observation and detached transcription.
The apparent subjectivity of citizen journalists, this position implies, warrants
condemnation to the extent that they cannot separate facts from values, let alone
opinion. An ability to identify and sustain such differentiations, long associated
with the ascendancy of the “quality” newspapers, is thereby deemed a matter
of personal integrity for the common good of the craft; as such, it distinguishes
journalists from aspirants.
One might be forgiven for drawing certain parallels between the “raw” jour-
nalist needing university education, as perceived by Pulitzer, and the citizens
with day jobs rebuffed by Lemann. Indicative of both perspectives is a marked
disdain for the apparent deviancy of the amateur, whose pretensions threaten
the ideology of professionalism. As Columbia’s journalism school was being
founded, the tenets of this ideology were being hurriedly consolidated in the
curriculum. Journalists at the time, as Carey (1978, 2000b, 2007) said, rarely
were educated in any formal sense of the term. Instead, “they were an unlikely
collection of itinerant scribblers, aspiring or more often failed novelists, ne’er-
do-well sons or daughters of established families and, most importantly, the
upwardly mobile children of immigrants with an inherited rather than an
educated gift of language, without much education. . . . They were often radical
in their politics and unpredictable in their conduct” (Carey 2000b, 16). Not-
ing this “ragtag” collection’s attraction to socialism and trade unions, Carey
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

also provocatively challenged Pulitzer’s motives in launching the Columbia

school: “Pulitzer was probably not alone in believing that a university education
might domesticate this unruly class, turn them into disciplined workers and
end their flirtation with socialism and trade unions” (16). Journalism educa-
tion, viewed this way, is a form of social control. It is a means of “co-opting
an undisciplined and contentious group and aligning them more closely with
the aims of business enterprise.” Intertwined with quests for knowledge and
professional standards is the desire for “a workforce that is moral, orderly,
habitual, and conservative” (16).

154 Stuart Allan

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey was questioning, in effect, whether courses such as Columbia’s were
intended to transform “irresponsible writers” into “responsible journalists” for
prospective employers, as well as for reasons that suited the university more
generally. It was apparent to him that faculty advisers were aiming to design
courses revolving around not only the essentials of the craft “but a politics and
ethics congenial to the needs of college presidents seeking, like all administra-
tors, more order and docility” (Carey 2000b, 19). To the extent that courses of
this type were perceived to curb the “natural excess of students who wanted
to be journalists,” they were rewarded with institutional legitimacy—both in
educational terms (where journalism’s place in the academy was slowly be-
ing secured, albeit in less than comfortable circumstances) and in professional
ones. “The history of journalism education is, therefore, part of the story of the
creation of a new social class invested with enormous power, and authority,”
Carey concluded (1978, 848). As such, “without meeting the historic canons
by which professions are identified, journalism has been made a profession by
fiat” (850). Thus, ensuing debates about the “expert” identity to be assumed by
journalists—once cast within the terms of an “ethical practitioners versus amoral
hacks” continuum—would be in all likelihood effectively resolved before they
had properly commenced.

Journalists as Citizens

In a 1906 letter to one of his Post-Dispatch editors, Pulitzer explained how to

ensure the newspaper served its readers:
Summing up in a nutshell: DON’T be afraid, but be sure that you are right.
Don’t go to the other extreme, but be exactly judicial and independent and
always fair. Have nothing to do with politicians on either side. . . . Every issue
of the paper presents an opportunity and duty to say something courageous
and true; to rise above the mediocre and conventional; to say something that
will command the respect of the intelligent, the educated, the independent
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

part of the community; to rise above fear of partisanship and fear of popular
prejudice. (in Seitz 1924, 286; see also Ireland 1938)

On the occasion of Pulitzer’s death, five years later, this vision—together with
opinions about the extent to which it was realized—figured prominently in as-
sessments of his life and the impact his newspapers had on the “new journalism”
of the era. Shortly thereafter, on September 30, 1912, the first cohort of students
arrived to attend the School of Journalism (a term’s tuition cost eighty-five dol-
lars). Seventy-nine students were enrolled, including twelve women. Over the

Professiona lism 155

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 years to come, fewer than a third of the enrollees earned degrees; many of the
remainder left in favor of newspaper employment (Baker 1954; Boylan 2003;
Hohenberg 1974).
In contrast to the legal and medical professions, which adopted strict proce-
dures of entry, licensed codes of ethics, and formal methods of self-regulation,
no such measures were thought to be consistent with the practice of journalism
envisaged for Columbia’s graduates. Certainly Pulitzer held that journalism’s
status—its elevation in the eyes of readers and journalists—nonetheless deserved
equal recognition. Professionalism was to provide the guiding ethos. The fac-
tors shaping identity formation were to revolve around a declared commitment
to the virtues of public-spiritedness. Precisely what Pulitzer’s attendant “stan-
dard of civic righteousness” would entail defied easy elucidation, finding only a
broad definition in relation to the “character” necessary to advance the public
good. Moral courage, so vital for public service, would have to be taught—an
aptitude for its principles, and with it the determination to behave responsibly,
was not inborn. Here, Pulitzer’s (1904, 19) distinction between “real journalists”
and those whose newspaper work “requires neither knowledge nor conviction”
underscored the difference between the personal qualities to be engendered by
journalism education and those derived from “mere business training.”
Pulitzer’s bold assessment of the normative criteria shaping his preferred
configuration of journalistic identity helps illuminate some of the assumptions
informing current journalists’ role perceptions. A certain mythology celebrates
this aspiration to democratic ideals (ranging from claims made by advocacy
organizations to fictional portrayals of journalism in the entertainment me-
dia), despite the recurrent skepticism expressed by many journalists themselves
concerning “visions” of their craft. More often than not, however, these familiar
discourses of identity, when read against the grain, reveal their dependence on
normalized—that is, professionalized—structures of social exclusion. Critical
researchers have documented how class differences can underpin hiring deci-
sions, for example, where informal considerations about family or personal con-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

nections, educational background, and financial resources (to offset the relatively
low pay at entry levels) may come to bear in what is almost always a highly
competitive process. Feminist researchers have shown how journalistic identity
continues to be defined within the day-to-day “macho culture” of the newsroom;
female journalists’ perceptions of sexual discrimination typically differ from
those of male colleagues. Ethnic minority journalists, research suggests, may find
themselves encountering inferential forms of racism, where pressures are placed
upon them to “write white” so as to conform to certain preconceptions about
what constitutes proper, objective reporting for predominantly white audiences.

156 Stuart Allan

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Deconstructing these factors—often subtle, seemingly “commonsensical” in their
influence—renders explicit the gap between the rhetoric of journalistic identity
and its lived materiality. Pulitzer’s intervention was ultimately about enhancing
the relevance of journalistic identity to democratic values, to ensure that in the
making of journalists, citizens would be produced. As such, it continues to rep-
resent a clarion call for change in both newsrooms and journalism classroom.
One way to engage with citizen journalism is to reinvigorate the journalist’s
identity as a citizen. Schools of journalism begin from the premises of their
profession, Carey observed: “In transmitting the language of professionalism
[a journalism school] makes available to students a ‘taken-for-granted world’ of
journalism that is rarely questioned or critically analyzed” (1978, 853). Consider-
ing the extent to which this holds true today, when established approaches to jour-
nalism education risk appearing anachronistic, invites self-reflexivity about all
aspects of a university program’s provision. The pressures on journalism educators
to make their curricula conform to the changing demands of the news industry
must be met at many levels, but especially with respect to the implications for
teaching what counts as an appropriate identity in both personal and collective
terms. This requires renewed commitment to experiment and exploration.
Citizen journalism is rewriting the prestigious role once held to be the exclu-
sive province of professional journalists. Any sense of complacency, however
ingrained in institutional norms and values, must be recast before viable alterna-
tives will begin to find purchase. Prospective journalists willing to participate in
dialogue and debate about how best to define their identity in new, progressive
terms may want to begin not with the premises of a profession they seek to
serve but rather with their obligations to the diverse publics whose interests they
will claim to represent. Now is the time for journalists to rethink their fraught
relationship with their fellow citizens.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Professiona lism 157

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Politics

Media Power,
Status Politics,
and Partisanship
Frederick Wasser
James Carey once explained that when he decided to read the lit-
erature of communication, “a wise man” suggested he begin with
John Dewey (Carey 1989, 13). He never named the wise man.1 In my
case the wise man was James Carey himself. As refracted by Carey,
Jürgen Habermas, and others, Dewey is often in my thoughts during
the contemporary crisis in American democracy. This crisis can be
defined any number of ways and at any number of levels, so I cannot
presume to touch on all its fundamentals or even exhaustively list
the ways to analyze it. Instead I will elaborate on a midlevel analysis
of the 1987 Bork hearings that Carey offered almost a decade ago.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Carey hit on something of great use when he investigated how the

media and political leadership handled Robert Bork’s failed nomi-
nation to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. While he discussed this
as a “media event” of excommunication, I am interested not in the
ritual model of media events per se but in the way Carey’s frame
grounds analyses of the evolving relationship between politics and
the new media landscape.
To set up the importance of this analysis, we can contrast Dewey,
whose Democracy and Education (1966 [1916]) positioned education

158

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 as the key to democracy, to the U.S. political and media establishments that, in
1987, abandoned the idea of using politics to educate. This statement needs con-
text because the turn was incremental, and the previous condition of televised
politics had never been a paragon of reflective discussion. But previously media
and political leaders acknowledged the functionality of such discourse. It is a
commonplace that the Bork hearings eroded bipartisanship. Carey’s analysis
suggests a stronger point: this erosion represented a refusal to educate, to listen,
and to reflect. This turn sets up our current crisis.
As articulated in the previously mentioned book and elsewhere, John Dewey’s
model of discursive democracy heavily emphasized the necessity of education.
Dewey was building an ontology that postulates the collective as prior to the
individual. This is to say that we are capable of individual consciousness only
because we already have language in common with other people. The image of
democracy that comes into being is one of children interacting in the sandbox,
breaking free of their family for the first time. He argues that we really learn
to be human not in specialized narrow communities such as the family, or a
gang of thieves (Dewey’s own image), but in an inclusive—indeed, national—
community. This method of government forces citizens to speak to one another
and gives us things (rei publicae) about which to speak.
The last two-decade period of growing partisanship is frankly surprising,
since it far exceeds its underlying causes. After all, the United States is no lon-
ger divided by basic issues such as slavery or widespread nationalistic or ethnic
violence. Partisanship itself seems to be the crisis. We now suffer a style of gov-
erning premised on the refusal to listen to opposition. This has hampered our
ability to deal with terrorism, globalization, depletion of resources, and unequal
distribution of wealth and medical coverage. Because there are no commensurate
causes, we must consider whether contingent factors, such as the postmodern
constructions of subjectivity, technologies of media, or the training of journal-
ists, are responsible.
James Carey was fated to live through these decades, and I evaluate his entire
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

career as a Deweyite response to the rise of partisanship. Starting in the 1960s,

he began with considerations of McLuhan and Innis informed by his own philo-
sophical and economic questions. The two Canadians resonated with Dewey
because they described the interaction within oral culture that obviously could
serve a discursive democracy. Carey turned to the burgeoning cultural studies
movement and Clifford Geertz’s anthropology in order to think about communi-
ties, their foundation in ritual, and the environment they provide for democracy.
The problem that confounded Dewey in the early twentieth century, however,
was how to remodel the discursive democracy of smaller communities for a

Politics 159

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 continental nation-state. This was also a problem for the Birmingham school,
championing of the resistance of subcultures. How does such resistance to a
dominant hegemony become visible in large nations? Journalism was the forum
of visibility for communities that are so large that they can only be “imagined.”
This is why Carey was so interested in journalism education and even accepted a
position, in the last phase of his career, at a professional journalism school in the
metropolitan center of New York City. His belief was that journalism provided
the discursive frame in an American democracy.
In the 1960s the turmoil and challenges came from problems of inclusion.
The multifaceted rights movement was trying to incorporate new groups into
the public sphere without eroding diverse identities ranging from gender to
sexuality to race. For Americans these challenges were paralleled on the for-
eign affairs level if one frames the Vietnam War as a postcolonial struggle of
reborn nations to assert their equality and autonomy. In this frame the political
struggles to win passage of federal civil rights legislation and to withdraw from
foreign interventions took on an educational tone, persuading people that the
new relations were consistent with abiding American democratic values. Since
it was messy and strongly associated with waves of violence and disruption, the
process rarely looked like education. Another tone of fear and exclusion was
reinvigorated in national politics and another frame of partisanship was appar-
ent in media representations.
Where was the tipping point to the contemporary condition of partisan frames
trumping the educational frame in politics?
The current wave of partisan exclusion started when the Republican Goldwater
faction eliminated the Rockefeller faction, with the strategy of narrowing their
own party’s base. It further took hold with Nixon’s so-called southern strategy
and the Reagan-Bush appeal to evangelical conservatives (dominated by south-
ern whites). While such regionalism and ideological appeals seem part and
parcel of the democratic give-and-take, their actual effect was to drive a major
national party to embrace the exclusionary rhetoric that has been a feature of
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

southern politics since antebellum times.

The discursive/educational model of democracy asks that we keep talking
with one another even if we energetically and raucously disagree. This model
strongly deplores accusations that talk gives comfort to the enemy. In any case,
talk and interaction are to be valued as ultimate goals. Universal inclusion is
ideal, but even inclusion within a segment is preferable. This may be contro-
versial among Carey’s younger, leftist-minded colleagues, but I read this notion
of inclusion as an ever-widening ripple, not as an all-or-nothing proposition.
In the twenty-first century, having all members of the Republican Party talk to

160 Frederick Wasser

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 one another is good; it is more preferable that Republicans talk to Democrats,
and it is infinitely preferable that they talk to Cuban communists, Islamic fun-
damentalists, and other demonized groups. The current partisanship has spread
its poison even within segments, however, such that even within a narrow party
base there is little exchange.
While many on the Left would not see Republicans’ not talking to one another
as an appreciable decline from Republicans’ not talking to others, I think Dewey
and Carey would. It is too high a bar to insist that reason will emerge only from
the inclusion of all in the discourse. We should be concerned that even within nar-
row segments, such as white men of power, people are no longer conversing.
The political shift is just one part of our crisis; the others are several media
shifts. Here the narrative gathers momentum in the 1980s, a decade that saw
particularly rapid introductions of alternative delivery systems. By the beginning
of the 1980s original cable programming on HBO, MTV, CNN, and elsewhere
had achieved mainstream status in American popular culture. The video-cassette
recorder had changed the movie industry and facilitated the sale and mergers
of many Hollywood studios into large transnational media conglomerates. One
such agglomeration was the Australian News Corporation’s purchase of Twen-
tieth-Century Fox and Metromedia to create the Fox broadcasting network. In
1986 Fox became a fourth TV network, breaking the three-network domination
that had lasted for thirty-one years. In short, opportunity for audience fragmen-
tation increased as people turned away from the big three to video, cable, or
Fox. At the same time, an expanded global audience emerged as transnational
media companies deepened and extended their reach.
Meanwhile, in 1985–86, all three networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) changed
ownership. In all three cases, the change diffused the pride of ownership and
led to increased focus on profits. The emphasis on the bottom line led to re-
ductions, including cuts in news-gathering resources and a radical decline in
the operation of foreign news bureaus. The 1980s also witnessed the advent of
national newspapers, led by USA Today and followed by the national printing
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and distribution of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Whether
these newspapers led to greater news availability is hard to say. The pioneering
USA Today summarized the news without expanding the resources of its pub-
lisher, Gannett. The “national” newspapers would lead to a certain segmenta-
tion, inspiring local newspapers to divert resources away from international
and financial coverage. Only CNN expanded news-gathering resources at this
time. The twenty-four-hour news cycle of CNN was much remarked at that
time, but did this improve the audience’s interest in news and information?
Apparently not; instead, it seems that media fragmentation and the decline in

Politics 161

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 foreign news played to increasingly distracted audiences. Michael Deaver and
other presidential advisers famously orchestrated displays of President Ronald
Reagan to appeal to the distracted audience by favoring photo and other visual
opportunities over analytical speeches and interviews or news conferences.
The histories of media fragmentation and political partisanship obviously
have an interrelationship, not of cause and effect, but of codependency. In the
Big Three network era, a functional political establishment collaborated with
media powers to use TV as the site of democratic public exhibition. This is the
U.S. history that Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz had in mind when they described
the international phenomenon of consensual “media events.” Carey, however,
turned to the Bork nomination in 1987 to propose an alternative model of me-
dia event as “dissensus rather than consensus” (Yadgar 2003, 208). Looking at
both the original model and the alternative view will help explain the decisive
degradation.

Media Events

Dayan and Katz first defined “media events” as a genre of rituals that occur
when the political leadership and media executives negotiate and schedule live
coverage of a major event. These are not breaking stories but set pieces in the life
of a nation or a global community. They are “high holiday” moments that bring
together communities or nations, particularly after tragedies. The funerals of
John Kennedy (1963) and Princess Diana (1997) were such moments. Dayan and
Katz also categorized “contests,” such as presidential debates, as media events.
They emphasized that even contests can result in a renewal of common purpose,
“not conflict but reconciliation” (Dayan and Katz 1992, 8–9). Moreover, they
stipulated, a successful media event requires that the media and political sphere
agree about its purpose and that the audience accept the event’s intended mean-
ing. Yadgar (2003) characterized this model as recognition of ritual’s integrative
power. Most of the examples Dayan and Katz offer occur within democracies,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

although they discussed the pope’s 1979 visit to communist Poland. Even this
event pointed to the future democratization of Eastern Europe. Thus the media
event has a flavor of doing for mass democracies what coronations, conquests,
and contests do for other political systems. This model of functionalism attracted
the attention of Deweyites looking for the forms in which a mass democracy
communicates.
Dayan and Katz proposed an international model, but media events can par-
ticularly inform the shifts in American broadcasting. I wish to examine the
American history of the media event. Radio had previously relayed the high

162 Frederick Wasser

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 political events, particularly the beginning and end of World War II. American
broadcast networks aspired to prestige and to fulfill political functions, albeit
timidly. The networks were so timid that the Federal Communications Com-
mission tried to prod their stations with the 1949 Fairness Doctrine, which, as
is well-known, required broadcasters to “devote a reasonable percentage of time
to the coverage of controversial issues.” This administrative rule clumsily tried
to impose Dewey-like discourse by obliging broadcast stations to air matters
of public importance and to give time to viewpoints other than those already
aired on the broadcast station. When television had to confront controversy, the
instinct of broadcasting executives was to frame this in terms that were already
sanctioned by the political leadership.
Thus early TV embraced exceptional moments that the political leadership
had already contained in rituals of resolving tragedies and controversies. Sena-
tor McCarthy was already wounded by the time of the 1954 Army-McCarthy
hearings. Dayan and Katz discussed the broadcast of the event as a contest that
reestablished limits after a transgression, reintegrating the community after a
breach. Television’s place as the center of the rituals marking the nation was
consecrated with its live coverage of the 1963 Kennedy funeral. The prestige of
television now gave it more confidence in its dealings with government.
During the 1970s network news started to veer from the frame provided by
administrations and to court controversy.2 Nonetheless, TV remained sufficiently
consensual to serve as the medium of ritual. Note, as an illustration of this, that
newspapers uncovered and pursued the misdeeds of the Nixon administration,
whereas television broadcast the 1973 hearings on the Watergate scandal. Dayan
and Katz interpreted these hearings as uniting the nation in the same manner as
the Army-McCarthy hearings.3 Even after the earlier turmoil, network television
was still able to be the medium for sanctifying resolutions of controversy and for
defining the mainstream. Those who felt they were not part of the mainstream
turned to other media.
Nixon had done much to break down biparty consensus in U.S. politics by us-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

ing a “southern strategy” that realigned civil rights politics with party divisions.
His dealings with the broadcast networks were tense and maladroit. Reagan
went further than Nixon by making Republicans the party of the so-called moral
majority. His aides, however, were skillful not so much in negotiating with media
executives those high “holy day” events as in manipulating broadcasters into
using their favored images in quotidian politics. The Reagan administration’s
heavy symbolic politics used the appearance of consensual display to cover a
reality of highly targeted policies, particularly attacks on labor unions and the
working poor. That administration’s use of distracting images was a turn away

Politics 163

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 from discursive democracy, but the real tipping point came when the opposition
party felt that it, too, had to turn away from discourse in favor of images.
A previous media event, the Iran-Contra hearings, had mixed results for
those who deplored the illegal behavior of Admiral Poindexter and Lieutenant
Colonel North. North, in particular, had upstaged the senators. In the aftermath
of this broadcast, Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court. He could
have easily been opposed for his pro–big business and antilabor decisions as
an appeals court justice. The media and the Democrats largely ignored this,
however, emphasizing instead his extreme hostility to the right to privacy. The
new politics did not allow time for a debate on the redistribution of wealth
but favored mass media attention on the emotional issues of domestic morals.
The Democrats embraced the new politics as they decided how to televise the
confirmation hearings. Television was precisely the medium where audiences
could easily be distracted from nonvisual debates on deregulating big business
in favor of attending to hot-button issues of sexual morality and reproductive
rights. The Democrats thought that, for a change, symbolic politics would favor
them—since Bork’s stance on such issues need not be debated but could simply
be dismissed as “outside” (Carey 1998b, 61).

Bork: The Penultimate Media Event

The Bork hearings confirmed that nonbroadcast media had finally gained trac-
tion with the mass audience. “The hearings were carried in their entirety on
Cable News Network, the Public Broadcasting Service and C-Span and were
repeated in both prime-time and late night. In some ways it was the first media
event for cable television for it took advantage of the expanded bandwidth and
the need of that expanded system for programming” (Carey 1998b, 53). This
was the emergence of the nonbroadcast audience into the high holidays of TV
not for the purpose of contest, coronation, or conquest but for degradation,
humiliation, and excommunication.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Although the origin of the event lay outside television, its timing and staging
were consistently designed for the electronic medium. The hearings were de-
layed from July to September. This allowed not only for intense research by the
nominee’s opponents but also “for promotion to work, for tension to build and
for expectations to surface” (Carey 1998b, 53). It would be good television at the
height of the new fall season. The staging was often a reaction to the previous
Iran-Contra hearings. At that time, Oliver North had managed to present himself
visually as a military hero despite his confessed disobedience of congressional
laws and dictates. He was initially helped in his posturing by the height of the

164 Frederick Wasser

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 dais, which made senators look down at him; allowing photographers to enter
the area between North and the senators led to low-angle photos of him in full
military uniform looking up in a standard heroic pose. The dais was then low-
ered and photographers were banned from the area between the senators and
the witness.
Carey (1998b, 60) argued that the hearings themselves offered few exchanges
of ideas: the senators asked relatively few questions “and instead tended to give
speeches concerning the majesty of the law and the transgressions of the nomi-
nee.” Certainly the attention to visual detail and careful orchestration of back-
stage and forestage management of the hearings lent credence to the charge that
the Democrats’ strategy was not simply to disagree with the judge’s position and
thereby decline to confirm him as a lifetime member of the highest court in the
land. The staging had little to do with a contest of persuasion and a lot to do
humiliation and trial by acclamation.
Politics and reason alone cannot explain the Bork media event. Why was Bork
such an easy target for this ritual, how were media elites and politicians able to
unite in staging this event, and why did the audience accept it? Certainly other
similarly extreme conservatives have successfully resisted this ritual. Like Oliver
North, Clarence Thomas was able to turn the media event back into contest
rather than excommunication. Carey noted that Bork was particularly vulnerable
on television because he belonged to “none of the above.” He was not part of
the military; he was not African American; he belonged to no distinctive ethnic
group, not even the established Italian or Catholic voting blocs that can protect
their own (such as Antonin Scalia). Bork’s religious agnosticism exposed him to
hostility from such conservatives as Howell Hefflin, a senator of Alabama. Even
at the highest levels of television ritual, group affiliation would now be presented
as more salient than career accomplishment, merit, and competency.
When his turn came, Clarence Thomas famously turned the new politics of
group belonging in his favor. He was an obviously poor candidate for Supreme
Court justice, with a very slim résumé and no superior knowledge of the law.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

President George H. W. Bush, however, clearly thought that he could slip Thomas
through because he was African American and therefore protected from ex-
communication. This cynicism turned out to be true. At first the Democratic
opponents fought only a half-hearted battle against Thomas. They did not want
to educate the public about the lack of credentials and lack of competency. Their
opposition became serious when Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harass-
ment. The sexual charge against Thomas inspired his opponents to think that
once again they could place him outside the community without having to argue
his merit. Thomas relied on his own ethnic identity, however, and the obscurity

Politics 165

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 of the charges of sexual inappropriateness to turn the event around. He bullied
the senators when he charged them with lynching, a hyperbole deliberately
chosen to address them as racists. A cowed Senate gave him the nomination.
Thomas’s victory in the contest was the third act in the North-Bork drama.
This act proves that the best protection anyone has on postnetwork television is
to identify with one group or another. Ethnic and gender identifications are im-
mediate and can be substituted for dialogue and discussion. President George W.
Bush tried to extend such protection to the “born-again” Christians. Why should
group identity offer protection? Because it is shorthand that does not require
explanation or discourse. It has been a constant feature of American politics,
increasing when new groups emerge either through immigration or migration.
It seemed to have ebbed around the time of President Kennedy’s election, when
media allowed him to explain his Catholicism during his run for office. Now it
is back, pushed by media that rarely have time for explanations.

Can Television Bring Us Together Post-Bork?

Indeed, since 1987 the media have exploded with controversial shows that openly
display impatience with explanations. Bork himself helped the Reagan admin-
istration overturn the Fairness Doctrine. The Reagan administration expressed
its intent to rescind the doctrine on its own discretion, as a matter of adminis-
trative law. Bork wrote the majority opinion (and Scalia concurred; both were
judges in the Washington, D.C., District Court of Appeals) that established the
Reagan administration’s power to proceed without congressional approval.4 The
elimination of the doctrine lifted the final cap otherwise hampering the rise of
angry talk radio. It had already been gaining strength because of changes in the
political economy of media. Now, in the post–Fairness Doctrine, post-Bork
media world, Rush Limbaugh and others could easily forestall Democrats’ abil-
ity to define the mainstream. Limbaugh and a slew of angry talk hosts on TV
and radio seemed to pop out of nowhere in the years following Bork, but the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

phenomenon had actually been some twenty years in the making.

Radio had turned to niche programming when the broadcast networks
switched their attention to television after 1948. The search for a new strategy
in the age of television led in part to the growth of call-in talk shows. The first
radio talk shows appeared in the 1950s. Radio station KABC in Los Angeles
went to twenty-four-hour talk in 1966 (Fornatale and Mills 1980, 83). Talk grew
on AM radio as the technological superiority of FM broadcasting eroded AM’s
music programming. These shows became more popular in the Reagan years,
partly because the Fairness Doctrine no longer created pressure to provide time

166 Frederick Wasser

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 for opposing viewpoints and partly because they helped segment the audience,
which in turn increased profits. At this point, talk became the leading edge in
increasingly emotive broadcasting. Thomas Kane (1998) notes that it served as
an outlet for angry white males who felt ignored by the American political scene.
The size of this audience was a profitable match for the economics of AM radio.
As cable and UHF TV channels grew, media executives realized that talk, with
its engaged listeners, could be profitable for television also. In the later 1980s the
Fox network took the lead in seeking segmented audiences for its TV stations.
Serendipitously, advertisers also were turning their attention toward targeted
segments (rather than the general public). On many channels this resulted in
“trash television,” a turn toward tabloid news shows such as Hard Copy and A
Current Affair. Television, then, borrowed radio’s response to the fragmentation
of the audience (Hallin 1992, 22).
Both advertisers and television producers tried to reach that fractured audi-
ence with televisual excess (Caldwell 1995, 4). In the 1990s this excess evolved
to “shock” advertising, the gory graphics of C.S.I., and the explicit language and
nudity of several cable shows. Shock images may not be as mean as they are rude,
but there is no mistaking the shrillness and meanness of the “reality television”
genre, with its gossip, backbiting, and depictions of strategies of inclusion and
exclusion. Rude programming became established.5 At the same time, talk radio
anger spread during the Clinton administration, when Rush Limbaugh’s mix of
partisan opinions and negative insults was picked up by a national radio network.
His became one of the largest syndicated radio talk shows. In 1994 Republicans
took control of the House of Representatives and made Limbaugh an honorary
member (St. George 1994, 1). Vicious attacks on the Democratic regime became a
feature of mainstream radio and newspapers in the 1990s. The collusion between
everyday shock media and politics was now emblazoned. Fox launched a cable
news channel in 1996, hiring key radio personalities such as Bill O’Reilly, who
aimed not to expand the broadcast audience but to increase profits with a smaller,
cable-sized audience, small enough for the partisan histrionics of radio.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

This shrillness played to an audience easily distracted by the next loudest thing.
The audience’s love of distraction is itself a social phenomenon that points to
overwork and increased anxiety about position in a society where income had
stagnated for many while it exploded for a relative few. Even as people tried to
create professional careers, the professions became subject to old-fashioned
class exploitation by the superrich. Nobody in mass media could explain this
puzzling frustration. Instead, there was old-fashioned anger at increased civil
rights for women and minorities. What was most salient from Carey’s analysis,
however, was that no one, not even the still-powerful Democratic Party, could

Politics 167

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 adequately respond to this partisanship. Niche programmers try to identify
profitable audiences as defined by advertisers, by cable operators looking for
subscribers willing to pay, or ideally, by both. Political programming therefore
targets merely one audience, alongside home shoppers and reality TV buffs.
Having developed from commercial radio’s profitable gathering together of ag-
grieved white males, which television then appropriated, partisan programming
makes no attempt to systematically represent every political belief.
This is an unfortunate development in television and radio programming, but
the complicity of the Democrats in the excommunication of Bork showed that
there would be little effective high-minded resistance to it. The 1988 election
was a new low point in uninformative media coverage of the campaign and the
Republican use of negative advertising. At this time the Democratic Leadership
Council (DLC) was formed. It has since gained tremendous influence, yet it
seems to encourage potential Democrats to shy away from the heavy work of
building support for new programs. All too often, it seems, the DLC has applied
the lesson of Bork to itself, thus concluding that Democratic leaders and can-
didates should not be “outside the mainstream”—precisely the crime of Robert
Bork. It has also allowed the “mainstream” to be defined by its opponents and
by media facing increased pressure from the partisan shrillness of Fox, Clear
Channel, and other corporations corrupted by the politics of deregulation.
From this perspective, while I judge the Clinton presidency to be one of rela-
tive competence and even some hints of progressiveness, it was also one that
failed to use its years at the “bully pulpit” to educate. Seen in this light, Clinton’s
rapid introduction and subsequent withdrawal of a health plan was the same
attempt to short-circuit education and persuasion as that made during the Bork
hearings. It exemplifies my point about Democratic timidity when Democrats’
ideas are portrayed as “outside” by the loudest parts of mass media. Of course,
many factors explain such timidity, including failed campaigns. But only a shrill
partisan media would treat an election loss as the end of the discussion. A
thoughtful, more consensual media environment would frame elections as part
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of ongoing debate and discourse. The Bork hearings gave media license to aban-
don thoughtfulness, and in the very next election cycle, coverage of issues and
debates was quickly reduced to the single question of “who is doing better?”
Since the Democrats have largely abandoned the task of education, media
executives seem increasingly unwilling to assert their own prestige. A spiral of
timidity continued in the decades following 1988; powerful media outlets have
submitted to humiliating retreats in the face of partisan pressure. Viacom bowed
to pressure groups in deleting a biopic of Ronald Reagan from its CBS schedule
and moving it to its less widely available Showtime cable outlet. Viacom contin-

168 Frederick Wasser

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ued its penance when its CEO, “the self-described ‘liberal Democrat’ Sumner
Redstone, abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush
[in October]. ‘I vote for what’s good for Viacom,’ he explained, and he meant it”
(Rich 2004b).
Another high profile event was the decision by the Walt Disney Company not
to distribute Fahrenheit 911, even though it had financed the documentary’s pro-
duction. In both cases, the media companies involved faced obvious retribution
from the Republican administration. Viacom’s owned and operated TV stations
were already facing fines stemming from Janet Jackson’s antics during the 2004
Super Bowl halftime show. Disney feared reprisals from the state government
of Florida, which was controlled by the brother of the sitting president, who
was unfavorably portrayed in Fahrenheit 911. Time-Warner refused to release
David O. Russell’s documentary on the first Gulf War to accompany his pre-
scient feature film Three Kings. This decision was made after the company had
financed the documentary production. Time-Warner spokespersons made it
clear that the documentary was “inappropriate” during the election season. These
events become landmarks of a general climate of intimidated and cowed media
organizations seeking favor with the federal administration through a series of
decisions about coverage of the Iraq invasion and other controversies.
Perhaps the Bork hearings serve as little more than a handy landmark for
partisan politics’ taking over the media’s functions in a democracy. Carey made
no outsized claims for its lessons. He merely described a media event that was
dysfunctional for democratic discourse. But I want to go further. Indeed, it may
be that Bork represented one of the last American media events, consensually
negotiated between a political leadership and media establishment. The high
“holy days” of TV were the Reagan funeral and the trial of President Clinton.
Of course, the 1999 Senate trial of Clinton was an attempt to use television for
an excommunication. It was designed by political leaders to be a media event.
But here the media participated only grudgingly. (Public opinion polls did not
show strong public support for the impeachment.) Thus the intended mean-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

ing of exclusion was denied when the Senate voted down the House’s bill of
impeachment. Nonetheless, the televised attacks on Clinton may have helped
to harden moralizing Christians’ group solidarity and thus tipped the balance
in the 2000 election. This fit the increased emphasis on identity in the post-
Bork world yet did not unite the nation against the philandering president. It
continues to be significant that media rituals of bringing together the American
polity falter after Bork.
Rather surprisingly, the Bush administration only minimally used television
to heal the nation after the terrorist attack of September 2001. Despite presi-

Politics 169

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 dential speeches, visits to sites of the tragedies, musical tributes, and television
marathons, nothing really brought together the nation in a healing, consensual
televised moment comparable to the 1963 Kennedy funeral. Tamar Liebes (1998)
showed how disaster marathons have become Israeli television’s preferred re-
sponse to terrorist attacks, although these marathons weaken the nation’s capac-
ity to calmly make rational decisions. After September 11 the U.S. government
made little effort to get ahead of television’s instinct to turn that coverage into
a disaster marathon. In such a marathon, television news analysts instinctively
framed the terrorist attack as an act of war. The administration adopted this
framing as its own, leaving a vacuum for others to play the healing role (e.g.,
via benefit concerts). In general, the one response that political leaders never
considered was to stage a compelling and calming media event. This may have
reflected George W. Bush’s incapacity for speech making, but on a deeper level
it marked the leadership’s disdain for negotiating with the media as equal part-
ners. Such negotiation is a defining feature of a media event (see Dayan and
Katz 1992, 5–77).
The Bush administration did like to impose events on media, as it did after
the 2003 fall of Baghdad, when President Bush made a bizarre and premature
announcement of victory on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Although the appear-
ance was well covered on television, the intended audience seemed to suspect
that the announcement was ridiculous. Television news reporters were less than
convincing in explaining why the president chose to fly onto an aircraft carrier
to stage the event. Obviously their lack of conviction resulted from the lack of
prior negotiation between media and the administration. The event was, in any
case, rendered false by the continuation of substantial violence in Iraq. Its status
declined to one of a pseudoevent. Similar difficulties marked President Bush’s
staging of post-Katrina events.
The single successful American media event post-Bork was the funeral of
Ronald Reagan in June 2004.6 The networks agreed to broadcast it, and network
anchors largely accepted the script that political leadership provided. The script
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

was transparently ideological in repeating as a mantra that Reagan won the cold
war (which is not at all a rational understanding of geopolitics or world history).
Thus, the event did not transcend national boundaries. Indeed, its occurrence
after a series of media intimidations by the Bush administration made it seem
that media executives had been forced to televise the various ceremonies at
length out of fear of political reprisal. The American audience initially under-
stood the coverage as a national ritual, but there was so much coverage that
evidence emerged of audience resistance: after seven days, a Wall Street Journal
poll found the plurality saying, “enough already” (Rich 2004a).

170 Frederick Wasser

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Bad faith is now prevalent regarding the motives of government-media col-
laborations. This skepticism forestalls or undermines staged events, despite re-
cent traumas. Television’s own status has been diluted and distributed across a
variety of channels. Commonality is no longer an aspiration in the post–three
network world. Partisan programming is a general part of the rise of “shock”
and other rude programming. This rise is connected to the deregulation and
media proliferation of the Reagan years. Although such programming antedated
Bork, the aftermath of those hearings contributed to a further acceleration.
Carey performed a great service in alerting us to the ritual of televised excom-
munications and suggesting its dangers for democratic discourse. But the conse-
quences should not be limited to the discussion of broadcast rituals. Rituals are
high moments, while Bork raises more quotidian questions: Why did Democrats
resort to a ritual of excommunication? Did the postwar years not show that acts
of exclusion were more properly Republican? The politics of big business and
shrinking the public sphere are premised on the ideology of exclusion based on
lack of money. By the Reagan years this bias extended to excluding those who
lack “family values”; rituals of exclusion belonged naturally to the GOP. Yet by
1987 the Democrats were ready to use their own symbolic politics and to put it
on television. It was a tool of desperation.
The Bork excommunication was a watershed moment for post–Big Three
network partisanship. Its consequences are not so much causal as symptom-
atic of a shortchanged discourse that emerged by 1987. A market-focused right
wing was arguing for a deregulated media. Its campaign relieved pressure on
media to provide a Dewey-like forum for public discussion. The Bork hearings
confirmed that this tendency had spread to both sides of the aisle and both
sides of the camera. The immediate Democratic advantage soon turned bitter
as the party lost control of defining what was outside the mainstream. Now, the
loudest voices emerging from fractured media claim the mainstream. So it will
continue, until Dewey’s vision of education as the key to political persuasion
is revived. Carey’s scholarship was dedicated to seeing this vision emerge from
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

the bottom up, from the schools, the journalists, and the people.

Notes
1. Charles Sandage, Theodore Peterson, and Jay Jensen were his most prominent men-
tors when he attended graduate school at the University of Illinois. Perhaps they all
mentioned Dewey.
2. The famous examples from this time period, such as Walter Cronkite’s pessimistic
televised visit to South Vietnam several months after the Tet offensive and “The Selling

Politics 171

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 of the Pentagon,” relate to the Vietnam War. Early PBS programs attracted some civil
rights controversy.
3. It is interesting that both events were used by emerging networks to solidify their
positions (ABC with Army-McCarthy and PBS with the Watergate hearings).
4. 801 F.2d 501, Telecommunications Research and Action Center v. FCC (1986, D.C.
Cir.).
5. Ideas in this paragraph are from Michael Leibowitz 2004.
6. Princess Diana’s funeral was a successful televised international event. President Clin-
ton’s effective address to the nation following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was
not a sufficiently ongoing event to be included in the genre as defined by Dayan and
Katz.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

172 Frederick Wasser

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Ethics

Communication Ethics
in Postnarrative Terms
Clifford Christians

Ethical formalism has been the dominant paradigm in communica-

tion ethics. Formalist ethical systems are based on rules, principles,
and doctrines that set standards for human behavior. Through rea-
son the human species is distinctive, and through rationality moral
canons are understood to be legitimate. Ethics is typically grounded
in prescriptions, norms, and ideals external to society and culture.
In mainstream professional ethics, an apparatus of neutral standards
is constructed in terms of the major issues media practitioners face
in their everyday routines.
Cultural studies understands morality in different terms, with its
assumption that the moral domain is intrinsic to human life. We are
not constituted as ethical selves antecedently; rather, moral values
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

unfold dialectically in human interaction. In contrast to prescriptive

codes, morality is inscribed in narrative. Ethical understanding is a
cultural product (Baier 1986). Moral commitments are embedded in
the practices of particular social groups, and they are communicated
through a community’s stories. The important issues in communica-
tion ethics revolve around these alternative trajectories. But neither
option meets the demands of a sophisticated critical cultural studies.
While narrative ethics has located a fundamental weakness in rule-

173

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 driven formalism, its relativism leaves communication ethics with an empty
center. With its critical orientation, a normative dialogic ethics is most compat-
ible with the field and a model of communication ethics for the future.

Formalist Media Ethics

The first American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, was shut down after one day
on September 26, 1690, when Massachusetts authorities found its news offensive.
In fact, colonial newspaper publishers and reporters were often criticized. But
the failings of the press were not specifically linked to ethical principles until
the end of the nineteenth century. The 1890s saw informal debates about con-
tent and newspaper practices replaced by reflection based on ethical precepts
(Dicken-Garcia 1989). A commonsense utilitarian formalism emerged as the
overall framework, that is, rules and guidelines for producing the greatest pos-
sible balance of good over evil. Sensationalism had been a staple of the entire
nineteenth century, but the Hearst and Pulitzer circulation battles during the
Spanish-American War made it a serious issue of principle in the late 1890s. As
new electronic communication systems crossed oceans and borders with sensi-
tive military, diplomatic, and commercial information, the ethics of privacy took
on urgency. Freebies and junkets were treated more systematically by internal
mechanisms and enforcement. Also late in the century, a platform was laid for
the free press–fair trial debate, although only in the minimal terms of insisting
on press rights.
The rudimentary work to establish moral principles during the 1890s evolved
into a serious enterprise early in the twentieth century through codes of ethics
and journalism education. The first journalistic code of ethics officially adopted
was the Kansas Code, endorsed by the Kansas Editorial Association in 1910.
Several statewide codes soon followed: in Missouri in 1921, South Dakota and
Oregon in 1922, and Washington in 1923. Local newspapers also prepared their
own codes during the 1910s and 1920s—some explicit (“always verify names”)
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and others moralistic (“be vigorous but not vicious”). In 1928 the National As-
sociation of Broadcasters prepared a radio code consisting of eight guidelines
designed to encourage broadcasting “in the public interest.”
The star among early media codes was the Canons of Journalism, adopted by
the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) in 1923, the second year
of its existence. Several journalism associations copied or imitated its content
during the 1920s. The currently popular Society of Professional Journalists/
Sigma Delta Chi (SPJ/SDX) code of ethics, for example, owes its origin in 1926
to the ASNE canons. Codes are routinely forgotten along the road to meeting

174 Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 deadlines, paying the bills, and protecting the press’s independence, but they
presume that while news media have a guaranteed right to disseminate infor-
mation, they must do so responsibly, according to regulations that the press
itself establishes. In the ethics of formalism, canons of practice—that is, codes
of ethics—are the conventional format for moral principles.
The 1920s saw the publication of four journalism texts committed to formalist
ethics: Nelson Crawford’s Ethics of Journalism (1924), Leon Flint’s Conscience
of the Newspaper (1925), William Gibbons’s Newspaper Ethics (1926), and Al-
bert Henning’s Ethics and Practices of Journalism (1932). While designed for the
classroom, these books advocated the principles and precepts then dominant
in the profession. The authors combed “through the policy platforms set out
in newspaper mastheads and search[ed] the codes adopted by national and
state press associations” (Hulteng 1985, 13). Although they did not cite one an-
other, the books offered similar lists of central issues: reporters and sources,
economic temptations and conflicts of interest, national security, free press–fair
trial, deception, fairness, accuracy, sensationalism, and protection of privacy.
The professions and the academy were establishing a formalist ethics of canons
and obligations.
Nonetheless, the flurry of activity in the 1920s; the growth of professional
societies, each with a code of ethics; the strengthening of journalism curricula
through the liberal arts—none of these could prevent the demise of ethics in
the face of an antithetical worldview, scientific naturalism. Scientific naturalism
aggressively ordered the structure of knowing during this decade and beyond—
naturalism in the sense that genuine knowledge can be identified only in the
natural laws of the hard sciences (Purcell 1973). Advances in the physical sci-
ences became the ideal as academicians—including those in communication—
applauded scientific methods and principles. Universities institutionalized the
conventions of objective reporting in journalism curricula. Journalistic morality
became equivalent to unbiased reporting of neutral data. Centered on human
rationality and legitimized by the scientific method, the facts in news were said
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

to mirror reality. Presenting unvarnished data was heralded as the standard of

good performance, with readers and viewers presumably deciding for themselves
what the facts meant. Reporters considered it virtuous to bracket value judgments
from the transmission of information. Journalism corresponded to context-free
neutral algorithms, and ethics was equated with impartiality. Objective reporting
was not merely a technique but a moral imperative (Lichtenberg 2000).
Concern for ethics during the 1930s through 1960s emerged only on iso-
lated occasions. Occasionally there were pockets of resistance in journalism’s
intellectual and vocational life, but the professional statistical model prevailed.

Ethics 175

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The scientific worldview was the ruling paradigm. A preoccupation with that
value-centered enterprise called ethics seemed out of place in an academic and
professional environment committed to factuality. The 1947 report A Free and
Responsible Press, by the Commission on Freedom of the Press, was the most
famous counterstatement of this period; the work of Robert Maynard Hutchins
and his fellow commissioners stands as a major milestone. Indeed, some mem-
bers of the commission, especially William Ernest Hocking, had engaged in a
serious rethinking of ethical issues. Hocking (1947) provided the conceptual
foundation for the commission’s work (published as Freedom of the Press: A
Framework of Principle) by emphasizing positive freedom, the intersubjectivity
of human experience, and freedom of expression as an earned moral right rather
than an inalienable natural right. The ultimate product of the commission’s de-
liberations, however, was a set of recommendations on ameliorating the worst
aspects of the economic conditions of the press. The commission recommended
neither structural changes in media ownership nor federal regulations, nor did
it move ethical thought to a new plane.
The Hutchins Commission promoted formalist ethics, albeit in a different
cadence. According to its social responsibility theory, the press must provide “a
truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context
which gives them meaning” (Commission on Freedom of the Press 1947, 21).
The press should serve as “a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism,”
give a “representative picture of the constituent groups in society,” help in the
“presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society,” and “pro-
vide full access to the day’s intelligence” (23–28). The commission stimulated
professionalism (quality work and integrity), codes of ethics, media councils,
better training, and media criticism. Social responsibility theory has generally
allowed formalism to dominate its paradigm in the same way the prescriptive
model commandeered journalism ethics in the preceding half century.
Media ethics is a branch of professional ethics. Given the power of mass com-
munications in today’s global world, occupations in the media are now included
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

with such professions as medicine, law, business, and engineering under the
umbrella “applied ethics.” Complicated ethical issues have proliferated in these
professions, as they have in journalism. From 1978 to 1980, the Hastings Cen-
ter of New York conducted the most extensive study yet done of the problems
and possibilities for teaching professional ethics in American higher education,
including journalism. Funded by the Carnegie Foundation, the results were
published in a series of volumes and monographs that have largely defined the
field of applied and professional ethics ever since (see, e.g., Christians and Covert
1980). The Hastings project included empirical analyses and teaching strategies.

176 Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 It made recommendations about course goals, evaluation, indoctrination, and
teacher preparation (see, e.g., Callahan and Bok, 1980).
The results of the Hastings initiative are evident everywhere. The Association
for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE), launched in 1991, now publishes
its own book series. The association’s 1998 reissue of Henry Sidgwick’s Practical
Ethics, with an articulate defense by Sissela Bok of its intellectual significance,
signals this trend toward professional ethics as a scholarly enterprise with its
own subject matter. Virtually all the professional and academic journals focused
on news pay attention to ethics; nearly all the media conferences and conven-
tions have modules in ethics. Universities, liberal arts colleges, and technical
schools regularly teach journalism and communication ethics. The dramatic
growth in research on media ethics has been equally unrelenting. MacDonald
and Petheram (1998) list over two hundred research centers and academic de-
partments around the world committed to media ethics.
Since its beginnings in the 1970s, applied and professional ethics accepted an
abstract view of the underlying subject matter. Reasoning in ethics “was repre-
sented as akin to deductive logic.” The field has operated almost exclusively with
the belief that “we can first and independently comprehend the rules of morality
as such and then only secondarily inquire as to their application in particular
specialized social spheres” (Whitbeck 1996, 3). The medical and biological sci-
ences have led the field in developing professional ethics, and that history is
dominated by principlism.1 The Belmont Report (National Commission 1979)
identified the basic regulations for research involving human subjects, and major
textbooks in the 1970s used principlist ethical frameworks. In Beauchamp and
Childress’s (2001) principlist approach, for example, a decision is morally justi-
fied only if it is consistent with the general principles and specific rules relevant
to the given situation. Beauchamp applies a similar decision-making model to
making news judgments, seeking to avoid “purely subjective preferences” by a
set of basic moral concepts with a practitioner focus (Klaidman and Beauchamp
1987, 20).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The most influential normative ethics during this period was utilitarian ratio-
nalism. Since the origins of this model, chiefly with John Stuart Mill, neutrality
is seen as necessary to guarantee individual autonomy. Neutrality was Mill’s
foundational principle in On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1861), as well as
in his System of Logic (1843). Utilitarian ethics was attractive for its compatibility
with the canons of rational computation. It replaced metaphysical distinctions
with the calculation of empirical quantities. Autonomous reason was seen as
establishing principles and prescriptions as the arbiter of moral disputes. “In
the utilitarian perspective, one validated an ethical position by hard evidence.

Ethics 177

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 . . . What counts as human happiness was thought to be something conceptu-
ally unproblematic, a scientifically establishable domain of facts. . . . One could
abandon all the metaphysical or theological factors . . . which made ethical ques-
tions scientifically undecidable” (Taylor 1982, 129).
Utilitarianism presumes one set of considerations that determines what we
ought to do morally. As a single-consideration theory, the canonical form of it
not only demands that we maximize general happiness but considers irrelevant
any conflicting moral imperatives, such as equal distribution. “It portrays all
moral issues as discrete problems amenable to largely technical solutions” (Euben
1981, 117). To its critics, however, this kind of exactness represents a “semblance
of validity” by leaving out whatever cannot be calculated (Taylor 1982, 143).
Consistent with the ethical rationalism that has long prevailed in philosophical
ethics, communication ethics has presumed that rationality marks all legitimate
claims about moral obligations, so that the truth of those claims can be settled
by formal examination of their logical structure. The general trend in formalist
communication ethics entails an ethical rationalism that requires autonomous
moral agents to apply rules consistently and self-consciously to every choice.
Rational processes create basic tenets of morality that everyone must follow and
against which all failures in moral duty can be measured.

Narrative Ethics

Narrative ethics emerged in the twentieth century as a formidable opponent of

the dominant formalist systems. Narrative is considered “an essential feature of
an intelligible moral life,” connecting morality to shared “dimensions of human
existence” (Johnson 1996, 1352). Moral practice and the human constitution are
interconnected. Narrative is considered vital to moral understanding; through
it, morality is rooted in everyday experience and gains multiple levels of com-
plexity. Narrative ethics argues that the decontextualized observation inherent
in formalist ethics fails to recognize that while humans think and act morally,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

as lingual beings they forget and remember, struggle with the past and hope
for the future, listen and speak, show remorse and make excuses. In Nel Nod-
dings’s (1984, 2–3) terms, an ethics that concentrates on arranging principles
hierarchically and that derives conclusions logically is “peripheral to, or even
alien to, many problems of moral action. . . . Moral decisions are, after all, made
in real situations; they are qualitatively different from the solution of geometry
problems.” In narrative ethics we formulate moral experience “in terms of its
origins, present concerns and outcomes.” “Rational calculation and impartial

178 Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 reflection” are replaced by “the quest for meaning,” by a narrative stance “most
appropriate [for] the communication of the good” (Johnson 1996, 1352).
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (2007) established narrative ethics in terms
of Western intellectual history. What he called the “Enlightenment Project” for
ethics was born at the time when science was formulating laws of physics to
explain nature. Philosophers of this orientation constructed laws or principles to
explain human behavior and basically agreed that morality must be justified in
terms of rational standards. Kant and others in the Enlightenment Project were
committed to constructing arguments that move from premises about human
nature “to conclusions about the authority of moral rules and precepts” (Mac­
Intyre 2007, 52). But rational principles alone do not lead to a unified system.
When the Enlightenment’s common beliefs and values began to disintegrate
with secularism and industrialism, the modernist project proved unsustainable.
Individuals are left making technical choices but do so in moral confusion. To
MacIntyre, our fragmented society has no conception of the common good and
no way for us to persuade one another about its nature. Therefore, the teaching,
acquisition, and exercise of morality can occur only if we construct “local forms
of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be
sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (MacIntyre
2007, 263; see also 1986).
One great mistake of the Enlightenment Project was “the tendency to think at-
omistically about human action and to analyze complex actions and transactions
in terms of simple components” (MacIntyre 2007, 204). MacIntyre advocated a
new perspective on moral philosophy rooted in the way humans actually expe-
rience life and how they interpret it, that is, in narrative. “Man is in his actions
and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not
essentially, but through history, a teller of stories that aspire to the truth” (216).
For MacIntyre, the modernist tradition neglects the concrete—in particular, our
common social and emotional experience—and our life narratives lived out in
a historical context provide the principal contribution to moral action.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

In MacIntyre’s perspective, the human capacity to narrate enables us to un-

derstand the unfolding of character. Narrative specifies both continuity and
starting anew. Narrative is the mode of communication “specifically suited to
virtue” (Johnson 1996, 1352). “It is not possible . . . to comprehend human nature
in the absence of a narrative framework” (1355). No human character develops by
itself without context. “All character presupposes a story, without which it would
be simply unintelligible” (1355). MacIntyre wanted to avoid the randomness he
associated with modern subjectivity and believed this could be achieved in part

Ethics 179

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 by stressing the close relations among character, narrative, and accountability. “It
is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our
own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is
appropriate for understanding the actions of others” (MacIntyre 2007, 212).2
Although the narrative turn in communication ethics is influenced by this
larger philosophical tradition, its roots lie in John Dewey’s pragmatism. Prag-
matism turned the formalist ethics of society and the professions inside out. As
MacIntyre did later, pragmatism contradicted the metaphysical foundations on
which the Western canon was based. Social constructions replaced formal law
systems. Contextual values replaced ethical prescriptions as the centerpiece. The
moral life was presumed to develop through community formation and not in
the obscure sanctums of isolated individuals. Moral values were now situated
in the social context rather than anchored by theoretical abstractions.
According to Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, the task of ethics is under-
standing those problem situations where we distinguish good conduct from bad.
Conflict and a tangle of incompatible impulses prompt us to ask the question,
what is good? These are the clues we need for a conception of values that is not
grounded in rationalism. Goodness and badness are not objective properties
of things themselves, nor do they merely express subjective attitudes. Rather,
value judgments say something we believe is true about the world. Thus Dewey’s
contextualism challenged both metaphysics and emotivism as possible homes
for values. Dewey did not seek an ultimate normative standard but investigated
the social conditions under which we consider our assertions warranted. For
Dewey, interpretation rather than pure reason or divine revelation was the only
appropriate method.
For the communications enterprise, the shift from principle to story, from
formal logic to community formation, is appealing. Stories are symbolic frame-
works that organize human experience. Through stories we constitute ways of
living in common. In Walter Fisher’s terms, we are narrative beings who exhibit
“an inherent awareness of narrative probability, what constitutes a coherent story,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and [a] constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether or not the stories
they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives”
(Fisher 1987, 5, emphasis in original). Humans distinguish and pursue this nar-
rative logic rather than merely recount episodes and action. Stories that exhibit
the attributes of coherence and fidelity inspire us to join with others who share
them. And stories become public discourse when they are driven by good rea-
sons. Narratives of good reasons make sense collectively and form the warrant
for communal decision making (Fisher 1987).

180 Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Narratives are linguistic forms through which we argue, persuade, display
convictions, and establish our identity. They contain in a nutshell the meaning
of our theories and beliefs. We tell stories to one another about our values and
concerns, and our aspirations. Storytelling “cuts through abstractions and other
obscurities,” enabling us “to think creatively and imaginatively” about “the end-
less details of . . . a disorderly world,” and in the process transforms “essentially
private experience into a shared and therefore public reality” (Glasser 1991,
235–36). The stories of the Selma march, the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the
benefactors of Anne Frank during the Holocaust, firemen rushing into the World
Trade Center inferno, and genocide in Rwanda galvanize public discourse and
activate our conscience. Stories oral and visual from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison
reverberate around the globe. Stories of Mother Teresa teach us how to live
with integrity. Family heroes inspire subsequent generations. Great storytellers
produce a complex collage that enriches our life together.
James Carey reconstructed narrative ethics for cultural studies using for his
framework journalism as a form of public communication; news is a narrative
genre akin to storytelling.3 Carey (1987a) proposed understanding journalism not
as an outgrowth of science and the Enlightenment but as an extension of poetry,
the humanities, and political utopianism. For Carey (1987a, 17), “journalism only
makes sense in relation to the public and public life. Therefore, the fundamental
ethical problem in journalism is to reconstitute the public, by nurturing its nar-
ratives. Journalism ought to be conceived less on the model of information and
more on the model of a conversation.” He agreed with Kenneth Burke: “Life is
a conversation. When we enter it, it is already going on.” Journalists are merely
part of the conversation of our culture, Carey added, one partner with the rest
of us—no more and no less: “All journalism can do is preside over and within
the conversation of our culture: to stimulate it and organize it, to keep it moving
and to leave a record of it so that other conversations—art, science, religion—
might have something off which they can feed. The public will begin to reawaken
when they are addressed as a conversational partner and are encouraged to join
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

the talk rather than sit passively as spectators before a discussion conducted by
journalists and experts” (17).
For Carey (1987a, 16), treating ethics as a formal system leaves the character of
and rationale for the press untouched, making it “a purely negative enterprise.”
Journalism ethics as rules are preoccupied with gifts, junkets, conflicts of interest,
sensationalism, and unattributed sources, accepting as a given “the entire struc-
ture of professional life” (6). “The ethics of journalism often seems to be a cover,
a means of avoiding the deeper question of journalism as a practice in order to

Ethics 181

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 concentrate on a few problems in which there is general agreement” (6). It may
stifle practices that damage the press’s credibility or are patently unfair. “But
none of this will solve the real problems of journalism. In fact, those problems
cannot be solved; they can only be dissolved into a new set of practices, a new
way of conceiving what journalism is and how one ought to go about it” (16).
For Carey, the formalist ethics of rules and procedures is rooted in the same
mentality as that of the mainstream press and so provides no critical perspective
on it.
We have inherited . . . a journalism of the expert and the conduit, a journal-
ism of information, fact, objectivity, and publicity. It is a scientific concep-
tion of journalism; it assumes an audience to be informed, educated by the
journalist and the expert. . . . I would suggest we throw out this vocabulary.
. . . What would journalism look like if we grounded it in poetry, if we tried to
literalize that metaphor rather than the metaphor of objectivity and science?
It would generate, in fact, a new moral vocabulary that would dissolve some
current dilemmas. . . . The sciences did enormous and important work in
securing the foundations of liberal democracy and it is not surprising that
journalism should take science as its model and try, in however degenerate
a form, to imitate it. But that age is over. Today, . . . the ethics of journalism
will not move us forward until we actually re-think, re-describe, re-interpret
what journalism is: not the science or information of our culture but instead
its poetry and conversation. (Carey 1987a, 18–19)

In the tradition of John Dewey reiterated by James Carey, the contextual ethics
of narrative is oriented to democratic politics. “Narratives can be regarded as
a condition of accountability since it is a unique characteristic of human be-
ings that they can be held to account for the tales they tell. It has been claimed,
therefore, that narrative is in essence a democratic mode, and, hence, is capable
of making a distinctive contribution to the virtues which sustain communities”
(Johnson 1996, 1352).
Shaped by her battles with totalitarian Nazism, Hannah Arendt keenly un-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

derstood the formative role of narrative in the public sphere. The civic arena, in
her view, is a unique domain forged out of dialogue and persuasion. Democratic
polity cannot rest on authoritarian claims to truth or on a tyrant’s dominating
will. For a state to be regarded as democratic in any substantive sense, everyday
practice must be participatory. Citizenship requires practical wisdom—that is,
the consensus of multiple perspectives achieved by communication. Judging is
inherently a social act driven by a commonsense desire to exchange opinions
with local others about courses of action. The public theater, in a normative
sense, is action space for taking initiatives. Thus Arendt tied narrative and

182 Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 public philosophy together, just as Carey and Dewey insisted. Taking ethics
out of the ether and situating values in the public arena is a paradigm revolt of
historic proportions.

Critical Dialogic Ethics

Narrative ethics points in the right direction. It contradicts the Western tradition
of extrinsic morality and anchors the moral domain in culture instead of ratio-
nalist individualism (see Ellos 1994). Nevertheless, narrative ethics is conflicted
in its own terms about which value-driven stories ought to be valued. Whatever
is identified conversationally cannot in itself yield normative guidelines. How
does one determine the status of context-dependent, everyday discourse if it is
dependent on context? The narrative paradigm typically yields arbitrary defini-
tions of goodness, as if to say, “This is good because respected voices say it is” or
“This is good because most people in a social group identify it as good.” Since
Hume, and certainly George E. Moore (1954 [1903]), we have recognized the
fallacy of deriving “ought” statements from descriptive ones.
Superficial versions of narrative ethics are relativistic, though the best in the
tradition establish a normative center for distinguishing good stories from de-
structive ones. But what in narrative itself validates that center? On what grounds
precisely does one require fundamental change in existing cultural and political
practices? Fisher’s appeal to an inherent awareness of coherence and fidelity is
defensible, but it is a claim about the nature of humanness that is not entailed
by the narrative paradigm itself. To bring the narrative turn to maturity, then,
communication ethics needs to be radically dialogic. Instead of leaving its criti-
cal dimension underdetermined and arbitrary, the dialogic interactive model
insists on a transformative voice. The transformation of journalism for which
Carey called can be accomplished more fundamentally through an ethics of
the dialogic relation than through one of contextual values. While the narrative
model is appropriate to an interpretive, ethnographic style of cultural studies,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

dialogic ethics is most compatible with its critical versions.

Communication ethics that works itself in and through dialogic theory is the
most sophisticated normative model at present. It embodies the commitments
of the political version of narrative ethics while benefiting from the breadth and
range of dialogic social philosophy.4 A normative dialogic paradigm is a decisive
alternative to relativism and a fruitful framework for communications in an age
of globalization and multiculturalism. In formalist ethics, all acts are monologic,
although actions may be coordinated with others. When humans are understood
as cultural beings, however, human action is dialogic. Our experience is then

Ethics 183

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 seen largely in terms of rhythm with other nonindividuated actors. Humans are
dialogic agents within a language community. Morality is grounded in human re-
lations. The “wellspring of ethical behavior” is in the “human affective response”
(Noddings 1984, 2). Reciprocal care and understanding, rooted in emotion and
experience, not formal reasoning, are the bases for moral discourse. Ethics is
located in the corporeal and creaturely rather than in rational prescriptions.
The dialogic perspective involves talking with one another about our mutual
responsibilities; we seek to discover a good reason for acting. We are not simply
being open to the other party’s perspective. We are actively listening and contrib-
uting with a view to uncovering a nonidiosyncratic truth capable of withstanding
the test of critical dialogue. A reason to act is a nonarbitrary thought-satisfying
determination supporting one course of action over others. When we give rea-
sons for our acts, the reasons “point to feelings, needs, impressions and a sense
of personal ideals” rather than to “principles and their applications” (Noddings
1984, 3). Dialogic ethics treats morality not as an impersonal action-guiding code
for individuals but rather as a shared process of discovery and interpretation
in which individuals continually and thoughtfully adjust their positions in the
light of what others have said and done.5
The dialogic lineage of Martin Buber, Paulo Freire, and Emmanuel Lévinas
insists on emancipatory struggles and transformative action. Together these
struggles and transformations ensure that the dialogic model of communication
ethics is unequivocally normative and thereby critical and enable us to endorse
a critical dialogism as the most advanced formulation of communication eth-
ics. For Freire (2001), only through dialogue do we fulfill our ontological and
historical vocation of becoming fully human. Without “a critical comprehension
of reality” (168) there is acquiescence in the status quo. Dialogic communica-
tion enables us to gain a critical consciousness as an instrument of liberation
(Freire 1973). Buber’s philosophy of communication is not content with empirical
claims regarding socially produced selves or lingual assertions about symbolic
constructions. He speaks prophetically that only as I-Thouness prospers will
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

the I-It modality recede (Buber 1958). For Lévinas (1981), we are embedded
within existential obligations to the Other. Interaction between self and Other
makes peace normative; nonviolence is not only a political strategy but a public
philosophy.
In his Dialogic Confession Ronald Arnett (2005) illustrates the normative dia-
logic tradition in terms of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s struggle with Nazi evil. Bonhoef-
fer’s discourse was one of pain and suffering, until evil triumphed in his execution.
His discourse was also one of life and gratitude and was given coherence in a
Christocentric faith community. Phenomenology is situated within chronicles

184 Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 of belief, and this faith is creatively applied in the concrete historical situation.
Without requiring that we imitate him directly, Bonhoeffer’s authentic engage-
ment with the historical moment made inescapable the need to begin in a dialogic
framework. Without a relational ethics guided by a center, we cannot embrace
the diversity of others in today’s world of narrative and virtue confusion.
Bonhoeffer issued a manifesto on behalf of dialogic ethics, affirming an unmit-
igated human dignity in nonnegotiable terms. He illustrated how the critical dia-
logic mode generates social criticism and leads to resistance. Since his discourse
is more than contingent, he could condemn oppression and dehumanization
without personal prejudice or emotional diatribe. Absent a defensible definition
of the good, arbitrariness will vitiate praxis. Communication ethics that recog-
nizes the genuine otherness in Others is a catalyst for critical consciousness.
Normativity is not a medieval remnant but the catalyst for empowerment.

Conclusion

Philosophical usage normally divides ethics into three parts: normative ethics,
metaethics, and descriptive ethics. The last reports on the moral behavior of
specific persons or groups and studies the way ethical decision making func-
tions de facto. In terms of communication, descriptive ethics gives an account of
failures and successes in journalism practice, locates the problems, and identifies
specific dilemmas facing media workers. Metaethics addresses issues about nor-
mative theories and philosophically examines, among other things, the nature of
the good and the right. Normative ethics fuses actual morality with principles,
concentrating on the justice or injustice of societies and institutions. Regarding
journalism, it deals with privacy, sensationalism, confidentiality, free press–fair
trial, conflict of interest, violence, national security, and the new technologies.
Most broadly, normative ethics concerns the best ways for professionals to lead
their lives and the principles to be promoted. Normative ethics seeks to establish
norms and guidelines, not merely to describe details or abstractions. From a
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

normative perspective, if abstract theory is our purpose, the conclusions are a

contained circle, out of touch with reality.
Normative ethics is the right approach for professional ethics, as the Hastings
Center established. But formalist models of the normative are inadequate. Nar-
rative ethics points us in the right direction, but dialogic perspectives include
the critical voice. Those traditions of narrative ethics that take the moral dimen-
sion seriously, such as MacIntyre’s, point to the normative but are likewise not
sufficient. Critical dialogic ethics is the catalyst for bringing the normative to
maturity.

Ethics 185

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 In terms of unapologetic normativity, the dialogic paradigm alone escapes
both the rationalist and distributive fallacies. An ethics of moral predicates
endorses the central role of reason while presupposing an a priori of duty. This
cognitivist ethics falls prey to the rationalist fallacy in which reason determines
both the genesis and the conclusion. Nor does the dialogic paradigm from Buber
to Bonhoeffer commit the distributive fallacy by presuming that humanity as
one empirical subject can be represented by one particular group. Its appeal to
everyday life, and Bonhoeffer’s dialogical confession, precludes assuming that
one strategic human position in the social structure represents the whole. A
revolutionary working class, persecuted minority, or religious sect is not made
universal by some faulty logic of substitution. Brought to maturity in Bonhoeffer,
dialogic theory advocates a politics of empowerment that diverges fundamen-
tally from a system of power blocs and power elites. This normative approach
simultaneously makes the ideological penultimate and critical dialogic com-
munication ethics the apex of normative theories.

Notes
1. The term principlism was coined by Clouser and Gert (1990) in a definitive essay cri-
tiquing the prevailing epistemology in medical ethics. For a response to their critique
and review of the issues, see McCarthy 2003.
2. Widely considered the most influential theological ethicist at present, Stanley Hauerwas
trades on the same insight that stories constitute a community’s moral framework. For
Hauerwas, the axis consists of appropriate forms of community, grounded in stories
of substantive morality and not merely in formal rules of proper procedure. Moral
power is inseparably connected to a body of language we inherit; the legacy moves us
toward a moral horizon and thereby holds the whims of autonomous individualism
at bay (see his A Community of Character [1981]; see also Hauerwas and Jones 1989).
3. Carey taught a seminar at Columbia to “sensitize students to ethical and political
considerations that underlie . . . contemporary journalism.” Its first week centered
on stories and asked, “What is the relation between journalism and other expressive
arts—fiction, history, etc.?” This unit—titled “Why Write? Why Tell Stories?”—assigned
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Robert Coles’s Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1989).
4. The interpersonal, psychological version of dialogue theory in Carl Rogers et al. is
therefore inadequate. Arnett (2005) demonstrates how dialogue should be understood
as public communication.
5. Koehn (1998) supports feminist ethics’ emphasis on a relational order. In her view,
however, a feminist ethics based on care and nurturance is not radically reciprocal,
since the one cared for depends on the one caring. She argues for a dialogic ethics
that makes feminist ethics more credible intellectually and more viable in practical
application.

186 Clifford Christians

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The Public

Philosophical Foundations
and Distortions
in the Quest for Civitas
Robert Fortner
What is the public and what is its ordained or practical role in a free
society? A variety of answers have been suggested for this question.
On the ordination side, what did the framers of the U.S. Constitu-
tion have in mind when they guaranteed—in the appended Bill of
Rights—freedom of press, assembly, petition, religion, and speech?
On the practical side, what is meant by the public itself—and how
one can know the mind of this public if its “opinion” is to be known
on matters of “public policy” in a “republic”?
We have all seen news reports concerning not only state or na-
tional public opinion in the United States but even international
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

public opinion—as though people living under various political and

economic systems, speaking different languages, and understand-
ing the world in profoundly different ways could somehow have a
single mind on some policy adopted or tragedy suffered in the global
arena. Often what this means is that decisions taken at the United
Nations, or state and nongovernmental organization (NGO) efforts
to respond to an earthquake or other natural disaster, are conflated
with the collection of individual reactions that might actually qualify
as a public response. Although it is never articulated, moreover,

187

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the assumption is that delegates to international assemblies express the will of
their individual publics through their votes, or that a common moral sensibility
so informs human minds—regardless of differences among people—that it is fair
to claim global public concern, outrage, abhorrence, compassion, or decision in
response to world events. Even while assuming such collective consciousness
or representation, however, we all know that actual reactions contradict these
assumptions. Those who perpetrate genocides are not universally abhorred.
National actions are condemned in general assemblies of states, yet change does
not ensue. Rhetorical fulminations against terror, or apartheid, or military ac-
tions resound, but states feel comfortable ignoring them. International tribunals
condemn, but states refuse to extradite. Is the idea of an outraged, or engaged,
or represented public anything more than a convenient myth?
Certainly the scholarship that has informed our idea of the public has dealt
with it as a reality and as being substantial enough to contribute meaningfully
to the true functioning of democracy. Abraham Lincoln captured this expecta-
tion in the concluding words of his 1863 address at Gettysburg: “that govern-
ment of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the
earth.” Still, Lincoln’s claim about the significance of the hallowed ground on
the battlefield came little more than a decade after Tocqueville’s criticism that
the power of opinion vested in the majority confronted no serious obstacles to
“retard, much less halt, its progress and give it time to hear the wails of those it
crushes as it passes. The consequences of this state of affairs are fate-laden and
dangerous for the future” (2000, 248).
Is the public to be trusted? Does representative democracy actually function
according to the will of the public? Is the will of the majority a dangerous or
unstable foundation for action? Is there one public, or are there many? How do
we identify the public (or common) weal? These are but some of the questions
that have been raised by those who have struggled to explain the nature of the
public and its significance in society.
The idea of the public emerged over a long period of time. In that respect its
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

development parallels that of people itself in Western philosophy. When “we the
people” was penned in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, for instance, the
term did not encompass African Americans, women, or even non-land-owning
peasants. Gradually, however, as reformers drew attention to the chauvinism
and racism of this interpretation, new laws extended the franchise of voting to
encompass these groups, and the notion of people expanded. The same situation
prevailed in England with the extension of rights through the Magna Carta in
1215, but it was largely only the lesser nobility who benefited. The French did
both better and worse in the revolution based on liberté, égalité, and fraternité,

188 Robert Fortner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 for it extended human rights to peasants but also demonized, dehumanized,
and decapitated the aristocracy.
The idea of the public has gone through several manifestations, some building
on ideas of previous writers, others contradicting those writers. No notion of
the public has achieved universal acceptance.
Jürgen Habermas (1991) has argued that the modern idea of the public origi-
nated when a bourgeois public emerged as mercantilism shifted into early capi-
talism during the eighteenth century. This idea of a modern public coalesced in
the coffeehouses of England, the salons of France, and the German literary and
table societies. These new gathering places provided a forum for discussion of
both economic and political affairs. This in turn increased the need for news,
giving impetus to both the expansion of news reporting and the commodification
of the news provided by the press. Some scholars have criticized Habermas for
ignoring the development of other publics, particularly those formed by women
and workers (see, e.g., Calhoun 1992; Thompson 1995). Although Habermas
(1992, 423) has admitted some shortcomings in his original work, he claims that
defenders have corroborated his “basic lines of . . . analysis.”
As people coalesced into groups to discuss issues that began to constitute
public business, they became a conversational public. These small groups consti-
tuted a civil society, one where differences of opinion could be aired and where
rational disputation was the norm. Habermas called this the developing public
sphere.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1971), examining the situation in the mid-
nineteenth century, went further when they claimed in 1888 that the bourgeoisie
had “exclusive political sway” (82) that resulted in “political centralization” (85)
and the enslavement of the proletariat (88). In one respect, this confirmed Hab-
ermas’s claim of a developed bourgeois public sphere and validated his omission
of working-class publics from his original analysis.
By the turn of the twentieth century most agreed that if a true public or public
sphere were to exist, it would require dialogue across the spectrums of class, age,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and religion. Otherwise a true civitas could not be maintained. In the twentieth
century, however, the arrival and application of electronic media to the practice
of politics, economics, and social control began to complicate the assumptions
that had propped up the shaky consensus about the nature of the public.1
The arrival of radio and the development of new means of propaganda using
the telegraph and wireless during World War I fueled concerns that people could
no longer be knowledgeably engaged in a genuinely informed public sphere. The
maturing of capitalism also brought with it an increasing emphasis on advertis-
ing and a subsequent concern about its role in steering a gullible public to the

The Pu blic 189

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 most cleverly promoted products rather than to the most useful, most effective,
or least expensive ones.
Such developments prompted alarm that the new potentials for propaganda
created by technology might short-circuit the rational ideals of the Enlightenment,
which had influenced expectations of the public, justified an expansion of the vot-
ing franchise, and allowed capitalism to flourish as business and manufacturing
leaders (the bourgeoisie) worked hand-in-glove with the state (especially during
the period of imperial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).
During the 1920s John Cowper Powys (1929, 273) referred to this new public as
a “herd,” while Walter Lippmann warned in 1922 (1949, 158) that it was no longer
possible to believe in the original dogma of democracy: “that the knowledge
needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the
human heart.” If we believe that, Lippmann said, we are deceiving ourselves. In
fact, he said, “the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements . . . and
the opportunities for manipulation [are] open to anyone who understands the
process.” A few years after making these remarks Lippmann (1925) went even
further, castigating the public’s very ability to self-govern and defining the public
as nothing more than a random collection of bystanders.
Although sharing Lippmann’s and Powys’s pessimistic views, Louis Wirth
(1964, 56) admitted that
with mass communication, the newspaper, the radio, the motion picture,
and with the political power resident in the masses of men who have to be
persuaded or moved, the dissemination of ideas has become an art and a big
business. Propaganda has become the price we pay for our literacy and our
suffrage. We have become the victims of the mouthpieces and loudspeak-
ers of those who have acquired the power to make decisions and those
who seek to wrest it from them. Propaganda has become the chief means
for enlarging the scope of consensus that we get and as a result is often an
unstable and spurious one.2

A second and opposite response saw great potential in the development of

Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

an informed public opinion. Both Louis Wirth and Robert E. Park expected the
new means of communication to provide the sinews of community that would
establish the mores and behaviors of urban life. Park (1967, 37, 38) referred to
publicity as a “recognized form of social control” and to the newspaper as the
first and most important practical agency for controlling public opinion. And
Wirth claimed (1964, 35) that it was the media “upon which the human race
depends to hold it together. Mass communication is rapidly becoming, if it is not
already, the main framework of the web of social life. . . . We live in an era when

190 Robert Fortner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the control over these media constitutes perhaps the most important source of
power in the social universe.”
Taking the position most directly at odds with Lippmann, John Dewey was the
most articulate, however, concerning the public’s role in a democratic society.3
Dewey emphasized that the Industrial Revolution and the development of capi-
talism had changed the context within which the public had to be formed. What
had developed in the United States, he said, was a “Great Society,” a society that
required far more attention be given to face-to-face conversation if it were ever
to become a great community. “When communication occurs,” Dewey wrote
(1958, 166), “all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision; they
are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public
discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking.”
Dewey (1954, 138) nonetheless admitted that the public had been eclipsed,
drawn away from the business of the state by “too many ways of enjoyment.”
So the public that Dewey envisioned as the foundation of the great community
remained, he thought, “shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself,
but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance” (142). The only
possible solution to this problem was greater use of communication, “the per-
fecting of the means and ways of communication of meaning so that genuinely
shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform
desire and effort and thereby direct action” (155).
In an age of spin doctors, image consultants, and pollsters who work the
electorate for political advantage, Lippmann’s pessimistic view of an easily ma-
nipulated public seems far more accurate than Dewey’s, Cooley’s or Park’s.4 The
more optimistic views, however, more accurately reflect the idealism of Jefferson
and Madison in constructing the documents that are the foundation of the U.S.
political system. These views also inform James Carey’s views of the public.
Of all the ideas Carey considered, perhaps that of the public engaged his
imagination longer than any other. He was not content merely to deal with this
idea’s descriptive dimensions; instead, he urged scholars—and particularly histo-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

rians and practitioners of American journalism—back to the sense of the public

that was shared by those who wrote the Constitution and thus had particular
expectations about the way the citizens who constituted this public would oper-
ate. His arguments about the public are thus both restorative and prescriptive.
Carey’s restorative approach calls for understanding the public as a people
engaged in conversation. He says that the purpose of the First Amendment was
“to create a conversational society of people who speak to one another, who con-
verse” (Carey 1997l, 216). The point of the First Amendment’s guarantees, not only
those that protect speech and the press, but those also that guarantee the right of

The Pu blic 191

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 assembly and freedom of religion, was to ensure that no one would be excluded
from this conversation, which was vital to the construction and maintenance
of democracy. The purpose of these guarantees, Carey says, was to ensure an
egalitarian access to the conversation—no one was to be excluded, as this would
enfeeble the efforts to restrain hierarchy, which was the bane of democrats such
as Madison, Jefferson, and Franklin, who had crafted the Constitution.
The more prescriptive aspects of Carey’s consideration of the public have
to do with ways in which the current practice of journalism needs to change
to help restore the public to its rightful place as the foundation of democracy.
Carey’s criticism of journalism is essentially that it has usurped the public with
a self-serving and illegitimate claim to serve it, when in reality it has cooperated
with public relations and the public polling industry to replace the public with
an impotent substitute in the form of interest groups.
Interest groups do not take the place of an active conversing public in Carey’s
view. By definition, he says, interest groups “operate in the private sector, behind
the scenes, and their relationship to public life is essentially propagandistic and
manipulative” (Carey 1997l, 218). Thus they are incapable of replacing the public.
They constitute, in essence, the opposite of the public.
Modern journalism’s role in replacing the public with the interest group en-
sued when the press relinquished its historical role as encourager of conversa-
tion, as enhancer of the cultural dialogue, as “one voice in that conversation,”
amplifying the conversation outward and helping it along by “bringing forward
information that the conversation itself demands” (Carey 1997l, 219). Instead, it
came to define its role as one of providing information from afar, information
that it chose to inject into the conversation, to set the agenda of the conversa-
tion, but without any “personal” involvement or stake in the outcome of that
conversation. To enhance its prestige as the Fourth Estate and to forestall any
politically motivated efforts to restrain its activities or control its quest for profit
through consolidation and giantism, the press took on the role of independent
institution, severing the intimacy it had with the public and thus eviscerating
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

both the character of that public and its connection to it. In essence, the press
committed seppuku and acted as kaishakunin for the public.5
The press soldiers on as though it were still part of the public conversation,
as though it were still alive to the expectations that the Constitution’s framers
had for it. Carey (1997l, 220) agrees that a free press “is a necessary condition
of a free public life, but it is not the same thing as a free public life.” It seems
unaware of its own demise.
There are several implications that result from this situation. First, since the
press is no longer intimately connected with the eclipsed public, and since we

192 Robert Fortner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 should “value the press to the precise degree that it sustains public life” (of which
there is none), there is little in modern society to recommend that we protect,
celebrate, or attend to the press at all. Carey also argues that two results emerge
from a protected press no longer doing its assigned task. “The first is the ten-
dency of the press to treat us like a client, a group with a childlike dependence
and an eight-year-old mind incapable of functioning at all without our daily
dose of news” (Carey 1997l, 220). Second is the effort the press makes to con-
vince us that “just by sitting at home watching the news or spending an hour
with the newspaper, we are actually participating in the affairs that govern our
lives” (221). Ultimately we fall victim to these two implications (which Carey,
of course, assumes we already have): “Since there is no public life, there is no
longer a public conversation in which to participate, and, because there is no
conversation, there is no reason to be better informed and hence no need for
information” (220).6
It is no surprise to anyone who has read Carey’s most quoted essay, “A Cultural
Approach to Communication” (1989), that many of his ideas are rooted in the
Chicago school, especially the work of John Dewey. From Dewey, Carey learned
that community itself is created, sustained, and transformed in community.
From Charles Horton Cooley he learned that the newspaper, in America’s urban
concentrations of immigrants, was a necessary tool for the conversation through
which strangers would interact to understand one another. And this expectation
is not far-fetched, as the Kerner Commission affirmed in its examination of civil
unrest in 1968.
If the press fails to foster within the community the conversation necessary
to sustain it—and thus to undergird the links among people who constitute
it such that society is possible despite the ethnic, racial, religious, political, or
gender divisions inevitable in a mobile, urbanized environment—there is little
reason to support the press’s claims to represent the public. If the press sees its
role primarily as one of “representing” rather than organically participating
within the public—sees itself, in other words, as an outsider that serves clients by
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

representing their “best interests” rather than as a partner with the public—then
it has become a tool of repression, propaganda, and self-interest rather than a
tool for conviviality. As Carey puts it (1997h, 255),
Unless we are willing to entertain the possibility . . . that we are defined, at
least in part, by the communities we inhabit—indeed, that we are the ani-
mals that are forever creating and destroying communities—and that we are
implicated in the purposes and ends characteristic of those communities,
I see no possibility of recovering a meaningful notion of public life or of

The Pu blic 193

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 public opinion. [Only when] we can see the story of our lives as embedded
in the story of a public community, a community of general citizenship
rather than one restricted by class, race, gender, and so on, while simultane-
ously believing that our lives are also embedded in communities of private
identity—family, city, tribe, nation, party, or cause—can journalism and
public opinion, the press generally, make a moral and political difference, not
merely a psychological one. Only then can journalism and public opinion
situate us in the world and give our lives moral particularity.

This understanding of the needs of the public, and the relationship between
this public and the press, is also what undergirds Carey’s conclusions about the
reasons for the constitutional guarantee of a free press. It is the Constitution,
Carey argues (1997l, 209), that creates the people. “It is an act and foundation
through which people constitute themselves as a political community. It embod-
ies hope and aspirations. It is an injunction as to how we might live together as
a people, peacefully and argumentatively but civilly and progressively.”7 Since,
as Carey puts it, citizenship is a term of space, and people occupying the same
space need an orientation that allows them to share it in peace, the guarantees
of the First Amendment were meant to help create a public that could live in
harmony when thrown together in urban environments. Carey (1997h, 238) thus
says that the First Amendment “is not a loose collection of separate clauses, but
a compact description of a desirable political society.” He then explains what
he means: “the First Amendment says that people are free to gather together, to
have public spaces, free of the intrusion of the state or its representatives. Once
gathered they are free to speak to one another, to carry on public discourse,
freely and openly. They are further free to write down what they have to say
and to share it beyond the immediate place of utterance.” The religion clause, he
continues (239), guaranteed that people would not be excluded from this public
space on the basis of religion, the principal bone of contention among groups in
Europe that were providing the bulk of immigrants to the United States. To have
established a “state religion,” the typical pattern in Europe, would have been to
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

give primacy to a particular strain of faith in the public discourse. The religion
clause thus denied the state the right to make such a designation, a prohibition
that the founders saw to be in the interests of the public.
These efforts were in effect attempts to define what Habermas called the public
sphere. Although there were some similarities in the bourgeois assumptions that
Habermas revealed in his analysis of European coffeehouses and other venues
of the public sphere and the constitutional framers’ guarantees, the American
efforts were perhaps as inclusive as the authors could imagine—before the issue
of slavery or gender equity rose powerfully enough to affect people’s conscious-

194 Robert Fortner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 nesses. Thus the public sphere was seen to encompass the entire community,
regardless of distinctions that may have separated people otherwise.
Perhaps the issues that bedevil consideration of the public are clear by now.
Nevertheless, let me summarize before moving on. First is the problem of inclu-
sion. Who is part of the public? Second, must the public—those who constitute
the public sphere—be engaged in face-to-face conversation to truly exist? Third,
is this public so prone to sway by propaganda that to consider it active or engaged
in the public business as a separate, critically thinking entity would be naïve?
Fourth, is it reasonable, given its agenda and means of financing, to expect the
press to play a positive role in creating and sustaining the public?
The lack of easy answers to these questions helps explain why the notion of
the public continues to engage scholarly attention. As the means of communica-
tion have multiplied, the issues associated with an active, engaged public have
as well. The advent of the World Wide Web, for instance, created expectations
that anyone could publish a newspaper. E-mail brought with it the expectation
that an interactive global village might finally be constructed. Blogging has been
touted as the new system for engaged public discourse.
So the questions are not answered; they are merely recast to account for new
circumstances. John B. Thompson (1995) has argued that the notion of “public-
ness” itself must be redefined. He says that in an electronic age, expectations
of face-to-face encounters as the basis for continuing public engagement fail to
account for new possibilities: “we must seriously question whether the tradi-
tional model of publicness as co-presence is adequate to the social and political
conditions of the late twentieth century” (236). Publicness, he suggests, can no
longer be based on the model of the Greek city-states—the model that informs
both the expectations of the constitutional framers and those of Dewey, Cooley,
Park, and Carey—but must reflect current circumstances and include “openness
and visibility” as operative concepts. “Making available and making visible”
should define what is public, and “this visibility no longer involves the sharing
of a common locale” (236).
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Thompson’s perspective is premised both on the development of the technolo-

gies of visibility—principally television—and on one of the major developments
that have frustrated the idealists writing about an engaged copresent public:
media concentration. Thompson says that this reality requires that the idea of the
public be redefined so as not to require copresence. “With the transformation of
media organizations into large-scale commercial organizations, the freedom of
expression was increasingly confronted by a new threat, a threat stemming not
from the excessive use of state power, but rather from the unhindered growth of
media organizations qua commercial concerns” (Thompson 1995, 239).8 Thomp-

The Pu blic 195

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 son’s proposed solution to this new threat—and to the need to “create the condi-
tions for the renewal of public life”—is “the principle of regulated pluralism.”
He suggests “the establishment of an institutional framework which would both
accommodate and secure the existence of a plurality of independent media
organizations” (240).
Another perspective on the nature of the public is based on Amatai Etzi-
oni’s work on communitarianism. Etzioni (1993, 13–14) argued that “we need
to concern ourselves with shoring up the social foundations of morality, so
that communities can again raise their moral voices, families can educate their
youngsters, and schools can graduate individuals who will become upstanding
members of their communities.” The problem that Etzioni addressed was that
the American concern for rights had outstripped the traditional emphasis on
responsibilities and that a new balance of these two concepts had to be estab-
lished so that communities could once again thrive in the United States.
Although Etzioni’s thoughts were not directly primarily to communication,
or to the nature of the public per se, communication scholars such as Clifford
Christians have applied them in the context of journalistic practice and the
formation of community. “Community formation,” Christians argues (1999, 71),
“is public journalism’s overriding mission. Civic associations in any meaningful
sense are only possible through active participation in articulating the com-
mon good and mutuality in implementing it.” Christians applies the Gestalt of
communitarianism to public life in his expectation that people will commit to
norms beyond their own self-interest. Without a philosophically rigorous moral
center, we would make little more than arbitrary choices when it came to, say,
defending struggles for social justice. The relativism that results from the lack
of such a moral core, Christians says, makes history little more than a contest
of arbitrary power (1997, 16).9 Building on what he calls “feminist communi-
tarianism,” Christians suggests that the role of the press is not the transmission
of information (also echoing Carey) but civic transformation. The result of this
transformation is not merely readers and audiences but “morally literate persons”
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

(Christians 2000, 37).

The debate about the nature of the public has remained remarkably consis-
tent—at least in the United States—since the writing of the Constitution. Dewey
and Lippmann reanimated this debate for the twentieth century, juxtaposing rule
by democratic community in conversation (Dewey) with rule by elites or techno-
crats (Lippmann). The debate continues. Are ordinary people able to see beyond
themselves, able to commit scarce resources for another’s benefit, and thus provide
the basis for true, morally functioning communities, or must we allow only a few
to decide what is best for all? Sol Picciotto (2001, 338) puts it this way: “A central

196 Robert Fortner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 issue, undoubtedly, is the continued growth of technocracy and rule by experts,
which can be seen as part of general changes in the nature of power, a shift to the
politics of expertise. This creates a tension with democracy.” Are experts better
able to decide what is best for society, or is it better to trust the hurly-burly of
explicitly political processes? More positively and optimistically, Picciotto offers
ways to support direct public participation in democracy and civic deliberation
that are rooted in classical Aristotelian concepts. He sees these as going a long
way to avoid the failures and public suspicion of the technicist bureaucratic and
managerialist decision-making of the global political economy.
It is likely that questions about the nature and role of the public will continue in
academic debates and within the public itself. The electorate seems to be deeply
divided about its ability to function effectively as a public or within a public
sphere or community. Further, continuing developments in the ownership of
media organizations appear to affect their ability to see a role for themselves be-
yond that of information providers. As for academic understandings, they seem
to be deeply affected by ideology and commitments to dialogue or “freedom,”
to rights or responsibilities. Ultimately the issue of the public is deeply affected
by the moral and philosophical commitments that inform the discussion.

Notes
1. I say “shaky” here because the ongoing political upheavals in Europe, the expansion of
empires, and the lack of literacy and the voting franchise in many parts of the Western
world made the expansion of the public sphere problematic.
2. Lippmann (1949, 48) summed up the public’s capacities this way: “The mass of abso-
lutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated in-
dividuals, is very considerable, much more considerable . . . than we generally suppose.
Thus a wide popular appeal is circulated among persons who are mentally children or
barbarians, people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose vitality is
exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has comprehended no factor
in the problem under discussion. The stream of public opinion is stopped by them in
little eddies of misunderstanding, where it is discolored with prejudice and far fetched
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

analogy.”
3. Dewey (1954, 117) credited Lippmann for his point that the public seemed to be lost
or bewildered, as well other ideas, even when his own analysis reached conclusions
diverging from Lippmann’s.
4. Richard N. Rosenfeld wrote in 2004 that Americans have become so unhappy with
the practice of politics in America that “we have become a nation of spectators, not
citizens” (35).
5. Seppuku is a Japanese form of ritual suicide by disembowelment. The kaishakunin
beheads the person who has committed seppuku.

The Pu blic 197

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 6. See also Allen 2002 (117).
7. See also McChesney (2004) for a similar argument concerning Alexander Meiklejohn’s
perspectives on the press and democracy.
8. This argument is quite similar to one made by the Commission on Freedom of the
Press in 1947.
9. Václav Havel (1991, 59) makes a similar point concerning the public in conflict with au-
thority. Authorities, he writes, systematically applaud the shift in public consciousness
from concern for suprapersonal goals and values to a more “inward” orientation that
provides an escape from the “public sphere.” This orientation renders people “incapable
of realizing the increasing extent to which [they have] been spiritually, politically, and
morally violated” and thus opens them up for “complex manipulation.”
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

198 Robert Fortner

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Technology

The Digital Sublimation

of the Electrical Sublime
Steven Jones

Technology is a lot like the weather. It influences us in myriad untold

ways; directly or indirectly, it affects everything from our behavior
to our physical health and our mental outlook. Like the weather,
technology is often in the news. And we try our best to forecast and
predict it, but its unpredictability continues to foil us. We know the
sources of weather; that is, we know in scientific terms what causes
it. Similarly, we know who creates a particular technology, but we
know little about the way it works or its likely operation, and we
know it best only in the present, as it is happening to us, and in
the past, in the stories we tell about its impact on us at some time
(usually long) ago.1 And we talk a lot about both, a similarity more
pronounced recently. An increasing number of people now talk
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

about technology at least as much as, if not more than, they talk
about the weather.
Today, technology is
* almost exclusively electronic (even primarily mechanical
devices, such as automobiles, now rely on electronics and use
electricity);

199

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 * almost entirely computer driven (chips are, it seems, in everything; some
municipalities in the United States are even debating requiring identity
chips be placed in pets);
* highly miniature, and even nanoscale, with such technologies already
redefining how we imagine “small”;
* largely silent, so that we do not hear it working but for the occasional
noise of a fan or an alarm;
* converging, at least insofar as a single device can do multiple things;
* and internally information oriented (machines are always providing
information, telling us something, whether we wish to know it or not, as
with automobile alerts saying, “The door is ajar”).

Of course, technology differs from the weather above all in that the latter is
natural, found in nature, and the former is not. Yet technology—particularly
modern, digital, networked communication technology—is coming to seem
more natural. This is partly because it is being woven into all manner of everyday
routines and partly because it is increasingly invisible and silent. Only fifty years
ago technology was predominately mechanical, large and therefore visible, loud,
and built for a single purpose. There was no missing it, and at least early on,
there were no attempts to hide it. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries can one find efforts to incorporate communication technology into the
landscape of everyday life. The effort was led by phonograph makers, who sought
to highlight the record player’s role “as edifying musical furniture, an unobtrusive
presence in the idealized environment of family life” (Barnett 1996, 301; see also
Kruse 1993; for a more general discussion of technology, domestic life, and the
home, see Silverstone and Hirsch 1992). Not surprisingly, the technology that
carried the human voice was among the very first modern technologies to find
a place in the home.
Yet while loud and visible, technology prior to digitalization told little about
itself and its workings. The information given to its users was at best obscure.
Users needed to troubleshoot should something go wrong; there was little if any
feedback, such as error codes or logs. One needed to dig around underneath
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

the hood of an automobile for clues about a problem, or listen for sounds from
the engine, or study the color of exhaust from the tailpipe. Even in the case of
early computers one had to decipher their inner working by looking at a series
of lights on a panel or examining software code and other sorts of readouts.2
Now, more types of technology allow people to communicate with one another.
There is also more communication between people and technology. And there is
more communication between devices of which users may often be unaware.

200 Steven Jones

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Technology, Culture, and Scholarship

Despite all these changes in technology that emerged in the past 150 or so years,
we have progressed very little in understanding technology as an element of cul-
ture. Perhaps that is because technology has come to seem increasingly natural.
Perhaps because digital technologies have, since the 1980s, seemed less revolu-
tionary and more evolutionary, they draw less of our attention. In cultural studies
the literature regarding technology is wide ranging; a tour through it can take
readers to many interesting places. Nonetheless, insightful understanding of
the history of technology and culture through the lens of social theory remains
elusive. Much of what has been written about technology and culture either
examines a particular invention and its “impact” on culture or ventures into
abstract, sometimes speculative, theorizing about technology’s “influence” on
culture. Even when the symbiotic relationship between technology and culture
is acknowledged, the acknowledgment is typically in service of determinism—
though of the cultural, rather than technological, sort: culture has caused a
particular technology to be invented or used in a particular way. Engineering is
assumed to follow the lead of culture or at least be secondary to it. Examinations
of the material conditions under which technologies are invented and the mate-
rial changes brought about by technology fare much better, for they are more
easily focused, and empirical evidence is readily available to show connections
between technology and socio-material conditions. (As I discuss later, however,
that too can cause problems.)
Most scholarship focuses on specific media technologies (often at a micro
level and with much historical detail), but what we need is intertechnologi-
cal work, that is, studies that might analyze and help explain the relationships
among technologies of communication and culture. Little research focuses on
technology transitions, the moments when we first encounter old and new media
together in everyday life. Old and new media rarely clash directly. Rather, they
coexist, often for quite a long time. They adapt (the new often adapting to the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

old—consider the sudden popularity of PCs as TVs or “media centers” or of

YouTube and the hype surrounding on-line video), and culture adapts alongside
and with them. The most interesting work in the literature of technology and
culture analyzes transitions and adaptations among technologies and between
technology and culture to give us an understanding of particular people and
moments (see, e.g., Hoggart 1961; Marvin 1988; Sennett 1992).
The earliest substantive and satisfying writing about technology and culture is
by Lewis Mumford. In Technics and Civilization (1934) Mumford described soci-

Tech nology 201

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ety as technical already well before machines were developed. Although scholars
prior to and during Mumford’s time had focused on the diffusion of technology
in society (in industry, for instance, or in the home), Mumford’s contribution
was to show how technology suffused our thinking. He used the term technics to
denote not only the use of a machine but also a reorientation of wishes, habits,
ideas, and goals brought about by an imagination that includes machines in its
universe. “Behind all the great material inventions of the last century and a half,”
Mumford wrote, there “was not merely a long internal development of technics:
there was also a change of mind” (3). The very presence of the machine as an
imagined object enabled its re-presentation in thought and culture.
Technics is most interesting in the realm of everyday life, where it illuminates
the underpinnings of social and cultural change in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Consider, for example, a chapter from the first volume of
Robert Caro’s (1982) biography of Lyndon Johnson titled “The Sad Irons.” To
explain why Johnson sought construction of dams on Texas’s Colorado River,
Caro provided a lucid and compelling tale of life in the Texas Hill Country,
where Johnson grew up, a tale that includes the trials of being without electric-
ity in a country that had rapidly become electrified. We, living in places that
have enjoyed ubiquitous electricity for as long as we can remember, may find
some of Johnson’s hardships quaint (e.g., the use of iceboxes that used ice and
not electric refrigeration . . . how antique). Others may make us pause as we
consider the consequences. For example, iceboxes were rare because the cost
of ice itself was prohibitive, and so inhabitants relied on canning to preserve
fruits and vegetables, but canning required both constant work as each fruit or
vegetable ripened and heat from stoves that had to be stoked with wood, which
was often carried great distances, and that caused a great deal of smoke and too
much heat during the late-summer canning season. Perhaps most surprising
and interesting for communication scholars is the single sentence that Caro
(1982, 512) sets on its own toward the end of the chapter: “Even reading was
hard.” Consider what it meant to have only candles or kerosene lamps avail-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

able for illumination and how that affected children’s education.3 One of Caro’s
interview subjects showed what technics means to the imagination: “‘Living
was just drudgery then,’ says Carroll Smith of Blanco. ‘Living—just living—was
a problem. No lights. No plumbing. Nothing. Just living on the edge of starva-
tion. That was farm life for us. God, city people think there was something fine
about it. If they only knew’” (513). The crux of technics lies in Smith’s last few
words: “If they only knew.” The ability to imagine alternatives, possibilities, and
perhaps most important, consequences is what is most at stake in Mumford’s
critique of technology and technological thinking. It is also what is at stake in

202 Steven Jones

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the best scholarly writing about technology. It does not merely tell us what we
do not know. Rather, it shows us new perspectives from which to understand
how and why what we know and do not know matters.
Not until the 1960s did explorations of technology and technics in the realm
of the mundane began in earnest in media studies. Scholars such as Marshall
McLuhan (1962), Harold Innis (1964, 1986), Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), and
Walter Ong (2002) explored media in transition with a particular focus on
consequences of technics for the senses and sensibilities. Their work opened
up interesting areas of questioning in an era during which modern electronic
media of communication emerged as elements of mass culture.
The interest in technology and culture was, of course, not absent outside
North America. In particular, in Europe the combination of Marxism and British
cultural studies resulted in important work on the technologizing of culture and
thinking. One of the first and most interesting books in British cultural studies is
Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1961); although most would consider this to
give technology at most only peripheral consideration, Hoggart’s insights apply
to the present, when the Internet and other new media provide seemingly end-
less choices and freedoms. Technology may provide new forms of expression,
community, and assembly, Hoggart (1961, 282) noted, but his concern was “that
freedom . . . be kept as in any sense a meaningful thing whilst the processes of
centralisation and technological development continue. This is a particularly
intricate challenge because, even if substantial inner freedom were lost, the great
new classless class would be unlikely to know it: its members would still regard
themselves as free and be told that they were free.”
Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) is the
most interesting and direct treatment of technology published in the heyday of
British cultural studies, particularly in the manner Williams was able to contex-
tualize television in society. It was here that Williams debuted the term mobile
privatization to denote the contradictory but compelling ways that media had
begun to alter not only the balance between the private and public but also the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

very meaning of those terms in relation to space and place. Still, scouring Brit-
ish cultural studies literature from the 1960s through the 1980s for commentary
regarding technology clearly shows that by and large the lines drawn there are
the same as those that have been drawn in most other analyses of technology:
utopia versus dystopia, the liberating promise versus the oppressive potential, the
(sometimes breathless) descriptions of what technology “made possible” (music,
video, art, etc.) and what it “made invisible” (labor, ideology, etc.). In short, tech-
nology is overvalued in regard to most every domain of human activity, its agency
made central and almost unquestioningly effective and thus deterministic.

Tech nology 203

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey on Technology and Culture: The Detour through Ritual

The work of James W. Carey is best situated in this conversation about technol-
ogy, although Harold Innis, too, contributed to Carey’s writing. Carey’s studies
in economics provide a closer link to Innis than might be evident from Carey’s
essays. Innis had earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Chi-
cago, and his early scholarly work reveals the makings of a liberal political econo-
mist. His break from classical economics toward the study of media influenced,
among others, Marshall McLuhan. Nevertheless, Innis’s shift toward studies of
media, particularly toward analyses of the spatial and temporal biases of com-
munication technologies, was influenced greatly by economics, particularly as
he linked changes in political economy to technology and media. Indeed, his
analyses are insightful and balanced precisely because Innis did not start from
a position centered on technology. In his view communication is a medium in
the sense of an intervening substance. It does not necessarily itself intervene;
it is not necessarily an agent. To understand it as a substance one must study
that which is embedded in it. That understanding of mediation was not lost
on Carey and came to be a hallmark of his nuanced analyses of the history of
communication technology.
Carey’s doctoral dissertation blended his knowledge of economics and jour-
nalism in research on the way words are priced (Carey 1963).4 Why did some
writers earn ten cents per word while others might earn a dollar per word? How
could all words in an article be priced the same? While working on his dis-
sertation, he encountered Marshall McLuhan, who had come to the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a stint as a visiting scholar, bringing with
him the seeds of his book Understanding Media (Carey 1998c). By then Innis,
too, had shifted toward media studies. The combination of Innis, McLuhan,
and his situation as a student among journalists at a time when new electronic
communication media were rapidly coming to dominate newsgathering and
news sharing apparently made a strong impression on Carey. It was not until
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

1975, however, that Carey synthesized Innis and McLuhan in his own voice, in
“A Cultural Approach to Communication” (1989, 13–36).
In that essay Carey clearly and forcefully distinguished two views of com-
munication, ritual and transmission. The latter is a “process of transmitting
messages at a distance for the purpose of control. . . . Communication then is
persuasion, attitude change, behavior modification, socialization through the
transmission of information, influence, or conditioning.” The former is “directed
not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of
society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of

204 Steven Jones

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 shared beliefs. . . . The archetypal case under a ritual view is the sacred ceremony
that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality” (Carey 1989, 6).
By highlighting ritual Carey added to communication an important human
dimension otherwise absent in the view of it as transmission or transportation.
He made clear that messages are nothing without meaning.
In each case, ritual and transmission, Carey’s terminology has religious over-
tones. The importance of this religious cast is particularly clear in his explanation
of the role transmission plays in exploration and colonization:
Transportation, particularly when it brought the Christian community of
Europe into contact with the heathen community of the Americas, was seen
as a form of communication with profoundly religious implications. This
movement in space was an attempt to establish and extend the kingdom of
God, to create the conditions under which godly understanding might be
realized, to produce a heavenly though still terrestrial city.
The moral meaning of transportation, then, was the establishment and
extension of God’s kingdom on earth. . . . [The telegraph] entered American
discussions not as a mundane fact but as divinely inspired for the purposes
of spreading the Christian message farther and faster, eclipsing time and
transcending space, saving the heathen, bringing closer and making more
probable the day of salvation. . . .
Communication was viewed as a process and a technology that would,
sometimes for religious purposes, spread, transmit, and disseminate knowl-
edge, ideas, and information farther and faster with the goal of controlling
space and people. (16–17)

This is not to say that Carey viewed transportation (or ritual, for that matter)
as merely a religious metaphor. Rather, it is important to take up this thread in
relation to McLuhan, who, like Carey, drew inspiration from his Catholicism.
Later, Carey noted the significance of McLuhan’s Catholicism:
McLuhan’s history of technology is in many ways a secularized version of
the basic Christian story of Eden, the Fall, and Redemption. Technology
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

restored the intimate connection to the Godhead sundered in the moment

of rational and sinful alienation. The metaphors which lace his work are
religious ones as well, drawn, in particular, from a Catholic vocabulary of
ritual and sacrament. Finally, though it is not something to be demonstrated
here, his understanding of the oral tradition (an understanding quite at
odds with that of Innis) is deeply informed by a liturgical sense of chant
and memory rather than a political sense of discussion and debate. The
preliterate world for which he yearned was a liturgical world rather than a
political one. (1998c)

Tech nology 205

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey, too, frequently referred to the Catholic tradition; his work is threaded
throughout with references to oral traditions and memory, particularly his
“Historical Pragmatism and the Internet” (2005). Nonetheless, he emphasized
politics, geography, and economics, elements he believed necessary to any se-
rious consideration of media and technology. Carey’s chagrin at McLuhan’s
evisceration of politics from technology was rearticulated in the aforementioned
review essay, which complains, “McLuhan was peculiarly disconnected from
the politics of his time and was admired by and appealed to those who reduced
politics to technology or who sought technological solutions to political dilem-
mas” (Carey 1998c).

Imagined Presence and Communication

I was first attracted to James Carey’s work in the early 1980s as a graduate student
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I was then (as I am
now) a “nerd” as that term was used at the time.5 As a high school student I had
access to a minicomputer, and at UIUC I was fortunate to land work helping to
prepare educational materials for use on the campus’s PLATO (Programmed
Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) computer system. At the time I was
primarily interested in becoming a rock critic and feature writer, and I was dab-
bling in being a musician. While the communication technology with which I
worked held my attention, I found PLATO to be less interesting than the tech-
nology used to create music. What most fired my imagination then—as it still
does now—was the simple idea, found in some form throughout Carey’s work,
that communication travels. I was particularly interested in the way music moves
from one place to another, the way it can be transported, and even more in the
way sonic spaces (e.g., reverberant spaces) can be created, moved, and used to
immerse a listener (Jones 1992, 1993, 2002). Although most scholars and readers
focus on Carey’s introduction of the ritual view of communication, Carey was
neither dismissive nor unaware of the value of transportation for an under-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

standing of communication. It was the transportation model with which Carey

took exception, the notion that communication can be reduced to merely the
“carrying” of information from one place to another. Carey regularly reminded
students in his courses that transportation routes were communication routes,
news was carried by travelers, telegraph lines followed railroad tracks, and so
on. Moreover, transmission is not the same as transportation. Innis made clear
that transportation is best understood in a physical sense, in terms of the abil-
ity of media to move communication across space and time. Carey’s interest
was, therefore, in changes media bring to cultural conceptions of spatial and

206 Steven Jones

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 temporal distance and in their bias toward the spatial or temporal. Most of
the scholars who address technology and culture, however, overlook the cul-
tural aspect of the “travel” of communication except when, usually in very glib
fashion, they introduce cultural imperialism (e.g., communication technology
“brought” this knowledge to that culture). The literature is, typically, first and
foremost a history of production or consumption (who “makes” technology or
who makes or sends something with it, or who “uses” technology or receives
something with it) without consideration of distribution. Transportation as
a metaphor for communication has unfortunately received short shrift from
cultural studies scholars interested in communication technology. (Notable
exceptions include Vincent Mosco, Douglas Kellner, Janet Wasko, Andrew Ca-
labrese, and Graham Murdock, among other scholars. Their works are oriented
toward political economy of communication, and they seriously consider the
nature of the movement of people and commodities in relation and in addition
to the movement of information.)
We can readily conceive of ways that communication can make us feel as if we
have traveled elsewhere. An interesting narrative to think about in this regard
is Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, but we rarely consider how communication can
make us think we have traveled in time. This is why the spiritual dimension in
Carey’s work is important and why communion matters. How near or far are we to
our ancestors? Do we speak to our forebears, and do they speak to us? How near
or far are we from our past? How do we commune with it? This is why McLuhan’s
and Carey’s Catholicism is so interesting. The notion of the Catholic Communion
involves making Christ present. It is this notion of presence that we must fur-
ther interrogate. How do media make us and others present? This fundamental
question has been addressed only in the most ham-handed ways, such as when
we ask whether the virtual is as good as the real or whether computer-mediated
communication can be as good as face-to-face communication.
Perhaps we can consider instead how technology makes us and others present
along multiple sensory dimensions, why we place value on particular types of
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

presence, how presence matters, how it is imagined, how it happens with and
through technology, and how and why we have learned to modulate presence. I
mean “presence” not in the way it is used with regard to new technologies, such
as ones used for videoconferencing (“telepresence”), but rather in the sense of
an “imagined presence”—quite literally, to borrow from the commercial world,
as “the next best thing to being there,” and yet so good that we are indeed able
to imagine being there. One easy way to sense the power of imagined presence
is to consider the importance of photos and recordings of loved ones who have
passed away. Once the living and dead have been located, what things do those

Tech nology 207

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 who have survived fire, tornado, flood, earthquake, or other disasters search
for? Usually they search for photo albums.
Communication technology has proven itself a means of making people pres-
ent across past, present, and future. As Jeffrey Sconce in Haunted Media (2000)
and John Durham Peters in Speaking into the Air (2000) each note, in different
ways, the electronic medium and the spirit medium share some of their roots,
which often run deep in American culture. Experience and memory, personal
and collective, human and electronic—these are the substance of culture and
of technology, and culture and technology can be understood as a substrate on
which the past is recorded, the present unfolds, and the future is predicted.

Technology and Culture: Where Do We Go from Here?

To return to where I began: while there is no shortage of communication tech-

nology to study and understand, we still know very little about technology and
culture. Perhaps technology changes too rapidly to be easily understood within
the context of culture, though analyses such as Raymond Williams’s Television:
Technology and Culture Form argue against this. More likely, technology is so
finely woven into the fabric of everyday life that relevant insights are hard to
come by. Insights about the relationships between technology and culture are
therefore harder still to discern.
Technology is dispersed throughout culture, yet it itself disperses culture, too.
Moreover, scholars of communication have become accustomed to dividing the
discipline by medium, as if each medium were somehow independent of other
ones. We are thus more likely to study an individual technology than to consider
technology as comprising those individual media. For example, the divisions (a
telling term for them) in the discipline’s major professional associations, the Na-
tional Communication Association and the International Communication Asso-
ciation, are sometimes specific in their focus (e.g., interpersonal communication
or mass communication). Scholars often self-identify even more specifically in
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

terms of television, radio, print journalism, Internet, and so on. The discipline
of communication has a deeply embedded medium-specific orientation that
tends to direct scholars toward intratechnological studies. This orientation is
evident in department curricula and job advertisements. Even scholars who
research the Internet and its social impacts too often confine their work to a
single Internet medium (e-mail, Web, chat, and so on). Jonathan Sterne (1998,
258) has chastised critical scholars for following other academicians in depict-
ing the Internet as a millennial cultural force: “In these millennial scenarios, the
cultural critic wonders at the possibilities and ‘impact’ of the ‘new’ medium: Will

208 Steven Jones

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 it revolutionize our lives or be a tool of alienation?” Why do critical scholars
critique the design of technology rather than try to understand, and when ap-
propriate intervene in, the interpretive possibilities of new media?
Neither mass nor interpersonal communication is as significant a category as
it once was. Indeed, they are becoming largely insignificant. Mass communica-
tion is no longer the simultaneous or near-simultaneous experience of media
content; it is the experience of technology and medium. Mass media still can and
do deliver content to large audiences, but how that content is chosen, attended
to, experienced, and perceived is increasingly individualized. What is “mass”
about mass communication is not the message, not the content, but in fact the
meaning we make when we engage with it. Carey acknowledged the importance
of another definition of mass by emphasizing ritual, linking that term to the
Catholic Mass. The Internet is a medium of mass communication not because
we may all look at the same Web pages but because its users share the experience
of its use—freezes, crashes, errors, and all. Moreover, much interpersonal com-
munication takes place by way of media rather than face to face, so maintaining
the notion that interpersonal communication requires physical presence is of
little use. Various technologies can no longer be categorized as tools either for
mass or interpersonal communication, because they can be used just as easily
for one as for the other. Is e-mail a medium of mass or of interpersonal com-
munication? Does it matter?6
Precious little in communication literature addresses multimedia or multitask-
ing. Not much addresses the Internet itself as a cultural site. While the Internet’s
impacts on politics and the impacts of policy and regulation on the Internet have
been studied, little scholarship (apart from some studies of flaming and flame
wars) deals with the everyday politics of on-line communication. Who “speaks”
on-line, who is allowed to speak, who is silenced, how does this speaking and
silencing “work,” and why does it happen? What does it mean? Convergence
is another area in great need of critical analysis. If there is any evidence of the
mythic concept of “convergence,” it is in people’s use of media and technology,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

and not in technology itself. But where is the research from which we could
understand how use is made, sometimes simultaneously, of multiple media?
Where are the theories about communication and multitasking, for example?
As has been demonstrated by the hand-wringing over social-networking sites
such as MySpace and Facebook, scholars studying computer-mediated com-
munication have long known that social relationships are a significant (maybe
the most significant) part of Internet use. Why do most studies of the Internet
and social relationships fall back on comparisons between Internet relationships
and non-Internet relationships, as if the experiences of social relationships are

Tech nology 209

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 easily comparable, no matter the medium, no matter other (myriad) details in
peoples’ lives? It is no longer (and may have never been) possible to distinguish
unmediated relationships from technologically mediated ones.

* * *
To return to the metaphor of weather with which this essay began, technology
had been loud and insistent. Like the fog that comes “on little cat feet” in Carl
Sandburg’s 1916 poem, however, it has become quieter. It is not silent. In some
cases, like the thickest fog, it is most obtrusive and obscuring. Take, for instance,
the mobile phone’s intrusion into quiet spaces. The furor over its noisiness ob-
scures both its blurring of public and private spaces and its transformation of
conversation and silence. Likewise, our computers generate myriad noises, some
of which are related to its activity and interaction with us, such as the start-up
chimes and beeps that signify error or task completion, and some of which are
related solely to its function, like fan or hard-drive noise. Keyboards and mouse
clicks make noise. Virtually all computers now have speakers and play all man-
ner of audio files. The sounds of our environments at work, home, and school
have changed greatly, yet while we sometimes consider the “new noisiness” that
accompanies these devices, we neglect to consider the noises they obscure. In
many cases we forget that many people need to obscure silence. Undergraduate
students used to leave the TV on in their homes or dorm rooms so they would
not feel alone. Now they leave on a computer or cell phone. Either way, they
fight loneliness, and they fight it with technology.
Indeed, our sense of cultural transformation, the means by which we measure
such transformation, has changed as well. Once we measured it by examin-
ing content—TV shows, or music, or newspapers. Increasingly we measure
cultural transformation by technological change, by the speed and memory of
our computers, the number of songs on our MP3 players, the size of those and
other devices, the speed of our Internet connections. You surely remember the
sound of your modem making its connection, and it undoubtedly seems both as
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

distant and as near as the myriad times you heard a popular song that you could
not get out of your head. Internet-related communication technology, relying
on IP and packet technology, has not only digitized content but also completed
the digitization of other media of communication; all on-line communication
is digital. There is no “old” medium that has not been digitized for on-line dis-
tribution. Digital media have put an end to mass communication as we knew
it, but at the same time they have created new forms of mass communication,
ones as full of contradictions as were old media (after all, the Internet, once a

210 Steven Jones

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 network of networks, has become the medium of media). Digital media are
interactive and individual but nevertheless bind us in interesting, meaningful,
and important social formations.

Notes
1. One could imagine a technology forecast somewhat like a weather forecast: Today will
be partly operable, intermittently communicative with spells of isolation; we’ll have a
high of eighteen connections and a low of two connections. Chance of frustration: 40
percent.
2. I recall in high school being able both to use an AM transistor radio with a DEC PDP
8/e to hear a computer’s registers operating and to manipulate the registers to play
tones on the radio.
3. David Nye’s Electrifying America (1992) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Disenchanted
Night (1988) provide longer accounts of illumination and electrification; Jean Verdon’s
Night in the Middle Ages (2002) offers anecdotes about light, and its absence, at a much
earlier time.
4. After earning an undergraduate degree in business administration, Carey went to Il-
linois to study advertising, but during his graduate studies he was surrounded by some
of the leading scholars and practitioners of journalism.
5. At that point it was used to denote essentially the polar opposite of “cool,” and it
certainly did not portend a potentially lucrative future, as it did in the post-Netscape
era.
6. Interesting, and again understudied, cases emerge when a person intends to send a
personal message but actually replies to a large group of people, as sometimes happens
on an e-mail list.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Tech nology 211

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Globalization

Counterglobalization
and Other Rituals
against Empire
Jack Bratich
James Carey made it clear that his primary identification, as scholar
and citizen, was with the nation-state: “Modern utopians claim that
we are now outgrowing the nation-state and that a new form of
world order is emerging, a global village, a universal brotherhood,
or world government on a shrinking planet–spaceship earth. Most of
this is pleasant if not dangerous nonsense” (1989, 170). “I don’t want
to be a citizen of the world,” Carey said (2006a, 222). He called his
Americanist streak a “useful ethnocentrism,” given that the United
States retained a special place in determining political changes.
Carey (2006a) reconfirmed his national orientation by claiming
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

that global institutions will be fought through the nation-state.1 More

broadly, Carey noted that defining communication as culture re-
quires privileging the nation, for only it provides the “analytical
access to shared representations.” Membership in a nation, however
historically contingent or technologically dependent, is “the one
nonpsychological fact of human identity of our time” (Carey 2002b,
204). But Carey’s affirmation of the nation-state need not be the
primary way to understand globalization. If, as Carey (1989, 148),
stated, “all scholarship must be and inevitably is adapted to the time,”

212

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 it can also be untimely. As Gilles Deleuze once described Nietzsche’s aphorisms,
the timeliness of one’s thought is like an arrow finding its destination in future
interpretation.
Globalization, of course, is inextricably linked to communications technolo-
gies. The expansion of information-communications technologies (ICTs), espe-
cially the Internet and wireless networks, is often cited in globalization literature,
reviving for the wired age McLuhan’s notion of the global village. No wonder,
then, that communication studies is central in the study of global processes; we
must interrogate the institutional contexts overdetermining communication
research, especially ones that instrumentalize communication scholarship in
the service of power relations.
The giddy proponents of globalization typically operate with a space-biased
approach, showing us images, from digital diasporas to real-time on-line, team-
based corporate projects and on-line conferences, of the ways communications
technologies connect us globally. Scholars similarly limit their research to de-
scribing and facilitating the particular distribution of ICTs. Globalization in
these accounts is the culmination of previous communications processes as well
as the retroactive justification for their development. That is, boosterist models
of globalization revive the transmission model writ large, unlinking communi-
cation from transportation now on a global scale.2 Globalization becomes the
realization of the “most ancient of human dreams: to increase the speed and effect
of messages as they travel in space” (Carey 1989, 15). Print dissolved regional
boundaries while solidifying national ones (Eisenstein 1979). Later, electronic
reproduction and distribution dramatically increased delocalization of identity
and expansion of sovereignty across space (Carey 1989). So, the despatialization
endemic to contemporary notions of globalization merely extends tendencies
of older communication forms.
Global boosters do not uniquely subscribe to transmission models. Critics
likewise operate on this model. The cultural imperialism thesis, for example,
focuses on spatial movement of culture enhanced and accelerated by digital
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

technologies. Cultural artifacts from the West follow the lines of older imperial-
ism, now substituting Coca-Cola for Christianity. Cultural imperialism brings
distinct values and processes: efficiency, standardization (“McDonaldization”),
instrumentalization, and homogenization. Pervasive and quicker command
and control structures bolster administration and surveillance of populations.
Nonetheless, some critiques of the cultural imperialism thesis also privilege the
transmission model. Creolization, localization, cultural hybridity, “glocalization”:
all these deny a single flow of culture from center to periphery. Although the
end is mutation and multiplicity, the West and its expansion remain an analytic

Globa liz ation 213

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 starting point. The local remains a spatial figure: a stopping point, a transmuta-
tion zone, a shelter.
Innis laid the foundation for a communication-based cultural imperialism
model, especially regarding the technical infrastructure of electric power and
border crossings. We could say that the space-bias society burst through its
nation-state container and went global. We simply increase the distance and
numbers of those separated in physical space. As Innis noted (1986, 1964), writ-
ing allowed society’s political and economic structures to accelerate and expand
control across larger regions. Modern technology did not increase decentraliza-
tion and democracy but acted as “superimpositions upon a larger trend toward
increased territorial expansion, spatial control, commercialism, and imperialism”
(Carey 1989, 135).
According to the globalization theorist Malcolm Waters (2001), culture is a
hallmark of globalization insofar as symbolic production and exchange have
been liberated from spatial constraints. Culture, Waters argues, is easily repro-
ducible and transportable. This formulation still embeds cultural globalization in
transmission, with globalization (and the concrete practices that it comprises)
representing perhaps the final step in the expansion of power via communica-
tion and transportation networks. How do we understand this apparent totality?
Globalization, like the communication processes that are its lifeblood, is not an
abstract autonomous force or a state of being. It comprises a specific series of
practices, institutions, and social agents. Globalization is a stake in struggle and
renewal. Making sense of this stake requires removing globalization from its
association with transmission and transportation and relocating it as a different
empire, one depending on and intensifying ritual forms of communication.

Ritual

In a “miraculously disconnected world,” Carey said, ritual represented the per-

sistent practices that held that world together (in Tucher 2007, 307). Corporate
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

versions of globalization oddly draw on and appropriate this ritual function.

This sentiment can be found in many ads for global communications tech-
nologies (from cell phones to webcam software to operating platforms). So a
ritual model allows us to rethink globalization: if ritual is understood as a map
of shared meaning, these maps alter and are affected by the artifacts produced
through other maps. This is a variation of cultural hybridization, where one
mixes, embeds, and lives out the resulting map. Images other than maps could
be more helpful. Noting that rituals are ancient and archaic, and highlighting
prayer, chant, and ceremony, Carey (1989, 18) takes as an exemplar “the sacred

214 Jack Bratich

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality.” But this
is a highly selective type of religious ritual. Other ritual practices and functions
may have become even more pronounced with globalization. Elaborating the
implications of the globalization of ritual, then, illustrates how “counter-empire”
and “alter-globalization” social movements exemplify ritual and globalization.

De-Westernizing Ritual
To globalize ritual requires de-Westernizing the concept of ritual. One cannot
simply transport the Western (primarily Christian) ritual model to all practices
that go under the name. Notably, Carey (1989, 16) located the transmission model
in a religious context, specifically Christianity’s institutional expansion, propa-
gation, and colonization: “movement in space was an attempt to establish and
extend the kingdom of God.” One significant component of this transportation
was Europeans’ encounter with indigenous Americans: extension of God’s king-
dom meant “saving the heathen” (17). Here we might allow a kind of global flow
into Western concepts, an introjection of the Other. Take the Haitian practice
of Vodu (Voodoo), where ritual involves communing and communicating with
nonhuman entities (loa). This communication often takes the form of prayer
(request or gratitude), but at other times there are deals struck, arguments, or
ecstatic expressions of being possessed. In many traditional rituals, communi-
cating with ancestors and with those physically present are equally important
to the constitution of community.
Indigenous rituals are not referenced here to oppose or replace the monothe-
istic (specifically Catholic) type Carey used, yet they show different modes of
cultural preservation, one of ritual’s key functions. The Afro-Caribbean religion
Santeria, for instance, does not involve overattachment to hermetically sealed tra-
dition. Resulting from both Yoruba practices and Catholic colonization, Santeria
retains an ambivalent core regarding colonial contact. From one vantage point,
Santeria is defined by the absorption and domination of indigenous rituals within
a Western master discourse. From another perspective however, Santeria rituals
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

only mimicked the Christian colonizer’s and transformed the Catholic Church’s
pantheon of saints into figures worshiped as traditional deities and ancestors.
Ceremonies also appropriated the Catholic altar, the Mass, and the initiation rites,
the celebrants performing traditional rituals under the cover of the dominant.
The means of this opening up to the outside (albeit under duress) allowed com-
munity bonds, creating a temporary shelter, a resting ground to gather strength
for future action. Santeria does more than preserve its rituals under a colonizing
institution. It ritualizes that very institution—making it repeat itself in a new
way—to augment the power of innovation and persistence of the social.

Globa liz ation 215

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Other modified, non-Christian rituals also reconfigure the separation of trans-
mission from ritual. Pagan spells and magickal invocation/evocation ceremonies,
for example, fuse transmission and ritual elements.3 The ritual, while having an
important relationship to time, is thoroughly spatial. Opening a ritual involves
a demarcation by creating sacred space. In addition to carving out a separate
sphere, magickal ceremonies are often designed to produce effects at a distance.
Be it sending messages across spaces, creating postritual effects (e.g., charms),
or traveling to the astral plane, transportation is a key component of rituals.
Such examples of hybrid and non-Christian conceptions of ritual suggest other
possibilities for understanding globalization via ritual. By globalizing ritual we
can return ritual to globalization—in mutated form.

The “New” Translocal

Ritual has a spatial dimension. Globalizing ritual can unsettle a privileging of
the local. Carey (2006a, 222) noted that people make sense of their lives through
proximate relations: communities, families, nation, the profoundly “particu-
laristic.” Carey positively described Innis’s focus on the local as site of cultural
persistence in the face of power’s expansion. Ritual was rooted in place (as
opposed to space), even while being time oriented. In this local place-based
culture Innis located a dialectical relation involving a complicated interplay of
resistance and acceptance. Carey links Christianity’s transmission to expansion
and empire while relegating the ritual function of churches to the local. But why
leave ritual or culture to the local? What if ritual, even in this religious context,
is an international phenomenon?4
Ritual, after all, involves identifying individuals with a collective map or shared
values. But what constitutes the borders of these geographical identifications?
To illustrate a ritual conceptualization of newspaper reading, Carey imagined
a colonist in the Americas reading a British paper while affirming himself a
subject of the British crown rather than a citizen of Virginia. Ritual is thus a
transatlantic and translocal act, one involving the production of subjectivity. The
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

ritual function within imperialism here is tied to the nation-state and its expan-
sion over wider territory. Why limit this translocality to the nation-state and its
satellites, to empire? How does translocal identification change with globalized
processes such as horizontal cultural exchange, accelerated mobility, and even
the horizontal communications that ICTs enable?

From Symbols to Material

Globalizing ritual also entails shifting the accent from symbolic and oral forms
of culture to embodied material elements. Carey’s ritual model largely relied

216 Jack Bratich

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 on the symbolic: conversation, dialogue, stories. Tied to the linguistic turn and
to lamentations of lost community often associated with oral communication,
Carey’s notion of ritual expressed a series of commitments and conjunctural
values. In other words, historicizing the ritual model in this way shows how it
selects which ritual elements to foreground.
The symbolic dimension is counterposed to a materiality often associated
with the transmission model. Comprising technical devices, transportation
infrastructures, and cables or wires, this materiality is impersonal, mechanical,
and systemic. Can’t we think of materiality in relation to ritual? Carey’s (1989,
27) enigmatic image of “dancing a map”—conveying a map of shared meaning
via dance—allows us to consider a “kinesthetic” ritual outside an oral tradition.
It is embodied, gestural, and affective (27). Dance-oriented rituals occur in many
traditions, including Vodu services (being ridden by loa) and pagan ceremonies
(maypole dancing or Wiccan “skyclad”—nude—solstice celebrations). Some
Christian sects, such as Pentecostals, commune via embodied ecstatic dance,
snake handling, and speaking in tongues.
Even the Catholic Mass has a kinesthetic quality (although it is not really
dance), and liberation theology uses the Mass for other kinds of mobilization.
Making the sign of the cross at key moments and the “Stations of the Cross” pro-
cession involve regimented bodies in motion. The series of commands directed
at bodies (kneel, shake hands, stand, form a line, sit) materializes the hierarchy,
mediation, and commands that constitute the disciplinary structure of the Ro-
man Catholic Church. Ritual is not immune from power relations, “regularity
and regulation”; ritual is a series of techniques for conducting conduct (Hay
2006, 32). Globalizing ritual thus foregrounds the material components of ritual,
a range of embodiments, gestures, and dancing maps, as well as their various
functions (ecstasies, relation to deities, being possessed, blurring boundaries).

Ritual: Memory and Tradition

Theorists of globalization have spilled much ink developing the concept of
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

time-space compression, one of the supposed hallmarks of a global age. Here,

world citizens are closer to one another through accelerated communications
technologies and connective media. The speed of interaction and expectations
has increased. The question is whether the time compression claim is the most
relevant to understanding globalization of culture. Globalizing also affects the
temporal quality of ritual, allowing us to rethink repetition.
Carey noted that the ritual model of communication emphasizes maintenance
of bonds over time, a repetition of renewal and a recommitment. Again, the
Catholic Mass shows that repetition is a predictable affair whose function is both

Globa liz ation 217

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 cultural (the communal renewal of values) and disciplinary (the reproduction of
commands and hierarchical structures). This repetition through time reestab-
lishes order as well as the commons. Ritual thus carries ambivalence even when
seemingly maintaining a common identity. Santeria’s hybrid practices therefore
add another ambivalent dimension: two traditions mutate into new practices
to ensure one tradition’s survival. Ritual is not repetition of “the same” through
time but transmutation and innovation based on context.5 When attached to
the already existing, ritual indeed involves maintenance. But globalizing ritual
repeats ritual differently (e.g., via different traditions): continuity, certainly, but
another repetition, another memory.
Carey’s work—on culture, communications, and ritual—consistently had a
future orientation. The faith in the communal spirit to resist tyranny and over-
come obstacles and the pragmatist pursuit of creating and renewing democracy
require a future direction. The turn to ritual forms was part of this ethos. Where
others saw only functionalist structures (whether administrative positivism or
critical analysis), Carey pointed to an irrefutable and recalcitrant dimension that
rescued hope and praxis from the clutches of despair and futility.
Rituals, then, are projections into a future. Their mutations speak to this fu-
turity—they innovate and adapt as ways to guarantee survival. Tactical patience,
temporary retreat: these are temporal strategies geared toward future generations.
Disrupting mechanical repetition allows us to think ritual as a refrain whose
consistency provides the support network enabling innovation and openness to
the future. Rituals have a virtual dimension in which the formal structures that
foster maintenance not only offer survival but amplify democracy and justice.
Empire is built on simultaneity of time (the end of history), so this virtual dimen-
sion of futurity is a necessary foil, as ritual was, to the transmission model.6
With all of this talk of hybrids, alternative temporalities, new translocals,
and reworked repetitions, globalizing ritual leads to a more germane idea: what
would it mean to globalize ritually? Having revised the ritual in the light of glo-
balization, can we reinject it into the processes of globalization? If ritual com-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

munication can counter the totalizing effects of transmission models (and their
imperialist contexts), we can make globalization (conceptualized primarily as
the extension of empire via communication) into a ritual effort. Can we turn
globalization as empire into a nontotality?
Multiple globalizations are occurring. Human rights discourse is the most
obvious example. Its roots in Enlightenment humanism already demonstrate
a universalizing tendency. Its cultural counterpart, cosmopolitanism, seeks a
secular community, a global public sphere via the invocation of shared artifacts

218 Jack Bratich

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 and values of modernity.7 Competing globalizations also undermine the totality
of any single system. On the one hand, global religious fundamentalism op-
poses Western imperialism with its own totalitarian aspirations. The retort, on
the other hand, is often called the Global War on Terror. Each globalizing force
harnesses the latest information-communication technologies for tactical ends:
cultural representations of the Other, journalistic incitement of fear and panic,
and on-line recruitment via homemade videos and military games.
These cultural dimensions are more than the transmission of commands
and expansion of power structures (both state and nonstate). They, too, involve
ritual. The religious roots of these global struggles require constant renewal of
commitment to the community. Secular rites emerge, too, in this global war.
Carolyn Marvin (1999) emphasized how national patriotism, with its flags, public
ceremonies, and sacrifices, is profoundly ritualistic. At the core of these compet-
ing globalizations are competing identifications with a community (“with us or
against us,” the blessed and the infidels, the chosen and the rest).

Counterglobalization: One Big Ritual? Or Many Yeses?

Is ritual, then, completely co-opted by competing wills to global domination?

Having altered our notion of ritual in the light of globalization, we can turn to an
exemplar of this immanent process, namely, the alter-globalization movement.
Kirsty Best (2005) convincingly argues that the transmission model continues to
determine discourse about democracy and public sphere, underpinned by faith
that distributing more and better information to more of the population will
result in a reasoned, active public. She calls for a ritual approach, especially for
understanding new social movements and counterglobalization activism (also
called the global justice movement). The alter-globalization mobilizations of the
last decade or so are known mostly for demonstrations at global governance sum-
mit meetings (e.g., the G8 in Genoa, the FTAA in Miami, the WTO in Seattle,
1999), but they also offer new examples of ritual communication.8
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Demos
Rarely is religion prominent in counterglobalization activism. Nonetheless, ritual
communication operates in the most “secular,” even atheistic practices. Street
protests typical in the global justice movement are more complex versions of the
student rallies that Carey (1989, 21) took as examples of ritual. Little emphasis
is placed on writing (although signs and fliers are regular features). Instead,
oral tradition is central—through chants, speeches, and songs (Graeber 2007).

Globa liz ation 219

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Music comes not only in the form of singing but in such developments as radical
marching bands, which provide movement, rhythm, and dance to street gather-
ings (Shukaitis 2007).9
Marching itself is the ordered movement of bodies in rhythmic step. As Carey
(1989, 21) notes, ritual provides a form, order, and tone. While military mass
movements produce one sort of affect and tone, street demonstrations have
roots in other rituals, such as wedding and funeral processions. The festive tone
of counterglobalization convergences—with their giant puppets, colorful floats,
and collective parodic performances—suggests tracing this ritual to cultural cel-
ebrations such as carnivals (Grindon 2007). The carnivalesque briefly suspends
contemporary hierarchical structures to flood the moment with the spirit and
affect of the people (Stallybrass and White 1986).
A key inspiration for the form and tone of the demos is the group Reclaim the
Streets, which reappropriated urban intersections for unlicensed parties. Groups
such as Pink Bloque and the Radical Cheerleaders created performance-based
street events that delivered feminist meanings via transformative dancing. And
as head of the Church of Stop Shopping, the Reverend Billy performs anticon-
sumerism liturgies in halls, stores, and streets. This is not postreligious irony.
The reverend sees his services as providing an authentic ritual, a way for activ-
ists and others to create common bonds (see http://www.revbilly.com). These
practices are not simply negationist protest. The convergences were not always
geared toward raising broader consciousness or making pleas to global governing
bodies to alter policy. Their potency came via the immanent strengthening of
social forces in the gathering, the power to break through fences, block traffic,
and create a new temporary set of social relations.
Through direct-action tactics, communal mixing of ideologies and bodies, and
the carnivalesque expression of hope and imagination, the counterglobalization
movement demonstrates that the streets are still where the promise of democracy
can be defended and extended. Some might argue that highlighting this promise
and carnivalesque interruption of the present differs significantly from ritual,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

whose function is to preserve and maintain social bonds through time. Carey
(1989, 155), however, called ritual the “container of human communication that
allows for the persistence and growth of culture.” Regarding counterglobaliza-
tion, growth is obviously a future-oriented process, but one whose telos is not
given. In sum, demonstrations (on the streets and in their planning stages)
are filled with ritual practices. In the unleashing of submerged powers and the
convergence of forces with no immediate identity, we can see a cultivation of
potentials for democracy that have been scattered and disconnected.

220 Jack Bratich

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Identification and Tradition
Carey (2006a, 203) noted that ritual centers on subjective identification with
an already existing formation: “a reaffirmation and an underscoring of tradi-
tion, of the past, of who I am, of who I will continue to be.” This time-based
affirmation comes on the heels of Innis’s argument that the right to tradition is
eroding (Carey 1989, 169). The counterglobalization movement is no stranger
to this argument; it is founded largely on the reassertion of indigenous cultures
on a global scale. The Euro-American composition of the global justice move-
ment finds inspirations in the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. The
significance of the global South, both in national politics (e.g., the role of Bolivian
indigenous groups in electing President Evo Morales) and on the international
scene (e.g., the World Social Forum gatherings), demonstrates that tradition is
not disappearing under the steamroller of hypermodern globalization. Rather,
indigeneity and tradition are recomposed and revived as new formations.
We must be wary of any pure affirmation of tradition, given ritual commu-
nication’s tendency toward exclusivity, antiquation, and reactionism (Tucher
2007, 308). A tight-knit community might renew itself through time as much
to preserve parochialism, ethnocentrism, or racial purity as to foster demo-
cratic social bonds. Carey (1998a) saw ethnic nationalism as a consequence
of globalization. What makes belonging and identification democratic is the
relation of the community to its outside. In strengthening its bonds, the com-
munity simultaneously needs to engage its Other and to transform itself in
relation to a future. A radical opening to an exteriority—say, regarding what
seems strange or intolerable—prevents ritual from ossifying into conservative
tradition.
For the counterglobalization movement, this preventive logic emerges in
the very forms of the organizations and protests. Consensus-based decision
making brought together differing ideological forces into a temporary alliance.
More than just being an effective means of organizing, this process has been
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

heralded as prefigurative. Creating a better world is not deferred to a future

utopia but embedded in everyday practices and in dramatic actions in the here
and now. In other words, counterglobalization produces a virtual dimension,
one in which the desired world is prefigured by calling it forth immanently in its
practices. One acts as if that world has arrived, creating and expanding it now.
The counterglobalization movement thus signifies formation of community in
time (around values such as social justice). Identification is with a present that
is as future directed as it is persistent through time.

Globa liz ation 221

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Even indigenous traditions take on this flavor when globalized. For example,
the Zapatistas’ primary spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, wears a balaclava.
His mask is not just a tactic for evading authorities; his anonymity functions
positively for identification. Marcos often says that Zapatismo is an identity that
can be taken up by anyone: “we are all Zapatistas.”10 Masking, via its depersonal-
ization, allows for solidarity beyond local communities. This is why masking is
a traditional component of rituals, although more needs to be said about ritual
communication that highlights secrecy over publicity (Bratich 2007).
Counterglobalization ritual is a connector, but this ritual does not function
only for current members. It is an opening to outside (and another time). Ritual
communication doesn’t predict—it makes room for a future. Ritual is an invita-
tion and a gift; it is hospitable. Rather than disappear into hermetical recesses, it
creates a space for the Stranger and makes an untimely gesture whose realiza-
tion is left for a people to come. Ritual preserves not an actuality but a spirit.
Globalization of culture thereby reconstitutes the terrain of struggle and the
tools for keeping its spirit alive.

Technology and Orality

Any discussion of ritual and (counter)globalization must address how technol-
ogy conditions types of ritual. For Innis, a counterculture emerges in maintaining
and reviving oral traditions (dialogue, conversation). Residual forms of these oral
practices (chants, speeches, songs, performances) are indeed embedded in coun-
terglobalization protests. Additionally, culture jammers—with their billboard
defacements and parodies of advertisements—work directly on the symbolic
sphere. With globalization comes communicational injunctions, however, where
language and expression are no longer easy refuge from technocolonization.
Linguistic proficiency, self-expression, even loquaciousness are subsumed under
capital. Constant communication is the basis of efficient white-collar work, from
team-based projects to evaluation and assessment mechanisms, from commu-
nicative professions (PR, news, marketing, self-help) to the expressive aspects
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

of retail work (the salesperson’s smile).

Self-expression is part of a confessional imperative as well as a self-marketing
ethos. The real subsumption of orality comes in the form of feedback and in-
teractivity. Carey’s (1989) claim that expansion of technology—in contrast to
orality—prevents feedback and participation was based on broadcasting. In an
economic and technical system encouraging interactivity and feedback, however,
expression is an injunction rather than a source of freedom. Once again we face
an overwhelming pessimism regarding global domination. But if we let go of
our attachment to local orality, another dimension of ritual appears. Just as the

222 Jack Bratich

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Catholic empire, via its expansion through writing technologies, gave birth to
Protestantism (arising from alternative reading), so globalization via ICTs can-
not be rejected simply as expanding domination. By encouraging feedback and
interactivity, ICTs intensify connections. Global networks are not only exten-
sions of the technical but the intensification of practices and the densification
of sociality. Peer-to-peer cultural practices (skill sharing, open-source produc-
tion, modification) exemplify this unintended consequence. Interactivity, de-
scribed previously as a value generator for capital, is not absolutely controllable.
Feedback loops follow no single pathway and thus embed a kind of openness
to mutations and innovations (Terranova 2004; Galloway and Thacker 2007).
Networks, horizontal relations, transversal practices: these enhanced forms may
support a new Reformation, a social recomposition of power and autonomy.
Likewise, Carey (1998a, 34) conceded that the contemporary global dispersion
of people, “the diaspora of the Internet,” was accompanied by the organization
of new social groupings. A million little networked rituals converge, mix, and
diverge to form new collective bodies. Ritual itself is no longer a macropractice
of binding a community of believers (usually on a scale of religious believers or
a nation-state). Now, ritual describes a multitude of nodal practices that gather
(concentration), disperse (viral connections), and hybridize (mutations). The
subjective results of these rituals are yet to be determined, but examples of these
new subjective figures are found in counterglobalization convergences such as
the World Social Forum meetings and, more specifically, Indymedia and a host
of grassroots media activities. The increased access to representational technolo-
gies, the enhanced ICT delivery systems enabling on-line journalism and blog-
ging, and the availability of exhibition sites all contribute to “social movement
journalism” (Graves 2007). Radical and grassroots media also testify to the rise
of a new social formation, one whose technical conditions are irreducible to
increased propaganda, information war, and marketing commands.
The global justice movement, or at least its constituent elements, has been ex-
perimenting with social networking sites, or “social media.” The networking, or-
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

ganizing, and tactical coordinating functions of these proliferating technologies

are notable, but communication research could intervene productively here to
examine this phenomenon as ritual. What ritual functions (dominant, residual,
emergent) circulate in virtual on-line worlds such as Second Life? Meanwhile,
the recent resurgence of crafting (knitting, crocheting, making materials by
hand, weaving) in youth culture shows reformed ritual imbricated in counter-
globalization efforts, from the explicit ethics of antisweatshop production to
knit-ins at alter-globalization demonstrations (K. Robertson 2007). This literally
manual and material activity is imbued with symbolism, from its visual images

Globa liz ation 223

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 and designs to the affective connections (shared stories, conversation, advice,
gift exchange) that surround the work.11
In sum, transmission produces conditions of communion irreducible to global
communications capture, ecologies for new types of collectivities. The coun-
terglobalization movement is one such experiment. It revives the oral and the
embodied ritual in its street demonstrations; its organizational forms produce
a collective body seeking a better future. This mixture indicates that globaliza-
tion is not an accomplishment but a project, a world-to-come as produced in
the present. At the same time, unlike the competing forms of globalization—
empires—these counterglobalization efforts involve ritualistic processes in which
democracy, justice, and a commons are produced immanently rather than used
to justify further domination. Counterglobalization does not solve globaliza-
tion’s dilemmas, but it does show how globalization is an impossible totality.
The movement interrupts the smooth flow, helping produce an interregnum
and creating, in the very heart of empire, a commons irreducible to the totality
of control. Ritual does not disappear with globalization; it mutates along with
the expansion of power and reinscribes itself into the veins of globalization’s
structures. As with the rise of new communications technologies in the 1890s,
the “social may have gone opaque, resisting representation” again, and now on
a vast scale (Carey 1998, 32). But now as then, this opacity motivates cultural
work to configure a new world.

Notes
1. While his analysis was U.S. based, his dialogues were international. He was the most
important “importer” of and commentator on the Toronto school or the Canadian
communication tradition (via his engagement with Marshall McLuhan and Harold
Innis). The pragmatism of the Chicago school of sociology—with its focus on newly
emergent spaces of identity as well as on immigration—also provides rich soil for
contemporary concerns. These key concepts (locality, mobility, ethnicity, identity)
continue to be relevant for globalization studies, even while the inflections and scale
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

have changed.
2. Packer and Robertson (2006) highlight increasingly tight links between communication
and transportation. Globalization itself is tied to the history of transportation (navies
and merchant ships, trade routes, and airplanes), the circuits of migration and tourism
crucially circulating culture globally.
3. The addition of the letter k to the word magic differentiates more traditional ceremonial
practice from the stagecraft and parlor tricks of mundane legerdemain.
4. Protestantism, by centering authority in the individual relation to the divine, liberated

224 Jack Bratich

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 its subjects from spatial constraints. The community of believers could be anywhere,
and via proselytizing, ought to be (see Waters 2001, 129).
5. The repetition of particular traditions notwithstanding, these traditions have differ-
ing approaches to temporality. Mircea Eliade (1971) developed the concept of archaic
time: rituals repeat inaugural gestures buried deep within species memory, a time of
eternal returns of founding rituals. Every contemporary ritual, then, is also a revival
and repetition of archaic time.
6. Toni Negri (2003) describes the time of counter-empire, which he locates in the term
kairos (an open time, an in-between, opportune moment that allows an opening for
rupture, the releasing of the arrow).
7. Globalization is not a flattening. Globalization would, one suspects, be treated as a
reconfiguration of urban centers, not just to increase control and profit, but also to
produce global cities whose energy and hybridity would concentrate the cultural pro-
cesses necessary for democratic renewal.
8. For overviews to the counterglobalization movement, see Harvie, Milburn, Trott, and
Watts 2005; Klein 2002; Notes from Nowhere 2003; Mertes 2004; Yuen, Katsiaficas,
and Burton Rose 2002. Moreover, the global justice movement depends heavily on
transmission (cell-phone aided tactical logistics, speed commands in distributed space)
and transportation (planes for activist summit hoppers).
9. For example, their tone and function make the Hungry March Band, Rude Mechanical
Orchestra, Infernal Noise Brigade, and Extra Action Marching Band more similar to
parade bands or New Orleans jazz funerals than to military models.
10. His famous line made during a 1994 interview (which has been modified over time) is
“Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano
in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the
streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec,
a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a
gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student and, of course,
a Zapatista in the mountains” (http://www.greenleft.org.au/1997/296/15601).
11. The knitting/craft circle is an obvious ritual; as a project I am working on with Heidi
Brush shows, the repetition of knit/purl becomes a basis for creating and maintaining
social bonds, sometimes to religious ends.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Globa liz ation 225

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Epilogue

How Scholarship Matters

Barbie Zelizer

Most scholars would say that they engage in intellectual work for
the sheer joy of it, yet underlying a fierce curiosity about the efforts
of the mind rests a humble hope that our scholarship will not perish
when we are no longer around to remind others of its relevance. This
volume asks us to consider concepts in cultural studies. In particu-
lar, it assesses the basic impulses of the work of James Carey in the
context of those who claim its influence on their own scholarship. It
is a smart, timely, and useful effort to delineate the setting in which
Carey’s ideas might and do live on. It is also a clear testament to him,
and to those he taught and mentored, that the offerings compiled
here come from some of the most renowned and respected scholars
in the field.
It is, then, with a large dose of humility that I attempt a task first
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

mandated to Carey himself. This book began while he was still alive,
and its epilogue was to have been his place to voice his assessments
of the articles collected here, to say whether they got things right
or wrong or moved in directions he had not anticipated. I can do
no justice to that task, so I will instead take my comments on a dif-
ferent path, envisioning Carey’s scholarship through the prism of
Raymond Williams’s keywords project and considering the chapters
compiled here as illustrative of a collective critical moment, one that

227

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 necessarily moves an academic community from honoring a deeply venerated
individual and scholar and his terms of intellectual inquiry to positioning his
work in context after he is gone. What that movement signifies about the health
and durability of academic inquiry is central to understanding both the role of
individuals as motivators of the collective and the resilience of the collective to
journey on once the individual is no longer among its members.
The questions, then, raised here are central: How have Carey’s scholarship
and key terms of inquiry fared over time? Are they still productive, and if so,
among whom, to what extent, and on which grounds?

On Keywords and James Carey

Keywords offer a fertile place to begin in taking stock of a field, and they have
emerged as useful tools for doing so at certain moments or in response to certain
critical incidents.1 This book, organized as an extended conversation about some
of the keywords that were central to Carey’s work, builds on the commonsensi-
cal relevance that keywords have accrued in our culture. Providing a kind of
shorthand to central, complicated, and controversial ideas, examinations of
keywords have moved with astonishing ease and rapidity into our understand-
ing of the world, appearing in places as varied as information retrieval, com-
puter networking, and citation analysis. Though they date to work in semantics
produced during the late nineteenth century,2 their popular usage today draws
most directly from the cultural critic Raymond Williams (1983), who argued
that keywords mark the collective edges of consciousness by which a collective
decides what matters.
As Williams saw his project, the relationship between culture and society
could be seen in an encapsulated form in the key terms by which the people of
a given time period referenced their world. The keywords he selected—a mere
131—embodied a set of conceptual supports for the time span of one of his semi-
nal books, Culture and Society (1958). While working on that volume, Williams
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

compiled a list of terms that he realized were central both to understanding the
cultural formations of the time and to anticipating their development over time.
Though the list was originally planned as an appendix to Culture and Society, it
was instead published nearly twenty years later as an independent collection of
reflective essays on words. Published in 1976 with only 110 entries and updated in
1983, Keywords offered a glossary of the cultural terms that mattered to the time
period under question. Many of those original terms still stand, although only
forty-one of them were transported into New Keywords (Bennett, Grossberg, and

228 Barbie Zelizer

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Morris 2005), which took Williams’s experiments with words and transposed
them, with alterations, onto the contemporary moment.
If faced with the task of identifying the keywords central to scholarship,
many scholars might find their names affixed to only a handful of such terms,
but the list of topics for this volume about James Carey covers virtually all
of communication’s core. They are worth listing: history/temporality, radical
pedagogy, space, religion, community/communication, culture, popular culture,
oral culture, ritual, identity, professionalism in journalism, democracy/power,
ethics, empire/globalization, the public, technology. The prescience and scope
of these terms is breathtaking; one might argue that Carey anticipated some
of the broadest contours by which communication would confront its own
evolution as a discipline.
Placed in this volume in three groups of essays, whose titling I will take up
later in this epilogue, the keywords that Carey brought to life mark many of
the impulses on the underside of communication’s default setting. In helping
us to orient more effectively and fully toward the messiness that had generally
eluded a field that widely adopted more direct and readily replicable models of
communication, Carey’s keywords function much like an alternative guide to
the field. His is the guidebook that we pick up on a second trip to the bookstore
before embarking on a journey to a new location, amid hopes that its specialist
walking tours, low-budget offerings, or particularistic orientations toward a
given place might offer some additional element to that provided by the more
conventional mainstream guides.
Carey’s mapping of the field, of course, was much more than an alternative
guide to the terrain. It allowed scores of scholars to look anew at communica-
tion and find contingent, contextual, and evolving answers to the questions their
investigations produced. Additionally, unlike the myriad often forgettable tomes
that clutter the bookstore’s travel section, Carey’s guidebook enjoys a durability
and persistence that speaks to a resilience of the alternative view, making one
wonder about all the forces that consciously and unconsciously helped to keep
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

it alternative. As Catherine Warren reminds us in this volume, Carey’s 1975

comment—that the ritual view of communication “has not been a dominant
motif in American scholarship”—remains the case today.
But how resilient or marginal has Carey’s view actually been, and against
which forces has it wrestled most effectively? Which of its aspects have survived
more heartily than others and among which parts of our academic community?
Through which terms are we able to discern what is most valuable about what
has remained?

Epilogu e: How Schol a rship M atters 229

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey’s work exhibits a number of impulses that suggest patterns showing
how scholarship continues to matter over time. His keywords provoke debate,
work better together than alone, and are changeable. It is worth considering
each impulse in turn, because though each seemingly presents an obstacle to the
durability of his scholarship, each also resonates strongly with the parameters
by which Raymond Williams initially set his keywords project in place.
First, it is widely recognized that the multiple ideas underlying Carey’s work
have been contradictory, provocative, and controversial. The precise details that
constitute each piece of work, by and large, have not generated agreement over
their definitions, shapes, nuances, or impacts. Instead, over his forty-odd years
of academic publishing, both Carey and his followers came to expect that most
new essays he wrote would be greeted by extensive conversation and debate, pro-
voking arguments over whatever he had sought to establish and exhibiting equal
degrees of understanding and misunderstanding. Journals debated his vision
of journalism history not once but repeatedly.3 The distinction between com-
munication as ritual and communication as transmission was bandied about so
fervently that it underwent a degree of fetishization, as Larry Grossberg observes
here. Indeed, many of the chapters in this volume exhibit reservations about
Carey’s core concepts: Angharad Valdivia raises questions about his insistence
on the nation and common culture; Lana Rakow resists Carey’s attack on the
Left, arguing that its progressive agenda was stymied by structural inequity;
and Jack Bratich ponders whether Carey’s embrace of the nation-state in ef-
fect foreshadowed an eventual gravitation toward globalization. The somewhat
predictable emergence of responses such as these suggest that Carey’s singular
terms of analysis, when separated out and viewed up close, have functioned less
well and less autonomously than one might have expected.
For Williams, however, this is what keywords were supposed to do. Alan
Durant (2006, 4) says of keywords: “They are not (or not only) a matter of a
distinct, technical sense (or senses) that may initially seem opaque but which
can be understood only if you have a glossary. Rather, Williams’s keywords
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

present a cluster of interlocking, contemporary senses whose interaction re-

mains unresolved across a range of fields of thought and interaction. Interaction
between the senses can lead to cross purposes and confusion in public debate.”
The controversies and lack of consensus over Carey’s keywords reflected what
Williams hoped his own keywords would facilitate. If words were both to rep-
resent what existed and to push toward what might develop, dissent and debate
were necessary responses to a process of language use that, in Williams’s (1983,
12) view, depended on meanings being “offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, as-
serted, qualified, changed.” The fact, then, that Carey’s cultural studies have

230 Barbie Zelizer

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 remained both debated and alternative speaks to the true spirit of Williams’s
scholarship—an imprecise alternative to the mainstream of communication
research and a pragmatist alternative to the more widely adopted Birmingham
school of cultural analysis.
Second, the multiple ideas that undergird Carey’s work seem to have endured
better as a collective than as individual terms. What rises to the fore regard-
ing Carey’s keywords is their collective presentation as an interlacing of ideas,
a matrix of related associations. When seen as a group, his key terms remain
easy bedfellows, made more tenable by virtue of their shared environment and
assemblage of ideas than by the particular traits of each. This, too, is in keeping
with what Williams had in mind. In Keywords (1983, 13), he recounted how, as
he struggled to discern the meaning for culture, he came upon other words:
“class and art, and then industry and democracy. I could feel these five words
as a kind of structure. The relations between them became more complex the
more I considered them.” Durant (2007, 4) continues, “to try to understand a
keyword . . . you have to engage not only with what the word can mean on its
own but also with its complex relations with other, similarly complex words.”
In such a light, it makes sense that the cumulative effect of Carey’s keywords
has been greater than the sum of the impacts of the individual terms. When do
we hear mention of his work on journalism without note of his work on ritual?
How often, if at all, are community and democracy separated? In part, this is
because Carey’s terms were all works in progress, subject to numerous conver-
sations that would tweak precisely what was expected to be most stable about
them. This is in part because the terms he chose to excavate were themselves
difficult and defied analysis. Who among us has not heard Raymond Williams’s
comments about the difficulties in defining the word culture? It is also, however,
in part because Carey positioned his helper terms vis-à-vis each other and in-
sisted on the primacy of context and hesitation over stability and certainty.
Indeed, the chapters compiled here say as much. Though they make directed
arguments about the way Carey’s scholarship extended from particular keywords,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

words fast-forwarded into other scholarly work, they also draw from neighbor-
ing keywords in an almost repetitive mantra, thereby exhibiting a seamlessness
to Carey’s legacy. Democracy figures centrally in Norman Denzin’s thoughts
on critical pedagogy, in Linda Steiner’s on community, and in Joli Jensen’s on
popular culture. When Mark Fackler talks about oral culture; Angharad Valdivia,
about space; and Robert Fortner, about the public, all speak of conversation, too.
Catherine Warren’s discussion of ritual and Clifford Christians’s essay on ethics
address news, Stuart Allan’s piece on professionalism discusses citizenship, and
both Jack Bratich’s address to empire/globalization and Steve Jones’s discussion

Epilogu e: How Schol a rship M atters 231

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 of technology focus on ritual. The interthreading of concepts calls to mind a
family with numerous cousins, all of whom see their singular relevance to the
grandparent in common, even if they do not recognize the trajectory they share
in connecting backward.
Finally, the meanings of the multiple ideas underlying Carey’s work keep chang-
ing. Such change suggests a vitality and dynamism to those who see its value and
an instability to those who worry over the work’s lack of staying power. Here too,
however, Carey echoes the path laid out by Williams, who maintained in Keywords
that major terms of reference change as social, economic, and political circum-
stances change. To quote from Durant (2007, 16) again, Williams’s “readings reflect
a ‘history of ideas’ motivation, sketching how the same term can label changing
concepts in different schools of thought, as well as in different periods.”
The value of change in association with Carey cannot be minimized, for he
gave many, if not all, of his students free rein to inquire, a freedom to explore,
and a license to wonder that has not always been part and parcel of academic
inquiry. But change, bearing the double-edged sword of risk alongside vitality,
also suggests that Carey’s key terms themselves have not remained the same
across those who invoke them. True, in various forms Carey’s guidebook crafted
unusual bedfellows—the private and the public, the professional and the aca-
demic, the moral and the political—but many of the concepts at the core of his
work have traveled over time in uneven and often unpredictable ways.
This book bears that out. Tracking the use-value of the terms, the change of
their meanings over time, and the productivity of the associated scholarship,
the authors here offer the clear view that some of Carey’s keywords have been
less durable than others. The unevenness of Carey’s keywords is particularly
evidenced by the volume’s chapter titles that tweak and alter what Carey origi-
nally had to say: “History/temporality” becomes here “history,” “religion” turns
into “faith in cultural studies,” and “identity” mutates into “identity/politics.” In
their ponderings, some use Carey quite a bit (Fredrick Wasser on democracy
and John Nerone on history), some use him but a little (Steiner on community,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Allan on professionalism, and Christians on ethics), and some use him almost
not at all (Denzin on pedagogy).
Thus, Carey’s key terms are contradictory and debatable; they work better as a
group than alone, and they are changeable. On the face of things, these impulses
might herald the fading power of Carey’s work. On each count, however, his
scholarship follows to the letter the keywords project of Raymond Williams,
suggesting that what might be seen as more broadly problematic—changeability,
debatability, the questions associated with a work’s particulars—may be in fact
what is of most value.

232 Barbie Zelizer

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 How does this help us see how scholarship matters? It suggests that Carey’s
keywords function more as a means to an end than as ends in themselves. What
looks self-explanatory is not. What appears autonomous depends on neighbor-
ing terms. What is argued from within a particular point in time is overturned
at another point in time. What appears to be coherent falls on its first trial. John
Nerone, in his chapter on history, shares poignant observations about Carey’s in-
ability to finish a book, despite the fact that he was always about a hundred pages
into writing one. In Nerone’s view, this in part resulted from Carey’s preference for
essays over books, because they “were explorations, a way of playing with certain
notions as tools.” No wonder, then, that the value of his terms relies more on re-
maining tentative and unclear than on providing demarcated indices of what the
collective is thinking. When seen as a compilation of keywords, it is noteworthy,
and somewhat paradoxical, that Carey’s scholarship stands more firmly on an
uneven terrain of undeveloped ideas, creative associations, and gestures toward
possibility than on one of distinct nodes on a clearly defined continuum.
But this may be what is most valuable about Carey’s work, for Carey thus
offers a different mode of scholarly engagement with the world. His guidebook
does something other than just provide keywords to mark off the field’s outer
edges of consciousness. It draws on the legacy that Williams crafted for his own
vocabulary of culture, where others were to use his book as a “conceptual out-
line or crash course for a given area, especially at the beginning of an academic
project or program. . . . The purpose of this kind of reading is to move beyond
simplistic or nuanced use of complex and perhaps forbidding terms, building
confidence as a preliminary to more detailed study” (Durant 2007, 15–16).
Thus, Carey’s keywords are positioned not so much as a map of the field as it
exists but as a map of what it could be. A guidebook of the potential is in truth
very much an alternative one: consider the lunacy of using a guide to tour a
city’s imagined places. And yet, because it etches the perimeters of the possible
in the field of communication, Carey’s work matters, and matters greatly.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

From Keywords to Platforms

At the turn of the last century, readers struggled to make sense of an injunction
from the epigraph of E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End—“Only connect . . .”
Over time, the phrase came to mean many things—connections among people,
between prose and passion, between past and present, across classes—all of them
relevant to Carey’s work. Connecting set the terms by which Carey engaged
with the world. For him, connection was central to all that he forwarded as
intellectual pursuit—not only about interchange itself but about the broad set-

Epilogu e: How Schol a rship M atters 233

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 tings associated with possibility and potential and about the range of associated
practices by which they could take shape. For Carey, connecting was a lifelong
project. The ground for connection needed to be prepared, tilled, and readied;
its vehicles or tools needed to be readied and the saplings planted, nurtured,
and tended; and beyond that preparation, the work of inquiry was expected to
produce a desired garden replete with curiosity, ethics, morality, community,
citizenship, and democratic engagement. Through connecting, Carey crafted
a vision by which the discipline of communication could thoughtfully link its
various incremental pieces into a meaningful intellectual project with multiple
threads. As Larry Grossberg says in his chapter, Carey’s “commitment to culture
is a commitment to . . . a vocabulary that can ground an ethical, democratic,
and civil vision of the possibility of collective life.”
Perhaps, then, individual keywords are not the most valuable devices through
which to appraise Carey’s work. We should instead orient our evaluation toward
the way his keywords have come together in productive and nonproductive ten-
sions—vibrating against one another, wrestling with one another for legitimacy,
sometimes shoving one another aside, but never letting go of the fundamental
mutual codependency that keeps them part of a shared vision.
It is here that the notion of platforms comes to play. Defined as “where we
stand when we do our work” (Barker 1998, 21–32), the idea of platforms refer-
ences metaphorical places or content fields in which one gathers certain key-
words together. Offering a way for keywords to coexist by elaborating, compli-
cating, and at times negating one another, platforms provide alternative paths
toward both comprehending what matters as evidence and moving it along into
one’s broader grasp of the field. For Carey’s students, this was instrumental,
for it allowed the safe pursuit of projects that were distinctly off-center in the
larger field of communication. Now, as we contemplate the longevity of Carey’s
scholarship, platforms further matter because they offer us a different way to
assess what has remained. They also, not incidentally, correspond roughly to the
three parts of this book—contexts, culture, and consequences.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Platform 1: The Landscape of Connection

The first platform in Carey’s work includes all those elements that have made it
possible to connect as a discipline—time, space, community, religion, education.
For Carey, these background elements facilitated our coming together as social
beings, and they provided the paths that enabled the movement beyond our
personal spaces into some kind of shared collective. This landscape of connection
provided the ingredients needed to set the task of connecting in motion.

234 Barbie Zelizer

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 In that light, Linda Steiner takes Carey’s early thoughts on community and
weaves them into a necessary and vital bonding agent for multiple collective
activities. John Nerone lays out Carey’s approach to history as twinning its lack of
unity with its capacity to engage in intelligent dialogue across many variations.
The point here is clear: connecting cannot happen without a thoughtfully laid
foundation on which it can evolve. In this sense, Carey was correct to insist on
the need to prioritize the default settings long before they could be activated in
any particular intellectual project. The landscape of connection was equally a
landscape for connection.

Platform 2: The Tools of Connection

For Carey, connecting required effort, and he recognized that it needed tools,
vehicles, and instruments that could mold the landscape in a desired fashion.
This second platform—culture, particularly in its popular and oral forms, ritual
and identity—constitutes the material in Carey’s work by which he saw us con-
necting the individual to the collective. Without it, the landscape remained
untilled and untended.
The claims in this regard are woven across this volume. Joli Jensen makes a
statement for popular culture’s relevance to the accomplishment of a workable
democracy, while Mark Fackler argues for oral culture’s centrality in achieving
the same goal. Moreover, in Careyesque fashion, the tools that offer a means
to a greater end also reconfigure sections of the landscape: Quentin Schultze
takes us backward in time, marking Carey’s rediscovery of the monastic tradi-
tion’s recognition of culture as instrumental to life itself; Larry Grossberg moves
us temporally forward, extending Carey’s thoughts on culture into an incisive
declaration for the necessary twinning of contemporary ethics and politics.
Without tools, Carey’s vision remains a landscape in need of nurture. Activat-
ing culture in its various forms, using ritual, and problematizing identity are all
ways of getting closer to the vision for which Carey strove.

Platform 3: The Fruits of Connection

Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

The third platform refers to the products and results of our labor of connect-
ing. They are the ends to which the discipline aspires: news, professionalism,
democracy, ethics, globalization, the public, workable technology.
It is no surprise that here Carey’s ideas enter into an engagement with the so-
called real world. Robert Fortner notes that Carey’s sense of the public was both
restorative and prescriptive and that characterization can be applied across the
board for his key terms. Running through many of the essays is a concern with

Epilogu e: How Schol a rship M atters 235

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the state of the collective(s) post-9/11 and during the eight years of the George
W. Bush administration, and it is fitting that many of the authors use Carey’s
inquiry as a way of clarifying what it means to stand on the cusp of potential
change. Jack Bratich contextualizes Carey’s work against an understanding of
the triumphs and trials of globalization, while Fredrick Wasser resituates our
contemporary grasp of democracy post-Bork. Here, too, in a manner typical of
Carey, the ends reposition the means: Norman Denzin charts his understand-
ing of critical pedagogy through his response to 9/11, while Catherine Warren
uses the lens of ritual to contemplate Abu Ghraib. The real, the practical, and
the external all weave through these essays in an effortless fashion.
In writing on globalization, Jack Bratich notes that Carey’s work was always
oriented toward the future: “The faith in the communal spirit to resist tyranny
and overcome obstacles, and the pragmatist pursuit of creating and renewing
democracy . . . pointed to a [rescue of] . . . hope and praxis from the clutches of
despair and futility.” In that light, Carey’s orientation toward connection bears
an instrumental relevance for the field, suggesting that the significance and va-
lence of his key terms mattered for their tone, their mood, and their cadence as
much as for the particulars of what they had to offer. How they have mattered
is thus as important as what has mattered, a lesson that any discipline invested
in stock taking might well heed.

Carey, Fast-Forwarded

How much have Carey’s keywords remained central to our collective imaginary
in communication? The response will ultimately depend on who is doing the
asking and the answering. Nonetheless, it is telling that the metaphors used here
have been spatial in nature—guidebooks and maps, landscapes and gardens.
Transforming the conceptual into grounded, concrete terms of reference, they
speak to Carey’s own insistence on twinning intellectual and pragmatic tasks,
and it was in part by such twinning that Carey claimed his place among the
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

handful of scholars who enabled the field to imagine the “what if ” of its future.
Imagining—as an act that takes the collective in many possible, illogical, wildly
creative, and unanticipated directions—depends, however, on starting from a
place that is known and familiar.
For that reason, this volume constitutes an effort to come to terms with a past
that will not—and should not—go away. On a collective level, Carey gave us a
vocabulary that now spreads broadly across the field of communication, always
to be approximated and referenced but never to be set in stone. As such, Carey

236 Barbie Zelizer

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 and his keywords will continue to propel us into an imagined future where all
things aspired might more closely resemble the platforms for inquiry that he
first coaxed so many others into initially considering.
This is how scholarship matters. In the conclusion to his preface to Keywords,
Raymond Williams (1983, 26) noted that his book left a number of blank pages
at the end, “not only for the convenience of making notes, but as a sign that the
inquiry remains open.” So too with James Carey’s keywords, which, true to his
spirit, will remain forever open to elaboration, amendment, correction, and
repair.

Notes
1. Examples abound. See O’Sullivan et al. 2000.
2. Alan Durant (2006) tracks similar keyword exercises among C. S. Lewis, I. A. Richards,
and William Empson.
3. Carey’s original article on the topic (Carey 1974) sent Journalism History on a repeated
exercise of the questions he raised at least once a decade thereafter. See, for instance,
Nord 1988 and Blanchard 1999.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Epilogu e: How Schol a rship M atters 237

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgments

Graduate students at the University of Illinois (Kevin Healey and

Dal Yong Jin) and the University of Maryland (Eunryung Chong
and Jessica Roberts) were indispensable in doing research and pre-
paring the bibliography. At a symposium at which these chapters
were first presented, Stuart Adam (Carleton University, Emeritus)
provided helpful critique. Bette Carey and Daniel Carey attended
and have remained supportive. Anantha Babbili, Theodore Glasser,
and John Pauly made welcome contributions. The editors and staff at
the University of Illinois Press proved to be sine qua non, especially
Kendra Boileau, Jennifer Reichlin, and Bruce Bethell.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Works Cited
Allan, Stuart. 2006. Online News: Journalism and the Internet. New York: Open University
Press.
Allen, David S. 2002. “Jürgen Habermas and the Search for Democratic Principles.” In
Moral Engagement in Public Life: Theorists for Contemporary Ethics, edited by Sharon
L. Bracci and Clifford G. Christians, 97–122. New York: Peter Lang.
Altschuler, Glenn C., and Stuart M. Blumin. 2000. Rude Republic: Americans and Their
Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Altschull, J. Herbert. 1997. “A Crisis of Conscience: Is Community Journalism the Answer?”
In Mixed News: The Public/Civic/Communitarian Journalism Debate, edited by Jay Black,
140–56. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.
American Psychological Association. 2004. “How Psychology Can Help Explain The Iraqi
Prisoner Abuse.” http://www.apa.org/topics/iraqiabuse.html (accessed Sept. 2004).
Anderson, Benedict. 1991 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso.
Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. London:
Methuen.
Apel, Dora. 2003. “On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11.”
American Quarterly 55, no. 3: 457–78.
Arenson, Karen W. 2002. “Columbia President, Rethinking Journalism School’s Mission,
Suspends Search for New Dean.” New York Times, July 24, B7.
Arnett, Ronald C. 2005. Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Augustine. 1991. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford University
Press.
———. 2002. On the Trinity, Books 8–15. Edited by Gareth B. Matthews. Translated by
Stephen McKenna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at http://www
.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=101795.
Ayittey, George B. N. 1998. Africa in Chaos. New York: St. Martin’s.
Baier, Annette. 1986. “Extending the Limits of Moral Theory.” Journal of Philosophy 83,
no. 10:538–45.
Baker, Richard Terrill. 1954. A History of the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia
University. New York: Columbia University Press.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Banzhaf v. FCC, 405 F2d 1082 (D.C. Cir., 1968).
Barber, Benjamin R. 1995. Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping
the World. New York: Balantine.
Barker, Peter. 1998. “Kuhn and the Sociological Revolution.” Configurations 6, no. 1: 21–
32.
Barnett, Kyle S. 1996. “Furniture Music: The Phonograph as Furniture, 1900–1930.” Journal
of Popular Music Studies 18, no. 3: 301–24.
Barney, Darin. 2004. “The Vanishing Table, or Community in a World That Is No World.”
In Community in the Digital Age, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney, 31–52.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
Barnhurst, Kevin G., and John Nerone. 2001. The Form of News: A History. New York:
Guilford.
Baym, Nancy. 1995. “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communica-
tion.” In CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, edited by
Steven G. Jones, 138–63. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Beauchamp, Tom L., and James F. Childress. 2001 [1979]. Principles of Biomedical Ethics.
5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bell, Colin, and Howard Newby. 1972. Community Studies: An Introduction to the Sociology
of the Local Community. New York: Praeger.
Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M.
Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bennett, Tony. 1998. Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage.
Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, eds. 2005. New Keywords: A
Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Bennett, W. Lance, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston. 2006. “None Dare Call It
Torture: Indexing and the Limits of Press Independence in the Abu Ghraib Scandal.”
Journal of Communication 56, no. 3: 467–85.
Benson, Heidi. 2004. “Want to Get Seymour Hersh Excited? Ask Him Why Abu Ghraib Is
Important. Then Take Cover.” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 14, p. E1.
Berry, Wendell. 1990. What Are People For? San Francisco: North Point.
Best, Kirsty. 2005. “Rethinking the Globalization Movement: Toward a Cultural Theory of
Contemporary Democracy and Communication.” Communication and Critical/Cultural
Studies 2, no. 3: 214–37.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Bierce, Ambrose. 1980. The Devil’s Dictionary. Franklin Center, Pa.: Franklin Library.
Bird, Elizabeth. 2003. The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. New York:
Routledge.
Bishop, Russell. 1998. “Freeing Ourselves from Neo-Colonial Domination in Research: A
Kaupapa Maori Approach to Creating Knowledge.” International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education 11:199–219.
Blanchard, Margaret A. 1999. “The Ossification of Journalism History.” Journalism History
25, no. 3: 107–12.
Blondheim, Menahem. 1994. News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public
Information in America, 1844–1897. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

242 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Blum, Linda M., and Andrea L. Press. 2002. “What Can We Hear after Postmodernism?
Doing Feminist Field Research in the Age of Cultural Studies.” In American Cultural
Studies, edited by Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus, 94–114. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Booth, Wayne. 1989. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Borgmann, Albert. 2004. “Is the Internet the Solution to the Problem of Community?” In
Community in the Digital Age, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney, 53–68.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
Boylan, James. 2003. Pulitzer’s School: Columbia University’s School of Journalism, 1903–2003.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Bracci, Sharon L., and Clifford G. Christians. 2002. Moral Engagement in Public Life. New
York: Peter Lang.
Bratich, Jack. 2007. “Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 1:
42–58.
Brison, Susan J. 2004. “Torture, or ‘Good Old American Pornography’?” Chronicle of Higher
Education 50, no. 39: B10.
Brooke, John L. 1998. “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural
Historians.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 1: 43–67.
Brown, Patricia Leigh. 2002. “Megachurches as Minitowns.” New York Times, May 9, F1, F6.
Available at www.nytimes.com/2002/05/09/garden/09CHUR.html.
Buber, Martin. 1958. I and Thou. 2d ed. Translated by R. G. Smith. New York: Scribner’s.
Bujo, Benezet. 1998. The Ethical Dimension of Community: The African Model and the
Dialogue between North and South. Nairobi, Kenya: Paulines.
Burke, Kenneth. 1974. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Butcher, Hugh, Andrew Glen, and Paul Henderson. 1993. Community and Public Policy.
London: Pluto.
Butterworth, Eric, and Weir David, eds. 1970. The New Sociology of Modern Britain: An
Introductory Reader. London: Fontana.
Cahill, Thomas. 1998. The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way
Everyone Thinks and Feels. New York: Doubleday.
Caldwell, John Thorton. 1995. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Televi-
sion. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Calhoun, Craig. 1992. “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere.” In Habermas and
the Public Sphere, edited by Calhoun, 1–48. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
———. 1998. “Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology
and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere.” Sociological Inquiry 68:373–97.
Callahan, Daniel, and Sissela Bok. 1980. The Teaching of Ethics in Higher Education. New
York: Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences.
Calvin, John. 1960. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by John T. McNeill. Phila-
delphia: Westminster.
Camon, Alessandro. 2004. “American Torture, American Porn.” Salon, June 7. http://www
.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/06/07/torture/index_np.html (accessed Oct. 2004).

Wor ks Cited 243

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Carey, James W. 1963. “Communication Systems and Social Systems: Two Economic Postu-
lates Applied to a Theory of Communications Systems.” Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
———. 1967. “Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan.” Antioch Review 27, no. 1:
5–39.
———. 1971. “The Politics of the Electronic Revolution: Further Notes on Marshall McLu-
han.” Urbana: Institute of Communications Research, p. 3.
———. 1978. “A Plea for the University Tradition.” Journalism Quarterly 55:846–55.
———. 1987a. “Journalists Just Leave: The Ethics of an Anomalous Profession.” In Ethics and
the Media, edited by Maile-Gene Sagen, 5–19. Iowa City: Iowa Humanities Board.
———. 1987b. “The Press and Public Discourse.” Center Magazine, March–April, pp.
4–16.
———. 1988. “Editor’s Introduction: Taking Culture Seriously.” In Media, Myths, and Nar-
ratives, edited by James W. Carey, 8–18. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
———. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays in Media and Society. New York: Rout-
ledge.
———. 1990. “Technology as a Totem for Culture.” American Journalism 7, no. 4: 242–51.
———. 1991. Interview with James Carey. Conducted by David Shedden. Available at http://
www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=101795.
———. 1997a. “Afterword: The Culture in Question.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James
Carey: A Critical Reader, 308–39.
———. 1997b. “The Chicago School and the History of Mass Communication.” In Munson
and Warren, eds., James Carey: A Critical Reader, 14–33.
———. 1997c. “Communications and Economics.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James
Carey: A Critical Reader, 60–75.
———. 1997d. “The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator.” In
Munson and Warren, eds., James Carey: A Critical Reader, 128–43.
———. 1997e. “Community, Public, and Journalism.” In Mixed News: The Public/Civic/
Communitarian Journalism Debate, edited by Jay Black, 1–15. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
———. 1997f. “The Dark Continent of American Journalism.” Munson and Warren, eds.,
James Carey: A Critical Reader, 144–88.
———. 1997g. “Political Correctness and Cultural Studies.” In Munson and Warren, eds.,
James Carey: A Critical Reader, 270–91.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

———. 1997h. “The Press, Public Opinion, and Public Discourse: On the Edge of the Post-
modern.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James Carey: A Critical Reader, 228–57.
———. 1997i. “The Problem of Journalism History.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James
Carey: A Critical Reader, 86–94.
———. 1997j. “‘Putting the World at Peril’: A Conversation with James W. Carey.” In Munson
and Warren, eds., James Carey: A Critical Reader, 95–116.
———. 1997k. “Reflections on the Project of (American) Cultural Studies.” In Cultural Stud-
ies in Question, edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding, 1–24. London: Sage.
———. 1997l. “A Republic, If You Can Keep It.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James Carey:
A Critical Reader, 207–27.

244 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ———. 1997m. “The Roots of Modern Media Analysis: Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLu-
han.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James Carey: A Critical Reader, 34–59.
———. 1998a. “The Internet and the End of the National Communication System: Uncertain
Predictions of an Uncertain Future.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
75, no. 1: 28–34.
———. 1998b. “Political Ritual on Television: Episodes in the History of Shame, Degrada-
tion and Excommunication.” In Media, Ritual and Identity, edited by Tamar Liebes and
James Curran, 42–70. New York: Routledge.
———. 1998c. “Marshall McLuhan: Genealogy and Legacy.” Canadian Journal of Com-
munication 23, no. 3. http://www.cjc-online.ca/viewarticle.php?id=468&layout=html
(accessed Sept 1, 2008).
———. 2000a. The Engaged Discipline. The Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture. Edited
by the National Communication Association. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
———. 2000b. “Some Personal Notes on US Journalism Education.” Journalism 1, no. 1:
12–23.
———. 2002a. “American Journalism on, before, and after September 11.” In Journalism after
September 11, edited by Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan, 71–90. London: Routledge.
———. 2002b. “The Sense of an Ending: On Nations, Communications, and Culture.” In
American Cultural Studies, edited by Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus,
196–237. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
———. 2002c. Untitled panel presentation at the Annual Convention of the National Com-
munication Association, New Orleans, La., November 23.
———. 2003. “Mirror of the Times.” The Nation, June 16, pp. 5–6.
———. 2005. “Historical Pragmatism and the Internet.” New Media and Society 7:443–55.
———. 2006a. “Configurations of Culture, History and Politics: James Carey in Conversa-
tion with Lawrence Grossberg.” In Thinking with James Carey, edited by Jeremy Packer
and Craig Robertson, 199–225. New York: Peter Lang.
———. 2006b. “Globalization, Democracy, and Open Communication.” Explorations in
Media Ecology 5, no. 2: 103–14.
———. 2007. “A Short History of Journalism for Journalists: A Proposal and Essay.” Inter-
national Journal of Press/Politics 12, no. 1: 3–16.
Caro, Robert A. 1982. The Years of Lyndon Johnson. New York: Knopf.
Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy,
Society, and Culture, vol. 1. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Chandler, A. D. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Chesterton, G. K. 1990. Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith. New York: Image Books.
Christians, Clifford G. 1997. “The Ethics of Being in a Communications Context.” In Com-
munication Ethics and Universal Values, edited by Clifford G. Christians and Michael
Traber, 3–23. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
———. 1999. “The Common Good as First Principle.” In The Idea of Public Journalism,
edited by Theodore L. Glasser, 67–84. New York: Guilford.
———. 2000. “An Intellectual History of Media Ethics.” In Media Ethics: Opening Social
Dialogue, edited by B. Pattyn, 15–37. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters.

Wor ks Cited 245

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 ———. 2002. “Introduction.” In “Ethical Issues and Qualitative Research,” special issue of
Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 4: 407–10.
———. 2003. “Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research.” In Handbook of Qualitative Re-
search, 3d. ed., edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 133–55. Thousand
Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
———. 2004. “Ubuntu and Communitarianism in Media Ethics.” Ecquid Novi 25:235–56.
Christians, Clifford G., and Catherine L. Covert. 1980. Teaching Ethics in Journalism Educa-
tion. New York: Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences.
Christians, Clifford, John Ferré, and Mark Fackler. 1993. Good News: Social Ethics and the
Press. New York: Oxford.
Clark, Charles. 1994. The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Clouser, K. Danner, and Bernard Gert. 1990. “A Critique of Principlism.” Journal of Medicine
and Philosophy 15, no. 2: 219–36.
Coles, Robert. 1999. The Secular Mind. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Commission on Freedom of the Press. 1947. A Free and Responsible Press. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Connell, R. W. 2002. “The History of Masculinity.” In The Masculinity Studies Reader, edited
by Rachel Adams and David Savran, 245–61. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Cooley, Charles Horton. 1909. Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York:
Scribner’s.
Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge.
Cova, Bernard, and Veronique Cova. 2002. “Tribal Marketing: The Tribalisation of Society
and Its Impact on the Conduct of Marketing.” European Journal of Marketing 36, nos.
5–6: 595–620.
Czitrom, Daniel J. 1982. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
———. 1990. “Communication Studies as American Studies.” American Quarterly 42, no.
4:678–83.
Dallmayr, Fred. 1981. Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Structuralist Theory
of Politics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Darnton, Robert. 1979. The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the “Ency-
clopédie,” 1775–1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Davis, Natalie Z. 1975. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

University Press.
Davis, Susan G. 1999. “Space Jam: Media Conglomerates Build the Entertainment City.”
European Journal of Communication 14, no. 4: 435–59.
Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Denzin, Norman K. 2007. Flags in the Window: Dispatches from the American War Zone.
New York: Peter Lang.

246 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 de Tocqueville, Alexis. 2000. Democracy in America. Edited and translated by Harvey C.
Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
De Zengotita, Thomas. 2005. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way
You Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury.
Dewey, John. 1935. Liberalism and Social Action. New York: Putnam.
———. 1954 [1927]. The Public and Its Problems. Athens, Ohio: Swallow.
———. 1958. Experience and Nature. 2d ed. New York: Dover.
———. 1966 [1916]. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Educa-
tion. New York: Free Press.
Dicken-Garcia, Hazel. 1989. Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth Century America. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
Didion, Joan. 2004. “Politics in the ‘New Normal’ America.” New York Review of Books 51,
no. 16 (Oct. 21): 64–73.
Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. 1984. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideol-
ogy in the Disney Comic. New York: International General.
Douglas, Susan. 1987. Inventing American Broadcasting: 1899–1922. Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Durant, Alan. 2006. “Raymond Williams’s Keywords: Investigating Meanings ‘Offered,
Felt for, Tested, Confirmed, Asserted, Qualified, Changed.’ ” Critical Quarterly 48, no.
4: 1–26.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Eliade, Mircea. 1971. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press.
Ellos, William J. 1994. Narrative Ethics. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.
Ellul, Jacques. 1985. The Humiliation of the Word. Translated by Joyce Main Hanks. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.
Ettema, James S. 1990. “Press Rites and Race Relations: A Study of Mass-Mediated Ritual.”
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7:309–31.
Etzioni, Amitai. 1993. The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communi-
tarian Agenda. New York: Crown.
———. 2001. The Monochrome Society. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Euben, J. Peter. 1981. “Philosophy and the Professions.” Democracy 1, no. 2: 112–27.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Fackler, Mark. 2003. “Communication Theory with an African Flexion.” In Mediating Reli-
gion, edited by Jolyon Mitchell and Sophia Marriage, 317–28. London: T. and T. Clark.
Farrell, Elizabeth F. 2002. “Columbia U.’s President Halts Search for a Journalism Dean
While Reviewing School’s Role.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 July. http://chronicle
.com/free/2002/07/2002072502n.htm (accessed Nov. 20, 2007).
Feeley-Harnik, Gillian. 2001. “‘The Mystery of Life in All Its Forms’: Religious Dimensions
of Culture in Early American Anthropology.” In Religion and Cultural Studies, edited
by Susan L. Mizruchi, 140–91. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, Ann. 1995. “Feminist Communities and Moral Revolution.” In Feminism and

Wor ks Cited 247

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Community, edited by Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman, 367–98. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Fine, Michelle. 1998. “Working the Hyphens: Reinventing Self and Other in Qualitative
Research.” In The Landscape of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and
Yvonna S. Lincoln, 130–55. London: Sage.
Fine, Michelle, et al. 2003. “Participatory Action Research: From within and beyond Prison
Bars.” In Qualitative Research in Psychology: Expanding Perspectives in Methodology and
Design, edited by Paul M. Camic, Jean E. Rhodes, and Lucy Yardley, 173–98. Washington,
D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Fischman, Gustavo E., and Peter McLaren. 2005. “Rethinking Critical Pedagogy and the
Gramscian and Freirean Legacies: From Organic to Committed Intellectuals.” Cultural
Studies—Critical Methodologies 5, no. 4: 425–46.
Fisher, Walter R. 1987. Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason,
Value, and Action. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Fishman, Jessica M., and Carolyn Marvin. 2003. “Portrayals of Violence and Group Differ-
ence in Newspaper Photographs: Nationalism and Media.” Journal of Communication
53:32–44.
Forbes, Jill, and Michael Kelly, eds. 1995. French Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Forgacs, David, and Robert Lumley, eds. 1996. Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Fornatale, Peter, and Joshua E. Mills. 1980. Radio in the Television Age. Woodstock, N.Y.:
Overlook.
Freedman, Samuel. 2006. “Outside Voices.” Public Eye, March 31. http://www.cbsnews.com/
blogs/2006/03/30/public_exe/printable1458655.shtml (accessed Sept. 15, 2007).
Freire, Paulo. 1973. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury.
———. 1998. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Translated by
Patrick Clarke. Boulder, Colo.: Rowman and Littlefield.
———. 1999 [1992]. Pedagogy of Hope. New York: Continuum.
———. 2001 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Friese, Heidrun, ed. 2002. Time, Difference, and Boundaries. New York: Berghahn Books.
Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. 1993. Australian Cultural Studies, Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975. Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Garnham, Nicholas. 1997. “Political Economy and the Practice of Cultural Studies.” In
Cultural Studies in Question, edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding, 56–73.
London: Sage.
Gerbner, George. 2002. Against the Mainstream: The Selected Works of George Gerbner,
edited by Michael Morgan. New York: Peter Lang.
Giles, Judy, and Tim Middleton. 1999. Studying Culture: A Practical Introduction. New
York: Blackwell.

248 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Giroux, Henry. 2000. Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies. New York:
Routledge.
Giroux, Henry, and Susan Searls Giroux. 2006. “Challenging Neoliberalism’s New World
Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy.” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 6,
no. 1: 21–32.
Gitlin, Todd. 1997. “The Anti-political Populism of Cultural Studies.” In Cultural Studies in
Question, edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Golding, 25–38. London: Sage.
———. 2002. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our
Lives. New York: Henry Holt.
Glasser, Theodore L. 1991. “Communication and the Cultivation of Citizenship.” Com-
munication 12, no. 4: 235–48.
Goody, Jack. 1968. Literacy in Traditional Societies. London: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2000. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institu-
tion Press.
Graeber, David. 2007. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland,
Calif.: AK Press.
Grant, George. 1969. Technology and Empire. Toronto: Anansi.
Graves, Lucas. 2007. “The Affordances of Blogging: A Case Study in Culture and Techno-
logical Effects.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31:331–46.
Griffiths, Paul J. 2004. “Christ and Critical Theory.” First Things, no. 145: 46–55.
Grindon, Gavin. 2007. “The Breath of the Possible.” In Constituent Imagination: Militant
Investigations, Collective Theorization, edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber,
94–108. Oakland, Calif.: AK Press.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1993. “Cultural Studies and/in New Worlds.” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 10:1–22.
———. 1996. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” In
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen,
131–50. New York: Routledge.
Gunn, Giles. 2001. “Human Solidarity and the Problem of Otherness.” In Religion and
Cultural Studies, edited by Susan L. Mizruchi, 80–94. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991 [1989]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An In-
quiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick
Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

———. 1992. “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere,
edited by Craig Calhoun, 421–61. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.’ ” In People’s History and Socialist
Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, 227–40. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson. 1976. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-
war Britain. London: Hutchinson.
Hallin, Daniel C. 1992. “The Passing of the ‘High Modernism’ of American Journalism.”
Journal of Communication 42, no. 3: 14–25.
Harari, Oren. 2005. “Leader at Large: What’s Your Brand?” Association Management,

Wor ks Cited 249

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 February. http://www.asaecenter.org/PublicationsResources/AMMagArticleDetail
.cfm?ItemNumber=9305 (accessed Sept. 1, 2007).
Hartley, John. 2003. A Short History of Cultural Studies. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change. New York: Blackwell.
Harvie, David, Keir Milburn, Ben Trott and David Watts, eds. 2005. Shut Them Down! West
Yorkshire, U.K.: Dissent!; New York: Autonomedia.
Hauerwas, Stanley. 1981. A Community of Character. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press.
Hauerwas, Stanley, and L. Gregory Jones, eds. 1989. Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative
Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans.
Havel, Václav. 1991. Open Letters: Selected Prose 1965–1990. Edited and translated by Paul
Wilson. London: Faber and Faber.
Hay, James. 2006. “Between Cultural Materialism and Spatial Materialism: James Carey’s
Writing about Communication.” In Packer and Robertson, eds., Thinking with James
Carey, 29–55.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture, the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Hersh, Seymour M. 1970. My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath. New York:
Random House.
———. 2004. “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” New Yorker, May 10, pp. 42–47.
Hewitt, Marsha Aileen. 1995. Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis. Minneapolis,
Minn.: Fortress.
Heyes, Cressida. 2002. “Identity Politics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall
2002 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2002/entries/
identity-politics/.
Hirsch, Paul, and Horace Newcomb. 2000. “Television as a Cultural Forum.” In Televi-
sion: The Critical View, 6th ed., edited by Horace Newcomb, 561–74. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Hocking, William Ernest. 1947. Freedom of the Press: A Framework of Principle. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hoggart, Richard. 1961 [1957]. Uses of Literacy. Boston: Beacon.
Hohenberg, John. 1974. The Pulitzer Prizes. New York: Columbia University Press.
hooks, bell. 1995. “Postmodern Blackness.” In The Truth about the Truth: De-Confusing
and Re-Constructing the Postmodern World, edited by Walter Truett Anderson, 117–24.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

New York: Putnam’s.

Hughes, Donna M. 2004. “Not Unfamiliar.” National Review, May 6. http://www.­nationalreview
.com/comment/hughes200405060834.asp (accessed Sept. 13, 2004).
Hulteng, John. 1985. The Messenger’s Motives: Ethical Problems of the News Media. 2d ed.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Human Rights First. 2006. “Command’s Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in U.S. Custody.”
http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/06221-etn-hrf-dic-rep-web.pdf (accessed Feb.
28, 2006).
Ignacio, Emily Noelle. 2005. Building Diaspora: Filipino Community Formation on the
Internet. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

250 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Innis, Harold Adams. 1956. The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic
History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 1964 [1951]. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 1986 [1950]. Empire and Communications. Vancouver, B.C.: Beach Holme.
Ireland, Alleyne. 1938. An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer. London:
Lovat Dickson.
Jackson, Wes. 1994. Becoming Native to This Place. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint.
Jacobs, Norman, ed. 1961. Culture for the Millions. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand.
Jarvis, Jeff. 2006. “Talk of the Town.” BuzzMachine, July 31. http://www.buzzmachine
.com/2006/07/31/talk_of_the_town (accessed Nov. 8, 2008).
Jensen, Jay. 1967. “Liberalism, Democracy, and the Mass Media.” Ph.D. dissertation, Uni-
versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Jensen, Joli. 1988. “Fear of Trash: Popular Culture Study in the Academy.” Unpublished
paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual Conference on Politics, Social Theory and
the Arts, Washington, D.C., October.
———. 1992. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Ador-
ing Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Music, edited by Lisa Lewis, 9–29. New York:
Routledge.
———. 2002. Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life. Lanham, Md.:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Jensen, Joli, and John J. Pauly. 1997. “Imagining the Audience: Losses and Gains in Cultural
Studies.” In Cultural Studies in Question, edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Gold-
ing, 155–69. London: Sage.
John, Richard R. 1995. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to
Morse. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Johnson, Peter. 1996. “The Limits of Fiction.” In Contemporary Political Studies, edited by
Iain Hampsher-Monk and Jeffrey Stanyer, 3:1352–58. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.
Johnston, Jill. 1973. Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. New York: Simon and Schus-
ter.
Jones, Steve. 1992. Rock Formation: Popular Music, Technology and Mass Communication.
Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.
———. 1993. “A Sense of Space: Virtual Reality, Authenticity and the Aural.” Critical Studies
in Mass Communication 10, no. 3: 238–52.
———. 2002. “Music That Moves: Popular Music, Distribution and Network Technologies.”
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Cultural Studies 16, no. 2: 213–32.

Joseph, Miranda. 2002. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Kalb, Claudia. 2005. “In Our Blood.” Newsweek, February 6, pp. 47+.
Kane, Thomas. 1998. “Public Argument, Civil Society and What Talk Radio Teaches about
Rhetoric.” Argumentation and Advocacy 34, no. 3: 154–58.
Kates, Steven M. 2004. “The Dynamics of Brand Legitimacy: An Interpretive Study in the
Gay Men’s Community.” Journal of Consumer Research 31, no. 4: 455–64.
Katz, Elihu, and Tamar Liebes. 1990. The Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural Readings of
Dallas. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wor ks Cited 251

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Keillor, Garrison. 2004. Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts for the Heart of
America. New York: Viking.
Kellner, Douglas M., and Meenakshi Gigi Durham. 2001. Media and Cultural Studies: Key-
Works. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Kincheloe, Joe L. 2004. Critical Pedagogy Primer. New York: Peter Lang.
Kittredge, William. 1987. Owning It All. San Francisco: Murray House.
Klaidman, Stephen, and Tom L. Beauchamp. 1987. The Virtuous Journalist. New York: Ox-
ford University Press.
Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo. Picador: New York.
———. 2002. Fences and Windows. New York: Picador.
Koehn, Daryl. 1998. Rethinking Feminist Ethics: Care, Trust, and Empathy. New York: Rout-
ledge.
Kornhauser, William. 1959. The Politics of Mass Society. New York: Free Press.
Kozinets, Robert V. 2002. “The Field behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing
Research in Online Communities.” Journal of Marketing Research 39, no. 1: 61–72.
Kruse, Holly. 1993. “Early Audio Technology and Domestic Space.” Stanford Humanities
Review 3, no. 2: 1–16.
Landes, Richard. 1993. “Justice, Work, Study, and Protest: The Biblical Contributions to
Modern Democracy.” Tikkun 8, no. 4: 67–72.
Lefebvre, Henry. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson Smith. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Le Hir, Marie-Pierre, and Dana Strand, eds. 2000. French Cultural Studies: Criticism at the
Crossroads. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Leibowitz, Michael. 2004. “A Culture of Meanness.” Unpublished student paper, Brooklyn
College, CUNY, June.
Lemann, Nicholas 2006. “Amateur Hour.” New Yorker, August 7, pp. 44–49.
Leonard, Thomas C. 1995. News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age with the Press. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1981. Otherwise Than Being or Essence. The Hague, Netherlands: Mar-
tinus Nijhoff.
Lichtenberg, Judith. 2000. “In Defence of Objectivity Revisited.” In Mass Media and So-
ciety, 3d ed., edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevich, 238–54. London: Arnold
Hodder.
Liebes, Tamar. 1998. “Television’s Disaster Marathons: A Danger for Democratic Processes.”
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

In Media, Ritual and Identity, edited by Tamar Liebes and James Curran, 71–86. New
York: Routledge.
Lippmann, Walter. 1925. The Phantom Public. New York: Harper.
———. 1949 [1922]. Public Opinion. New York: Free Press.
Lugo, Alejandro. 2000. “Theorizing Border Inspections.” Cultural Dynamics 12, no. 3:
353–73.
Maalouf, Amin. 2000. In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. Translated
by Barbara Bray. New York: Penguin.
MacDonald, Barrie I., and Michel Petheram. 1998. Keyguide to Information Sources in Media
Ethics. Los Altos, Calif.: Mansell.

252 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1986. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press.
———. 2007 [1981]. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3d ed. Notre Dame, Ind.: Uni-
versity of Notre Dame Press.
MacIver, Robert M. 1928 [1917]. Community. New York: Macmillan.
Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society.
Translated by Don Smith. London: Sage.
Malamud, Martha. 2002. “Writing Original Sin.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 10, no.
3: 329–60.
Mansbridge, Jane. 1995. “Feminism and Democratic Community.” In Feminism and Com-
munity, edited by Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman, 341–66. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press.
Marvin, Carolyn. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Com-
munication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1997. “Famed Psychic’s Head Explodes: James Carey on the Technology of Journal-
ism.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James Carey: A Critical Reader, 119–127.
———. 1999. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. With
David W. Ingle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2002. “Media Rituals: Follow the Bodies.” In American Cultural Studies, edited by
Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus, 182–95. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1971 [1888]. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by
Samuel Moore. London: Penguin.
Mattelart, Armand. 1996. The Invention of Communication. Translated by Susan Emanuel.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McCarthy, Joan. 2003. “Principlism or Narrative Ethics: Must We Choose Between Them?”
Medical Humanities 29, no. 2: 65–71.
McChesney, Robert W. 1999. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubi-
ous Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
———. 2002. “Whatever Happened to Cultural Studies?” In American Cultural Studies,
edited by Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus, 76–93. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
———. 2004. “The Meiklejohn Challenge.” Journalism and Mass Communication Educator
59, no. 1: 24–30.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

McGerr, Michael E. 1986. The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928.
New York: Oxford University Press.
McKay, Floyd. 2004. “Digital Technology in the Age of Terror.” Seattle Times, May 26, p.
B7.
McLaren, Peter. 1997a. “The Ethnographer as Postmodern Flaneur: Critical Reflexivity and
Posthybridity as Narrative Engagement.” In Representation and the Text: Re-Framing the
Narrative Voice, edited by William G. Tierney and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 143–77. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
———. 1997b. Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium.
Boulder, Colo: Westview.

Wor ks Cited 253

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, Marshall, and Eric McLuhan. 1988. Laws of Media. Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press.
McRobbie, Angela. 1997. “The Es and the Anti-Es: New Questions for Feminism and Cul-
tural Studies.” In Cultural Studies in Question, edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter
Golding, 170–86. London: Sage.
Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Mertes, Tom, ed. 2003. A Movement of Movements. London: Verso.
Mezlekia, Nega. 2000. Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood. New York:
Picador USA.
Midler v. Ford Motor Co. 849 F.2d (9 Cir. 1988).
Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
Milton, John. 1951 [1644]. Areopagitica, and Of Education. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts.
Mindich, David T. Z. 1998. Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American
Journalism. New York: New York University Press.
Mizruchi, Susan L. 2001. “The Place of Ritual in Our Time.” In Religion and Cultural Studies,
edited by Susan L. Mizruchi, 56–79. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Mobile Revolution. 2004. BBC Focus on Africa, January–March, pp. 18–25.
Moore, George E. 1954 [1903]. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mulhern, Frances. 2000. Culture/Metaculture. London: Routledge.
Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Muñiz, Albert M., and Thomas C. O’Guinn. 2001. “Brand Community.” Journal of Consumer
Research 27:412–32.
Munson, Eve Stryker, and Catherine A. Warren, eds. 1997. James Carey: A Critical Reader.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nakamura, Lisa. 2007. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral
Research. 1979. Belmont Report: Ethical Principals and Guidelines for the Protection of
Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. Bethesda, Md.: Government
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Printing Office.
Negri, Antonio. 2003. Time for Revolution. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. New York:
Continuum.
Nelson, Cary, and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. 1996. “Cultural Studies and the Politics of
Disciplinarity.” In Discplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, edited by C. Nelson and
D. P. Gaonkar, 1–22. New York: Routledge.
Nerone, John C., et al. 1995. Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Neville, Tim. 2007, “Birds of a Feather.” New York Times, April 6, pp. B1, B8.

254 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Nisbet, Robert. 1969. Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Develop-
ment. New York: Oxford University Press.
Noddings, Nel. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Nord, David Paul. 1988. “A Plea for Journalism History.” Journalism History 15, no. 1:
8–15.
———. 2001. Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their
Readers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Notes from Nowhere, ed. 2003. We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-
capitalism. New York: Verso.
Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Histori-
cal Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Nye, David E. 1992. Electrifying AmeriCalif.: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Ogbonnaya, A. Okechukwu. 1994. On Communitarian Divinity. New York: Paragon.
O’Hara, Maureen. 1995. “Constructing Emancipatory Realities.” In The Truth about the
Truth: De-Confusing and Re-Constructing the Postmodern World, edited by Walter Truett
Anderson, 151–55. New York: Putnam’s.
Ong, Walter J. 1967. The Presence of the Word. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
———. 1974. “Mass in Ewondo.” America 28:148–51.
———. 1996. “Information and/or Communication Interactions.” Communication Research
Trends 16:1–16.
———. 2002 [1982]. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 2d ed. New York:
Routledge.
Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
O’Sullivan, Tim, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, John Fiske. 2000.
Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Packer, Jeremy, and Craig Robertson, eds. 2006. Thinking with James Carey. New York:
Peter Lang.
Pallares-Burke, Maria. 2003. The New History: Confessions and Conversations. London:
Polity.
Parati, Graziella, and Ben Lawton, eds. 2001. Italian Cultural Studies. Lafayette, Ind.: Bor-
dighera.
Park, Robert E., Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie. 1967. The City. Chicago:
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

University of Chicago Press.

Pasley, Jeffrey L. 2001. “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American
Republic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Peters, John Durham. 2000. Speaking into the Air. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peterson, Theodore B. 1956. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Pew Trusts. N.d. “Youth Voting.” http://www.pewtrusts.com/ideas/index.cfm?issue=7 (ac-
cessed Nov. 2004).
Picciotto, Sol. 2001. “Democratizing the New Global Public Sphere.” In The Market or

Wor ks Cited 255

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the Public Domain: Global Governance and the Asymmetry of Power, edited by Daniel
Drache, 335–59. New York: Routledge.
Piccone, Paul. 1976. “Beyond Identity Theory.” In On Critical Theory, edited by John O’Neill,
129–44. New York: Seabury.
Pieper, Josef. 1998. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Translated by Gerald Malsbary. South
Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s.
Pilger, John. 2004. “Torture’s Not New, but Now It’s News.” Daily Mirror, May 7. http://www
.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=14217560&method=full&siteid=50143
(accessed Aug. 15, 2004).
Porco, Carolyn. 2006. “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_8
.html (accessed Dec. 9, 2007).
Porter, Roy, ed. 1997. Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Powys, John Cowper. 1929. The Meaning of Culture. New York: Norton.
Pred, Allan R. 1980. Urban Growth and City Systems in the United States, 1840–1860. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Pulitzer, Joseph. 1904. “The School of Journalism in Columbia University.” 2006. Facsimile
reproduction, The School of Journalism. Seattle: Inkling Books.
Purcell, Edward A. 1973. The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the
Problem of Value. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Radway, Janice A. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Ragas, Matthew W., and Bolivar J. Bueno. 2002. The Power of Cult Branding. Rosevillle,
Calif.: Prima Venture.
Rakow, Lana F., and Laura A. Wackwitz. 2004. “Difference in Feminist Communication
Theory.” In Feminist Communication Theory: Selections in Context, edited by Lana F.
Rakow and Laura A. Wackwitz, 13–27. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Ratcliffe, M. 2006. “Journalism of All Kinds and the Process of Growing.” Rational Rants,
July 31. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ratcliff/?p=164 (accessed Nov. 8, 2008).
Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Reid, Whitelaw. 1875. “Whitelaw Reid.” In Views and Interviews on Journalism, edited by
C. Wingate, 25–40. New York: Patterson.
Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier.
New York: Harper Perennial.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

———. 2002. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books.
Ricchiardi, Sherry. 2004. “Missed Signals.” American Journalism Review, August–September,
pp. 22–29.
Rich, Frank. 2004a. “What O.J. Passed to the Gipper.” New York Times, June 20, sect. 2, p 1.
———. 2004b. “Will We Need a New ‘All The President’s Men’?” New York Times, October
17, sect. 2, p. 1.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1967. The Symbolism of Evil. Boston: Beacon.
Robertson, Craig. 2006. “A Ritual of Verification? The Nation, the State, and the US Pass-
port.” In Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson, eds., Thinking with James Carey, 177–97.

256 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Robertson, Kirsty. 2007. “The Revolution Will Wear a Sweater: Knitting and Global Justice
Activism.” In Constituent Imaginations: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization,
edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, 209–22. Oakland, Calif.: AK Press.
Rose, Jonathan. 2001. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press.
Rosen, Jay. 1997. “We’ll Have That Conversation: Journalism and Democracy in the Thought
of James W. Carey.” In Munson and Warren, eds., James Carey: A Critical Reader, 191–
206.
———. 2004. “Democratic National Ritual 2004.” The Revealer, July 26. http://www
.­therevealer.org/archives/main_story_000583.php (accessed Aug. 26, 2004).
Rosenberg, Bernard, and David Manning White. 1957. Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Rosenfeld, Richard N. 2004. “What Democracy? The Case for Abolishing the United States
Senate.” Harper’s Magazine, May, pp. 35–44.
Sampson, Edward E. 1989. “The Deconstruction of the Self.” In Texts of Identity, edited by
John Shotter and Kenneth J. Gergen, 1–19. London: Sage.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1981. The Family Idiot: Gustav Flaubert, vol. 1, 1821–1857. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1986. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception
of Time and Space. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1988. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century.
Translated by Angela Davies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schmickle, Sharon. 2004. “The Power of the Pen.” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Oct. 24, p.
17F.
Schrag, Calvin O. 1986. Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity. Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
Schramm, Wilbur. 1988. The Story of Human Communication: Cave Painting to Microchip.
New York: Harper and Row.
Schudson, Michael. 1978. Discovering the News. New York: Basic Books.
———. 1999. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press.
Schultze, Quentin. 2002. Habits of the High-Tech Heart. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker.
Schwab, Peter. 2001. Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs. New York: Palgrave.
Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University.
Seitz, Don C. 1924. Joseph Pulitzer: His Life and Letters. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Selznick, Philip. 1992. The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Com-
munity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sennett, Richard. 1992. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Norton.
Shipley, Joseph T. 1945. Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Philosophical Library.
Shohat, Ella. 1999. “By the Bitstream of Babylon: Cyberfrontiers and Diasporic Vistas.” In

Wor ks Cited 257

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Home, Exile, Homeland: Film Media, and the Politics of Place, edited by Hamid Naficy,
213–32. New York: Routledge.
Shukaitis, Stevphen. 2007. “Affective Composition and Aesthetics: On Dissolving the Audi-
ence and Facilitating the Mob.” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest 5. Available at http://
www.joaap.org/5/articles/shukaitis/shukaitis.htm (accessed Apr. 28, 2009).
Siebert, Fred Seaton. 1952. Freedom of the Press in England, 1476–1776. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Siebert, Fred Seaton, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramm. 1956. Four Theories of the
Press. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Silverstone, Roger, and Eric Hirsch. 1992. Consuming Technologies: Media and Information
in Domestic Spaces. London: Routledge.
Smith, Bonnie G. 1998. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples.
London: Zed.
Sontag, Susan. 2004. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times Magazine, May
23, pp. 24–29, 42.
Spender, Stephen. 1984 [1947]. “Introduction.” In Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, vii–
xxiii. New York: New American Library.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Starr, Paul. 2004. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications.
New York: Basic Books.
Steiner, Linda. 2002. “The Uses of Autobiography.” In American Cultural Studies, edited
by Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus, 115–33. Urbana: University of Il-
linois Press.
Sterne, Jonathan. 1998. “Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies vs. the Millennium.” In
Doing Internet Research, edited by Steve Jones, 257–88. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
———. 2006. “Transportation and Communication: Together As You’ve Always Wanted
Them.” In Packer and Robertson, eds., Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Commu-
nications, Transportation, History, 117–45.
St. George, Donna. 1994. “Limbaugh Plays to an Admiring House.” Philadelphia Inquirer,
December 12, p. 1.
Sullivan, Roger. 1994. Kant’s Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Taylor, Charles. 1982. “The Diversity of Goods.” In Utilitarianism and Beyond, edited
by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, 129–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Taylor, George Rogers. 1951. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Rine-
hart.
Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London:
Pluto.
Thaves, Bob. 2003. www.frankandearnest.com (accessed Oct. 27, 2004).
Thomas, George F. 1959. “Political Realism and Christian Faith.” Theology Today 16, no.
2: 188–202.

258 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Thomas, William I., and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. 1928. The Child in America: Behavior
Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf.
Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1963. Community and Society. New York: Harper. German-language
original published as Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887.
Tucher, Andie. 2007. “Communication, Community, Reality, Ritual, and the ‘Potato Hole’
Woodson.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 31:301–9.
Twitchell, James B. 2004. Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College, Inc., and
Museumworld. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Van der Veur, Paul R. 2002. “Broadcasting and Political Reform.” In Media and Democracy
in Africa, edited by Goran Hydén, Michael Leslie, and Folu F. Ogundimu, 81–106. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction.
Verdon, Jean. 2002. Night in the Middle Ages. Translated by George Holoch. South Bend,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
Von Zielbauer, Paul. 2007. “Colonel Is Acquitted in Abu Ghraib Abuse Case.” New York
Times, Aug. 29. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/world/middleeast/29abuse.html
(accessed Dec. 25, 2007).
Warner, Michael. 1990. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone.
Waters, Malcolm. 2001. Globalization. New York: Routledge.
Webber, Melvin. M. 1963. “Order in Diversity: Community without Propinquity.” In Cities
and Space: The Future Use of Urban Land, edited by Lowdon Wingo Jr., 23–54. Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Weems, Mary. 2002. I Speak from the Wound That Is My Mouth. New York: Peter Lang.
Weiss, Penny A. 1995. “Feminism and Communitarianism: Comparing Critiques of Liberal-
ism.” In Feminism and Community, edited by Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman,
161–86. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Wellman, Barry. 1999. Networks in the Global Village: Life in Contemporary Communities.
Boulder, Colo.: Westview.
Whitbeck, Caroline. 1996. “Problems and Cases: New Directions in Ethics 1980–1996.”
Professional Ethics 5, no. 3 (Fall): 3–16.
White, Ed. 2004. “Early American Nations as Imagined Communities.” American Quarterly
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

56, no. 1: 49–81.

White, Horace. 1904. “The School of Journalism.” North American Review, January, pp.
25–32.
Wiesel, Elie. 1990. From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences. New York: Schocken.
Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society 1780/1950. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Penguin.
———. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana.
———. 1983 [1976]. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983; rev. ed., 1985.
Wills, Garry. 1999. Saint Augustine. New York: Viking.

Wor ks Cited 259

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Wiredu, Kwasi. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Wirth, Louis. 1964. On Cities and Social Life: Selected Papers, edited by Albert J. Reiss Jr.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1983. Until Justice and Peace Embrace. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-
mans.
Word, Ron. 2004. “South Wire: Alma Mater Attracts Gator Retirees with State-of-the-Art
Community.” http://www.oakhammock.org/about/press/almamater.asp (accessed Jan.
8. 2007).
Yadgar, Yaacov. 2003. “A Disintegrating Ritual: The Reading of the Deri Verdict as a Media
Event of Degradation.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 2: 204–23.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.” in
Feminism/Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson, 300–323. New York: Routledge.
Yudice, George. 2003. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Yuen, Eddie, George Katsiaficas, and Daniel Burton Rose, eds. 2002. The Battle of Seattle.
New York: Soft Skull.
Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary S. Zboray. 2005. Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s
History of the Mass Market Book. New York: Routledge.
———. 2006. Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Zelizer, Barbie. 2004. “When Facts, Truth, and Reality Are God-Terms: On Journalism’s
Uneasy Place in Cultural Studies.” Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 1, no.
1: 100–119.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

260 Wor ks Cited

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Editors and Contributors

Editors

Clifford Christians is a research professor of communications and a profes-

sor of both journalism and media studies at the University of Illinois. He has
been a visiting scholar in philosophical ethics at Princeton University, a research
fellow in social ethics and a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, and a
PEW fellow in ethics at Oxford University. On the faculty at Illinois since 1974,
Christians has won five teaching awards. He serves on the editorial boards of
more than two dozen journals, is the former editor of Critical Studies in Media
Communication, and currently edits The Ellul Forum. He completed the third
edition of Rivers and Schramm’s Responsibility in Mass Communication, has
coauthored Jacques Ellul: Interpretive Essays with Jay Van Hook, and has written,
coauthored, or coedited Teaching Ethics in Journalism Education, Good News:
Social Ethics and the Press, Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning (now in its
eighth edition), Communication Ethics and Universal Values, Moral Engagement
in Public Life: Theorists for Contemporary Ethics, The Handbook of Mass Media
Ethics, and Ethical Communication: Stances in Human Dialogue.

Linda Steiner is a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland.

Before coming to Maryland, she was a professor of media studies at Rutgers
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

University. Her most recent books are the coedited Critical Readings: Gender and
Media and the coauthored Women and Journalism. She served as the editor for
Critical Studies in Media Communication (and as an associate editor under Prof.
Christians) and currently sits on the boards of nine journals. She was also an as-
sociate editor for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. Her service to
the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication includes
several positions, and she will serve as AEJMC president in 2010.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Contributors

Stuart Allan is a professor of journalism in the Media School, Bournemouth

University, U.K. He is the author of News Culture (1999), Media, Risk and Sci-
ence (2002), and Online News: Journalism and the Internet (2006). His edited
collections include News, Gender and Power (1998; with Carter and Branston),
Environmental Risks and the Media (2000; with Adam and Carter), Journalism
after September 11 (2002; with Zelizer), Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime
(2004; with Zelizer), and Journalism: Critical Issues (2005). He is a book series
editor for the Open University Press and serves on the editorial boards of several
peer-reviewed journals.

Jack Zeljko Bratich is an associate professor of journalism and media studies

at Rutgers University. As a visiting research associate at the University of Illinois,
he was comanaging editor for three scholarly journals. He authored Conspiracy
Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (2008) and coedited Foucault,
Cultural Studies, and Governmentality and Mobile Identities, Mobilized Knowl-
edges: Technology and Culture in a Global Society, a special issue of Information,
Theory, and Society. He has published in Cultural Studies–Critical Methodologies,
Cultural Studies, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Communication Theory,
Television and New Media, and Information, Theory, and Society.

Norman Denzin is a research professor of communications as well as a profes-

sor of sociology, of cinema studies, and of criticism and interpretive theory at
the University of Illinois. His research covers the span from theory to institu-
tional practice. His books The Alcoholic Self and The Recovering Alcoholic won
the Charles H. Cooley Award of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interac-
tion. His recent publications include Screening Race: Hollywood and a Cinema
of Racial Violence, Interpretive Ethnography, The Cinematic Society, Images of
Postmodern Society, The Research Act, Interpretive Interactionism, and Hollywood
Shot by Shot. He is a past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, the editor of The
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Handbook of Qualitative Research, a coeditor of Qualitative Inquiry, the editor

of Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, and the series editor for Studies in
Symbolic Interaction.

Mark Fackler is a professor of communications at Calvin College, Grand

Rapids, Michigan. He is a coauthor of Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reason-
ing (8th ed.) and Good News: Social Ethics and the Press. He has written and

262 Editors a n d Con tr ibu tors

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 edited several other chapters and volumes. Fackler teaches ethics and media
and development at Daystar University, Nairobi, and helps American students
understand, through lived experience, processes of development and democra-
tization in rural areas, principally among the Maasai of the Serengeti plain. He
has lectured recently in the Netherlands, Mongolia, and Ethiopia.

Robert Fortner is the director of the Media Research Institute, a nonprofit

research organization that carries out fieldwork and analysis on behalf of other
nonprofits working in the developing world. He is also a professor of commu-
nication arts and sciences at Calvin College. He has authored four books in the
areas of international communication and communication theory and is editing
three others on communication ethics with his colleague Mark Fackler. He has
also authored more than one hundred reports, monographs, and essays. He has
lectured or taught in more than twenty countries.

Lawrence Grossberg is the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Com-

munication Studies and Cultural Studies and an Adjunct Distinguished Profes-
sor of Anthropology, American Studies, and Anthropology at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has won numerous awards from the National
Communication Association and the International Communication Association,
as well as the University of North Carolina Distinguished Teaching Award. He
has been a coeditor of the international journal Cultural Studies for over fifteen
years. His work has been translated into a dozen languages. His most recent
books include Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future (2005),
New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (with Tony Ben-
nett and Meaghan Morris, 2005), and MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular
Culture (with Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney, and MacGregor Wise, 2005).
His forthcoming book is Cultural Studies, Intellectual Labor, and the Challenges
of the Contemporary.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Joli Jensen holds the Hazel Rogers Endowed Chair in Communication at

the University of Tulsa. She has taught at the University of Virginia and the
University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs
about High Culture in American Life, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity and
Commercialization in Country Music, and Redeeming Modernity: Contradictions
in Media Criticism. She has written essays on media criticism, communication
technologies, communication theories, the social history of the typewriter, fans
and fandom, and religious identity.

Editors a n d Con tr ibu tors 263

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Steven Jones is an associate dean for liberal arts and sciences, a professor of
communication, a research associate in the Electronic Visualization Labora-
tory, and an adjunct professor of electronic media at the University of Illinois–
Chicago. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Society Online,
CyberSociety, and Doing Internet Research. Jones founded the Association of
Internet Researchers and serves as a senior research fellow at the Pew Internet
Project, the editor of the Digital Formations book series, and the editor of New
Media and Society.

John Nerone is a research professor of communications and a professor of

media studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the au-
thor or coauthor of four books, including Violence against the Press: Policing the
Public Sphere in US History (1994), Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the
Press (1995), and, with Kevin Barnhurst, The Form of News: A History (2001).
He coedits (with Robert W. McChesney) a book series in the history of commu-
nication. His primary areas of interest include the history of communications,
historical research methods, and American culture.

Lana f. Rakow is a professor of communication and women’s studies at the

University of North Dakota. She has written or edited four books and dozens
of journal articles and book chapters, and her research interests include gender,
the history and philosophy of technology, communication theory and research
methodology, community communication, and curriculum change. Rakow
serves as the director of the UND Center for Community Engagement, a pro-
gram connecting faculty and students with communities through experiential
learning and public scholarship.

Quentin J. Schultze is the Arthur H. DeKruyter Chair, the executive director

of the Gainey Institute for Faith and Communication, and a professor of com-
munication arts and sciences at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

publications have appeared in numerous books and several dozen journals. His
books include Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Informa-
tion Age and Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic
Accommodation. He is a former president of the Religious Speech Communica-
tion Association.

Angharad N. Valdivia is a research professor at the Institute of Communi-

cations Research at the University of Illinois. She holds faculty appointments
in that university’s Media Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Latina/o

264 Editors a n d Con tr ibu tors

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Studies Departments. Her teaching and research focus on issues of transnation-
alism, gender, ethnicity, media studies, and popular culture. Her books include
A Latina in the Land of Hollywood, Feminism, Multiculturalism and the Media,
A Companion to Media Studies, and Latina/o Communication Studies Today. In
addition, she is the editor of Communication Theory.

Catherine a. Warren is an associate professor of English at North Carolina

State University. A former newspaper reporter, she is currently the faculty editor
of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors.
Warren coedited, with Eve Stryker Munson, James Carey: A Critical Reader
(1997), a collection of his essays with commentary, and, with Mary Vavrus,
American Cultural Studies (2002).

Frederick Wasser is an associate professor at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He

worked for many years in Hollywood film postproduction and is the author of
Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (2002). He is currently
writing a book about “Steven Spielberg’s America” and has published other
chapters and articles about the contemporary Hollywood film industry.

Barbie Zelizer is a professor of communication and holds the Raymond Wil-

liams Chair of Communication at the Annenberg School of Communication at
the University of Pennsylvania. She is a coeditor and a founder of the journal
Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism. She has written or edited nine books,
including the award-winning Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through
the Camera’s Eye and Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media,
and the Shaping of Collective Memory, as well as sixty articles and book chapters.
Zelizer served as president of the International Communication Association and
has been a Guggenheim fellow, a research fellow at the Freedom Forum Media
Studies Center, and a fellow at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on
the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Editors a n d Con tr ibu tors 265

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Index

ABC, 161, 171n3 Castells, Manuel, 61

Abu Ghraib, 118–26, 181 Catholicism, 38, 47, 166, 215, 223; Carey and,
academic culture, 8, 21, 39–42, 109, 125, 128, 49, 205–7, 209, 217–28
228–29 CBS, 103, 121, 161, 168
academic work, 26, 35, 49–52, 97–99, 141 censorship, 7, 36, 146
advertising, 54, 107, 147, 167–68, 189 ceremony, 56, 64, 117–18, 205, 214–25
Africa, 104–13 Christianity, 46, 213, 215–16
African Americans, 131, 188 citizen journalism, 145–46, 152–53, 157
American Indians, 131, 138 civil rights, 22, 46, 160, 163, 167, 172n2
American Society of Newspaper Editors class, 9, 75–76, 129–31, 139, 150–56; working,
(ASNE), 174 5, 92–93, 110, 186, 189
Anderson, Benedict, 14, 56–57, 64 CNN, 121, 161
Annales school, 5, 10 codes of conduct, 147
Arendt, Hannah, 5, 88, 182 colonialization, 13, 76, 104, 113, 215
Areopagitica (Milton), 105 Commission on Freedom of the Press
Arnett, Ronald, 184, 186n4 [Hutchings Commission], 105, 176, 198n7
art, 74, 101, 181, 231; distinction of fine, popu- communitarianism, 106, 196
lar, high arts, 88, 90–91, 97 community, xi-xv, 28, 54–69, 141, 173, 186n2,
audience, 115, 119, 123–24, 209; broadcast, 235; branded, 58, 59; culture and, 76–77, 85,
164–65, 167–70; in cultural studies, 91, 91, 134–36; intellectual, 8–14, 106–10, 116;
93–100; national, 15, 117 ritual and, 163, 215, 217–23; ties with time
Augustine, 43–47, 52 and communication, 27, 32–33, 190–97; as
authority, 31, 62, 136, 155, 179, 198n8; govern- value, 19, 130, 179–80
ing, 4, 18, 44; religious, 76, 224; scientific, community journalism, 66–67
83–137 consensus, 60, 65, 77–78, 80, 125, 221; politi-
autoethnography, 20 cal, 114, 189–90
Constitution (US), 187–88, 191–92, 194, 196
Belmont Report (National Commission for consumerism, 34, 42, 59, 68
the Protection of Human Subjects of Bio- conversation, 42–43, 191–93, 195; Carey and,
medical and Behavioral Research), 117 xv-xvi, 26–27, 38–39, 230–31; public, 19, 23,
Bible, 47 66, 105–11, 113, 140, 181, 217
Bierce, Ambrose, 56 Cooley, Charles Horton, 102, 191, 193, 195
Birmingham school, 160, 231 counterglobalization, 219–20, 221–24, 225n8
Bok, Sissela, 177 cultural imperialism, 207, 213–14
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 184–86 cultural studies: Carey and, 27, 77–79, 159,
Bork, Robert, 158–59, 162, 164–71 230–32; credos, 40, 43–45, 48–49, 51–52,
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

British cultural studies, 29–30, 73–78, 90, 203 56; crises in, 73; critical, x-xiv; ethics, 173,
Buber, Martin, 184, 186 183; history, 75, 81–84, 86, 136, 139; journal-
Bujo, Benezet, 106 ism and, 117, 181; national based, 30, 33–34,
Burning Man, 62–63 39; performative, 20–21; politics and,
Bush, George H. W., 165 129–30; popular culture and, 89–102; space
Bush, George W., 22–24, 129, 132, 166, 169–70 and, 28–29; technology and, 201. See also
Butler, Nicholas Murray, 149 British cultural studies
cyberspace, 35–36, 66, 122
Calhoun, Craig, 64, 67, 189
Canada, 29, 31–33 Dayan, Daniel, 117, 162, 163, 172n6
Carnegie Foundation, 176 de Certeau, Michel, 29

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 degradation, 118, 124, 162, 164 Facebook, 209
democracy, xi-xv, 17, 24, 58, 64, 123, 158–62, Fairness Doctrine, 163, 166
197; cultural politics and, 19, 21, 135, 169; Federal Communication Commission, 172n4
culture and, 30–35, 96, 100–104, 218–20; feminism, 55–56, 59, 67, 132
deliberative, 8, 108, 113, 188–90; journalism First Amendment, 23, 33, 191, 194
and, 150–51, 192; as value, 38, 43, 47–48, Fisher, Walter, 180, 183
89–90 Foucault, Michel, 4, 76–77, 80–82
Democrats, 22–23, 105, 161, 164–68, 171, Fox Broadcasting, 161
192 Frankfurt school, 93
determinism, 5, 201 freedom of expression, 176, 195
Dewey, John, 8, 57; Carey and, xi, 12, 19, Freire, Paulo, 18, 19, 184
111–12, 114; community and commu-
nication, 64, 66, 69, 130, 136, 140–41; Geertz, Clifford, 42, 159
democracy and education, 102, 158–59, Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft, 55
162; Lippmann and, 9, 191, 195–96, 197n3; Geography, xii, 29, 76, 152, 206; as territory,
pragmatism and ethics, 180, 182–83 55, 58, 60, 66
dialogue, xi, 42–43, 141, 184, 217, 224n1; intel- Giroux, Henry, 17, 18, 21–22
lectual or public, 6, 8, 182, 186n4, 189, 192, Gitlin, Todd, 31, 93, 129
197; orality and, 108, 222; pedagogy and, globalization, xv, 34, 159, 183, 212–25; Carey
18–19, 157 and, xiv, 230–31; culture and, 80, 100–102
Didion, Joan, 23–24 global village, 61, 69, 135, 195, 212–13
discourse, 32, 42–43, 79–80, 102, 136, 140; glocalization, 213
academic, 11–12; consumer, 18, 58, 60; governmentality, 76, 81–82
critical-cultural, 20–21, 43, 86; democratic, Gramsci, Antonio, 85
171, 219; moral, 45, 183–88, 215; political,
102, 105–6, 110, 113–14, 159, 161, 163–64, Habermas Jürgen, 5, 12–13, 158, 189, 194
168–69, 218; scientific, 28; technological, Havel, Václav, 46, 198n8
35, 83, 106. See also public discourse Hearst, William Randolph, 149, 174
diversity, xii, 48, 56, 61, 67, 69n3, 185; cultural hegemony, 7, 30, 112–13, 160
and multicultural, 40–43, 45, 183 Hersh, Seymour M., 119–21, 123
Durkheim, Emile, 117 Hispanics, 131
Hocking, William Ernest, 105, 176
economics, xii, 12, 18, 21, 129, 132, 139–40, 176, Hoggart, Richard, 83, 87n3, 90–91, 93, 98, 203
189, 197; approaches, 4, 9, 33–34, 93–94, Hollywood, 103, 161, 265
97–98, 129, 159, 166, 207; Carey and, 204, homosexuality, 37, 139
206, 214; culture and, 73, 76, 79–86, 232; hooks, bell (Watkins, Gloria Jean), 136
forces, 18, 130 humanism, 218
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 2, 203, 213
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Ellul, Jacques, 104 identity politics, 82, 129, 130–31, 136, 139, 141
Engels, Friedrich, 189. See also Marx, Karl ideology, 57, 117, 132, 171, 197; cultural imperi-
Enlightenment, 105, 179, 181, 190, 218; as alism, 207, 213–14; culture and, 77, 79–82,
reason and rationalism, 44, 76, 133–34 101; imperialism, 37, 128, 213, 216, 219;
ethics, xi, 78, 84, 106, 173–78, 180–86, 223, professional, 9, 147, 154
229, 232–35; codes of, 174–76; dialogic, 174, Indymedia, 66, 223
183–86; journalism, 155–56; narrative, 173, Innis, Harold Adams, 4, 37, 203; as Canadian,
178–79, 181, 183, 185; utilitarian, 177 31–35, 37; Carey and, xii, 6, 9, 11–12, 27, 38,
ethnography, 19, 29; autoethnography, 20 43; culture and, 214, 216, 221–22; history
Ettema, James S., xiv, 116–17 and, 4, 8–9, 14; McLuhan, Carey, and, 15,
Etzioni, Amitai, 57, 196 27, 159, 204–6, 224n1; technological bias,
exceptionalism, 30, 110 29, 32–33, 64, 78, 83–84, 104, 216, 221

i n dex 267

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Internet, impact of, 28, 35–36, 54–55, 66–68, Mill, John Stuart, 177
213; rhetoric of, 13, 59, 101; as technology, Milton, John, 105, 112
32, 109, 123–25, 152–53, 203, 208–10 mobile phone, 32, 110, 210
Islam, 46, 161 model(s), 26, 79, 125, 229; conversational,
27, 39, 181, 183; of democracy, 22, 24, 195,
Jensen, Jay, 6, 7, 8, 171n1 259–60; intellectual, 26, 30, 33–34, 47, 68,
Johnson, Lyndon, 202 162; normative, 176–77, 183–84; ritual and/
journalism: ethics, 119, 174–77, 182–85; as or transmission, xiv, 13, 17, 27, 32–33, 38–39,
literature, 11, 17, 181; practices, 116, 120–21, 84, 158, 213–19
123, 126, 127n3; professionalism, 11–12, modernity, 74, 219; vs. community, 56–57,
145–57; public, 196; role in public life, 8, 32, 68; culture and, 76–77, 79, 81, 86, 92–93,
35, 89, 181, 191–92 101, 109
journalism education, 12, 35, 160, 174–75, Mumford, Lewis, 8, 78, 88, 92, 201–2
186n3 MySpace, 62, 209
journalism history, 4, 8–10, 13, 15, 117, 230, 237n3
Judaism, 46 narrative(s), xii–xiii, 21–22, 98; 113; brand,
56; grand, 12, 15–16, 56; historical, 3–6, 8;
Kant, Immanuel, 74, 105, 179 of journalism, 10–11; reinvented, 22–24;
Katz, Elihu, 99, 117, 162–63, 170, 172n6 religious or meta-, 40, 50, 52, 115. See also
Keillor, Garrison, 22–23 under ethics
Keller, Bill, 121 nationalism, 56, 85, 118–20, 122, 125, 221
Kerner Commission (The National Advisory NBC, 161
Commission on Civil Disorders), 193 News (news organization, news media),
Knight Foundation, 58 10–11, 24, 33, 67–78, 115, 119, 146–57, 161–63;
colonial, 174; conversation, xv, 181, 193–95;
Left, the, 7, 91, 129–33, 160–61 forms, 13, 89, 94–95, 116, 189–90, 204, 223;
Lemann, Nicholas, 146, 152–54 readers, 10, 64–66, 216
Levinas, Emmanuel, 184 New York Times, 111, 119, 120, 121, 145, 161
liberalism, 7, 9, 56, 57; leftists, 129, 160; New York World, 148
neoliberals, 18 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 44
Nixon, Richard M., 160, 163
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 53, 179–80, 185 Noddings, Nel, 178, 184
Maffesoli, Michel, 62 normativity, 185–86; norms, 57, 106–7, 147,
Mansbridge, Jane, 56, 67 157, 173, 185, 196
Marvin, Carolyn, 13, 32, 35, 119, 137, 201, 219 North, Oliver, 164, 165, 166
Marx, Karl, 4, 5, 30, 80, 189; Marxism, 9, 14,
20, 22, 30, 44, 92, 203 Obama, Barack, 139
masculinity, 138 objectivity, 11, 13, 116, 147, 154
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

materialism, 6, 9 Ogbonnaya, A. O., 106

McCarthy, Joseph Raymond, 163, 172n3 Ong, Walter, 9, 78, 103–7, 110, 114, 203
McChesney, Robert, 33, 129, 131, 198n6 orality, 11, 103–4, 107–9, 111–13, 222
McLuhan, Marshall, 4–5, 69; Carey and, xii,
15, 27, 159, 224n1; technological bias, 9, 29, palaver, xvi, 106–8, 114
104, 135, 203–7, 213 Park, Robert, 8, 190–91, 195
media events, 115–16, 125, 158, 162; media Patriot Act, 24
ritual, 116–18, 169 patriotism, 120, 124, 219
memory, 24, 67, 109; ritual and, 33, 38–39, 104, Pauly, John J., 99, 118
205–6, 208, 217–18, 225n5; visual, 119, 123 Peterson, Theodore, 6, 8
Mezlekia, Nega, 113–14 phenomenology, 184

268 i n dex

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 political correctness, 31, 130 Selznick, Philip, xi, 57, 60, 65
polling, 59, 108, 169, 192 sensationalism, 148, 167, 174–75, 181, 185
polysemy, xii, 76, 78 sensitized concept, 109, 110
pornography, 122, 124 Siebert, Fred, 6, 8
pragmatism, xi, 77, 78, 180, 206, 224n1 smart mobs, 62
principlism, 177, 186n1 social media, 223; Facebook, 209; MySpace,
privacy and privatization, 18, 39, 133, 192, 203; 62, 209
individual, 13, 55, 68, 135, 139, 181; of space, social responsibility, 176
12, 32, 210 Society of Professional Journalists/Sigma
progressives, 92 Delta Chi, 174
propinquity, 54, 63–64 Sontag, Susan, 119, 122
Protestantism, 47, 49, 223, 224n4 Spencer, Herbert, 55
public discourse, 23, 114, 131, 138, 180–81; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 148
Dewey, Carey, and, 8, 17, 135, 191, 194; of subculture, 99, 160
identity, 131, 156. See also discourse
public journalism, 196 Taubman, Philip, 121
public sphere, and communication, journal- Technology: Carey and, 9, 11–12, 28, 77–78,
ism, 11, 32, 67–68, 107, 218; democratic 84, 89, 235; communication and culture,
values, 8, 18, 160, 171, 182, 197, 198n8; edu- 190, 199–211; history of, xv, 5–6, 201, 205;
cation, 21; history of, 5–6, 13, 189, 194–95 new, 35–36, 110, 122–25; space/time bind-
Pulitzer, Joseph, xv, 146, 148–52, 154–57, 174 ing, 33, 104, 112, 114, 135, 214, 222, 229, 232,
television, 107, 163–71; alternative, 66; audi-
rationalism, 133, 134, 177–78, 180 ence, 59, 108; as form, 101; studies, 96–98,
Reid, Whitelaw, 148 208; technology, 12, 92, 122–23, 203, 208;
relativism, 133, 174, 178, 183, 196 trash, 167
religion, xii, 40–53, 61, 76, 80, 181, 187, 194, Thomas, Clarence, 165–66
232; Carey and, 84, 116, 234; identity and, Tocqueville, Alexis de, 30, 48, 188
37, 130, 137, 189; metaphors and ritual, transportation, 214–17, 224n2; Carey, Innis
56–58, 215, 219. See also specific religions and, 205–7; media and, 12, 35–38, 104;
Republican Party, 160 technologies of, 32–33, 64
resistance, 83, 216; acts of, 109–10, 114, 185; tribalism, 62
pedagogy and, 18–19, 21; popular/cultural,
73, 82, 85, 160, 175 Ubuntu, 107
Reverend Billy, 220 USA Today, 161
Rheingold, Howard, 62, 69n2 uses and gratifications research, 94–95, 99
ritual, xiv-xvi, 103, 107, 115–27, 214–25; civic utilitarianism, 83, 174, 177–78
and political, 6, 8, 159, 162–65, 169–71;
communication as, 10, 38–40, 50–52, Wall Street Journal, 161, 170
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

229–32; culture, 95, 135, 137; vs. transmis- Walt Disney Company, 169
sion model, 27, 33, 49, 79, 84, 204–9. See White, Horace, 149
also model(s): ritual and/or transmission Wiesel, Elie, 51
Rosen, Jay, 17, 107, 126n1 Williams, Raymond, 93, 98; Carey and, 12,
49; on culture, 75, 77, 82–84, 87n3, 90;
sacrificial love, 40, 48, 50 Keywords, ix-x, xiii, 28, 227–33, 237; on
Santeria, 215, 218 technology, 203, 208
science, 57, 76, 79, 83–84, 177; journalism of, Wiredu, Kwasi, 106
121, 181–82; naturalism, 175; social, 4, 20,
73–74, 94, 97, 112, 134; technology and, 28 Young, Iris Marion, 55
secularization, 57 YouTube, 54, 201

i n dex 269

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The History of Communication
Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60
Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf
Last Rights: Revisiting Four Theories of the Press Edited by John C. Nerone
“We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers
Allen Ruff
WCFL, Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926–78 Nathan Godfried
Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom
and Liberty Alex Carey; edited by Andrew Lohrey
Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the
Bottom Line Yuezhi Zhao
Print Culture in a Diverse America Edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand
The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90
John M. Coward
E. W. Scripps and the Business of Newspapers Gerald J. Baldasty
Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography Edited by Bonnie Brennen
and Hanno Hardt
Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times
Robert W. McChesney
Silencing the Opposition: Antinuclear Movements and the Media in the Cold War
Andrew Rojecki
Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres Rosa A. Eberly
Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers
David Paul Nord
From Yahweh to Yahoo!: The Religious Roots of the Secular Press Doug Underwood
The Struggle for Control of Global Communication: The Formative Century Jill Hills
Fanatics and Fire-eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War
Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter Jr.
Media Power in Central America Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus
The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life Michael Dawson
How Free Can the Press Be? Randall P. Bezanson
Cultural Politics and the Mass Media: Alaska Native Voices Patrick J. Daley and
Beverly A. James
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Journalism in the Movies Matthew C. Ehrlich

Democracy, Inc.: The Press and Law in the Corporate Rationalization of the
Public Sphere David S. Allen
Investigated Reporting: Muckrakers, Regulators, and the Struggle over Television
Documentary Chad Raphael
Women Making News: Gender and the Women’s Periodical Press in Britain
Michelle Tusan
Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s
Inger Stole

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Speech Rights in America: The First Amendment, Democracy, and the Media
Laura Stein
Freedom from Advertising: E. W. Scripps’s Chicago Experiment Duane C. S. Stoltzfus
Waves of Opposition: The Struggle for Democratic Radio, 1933–58
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf
Prologue to a Farce: Democracy and Communication in America Mark Lloyd
Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike Deepa Kumar
The Scripps Newspapers Go to War, 1914–1918 Dale Zacher
Telecommunications and Empire Jill Hills
Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression David Welky
Theories of the Media Clifford G. Christians, Theodore Glasser, Denis McQuail,
Kaarle Nordenstreng, Robert A. White
Radio’s Hidden Voice: The Origins of Public Broadcasting in the United States
Hugh Richard Slotten
Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies Edited by Linda Steiner and
Clifford Christians
Refiguring Mass Communication: A History Peter Simonson
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The University of Illinois Press
is a founding member of the
Association of American University Presses.
____________________________________

Composed in 10.25/13.5 Adobe Minion Pro

with Lubalin Graph display
at the University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2010. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.

Designed by Copenhaver Cumpston

Manufactured by Sheridan Books, Inc.

University of Illinois Press

1325 South Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820-6903
www.press.uillinois.edu

Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies, University of Illinois Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,