Artikel Ilmu Komunikasi

MAKALAH
PEMBERANTASAN KORUPSI

OLEH:
LA TAYA

FAKULTAS ILMU SOSIAL DAN ILMU POLITIK
UNIVERSITAS HALUOLEO
KENDARI
2010

BAB I
PENDAHULUAN
1.1 Latar Belakang

Korupsi memang sudah terjadi sejak pemerintahan presiden pertama Republik Indonesia. Namun pada saat itu belum dilihat secara jelas oleh rakyat tapi perlahan akan terjadi dan akan menyengsarakan rakyat. Bahkan pada saat itu dibentuklah sebuah tim dengan sebutan “Pasukan Khusus” dan ini hanya menyelamatkan 11 milyar kekayaan milik Negara. Pasukan ini tidak bertahan lama dalam memberantas korupsi dengan alasan mengganggu prestise presiden Soekarno.

Selanjutnya pemerintahan soeharto yang dikenal dengan Orde Baru. Pada pemerintahanya ia juga memberantas korupsi namun tidak menyetuh pada kalangan seperti Bulog, Pertamina, Departemen Kehutanan dan lembaga negara yang dianggap sarang koruptor. Hingga pada pemerintahan Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono pertama perjuangan pemberantasan korupsi belum dan tidak akan pernah tuntas.

Salah satu isu yang paling krusial untuk dipecahkan oleh bangsa dan pemerintah Indonesia adalah masalah korupsi. Hal ini disebabkan semakin lama tindak pidana korupsi di Indonesia semakin sulit untuk diatasi. Maraknya korupsi di Indonesia disinyalir terjadi di semua bidang dan sektor pembangunan. Apalagi setelah ditetapkannya pelaksanaan otonomi daerah, berdasarkan Undang-Undang Nomor 22 Tahun 1999 tentang Pemerintahan Daerah yang diperbaharui dengan Undang-Undang Nomor 32 tahun 2004, disinyalir korupsi terjadi bukan hanya pada tingkat pusat tetapi juga pada tingkat daerah dan bahkan menembus ke tingkat pemerintahan yang paling kecil di daerah.

Dalam makalah ini akan dibahas tentang bagaimana pemberantasan korupsi di Indonesia dengan keberadaan Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK)?

1.2 Rumusan masalah

Adapun yang menjadi rumusan masalah dalam makalah ini adalah bagaimana pemberantasan korupsi di Indonesia pada era globalisasi dengan keberadaan Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK)?

1.3 Tujuan Penulisan

Penulisan makalah ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pemberantasan korupsi di Indonesia dengan keberadaan Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK).

1.4 Sistematika Penulisan

Makalah ini terdiri dari tiga bagian, yaitu Pertama: Pendahuluan, meliputi latar belakang masalah, rumusan masalah, tujuan penulisan dan sistimatika penulisan. Kedua: Pembahasan atau pemberantasan korupsi di Indonesia dengan keberadaan Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK). Ketiga: Penutup, meliputi simpulan dan saran.

BAB II
PEMBAHASAN

Pemerintah Indonesia pada saat ini tidak tinggal diam lagi dalam mengatasi praktek-praktek korupsi, baik itu tingkat daerah, provinsi maupun pusat. Upaya pemerintah dilaksanakan melalui berbagai kebijakan berupa peraturan perundang-undangan dari yang tertinggi yaitu Undang-Undang Dasar 1945 sampai dengan Undang-Undang tentang Komisi Pemberantasan Tindak Pidana Korupsi. Selain itu, pemerintah juga membentuk komisi-komisi yang berhubungan langsung dengan pencegahan dan pemberantasan tindak pidana korupsi yang salah satunya Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK).

Menurut Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) Pemberantasan korupsi adalah serangkian tindakan untuk mencegah dan menanggulangi korupsi melalui upaya koordinasi, supervisi, monitor, penyelidikan, penyidikan, penuntutan dan pemeriksaan di sidang pengadilan dengan peran serta masyarakat berdasarkan peraturan perundang-undangan yang berlaku.

Dari penjelasan di atas dapat kita pahami bahwa dalam pemberantasan korupsi di Indonesia pada khususnya, terdapat 3 (tiga) unsur pembentuk yaitu
a. Pencegahan (antikoruptif/preventif),
b. Penindakan (penanggulangan/ kontrakorupsi/ represif), dan
c. Peran serta masyarakat

Rumus:Pemberantasan korupsi = pencegahan + penindakan + peran masyarakat

Selain lembaga dalam dan luar, ada lembaga swadaya masyarakat (LSM) yang ikut berperan dalam melakukan pengawasan kegiatan pembangunan, terutama kasus- kasus korupsi yang dilakukan oleh penyelenggara negara. Diantaranya, Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), Government Watch (GOWA), dan Masyarakat Tranparansi Indonesia (MTI). Namun, kenyataannya praktek korupsi bukannya berkurang malah meningkat dari tahun ke tahun. Berdasarkan Indeks Persepsi Korupsi 2003 yang diterbitkan oleh Transparency International ternyata Indonesia berada diperingkat 122 dengan skor 1,9. Sedangkan indeks persepsi 2006 menunjukan bahwa Indonesia berada di peringkat 130 dengan skor 2,4 atau peringkat 1 dari Finlandia dengan skor 9,6. Dalam hal ini peringkat skor Indonesia naik, artinya selama 2003-2006 pemberantasan korupsi di Indonesia mengalami keberhasilan akan tetapi keberhasilan itu tidak lebih baik dari kemajuan yang dicapai oleh Negara-negara lain. Keberhasilan itu masih jauh sempurna untuk itu dibutuhkan perjuangan yang lebih giat lagi dalam memberantas korupsi.

a. Pencegahan (Anti korupsi)

Anti korupsi adalah kebijakan untuk mencegah dan menghilangkan kesempatan bagi berkembangnya korupsi. Artinya bagaimana meningkatkan kesadaran individu untuk tidak melakukam korupsi, bagaimana menyelamatkan uang dan asset yang dimiliki oleh Negara. Langkah-langkahnya antara lain sebagai berikut:
1. Perbaikan sistem
• Memperbaiki peraturan perundangan yang berlaku, untuk mengantisipasi perkembanga korupsi yang menutup celah hukum atau pasal-pasal karet yang sering digunakan koruptor melepaskan diri dari jerat hukum.
• Memperbaiki cara kerja pemerintahan menjadi simple dan efisien.
• Memisahkan secara tegas kepemilikan Negara dan kepemilikan pribad, memberikan aturan yang jelas tentang penggunaan fasilitas Negara untuk kepentingan umum dan penggunanya untuk kepentingan pribadi.
• Menegakkan etika profesi dan tata tertib lembaga dengan memberikan pemberian sanksi tegas.
• Penerapan prinsip-prinsip good governance.
• Mengoptimalkan pemanfaatan teknologi, memperkecil terjadinya human error.
2. Perbaikan manusianya.
• Memperbaiki moral manusia sebagai umat yang beriman.
• Memperbaiki moral sebagai satu bangsa.
• Meningkatkan kesadaran hukum, dengan sosialisasi dan pendidikan anti korupsi.
• Megetaskan kemiskinan. Meningkatkan kesejahteraan.
• Memilih pemimpin yang bersih, jujur, dan anti korupsi, pemimpin yang memiliki kepedulian dan cepat tanggap, pemimpin yang bisa menjadi teladan.

b. Penindakan (Kontra Korupsi)

Kontra korupsi adalah kebijakan dan upaya-upaya yang menitikberatkan pada aspek penindakan. Dalam penindakan harus berpedoman pada hal-hal berikut:
a) Hukuman bagi koruptor harus mengandung unsur jera dan pendidikan.
b) Penindakan harus bisa mengembalikan uang Negara yang dikorup
c) Penindakan harus ada prioritas, dimulai dengan instansi penegak hukum, lembaga pelayanan publik, pejabat tinggi Negara dan para elit politik.
d) Penyidik, Jaksa Penuntut Umum dan hakim harus bebas dari segala bentuk campur tangan pihak manapun.
e) Penyidik dan penuntut harus memiliki komitmen yang tinggi dalam pemberantasan korupsi serat dilengkapi dengan peralatan canggih dalam proses penyelidikan dan penyidikan.
f) Masyarakat harus mendukung proses supremasi hukum dimana mereka tidak boleh keberakan jenggot jika ada anggota keluarga, orang sekampung, separtai yang dijatuhi hukuman.


c. Peran serta masyarakat

Korupsi sungguh menyebabkan krisis kepercayaan. Korupsi di berbagai bidang pemerintahan menyebabkan kepercayaan rakyat dan dukungan terhadap pemerintah menjadi minim. Padahal tanpa dukungan rakyat program perbaikan dalam bentuk apapun tidak akan pernah berhasil. Sebaliknya jika masyarakat memiliki kepercayaan dan mendukung pemerintah khususnya KPK dalam memberantas korupsi maka korupsi pun bisa diakhiri.

Setiap orang berhak mencari, memperoleh dan memperbaiki informasi tentang dugaan korupsi dan menyampaikan saran dan pendapat maupun pengaduan kepada penegak hukum terlebih lagi kepada KPK.

BAB III
PENUTUP
3.1 Simpulan

Dari pembahasan di atas maka dapat disimpulkan bahwa pemberantasan korupsi di Indonesia dengan dibentuknya Komisi Pemberantasa Korupsi (KPK) ada tiga unsur yang paling penting yaitu:
a. Pencegahan (antikoruptif/preventif),
b. Penindakan (penanggulangan/ kontrakorupsi/ represif), dan
c. Peran serta masyarakat

3.2 Saran

Kita sebagai anggota masyarakat yang sadar akan korupsi, maka marilah kita mendukung khususnya Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) dalam memberantas korupsi di Negara kita dengan pedoman “Kenali, Lawan Dan Laporkan Korupsi”

DAFTAR PUSTAKA

Maheka, Arya. Mengenali dan memberantas korupsi. Jakarta: KPK RI

Suwarno, Yogi. Pusat Kajian Administrasi Internasional LAN RI.

www.dw-word.de.htm

www.sejarah-pemberantasan-korupsi.html

www.liputan6.com

Roots of our field, we take a signitificant step toward understanding how organizing is deeply raced” (ashcraft & allen, 2003, p. 32).
And this conversation has started. Ashcraft and Allen’s (2003) examination of the racial roots of organization communication, Warren’s (2001, 2003) examination of whitnesssinthe performance studies classroom, Cooks’s (2001,2003) and others examination of the racial roots in theaching and research in intercultural communication have opened the conversation about the interwoven character of race and communication studies.
A recent discussion on CRTNET (communication Research and theory Network-the National Communication Assoociation’s (NCA’s) daily electronic news service) illustrates the kinds of institusioanal issues we’ve reviewed. This particular discussion focused on travel grants provided to students of colour to attend the NCA annual convention. Several discussants strenuously objected to these grants and questioned the ethics of awarding grants on the basis of race. Some even argued that these grants were morally indefensible. While this discussion seems to focus narrowly on the single issue of assisting students of colour to travel to the NCA convention, it also segregated field of study. On the surface, those arguing against travel grants frame the issue in terms of equity and fairness-why should some conference attendees be awarded travel grants solely on the basis of ethnicity or race? However, viewed in the larger historical context of race relations within our discipline, this argument reflects coded communicaton practice – termed ‘’whitespeake’’ by dreama Moon (1999)-which not only excludes by ignornng the larger issue, but also creates a community, through white bonding. The CRTNET exchange thus is one example of how communication (the practice, idea, and field) is raced : long-standing racialized patterns of communication and the historical organization of the disciplie empower some to speak on behalf of “fellow” white individuals who want toreproduce the dicipline’s structures of racial privilege by discouraging incentives to members of groups who historically have opted out of this discipline. This kind of community –as a scholarly, academic community-can only fail in its attemptsto build it self on that racialized foundation.
The whitness of communication isreflected in the most recent national center for education statistic (U.S Department of Education, 1993/1999) that show that 87,5% of communication faculty are white. In his study of the communication discipline, Ronald Gordon points to these statistic among others and argues that the composition of the field influences how we study communication : “The views that we have not reprecented a sample of all possible conceptual positions and points from which knowledge of communication can be constructed. Our American communication theorists have been an extremely homogeneous group”(1998/1999, p. 3). Yet, we are suggesting that the consequences of the whiteness of communication studies is not simpy that this demographic has narrowed our way of thingking about communication, but that it has also allowed discouraging barriers to be erected to keep the field the way it is.
Our call, then is to envision communication studiesin another way, with a different agenda and future. As we move toward living in a more racially divers society, as well as a more globally oriented world, a discipline that remains racially segregated risks its own viability. We wish to avert the potential marginalization of communication studies and call for beginning the long process of taking race seriously in this discipline. It already as taken seriously in the everyday practice of communication.
As an academic discipline, we risk our profession and field if we continue to ignore the significance of race and the role of race the role of race in society. The ongoing racial disparities in the united states in employment, housing , religion, and other institutions guarantee that race does matter. If communication scholars cannot or will not begin to contribute to a better understanding of the importance of communication in a racialized society, if will be increasingiy difficult to argue that communication studies is central to the mission of most universities and colleges, as many emphasize serving social and community needs.
Indeed, as noted, some communication scholars, including asharaft and allen (2003), butney (1997), Crenshaw (1997), cooks (2001, 2003), Halualani et al. (2004), Jackson and Garner (1998), and Moon (1999) have begun the long process of reconfiguring our discipline’s mission and vision. Yet, many more of us need to embrace a much more socially inclusive and responsible mission for our profession. In so doing wecan position communicationin a way that addresses social needs, situates us well to seek external fnding and grants, and universities a meaningful mission and visionboth now in the future.
Note :
1. Some HBCUs, such as tukegee, emphasized the “industrial arts” (e.g.tailoring, masonry, carpentry) as more practical approaches to helping its students survive in a white –dominated society. See conley (1990) for a more detailed history of communication.
2. We should acknowledge NCA’s policy on diversity , at http ://www.natcom .org/policies/external/diversity.htm. it calls for inclusivity (which is good )and promotion of dialogue, but it fails to emphasize that dialoguehas to be set within a context of unequal and hierarchal relations.

Additional Readings
Ashcraft, K. L. & Allen, B. J. (2003). The racial foundation of organizational communication. Communication Theory, 13, 5-38.
Bahk, C.M.,Jandt, F. E. (2004). Being white in America : Development of a scale,Howard journal of Communications, 15, 57-68.
Brodkin, K. (1999), How jews became white folks : And what says about race in America. New York: Rutgers University Press.
Buttney, R. (1997). Reported speech in talking race on campus. Human Comunnication, 23,477-506.
Cohen, H. (1994). History of the speech communication discipline : Emergence of a discipline 1914-1945. Annandale, VA: Speech communication Association.
Conley, T. (1990). Rhetoric in European traditional. New York: Longma.
Cooks, L. (2001). From distance and uncertainty to research and pedagogy in the borderlands: implication for the future of intercultural communication. Communication Theory, 11, 339-351
Cooks, L. (2003). Pedagogy, performance, and positionality: Teaching about whiteness in nterarcial communication. Communication Education, 52 .245-257.
Crenshaw, C, (1997). Resisting whiteness rhetorical silence. Western journal of communication,61,253-278.
Crowley, S., & Hawhee, D. (1999). Ancient rhetorics for contemporary students (2nd ed). Needham Heights. MA: Allyn & Bacon
De uriarte, M. L.,with bodinger –de uriarte , C., & Benavides, J. L. (2003). Diversity disconnects: From class room to news room. Retrieved December 15, 2004, from http://journalism .utexas.edu/faculty/deuriarted/diversity_disconnects.pdf
Dues, M., & Brown, M. (2004). Boxing Plato’s shadow: an introduction to be the study of human communication . Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Gordon. R. D. (1998-1999, winter-spring). A spectrum of scholars: Multicultural diversity and human communication theory. Human Communication, 2 , 1-8.
Halualani, R. T., Chitgopekar, A. S., Morrison, J. H. T. A., & Dodge, P. S. W. (2004). Diversein nameonly intercultural university. Journal of communication, 54 , 270-286.
Ignatiev, N. (1995). How the Irish became white. New York: Rotledge.
Jackson, M. F. (1998). Whitness of the a different colour : European Immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moon, D. (1999). White enculturation and bourgeois ideology: The discursive production of “good (white) girls.”In T. K. Nakayama and J. N. Martin (eds.), Whitness: The communication of social identity (pp. 177-197). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Nakayama, T. K., & Krizek, R. L. (1995). Whitness: A strategic rhetoric. Quarterly jounal of speech, 81, 291-309.
Omi, M., & Winnant, H. (1994). Racial Formations in theunited states from the 1960’s to 1990’s. London: Rouledge.
Shankilin, E. (2000). Representations of race and racism in American anthropology. Current Anthropology, 41, 99-103.
U.S. Department of Education, Natioanal Center for Education Statistic. (1993, 1999). Table 231: percentage distribution of full-time and part-time instructional faculty and self in degree-granting institutions, by program area, race/ethnicity, andsex: fall 1992 and fall1998 (Natioal study of postsecondary faculty). Available at http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d02/tables/PDF/table23.pdf.
Warren, J. T. (2001). On the perfomative dimensions of race in the classroom. Communication Education, 50 , 91-108.
Warren, J. T. (2003). Performing purity: whitness, pedagogy, and the reconstitution of power. New York: Peter Lang.
Wells, S. (2002). The journey of man: A genetic odyssey. Princeton, NJ. Pricenton University Press.

Communication as social identity

Jake harwood
Conformity is bad. We should be ourselves and celebrate our individuality. Or in the words of cartoonist Gary Larson’s penguin, struk in a flock of udentical penguins, “I’v just gotta be me!” so goes the mantra of modern(western) world, and so, often, goes our understanding of human communication . we study individuals, how they talks, why they talk . we examine relationship to be sure but often we are interested in inherently individualistic processes-satifaction or feelings (personal feelings) of intimacy. Perspectives such as social exchange theory have us performing mental calculation of the personal rewards and costs provided by our friends and lovers. Our selves tend to be understood as very “personal” selve, operating as outonomous units, either unconnected to others, or connected as a function of the rewards provided to the individual. In contrast, when people oprate in terms of more collective interest , yhey are ussualy concidered in deviant or pathological terms. Rioters throwing rock at police football hooligans on a rampage and soldiers killing the enemy (without considering their individual characteristic) are often considered to be acting at a “less than human” level.
The social identity/self categorization offers a different take on our social experience (tajfel and turner 1986: oakes, Haslam and turner 1994). This approach (put broadly) states that an individual self can be understood at different levels of abstraction. At the individual (personal identity) level,we are concerned with our difference from other individuals and the things that make us unique as people. At the collective (social identity) level, we are concerned with our groups differences from other groups and the things that make our group unique. When operating at the level of social identity, individuals act as group members understand and judge the baviors of self and others in tearms of group membership, and tend to deindividuate both self and others. It is crucial to note that this deidividuation is not regarded as a phatological or somehow more primitive mode of functioning. From this perspective, operating in terms of groups is an inherent part of being human (turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, and wetherell , 1987). Such functioning makes institutions like families, governments and teams possible, and allows us to enjoy the benefits that come from collective activity. However, it also has negative consequences in terms of, for instance, the ways in which deindividuating self and others can lead to prejudice and intergroup conflict. This general approach has been characterized as an intergroup approach, and the current chapter explains why this approach and social identity theory in particular is a useful way for us to approach human communication (see Harwood and Giles, 2005, for a review of social identity approaches to communication).
This intergroup approach provides some unique tools for understanding social behavior. For instance, Reicher (1986) has provided a number of insight into the behavior of crowds, particularly in riot situations. Understanding the behavior of the individuals in a crowd in terms of their operation at a superordinate level of identity provides a greater understanding of such behavior than does examinintanding of such behavior than does examining the riot as the work of a mass of lunatics hell-bent on destruction. Similarly the intergroup approach also draws attention to the contribution of both sides in a crowd situation. Police or other authorities contribute to such situations, and yet the way in which they conceive of themselves in terms of identities and their perceptions of the rioters are rarely examined (stott and Reicher, 1998). The one exception to this occurs when it serves our political purposes. For instance when behaviors by authorities in other regimes conveniently can be characterized as repressive or anti democratitic, western media feel comfortable in describing them as such (for example, think of how western media convered thecrackdown on democratic protest in China’s Tiananmen Square in 1989). The focus on civil disturbances in the west, however, tends to be almost exlusively on the behavior of the “rioters” rather than on the authorities. Hence, an intergroup approach provides an understanding of the behavior of people in these situations, as well as the ways in which the situations are framed by observers.
Crowds and riots are not the primary fodder for communication researchers. Therefore in the following section, I provide some brief examples of how themes central to contemporary communication research can be reexamined (and perhaps revitalized) by an intergroup perspective.

The analytic category of ritual can designate both formal rites and ceremonies, set aside in special place and times and receiving special degrees of attention, and the relatively more formal elements and characteristics of otherwise ordinary, everyday activities—all of the little ways in which how you do it matters: a handshake or an introduction well—given or not, for example, or all of the examples of facework, deference, demeanor, and politeness studied by Goffman and other (e.g., Goffman, 1959, 1967).

The study of ritual communication thus requires attention to both the explicit use of communication in formal rites and ceremonies and to the often-implicit communicative consequences of the formal element of everyday activities. This latter category is very broad and thoroughly entangled in the meaning and morality of life. Wherever serious things are at stake, people will read observables as signs; little or nothing will be dismissed as accidental and the details will have meaningful or moral implications, whether or not they were intended. Engagement with the serious life, then, renders the world a communicative experience. Just as the animist may see the natural world as a text of spiritual activities, the modern man or woman is inclined to engage the social world as a communicative text—as if it were written to be read.

Ritual communication, in both of its aspects, is consequential. This is most explicit in formal rites and ceremonies, which are usually conducted for the explicit purpose of bringing about some of their consequences. Oaths, promises, and rites of transition such as bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, or baptisms establish obligations, often through defining new social roles. Citizen of one country can be turned into citizen of another; citizens can become soldiers, holders of office, or imprisoned felons; single individual can become married couples; and children become adults. In the ritual aspects of everyday communication, too, people’s selves are constructed and conveyed, their identities are at stake, their hopes are invested. In short, the ritual communication aspect of everyday life constructs the realities in which we live.

The study of ritual communication, then, including the realiry-constructing consequences of communication in both formal rites and ceremonies and in the ritual aspects of everyday activities, requires a broad focus on “the communicative.” This is a large category then messaging behavior, larger than activities designed to communicate; it includes all of the ways in which things are done in the saying and said in the doing (Rothenbuhler, 1993).

It is useful to think of communication as ritual for empirical, theoretical and moral reason. More often than we usually think, it is empirically true that communication is ritual. Thinking as communication as ritual is a useful theoretical strategy because it draws our attention toward the social consequences of communication. Thinking of communication as ritual reminds us, finaly, of the importance of communication in moral life, of our roles in life as moral agents.
Empirical

“Communication is ritual” nay be an overgeneralization, but not by as much as it might appear. We tend to overlook how often our communication is primarily ritualistic, and nearly all communication has at least home ritualistic character or function.
The term phatic communication, designating relatively contentless greeting and formulaic questions and answer such as “how are you today?”, “fine, how are you?” is well know (Malinowski, 1923/1949, pp. 313-316). Goody (1973); Coupland, and Robinson (1992), and other have demonstrated how important this apparently empty communication is. These are aspects of greeting and leave-taking that maintain the reality or two people in social relation (Firth, 1972). Bateson’s (1972/1987) concept of meta-communication has been used to draw attention to a functionally similar relational aspect of all communication (watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). In intimate relations, families, and organizational life, these relational aspects of communication and ritual forms for conducting them are that much more important (e.g., Bossard & Boll, 1950; Knuf, 1989-1990; Sigman, 1991; Wolin & Bennett, 1984). Identity as couple, family or organization is implicitly threatened by the multiple roles and time apart required by modern life. Ritual of greeting, parting, boundary maintenance, and reunion thus are developed to ménage those multiple roles along with time apace in relational terms.

Ritual also appears in a variety of form in mass communication. Starting at the most mocro and prosaic, newspaper reading, television viewing, or music listening are important parts of many people’s daily leves. To count as a ritual, this media use must be more than a habit or routine; there must be an element of the serious about it. The serious life, the realm of ought and ought-not, enters into daily media use comes to be associated with a family or household ritual. Watching the evening news together, along with food and talk, for example, an irrespective of the content of the news, can be a way to reintegrate the family after work, school, and other activities. Similarly, watching David Lettermen or putting some music on the stereo after the kids are in bed can become the anchor for an important time of adult conversation and intimacy. These are not the most serious things in the world, but they are activities that one would regret missing, and that, if neglected, could impact family happiness. (See Lull, 1988; Morley, 1992; and other for studies or family television watching that are rich in examples).

Another way the serious life enters every day media use is as a means of contact with more serious things beyond the individual’s immediate experience. This is a (ritual) version of the classic vision of what the media are supposed to be good for: they connect center and periphery; they help integrate the social whole, even in massive modern societies; and they broaden the life worlds of their audience members. There is no reason, really, to believe all that, especially given the cheap amusements and commercial manipulations to which today’s media industries have dedicated themselves, but the idea is there in the culture for a reason. It is not unusual for media audience members to experience obligation. Some things should be watched, some news in more important, some events required further reading. There are people who feel out of sorts if they are not caught up on the news. Similarly, some media use has a sense of propriety about it; some music listening requires undivided attention, favorite shows have to be watched in the TV room, Mom or Dad can’t be interrupted, and so on. When media use is more than a habit or a circumstantial choice, when there is a sense of obligation or propriety, then that media use may well be ritualistic, providing a means of contact with the serious life.

A third way that daily television use, in particular may be ritualistic is based on implications of the program schedule. The program schedule is a structure that viewers more or less must accept; it is an order that is imposed or their lives. That might mean relatively little, but it also can be built into more. More than a clock, the program schedule can regulate other activities and can be used as a way of marking time. Children and adult alike are prone to eat and sleep, among other things, at moment that fit the schedule at much higher proportions than would be predicted by the relevant biological processes. The progress of the day and the flow of the week can be noted and, modestly, celebrated with attention to be television. This often involves setting aside a certain time for television viewing: the week is almost over and we relax with Thursday-night TV, for example.

Most of these examples would fit in the category of family rituals, but I raise them here because of another intriguing question. What does it do to our experience of communication when we must fir ourselves into program flows? Was there something more important about watching television in a quasi-ritual way, when there were only three channels and one had to watch it when shown or not at all? When one accept the program schedule and arrange one’s life (in whatever small ways) to view a certain thing at a certain time, is there something slightly ritualistic about that, something that is absent with time-shifted videotaping or on-demand pay-per-view? Is there something slightly ritualistic about getting news from a TV program available to everyone at a certain time and no other, more so than searching for the news on the internet?

Another approach to media ritual has recently been delineated by Couldry (2003). He points out that the media have come to be seen as important social institutions because of the idea that they are in touch with important things that happens at the centers and tops of nations; he calls this the myth of the mediated center. He analyzes media ritual as all of those activities that mark “the media” as the distinct category and valued institution, and that protect the myth of the mediated center. Media rituals, in this light include not only many of the activities of media organizations and their production staffs, but also those aspect of the content of the media that portray a sense of the importance of being in the media or that recruit audience members to these ideas. Celebrity systems, talk show, advertising, and the most important of news event all work together, in this view, to maintain the idea of the media and its ritual importance.

Finally, the most obvious form of ritual communication in the media is ceremonial television. Certain special event on television require a kind of dressed-p viewing. They interrupt the normal schedule flow; are broadcast live; may attract huge audiences who plan their viewing and make special arrangement (perhaps to view in group or with food and drink); and are proclaimed to be historic by their participants and the media. These event, such as state funerals, royal weddings, some of the Pope’s trips, and former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Juresalem, were dubbed “media events” by Katz and Dayan in a series of articles in the 1980s and later in their book of the same name (dayan & katz, 1992). For the French translation, Dayan engaged in some revisions, and the new title was translated into English as “ceremonial television.” On these occasions, television viewing has an obvious ritual element that can be identified in a variety of empirical indicators. (e.g., Rothenbuhler, 1988,1989).

So, from face-to-face interactions through organizational life and everyday media use to the most special of mediated events, nearly all communication has at least some ritual characteristic. A substantial proportion of communication is primarily ritualistic, having little other content or function. Very often, then, it is in a general sense true that communication is ritual. Even if it is, strictly, an overgeneralization, it is a reasonable estimate and a good starting presumption for a theory of communication.

Theoretical

Thinking of communication as ritual draws our attention toward the social consequences of communication. Theoretical Of communication as ritual are

In the fact that manipulator doesn’t really intend to establish the relationship of trust, closeness, and mutual care implied by the touch on the shoulder. It is therefore not sufficient to say that the buyer is responsible for not being duped. Rather, the seller is the responsible for imitating or initiating a relationship he or she does not really want to enact.

Such techniques can rarely be said to be ethical because they rely on relational qualities that the initiator does not really wish to follow through. If one teaches that these techniques work, one should do in the context of teaching student about the fluidity and defense of relationship as valuable entities with particular qualities, benefit and obligations. But not all persuasion techniques will be the character to falsely manipulate relationship. In contrast, technique of risk communication will be appropriate adaptations to particular relational dynamic in some contexts and inappropriate manipulations in other. The standard of the advancement of mutual care serves is one important key to making such judgment (Noddings, 1984; O’Brian Hallstein, 1999).

The concept of relationality offers the different sort of challenge to those such as Foss and Griffin (1995), who have denied the appropriateness of persuasions altogether. These denials have been based on the belief that persuasion and coercion were impossible to distinguish. But that argument would invalidate in effort at communication whatsoever, because it is as difficult to distinguish when talking to someone becomes persuasion as it is to distinguish coercion from persuasion. As rhetoricians from both the right and left have emphasized, all symbol use brings at host of loadings, interests, ambiguities, and entailments with it. It is impossible simply to mirror, one introduces change in those ideas (even mirroring would introduces change by reinforcement).

The ideas that one could forego persuasion rests on the belief in an autonomous self, and the relational perspective insists that there are no such things. Any two persons are always in some relationship to each other, and any relationship presumes ineradicable lines of influences, usually carried in part through the communicative flows of meaning and confusion that constantly remake the person involved. So one cannot not persuade. Instead, the ethnic of mutual care sets standards for a relationship and for communication for relationship. The older ideas of respect for the other and openness to changing one’s own ideas are part of these standards (Ehninger, 1970), but additional criteria reside in attention to the sustainable quality of the relationship and to support for the other’s needs/desires where that does not violate the quality of the relationship or any of one’s own needs/desired that might be substantially greater. The concept of relationality thus rewrites the agenda for persuasion ethnic in fundamental ways and open a new kind of discussion about goals and standards.

I hope that these examples have provides a sufficient sets of hints as to how thinking of communication as a process of relating should reshape the field of communication studies. Other examples are ready at hand. The study of nonverbal communication should cease focusing on sets of universal gestures, facial expressions, or categories of distance and instead begin to be a full-bodied analysis of how nonverbal factor establish and maintain relationship in different contexts. Small-group and organizational communication already much of the relational about them, but reorienting to relationality as a fundamental quality will allow expansion and deedpening of these tendencies.
In a crucial way, the call to realtionality is statement that it is well past time that communication studies came into its own. For more than two generation of scholarship, communication has been dominated by the Western vision of the individual. In experimental studies, communication studies is still poor relative to psychology because the discipline’s leading researches continue to follow the models and assumptions of psychology—which focus on the individual rather than the relational system in with communication happens. In rhetorical studies scholars have continued to frame studies around the liberal individual—or around bashing the liberal individual—but there has been no alternative framework for thinking about how public or culture communication constitutes human being (only that it should not do so, theoretically speaking). Taking seriously the concept of communication as relating will allow us to take serious communication as a process with a distinctive ontology and unique methods. It will thereby allow us to better understand communication, which means to better understand the human animals who relate, and thereby constitute their being, through such incessant communication.
Notes

1. Wittgestein (2001) initiated this line of thinking of language in terms of use, but this unfortunate choice of the “game” metaphor obscured the more fundamental property of relationality and prevented further development of the concept.
2. The nature of the four basic forces of the universe is consonant with such a view because each of the forces acts over a different distance with a different amount of force, but this merely accounts for why matter is differentially dispersed in the universe rather than being a uniform soup.
3. A third, communitarian, perspective dominates rhetorical studies of persuasion. This perspective is the closest to be relational perspective. There is insufficient space to deal with the differences with enough detail to be satisfying.
Communication as ritual
Eric W. Rothenbuhler
The reality-constituting effect of ritual and ceremony are well known. Saying “I do” in the right circumstances at right moment, to take a familiar example, makes it done and it cannot be undone without a different ceremony in different time and place. The effective mechanism of such rituals is formal communication—people performing symbol according to normative forms to achieve social ands. This structure, familiar from special communication in a special events, is also ubiquitously present in routine communication. The nod, the handshake, and the greeting are small all rituals; conversation, television watching, and news reading also have their underlying ritual structures. In the sense, communication as ritual. In all the small ways that form has consequences and propriety matters, communication as ritual.

“Ritual is the voluntary performance of appropriate patterned behavior to symbolically effect or participate in the serous life.” (Rothenebuhler, 1998, p. 27). The “serious life” is a phenomenological category designating those things treated as more important, more morally freighted, and more obligatory than others within any given context (the term and its use derive from Durkeim, 1912/1995; see also pickering, 1984, pp.352-361; Rothenbuhler, 1998). It is useful to use the term with a degree of relativity, allowing it to designate different things appropriately in different contexts. Compared to sickness and death, for example, who sits where is not the most serious thing. At the funeral,though,mor in board meeting, who sits where is a serious thing. There are right and wrong ways to do it, and seating orders will be take as signs—people will talk about what it means.

COMMUNICATION AS VISION

Cara A. Finnegan

Communication theory suffers from iconophobia. In a field whose oft-stated reason for being is to teach people how to communicate better, our ideas about what constitutes “good communication” depend heavily upon a fear of images, indeed, communication theory seems to subscribe to john dewey’s infamous dictum, “vision is a spectator : hearing is a participator” (1927/1954, p. 219). We tend to assume that the purest, best communication is talk (or, second-best, its verbal stepsister, text). Talk is imagined as conscious, face-to-face, participatory, deliberative, images are framed as dangerous, and audiences in this scheme can only be passive, unengaged, or duped. At best, the field of communication ignores vision; at worst, it excoriates it.
Such an orientation is particularry problematic when communication scholars study visual communication. Political communication decries a culture of “media spectacle” that substitutes images for “real debate” about ideas in the public sphere. Rhetorical studies positions talk and text as superior to vision, because-as many, from plato on, have argued-appearanceslie, distort, and make “pure” communication impossible. And, arguably, the media effects research tradition would not exist all were it not for the tacit assumption that the effects of visual media are, well, bad.
These are broad caricatures, of course, but my point is this: communication has done little to interrogate its own iconophobia, even though many of our theories of communication actually depend upon it. If we pursue the consequences of this polemical claim, then a important set of questions emerges. How might our understanding of communication be different if our metaphors for communication were less fearful of images and more friendly toward them-that is, less iconophobic and more iconophilic? What would a communication theory grounded in iconophilia look like? And how might it translate to richer scholarship on the visual? This last question is of particular importance to me. As a visual communication scholar, I am bothered by the extent to which vision, when it figures in our scholarship at all, is framed as inherently flawed. I want to set aside negative caricatures of the visual that undergird particular orientations toward communication and attempt instead to think in new ways. Following art historian james elkins’s suggestion that we “become irritated at our favorite theories” (2003,p. 201), I suggest that this rethinking of our metaphors for communication is a good way to begin.
Like communication, vision is itself a term invites many metaphors. We routinely discuss our scholarly “insights”, tell our friends that “I see what you mean”, and argue about whether politicians are “blind” to the consequences of their actions. However, not all visual metaphors are created equal. It is not enough to argue that we should frame “communication as vision”; as the quotation from dewey hints above, some metaphoris for vision may actually be iconophobic. In this essay, I take up there potential ways to frame communication as vision: surveillance, spectacle, and analogy. In the spirit of taking a stance and seeing it through, what follows is not and extended treatment of the metaphors but a brief, opinionated discussion that recognizes the benefits and drawbacks for communication of each. Of these there, I argue that analogy best anables us to theorize “communication as vision” without falling into the trap of iconophobia. If communication scholars were to adopt the more iconophilic orientation to vision offered by analogy, they would be better prepared to embrace the richness and complexity of visual communication.

Communication as…surveillance

The metaphor of vision as surveillance frames communication as a dialectic of power relationships. In the language of surveillance, someone (usually someone more powerful) is watcing, and someone else (usually less powerful) is being watched. Film and television scholars, for example, productively have employed the metaphor of “the male gaze” to explore how the viewing experience is based upon a gendered (and raced and sexed and classed) kind of surveillance. The “dominant gaze” is the male gaze, the white gaze.
(Aristoteless, 1963, Book VI Ch. 3-4). As heidegger wrote of this section in Aristotle’s Nichomacheans Ethics, techne “reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 13). Creation and cintigency are central to how we should understand techne. A simple example would be a musician’s “technique,” which describes the practical sense that she bring to her instrument and the actual process through which she plays it. A musician’s technique encompasses both her actual movement and the practical, embodied knowledge she brings to the instrument.
Several things should be apparent from this defenition and axample. First, techne is embodied knowledge, not formal or logical knowledge. Techne is meant to be disnguished from abstract knowledge, which Aristotele called episteme. Episteme designated the realm of formal theory, scientific knowledge, of fact and ideas. So, to extend the musician metaphor, the ability to play a song that rocks or to perform a masterful interpretation of Bach’s cello etudes is a form of techne, because demonstrates the unfolding of a sensibility. To be sure, this sensibility is cultured. As countless ethnomusicologists have shown, the basic ideas of “in tune” or “ in rhythm” vary from culture to culture. At the same time. A musician’s technique is also an irreducibly personal, embodied sense of what it means to make music. Thus, techne bridges the chasm between possibility and actuality: it indexes both what the musician actually does and what she or he is capable of doing or willing to do. Techne refers both to action and the conditions of possibility for action.
Conversely, the ability to name from memory all the flats in the key or G-flat is a form of episteme, as is an encyclopedic knowledge of the name and instruments all of the backup musicians who played with your favorite jazz soloist. Formal knowledge is also cultured, but it is knowledge that requires thoug, memory, formal learning, action, or recollection. Episteme has no necessary connetion to what one does or can do. It is knowledge for the sake of knowledge. The object and purpose of episteme are different from those of techne the former is knowing about, the latter is embodied knowledge.
Techne has, in our time, given way to two terms that designate some of the most important aspects of communication; technique and technology. Both terms share with techne an ambiguity between the actual and the possible and the dual connotation of practical knowledge and practical acts. To consider communication as a technique or learned skill is uncontroversial. To use phrases like “good communicator” or “knack for getting her point across” implies that communication is an art about which people gain practical knowledge. In the domains of art and media, this is even more clear. Lenguange used to describe the work of a writer, an artist, a songwriter, or for that matter, a chef, or someone who makes perfume, is often the lenguange of skill, sense, and facility. But techne goes further than this, for it designates not only the skill of people who might say have special telents and styles of communication embodied in each person. The subtle gestures of casual conversation, the split-second decision of whether to a stranger’s eyes on the street, the inflections of the voice-hundreds of different technique of empathy and avidance, closeness and distance-are in use at every moment of every day.
“one might say that arms and legs are full of numb imperatives,” writes sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1990, p.69). He argues that social life is built up from “practical logist” that do not necessarily follow the rules of formal reason but rather have a logic of their own. For example, “a man who raises his het in gretting is un wittingly reactivating a conventional sign inherited from the Middle Ages, when, as Panofsky reminds us, armed men used to take off their helmets to make clear their peaceful intentins. (Bourdieu, 1981, p. 305). If we meet and I tip my hat as a gretting, it is not because I wish to indicate that I do not plan to kill you. It is simply out of habit, a technique of gretting. In this way, a tip of the hat exists as a sorf of unthought, unconsidered “second nature.” It is something people “just do.” But this habit has a history and a social valence, as do all such gestures and habits. All this is to suggest that although the techne of communication is intensely personal and stylized, it is also intensely social. Scholars of interpersonal communication who examine distance and comportment in bodily action have made this point repeatedly, as has Erving Goffman (1963), who famously demonstrated that while norms and stigmas are intesely social, it is up to each individual to negotiate them effectively and creatively.
All this is well and good, but why use techne as driving metaphor for communication in general? Techne has descriptive and political benefits for those of us who wish to develop an account of communication as a social phenomenon. Descriptively, an approach to communication as techne demands that we examine what people actualy do when they are communicating—not what they say they are doing or what they think they are doing, but what they do. Here we return to Bourdieu and his notion of practical logic. In causal conversation, each gesture or turn of phrase is not consciously willed or considered. Rather, it comes out of repertoire or sensibility developed by the people involved. If a musician had to think before each movement on an instrument, or, for that metter, if I had to think before each press of a key on this keyboard, we never would get anything done. Because the sensibility is embodied and superficially spontaneous (that is, spontaneous after lots of practice), it does not necessarily conform to the rules of logic or the protocols of reason, action taken by people or machines located in some kind of social network. The mechanical action is obviously unconscious and habitual, but so are much so some sensibilities and relations, we must account for apparently spontaneous action as coming out of learned repertoires of possibility.
Indeed, it is the questions of possibility that has so animated 19th and 20th – century phisolophers of interest to communication theoriests. Marx’s famous adage that people make history but in conditions not of their own making perfecly captures the relationship between possibility and concrete action in techne. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, the “nonspontaneous principle of spontaneity” (1990, p. 56), attempts to explain how apparently spontaneous action is roorted in learned, embodied social tendecies. Michael Foucault’snotion of a “diagram” of social relations that makes possible the interactions in a prison, a school, or a confensional similarly partakes of Aristotle’s useful ambiguity between an event and its possibility in techne (for a full discussion, see Deleuze, 1988; Foucault, 1977,1991). Though they approah the quetion very differently, both Bourdieu and Foucault situate actual event within a broader terain of conditions of possibility. To use a somewhat prosaic metaphor, they are interested in the rules of the social game. Both sides of the lenguange debate in linguistics also partake of the sicial question animated by techne. A sense of concreteaction rooted in a range of embodied possibilities animates both Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf’s hyphotesis that lenguange makes possible understanding and Noam Chomsky’s notion of a “generative grammer” that exist in people’s mind prior to the acquistion of lenguange (Chomsky, 2004, Sapir, 1949; Whorf, 1956), both theories treat lenguange as a techne, and art that produces something in the world and requres a practical sense (the debate, of course, is over the origin of that practicaly sense).
A concept of communication as techne also requres us to rethink the relationship we posit between bodies and technologies. Modern media are vast aggregates or asemblages of technique, institutions, and technologies. Machine and rechnological system are an extension of the logic of possibility, practical knoledge, and ralized action hidden in the techne because they are essentially crysstallized sets of repeatable activities and relationship. Though the world technology has been around since the Middle Ages to refer to a treatise on practical arts, its came to mean “the practical arts, collectively” in 19th—century usage (Oxford English Dictionary, “Technology, s.v). communication technologies are nothing more and nothing less than collectivized, amalgamated, and routinoized technique of communication.
Bruno Latour’s famous example of the door-closer illustrates this well. Here, a whole set of social relations, practices, and assamptions are crystallized in the device to keep a door closed: to separate inside and outside; to control passages, people and noice; to demercate space symbolically; the door-closer thus reinforces these structured tendecies and habits, even as it acts independently of people once it is built and set up, symply closing the door each time it is opned. When the door-closer woprks, it dissapears from consciousness. Its function is forgotten. When the door-closer does not work the way it is supposed to, it has all sortsof new social significance, simply by virtue of closing the door a little to quickly (and batting passersby on the behind) or too slowly (Latour, 1988). Technologies, thus, are associated with habits and practices, sometimes crystallizing them, sometime promoting them, and sometime fighting them. They are structured by human practices so that they may, in turn, structure human practices. Technologies are crystallized bits of practical art and practical reason—they are technique externalized and delegated to machines.
Often, these function could be performed by people or machines. Whether we are talking about a person responsible for closing a door or a sping-loaded gadget, a door-closer control the physical communication of bodies between a room and a hallway. Other technologies (and if you think about it, all modern technologies are really techmological system) ossify technique of communication in other ways. On a simple level, people use cameras to see for them; telephones; microphones; and magnetic pickups to hear for them; speakers to sing, speak and serenade for them; and electric lights to suplement their limited power of sight, in some cases, a word encompasess both people and machines. An interesting contemporary example is computer. Computer were once indivuals or groups of people employed to make calculations. Noe the term applies to general-purpose calculating machines.
Even more complex media are basically large groups of related technique, combined together in institutional form. The conxtruct of television or radio as broadcasting, for instance, requred that we conceive of the production and consumption of broadcast material in certain ways. On the production and distribution and, a broadcast medium requres a massive infrastructure of institution, people, and technologies, all of which undertake routine, repetitive action. Broadcasting is a techne on a massive scale; from the skill and cultivated instincts of the engineers at the station; to the ways in which cables, switches, and satellites direct signals; to the ways in which these technology implement corporate or national policies. On the consumption and, people employ countless technique of listening to experience “radio,”as we kow it, and the same can be said for spectatorship and television. Publishing, public speaking, or recording all invoke related but different sets of technique, relations, and institutios.
So communicatio as technology and communication as technique share the sam root: communication as techne. I have suggested an anlytical approach that sees both on a continuum. But conceiving of communication as techne. Technolgy has not fared well in our histories of communication. The tale usually told is that before the invetation of writing, communication happened as speech, inside the subject’s mind and out through the subject’s breath. It was ephemeral, transitory, and even magical. This “primacy of speech” thesis suggests,as did Plato in the Phaedrus (1961), that writing is the fisrt true technology of communication. Indeed, a parade of communication historians have likened all other communication technologies to writing. In the primacy of speech model, we “add technology and stir” to speech to get other kinds of communication. Along with this model comes a series of laments about the alienation of modern life, the loss of community, and the decline of intersubjective recognition as humans use tools more and more to communicate with one another.
The problem here is both political and descriptive. The “add technology and stir”model isa political problem because it leads communication scholars to invoke a bizarre nostalgia, where the stark inequalities and everyday struggles for survival that chacterized lifein previous centuries dissapears. It is not that our would today is perfect—far from it! If you are not upperclass, male, heterosexual (in many cases), able—bodied, and a member of the dominant ethnic and religious group in your region, your life chances—and the choices of what to do with your life—would you have been severely diminished in any historical period prior to our own. So we sould be wary of any theory or history of communication that asks us to look back to aerlier period for examples of more just, equitable, or harmonious societies.
There are additional good descriptive grounds for a model of communication with techne as its driving metaphor. Techne is at the very historical core of what it means to communicate, and, contrary to the “add technology and stir” model of communication history, techne is, in some senses, historically prior to the advent of human communication. If one is looking for that special something that separated our evolutinary ancestors from other animals, it would have to be humas’ peculiar combination of lenguange and tool use. Indeed, archaeologists have found evidence of painting, sculpture, and musical instruments that go “all the way back” to the origins of the human race. The earliest know sculpture, for instance, are over 35,000 years old, but archaeologists have speculated that sculpture itself goes back at least 70,000 years. If these hypotheses are correct, they trouble the model of communication that claims humans once lived in a world of communication to which technology was added. The dimensions of craft, tool, and “practical art” were therefrom the very beginning.
Indeed, Lewis Mumford has argued for a sense of lenguange as tachne as well. Mumford writes that there is a “vital conneting between all physical movement and speech” (1966,p. 86, emphasis in original). Speech is one technique of the body among many. But for Mumford, spoken lenguange also is intimately related to tool use through the process of standardizatio, because they followed the same historical pattern. Once satisfactory formsof tools or word were reached, there is little evidence, he says, for “wanton variation” in their form. Communication reuires both lenguange and technology—and both are forms of techne.
It would be unfair at this point to take the pragmatist ascape from essences and say that the question of what communication is should be replaced with what communication does. But as communication as a practical art—as doing—should be a central concern for us. To put it another way, communication is a philosophical and political problem, because it a practical art through which people make, break, or maintain their worlds. We should conceive of communication as techne because the most important parts of communication are precisely they unthough second natures of technique and technology. Communication as techne highlights the two most important aspects of communication today; the widespread use of technology in conjuction with other forms interaction and the simustaneously social and habitual forms of interaction that make up modern life. If one goal of communication scholarship is to find and describe ways to live ethically and well in large—scale and diverse societies, communication as techne may be our best path there.
Notes
1. Boudieu’s comments qouted here appear in discussion of his concept of habitus, which is somewhat beyond the scope of this essay, see Sterne (2003)for a longer discussion of Bourdieu and technique.
2. Students of Momford may argue that this reading goes against the grain of his project in Myth of the Machine, which aims to dethrone a historical narative of technological progress with “modern” (1960s era) technolgy at its apex. Perhaps, but my goal is not to celebrate modern technology, but rather to identify the shere roots lenguang, technique, and technology in the concept of techne.
Additional readings
Aristotle. (1962). Nocomachean etnis (M. Ostwald, Trans) Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merril.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R.Nice,Trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
Foucault, M. (1991). Questions of Method (C. Gordon, Trans). In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds), The Foucault effect; Studies in govermentality (pp.73-86). Chocago University of Chicago Press.

MATERIALIZING
(Arbi)

Possibility of maintaining not only a verbal but also a visual record of events wherever a camera was running. Such material preservation, of course, enhances the possibilities that our representation of the present will be picked up, appropriated, accepted, revised, rejected, or reviled at some point in the future. They may, of course, still be forgotten despite their preservation. But they are available at least for collective memory work.
A second implication of the materiality of communication technologies is the deliberate attempt to shape collective memory by means of particular kinds of communicative messagea. For example, we are used to thinking about the objects in a museum ot other historic preservation site as being definitively precious, worth our time and trouble to pay a visit and observe the objects. But museums, like other communication modalities, impart very partiual understandings of the cultures and pasts they represent. Not everything from a culture, or art historical period, or technological era, si collected, retained, or displayed by a museum. Only those objects that are valued for particular reasons in the ongoing present are displayed in their collections. So, for example, why are judy garland’s ruby slippers from the wizard of oz, Indiana jones’s hat, Michael jordan’s jersey, and archie bunker’s chair displayed in the national museum of American history in Washington, DC, as opposed to the hundreds of millions of other possible choices from American popular culture and social history? Why is the giant but tattered flag that flew over fort McHenry displayed and so carefully preserved there? What is the museum attemting to impart to its audience about U.S. history by6 displaying these items and not others?
A third implication is an interesting return-with a twist-of theorized connection between memory and place. Recall that ancient rhetoricians advised speakers to associate their ideas with physical places, for clarity of recollection. More recently, communication scholars, as well as memory scholars in other fields, havev built on the assumption of thinking like gaston bachelard (1958/1994) that people already, naturally, associate ideas with places, and have begun to study places-domestic architecture, museums, pubs, and memorials, for example-as themselves representing important communicative messages, rather than simply serving asbackdrops, contexts, or scenes in which communication occurs.
Sixth, directly related ti the notion of materiality is the idea that communication ofteninvolves struggles over power. Communication is not just something we do; it is a highly valued practice or “commodity”, particularly in some forms and with some specific outcomes. As a result, sometimes communication compete for-among other things-the means to represent the past in their own ways for the purpose of serving particular interest in the present. Note, for example, the venomous conflicts over the public display of the confederate battle flag in the American south during the past fifteen years.the proponents of flag display argue that they are simply honoring their “heritage” paying tribute to a way of life represented by the “old south”. Opponents suggest that such proud displays create traumatic memories for those whose ancestors were enslaved in that culture, and that to honor the old south is to eulogize the historical practice of slavery. Needless to say, the outcomes of the present moment. Their counterparts suggest, rather disingenuously, that removing the battle flag from civic sites (like state capitol buildings) violates their civil rights. The point is that the struggle over symbolism of the past is just as surely a struggle over power in the present. It has long been held in various aphorisms and anecdotes that to the cultural “victor” belongs the privilege of writing history. With little adaptation, it seems fair to suggest that struggles for power in social groups often are waged under the sign of memory-what the group will choose to remember, how it will be valued, and what will be forgotten, neglected, or devalued in the process.
The study of communication as collective memory, like any other theoretical position, may have some drawbacks. For example, it would be problematic to place a stronger emphasis on popular renditions of the past-how we would like to remember-than on historical accounts that seek for a more neutral rendition of what happened in the past (zelizer, 1995). The dangers of presentism also have been remarked and investigated productively (cox, 1990). However, if we think of history and memory not as competitive but as mutually enriching, memory studies can serve our understanding of communication in a number of ways.
They do so most generally by urging us to consider what is at stake when a communicator refers to or invokes the past. The past, from the prespective of collective memory studies, is not a dry, neutral record of what when before but an ideologically inflected cultural resource that communicators draw upon in their interaction wiht others. Most important, when some version of the past is invoked, it is all too often marked as “true”, as an unquestioned or obvious matter of facticity, despite its inflections and what has been left out or forgotten.
Understanding communication as collective memory also invites analytic access to a broad range of communicative phenomena, from interpersonal exchanges to media programming to popular culture products. In fact, it transforms what we would usually take to be a context for communication-a museum, a park, a preservation site, or other place-and implores us to see it as a mode of communication in its own right.a collective memory perspective also allows us to probe a communicative message at a number of levels of abstraction, from the basics of its language and assumed genre to the identities it constructs and the ways in which it enacts power. It reminds us to think about how any message alters its context and speaks back to messages that have come before. And because of its focus on what how we remember, it prompts us to think clearly about what is not said, as well as what is, for forgetfulness is a central operation in the process of constructing coherent and communicatively powerful memories.

Additional Readings

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory (L. A. coser, Ed. & Trans). Chicago : university of Chicago press.
Huyssen, A. (1994). Twilight memories : Marking time a culture of amnesia. New York : routledge.
Lipsitz, G. (1990). Time passages : collective memory and American popular culture. Minneapolis : university of Minnesota press.
Nora, P. (Ed). (1996-1998). Realms of memory : the construction of the French past (Vol. 1-3). (A. goldhammer, Trans; L. D. kritzman, Eng. Trans. Ed). New york : Columbia university press.
Zelizer, B. (1998). Remembering to forget : holocaust memory through the camera’s eye. Chicago : university Chicago press.

References

Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space. Boston : beacon press. (original work published 1958)
Blair, C. (1999). Contemporary U. S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric’s materiality. In J. Selzer & S. Crowley (Eds), rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison : university of Wisconsin press.
Campbell, K.K., & Jamisen, K. H (1977). From and genre in rhetorical criticsm : An intreoduction. In K. K. Campbeell & K. H. Jamisen (Eds), form and genre : shaping rethorical action (pp. 9-32). Falls church, VA : speech communication association.
Cox, J. R. (1990). Memory, critical theory, and the argument from history. Argumentation and advocacy, 27, 1-13.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaelogy of knowledge (A. M. S. smith, trans). new york : pantheon.
Huyssen, A. (1995). Twilight memories : marking time in a culture of amnesia. New york : routledge.
Nietzsche, F. (1989). On truth and lying in an extra-moral sense. In S. L, gilman, C. Blair, & D. J. Parent (Eds. & Trans.), friedrich Nietzsche on rhetoric and language (pp. 246-257). New york : oxford university press. (original work published 1873)
Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history : les lieux de memoire. Representation, 26, 7-25.
Yates, F. A. (1966). The art of memory. Chicago : university of Chicago press.
Zelizer, B. (1995). Reading the past against the grain : the shape of mamory studies. Critical studies in mass communication, 12, 214-239.
Zelizer, B. (2001). Cxollective memory as “time out” : repairing the time-community link. In G. J. Shepherd and E. W. rothenbuhler (Eds.), communication and community (pp. 181-189). Mahwah, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum.

Judith N. Martin And Thomas K. Nakayama
(Salam)

Conversations about race in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century reflect the contradictory status of race in society. On the one hand, the conversations seem to be ubiquitous-discussions of affirmative action policies in hiring and education, equal access to voting during national and state elections, and persistent racial disparities are often in the news. In the other hand, conversations about race in workplace and social setting often are uneasy or simply absent. Examinations of the racial dimensions of our own discipline ore no different. On the one hand, adversement seek faculty of color, but, on the other hand, there is little discussion about how communication is raced, what this means, and the implications of this racialization for students and faculty.
There are at least three ways to view the relationship between communications and race:
1. Racial histories and demographics inform and reflect communication behaviors
2. The conceptualization and study of communication is raced-historically and contemporaneously
3. The field of communication is raced

In this essay, we’ll first define what we mean by race and then describe these three approaches, focusing primarily on the third.
Scientists today largely have discredited traditional physiological/biological notions of race, noting that there is more genetic variation within racial groups than between them (Omi & Winant, 1994; Wells, 2002). They, along with communication scholars, emphasize instead the social construction of race and the fluidity of racial categories. For example, scholars have shown how the category “white” evolved over the years in the united states, expanding to include people of Irish, Jewish, and southern European descent-all previosly excluded as not quite white (Brodkin, 1999; Ignatiev, 1995;Jacobson, 1998). Race, then is a social construction, but it has a very real, material impact on our everyday lives. It is a fiction, but it is real and it is this cultural contradiction that undergirds our conversations on race and its place in communication studies.
Communication Behavior Is Raced
A first view of communication as raced examines how racial characteristics inform communication habits. Stated simply, communication is an intensely racialized practice. With whom we communicate with them, and how much we communicate with others follows largely racialized formations. Communication scholars for years accepted that race influences the communication behaviors of “others”, but only racently have we turned the spotlight explicitly on the communication of white people. The research exposes the underlying racial hierarchy and describes how the connection between race and communication for white people largely goes unrecognized (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995). Though people who are not white see that distinctness, dominance, normalcy, and privilege are characteristics of whiteness, and hence influence the communication of white people, white people themselves often do not recognize or see these connections (Bahk & Jandt, 2004)
In their study of student communication at a multiracial campus, Halualani, Chitgopekar, Morrison, and Dodge (2004) highlight the general features of this link between race and communication, reflecting larger societal patterns. That is, those students (like most individuals) largely communicate with other in their own racial group, despite living in an increasingly multiracial/multiethnic society. Individuals do not, however, simply choose to communicate with members of a particular racial or ethnic group. Instead, these communication patterns reflect larger social organizing about where racial groups predominately live and the kinds of workplace encounters they are likely to have, as well as the leisure aspects of our racialized society. In short, we argue that it is imperative to place our communication practices within the context of a highly racialized society in order to better understand everyday communication practices. Yet, to understand why the relationship between race, power, and communication is often obviated, we also need to axamine the historical development of the study of communication.
The Study of Communication Is Raced
A second view suggests that the very study of communication it self is raced. From its origins in 5th century BCE Greece, the study of communication (then called rhetoric) focused almost exclusively on the communication patterns of those in power. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other were interested in empowering Greek and Roman citizens, although ignoring the ways that communication might help slaves, women, and other noncitizen advocate for their interest, needs, and desires. The practice and study of communication was by and for those already empowered in society (Crowley & Hawhee, 1999; Dues & Brown, 2004).
This elitism was not easily translated into the development of communication studies in the United States. The drive for democratic participation in society was a major motive for the development of “speech” courses for those students who did not come from privileged backgrounds (Cohen,1994). Even today, communication studies is largely missing from elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and Emory, but remains prominents at less elite ones.
We must note, however, that this democratic drive was marked by the racialized society in which it occurred. When the then new land grant institutions were established by the 1862 Morrill Act, public speaking was taught mainly to empower its white male students largely from farming families and other nonelite backgrounds to participate in democratic institutions; the study of communication (speech), meanwhile, remained in largely segregated context.1 The Second Morril Act established “1890s institutions,” which are today known as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Theses schools, thought undoubtedly important, offered segregated and sometimes second-class educational opportunities for their students.
It is instructive, then, to examine how the study of communication continues to be raced today in our research, teaching, and practice. This examination follows a trend set by other disciplines as well as several subdisciplines within the field of communication. For example, anthropologists have recognized anthropology as currently one of the “least integrated or whitest professions” (Shanklin,2000,p.99). More important, Shanklin goes on to explore the implications of this whiteness that anthropology delivers “inchoate messages about anthropological understanding of race and racism in introductory texts and that anthropologists do not participate actively in public discussion” (p.99).
Similarly, the accrediting Council for Education in the field of journalism and mass communication notes that the standard failed most frequently in accreditation in this disciplines Standard 12 is that which calls for racial integration of faculty and students and the inclusion of women. (De Uriarte, Bodinger-de Uriarte, & Benavides, 2003). The second most failed standard is Standard 3, which calls for diversity in curriculum. Where diverse curriculum exists, it is rarely a required course (pp.vii-viii). In 2000, minorities earned only 25% of all BA degrees and 10% of all MA Degress in U.S journalism programs. Figures remain miniscule for PhDs, now almost universally required for a tenured position as a journalism educator (p.viii).

The Field of Communication is Raced
Can the same be said for the field of communication? Are we largely a white profession, white in racial composition of faculty and students, white in curiculum, white in research interests and theorizing, and largely silent when it comes to the public debate on race and communication?2
Taking a quick look at intitutional data on communication majors highlights the whiteness of our disciplines and its attraction to white students out of proportion to their demographic numbers. We highlight the two institutions at which we currently work. At Temple University, 59.4% of the students are white, but 65.6% of the communications and theater students are white. Ar Arizona State University, 67.8% of the student body is white and 77.4% of the communication students are white (only 17.7% of communication students are minority students the remaining are either unknown or international). Set againts the number of minority students, the predominance of white students highlights the disparity. While we know of no national study on communication students , we speculate that this is a national trend. Yet, as a discipline, we remain unreflexive about the whiteness of communication studies. Our point is not simply that communication has many more white students than its general demographics would indicate, but to question the ways in which the study of communication continues to empower white people, while at the same time unwittingly remaining unresponsive to the needs of the rest of society.
Ashcraft and Allen (2003) argue that introductory textbooks are one important venue for understanding the ways that race functions in the communication discipline, in that they “disseminate a field’s canon of knowledge” (p.7) and socialize graduate students and faculty members who teach from them. Thus, they not only reflect the discipline but also help reproduce it. Ashcraft and Allen’s content analysis of organizational communication textbooks led to the indentification of the following themes in the treatment of race:
1. Race is separate, singular concept that is relevant only under certain circumstances.
2. Race is relevant insofar as it involves cultural differences, which can be identified, valued, and managed to improve organizational performance.
3. All cultural differences are synonymous with international variations.
4. Racial discrimination is a function of personal bias, interpersonal misunderstanding, organizational failure to manage cultural differences, and disproportianate demographics.

While these observations are specific to the field of organizational communication, they seem to hold true for theory and research in interpersonal communication, intercultural communication, and rhetoric the arcas we are most familiar with and are likely to hold true in other areas as well. The common thread here is the focus on communication at the individual level, with little regard for the larger contexts in which power and historical relations might enter. In a reflection of Ancient Greek concerns about communication, we can see that contmeporary communication concerns center around ways to help white people deal with racial difference, whether for organizational effectiveness, interpersonal efectiveness, or managing differences. Interpersonal communication skills (e.g., studies identifying components of communication competence) are presented in such a way that they seem to help white individuals deal with others who are assumed to be white.
Studies of intercultural contact reflect this same centering of whiteness (Cooks, 2001). Halualani et al. (2004) note that “the most glaring short coming in intercultural contact literature is the predominant focus on majority (or white/European American) attitudes toward interacting with minority groups” (p.274). Again, communication studies clearly is in the service of white people at the expense of racial others.
Our call here is for communication scholars to begin taking our racialized history and contemporary context seriously, so that we can begin to service the diversity of U.S. society and its future outlook. As long as we ignore race or work primarily to serve the needs of white Americans, our undergraduate communication major, graduate students, and faculty will become increasingly isolated from engaging contemporary social issues, whether in health care, education, business, or elswhere. It is only “by examining the racial

Communication as Embondiment
(Rahman)

This chapter will be a discussion of two powerful instrument of communication, body and text, and their long and difficult embrace. By body , I mean our biological res extense the heat-seeking skin packages that all living human beings inhabit. By text, I mean whatever detaches the body from its message. We chiefly think of texts as a graphic representantion of spoken lenguange or number from which the living body is extracted. Visual image, too, can be thought of as texts that keep bodies at a distance, distilling them as analog or digital lines or dots set into a receptacle medium such as stone, cellulosa, celluloid, or ellectrical current. The long process of displacing and concealing bodies by texts that chacratherizeds modernity has been virtually unplumbed by communication scholars, a remarkable omission in our efforts to understand how human societies develop and engage media. But perhaps this is not very suprising at all. The cultural reflex that regards text as mind’s trace divorced from any coporeal arigins reflects an aspiration to transcend bodies that has been centuries in the making. In the modern social imaginary, the body is at best superfluoes to communicative exchange at worst a moral impediment to thought.
A much differend view regards bodies as the stubborn, ineradicable foundation of human communication and a powerful underlying subject of all mediated comunicatin. Proposes that bodies have modified texts in significant ways and have been importantly modified by them in return, notwithstanding a conventionl narrative that assigns them a gradually disappearing role in the historiy of media. This more complicated view takes seriously the fundamental corporeality that undergirds communication and challenges a dominating ethos in which only whatis textualy expressible is socially valued. In the world view of textual dominance, the activity of bodies is often presented in extreme terms-beyond notice on the one hand, pathological on the other. Bodies are burshed aside as ineffectual and decorative until they surface too insistently and become orminously threatening. The notion in both views, that bodily absence is a virtue, is a central assumptions of contemporary communication and greatly influences how we think about and organize social relations.
By contrast, text is presumed to have only strong effects. A tradition that extends from Eric Havelock (1963) to Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979,1980) and Ernest Gellner (1983) attributes tectonic cultural shifts to the assimilation of texts, especially written ones. In broad strokes, these include the destuction of customary social life, rearrangements of the sensory “mix” and the origins of individualism. Printing, writing’s industrial handmaiden, is given credit for launching and sustaning the Renaissance and for laying the foundatiens of modern science and nation-state. The fate of communicating bodies have been mystified, segregated, bunished, buffered, and positioned; and how they have accommodated, resisted, and fougth back as bodies rarely have been explored. Nor has the evolution of structures of feeling that organize relations amongs embodied persons in textualized world.
We certainly think we know about text, the medium scholars swim in. It is, oddly, the body that needs anchoring. Since incarnation is the very condition of human life this seem starling. Gesture, the set of observable signals that coordinate bodies with one another, is our origin communication, however unthinkingly we may dismiss it. Gesturu, which is harder to ignored because it is gloriously axaggerated in dancing, military drill, group festivity, music making religious ceremony, and public assembly, treated as embellishment if we think of it at all. Classic insights about the communicative dimensions of gesture—Marcel Mauss’s notion of a social repertoire of “body techniques” and George Herbert Mead’s (1934) account of lenguange as “vocal gesture” are two—have lain dormant and undeveloped.
But these are stubborns ideas. Robin Dunbar (1998) has argued that spoken lenguange arose to improve the efficiency of social grooming, the gestural communication of solidarity that cements social bonds for the survival of primate groups. Dunbar’s claims offer a useful frame for James Carey’s (1975) well-know distinstion between ritual (which can be describes as gesturally embodied) and transmission (which is textually disembodied) communication. Though widely admired, this distinction never has been seriosly taken up in the field and, as we might say, fleshed out.
The standard historical narrative offer a story of technological and moral advancement that progressively strips bodies from the arenas of important communication and invests all past communication with the dream of bodilessness (Peters, 1999). Textualization is presented as overcoming the material and moral limitations of the human body. Of course, media can never eliminates bodies. In fact, lthough we are at pains to deny it, all media ever mediate are bodies (often in layered fashion by mediating that mediate bodies). In this light, media history appears less a chronology of textual innovations leaping across the finitude of bodies. It appears, rather, as an antogonistic encounter between bodies and texts in a high-stakes struggle to allocate purity, honor, and power. (See Marvin & Ingle, 1999; Marvin 1994,1995, 2004). If the are of Western history looks like an unbroken string of textual triumphs from the first striings of bureucracy in the 11th century, these victories have never been total not secure. This is because the textual class requires bodily power to enforce its dominion, a point that will be developed.
Our own text-centric model of culture does seem provincially modern. In absolutist Europe, peasants were the feet and body of society, mobility its arms, the clergy its head, and the king the embodiment of the whole. Elsewhere and at other times, the communicating world has been a dream, a dance, a chain of being, or a battle. Every model of culture elaborates a relationship of the body to the society around it. To imagine culture as text is altogether different of imagining it as dance. In one, the body remains separate from culture and ontologically distinct entry. In the other, culture is actively constituted in bodily participation.
Its remain hard work to stake out a bodily focus for communication in a field that has its center in text-focused media regimes. Our first task is to reconsider mediation it self. Instead of implying a historical progression of textual artifacts on a one way mission to leave the body behind, mediation is more accurately characterized as any packaging of the communicative body expressed in one of two modes. Dramatization works to enhance the potency of the communicative body. Clothes, ormamentation, masks, perfurne, cosmetics, armor, dancing, singing, feasting, and oratory are dramatizing media that take the communicative power of the physical body seriosly and amplify its aura, the sense of its communicative presence.
Textualizatin work by evacuating the body from communication and impoverishing this aura. It does not get rid of bodies (though this happens as Henri Levebvre says [1991], the text kills) so much as it cover up and disguises them, or attempts to turn them into text. Print, musical notation, film, telephony, and video are textualizing media that fragment and reconstitue the body’s message in simplified form. Sociologically, textualization gives rise to two great classes. One of these commands text the other is comanded by it.
The textual class (it includes, no surprise, academics) is skilled at producing and using texts. It is also the class most entitled to shield and preserve the bodies of its members from physical hardship and danger. This is its privilege, to withdraw the physical body from the fray while deploying those for whom withdrawal is not an option. The body is the emblem of those who lack textual credentials, whose bodies are available to be used up by society, and whose powers of social participation derive from whatever value their bodies wave for cultural muscle work, the most dramatic expression of which is war. In modernity, all bodies are disciplined by texts: some to use them, some to stay away from them (Marvin, 1994, 1995) Textualization is the indispensable act of modern power in which every aspect of our lives is implicated. It confers personhood and social status through textual identification and credentialing. It saturates the imaginative environment with information, advertising, and entertaiment, all of which overwhelm the authority of bodily experience.
To portray the textual class as the seat of modern power may seem ludicrous to academics who find it difficult to imagine themselves in any such position. They are, of course, only handmaidens. In the social ecology of text body relations, academics are textual functionaries who recruit and train new text class members while convicing the body class to hold textual institutions in awe.
What does it mean, then for the textual class to rule? Consider how U.S. presidents, who dress in the uniform of textual professionals and rarely display the emblems of combat familiar to traditional societies, wage war. A president goes to war not by raising his sword, but by signinga text. No guns move without signed orders, though the president’s power lies in the readiness of these guns to respond and in the belief of these who stand behind them in the Constitutional text that authorizes the governmental system. Much cultural energy is devoted to concealing this absolute radiance of the textual class on its bodily substratum and to eliminating opportunities for it to move againts the textual class. This antagonism toward the body class it the deep conradiction at the heart of textual sensibility and power.
The impoversihment and delegitimazition of bodily experience generate nostalgia for the romance of face-to-face communication among some textual class members, but this nostalgia is more self indulgent than serious. To privilege the body genuinely is to embraceits defining power, which is the exercise of physical force. The textual class abhors bodily force, its greatest that and the enforcer of its authority. The remote object of textual class affections is more nearly constituted in mediated bodies, such as those disseminated in the romantic reconstructions of journalists and anthoropologists and in glossy images of advertising and tourism. When, to the everlasting dissapointment of guardians of text-based hierarchy, removing the body altogether from communication turns out to be impossible, whole campaigns are mounted to make it less visible. This is done by restricting and stigmatizing its actions, by making it more like text, by directing attention away from it. Yet bodies fight back, reasserting themselves in bodily spetacles, war, and contests of secular and religious morality.
Body and text are not absolute analytic categories but relative positions on a calssifying continuum in which each may that defer to dictionaries and other artifacts of textually disciplined language present themselves as more text-like than bodies whose colloquial speech bears the oral empress of neighborhood origins. Pornography and popular novels are lower on the scla of cultural esteem than the theoretically driven, relatively more disembodied text of physicists, lawyers, and engineers. In principle, images fall more often than written text on the bodily end of the textual spectrum. The more texts float free of the bodies that produce them, the higher their cultural standing and that of the bodies associated with them. This variable classification calls to mind Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) division between the grotesque body-overflowing, stinking, fecund, vulgar and the body of calssical sculpture smooth, unorificed, decorous, self-contained. To smooth and cover the orifices of the grotesque body is to narrow its communicative channels, to make it more like text.
How are we to understand the obvious point that posttraditional societies, however awash in rapidly multiplying texts, are preoccupied with sex, fashion, sports, creature comforts, and sensational crime – bodily concerms, all? The bodily melodrama of popular culture constitutes a kind of rebel beachhead againts the discipline and pace of contemporary textualization. In a textual world, of course, nothing is so simple. The popular bodies that command the greatest prestige are the very ones that have been most successfully transformed into texts. Extravagant social and cultural rewards flow to athletes and performers not for their corporeal virtuosity alone, , but to those whose bodily achievements lend themselves to the widest possible dissemination through textual reproduction. This is the licensed carnival of the textual class.
An adequate account of the historical impact of textualization will not be a matter of grand theory. It is not subtle enough. Only extended and patiently detailed investigation can convey how body-based communities have textually remagined themselves again and again. The conquest of the New World and the Inquisition area part of that story. So are humbler smaller scale stories social relationships, and status rearrangements bitterly struggled over. Grand theory can open up directions of inquiry and suggest provocative hyphotheses. But, in the and, it only signals where to begin looking.
With that thought in mind, the Reformation offers it self as a seismic center of the shift from bodily to textual magic that so profoundly marks the modern West. Religion has always addressed bodily experience, especially its most deeply felt moment of suffering and death. The Church Universal, dominant in the West, is a shockingly corporeal faith, its central event the brutal sacrifice of a god who agrees to take on ultimate bodily pain. With the Reformation, the relationship of believers ti the deity ceased to be mediated through the body of the priest and come to be mediated through individual Bible reading. This and accompanying text-body struggles (Muir, 1997; Duffy,1992’ but seek stock, 1983, who traces this process to the 11th century) over the magicaly bodily potency of icons; statues; and rituals of gesture, song, and dance profoundly transformed the West. (Capitalism, the cultural successos of the Reformation, appears as the most spritually ascetic of arrangements, having evacuated material things of their meaningful connections with bodies while transforming both into an etherealized text stripped of experience, connection, love, and existential groundedness the bottom lines).
The 19th century was a great accelerator of textualization. Lawrence Levine (1998) has traced the division of high, and low culture to the segregation of elite and popular bodies in opera, theater, and museum audiences. Where bodily improvisation had been the anticipated proregative of performers and noisy evaluation the norm for audiences, high culture was reimagined as sacred canon of inviolable texts of music, dance, and drama from which performers must not deviate. Audiences for the so called high arts became progressively less sensuous and more intimidated, their responses less confidents and less performed. The mutually constrituted tasks of cultural judgment and participation were severed, the former surrendered to an emerging class of textual critics who took upon themselves the task of maligning the newly distinguished popular arts as well.
Concurrently, Progressves sought to break up urban political machines heavily dependent on the mobilization of bodies and to promote the notion of well-behaved “independent-minded” literates as the only fit civic participants (Marvin & Simonson, 2004). “Informed” and “Deliberative” voters read newspaper and kept their voices down in political discussion, which they favored over an older notion of politics as a team sport. Poor, immigrant, African American, and other bodies that troubled textual elites were disenfranchised for failing to achieve the literacy levels of the educated middle class. Alcohol-laced, physically exuberant rallies; military marches; and bonfires were discredited adn sometimes outlawed. These occasions of broad sensual appeal had regularly drawn the body class together to present it self as a political and physical force to be reckoned with. Increaingly deprived of political muscle and lacking textual credential, the body class became ever more detached from the political process, which is its condition today.
There is an ominous saying that a regime’s success can be measured by how many people survive it. Nothing demonstrates more clearly that bodies are the raw material of society and incarnations of our core moral situation. To this end, the basic job of society is to reproduce, organize, deploy, and dispose of bodies. The job of culture is to justify, cope with, and teach those arrangements. Modern societies seek to sustain the burdens of child rearing, work, and war through a consensus that partly depends on collective denial and evasion of the inequities of any particular distribution of these sacrifices. Textualization is central in making this happen. It encouragers the immaterial accounting of burdens in highly filtered words and images, and in statistics safely received in environments to which those especially burderned the poor, diseased, unemployed, and imprisoned have little access.
Textualization therefore creates the modern dilemma in which the textual class risks losing touch, and everything that term implies, not only with the real conditions that sustain their society but also with their own moral commitments as willing bodies, for which there is no substitue, to the survival of the group. The textual class encounters the world through vicariously distant representation and simplifying abstractions. It is challenged not only to empathize with the real condition of the body class on with it builds it power but by the temptations of a moral relativism that dilute its convictions. The body class places the bodies of those it loves on the line for community. In this sacrificial embodiedness, moral relativity is not possible. Moral dogmatism is the dilemma of the body class. Both views are responsible for their share of the world’s horors and its finest achievements. To understand the complexities that beset these two communicative world views and the consequences of their entwined fate, is a grand sober challenge for scholars or communication.
Addtional readings
Clanchy, M. (1993). From memory to written record: England 1066-1307. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1979)
Caplan, J. (Ed.) (2000). Written on the body: The tattoo in European and American history. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press
Thornton, T.P. (1996). Handwriting in America: A cultural history. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Torpey, J. (1999). The invention of the passport: Surveillance, citizenship and the state. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
References
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world ( H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press
Carey, J. (1975). A cultural approach to communication. Communication, 2, 1-22.
Duffy, E. (1992). The stripping of the altars: Traditional religion in England, c. 1400-1580. New Haven, CT: Yale Unversity Press
Dunbar, R. (1998). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Eisenstein, E. L. (1979, 1980). The printing press as an agent of change: Communication and cultural transformation in early modern Europe (Vols. 1-2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Havelock, E. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press
Lafebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
Levine, L. (1998). Highbrow/lowbrow: The emergence of cultural hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Marvin, C., & Ingle, D. W. (1999). Blood sacrifice and the nation: Totem rituals and the American flag. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Marvin, C. (1994). The body of the text: Literacy’s corporcal constant. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 80(2), 129-149.
Marvin, C. (1995). Bodies, texts, and the social order: A reply to Bielefeldt. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81(1), 103-107.
Marvin, C. (2004). Peaceable kingdoms and information technology: Prospects for the nation-state. In M. Sturken, D. Thomas, & S. Ball-Rokeach (Eds.), Technological visions: The hopes and fears that shape new technologies (pp. 240-254). Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Marvin, C., & Simonson. P.D. (2004). Voting alone: The decline of bodily mass communication in presidential elections. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1(2), 127-150

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self & society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Muir, E. (1997). Ritual in early modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Peters, J. D. (1999). Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Stock, B. (1983). The implications of literacy: written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Princenton, NJ: Princenton University Press.