COMMUNICATION AS VISION
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.
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.
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COMMUNICATION AS VISION
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