Remodelling Communication: From WWII to the WWW 9781442699717

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R E M O D E L L ING CO MMU NICATI ON : F RO M W WII T O T HE WWW

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Remodelling Communication From WWII to the WWW

GARY GENOSKO

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012  Toronto Buffalo London  www.utppublishing.com  Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4434-2   Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication Editors: Marcel Danesi, Umberto Eco, Paul Perron, Roland Posner, Peter Schulz _________________________________________________________________  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Genosko, Gary, 1959– Remodelling communication : from WWII to the WWW/ Gary Genosko. (Toronto studies in semiotics and communication) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4434-2 1. Communication models – History – 20th century. 2. Communication and culture – History – 20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Toronto studies in semiotics and communication P93.55.G45 2012  302.2309'045  C2011-908092-3 _________________________________________________________________ This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 Regaining Weaver and Shannon 29 2 Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall 48 3 Roman Jakobson and the Primacy of the Poetic 63 4 All Models Are Simulations: Jean Baudrillard’s Critique of Communication 73 5 Phatic (Dys)functions 88 6 Umberto Eco and Guerrilla Decoding 98 7 From General Modelling to Metamodelling 111 Conclusion 126 Notes 135 Index 157

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List of Figures

1. Transmission of information (after Shannon and Weaver) 30 2. Bottomless model (after Hall) 49 3. Six factors and functions (after Jakobson) 64 4. Semiotic qualifications of decoding (after Eco) 99 5. General graphic model (after Gerbner) 113 6. Rhizome of transmission (after Sampson) 120 7. Processing and perception (after Winkler, following Bühler) 122

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the invitation of Andrew Murphie at the University of New South Wales and his colleagues on the editorial board of Fibreculture for the opportunity to develop some of the theses contained in this book in an invited lecture as well as editing a special issue of the journal on metamodelling and new media in 2008. Much of the initial research for this project was undertaken while on sabbatical in Sydney in 2006. Access to the University of Sydney library was made possible by Alan Cholodenko and the Power Institute; at UNSW, my visit was hosted by Paul Patton of the Department of Philosophy. I would also like to thank Jussi Parikka, who was then at Anglia Ruskin University, for advancing my understanding of post-representational theory in digital culture, and for his kind invitation to speak on this subject at the Centre for Research into Digital Culture in Cambridge in 2009. Encouraged by Paul Bouissac at the University of Toronto, I first sketched a diagram of what this book might look like in the late 1990s. While the final version looks quite different, certain family resemblances are evident from a number of perspectives. The final stage of research for this study was completed in Toronto where, by the generous invitation of Dean Seamus Ross, I was a visiting professor at the iSchool of the University of Toronto in 2011–12. My contact editor in the humanities at University of Toronto Press, Richard Ratzlaff, was most patient with my tardiness, and I am delighted with Marcel Danesi’s decision to embrace this book for the series Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication. Last but not least, my daughter Hannah Genosko patiently redrafted the models that appear in this book.

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R E M O D E L L ING CO MMU NICATI ON : F RO M W WII T O T HE WWW

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Introduction

Models perfuse communication studies. The most famous models bear an overt theoretical affiliation; for example, the mathematical/ engineering/transmission model is based in information theory. Most models are categorized into currents of emphasis and innovation, such as those that develop our understanding of audiences of receivers. While there are dozens of mass communication models bearing upon communication processes involved in television, newspapers, radio, and similar mass media, they are not widely known, and the history of their development remains largely a concern for a small number of specialists. Only a few important and influential models are recognized by the names of their authors, such as ‘Shannon and Weaver.’ Very few models of communication travel seamlessly across the long and numerous branches of communication studies and beyond. But make no mistake, all such models share core components that are repeatedly recoded, redrawn, and augmented.1 The family resemblances are unmistakable. The very idea that models might become a matter for reflection across specialist divides is best seen today in the philosophy and sociology of science. The assembling of models from far and wide in communication studies for critical purposes extends the subject of modelling into communication. Models are not only of interest to philosophers of science and of communication, for linguists, too, have made the modelling of language a subject worthy of attention. Linguists treat models as methodological issues because they are often not based on the result of research into the structure of language but rather imported from elsewhere. As Polish linguist Roscislav Pazukhin observed, the ‘modelling principle’ in linguistics is exogenous, that is, borrowed from the sciences (physics, mathematics, astronomy, etc.)

4 Remodelling Communication

and ‘linguists appear to be convinced that the models which proved their efficacy in physics, logic, etc., cannot fail when applied to linguistic data.’2 For Pazukhin, linguists are deluded in the belief that the simple transposition of models will yield any valuable insights into language in the absence of ‘the rigorous restrictions imposed on model use by the actual relations which link theory, model and empirical data in science.’3 But not everybody holds this position. In a comment on Pazukhin’s remarks, colleague Barbara Stanosz noted that even in the most respectable empirical sciences the method of modelling shares in the ‘sin of linguistics,’ which is to have recourse to ad hoc modifications and improvements, perhaps ad infinitum, of models that never surmounted ad hocery in the first place. The best model of language would be, for Stanosz, ‘the one that can explain the largest set of empirical facts.’4 But where would it come from? And moreover, why would it be judged with sole reference to empirical facts? Perhaps this tells us that model building is the sort of free activity undertaken without a user’s manual, while still circulating as vocational knowledge – perhaps technical lab or ‘bench’ work – imparted at the training level in a variety of disciplines, and subject only to the limits of imagination and materials, or the theorization of open-endedness. In an interdisciplinary area of study like communication, one would expect modelling to draw from a quite heterogeneous range of materials in its construction phase, at least engaging in a passive transversality – in a relationality that surmounts both horizontal and vertical divisions. This would render irrelevant fealty arguments based on disciplinary obligation. What is a model, anyway? This question is worth asking, because what a model is seems to be known to many. Discussions of modelling in science and in semiotics have produced impressive typologies and hierarchies, as well as simulations of the modelling process, but these sorts of accomplishments are not especially helpful for my purposes.5 Rather, the key question for understanding the nature of models is the relationship between modelling and the world (empirical data) within a given theoretical context, a matter that occupies all modellers. Social scientists typically say that the ordinary sense of modelling is representational.6 Are models representational if by this we mean that they are doubles of pre-existing phenomena? Or are their referents other models, which correctly implies the existence of many models, perhaps organized into groups, in some kind of relational competition or complementarity (hierarchies or levels) within a given theoretical or problem space? Undoubtedly there is both a representational and

Introduction 5

a differential-comparative dimension beyond and between models. Models are surrounded by a complex theoretical-discursive scaffolding that includes criticisms of them and the results they produce. On the one hand, models are imperfectly representational. Their simplicity makes them partial and limited. Some very abstract models like those of pure mathematics and pure theory are not descriptive in a literal sense of visual mirroring and may be used to advance certain kinds of claims without implying the existence of empirical data to ground them; in this case the model could be valued for the quality of contemplation it generates. Other models display varying kinds and degrees of similarity with real objects and processes, but the static visual and spatial dimensions of models convey weakly dynamic processes and only vaguely suggest what a fuller picture might look like through the partial connections with the features they present. Yet it is the visuality of models that makes them ‘stand out and serve as focal points . . . provoking further discussion.’7 But models are not solely visual. They are embedded in sprawling archipelagos of non-linguistic and linguistic materials, including theorems, descriptions (with supporting analogies), formulae, data, and a general vocabulary useful for the interpretation of a variety of phenomena. Models are in this respect complex explanations with multiple semiotics and territories: a cognitive domain that aids discovery and may be generally called heuristic; a pedagogical zone that serves as a guide for thought and exploration; a creative apron that helps inform imaginative extrapolations and build new hypotheses; an instantial patch that instantiates the axioms of a theory; a representational swath that bears upon the world in some designated manner, minimally or maximally, in matter or in mentality (immateriality), not to mention unconsolidated fringes where flux and flight take place.8 Models occupy a good deal of property, some of it ungraded and unzoned, just pure potential for development. Sometimes users are bewitched by diagrams alone and fail to mount an exploration, opting instead for a sedentary iteration of the same schema. Much modelling is no more than an exercise in redrawing. On the other hand, models are not obviously or exclusively representative of a real. Their axis of reference is primarily with other models that purport to model the same things. These other models may be arranged hierarchically such that higher models refer to lower ones, or one looks into the future ‘not to predictions about data, but to predictions about a model of possible data’ on the basis of high-level models.9 Models are, in this scenario, about other models and the data used to

6 Remodelling Communication

generate them. However, there may be isomorphism between models and thus their components are perfectly analogous. The important relation in this instance is between the model and the theory it satisfies and other models that do the same, only better, or worse, or equally, maybe just differently, and these differences may be themselves modelled, and the solutions to these differences projected in various ways. In between the two above views one finds a complex compromise position developed by semioticians interested in modelling. In a remarkably compact phrase, Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell state, ‘Models reek of iconicity.’10 This claim has quite interesting implications. It entails that models may be distinguished from representations: ‘ “Modeling” captures the complementation, the provisionality, the counterfeit involved in open-ended synergies. “Representing” by comparison conjures up a highly targeted, a priori, nonproblematic closed system.’11 Somewhere between determinate reference and its rejection stands this deployment of C.S. Peirce’s icon. For Peirce, icons were semiotic phenomena best described through likeness (mental photograph, diagram, analogy, image). ‘The Icon is the visual essence of model building,’ as C.W. Spinks writes.12 Peircean icons are linked not only to visuality but also to discovery, concept generation, and experimentation based on observation. There are two directions intimated here: models of existing things and models for things to be constructed or immaterial cognitive activities. However, the relation between the iconic sign and the object to which it bears a likeness or with which it shares some characters does not entail representation in the strict sense of validating the object’s existence. Indeed, icons do not provide a guarantee of the existence of the objects they resemble; they are strictly speaking hypothetical signs linked closely to possibility that generate concepts in the minds of those observing their qualities. Although icons are also subject to existential grounding (indexicality) and proof (symbols) they are loosened from the demands of a rigorous referentiality. Additionally, icons have an array of nuanced classes of semiotic relations. ‘We view models primarily as aids to thought which are especially appropriate in the study of communication,’ as Denis McQuail and Sven Windahl explain in the context of studying mass communication modelling.13 What makes visual models helpful in an ordinary sense is that they manifest the otherwise invisibility and non-visibility of many communicational processes. It is this kind of valuation of modelling as a productive heuristic that best characterizes the practice within mass

Introduction 7

communications. Simply put, models help define problems and give direction to the search for solutions to them. One doesn’t have recourse to them in moments of weakness when abstract thought fails or formal rigour slips into informal picture-thinking. There are, of course, much more sinister interpretations of this friendly modelling process. But before I get to them, I want to provide an overview of modelling for those who still may not be sure about the subject matter of this book. A precis on modelling is in order. While not exhaustive, and pitched at a general level, it is meant to flag the issues that will be dealt with in the chapters of this book. Provisionally, then, models are simplifications of something; not just any simplification, but valid simplifications – but that does not imply that they are all true. Models represent the thing(s), like ‘real’ natural and/or artificial systems, that they simplify. The ‘real’ system is framed and finite. Modelling is, as stated above, a form of representation. The thing/systems(s) that models represent are more complex than representational simplifications of them. Nonetheless, models strive for representational precision through the use of symbols, diagrams, and numbers. Models endeavour to represent at a pertinent scale, engaging appropriate space–time coordinates and, typically, accounting for observables and even non-observables. The search for pertinence in the name of precision may require models to integrate common features derived from mathematics or elsewhere in order to define relationships and use fundamental concepts borrowed from any number of disciplines. These borrowings make models generalizable to some degree. Models are productive – they do something – in the sense that they are designed to, or have structures that, generate data about the systems they represent, and they remain responsive to such systems. The relationship between models and the systems they represent is sometimes called the validity relation where validity encompasses replication of systemic data, predictive capacity, and structural correspondence with the system at issue. Models may be used to make predictions, explain things that have already happened, and be manipulated (i.e., by changing the parameters) so as to prescribe courses of action or at least make suggestions. So-called good models capture something essential or vital about their systems and do so in simple, clear ways, free (in some sense) of modeller peccadilloes. Models also have ethico-aesthetic qualities that may be appreciated in their degree of parsimoniousness and elegance or clunkiness. Simulations of real systems through models are undertaken when experimental study cannot work directly with such systems for ethical and

8 Remodelling Communication

economic reasons. Of course, simulations may not represent a pre-existent real at all but, in Jean Baudrillard’s famous phrase, a hyperreal that is ‘always already reproduced.’ Models are subject to categorization and subcategorization with reference to the temporality of their events and other time sensitivities, such as whether they account for memory, history, variables, and a relationship presupposed between the system and its context. Moreover, some models represent by direct material representations, others by greater abstractions such as symbolic and logical means, or they are analogically based on a theory where there is no ‘real’ system. Models may be simulated by computer programs. The realization of the instructions set out by the model in software introduces a third element and is sometimes known as the simulation relation. The system–model relationship is measured by multiple validities; the model–simulation relationship is understood through faithfulness and correctness of the programming. Thus, models are involved in triadic relations: system– model–simulation. But there is a fourth term as well, the modeller himself or herself, to which may be added a further fifth plus position: multiple users. In the elemental triadic relationship, however, the simulation may refer both to the ‘real’ system and the model (mathematical statements); that is, it may give instructions for a switch to turn on or off and make use of the equations that represented the ‘real’ system in its algorithms. The dramatic moment arrives when the primacy of reference to the ‘real’ system is broken. Nowadays, this is where the theoretical action is located. In some cases, there is no longer any need to refer to the ‘real’ system. Beyond representation, a simulation is the system it creates: the elemental triadic relation is reconfigured such that the simulation (computational) has little or no recourse to the ‘real’ system of observables but behaves according to the rules (and the new rules generated, as well as unexpected, emergent properties) of its own system by means of program language in silico: ‘The rule is the best possible model of the real thing, namely, the thing itself.’14 Not all simulations work this way, since they may be used to train people for ‘real’ system interventions or investigate ‘real’ work problems; in such instances fidelity to the ‘real’ system is important. Further, the previously triadic relation may shrink once again as the simulation as a non-representational computational system absorbs the model, or at least translates into computer code the statements of such a model conceived of mathematically. Of course, not all models are mathematical. Those that are may be digitized. The idea

Introduction 9

of a ‘mathematical model’ entails some measure of quantification and a large dose of formalization, if not rigour. As catastrophe theorist René Thom reminds us, the efficiency with which mathematical formulae may be applied rapidly declines, but not abruptly, beyond certain receptive disciplines such as physics, although even more shallow applications may be ‘scientifically’ productive, with a proviso: ‘As a general rule, more errors arise from the theory (or lack of it) that governs the building of a model, than the approximations coming out of a numerical treatment of the system.’15 Good models require sound theories, and there are limits to how far and how well both may travel. Not all of the debates on modelling are framed in such positivistic language. The idea that communication is modelled has suggested to Baudrillard that something significant has occurred to – that is, befallen – communication. It has passed into simulation like a soul into the shadow world. For Baudrillard, communication is generated by models, that is, it is ‘diffract[ed] from a generative core . . . according to modulated differences.’16 It is in this sense beyond representation and not merely different from it, because its only reference belongs to the core or cell from which everything issues in advance, such that the end is already written in the combinatorial possibilities contained in the code (finality is there at the beginning). Clearly, Baudrillard needs a few examples of this model, and he finds them in the pairing of semiotics (code from which value emanates and by means of which competence is defined) and genetics (DNA as prototype of every code), under the rubric that genetics provides a strategic command-code (for the ‘theologians of molecular transcendence’) for all non-genetic phenomena. If communication issues from models, it means that social relations are emptied of all content and simply refer back to the modulated differences orchestrated by simulation models (already reproduced). This is, for him, semio-genetic reductionism. The reign of the model is, for Baudrillard, nothing less than the total pre-elimination of genuine, metabolic exchange and communication with real stakes and consequences. Totally lacking its own determinations, then, communication enters simulation: ‘the model itself has become the only system of reference.’17 A much less dire version of models, but one with many of the same issues and relations raised by Baudrillard, has been developed by historians and philosophers of science to describe the partial independence of models from both theory and data. Mary S. Morgan and Margaret C. Morrison have presented an interpretation of models that places

10 Remodelling Communication

them in a double relation of partial dependence and independence with theory and the world. Models may both model theory and empirical relations by demonstration and allow future states to be forecast. Importantly, models can guide the applications of theories, provide evidence for testing other models, and direct interventions in the world (obviously, electrical diagrams are vitally important for electricians, but models of economic stability projected into the future are just as vital but differently for economists at the major banks, especially when interest rates are being set). Whereas Baudrillard’s extreme hypothesis is that models are simulations whose only referents are what they themselves generate, and hence they are closed off from the real, Morgan and Morrison think otherwise. For them, models mediate relations. The close links between simulation and modelling are not in doubt, especially in the age of computerization, as many models are simulated, which is to say, put to a test as to their adequacy and usefulness as instruments: ‘Simulations allow you to map the model predictions onto empirical level facts in a direct way.’18 Models, in this view, are ‘active agents’ but still within representation because they render something of the world. Simulations of models are, for Morrison and Morgan, bridges between abstract models and their ‘stylized facts’ and applied models in technological contexts with their ‘concrete facts.’ Baudrillard’s warning is, however, well taken. There is circularity inherent in Morrison and Morgan’s claims for models, since models appear to be both referents for new concepts and the tools that produced the new concepts in the first place, thus closing off their field of reference.19 The ‘mediating’ perspective permits models some autonomy without reifying them into the generative source of any ‘real’ that is always simulated in advance, and without hitching their fortunes to either theory or data as the sources from which they must be derived and, in turn, from which they acquire relevance. But if there is a common ground between Baudrillard and the mediating models perspective, it is that the focus of attention is on the implications of autonomy: models are not developed in response to specific data; indeed, models are sources of independent, ‘mediated’ scientific knowledge and in a sense are not beholden to the demands of representation, or at least provide no guarantee about how ‘realistic’ or ‘truthful’ they are; and these models are quasi-independent from theory in a specific, restricted sense (they are valuable even in the absence of an available theory that would inform them). They present their own worlds but may intervene, through the knowledge they produce, in both theory and experiment.20 They have

Introduction 11

the active agency to supplant representation. They are subordinate to neither theory nor data. Such models teach through the constraints they present. The knowledge they provide is not tied strictly to the requirement of an increasingly accurate representation, because they work with other kinds of assumptions (those that are too ideal to be rendered concrete; those that are not correctable; those that are not transferable, directly or indirectly, into action). The knowledge they deliver is quite specific and beyond what abstract theory could provide, what representation could guarantee, or experimentation could confirm or deny. The reticence of mediating models about the axes of theory and data suggest that they are a species of icons. They show a great deal but cannot guarantee the existence of what they show; other sign types are required for that. It is not that they fail at representation; rather, they are limited in their existential vouchsafing. One of Baudrillard’s favourite terms to describe the loosening of signs from referential anchors, or any categories without standards, is flotation.21 Mediating models don’t float in this way: they are not radically indeterminate and adrift, exchangeable against anything. They have some non-convertible features, yet their disconnection is not extreme. To borrow the conceptual vocabulary of French schizo-analyst Félix Guattari, such models have an element of a-signification when their mediation passes through neither representation nor empirical verification; that is, a-signifying signs trigger material and machinic operations without a third dimension of meaning or whatever lies on top of a pyramid of meaning.22 Guattari’s favourite example is from financial informatics (bank cards) where ‘meaning’ is unnecessary. By the same token, they have not become completely detached from theory or data, which they may on occasion invoke. Like a-signifying semiotics, mediating models are relatively autonomous and still make use of wellformed signifying semiologies when they are required to perform a ‘mediating’ function toward theory or data. Still, both share unique elements that are creative flights before representation, without losing themselves in a dizzy, Baudrillardian indeterminacy. They have slipped off the yoke of aspiring to greater and greater realism. There is also a healthy reticence about the capacity of a given model to attest to the reality of its referents and in addition to open all of its aspects to interminable corrections, becoming tied down to experimental confirmation. Such models are also extremely limited in the ability to serve as an instrument for real-world interventions, since they don’t bear directly on either relevant theory or the part of the world at issue.23

12 Remodelling Communication

Mediating models are displaced from theory and data, beginning with their construction. As hybrid forms, they are partially independent of theoretical and empirical determinations in as much as elements of them are imported from beyond the domain(s) that gave rise to them in the first place. Models are assemblages of heterogeneous components. They depend on imported parts, which may be modified in transit or on arrival – they are hacked or modified. The resulting models are not quite as extravagant and bizarre as Goldberg machines, however. They thrive on this interdependency between disciplines and domains, and possess a wily DIY element. These components are the building blocks from which model worlds are constructed and in terms of which local consistencies are established, stratifications are carved, and self-referentiality is unfurled. Further, Morrison and Morgan specify that ‘the crucial feature of partial independence is that models are not situated in the middle of an hierarchical structure between theory and the world.’24 Models are de-territorialized from occupying the middle ground in this bipolar axis so that new kinds of relations (and nonrelations) may be established with both poles, but not only with these somewhat massive pre-existing coordinates. This partial independence entails the capacity to mediate and deviate, to line up and swerve in obvious and non-obvious ways. If the distinct connections between the poles of the core axis become indistinct (i.e., models do not simply show their theories to be true), new connections may be forged with other unmarked points of reference along unedited vectors and in entirely novel universes. Models may also simply find new routes to the old poles by taking detours engendered by the worlds they develop. The models that get lost in their own mists deserve the name of ‘floating models,’ but not in Baudrillard’s sense. Baudrillard’s collapse of simulation and modelling into the code whose anterior finality is almost completely determinative, means that models are wedged into a theoretical corner – they can generate only simulacra of themselves. Mediating models may ‘float’ off-centre between theory and the world, but unlike ‘floating models’ that have gaps between the theory they cannot justify and the misfit between experimental results and their predictions,25 they are not suspended without effect. In other words, mediating models are not trapped by systemic redundancies that would have them positivistically abstract from the real only the essential, while discarding the inessential.26 Models are not in this respect reducible to distillations. The abstractive processes of modelling are more indeterminate, freer, and less controlled – partially independent – and they play with

Introduction 13

the backwash of the inessential. They draw or extract their components from any number of sources, or they redeploy what they ‘abstract’ from the redundant poles, crystallizing their components around new assemblages with new potentialities: they are remade and free-made. In communication models, the big components (source, encoder, signal, message, decoder, destination) that dominated the technical definition of the field (place-to-place as opposed to face-to-face) in the 1950s are the terms around which many models contract, and in this way they choke potential by fixing the contoured consistency of the assemblage and providing only new, restrictive dichotomies (signifying abstractions) as a field of potential exploration (interpersonal versus technical, or a little of both), rather than allowing for any other components to develop and take flight, to throw out new lines of flight and connect with an outside. Guattari’s theoretical move in this context was that ‘a vectorial field of processes of destratification is substituted for global hierarchies.’27 This is similarly the case with mediating models to the degree that they skirt theory-data hierarchies yet still connect with both, when necessary. We must be careful here, however, to avoid the temptation of simply replacing a model that admits some element of flutter into its otherwise linear, stable, and discernible parts for another model that admits an element of fixity into its non-linear, unstable, and perturbed parts. Sobriety is urged in the shifting into a new mode of conceptualizing modelling, because the internal structure of the modelling process may be maintained uncritically in substitution or replacement. Guattari can help us to understand the conditions and consequences of this de-stratification and how they bear upon modelling. The processes at issue all involve becoming improper, as it were: there are three vectors of escape from pre-existing coordinates: ‘unedited’ connections are put into play; ‘new realities’ are engendered; and signifying and representational relations, including iconicity, are skirted around.28 For Guattari, so-called theoretical entities called sign-particles (parts of signs without wholes) contract form–matter connections by skirting around substance (well-formed semiological substances, displacing the priority given to linguistic substance, but also exploding the concept of a unity of form/substance itself). Sign-particles are not even semiotic entities at all, just rogue matter-function pilots that connect, create, and elude by installing themselves in and among assemblages of components; Guattari postulates their existence in order to illustrate the problems of escaping from pre-existing coordinates, like semiotic bi-polarities (double articulation), the semiotic square, or semiological triangle.

14 Remodelling Communication

It is surprising how resilient these figures are. The triangle of meaning survives intact today.29 This is why Guattari preferred to describe sign-particles in terms of their diagrammatism as opposed to iconicity, because they were more de-semiologized and de-formed than icons that – even though they showed reserve toward their referential function in exhibiting in themselves the characteristics of their objects – still didn’t move very far from well-defined representational coordinates. And it is this conservatism that accurately describes the iconic value of mediating models. Diagrams are more elusive and less translatable, not so readily prone to capture by being taken up, turned into, or brought under the authority of codes. If we consider how this kind of approach is utilized within communication theory, the transition that is figured is from a model of communication to a model of viral transduction: this is especially pertinent when one considers, to use Hans Moravec’s felicitous expression, digital wildlife.30 Tony Sampson has produced a tangled, ‘anarchically scrambled’ remodelling of communication after Shannon and Weaver, in which the evolution of the relations within the network and human–machine assemblages change fundamentally the technical orderliness and efficient flows of the model. The digital network obeys neither the linearity of transmission nor veracity of code, and for this reason Sampson adds deceivers to senders and receivers in honour of the new types of noise that are expressive of the network and cannot be simply filtered out and the system ‘righted’: piracy, viruses, spam . . .31 The network is inseparable from deception: deceivers are cosubstantial with senders and receivers. In social theory today one of the most significant insights into technology is based on Paul Virilio’s perception of the relation between substance and accident. All technical objects generate accidents specific to them, and as technical objects become more widespread and interactive, accidents are generalized. Put philosophically, the relation between substance (necessary) and accident (relative) is reversed so that, following Virilio’s if-then clause, ‘if no substance can exist in the absence of an accident, then no technical object can be developed without in turn generating “its” specific accident.’32 The idea, then, is that accidents are not really aberrant; the blackout is inseparable from the electrical grid.33 Breakdown and malfunction are inseparable from the communication network. Deception is a dimension of reception. This insight informs my perspective throughout this book and entails regaining communicational accidents (not only noise but the various dysfunctions, disconnections, and excesses). Eventually, we will need to

Introduction 15

accustom ourselves to speaking less about ‘accidents’ and ‘aberration’ than about details or incidents that precipitate bifurcations, unforeseen connections, and the breakdown of stable reference points. For the moment, I want to think about the compromise of mediating models in terms of their quasi-independence. They are never radically de-territorialized and avoid the fetishism to which independence may give rise. The qualification quasi- renders their fetishism harmless, to use Max Black’s words.34 Since mediating models don’t float, they are anchored sufficiently by guy lines so as to avoid twisting in the winds of heuristic fictionality – another expression suggested by Black. However, they unfurl worlds (their universes of value) not unlike works of fiction. Such models unfurl vast discursive and non-discursive worlds of reference with multiple semiotics engaging both representational and non-representational processes across actual and virtual domains. The sections of such worlds are not equally accessible; some manifestations contain an inactual dimension that is pure potential and we glimpse only occasionally. Self-powered original and imaginative flights are not always incarnated in actual matter and they escape coordination of any type and elude capture by identification, roaming far from anything that might crystallize them. Sometimes this is visualizable; sometimes it cannot be localized and remains unknown. Sprawl is initiated by analogy. In practical terms, what sort of interpretive practices would an emphasis on a modest de-stratification entail? What can readers of communication models learn from this discussion? First of all, there is no need to jettison the history of communication modelling, but there is a need to rewrite its components and reinvent its structures – to rethink the ‘chain’ of communication. The first step is revisiting well-known models. Refocusing on the new worlds of reference that models present alerts us to the need to re-explore territories that are not confined to the seductions of visual materials alone, and the misdirections and miscalculations to which they give rise, but include vast arrays of supporting materials. What a model means is not reducible to the visual diagram, and the restrictive exploration of similarity, which features so prominently and deleteriously in communication studies as it is re-inscribed (in either simpler or more complex versions) and narrowly criticized. For instance, the ‘transmission’ model of Shannon and Weaver may be inflected in any number of ways by adding, in the manner of Juri Lotman, internal communication: a dimension of auto-communication (I-I as opposed to I-s/he model) of the mnemonic type that emphasizes

16 Remodelling Communication

receiving codes with a rhythmic basis rather than receiving messages.35 This inflection is not a radical de-stratification. The seductiveness of an overbearing iconicity will be resisted for the sake of the lesson of partial independence of icons from referents: no longer stuck on this point, we are free to explore their worlds of qualities, suburbs of explanations, and hybrid semiotic scaffolding, as well as offshoots and essential accidents. The vectorial field of de-stratification beckons as soon as we stop asking if communication models are true and instead focus on their autonomy and potential for providing valuable lessons by means of a rough passage between and beyond fixed coordinates. Paying attention to a-signifying sign-particles is not a matter of augmenting or tinkering or refining existing models. Guattari likened this sort of attention to the centrifugal flinging that emptied out semiological models so that the sign-particles could gain a foothold in the most decentred of spaces, and initiate experimentation. He might as well have been describing a careful taking hold of an object and gently shaking it until something comes loose or falls out – a detail that reveals what that object might do, opening a crack of potential for imagination, and probing fingers. Inspired by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, a number of contemporary media theorists have set themselves a post-representational task of considerable scope: to overcome the representation of media anomalies through categorization, metaphor, analogy, and static structuration, and instead forge a new dynamic, techno-materialist orientation that regains the anomalous object (spam, virus, etc.) from its banishment into the exclusionary domain of irregularity. Anomalous objects and events are expressive of their environments and they are not reducible to mere hindrances subject to filtering or correction; rather, such correctives like antivirus software assist in the coevolution of viruses and the networks in which they thrive. Thus the task is not to control but rather to diagrammatically map (not re-represent or trace but project) the becoming-other of communication, to follow its flows and connective energies and contaminations, asking how it works rather than defining what it reflects or verifies.36 Inspired by Virilio and Guattari, this orientation moves towards the mobilization rather than the inhibition of these forces and, in the process, resisting the temptation to restrict models to their typical segmentations and standard relations. It is not inappropriate to speak of a catalytic modelling moving towards breakdown as breakthrough into the post-representational domain of an exact communication. There are, in addition, abundant, consonant examples in philosophy

Introduction 17

of science of the post-representational strategy of rethinking models as productively ‘configurational’ of the kind of understanding generated through interactions with them.37 This book will pursue, then, some of the implications of the agency of modelling assemblages in communication theory. Overview of Chapters Chapter 1 restores and expands the contextual field of the mathematical model of communication published by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949. This restoration will be undertaken by questioning the socio-semiotic scenes of encoding and decoding found beyond the descriptions of the mathematical theory. My goal is to unearth some of the cultural content that has been hinted at but not fully excavated in communication theory by thinking culturally with Shannon and Weaver, with special attention to the latter’s contribution, despite a tendency to erase him altogether by the scientific habit of listing main author first and then attributing authorship only to the first on the list. I begin with a displacement of hierarchy and authority. Let’s think of a Weaver and Shannon model. Weaver’s task was to communicate about the mathematical model in non-technical terms. He was assigned this task by the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and didn’t realize, by his own admission, was he was getting into, yet he managed to produce several versions of this explanatory text as well as theorize about popular scientific writing.38 The technology that interests me is telegraphy, and this concern both unfixes the scholarly preoccupation with telephony under the sign of Bell, and foregrounds the service environment of the telegram office. In short, the general communication model proposed by Weaver and Shannon was most readily explicable in a specific nineteenth-century technology. Weaver asked his readers to look backwards in order to grasp it. To regain the much-studied model, it will be brought into contact with the socio-semiotic and technological scenes in which it was embedded, slipping past its well-formed mathematical expression. My restoration is not a rehearsal. The Weaver and Shannon model enjoys the status of a ‘mandatory stopover’ and ‘founding reference,’ as Armand and Michèle Mattelart put it,39 for all socio-culturally minded readers in communication studies. It is this status itself that has proved problematic, because it has resulted in a certain kind of inability to tarry befalling enthusiasts and critics alike – an impatience that is evident in

18 Remodelling Communication

the abundant summaries of the model’s key components, as they were graphically represented, available in the literature, and the widespread desire to show its limitations (a linear model adequate only for communication engineers).40 My strategy is not to uncritically revalorize the mathematical theory and to point backwards to the circular and feedback models that came in its wake; likewise, I do not want to deny the negative influence of the mathematical model’s legacy of presenting communication as one-directional, based on shaky behavioural postulates (stimulus-response), and a ‘totally inadequate grid to apply to the human communicational situation,’ as Anthony Wilden has stated with definitive intent.41 Morrison’s position on modelling may be described as instrumental in the sense that the measure of a model is best seen in how it helps solve practical problems in knowledge production – ‘the proof is in the use.’ This is easily appreciated in engineering models, like the one advanced by Weaver and Shannon, which wants to perform rather than provide ontological insight into communication as such. Morrison’s pragmatic perspective is helpful, because it alerts us to the necessity of attaching the performance of models to technological considerations ‘about what we want to do and what kinds of instruments we have at our disposal that drives the choice of the model.’42 This is why getting at the telegraphy technology that enabled Weaver to define communication in a certain manner, as well as generate narratives about the accomplishment, is significant for understanding modelling in communication. It releases us from rehearsing once again why the linear, compartmental model proposed by Weaver and Shannon doesn’t correspond to today’s – or even yesterday’s – communicational networks of the world. Of course, the restoration of context has more general issues with which to deal. Such a restoration itself calls for a wider perspective. For a cultural reader, it is that communication theory and cultural studies were both war babies. The papers of the late 1940s written by Norbert Wiener,43 the father of cybernetics, are indelibly stamped by his wartime work. It was work on a war project with Julian Bigelow that pushed the theory of prediction in the direction of the integration of feedback, for the question upon which Wiener and Bigelow were working was posed by nothing less than anti-aircraft artillery – in other words, a classic question of control and communication between the theory of curvilinear prediction of aircraft position and how the human gunner points artillery. How does one get feedback into this human–machine system to close the gap between the pattern that a motion follows and how

Introduction 19

it is actually performed? In short, feedback links output to input, and the gap is closed by introducing new input into the system so that the actual performance is brought into a closer relation with the pattern. Wiener admits that cybernetics would have been unthinkable without his wartime work. Much later there arose the need for a cyborgology, later transferred to the cultural domain, based literally in war and computing; this has been accompanied by a steady stream of warnings about the military origins of the term. If there is a spectre haunting cyborgology, it is war. Donna Haraway often reminds her readers of this, even though her figural cyborgs exceeded their origins.44 Cultural studies is also a war baby. This is not an idle fancy, the illusion of which is created through my creative juxtaposition of cybernetics and cultural studies against the communication model. One of many things to be gleaned from a close reading of Fred Inglis’s intellectual biography of Raymond Williams is the connection between the latter’s war service and activities and his cultural-theoretical interests. What makes Inglis’s account so interesting is found beyond the inherited wisdom – what he dubs ‘Guards Officer.’45 He situates the activist intellectual, the aristocratic radical if you will, Edward Thompson, in the same milieu, widening the potential scope of the inquiry, so that one can place Thompson and Williams in extramural education, the Communist Party, and the burgeoning magazine/journal/publishing culture of the left, and as fellow officers of the British civilian army in the Second World War. One of the things that Williams learned in Cadet School of the Royal Artillery was bracketing how to calculate and call down artillery fire on points in a landscape in the foreground from one’s position from guns placed in background positions – a cybernetic-communication problem that could be calculated geometrically. However, what distinguishes Williams’s experience in the 21st Anti-Tank Regiment is not so much his cybernetic lessons learned in the course of victory, which I do not want to diminish, but his editorship of the regimental newspaper Twentyone, whose existence resulted from the capture of a printing press in the spring of 1945. As Inglis describes it, Twentyone was somewhere between the Cambridge University Journal and that much-lamented Labour paper, the Daily Herald. Williams served as both editor and writer, producing many pieces under various pseudonyms. Marked by idealism and innocence, as Inglis puts it, the political views expressed by Williams were a kind of discourse on freedom and an absolute condemnation of fascism.46 It seems fairly obvious that it wasn’t the Cold War that was on Williams’s mind. Rather,

20 Remodelling Communication

biography and journalism dovetail with post-war history in the lives of both Williams and Thompson, and this is the juncture at which a certain cultural studies is announced alongside the advent of total peace. The summer of 1945 saw the landslide victory of Labour, which Williams enthusiastically announced and covered in Twentyone, and the reality of the total peace that would be waged by the welfare state outlined by Sir William Henry Beveridge in his report on security dating from 1942. As French urbanist Paul Virilio underlines, the freedom at stake in the Beveridge report entailed transcending the freedom from want that Roosevelt counted among his four freedoms in the New Deal of the same period. Virilio writes, ‘That which some enthusiastically call freedom from want is in fact exactly the opposite, since it is now only the state which, in the words of Beveridge, will be qualified to make the diagnosis of want for the well-being of the citizen. This was a system of society, the welfare state, which was already an objective of war, a warfare state or war pursued by other means.’ To sing the praises of freedom in the context of a crippled capitalist democracy still upholding the unattainable goal of freedom is to readily embrace a compromise: at least Labour won the election, even if the free individual, as Virilio continues, ‘is no longer properly spoken of as a citizen; he is an anonymous organism in a limited situation, since the law sees to the minimal satisfaction of need.’47 The welfare state appears as the unassailable sender communicating messages of survival in the forms of assistance and guarantees; failure to receive would be, as Virilio suggests, death: ‘Non-assistance [is] a condemnation to death.’48 Virilio’s reading is too inflexible to permit a range of decodings; his position also lacks the sociological nuances that gave rise to the work of the Birmingham tradition of cultural studies. The connection between communication and cultural studies in which Weaver and Shannon are caught up will not be sustained only by war, despite the ingenuity of scholars like Friedrich Kittler who continue to draw creative lines between Shannon and others, for example, with Alan Turing’s invention of the vocoder to encrypt the wartime conversations of Churchill and Roosevelt, and the masterful recordings of musical performance artist Laurie Anderson in the late 1970s and 1980s featuring the vocoder (‘Big science, hallelujah’!).49 There are archaeologies and politics attached to the mathematical model, even if these are shed like second skins as they are taken up by communication theorists. It is vitally important to hold together the technical and social-semiotic. Recall David Holloway’s study of how cybernetics – ‘the science of

Introduction 21

optimal control of complex dynamic systems’ – within a contested field, emerged as a model of government in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and 1960s, because it ‘matches, in certain important structural respects, the view of policy-making held by the state and party bureaucracies.’50 In short, it informed bureaucrats about how to command and control the kind of complex technological, economic, and social changes that got underway in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Within Soviet cyberspeak, computers were known popularly as ‘machines of communism’ – good for weaponry, large civilian economies, and political planning, too.51 Ultimately, post-war ideology and socio-semiosis in a service environment with an outdated technology align to restore the content for my Weaver-centric examination of the mathematical model of communication. The question of war as it concerns Weaver concerns his participation in the Cold War propaganda effort of the United States under the banner of atomic science. The investigation of a model’s autonomy requires one to ask which models are grouped together, which ones are excluded, and why – therein asking after grammars of acceptance and exclusion. The second chapter turns to one of the most influential papers in the cultural studies tradition, Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ originally published in 1973. It is largely fruitless to look for evidence of Hall’s influence on how communication is modelled in the study of mass communication and television studies, which were Hall’s key interests at the time. His simple, almost skeletal model of televisual communication (and lacking a bottom half), and his innovative and dynamic interpretation of decoding are not included in catalogues of models such as Communication Models for the Study of Mass Communications by McQuail and Windahl, despite the fact that Hall critically interrogates one of the main features of sociological mass communication models, that is, the mirror of basic features between sender and receiver (i.e., as evident in the work of John W. Riley and Mathilda White Riley in the late 1950s, as well as G. Maletzke in the early 1960s).52 Hall also flagged his familiarity with many of the main buzzwords of mass communication research, but made sure to put them in scare quotes – ‘need,’ ‘use,’ ‘effect,’ and ‘gratification’; these were for him all ‘typical processes identified in positivistic research.’53 It is notable that, in listing these features in order to reject them, Hall remains aligned with the main focus of this strain of modelling centred on so-called active audiences, even if the approach simultaneously constrained such activity by functionalistic postulates (consuming certain content fulfils audience needs) and an

22 Remodelling Communication

effects orientation beyond need (‘choice’ of content is a far cry from Hall’s globally oppositional act of decoding).54 There was an unequal exchange between Hall and mass communications theorists. This is one of the legacies of cultural studies – its politics of knowledge, if you like. Cultural studies once enjoyed the status of an outsider before it managed to sneak into the English Department at the University of Birmingham through the back door, around 1963, courtesy of the pioneering efforts of Richard Hoggart. Cultural studies enjoyed the freedom of an engaged interdisciplinarity that prevented it, once on the inside, from being subsumed or disciplined by English as well as saving it from the temptation to restrict its field of inquiry. Cultural studies was able to deviate from the canon and focus its attention on lived cultures, combining ethnography and cultural Marxism, while taking up the easily debased popular and present – a debasement founded on the assertion of a false conflation of the study and its objects, making cultural studies, for its enemies, as lowbrow and massified as some elements of the culture with which it concerned itself. This was a textbook example of the erroneous, but oft-deployed conservative strategy of collapsing a study and its object in order to irredeemably stain the former. Moreover, this study of contemporary culture didn’t look anything like ‘proper’ sociology (structural-functionalist), and it triggered a blistering attack from the empirically minded watchmen of the discipline, especially when the classic texts of the sociological tradition began to be plundered for hidden gems adaptable to the tasks at hand. Sociology’s initial resistance to cultural studies and its imposition of tool-like research methods against epistemological investigations seems so distant from the milder but not so open current climate – better late than never – and even the hyperbolic celebration of cultural studies as a panacea, a form of renewal, a great opportunity, the study that goes anywhere with an ampersand before or behind it, etc.55 The literary-flavoured, loose sociology practised by members of the Centre for Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham broke with the theoretically impoverished structural-functionalism (blind to its own ideology and contingency) that dominated British sociology, and it appropriated sociological tradition from the inside. Referring to Hoggart’s inaugural lecture, even with its compromises and conservatism, Hall continued that it ‘triggered off a blistering attack specially from sociology, which, while not concerned with such issues [neglected materials drawn from pop culture] reserved proprietary claim over the territory. For example, the opening of the Centre was greeted by a letter from two

Introduction 23

social scientists who issued a sort of warning: if Cultural Studies overstepped its proper limits and took on the study of contemporary society (not just its texts), without proper scientific (that is quasi-scientific) controls, it would provoke reprisals for illegitimately crossing the territorial boundary.’56 Sociological countermeasures, to extend the war metaphor, initially and for some time proved futile against incursions and eventually faded out. There is much to be learned from this episode. Disciplinary territorialization and re-territorialization limit or defer mutuality and translatability. They limit the transversality of models (openness to connections) that are grounded in mass communication, reducing the richness of their clustering and cataloguing for comparative study and component development; but there are important exceptions to this tendency in the work of John Fiske, who has grasped that communication is intimately involved with cultural studies. Hall’s work is complex in its use of semiological and anti-semiological as well as Marxian and anti-positivist social scientific knowledges. Its theoretical polyvocity is legendary. But it looks like communication modelling at a superficial level and this undoubtedly helped it to circulate, with the aforementioned restrictions, even while it criticized those from whom it borrowed. There is also an unsavoury backwash of the need to borrow and poach in cultural studies: a lack of attention to the model’s unactualized worlds, a residual indifference that is carried back from the exploratory expeditions into proper disciplines (i.e., sociological indifference to textuality). I am not suggesting a fetishism of icons. Rather, the neglect I am suggesting is evident in some reproductions of Hall’s work. What interests me in this chapter are Hall’s own reflections on his modelling exercise and what may be learned from them. Chapter 3 takes up linguist Roman Jakobson’s model of communicative functions that he developed within the context of the study of poetics. In my treatment of Weaver and Shannon I orient the model towards the contextual-referential conditions of telegraphy and how it served post-war ideology. The orientation that Jakobson brings to communication moves in the opposite direction. His alignment of the message with the poetic function places ‘referentiality’ inside the textual. This move creates tension between the textual and the referential, or between poetry and prose. This tension is positive and does not result in a total indifference to the referent. While Jakobson did distinguish between poetry and prose on the basis of the former’s focus on the sign and the latter’s interest in reference, poetic devices such as tropes were – and it

24 Remodelling Communication

is worth noting the care with which he made this claim – ‘mainly’ poetic devices and, further, their study would be ‘directed chiefly toward metaphor.’57 What Jakobson includes is the study of poetic devices in prose. The poetic is, as Richard Bradford put it, a kind of ‘monkeywrench’ in language’s reliance upon extra-textual contexts in support of the sharing of meaning.58 The poetic function bends back on the text and its encoding, yet even when it does this it is never really done with referentiality. The poetic may play at or with reference through ambiguation, yet in the communicational situation context-dependency is never far away: ‘In all types of poetic writing we encounter a complex network of tension between the constituent parts of the communicative process – sound and meaning, paradigm and syntagm – and this set of uneasy relationships will involve a shift either towards the controlling presence of the encoder or towards the extratextual context shared by encoder and decoder.’59 This positive tension is the key feature of the cohabitation of the poetic and referential functions, what Bradford calls the ‘interface’ of metaphor and metonymy, or the joint metalinguistic reflection on the code to which encoder and decoder may have recourse in order to tame the poetic’s flights. I have two goals in reading Jakobson’s poetic model of communication. The first is to discover the refrain of paronomasia in his work on the poetic function and gain from this the ability to appreciate the textuality of non-poetic language. The second is reached by acknowledging that emphasis on one of the given six functions will yield a different sense of communication, breaking out a function draws a line of creative flight. I will focus my attention on the phatic function attached to the factor of contact between addresser and addressee in Jakobson’s modelling of verbal communication. I will treat it as a sign-particle and detach it from the other functions in order to pursue its circulation across the domains of cultural and media studies. Impetus for this strategy comes from Baudrillard’s critique of Jakobson’s model of communication based on the vicissitudes of this function, a matter I explain in detail in chapter 4. In this respect chapters 3 and 4 constitute a unit, with chapter 5 serving as a line of flight. Chapter 5 tracks the expanded field of contact across cultural and media studies and the increasingly ‘dysfunctional’ consequences of holding open the channel. The phatic function may be dysfunctional, but it is also extremely productive in the cultural field, as my reflections on the horror film genre will suggest. The destiny of the phatic function is this exploration

Introduction 25

of dysfunction as a breakthrough. One valuable lesson is that the medium is no longer the message but, rather, the passage is the message. The phatic dysfunction is a catalytic sign-particle renovating ‘contact’ as a vibrant relationality. As Brian Massumi explains, relationality is linked with excess: ‘Relationality is the potential for singular effects of qualitative change to occur in excess over or as a supplement to objective interactions.’60 And excess is primary, singular, a unique event, and stubbornly so. Excess is the realm of potentiality, of the virtual. Holding open the channel beyond the vagaries of the digital (perfunctory tele-phasis), about which Baudrillard was rightly critical, makes room for phatic transductions of energies and flows not reducible to their actualization. Holding open induces more and more passages. To describe this as virtual with its excess of potentiality retrieves something vital from Jakobson that I will excavate in chapter 3 by means of the poetic: something happens before its takes place. In developing his sense of the phatic, Jakobson turns to a final example, which echoes his examples of the poetic: ‘It is also the first verbal function acquired by infants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication.’61 Infants enter into communication before producing (sending or receiving) well-formed semiotic substances. This makes the phatic autonomous from position (as sender or receiver of well-formed messages): passage precedes position. It resists form and closure in the code-saturated message. Springboarding from the discussion of the poetic function at the end of chapter 3, and more fully in chapter 5, I will show how this reading of affect as virtuality challenges communication as a modelling of confinement and capture, a retrospective application of rules inherited from other codes. From dysfunction to escape: no more automatic isolation, separation, depotentialization of communication by a model. Chapter 6 looks in detail at Umberto Eco’s semiotic modelling of communication within multiple contexts, first as part of his theoretical trajectory as a philosopher of the limits of interpretation and the openness of texts, and how freedom of reading is at once maintained and constrained. It is specifically the idea of aberrant decoding developed by Eco and its reworking in the writings of John Fiske in terms of cultural dynamics – intergenerational and even inter-millennial semiotic strife – that frames this chapter. The transit in Eco from aberrant decoding to the guerrilla decoder’s tactics of resignification will be studied in detail for what they intimate about the freedom of counter-global decoding. Although a guerrilla decoder is most definitely in Eco’s

26 Remodelling Communication

semiotics not an empirical, sociological figure, she or he does not act alone but, as the name suggests, may be at least figuratively situated in a social assemblage, a small band. A guerrilla decoder is not a rogue reader running a lonely, aberrant line (still, in Eco, aberration is counterhegemonic in the sense that it betrays the sender’s pre-ferred meaning). Rather, this socio-semiotic appreciation of the figure assists in rendering two points about communication: communication is perfused with power relations, and all coding is social. As Hall once noted on the point of having power running through the ‘circuits’ of his model, the idea of perfect communication and the transparency of messages is pure hegemony – what Baudrillard would call the ‘perfect crime’ lacking any uncertainty, otherness, and conflictuality62 – whereas the counterhegemonic decoding positions placed receivers in some kind of communities or social constituencies in which ‘pre-ferences’ were called into question and refashioned. It should be noted that Eco, too, in both naming the elementary engineering of information model of communication that he elaborated in A Theory of Semiotics the ‘Watergate Model,’ and later criticizing its assumptions ‘as being rather summary,’63 slyly mocks its pretensions and politics with the Nixon label. The larger context of reading Eco and Fiske together with Hall is to witness one example of the insertion of cultural studies into a communicational matrix. Put simply, the cultural turn in communication modelling turned from reflection to refraction and deflection as far as decoding is concerned. Although there are limits to this turn, which often pursues its findings passively and settles for coping strategies instead of breakthroughs, there is nonetheless in this cracking open of the communication model an invaluable effort at questioning what a receiver can do. Recently, the displacement of television by interconnected new media as the matrix of communication has rewritten the assumptions about how one of the central binaries of communicational thought – sender and receiver – is discussed. Instead of thinking about counterhegemonic interpretations, contemporary media theorists like Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi analyse the asymmetrical, non-standard formatting between digital transmitters and organic receivers as an unequal evolution that has pathological effects. Under these conditions, ‘communication becomes an asymmetrical, disturbed process’64 because of the overwhelming quantity and speed of transmission and the need for artificial psychopharmacological supports against permanent electrocution, panic, depression, and other breakdowns (not breakthroughs) related to competition and capitalist exploitation. This is the fate of the

Introduction 27

cognitariat – cognitive labour or brain workers – whose livelihood requires them to be permanently plugged into the digital nervous system, but recompensed only for the occasional services demanded of them. Chapter 7 envisions a somewhat surrealistic contrast between two wildly disparate thinkers in order to fulfil the book’s trajectory from representation to post-representational modelling. The 1950s and early 1960s were periods during which general models of communication were advanced and discussed. Drawing upon key examples from these periods, I trace the trajectory from the general model to the meta-model, that is, from George Gerbner to Félix Guattari, from the annals of social science transmission theory to the critique of generality itself in an era of auto-modelling and suspicion about communication as such. This juxtaposition of divergent approaches is instructive in exposing the persistence of modelling as a critical practice expressed by thinking through diagrams that are representational and post-representational. The drive for a unified theory has, over time, been displaced, superseded by a respect for singularities out of which a common may be made. General modelling is for Gerbner, writing in 1956, the best way to address the fact that, as he puts it, ‘the field of communication study is having communication troubles.’65 The creation of a general model would not only account for both technical and valuative dimensions of communication, but also move communication studies along the path to becoming a science. His approach begins in an almost entirely analogical way, since the predicament of model building for communication theorists is shared by theoretical physicists. The problem of ‘borrowing’ models and how communications phenomena of interest would be ‘mapped’ onto such importations was in the air in the mid-fifties as communication thinkers grappled with the influence of information theory, not to mention the existing initiatives of Lasswell and Schramm. What Gerbner sought from physics was a vision of model building that, despite criticisms of its aridity and abstruseness to the contrary, did grapple with the real (at least experimental results), was understandable in how every model combined to further insight into the structure of the phenomenon at issue, and could be rendered graphically. Metamodelling operations – not to be confused with higher-order or general modelling – introduce movement, multiplicity, and transformation into models. Metamodelling de-links modelling with both its representational foundation and its mimetic reproduction. It softens signification by admitting a-signifying forces into a model’s territory; that is, the centrality and stability of meaningfulness is displaced for

28 Remodelling Communication

the sake of singularity’s unpredictability and indistinctness. What was hitherto inaccessible is given room to manifest and project itself into new and creative ways and combinations. Metamodelling is in these respects much more precarious than modelling, less and less attached to homogeneity, standard identities, and the blinkers of apprehension. Metamodels criticize existing models without remodelling, without recapitulating the general. And in eschewing the general, the standard, the universal, and the normative pattern, singularity is embraced. As Janell Watson has observed of Guattari’s concept of metamodelling, ‘To build new models is to build a new subjectivity . . . Productive metamodeling liberates subjectivities from normalizing models.’66 Normalization was normopathic for Guattari. In concert with Michel Foucault, Guattari found the normalizing gaze to be coercive and disciplinary in making individuals visible in order to compare and contrast them; position them in relation to rules; hierarchize abilities; induce conformity; and find the limit between the normal and abnormal.67 Metamodels therefore proliferate, generate, deviate, and creatively project new reference points for auto-management. How Guattari helps us to diagram communication is the goal of this final chapter.

1 Regaining Weaver and Shannon

The account I will present in these pages runs against the received wisdom of communication theory today. There are two parts of this so-called wisdom: first, the mathematical model of communication developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver1 in the Bell Labs should be transcended because it is misleading; second, it can be simply ignored. If these seem like exaggerations, think again. The first claim is a standard of Marxian scholarship on communication that stretches forward from the pioneering work of Dallas Smythe and is rehearsed again and again in the literature: the ‘transportation’ or ‘transmission’ model, as Shannon and Weaver’s study became known in a kind of shorthand (even by anti-Marxists, as we will see shortly in the case of Marshall McLuhan), is claimed to be misleading because it both reproduces hierarchical capitalist administrative relations and misconstrues messages as displaceable goods rather than as exchanges (consequences of which may be pursued in dialectical terms).2 A good example of the second claim at play is in Paul Cobley’s otherwise excellent The Communication Theory Reader,3 in which no mention is made of Shannon and Weaver or of cybernetic research, a fairly common crucible of communication studies. Rather, Cobley takes key texts in structuralism and post-structuralism as his starting points, beginning with C.S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, and moving forward in search of the theoretical lives of signs in linguistic, philosophical, and literary traditions. Cobley’s point of entry is the thematic emphasis on signification (rather than signaletics). All too conveniently, Shannon and Weaver’s work is erased. Signaletics is once again treated like a poor semiotic cousin. By the time I reach the final chapter of this book, I hope to convince the reader that signals are not only salvageable

Figure 1: Transmission of information (after Shannon and Weaver)

Observer

Information Source

Transmitter

Receiver Signal

Received Signal

Message

Noise Source

Correction Device

Destination

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 31

but constitute a viable techno-materialist principle of continuity from Gerbner to Guattari. My claim is that communication considered from the standpoint of how it is modelled must not only reckon with Shannon and Weaver but also regain their pioneering efforts in a new way. In this I am refusing to rehearse well-known criticisms that would leave Shannon and Weaver behind for the sake of a critical communication and cultural studies, whether it is explained in terms of signification, media, political ecology, or poetics. The notion that Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical model is far removed from the concerns of semiotics and cultural studies is misleading and needs to be debunked. The only way forward toward understanding communication modelling under the sway of cultural theory is by a productive return to the mathematical model. What I am regaining is a new perspective on an old problem. The recontextualization of Shannon and Weaver requires an investigation of the techno-cultural scene of information ‘handling’ embedded in their groundbreaking efforts; not incidentally, it was Harold D. Lasswell, whose work in the 1940s is often linked with Shannon and Weaver’s, who made a point of distinguishing between those who affect the content of messages (controllers) as opposed to those who handle without modifying (other than accidentally) such messages. Although it will not be possible to maintain such a hard and fast distinction that ignores scenes of encoding and decoding, Lasswell’s examples of handlers include key figures such as ‘dispatchers, linemen, and messengers connected with telegraphic communication’4 whose activities will prove to be important for my reading of the Shannon and Weaver essays. Telegraphy and its occupational cultures are the techno-social scenes informing the Shannon and Weaver model. The Mathematical Model of Communication Revisited The celebrated Shannon and Weaver model of communication was described in two essays dating from 1948 and 1949: Weaver’s ‘Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication’ and Shannon’s ‘The Mathematical Theory of Communication.’ Shannon’s work was undertaken in the laboratories of Bell Telephone and was originally published in the Bell System Technical Journal.5 These two essays are classics of information and communication theory and, even though it is Norbert Wiener who is mentioned most often in connection with the development of statistical communication theory and

32 Remodelling Communication

cybernetics, Wiener credits Shannon with generating his own interest in the field. He can be, however, less generous and probably more accurate in noting that the engineering approach to communication based on statistical theory was an ‘idea [that] occurred at about the same time to several writers.’6 It is not unreasonable to think of this discovery in terms of simultaneity and complementarity. Scholars in information theory with an interest in the work of both Shannon and Wiener separate them on the basis of the two concepts that will play a large role in this chapter as well as those that follow: encoding and decoding. Robert Ash, for instance, writes, The Shannon formulation differs from the Wiener approach in the nature of the transmitted signal and in the type of decision made at the receiver. In the Shannon model, a randomly generated message produced by an information source is encoded, that is, each possible message that the source can produce is associated with a signal belonging to a specified set. It is the encoded message that is actually transmitted. When the output is received, a decoding operation is performed, that is, a decision is made as to the identity of the particular signal transmitted. In the Wiener model, a random signal is to be communicated directly through the channel; the encoding step is absent. The decoder in this case operates on the received signal to produce an estimate of some property of the input. In general, the basic objective is to design a decoder that makes the best estimate.7

Of course, there are other significant differences and similarities (how the channel is modelled, for instance, and the scale adopted for addition and multiplication – two rather than ten – which Wiener borrowed from the Bell labs) between the Shannon and Wiener models, but they do not concern us here. It is worth noting, however, that the production of an identity between encoded and decoded messages remains the fundamental problem in communication, no matter if we are considering signal accuracies or the asymmetry (non-identity) between meaning structures at either end of the model. While it may seem a long step from this ‘low threshold’ of semiotic theory – as Umberto Eco8 refers to informational-engineering problems of communication – to Stuart Hall’s political culture of communication, in which many of the theoretical traditions he had assimilated were brought to bear on the problem of decoding, the elementary categories do not change. However, Shannon’s inclusion of an encoding step, and the need to follow up on it but in reverse at the decoding phase, tells us that the mathematical

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 33

model is at the very least labour intensive. Roman Jakobson, it may be noted if only in passing, took great care in exploring the many points of contact between information and communication theory while respecting their respective autonomy. He points out, for instance, that the same issue of meaning had bedevilled communication theory and linguistics, until both finally overcame their mutual tendency to exclude it and set about tackling its relation to context.9 In this chapter, the focus is on the problems outlined in Weaver’s paper, with occasional references to Shannon. The reason for this is simple. It is the commentary on general problems rather than the mathematical expression of the model itself that provides the backdrop against which subsequent deployments of it in a variety of cultural domains (poetics, television, commercial communication, etc.) may be best appreciated. Weaver approaches communication in a most general way in a broad statement about minds affecting other minds by various technical procedures. For Weaver, communication poses problems at three levels: technical, concerning the accuracy of transmitting a finite set of symbols conceived as an engineering problem (accuracy); semantic, a concern with the precise conveyance of meaning, posing the problem of identity between intended and received meaning (philosophical problem); and effectiveness, i.e., does the received meaning have the desired effect on the decoder, influencing his or her conduct (again, another philosophical issue, but one obviously not far from marketing)? It is to the first level that Weaver directs his attention. At the level of technical communication, the two-terminal model presents an information source from which issues a message to a transmitter that sends a signal through a channel, subject to a certain amount of noise. The signal is received by a receiver, which delivers the message to its final destination. Ultimately, my interest will fall on the receiver’s decoding practices, rather than the transmitter’s encoding of a signal into a message. Weaver’s model presents both problems, because it doubles the efforts of communication at both poles. The information source, to begin with, involves the selection of a message out of a set of possible messages (the message may consist of words, pictures, music, etc.). The transmitter changes or translates the message into a signal; the signal is sent through a communication channel from the transmitter to the receiver. On the encoding side, messages are selected, translated, and then transmitted. The process is threefold. The media referent for the model is Morse telegraphy, involving the selection of a message consisting of written words and its translation

34 Remodelling Communication

into a series of dots, dashes, and spaces. The receiver on the decoding side must share this code, and it functions, as Weaver puts it, as an ‘inverse transmitter.’10 Sometimes, noise gets into the transmission. It is thought to be unwanted and distorting, adding or subtracting from the signal, thereby creating uncertainty about the message. Noise does not have a value independent from the signal it affects; hence it is part of a ratio. As for the message itself, the transmitter encodes it from an information source. Despite the technical nature of the representation, the interpersonal drama of the situation is fairly obvious: a message is delivered to an operator who then translates it into a shared technical code (the alphabet translated in Morse telegraphy using a telegraph machine) for mechanical transmission, but what comes through at the other end (either recorded on paper or heard by the operator) needs to be converted (sometimes written out in longhand or attached to another piece of paper) and delivered (sometimes by messengers to the homes or offices of off-site recipients). The prose style was known as telegraphese, a terse, clipped English for the most part written in longhand, but pared down to its essentials. This is a subcode within the encoding operation that Weaver neglects to mention, upon which may be grafted other subcodes (ciphers and private codes) and other decodable features of the communication scenario that consists of complex human–machine assemblages distributed in a non-uniform manner over space and time. The other two levels raise semantic issues and call for the invention, in Weaver’s estimation, of a semantic receiver that is interposed between the engineering receiver (changing signals back into messages) and the destination.11 There is implicit in this communication a chain of command that will become clear in a moment. The addition of a second decoding has the goal of ‘match[ing] the statistical semantic characteristics of the message to the statistical semantic capabilities of the totality of receivers, or of that subset of receivers that constitute the audience one wishes to affect.’12 Implied here is the need for sensitivity to small groups of receivers, but in the language of matching statistically the characteristics of messages with the capacities of audiences. The idea of capacity is particularly rich13 and relevant to the lecturer: it works on the analogy of crowding too much information over a channel since, no matter how efficient and clean the encoding, it is still possible to both overwhelm the channel and overburden the audience’s capacity to receive the message, or what remains of it. Overstimulating the audience will also produce error and confusion. Of course, this is

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 35

conceived of statistically. Capacity often pertains only to the channel as a piece of technical equipment defined mathematically and not at all to a specific scene of cultural communication (lecture) or message content. As Colin Cherry develops the concept, information capacity is Shannon’s great expression of a maximum that gathers the features of time, bandwidth, and signal power, with the addition of a noise rate. I concur with Cherry that ‘perhaps the most important technical development which has assisted in the birth of communication theory is that of telegraphy,’14 but there is more going on in this admission than technical description. Information theoretical models of communication were little concerned with meaning and not at all with individual messages, being instead most concerned with the statistical characteristics of messages. To put it bluntly, information is not meaning: engineering triumphs over semantics. What could be said is more interesting than what is said because the analysis of informational units called bits, the selection and combination of which is subject to degrees of freedom and constraint, is described by a logarithm (x is the logarithm of y to the base m) beginning with the base m = 2; to the power of x or the number of alternatives, which tells you the number of bits of information, equals y (if the base is 2 and the alternatives are 16, then there are 4 bits of information). It is not my intent to follow Weaver as he clears the ground for the statistical study of language. However, several further observations are warranted, if only to bring into focus the lecturer–audience example. In the writings on human communication of Vilem Flusser, one finds a fascinating mixture of existentialism and cybernetics. Flusser conceives of human communication as an artificial codification whose purpose is to veil the meaninglessness of existence, that is, to induce forgetfulness about being-towards-death (nature). In this sense, human communication is for Flusser negentropic – it resists entropic loss in concerning itself with the storage of information that is objectively unverifiable. Flusser uses the lecturer–audience example to contrast natural and artificial communication: the lecturer (sender) does not merely emit sound waves (nature) but words (artefactual codes) through the medium of the room (air transmits such waves) to an audience (more than a mere wave receiver but a decoder of strings of signs). Taken naturally, communication is an entropic process, but understood unnaturally, it is a negentropic process in which the degradation of the energy transmitted is resisted as the ‘sum total of the information in the room increases as the lecture goes on.’15 Flusser definitely situates

36 Remodelling Communication

human communication on the side of contemplation and dialogue as opposed to explanation but does not describe the audience’s capacity for genuine dialogue in his example. It turns out, upon closer examination, that the social scene of the engineering problem of communication is stratified in various ways, the most obvious of which is gender in a service environment. Weaver writes in an extraordinary analogy, ‘An engineering communication theory is just like a very proper and discreet girl accepting your telegram. She pays no attention to the meaning, whether it be sad, or joyous, or embarrassing. But she must be prepared to deal with all that come to her desk. This idea that a communication system ought to try to deal with all possible messages, and that the intelligent way to do this is to base design on the statistical character of the source, is surely not without significance for communication in general.’16 Indeed, Shannon remarked at the outset of his paper that semantics are irrelevant to engineering; rather, the focus is on the selection of the message from a set of possible messages. In Weaver’s analogy, that is, his attempt to communicate about his communication model, the analogical telegraph girl should be discreet and have no interest in meaning, which is to say, in content; her task is to translate English (or whatever language) into code and then, all things being equal, have someone like herself down the line decode the information. She should, like the technical model itself, remain ‘indifferent to meaning.’17 The social scene here is a service environment (the telegraph office, indelibly stamped with the Western Union name), but in the military and/or business chain of command, orders are issued by superiors and delivered for execution by employees at the telegraph desk where dispatches are relayed. Translation of the message is a gendered activity18 that requires compliance, discretion, and above all else, suspension of moral interest. No person has ever been completely separate from meaning, that is, a pure handler. Not even the analogical telegram girl conjured by Weaver. If the encoder is a discreet girl – not a woman – then who is the receiver? This is a question that becomes important as soon as one senses that the non-mathematical dimensions of the mathematical model have a gender and a hierarchy of power/knowledge. The receiver is the one who reconstructs backwards the messages from the signal, but the destination is the person for whom the message is intended. The receiver is not the destination. The receiver is another telegraph operator low in the hierarchy who then gives the message (via intermediaries) to ‘her’ superiors. The model of communication is subject, then, to

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 37

metamodelling operations around gender and chain of command (or at least a service environment). This side of the model is stratified – or to use a less sociological term, striated, although this was already evident in early technologies like the vocoder (analysis and compression on the encoding side and re-synthesis or reconstitution of speech at the decoding side).19 At the heart of the engineering model is the figure of a discreet girl whose activities should pique the interest of those who would dismiss the model because it offers nothing greater than a statistical description of the transportation and transmission of messages. One of the contributions to the understanding of telegraph culture made by popular science writers is the extent to which the profession was stratified by speed (sending and receiving messages), urban versus rural locations (the former highly valorized, and the latter stereotyped as slow and backwards), and gender as it was decoded flush with technology (the allegedly ‘lighter’ touches of women’s fingers on the Morse keys), and the array of informal communications among members of the telegraphic workers community.20 ‘Telegraph operators enjoyed scant occupational prestige compared with other electrical professionals,’ and with the transition to telephone, the model of employment remained ‘domestic servitude,’ according to Caroyln Marvin.21 The mathematical model is, then, a service-sector setting of cognitive labour. This ‘discreet girl’ has not gone unnoticed in the critical literature. Ronald E. Day indicates that the figure of the discreet girl is an ‘imagined standard.’ In his critical assessment of the figure of ‘man’ in Shannon and Weaver’s writings, Day shows how the figure is subject to the statistical control of the systems that serve ‘him’ but in a way that binds him to their control, making freedom a kind of technical bondage. The scientist is a ‘man’ with a female secretary, who is also bound by the machine to statistical control and is tasked with deflecting all affects. If for Day the ontological reality of ‘man’ is in doubt in Shannon and Weaver’s texts, the same may be said of the ‘discreet girl’ whose agency is merely an effect of the communication system.22 Returning to the technical problem of noise, what is to be done about noise in the channel? How does one combat this so-called chance variable? The issue is formulated this way: the received signal E is a function of the transmitted signal S and the variable N, so that E = f(S,N). The Weaver and Shannon solution is to situate an auxiliary observer in the communication model. This observer-device surveys what is sent and received, noting the errors and transmitting data about them over a correction channel so that the receiver can make the corrections.

38 Remodelling Communication

Correction is a clean-up operation, a secretarial function. In principle, cleaning up the message adds clarity. In between the information source and the transmitter, the original message branches off and upward toward an observation device that is neither a ‘man’ nor a ‘girl,’ back to which flows the corrections concerning the received message from the receiver. From the observation device flows forward correction data past the receiver and the received message to a correcting device that sends the repaired message to its destination. This is a cumbersome solution. Even though it reduces noise considerably, the additional channel required for this solution does not eliminate it – there remains an arbitrarily small fraction of errors. Other ways of battling noise include various uses of redundancy, sending the same message many times and determining the probability of errors, understanding the redundancy at the source and at the destination as well (in telegraphy, despite the clipped nature of its syntax, the redundancy of the English language remains and has to be accounted for in some manner). It is easy to imagine a reduction ad absurdum of corrections of corrections and channels upon channels that would boil noise right out of the communicational pot but inflict its own damage in the process. The quantitative nature of the solutions attempted in the form of surveillance devices is perhaps not surprising. However, I am arguing that the mathematical model of communication is far from value neutral or even, strictly speaking, a technical problem. It poses a cultural problem, the demonstration of which is part of how it may be constructively regained. This approach also requires further re-engaging with failed representations of the model. Straw Model Many analyses of the Weaver and Shannon model under-represent it to the point of creating a straw model that is easily subject to criticism. The point of my treatment was to bring out several factors (the ‘telegram girl’ and the ‘auxiliary observer’) that are normally neglected, even by insightful critics. Take as an example Ian Angus’s remarks on the ideological effects of the model. Angus rightly suggests that the transportation model figures communication as the ‘transfer of content’ from one place to another, in which ‘the origin and destination of the transfer pre-exist the transference itself and are not altered by it.’23 Messages, in other words, do not affect two poles from which they are sent and received. Angus duly notes the separation of channel from content, but

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 39

without the specific gender and social dynamics at stake; indeed, one may add here Day’s acute insights in the spirit of Guattari into the ‘standardization of identities’ at the poles of the communication model.24 Insightfully, however, Angus notes that identity of the sender and the receiver is erased – ‘another question entirely.’ Precisely. As we have discovered, what is presupposed is a particular figure enabling the communicative process and who gives the model a gender with the required value of discretion, a cultural value attributed to secretarial staff and communication systems by analogy. And it is from this that we want to learn something further about what transpires in the model’s office politics. As I have been insisting, the telegraph office is the medium to which readers need to turn. Unfortunately, the era of telegrams is over, with the elimination of the service by Western Union in January 2006 after 155 years in the business.25 The transit from telegraphy to telematics is complete. But was the situation in the late 1940s any more promising for telegraphy? By looking at how the model appears in work of Marshall McLuhan, singly and with his son Eric, one will find that the great thinker of media had little to observe about the message of the telegraphic medium. McLuhan’s own theory of communication was articulated against the reigning cybernetic model of the time in which the receiver was thought to merely (re)produce and ‘match’ what was encoded and sent, often having to turn to a supervisor to deliver the goods to their final destination. McLuhan did not appreciate the rationality of the linear mathematical model of communication. The distinction that was often made by McLuhan between ‘matching’ and ‘making’ marks out two apparently different conceptions of communication. Marshall and Eric McLuhan, for instance, devoted a few pages in The Laws of Media to a critique of the Shannon and Weaver model. They claimed the model was based on the assumption that ‘communication is a kind of literal matching rather than resonant making.’26 To borrow the terms used by the McLuhans, the Shannon and Weaver model is figure without ground; left hemisphere (quantity, precision) over right hemisphere (holistic, simultaneous); matching over making. The model embodies efficient causality – a force that is testable and controllable, without paying proper attention to the ‘side effects’ of communication, which it excludes, and in so doing misses the new ground or ‘environment’ that emerges and shapes the experience of users; indeed, it transforms their worlds. For the McLuhans, communication involves making

40 Remodelling Communication

and interaction (‘participation’), about freedom from fixity and rigidity. Matching what arrives at the destination with what was formed at the source ignores participatory meaning-making. Consider a further example. What did McLuhan and Wilfred Watson write of Mrs Leavis’s book Fiction and the Reading Public in their assessment of its outdated presumptions in From Cliché to Archetype? She was stuck in matching or ‘checking’ communication between the artist and public on the basis of the former’s ability in ‘managing a symbolization of something which was previously the property’ of the latter. For McLuhan and Watson, ‘Mrs. Leavis is making the familiar literary assumption that matching, rather than making, is the function of literary training.’27 The McLuhans considered almost any artefact amenable to the study of its transformative effects on users and grounds. But their construction of the receiver liberated from the ‘hardware model of information theory – transportation of data from point to point’28 – is in the service of a description of the sensory surround of the new electric environment of ‘tactile acoustic space.’ In other words, the McLuhans announced a theory of perception that took making to mean that receivers were creative artists. Theirs was a poetics of adaptation by degrees. I want to put this in somewhat negative terms. For McLuhan, the failure to create an anti-environment ‘leaves one in the role of automata merely,’29 as we have seen in the construction of a correction-observer. Throughout his career Marshall McLuhan sought refuge from fundamental socio-technological change in artistic strategies understood as coping mechanisms (artists create anti-environments, counter-situations, or they pen counterblasts that allow one to become aware of what is otherwise all but invisible, the environment presently structuring one’s experience). A counterblast, McLuhan explained, ‘does not attempt to erode or explode.’ It calls for the creation of counter-environments ‘as a means of perceiving the dominant one [environment].’ A counterenvironment doesn’t destroy, it ‘controls’ and ‘creates awareness.’ McLuhan clarifies that art copes with environments by creating antienvironments. It is a question for McLuhan, it is fair to say, of the survival of certain valorized artistic practices. How does this bear on telegraphy? The social scene of decoding at the telegraphy table, and later at the telephone switchboard, influenced the formulation of problems and solutions in the mathematical model of communication. Yet it is by regaining the gender attributed by analogy to the theory, the operations of a hidden service environment, and properties of the medium that key criticisms and dismissals may be swept away. There is in the mathematical model, contra McLuhan,

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 41

making at stake. Telegraphy is a gendered technology, not simply by analogy, especially after the 1870s in the United States when women broke into what was hitherto a ‘boy’ culture. Prior to this time, as one of Thomas Edison’s biographers reminds us, tramp telegraphers such as the young Edison drifted from city to city in search of work and established friendships with operators down the line whose signature ‘touch’ of their keys was known to those sensitive enough to hear it.30 The existence of vocational knowledge is hardly news. But the issue here is that meaning (singular haptic signatures) was communicated between operators in addition to the content of the messages. The channel itself had the capacity to turn handlers into meaning-makers by the delicate transduction of the impressions of the operator’s body. Of course, face-to-face socializing during down periods would often take place from table to table in a given office (before the invention of the semi-private cubicle). The telegraphic scenes of encoding and decoding on an individual level influence the formulation of problems and solutions around specific practices. There were basically two ways to receive a message: listening to the short intervals (dots) and long intervals (dashes) between clicks and writing out the message in longhand, or a decoding practice assisted by the registration on paper of words, which would then be attached to a form and given to the recipient. The double-scene of decoding, without or with a step of paper registration, required the operator to translate the Morse code and then deliver the message, the final destination being someone other than the operator (this suggests the social inequality of the position of the operator in a service economy, and Edison qua operator was fired more than a few times in the 1860s for various reasons). A certain level of secretarial proficiency is presupposed here (that is, in code facility), but more important was the general knowledge that an operator could bring to fill in the inevitable gaps in the message; to this end, Edison was constantly reading newspapers so that he could overcome the tremendous noise in the system (the downtime produced by static, broken wires, obscure ‘private’ codes, references to events, and the rules telegraph operators introduced to ensure clean and efficient communication free of fraud and error). This meant Edison was a maker, not a handler or mere matcher; and makers get fired. Yet the location of agency appears to have slipped backwards from the discreet girl into the fingers of an active, named, male receiver, a masculine mover of technological history. Senders and receivers of both genders are, rather, active in the range of communications available to them in using the code and technology, and both are subjected to the

42 Remodelling Communication

telegraphy office’s chain of command. The channel of telegraphy was filled with all sorts of noise, such as fluctuating currents, leakages, but also content meaning provided by operators, etc. If we adopt the language of Edward Sapir for a moment, it is evident that a ‘language transfer’ from speech (phono-centric ‘original language system’) like Morse code (beyond writing to a remote region, in Sapir’s estimation) entails the principle of a reverse transfer (partially or back to the origin) that holds much potential for noise.31 The notion of operator discretion must also be considered in its most general rather than moralistic sense, because the scene of telegraphic decoding often involved discretionary interpretation, even if, in the end, this simply meant informed guesswork that faithfully reproduced the original encoded message, which could be easily confirmed in the case of published news stories, but not so readily in the case of proprietary business information or personal situations crowded by hearsay. The issue of privacy was present, though it would intensify with further revolutions in telecommunications, beginning with the telephone (especially with the advent of the party line). Inverse transmission in the double-scene of decoding involved supplementation of the message. From the signature touch of the key, to the tone of a female operator’s voice, to her familiarity with certain users/subscribers, and her role in office politics, there is a remarkable play of mediation at work in the channel that relies upon relays operated by employees who, Marvin rightly insists, are not members of the class whose communicational relations they mediate. Matching cannot be simply contrasted, emptily and unproductively with making, as if the latter were anointed with activeness against an allegedly passive matching operation. Making the link between encoding and decoding and lives lived is the hallmark of cultural studies as it has rethought the model of communication, and this insight can produce an informed reading of the mathematical model as well. The processes of subjectification that rendered young women (telegraph and then telephone operators) active32 nodes in the labour process also gave rise on their part to resistances and strategies of coping (personal and collective, technographic and semiotic) with discipline, standardization, exhaustion, and exploitation. Australian media and communications theorist Steven Maras has contributed significantly to the rethinking of the transmission model of communication. His statement may be read as a kind of credo for this chapter: ‘In suggesting that a violence against transmission is part of our intellectual landscape, I want to contend that the critique

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 43

of transmission as an image of communication carries with it baggage [the tired “process” or transmission versus the “semiotic” or exchange school distinction] that is still to be unpacked.’33 Maras has a specific figure in mind to help unzip the baggage, and it is Régis Debray. What is perhaps most surprising about Maras’s effort to regain transmission via Debray is that he first asks his readers to reconsider the work of Wilbur Schramm during the 1950s. Maras’s route to Debray takes him through a bona fide ‘transmission’ thinker from the 1950s and 1960s. This detour is instructive, because it demonstrates that the mathematical model was augmented by subtle appeals to how – on non-quantitative and semantic grounds such as the recourse to experience in encoder-decoder relations hinged on the figure of how sender and receivers ‘tune’ into messages – the communication process itself shapes the message. Despite Schramm’s recourse to communication concepts borrowed from the psychology of learning34 and his construction of a stimulus-response model for understanding mass communication effects, he presented a processual, complex, and multidirectional vision in which ‘it is misleading to think of the communication process as starting somewhere and ending somewhere. It is really endless. We are little switchboard centers handling and rerouting the great endless current of communication.’35 In other words, Maras’s project is to find in Schramm a semiotic sensitivity that would be otherwise occluded by an unreflective dismissal of transmission modelling, and an uncritical reproduction of the transmission– semiotic distinction. Maras’s rehabilitation program finds in Debray’s semio-technomaterial conception of transmission as transportation and transformation a form of remodelling in process: ‘transport by is transformation of. That which is transported is remodeled, refigured, and metabolized by its transit. The receiver finds a different letter from the one its sender placed in the mailbox . . . To transmit should not be considered merely to transfer.’36 What has Maras recovered with these two references? He has provided a corrective to the statements made from Smythe to Angus and beyond about the pre-existence of the message and the noninfluence of the sign-vehicle on the message and its passages. Cold War Communication Warren Weaver was a consummate promoter of scientific institutionalization. His wartime activities concerned now-classic problems of

44 Remodelling Communication

machine translation in the service of intelligence, theory of air warfare, especially computing problems around antiaircraft and air-to-ground fire, as well as cryptography, all undertaken within his committee, the Applied Mathematics Panel, under the auspices of Dr Vannabar Bush’s Office of Scientific Research and Development. His public labours as a popularizer of science began prior to the war in the 1930s in his capacity as an officer of the Rockefeller Foundation. He won prizes for his popular science writing from both UNESCO and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The promotion of R & D and proselytizing for science’s wartime accomplishments are intimately linked with Weaver’s name, and he publicly intervened in debates around the establishment in the United States in the post-war years of national funding bodies for science research when they were threatened by critics of big science. Despite his sterling curriculum vitae, Weaver’s humanism could be quite misleading. For instance, his description of how he deployed his notion of communicative accuracy – an audience is moved in the right direction of correct understanding without being misled when the inaccuracies of the communication do not unduly hinder this movement – was in the capacity as chair of a committee of geneticists on the likely genetic effects of nuclear fallout from atomic weapons testing. The split committee (between a group warning of grave risks and another of tolerable risks) was won over, difference resolved, by Weaver’s concept that put the emphasis on general agreement over specialist qualifications and public debate over what he defined as minor issues. Communication accuracy smooths dissensus by generalization, and the diminishment of difference provides quietude.37 For all of Weaver’s sophistication in promoting the needs of science and ‘progress,’ he had at his ready, to adopt a McLuhanism, a rear-view mirror explanation. In a more popular version of his famous essay on information theory, he turned immediately to the example of telegraphy to explain the mathematical model, using as ‘content’ the sending of a birthday greeting by wire (a non-commercial usage). Circa 1952, this might have seemed strange to a telephone-using public; indeed, it does not seem concerned with state-of-the-art telecommunications and information technologies (television or early computers); nor, for that matter, was he interested in technical improvements in telegraphy (automation of transmitters, increase in wire capacity, etc.). Indeed, Weaver optimistically generalizes to telephone communication from telegraphy. More importantly, he explains key concepts like the

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 45

stochastic process of likely message choice by means of Morse code design, underlining probability as opposed to predictive laws: ‘When the telegraphic code was first designed, why did Morse assign the simplest symbol of one dot to the letter E, and the most complex symbol of three dots, a space, and a dash, to the letter Z? For the very good statistical reason that he counted the supply of type in a printing office, and found that they had a maximum number (12,000, in fact) of examples of E and the minimum number (only 200) of Z.’38 Weaver has recourse to telegraphy because he wants to explain an unfamiliar thing, a mathematical theory of communication, by analogy with a familiar thing. This use of analogy was described by Max Black in terms of how theory takes hold by analogy of something better known and established, for the sake of using the resources thus acquired to advance the understanding of a relatively difficult and less-known model.39 This seems to be what motivated Weaver to turn to telegraphy. The intellectual respectability of extension by analogy – without metaphor, there might be no algebra, quipped Black – also has drawbacks, because it relies too heavily on a specific technology that ‘insulates’ the theory from criticism. It also permits, as we have seen in Weaver’s notion, the analogy of telegraphy to be generalizable to telephonic communication (not to mention television, smoke signals, drumbeats, heliograph signals, etc.) – an opportunity to avoid explanation in the name of suggestion (plausibility) and deceptive smoothness (universal translatability between disparate systems as long as approximate structural similarities appear to be maintained). This smoothing or ‘quieting’ operation is facilitated by familiarity and helps extend the theory’s reach through a process of naturalization of its components, reproduction of their relations, and inoculation against the introduction of new, heterogeneous elements. In other words, this is propaganda in action. The restoration of context – technology and its intersections with gender and socio-semiotic scenes of decoding – undertaken in this chapter had the goal of unearthing some of the cultural content that has been hinted at but not fully excavated in communication theory by thinking culturally with Weaver and Shannon. I paid special attention to the former’s contribution, despite a tendency to erase him altogether. I began with a displacement of hierarchy and authority. I am inclined to simply state for those who, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, ‘know my method,’ that I focus my attention on the less wellknown half of thinking pairs – on Roger Caillois instead of Georges Bataille, on Félix Guattari rather than Gilles Deleuze. My strategy is not

46 Remodelling Communication

to uncritically revalorize the mathematical theory. It is simply that this model must be forced to reveal its universes of reference (and those of its critics as well) in the context of its ideological underpinnings, sociotechnical entanglements, and discursive strategies, exposing the extent to which ‘mathematics’ is suspended in complex non-mathematical interchanges, the critical apprehension of which permits a reordering in which Weaver comes before Shannon. Two further orientations may be derived from the discussion in this chapter. The first is that the crucible of transmission may be Cold War ideology and the growing economic role of the service sector, but its affective dimension involves the transduction of, as Massumi describes it, ‘a force of potential that cannot but be felt, simultaneously doubling, enabling, and ultimately counteracting the limitative selections of apparatuses of actualization and implantation.’40 What does a telegraph operator transmit? She sends charges or impulses of virtuality that are not exhausted in and by selective actualizations, that is, messages and overt codes, in making contact with the keys with her fingertips. Quantity is swarmed by incipiences of potential that are induced towards specific actualizations (mirroring and non-mirroring) largely by receivers who want to play the gendered field of intensities. There are many examples of foul play in the fake telegraphic marriages that were arranged,41 just as there are friendships and romances in the transduction of such sensory potential as an identifiable style manifested by finger pressure, speed, and rhythm. This not only turns transmission into transformation, but turns quantity (of information) into a field of qualities that catalyse receivers and their milieux by turning them away from the content inputs of encoding and decoding operations. The ‘least catalytic is information,’ Massumi reminds us, in refiguring communication as transductive, manifesting, modifying, and modulating force; in this chapter, however, information is never far from affect: what cannot but be felt in between the dots and dashes and in the folds of content. The scene of transmission is rearranged as the receiver–destination relation is complexified, and the affective socio-semiotic scene disrupts the final transfer of information from the receiver to the destination. Second, improvements in channel capacity have helped to realize Shannon’s conception of ‘a vanishingly small probability of error which can be approached but not exceeded as the coding is improved.’42 Noise always exists to some degree as random disturbances, and rates of loss may be accurately determined. Cherry represents noise as ‘bogus instructions [and information]’43 that interfere with and destroy source

Regaining Weaver and Shannon 47

information. Reception becomes for Cherry a matter of receiver extraction of the salient message material from interfering noise; the latter enters into the transmission from a source independent of the sender – it often appears in the model in the back half or receiver side. Cherry’s sense of noise as ‘bogus’ sounds remarkably contemporary. Sampson’s addition of ‘deceivers’ to senders and receivers underlines the emergence of a new noise that exists ‘beyond the signal/noise ratio’: ‘liar codes . . . are environmental absurdities and anomalies that resonate outside the technical layer into the cultural milieu of the humancomputer assemblage.’44 Sampson alerts us to two important features of noise: noise does not intersect the linear way of the communication model at some point, disturbing the signal as it is received; neither does it perfuse and influence every element of the model from a central position (see LaFleur’s redrawing of Shannon and Weaver in McQuail and Windahl).45 Rather, conceived non-linearly and turbulently, liar code is not a ‘random’ factor of disorder but in Sampson’s words ‘a calculated act of violence’ that evolves the relations of the network from the inside; indeed, every attempt to filter and block it helps to (re)produce it. Noise therefore does not have an outside source whose bogus status (untrustworthy) may be unmasked, and once inside is not merely irregular or manageable interference. ‘Noise’ is substantial, and the myth of approaching a frictionless, noise-free medium must be debunked because network relations exceed, open, and recondition sender–receiver relations. Theorists of the new noise advise us to grasp ‘the inessential of network culture.’46 Even the relative stability of the social characteristics of historical socio-semiotic scenes of decoding may be called into question in the era of noisy networked communication.

2 Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall

One of the less attractive features of the cultural studies that we have today is the publishing bonanza in which classic statements, such as the one by Stuart Hall on ‘encoding/decoding’ (shortened as if to build in familiarity and erase history by eliding the ‘in the media [sometimes “television”] discourse’ that originally followed the two code words in 1973) with which I will be concerned in this chapter, reappear in ‘Reader’ formats in slightly but significantly altered versions, deviating from the original Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) Stencilled Paper #7 that informed the Culture, Media, Language version of 1980 (an ‘edited extract’ by Hall himself) and then the Cultural Studies Reader of 1999, undoubtedly among many other versions.1 The effects of the globalization of a classic statement should be obvious to anyone, especially since it begins with the erasure of Marx. I have no great fight with editor Simon During, for he is among many others who have reprinted the Hall essay in a politically updated and cleansed format. How this treatment of a text happens to a genuine classic of the field is the real issue, although the idea that a fledgling ‘discipline’ has classics may be premature. And, in the case of Marx, the references to the ‘1857 Introduction’ have come and gone – absent in the original, but present in the Culture, Media, Language version, and then subsequently erased.2 Meagre in Form, Rich in Content In the very first paragraph of The Cultural Studies Reader’s version of Hall’s essay, the explicit reference to Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital as homologous sources for the idea that along the stations or moments (production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction) of

Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall 49 Figure 2: Bottomless model (after Hall) program as ‘meaningful’ discourse encoding meaning structures 1

decoding meaning structures 2

frameworks of knowledge

frameworks of knowledge

relations of production

relations of production

technical infrastructure

technical infrastructure

the communication model ‘a “complex structure in dominance” [is] sustained through the articulation of the connected [yet distinctive] practices’ is erased without explanation.3 Readers of the Reader are left without a key side to the homology that supports the complex structure of dominance between the circulation of commodities and the model of communication. Hall is not actually beginning with a positive statement, and it is useless to cleanse his text of the negative, through selected editing, without great violence. He notes criticisms of the process of communication in mass-communications research but merely in a summary version without any attention to the model’s history. He focuses on the linearity of the most central components (sender, message, receiver) and then initiates a claim on this somewhat weak foundation about failures to appreciate the model’s different moments, the absence of a structural conception, etc. Linearity is, then, Hall’s fallback term (as it was McLuhan’s) for an intolerably smooth and undifferentiated process. As far as circuits go, he looks to Marx’s C-M-C, the circulation of commodities as a form of communication, because it does not suffer from the problems Hall associates with linearity. First, C-M exchange of commodities for money (sale); and then M-C, exchange of money for commodities (purchase), united in the formula-circuit of selling in

50 Remodelling Communication

order to purchase: C-M-C. Marx’s description of the series of metamorphoses that constitute the curriculum vitae of the commodity along the circuit (conversion into gold and its reconversion) figures money as a medium of exchange and circulation and reveals the connected practices and determinations of the commodity’s passage along its stations from production, the point of departure, through distribution, exchange, and consumption, that is, from the general through the particular to the individual, and the determinations, in the first place, of the laws of nature, various social factors, formal social movement, and then to the receiver whose consumption reinitiates the whole process in the unity of production and consumption – another closed loop, to be sure, but one whose internal structure is highly differentiated. Hall then returns to linearity. Now, this may seem fundamentally paradoxical in the absence of the Marx material. The language model of communication, operated by codes and syntagmatic discursive chains, which is to say, sequential linearity of two or more (but a fixed number of) terms in a series, requires the so-called linguistic order of succession of signifiers in praesentia. So Hall cannot dispense with linearity, but he will give it a material foundation. This is why the homology is so very necessary. In Hall, there is not so much a sign form as a message form (how an event appears after having been excreted by the production structures of television) that is exchanged between sender and receiver in the televisual discourse under consideration (the content of Hall’s analysis was erased from the essay’s title early on, and readers are left to wonder about its specificity and generality). The message form is of the order of appearance and surface, Hall emphasizes, and in no way random.4 A real historical event becomes an item or a communicative event, subject both to the encoding pragmatics of media treatments of a story or idea and institutional structures of broadcasting; as Hall puts it, ‘production constructs the message.’5 The discursive message form – that is, the discursive form that is the product – is distributed to audiences via the televisual channel and taken as meaningful, decoded, and consumed. The determinate moments are encoding and decoding, hence the paper’s title. Why is the bar of structural implication in the 1980 title ‘Encoding/ Decoding’ subject to a diacritical revision as a comma in the Reader as ‘Encoding, Decoding’? The force of implication covers the entire field of homologous terms, including production/consumption and encoding/ decoding, and is expressed by Hall with reference to the work of Philip Elliot, from whom the conclusion is drawn that production

Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall 51

and reception of the televisual image are not identical, yet are related: ‘They are differentiated moments within the totality formed by the social relations of the communicative process as a whole.’6 The salient point is that the ‘skewed and structured feedbacks’7 of audiences influence production and thus decoding/consumption is a determinate moment of encoding/production. The comma is a slight pause that still conjoins two items in an incomplete inventory of aspects of the communication model. On the side of encoding one finds all of the institutional structures, division of labour, and techniques of broadcasting organizational culture; these relations of production pass under the discursive rule of language in the coding process that yields a program as meaningful discourse. Encoding is subject to what Hall summarizes as meaning structures and ideas, routines, skills, professional beliefs, institutional knowledges and assumptions, combined with common or expert knowledge drawn upon in myriad ways from social and political realms, conceptions of audiences, etc. In the first determinate moment, there are structures [material]-codes-messages; in another determinate moment, there are messages–decodings–social consequences [structures]. The reception of messages by the audience is also framed by meaning structures, as well as socio-economic relations, and realized by acquiring social use value or political efficacy. ‘Meaning structures 1’ and its sequel, ‘Meaning structures 2’ on the decoding side, are not immediately identical, even though Hall thinks production is predominant (echoing Marx that production is decisive); even products, in our case programs, become real only in being consumed or viewed. Meaning structures are pools of knowledge that producers and consumers may share to some extent; producers try to ensure that the transfer of meaningful messages to audiences is successful by dipping into the pools (codes) of knowledge from which audiences also draw. The limits to the economic analogy may be forced to appear here, because the audience’s reception of the message, which articulates it as a coherent group demographically and psycho-graphically, is itself a condition for the commercial exploitation of the message form in the sale by the broadcaster of time to advertisers so that they may reach particular audiences with their messages. I use the word forced because Hall does not build into his conception of structure a reflection on advertising. Advertising revenue is vital to a completely commercialized television system such as is found in the United States, and of lesser import in a mixed system of public and private, with tight

52 Remodelling Communication

reins on the presentations of advertisements, that has existed in the United Kingdom since the mid-1950s, with the result that advertisers could not gain a stranglehold on the production of programs.8 So what Hall means by structure is national-specific to the medium at issue, and it was influenced by the tastes of cultural elites in the media sector. But his focus on televisual aesthetics and the ‘ideological fictions’ of producers were already evident in his UNESCO-sponsored report on British television of 1971.9 There is no immediate identity between the two meaning structures; there is no perfect symmetry between encoding and decoding. The codes may overlap but they do not fit together without friction, because of the ‘structural differences of relation and position between broadcasters and audiences,’ but also the ‘asymmetry between the codes of “source” and “receiver” at the moment of transformation into and out of the discursive form.’10 This asymmetry is evident in the visual presentation of Hall’s model, which is organized into a series of unidirectional arrows from institutional structures upward through ‘Meaning structures 1’ on the side of encoding through the program as message and then, in order to indicate the lack of equivalence between what would otherwise suggest a mirror of communication, the arrow falls through decoding, ‘Meaning structures 2,’ into audience structures (which are the same as those that determined production, at least in name). Hall’s communicative chain may be full of links, but they are non-identical; this is the articulatory logic of communication, to use the Gramscian concept Hall deploys in refiguring the process of communication, which entails thinking of non-equivalence within the unity of encoding and decoding, and the fact that the components of the model are themselves relatively autonomous articulations: interrogating any articulated structure or practice requires an examination of the ways in which the relatively autonomous social, institutional, technical, economic, and political forces are organized into unities that are effective and are rarely exclusively empowering or disempowering.11 Communication rises and falls into the domain of the effects of decoded messages on social practices irreducible to behavioural postulates that confound the televisual message with the real referents of its signs (Hall’s canine pun is illustrative: behaviourism may have ‘dogged mass media research,’12 but semiotics reveals that the barking dog in the film is a sound image but it cannot bite!). Hall embraces the idea that the analysis of televisual program content may be renewed through semiotics, which leads to the insight that ‘discursive “knowledge” is

Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall 53

the product not of the transparent representation of the “real” in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions.’13 Hall does not move very far away from the analysis of content. Semiotics will remain supplementary. Hall’s version of the communication model, then, transforms previous understandings of the idea of content of television analysed by content analysis and the conception of the audience based on cause and effect that ignore the character of the televisual sign and the dimensionality of the visual messages themselves (a reduced three-dimensional world). These criticisms are thought to be direct rejoinders to the emphasis of ‘Leicester school’ mass communications researchers who treat the communicative process as transparent, misread signification, apolitically analyse the medium, and present an un-nuanced view of the audience, even if Hall’s critique has to ignore some of the finer points of behaviourism.14 Hall specifies the character of the televisual sign: iconic, after Peirce, to the extent that an icon ‘possesses some of the properties of the thing represented’ and the mistaken notion of iconic transparency has caused a ‘great deal of confusion’ (based in ignorance about the image’s discursive mediation).15 Icons are not merely – that is, exclusively – pictures that have achieved a ‘near-universality,’ to use Hall’s words. A semiotic convention of representation is that an icon is a photograph; but a photograph is as much an index because of the relation that light plays in its creation, a direct essential connection involved in the sign–object relation. In connection with visual language, we have learned that iconic resemblance – together with indexical connectivity that supposedly assures the object’s existence – have been used to tell no end of lies, normally by deviously enlisting conventional signs or symbols toward misleading ends. But, more sympathetically, Hall’s point is well taken that televisual signs require knowledge of conventions of representation and semiotic difference between types of signs in order to avoid confusions around the televisual sign: ‘Iconic signs are, however, particularly vulnerable to being read as natural because visual codes of perception are very widely distributed and because this type of sign is less arbitrary than a linguistic sign: the linguistic sign “cow” possesses none of the properties of the thing represented, whereas the visual sign appears to possess some of those properties.’16 The guns in the representation of a violent event on television cannot literally blaze; the event is coded, constructed, edited, and presented within the stock conventions of stories about violence. But signs in the Peircean tradition are, of course, not easily separated off from one another; such

54 Remodelling Communication

a separation is merely another illustration of how a convention (conventional signs are other kinds of signs) may grab hold of a theory and hold it for ransom. In Hall’s usage, naturalist confusions arise when there is ‘an achieved equivalence – between the encoding and decoding sides of an exchange of meanings.’17 Such equivalence produces interpretive habits that are hard to break and allow codes upon which all messages depend – there is no intelligible discourse without the operation of a code – to remain hidden (as an ideological effect). Hall’s turn to Peirce doesn’t register in the bibliography of the Reader. We very quickly reach, however, the limits of Hall’s semiotic tolerance. He does not typically distinguish between denotation and connotation, because ‘analytic distinctions must not be confused with distinctions in the real world.’18 It is easy to be fooled by denotation, Hall tells us, because literalness is falsely connected with naturalness (uncoded). Anyway, ‘most signs will combine both the denotative and connotative aspects’19 and are rarely restricted to only the former, the latter marking the multiple articulations with situational ideologies and the interactive intervention of ideologies. Hall suggests a separation between fixed ideological value (denotative) and mobile ideological values (connotative) in context-dependent struggles over meaning. His reference to Voloshinov is instructive.20 The struggles at issue are, of course, class struggles. What did Hall learn from Voloshinov? Generally, signification is ideological, no matter at which level it is pitched. Signs, to the extent that they stand for something for somebody else, are ideological (i.e., in this nomenclature superstructural). Signification is social, interactional, and addressers and addressees are situated, not abstract. Messages are shared territories involving immediate social spaces and broader social relations whose meanings are arrived at dialogically, that is, as effects of communicational interactions. Hall does not follow Voloshinov’s linguistic reductionism (all signs are reducible to speech), despite his emphasis on discourse. Indeed, connotations of visual signs exemplify for Hall the process by which ‘already coded signs intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional, more active ideological dimensions.’21 It is appropriate that Hall then turns to Roland Barthes in his pursuit of connotation, since, as Barthes notes in his Elements, ‘the future probably belongs to a linguistics of connotation.’22 This is the domain of semiotic anthropology and fragments of ideology according to Barthes, at least on the level of the signified. From Barthes, Hall received an open

Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall 55

version of connotation through which culture, knowledge, history – the world – enter and speak or write as ideology (signifieds) and rhetoric (signifiers or connotation). Hall retains the denotation/connotation distinction simply for its analytic value, in spite of himself, it seems, and the acknowledgment that it is not how signs are taken in their combined sense by real language communities. The connotative level of language becomes, then, the privileged but not exclusive window of mobile ideology through which passes already coded signs, and these latter engage deep cultural codes. Codes give direction to the televisual signs and reveal maps in which the whole range of social meanings, practices, and usages, ‘the rank order of power and interest,’ are written.23 It is interesting to note here that Hall’s sense of mapping is largely representational, and even though it is tied to the work of interpretation of media audiences, it is not productive of an existential territory. This puts a limit on work in this area. Hall seizes upon inequality among connotative codes to expose hierarchical arrangements, specifically those ordered under dominant or preferred meanings, that is, sense-giving constructs that assign and integrate the new, problematic, or troubling. Maps of capture are dominant but not determined, because the emphasis is on preference ( pre-fer: enforce and police) in advance that may shift, but more generally, remains open. Hall’s sense of this process is presented by invoking active rules of competence, whose job it is to pre-fer one semantic domain over another and rule items into and out of their appropriate meaning sets. The interpretive work involved in the communicative process has been neglected, according to Hall. By dominant, Hall signals the means of enforcing, convincing, commanding, and legitimating a particular decoding. The tendency in communicational processes such as broadcasting is for simple pluralism and polysemy to break down upon closer inspection into the influence of the dominant cultural order; indeed, specific political regimes are imprinted into preferred meanings. For Barthes, for instance, in ‘The Man in the Street on Strike,’ preferred meaning is imprinted by the bourgeoisie as the social class that does not want to be named, and it ex-nominates itself by naturalizing and universalizing its particularly contingent status, spreading its brand of common sense over everything. Mythologies of the labour action, especially strikes, are cases in point. In the preferred code of bourgeois maxims, print images of striking workers walking a picket line (he refers to Le Figaro) are an affront to good sense because their actions negatively affect those

56 Remodelling Communication

outside of the management group with which they are in disagreement. The preferred meaning is enforced by discourses in which representatives from related industries speak of economic gloom and doom, and people in the community explain how they are managing to cope with disruptions in their everyday routines. Strikes are in this way scandalous because bourgeois reason figures workers and ordinary taxpayers as solitary characters, thus ‘preserv[ing] the essentialist separation of social cells, which we know was the first ideological principle of the bourgeois revolution.’24 Barthes continues, ‘By protesting that a strike is a disturbance to those it does not concern, the bourgeoisie testifies to a cohesion of social functions which it is the very goal of the strike to manifest: the paradox is that the petit bourgeoisie invokes the naturalness of his isolation at the very moment when the strike overwhelms him with the obviousness of his subordination.’25 Hall’s Barthesean vision of connotation as an open medium through which culture, knowledge, and history may travel and speak – while remaining open to active transformations, especially those that are ideologically driven – is also tinged with Volosinov’s critique of abstract objectivist formalism. This allows Hall to escape from a slavish objectivist vision of codes and introduce interpretive work into the mix. This emphasis on work does not lead into an appreciation of the creative, subjective, individualist, perhaps even private matter of getting or understanding a televisual message. Rather, Hall is interested in the way that television producers and broadcasters phrase the problems with reference to failed messages (audiences that don’t grasp their intentions): ‘What they really mean to say [and clearly Hall thinks he understands their intentions as well as they do] is that the viewers are not operating within the dominant or preferred code. Their ideal is “perfectly transparent communication.” ’26 The polar opposite of transparency is opacity or distorted communication. The semiotic elegance of Hall’s rightly famous paper derives from the balance he achieves between the semiological and its critique, between two odd bedfellows: glottocentric Barthes and dialogical Voloshinov. Pre-ference is a modality of encoding; it is neither deterministic nor prescriptive. It is a question of ‘constructing some of the limits and parameters within which decodings will operate.’27 Formal semiology cannot ignore the work of decoding, the management of the semiotic scaffolding it receives. Encoding pre-fers; decoding is constrained by the parameters of encoding. Some degree of correspondence exists between encoding and decoding, but it is constructed and not guaranteed.

Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall 57

But it is not totally open, either; uncontrolled semiosis is one of the ghosts that haunts interpretation with the virulence of nihilism. There are wildly aberrant misunderstandings and perfect transparencies: between unlimited drift and arbitrariness and the sempiternal glance of angels in which all is revealed, maybe signs, as such, disappear. Yet Hall’s language of constraints, construction, degrees of reciprocity, limits, and parameters is central to all semiotic theorizations of openness: a message is not open to any decoding whatsoever, even when it is a so-called open work, to use a musical example, like graphic notation (Sylvano Bussotti) or grouped notes (Karlheinz Stockhausen).28 Admittedly, intentionally open works of the avant-garde are not very much like most television broadcasts, but the conceptual language of limits, relations, and tendencies, even the sobriety of decoding practices, circumscribes freedom. Hall pursues a line of thought that cannot be captured by the intentionalist-deconstructive polarity; still, Hall does attempt ‘to deconstruct . . . “misunderstanding” in terms of a theory of “systematically distorted communication.” ’29 Decoding from Three Positions The most well-known and influential part of Hall’s essay follows. He turns to the first of three hypothetical positions of decoding, the dominant-hegemonic position. In this position, the mode of reception of the televisual message is ‘full and straight.’ It corresponds to an ideal type of nearly perfect transparent reciprocity between encoding and decoding in which the decoder works ‘inside the dominant code.’30 Here Hall deploys a hegemonic – in the sense of dominant – map of meaning or mythology that is inhabited and used to navigate everyday life. He shows his readers the inside of this position in relation to the professional code of television shared by broadcasters and producers. This description of encoding pragmatics assumes that the message upon which the broadcasters work has ‘already been signified in a hegemonic manner.’31 Operating within the dominant code, but relatively independent from it, the professional code works by displacement and bracketing of the hegemonic quality of the interpretations of the dominant code. Professional broadcasters wrap ideology in technicality. They receive, invite, and frame hegemonic interpretations of public affairs generated principally by political and military elites (Hall’s examples are of Northern Ireland, Chile, and certain government legislation in England). But much the same may be said of the displacement

58 Remodelling Communication

of meaning into technicality in the engineering or mathematical model of communication. The dependency of the professional broadcasters on already coded material should be obvious; to this reproduction of the hidden conversations of those in power, the professionals select occasions, formats, talking heads, clips, debates, a roster of familiar and trusted experts, etc., although Hall is somewhat unclear on this point: professional broadcasters, it seems, reproduce reproductions, already coding readings of events sometimes, he admits. This creates conflict and contradiction and as an institution, broadcasting enjoys a certain degree of privileged access to the coded messages of power elites. Broadcasting is linked to defining elites, but Hall does not pursue this point. The reproduction of already coded, hegemonic interpretations (whether in the form of press releases, press summaries, preselected questions at press conferences, managed interviews, media liaison teams, spin doctors, etc.) is, Hall observes, accomplished in a manner that is not obviously biased; rather, ‘ideological reproduction therefore takes place inadvertently.’32 Examining the Social Contract of the late 1970s in England and the transition from Labour to Thatcherism, Ian Connell provides a partial empirical proof for Hall’s first hypothetical position (the very thing Hall thought needed to be done) through the reproduction of an already given political ideology, of an already-always-there interpretation.33 But Connell is concerned mostly with encoding. Our question is this: how much work is decoding the message full and straight? Hall answers this question indirectly as he presents his three hypothetical positions: work increases toward the third position and as it takes on the character of resistance. Work is defined as resistance (informed dissent), but not to the medium as such, as in the tradition of formal analyses of everything from priming time and video-framing through jolts-per-minute and felt-meaning, to taping, zapping, and television-on-demand.34 The second position is the negotiated code. One of the defining characteristics of the dominant position is the globality, grandness, totality, largeness of its interpretive horizon (national interest). This second position is defined by contrast through its refocus of the global in terms of local conditions. The negotiated code operates by the exceptions of situated logics; its work involves setting it own parameters. Hall uses this position to rethink the meaning of what counts as a misunderstanding of the contradictions that arise from the adaptive and oppositional elements put to work on negotiating dominant encodings

Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall 59

(i.e., one may acknowledge, in the politics of neoliberal deficit management, the dominant-hegemonic economic message at the level of a nation’s accounts, trade balances, etc., as long as this does not entail closing one’s local hospital). It is in the midst of this second position that Hall defines the hegemonic viewpoint: ‘It defines within its terms the mental horizon, the universe, of possible meanings . . . it carries with it the stamp of legitimacy, it appears coterminous with what is natural, inevitable, taken for granted about the social order.’35 A mental horizon stamped with legitimacy and naturalness is essentially what is meant by consent in discussions of hegemonic dominance. It is the space in which acceptance and contestation take place. This horizon is a container, a frame that doesn’t appear to have any particular interests (this is what Barthes meant by mythology’s ability to erase its own contingency). Hall’s second position nicely clarifies a significant feature of dominant-hegemonic meaning: it is actually won and requires care, cultivation, and defence (technically, it is temporary and conjunctural), since the consensus it has achieved threatens to shift and slide apart in the moving social, political, and moral field of relations. In this way, Hall’s positions two and three, as we will shortly see, trace a vector of progressive dissent as consent fractures into dissensus, the first glimmer of which is exposed in the disjuncture of translating the global into the local and, finally, with an explicit decoding against the global. In the third position, the decoding audience understands the global meaning and grasps the connotative inflection of the message but ‘decode[s] [it] in a globally contrary way.’36 The work involved takes place through the deployment of what Hall calls an oppositional code and features two closely related moves: messages are de-totalized so as to be re-totalized and in this manner lifted from a preferred code to an alternative code. Hall’s example is listening to a debate on wage limits and recoding ‘national interests’ as ‘class interests.’ Decoding entails recoding every time one hears economic statements about the need to pay down a public debt (national or otherwise). I recode this as a call to erode the public sector (smart-size), union-bust, punch holes in the social safety net, scapegoat the poor, match administration with surveillance, etc. Or, to borrow an example from the social studies of the counterculture in Policing the Crisis, oppositional, countercultural decoding circa the late 1960s saw consensus as coercive and redefined tolerance as repressive.37 The transition from negotiated to oppositional (re)coding is for Hall ‘one of the most significant political moments.’38

60 Remodelling Communication

Hall’s sensitivity to the indeterminacy of decoding39 certainly provided impetus to the ethnographic studies of media audiences in cultural studies. This willingness to probe indeterminacy was an innovation, and the decoding practices of audiences were sought on this basis without desperation. Many have turned to some version of articulation to explain this innovation, demonstrating that it enabled communication to be conceived as something other than correspondence, agreement, or guarantee, without sliding over to the side of complete disagreement and free decoding. The non-deterministic links between encoding and decoding were plotted by Hall along a continuum from global (dominant) to local (negotiated) to counter-global (oppositional); thus Hall presented communication as a problem like hegemony itself, because the unity of the process was constructed and shaped by complex institutional forces, overlapping codes, competing and shifting accents, and inflections, and as such, the meaning of messages needs to be continuously (re)articulated because those messages are without guarantees. Finally, Hall’s contribution to the study of models of communication has been called into question by those such as Lawrence Grossberg. He has remarked, ‘Articulation transforms cultural studies from a model of communication (production-text-consumption; encoding-decoding) to a theory of contexts.’40 Certainly, the attempt to theorize context becomes one of the greatest challenges for modellers. And this, I believe, is what Hall contributed to the model of communication. Articulation may be a transformative concept that pushes cultural studies beyond, as Grossberg put it, the practice of critical interpretation, but its very context of theorization, the readymade scaffolding up which it clambered, was the model of communication inherited from other traditions. Hall opened up the universe of decoding as a political and semiotic issue within a specific national manifestation of a single medium: British television. And his version of the model had a minimal empirical foundation, and for this reason had little social scientific cachet. His was a hybrid theory based on perception and not empirical data.41 The Limits of Modelling Hall has retraced his steps and criticized several of the assumptions that informed ‘Encoding/Decoding.’ However, his remarks on the model itself are limited in scope, yet decisive. By way of a conclusion, I will consider the four important points Hall makes.

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First, Hall was engaged in a polemic against a specific vision of communication as it was then practised in mass communications. Like many others, including McLuhan as I discussed in chapter 1, Hall wanted to position himself against the famous ‘transmission’ model.42 This field of resistance produced strange bedfellows. But Hall’s specific point was to debunk the myth of the fixity, transparency, and pre-formedness of meaning in a unidirectional and unidimensional model. Second, Hall was not presenting what he calls a ‘grand model,’ one that would survive the decades, and was both complete and generalizable; rather, as he commented, ‘I don’t think it has the theoretical rigor, the internal logical and conceptual consistency for that.’43 As I suggested above, the model had a lineage, a field of modelling in communications, and elsewhere and did not stand alone. Third, he failed to insert a temporal dimension into his spatial model. Hall relates this issue to the illusion of sameness produced by an understanding of articulation based on an analogy with an individual that entails locating the moments of production and consumption in the same place along the same time line. For Hall, the moments of encoding and decoding could be geographically remote (Taiwan and Manhattan, he mentions), but also temporally disconnected (ten years apart). These are not analogically related to individual, embodied acts but instead are non-contiguous, global, systemic relations.44 Fourth and finally, Hall admits, ‘I make a mistake by drawing that bloody diagram with only the top half. You see, if you’re doing a circuit, you must draw a circuit.’45 The problem of the un-diagrammed circuit and the missing bottom half of the model have betrayed Hall’s insistence on the non-originary nature of encoding that affects and is affected by anterior codes (‘already given’). Again, this is polemical writing, Hall claims, and it is directed against totalism with regard to acts of meaning production. Additionally, the model’s missing bottom half creates a false dichotomy between the real world and the world of encoding and decoding or discourse in which the real is falsely miraculated (‘pops’) into signification (as if it were not there already or flush with it). What is remarkable in Hall’s reflections is that he does not reject the model as such, even to the extent that he repeated some of its flaws – unidirectionality of the arrows, negating feedback, for instance – and the linearity of flow underlined by the ‘Procrustean’ approach to diagramming (more kindly, perhaps, would be simplicity). The sophisticated theoretical heterogeneity of Hall’s discussion of communication, read together with the relatively meagre details offered by

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the model itself, as well as the perspicacity of his reflections on modelling, suggests that the transmission model still held sway over the conjuncture of communication and cultural studies that existed in the early 1970s. Hall’s efforts to get beyond it were not fully realized, not as the result of faults internal to his landmark paper, but because it was written on the cusp of a significant shift away from communication into theories of texts. The work required to develop and correct (Hall prefers ‘change’) the model was not undertaken for a variety of specific institutional (lack of funding for empirical testing) and large-scale theoretical sea changes: ‘At the time I would have loved to have done a properly constructed test of the model and see what it delivered, and whether I could have developed the model better in light of that. We didn’t have that chance.’46 Despite Hall’s misgivings, his analysis of encoding and decoding evoked in an entirely new way these two volumes of code. Literally, at least since WWII, encoding and decoding have stood together as the two volumes of cryptology and, in some electromechanical examples, as a switch on a machine for dual functions: encode or decode. Hall changed in a fundamental way how these volumes of codebooks were conceived, lifting them from the history of cryptanalysis and into the cultural sphere. Just as Weaver noted in passing in his description of telegraphic code the significance of the frequency letter list for English that begins with E and ends with Z, this cryptanalytical principle may be taken together with encoding/decoding as shifts of emphasis from technical to cultural universes of reference in the movement out of the shadows of WWII to the WWW.

3 Roman Jakobson and the Primacy of the Poetic

The influential Russian linguist Roman Jakobson is perhaps best known in semiotic and structuralist circles for three innovations: 1 A sense of dynamic or open synchrony, greater than a slice of time and closer to a span with its own interwoven micro-histories; 2 An emphasis on simultaneity and equivalence over linearity; and 3 The placement of poetics at the heart of his theory of language and communication, elevating aesthetics over semantics and using poetics to criticize the principle of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs through an effort to regain onomatopoeia as a rule rather than an exception, which was hitherto based on a strictly non-aesthetic sense of language.1 In the first of his Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning dating from 1942, Jakobson meditates on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ and the signifying quandary posed by the onomatopoetic refrain of the croaking bird: ‘Nevermore.’ Here Jakobson subtly evokes the ‘mystery’ of the unity of sound and meaning, the investigation of which requires an extra-semantic sensibility.2 What interests me in this chapter is one important consequence of Jakobson’s valorization of the poetic: the importance he gives to the poetic function in his model of communication. This chapter provides a reading of a classic text in communication theory, Jakobson’s 1960 paper ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.’3 For those who have forgotten the lessons of this remarkable paper, containing another key model alongside those of Weaver and Shannon, and Hall, this chapter will refresh fading memories. For those who have not read it, perhaps

64 Remodelling Communication Figure 3: Six factors and functions (after Jakobson) R

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they will be inspired to do so. However, it is worth noting that Jakobson saves what is at the centre of his theory for last in his presentation of the functions of language. There is not only a certain amount of drama in this mode of presentation, but also the implications are substantial because the primacy of the poetic challenges the referential function, and this challenge is posed through the fundamental ambiguity of messages (this is a non-restricted sense beyond poetry proper). It is useful to recall Paul Ricoeur’s observation in the course of his analysis of the relationship between the poetic and referential functions in Jakobson’s theory: ambiguity profoundly alters reference rather than suppress it.4 One of the peculiarities of Jakobson’s statement is that it may be read as an elaborate reflection on a single example, given the heavy labour performed by the rhetorical figure of paronomasia (wordplay in many guises). For all of his attention to the very thing that linguistics and theoreticians of language often wrongly excluded from their considerations (emotive elements), Jakobson’s turn to the study of the functions of

Roman Jakobson and the Primacy of the Poetic 65

language is seemingly devoid of emotion and quite minimalist, albeit with variations on the trappings of the mathematical model, with its doubling and observation (here it is ‘checking’) in the pursuit of the elimination of error and corrective channels (‘The Addresser sends a Message to the Addressee’); however, where engineers double, Jakobson will ultimately split addresser, addressee, and message. If the engineers wanted to subdue meaning, Jakobson wanted to split it. He first reveals ‘constitutive features in any speech event’ in a ‘concise survey.’ To these six features will correspond the six functions of language. The components of the model of communication determine or direct the distribution of the functions. In this way the model serves as a template for Jakobson upon which to hang his functions. Briefly, the addresser/encoder sends a message to the addressee/ decoder. Messages are embedded in or refer to contexts, which the addressee must be able to grasp and perhaps even verbalize. The addresser and addressee need to partially share a code, that is, the rules governing the relationship between the message and its context; and the message is sent through a physical channel and contact, a psychological connection, is established between addresser and addressee so that they may enter and stay in communication. Jakobson writes, ‘Each of these six features (Addresser-Message-Context-Contact-CodeAddressee) determines a different function of language.’5 Jakobson places his greatest emphasis on the message and the poetic function; others, such as Baudrillard, have emphasized the code and metalingual function through a political economy of the sign that exposes the ‘reign of the code’ that is built on the destruction of reference (see chapter 5). To put the matter somewhat crudely, a theory of communication or critique of the model of communication may be accomplished by emphasizing a specific constitutive feature and the function it determines. This perspective is already suggested by Jakobson with regard to all verbal messages oriented, for example, to referents: ‘The leading task of numerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions in such messages must be taken into account by the observant linguist.’6 Even denotative messages are not limited to one function; yet the referential function will remain atop the hierarchy of functions pertaining to such messages. But Baudrillard, for instance, will shift his attention to contact and phatic function in a critique of non-communication in the information age of networks (thereby turning the supposedly psychological connection into a merely technological one).7 It is an interesting and worthwhile exercise to imagine a theory of communication and/

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or a critique of another such theory that results from an emphasis on different features/functions and/or experimentally mixing a particular hierarchy of functions, downplaying the predominant function of a verbal message, etc. In this respect, the six functions, each emphasized in its turn, thus requiring a different hierarchical arrangement, can be used to generate six or more – if combinations are entertained – theories of communication. Parallel to Baudrillard’s critique of communication as simulation and the phatic function as nothing by a technical tele-point, one finds an array of addressee and conative function-based approaches such as Ien Ang’s.8 Ang’s ‘theoretical inversion’ is accomplished through a critique of the presupposition of successful communication between sender and receiver in an incoherent space of contemporary culture (a global capitalist village) in which communication breakdown results from the radical uncertainty of meaning (it is never given and cannot be assumed). However, the features/functions still act as guideposts to the indeterminacy of meaning and the increasingly strange figure of the addressee (audience) in the chaos called late capitalist, postmodern culture. The criticisms of Baudrillard and Ang, among others, are typical problems with which readers today must reckon in assessing Jakobson’s accomplishment and the viability of a theory of communication that gives primacy to the poetic. The Other Functions I begin by considering the Jakobsonian functions other than the poetic. ‘The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function,’ writes Jakobson.9 Context-oriented messages are predominantly referential; Jakobson uses the terms denotative (oriented toward perceptible extra-linguistic objects) and cognitive (suggesting the core meaning by contrast with subsidiary emotive content, as in the Port Royal tradition). The important point is that the factor ‘context’ is a general concept crossing Fregean and Port Royal logics, among many others presenting the nuances of denotation. The emotive function is focused on the addresser. It is essentially attitudinal (about the subject matter of the communication) or ‘expressive’ in that it ‘produces an impression of a certain emotion whether true or feigned.’10 This production of an impression is illustrated with an example of how an actor may give a wide range of ‘expressive tint’ to a single phrase. Although

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the emotive function is ‘laid bare in the interjections,’ Jakobson writes, ‘it flavors to some extent all our utterances.’11 In this statement Jakobson sets himself apart from those who would restrict their analysis of language from the informational perspective to its strictly cognitive aspect, relegating emotion to a non-linguistic feature. While Jakobson explicitly counters this position, the order in which he presents the function, turning immediately from referential to emotive, assures the inclusion of the second, weaker, often ‘subsidiary,’ or even extraneous side of the couple, as a further source of information conveyed by messages. He underlines the difference between the emotive and referential functions on the basis of the former’s peculiar sound patterns and their syntactic role as equivalents of sentences rather than as components of them. But this difference is only relative because of the circumstantial or contextual sensitivity of emotive utterances (the example of the theatre breaks down even further into the Russian theatre and of Stanislavskij’s test in particular, decodable by Muscovite listeners, an audience familiar with this local, specialized subcode); in other words, the utterance of an emotively tinted message involves the implicit construction of an addressee, the factor to which Jakobson next turns. The conative function is illustrated by imperative verbal sentences that are not subject to a truth test (unlike, he thinks, declarative sentences). Although Jakobson seems to inherit the term conative from psychologist Karl Bühler’s triadic organon model of language (speaker-listenerobject to which correspond the functions expression-conation[appeal]representation) in which it is illustrated by incantations that convert something or someone into an addressee, some authors such as Eco simply refer to the function as imperative.12 Jakobson’s additional example of magic spells as conative messages is fascinating, because it involves the conversion of an inanimate thing or ‘absent [second or] third person’ (not a person, at all, really, if we follow the examples of the incantations, spells addressing Water, Sun, Moon) into an addressee; in other words, an orientation toward a certain kind of absent referent is transformed into an addressee with whom, or it, some characteristics are shared. This is retained by Jakobson from Bühler’s orientation towards the listener. But Jakobson has surprisingly little of an explicit nature to say about this function’s orientation toward the addressee and his or her or its reactions and the history of its various uses in Russian and Prague circles.13 The phatic function is derived from Bronislav Malinowski’s concept of ‘phatic communion,’ the use of language to maintain a social relation

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through ritualized formulas such as greeting, chit-chat about the weather, and related formal niceties (redundancies) of social communication. If Jakobson advances this social function, it is by inclusion of the means of discontinuing communication rather that simply prolonging it (including confirmation of the interlocutor’s attention). The ‘mere purport,’ as Jakobson puts it, of prolonging communicative contact suggests the emptiness of such contact; the example from Dorothy Parker is illustrative: ‘ “Well, here we are,” he said. “Here we are,” she said. “Aren’t we?” “I should say we are,” he said.’14 This not only makes the function susceptible to the aforementioned critique launched by Baudrillard, but in addition suggests that the emptiness of contact has a propitious technical function as a test of the system itself: testing 1-23, or as Jakobson puts it: ‘Hello, do you hear me?’ Yet in order to arrive at this conclusion, one would have to suppress the other functions, which, in the Parker example, are richly suggestive in emotive terms. The focus on what language does in establishing social solidarity (or mutual boredom) leads Jakobson to suggest, zoo-semiotically, that talking birds and humans share the phatic function of language; and, like parrots and budgerigar, infants communicate before they can communicate (exchange information). These examples are underdeveloped in Jakobson’s paper. In chapter 5, I will take up the phatic function separately because of the enormity of its influence across the disciplines. The phatic function shares a great deal with the metalingual function. The former ‘checks whether the channel works’15; the latter is used by addresser and addressee ‘to check up whether they use the same code’16 – a double check: first on the channel and then on the code. Jakobson also calls it a ‘glossing function,’ an explanation added between the lines or in the margins; and, since he develops an exasperating example of someone whose unfamiliarity with school vocabulary leads to repeated requests for definitions (‘The sophomore was plucked’), such requests for ‘equational definitions’ are dull, repetitive, ‘strictly metalingual.’17 The Poetic Function Finally, Jakobson reaches the poetic function, focused on the message itself. Irreducible to poetry as such (verbal art is dominated by its poetic function, while the poetic remains subsidiary in other verbal activities, which would unduly confine linguistics), study of the poetic function is embedded in general problems of language, and the proper scrutiny of

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language must include the poetic. This function ‘focus[es] on the message for its own sake’ and in this way ‘promot[es] the palpability of signs.’18 Jakobson’s first illustration conveys this palpability through a message’s shape: ‘ “Why do you always say Joan and Margery, yet never Margery and Joan? Do you prefer Joan to her twin sister?” “Not at all, it just sounds smoother.” ’ In a sequence of two coordinate names, as far as no rank problems interfere, the precedence of the shorter name suits the speaker, unaccountably for him, as a well-ordered shape of the message.’19 In this example, the sound shape of the conjoined names – short followed by long, with syllable gradation – determined their order of presentation, giving a false sense of value through priority of presentation. Attention to the sound of the conjoined names reveals this as long as no questions of rank (the elder Joan, perhaps) interfere with such poetic considerations about language’s palpability. Put another way, the smooth sound shape of the combination produces the structured effect of pre-ferring one person over another. But this effect is unaccounted for by the speaker – at least not initially accessible to thought. Jakobson’s reorientation of linguistics also has political moments, since ‘poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total re-evaluation of the discourse and of all its components whatsoever.’20 It was Julia Kristeva who saw in Jakobson’s turn to the poetic the foundation of the ‘linguistic ethics,’ which would have as its object poetic language, understood as the swelling of a heterogeneous process, a rhythm inassimilable to structure – nothing less than the struggles of the Kristevan subject-in-process.21 Jakobson then turns to several paronomastic images as illustrative of the poetic function. Why paronomasia, this recurrent trope of substitution and play on words, sometimes reduced to assonance and alliteration? Play on the sound and meaning of words is indicated by the example of ‘ “the horrible Harry.” “Why horrible?” “Because I hate him.” “But why not dreadful, terrible, frightful, disgusting?” “I don’t know why, but horrible fits him better.” ’ It just seems to fit him better than dreadful or disgusting. For Jakobson, ‘without realizing it, she clung to the poetic device of paronomasia.’22 She was aware before thought, a phenomenon that the poetic ‘explains.’ What seems to fit pre-exists the proffered associative cluster imposed retroactively in the form of a question. A more complex example follows: ‘I like Ike’ (with reference to Dwight Eisenhower). The sound shape of this political election slogan is /ay layk

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ayk/. Jakobson makes much of the echo rhyme in which /ayk/ is contained in the previous word /layk/, concluding that ‘I like Ike’ displays ‘a paronomastic image of a feeling which totally envelops its object.’23 The poetical economy and efficiency of alliteration is at work here in this subject/object envelopment. Sound carries the envelopment as the subject leaves itself for the object with which it unites. After introducing these examples, Jakobson turns immediately to the statement of a theoretical principle based on what is ‘the indispensable feature inherent in any piece of poetry.’24 There are two axes describing ‘modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior’: selection and combination. The selection of a noun from a reservoir of more-or-less equivalent nouns in a message about a particular topic, child, rather than kid to which an appropriate verb is added as a comment – sleeps, walks – results in a combination of chosen words. Selection is governed by equivalence (similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity) while combination is governed by contiguity. Jakobson specifies: ‘The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.’25 All sorts of ‘equalizations,’ ‘equations,’ and ‘matches’ result: between syllables, stresses, pauses. Equation is the cornerstone of sequence, and the measurement of sequences is essential to the poetic. Poetics is perfused with similarity, with likeness and repetitiveness. The projection of similarity on contiguity makes poetry ‘thoroughly symbolic’ and gives a metaphoric tint to metonymy, and vice versa. It also raises the poetic function above the referential function through ambiguation. This is the hallmark of any poetic message, ‘any self-focused message,’26 and it entails the splitting of addresser and addressee into author-reader as well as the ‘I’ of the storyteller, for instance, and the ‘Thou’ of monologues, epistles (‘alleged addressee’). If the poetic ambiguates referentiality, does referentiality dis-ambigute the poetic? Not exactly, because the double sense of the message and splitting of addressee and addresser may also involve the splitting of reference itself: ‘It was and it was not’; ‘Once upon a time, or maybe twice.’ The disambiguation needs to be interrogated in order to reveal the splitting at issue.27 Why the refrain of paronomasia, then? Jakobson explains, ‘In a sequence, where similarity is superimposed on contiguity, two similar phonemic sequences near to each other are prone to assume a paronomasic function. Words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning.’28 This brings us back to ‘The Raven’ with its ‘repetitive alliteration’: ‘And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting.’ The next line

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in the final stanza displays the merger of the bird’s perch and the bust upon which it sits through ‘ “sonorous” paronomasia’: ‘On the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door’ (pallid, Pallas). Jakobson continues to catalogue the ‘ingenious paronomasias’29 (the chains and strings of them) in this primary text by Poe. Jakobson’s attention to paronomasia segues into the significance of sound symbolism (especially ‘conspicuous similarity in sound’) as a fundamental reorientation of semiotic attention to the acoustic above the semantic. While he does make his strongest case with reference to a poem, it is useful to recall his earlier appeal to the political slogan in which paronomasia was present in another kind of message. The repeated example of paronomasia is itself, if we may read Jakobson against or with himself, to be understood as yet another example of the repetition (echoes) he made so much of in his theoretical work. Even the ‘Closing Statement’ itself, as a verbal communication, has a poetic function in the sound textures of its arguments. Jakobson succeeded at moving poetic competence back into linguistics and in moving the poetic function beyond poetry as a vital accessory in the analysis of messages as such to which communication theorists need to attend. Sound textures and grammars carry subtle meanings that appear inexplicable or do not appear at all until queried, just as we found in the ‘Joan and Margery’ and ‘horrible Harry’ examples in which the order seems suitable ‘unaccountably’ and the adjective simply fits better, ‘I don’t know why?’ As I suggested earlier, poetic effects may assist in the construction of a message’s structural dimension in that they provide fragmentary support for a retrospective imposition and maintenance of classifications, orders, or preferences. The poetic function forms part of what Hall called the aural-visual televisual message form (of appearance), the ‘mode of symbolic exchange’ that cannot be ignored.30 The poetic emphasis on the ‘palpability of signs’ shifts the feeling of sound shapes to a place prior to semantics, which plays catchup. This play is an effect of Jakobson’s insistence on consideration of all the functions, which means specifically that others sneak up on the poetic function in specific contexts and provide anchors and explanations for it. While poetics has a technical name for the relations it describes (tropes), this naming is qualified by non-conscious experiences, and these cannot be given in advance. By the same token, the poetic finds itself already in a relation with the non-poetic, which it can’t explain except by recourse to sticky affective attachments, and a cluster of late-arriving options (i.e., ‘Why not dreadful Harry?’).

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In this chapter I have sought to underline two features of Jakobson’s examples of the poetic and the role of paronomasia: palpability of signs take precedence over other semiotic features; and the emergence of a sound form seems inexplicable. Taken together, this recasts the poetic not so much as a disruptive, destabilizing force directed by a revolutionary subject, but as an immediate, felt relation that then takes on meaning and becomes conditioned by other kinds of controls in light of its alleged indifference to referentiality, or lack of deference to context, or the encoder’s or decoder’s efforts to find extra-textual anchors for the message.31 By foregrounding the unaccounted dimensions of Jakobson’s examples, I wanted to avoid romanticizing the poetic as a monstrous, marginal, destructive force. Further, I also attempted to interrupt the ‘direct and immediate relation to meaning’32 that some readers of Jakobson’s poetic function insist upon in a dual parallelism between sound and meaning equivalences. Attention to the textures of the phonic equivalences between signs from which sound figures are composed does not require the quick arrival of whatever stabilizing/ explanatory scripts that come after sound. By emphasizing an unaccountable and unqualified feature of palpability that preceded cognition, I did not discover something radical, but rather the ‘advent’ of a relation with intensity. This concept of ‘advent,’ as I suggested in my introductory discussion of communication before communication, is an irreproducible before and it has been used by both Guattari, in his delineation of the potentiality in felt aesthetic relations before specific applications,33 and Massumi, in defining potentiality as an ‘always, just’ – arrival before coming.34 In both cases, these authors help us to grasp how the poetic model highlights the non-representational, indeterminate, and barely actual aspects of messages.

4 All Models Are Simulations: Jean Baudrillard’s Critique of Communication

This chapter will focus on Jean Baudrillard’s critical remarks on modelling communication in his essay ‘Requiem for the Media.’ The ‘requiem’ of the title refers to Baudrillard’s global critique of the possibility of a media theory – ‘there is no theory of the media’ – which has remained stuck, as he states, between two failures: empirical or mystical, Marx or McLuhan.1 My point of entry will be through Baudrillard’s criticisms of both Marx and McLuhan as the context he creates for his criticism of Jakobson’s model of communication as both ‘model’ (hence simulation) and exemplar of the manufacture of communication that Baudrillard takes as non-communication or non-genuine exchange. Baudrillard’s specific comments on the alleged failings of Jakobson’s model and the primacy of the poetic were written in the early 1970s and for some of his readers today must be read with a grain of salt. Mark Poster takes this position, because it seems that a critique of mediatic communication as unidirectional ‘does not anticipate the imminent appearance of bidirectional, decentralized media, such as the Internet.’2 This criticism does not fully acknowledge that Baudrillard has a sense of low-tech, bidirectional communication that challenges monopolistic media unidirectionality; yet it is surely correct to point out the absence of a multidirectional network in his conception of communication and media in general, despite acknowledging the emergence of Minitel messaging. However, even if these points are granted, it does not solve the problem of the generalizability of a counter-example that valorizes a network form. There are many versions of this fundamental issue in the literature on communication theory. Consider Flusser’s version. He distinguishes between mass media discursivity structured by few senders of messages and the many receivers for whom genuine dialogue with and

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influence upon the senders is impossible, and the dialogical conditions that would change this situation fundamentally: ‘TV can be changed so that it becomes a true “network.” ’3 Yet with such a solution, a robust ‘omnidirectional dialogue’ would present its own dangers (e.g., erasure of privacy). For Baudrillard, recourse to the network is less a danger and more a fantasy that communication is enhanced. Such a recourse solves nothing, and in the place of exchange and reciprocity ‘communicational man is assigned to the network in the same way the network is assigned to him, by a refraction from one to the other . . . man performs only what the machine is programmed to do.’4 The network form merely makes undecidability (of knowledge and exchange among persons) more sophisticated, Baudrillard claims. Neither Marx nor McLuhan Baudrillard asks, what if McLuhan was correct that Marx was obsolete in his lifetime (remaining a man of railways)? Here Baudrillard’s strokes are characteristically broad in asking what one gets when media/communication are grafted onto the Marxist analysis of production and social conflict. His answer is twofold: 1 A generalization of the commodity form that encompasses all of social life but in the absence of a critique is ‘rendered unthinkable,’ within the terms of its theory, of the political economy of the sign (the latter would be Baudrillard’s contribution); or 2 Admission of the partiality of Marxism and its non-generalizability (that is, what is said of material production is not transferable to non-material production and, importantly, that the theory of production is in this way tied to its historically contingent object [material production], which is what makes it non-transferable). Baudrillard concludes that there is no viable Marxist theory of the media/communication. But writing this in the early seventies would not have been groundbreaking. This was a widely accepted thesis among many European Marxian scholars interested in communication and information during this period, and such a theory was emerging in a variety of places. Let’s revisit for a moment Baudrillard’s version of what McLuhan wrote about Marx: ‘In his candid fashion, he is saying that Marx, in his materialist analysis of production, had virtually circumscribed

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productive forces as a privileged domain from which language, signs, and communication in general found themselves excluded. In fact, Marx does not even provide for a genuine theory of railroads as “media,” as modes of communication: they hardly enter into consideration. And he certainly established no theory of technical evolution in general, except from the point of view of production – primary, material, infrastructural production as the almost exclusive determinant of social relations.’5 Baudrillard’s reference is to the opening pages of War and Peace in the Global Village where McLuhan is pointing to two paradoxes: that anti-communism and Red scares are ridiculous because communism, in his specific sense of the term, has already happened and adequately describes our own electric, tribal service environment: ‘By Karl Marx’s times, a “communism” resulting from such services [“by the middle of the nineteenth century the extent of environmental services available to the workers of the community greatly exceeded the scale of services that could be monopolized by individual wealth”] so far surpassed the older private wealth and services contained within the new communal environment that it was quite natural for Marx to use it as a rear-view mirror for his Utopian hopes.’6 The rear-view mirror shows what is behind us – communism already belongs to yesterday in Marx’s time – and is the basis upon which Marx goes forward. So Marx drove forward his analysis on the basis of an old environment, and for him the new environment remained invisible (his inability to see railroads forwardly as ‘media’). But this catches Marx in a predicament, which, according to McLuhan, is a ‘human bias.’7 The corollary of this bias is the claim that a ‘commune-ist’ environment already existed, it was Marx’s rear-view mirror, yet this made him blind to the then new media around him. McLuhan is clearer on this point elsewhere. In an interview, McLuhan states, ‘Marx paid no attention to the environmental effects created by new products. He studied only work, market, products. The fact that the typewriter as a product completely revolutionized all administration and social life and the place of women in society was not his bag. In this respect Marx is exactly like Smith, Ricardo, Mill and the rest. None of the classical economists, including Marx, has ever studied the effects of new products in creating environments.’8 In short, Marx was transfixed by the view in his rear-view mirror of an already established commune-ism. The ideas that service environments today are freely accessible is one obvious blunder of McLuhan’s

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commune-ism, and it is a criticism rehearsed by every generation of readers against one another (Baudrillard and Smythe point out HansMagnus Enzenberger’s McLuhanesque folly of uncritically accepting as a truth the universal accessibility of new media against the evidence of the political economy of the radio spectrum).9 For his part, McLuhan had little sense of social stratification and almost no grasp of political economy, and this is why Arthur Kroker quite rightly refers to him as a deeply compromised thinker, a ‘missionary’ of the corporate world: capitalism as a step towards the ‘Pentecostal condition’ of human consciousness in the global village. Capitalism would be subsumed by technology as it realized the Catholic humanist vision of McLuhan. The commune-ism that McLuhan found already present before Marx’s birth went unanalysed because it merely served as a step in the progressive development of extensions of humankind (mechanical outstripped by electrical and then electronic) in the movement toward the McLuhanatic Utopia. Two blindnesses, two utopias: of course, unlike McLuhan, Marx is not so easily subdued when it comes to his thinking of technology, as recent renovations of the ‘Fragment on Machines’ from the Grundrisse have shown. Here we have a vision of cybernetics (the transformation of machinery into a system) based on a theory of automation (self-moving power) and most importantly the displacement of workers to mere ‘conscious linkages.’ Marx already saw that ‘the production process has ceased to be a labour process . . . labour appears . . . merely as conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system.’10 Welcome to the machine: objectified labour confronts the vestiges of living labour. The ‘necessary tendency’ is the absorption of knowledge (science) into (fixed) capital where it is materialized rather than in labour, which itself becomes more and more immaterial. Baudrillard’s argument is also aimed at Enzenberger. All the left, Baudrillard claims, dreams of taking over the media and releasing it from the ideological manipulations of capital; it could be democratized if it was run by revolutionaries (variations on this common claim exist and focus largely on the substitutions of a new code or codes that change how one lives). Yet the media, because they are beyond material production, remain a bit of a ‘social mystery’ for the left, like signs in general. Many leftist intellectuals, like Enzenberger, point out that young militants either capitulate to new media, exploring them ‘apolitically’ through subcultural and underground formations, or revert in

Jean Baudrillard’s Critique of Communication 77

the face of them to ‘archaic modes of communication’ such as the use of hand presses or other ‘artisanal means.’11 Baudrillard’s analysis seems dated in the era of diverse alternative and social media. But it is already present in Baudrillard’s use of a reproach of Enzenberger’s that the students in May 1968 should not have occupied the conservative and tradition-bound École des Beaux Arts, but focused on the state-run Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française (ORTF) (Baudrillard thinks that this occupation changed nothing anyway12 and suggests something of the argument he is going to mount against the seductions of simulated mediatic communication and the charm of the ‘archaic’ and ‘low tech’). There is a need to liberate the liberatory elements of the media and technology (hitherto frozen by capitalism), according to the left as Baudrillard represents it. But how can this be accomplished, Baudrillard argues, in exposing a contradiction in Enzenberger’s thought, when media (like television) are already inherently massive and serve the many? Is not the medium the coming of the mass-age? Is not the attempt to liberate media contradictory, if socialists successfully acquire their own wavelengths or bandwidths (Enzenberger thought that they might also build their own transmitters like free radio radicals in the fashion of Radio Alice), thus fighting against the mass for the sake of the few, against, that is, what is inherent about the structure of the media that is socialist? Here we see one of Baudrillard’s favourite contractions: socialist and social: ‘Why fight . . . if the media realize themselves in socialism?’13 After all, Enzenberger, too, invested a great deal in the observation about the egalitarian character of new media in which anyone can participate. Enzenberger was, before the fact, dreaming of a networked society of political subversion; McLuhan was, for him, a charlatan. Yet Enzenberger’s dream is remarkably close to McLuhan’s, since neither investigated the stratifications that shape access to socalled new media, nor did they interrogate their respective sense of ‘universal’ – ‘reversible circuits,’ decentralized, mobilizing against consumer spectacle, and collective (even a little terroristic).14 Just as Marxists dream of restoring the use value of objects by stripping them of their exchange value, Baudrillard maintains, they believe it is possible to restore to media their communicative truth (open and democratic), rescuing them from the distortions of dominant ideologies. This presupposes, Baudrillard thinks, that ideology already exists somewhere and is simply channelled (that is, distributed) through media, which also makes the latter mere containers of messages. Rather, for Baudrillard, ideology is embedded in the social relations the forms of

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media dictate and induce. Media are thoroughly ideological (‘the very operation of exchange value’15), and Baudrillard rejects Enzenberger’s presupposition of the ideological neutrality of media. This does not make Baudrillard pessimistic simply because he rejects at once technooptimism (McLuhan) and dialectical optimism (Enzenberger).16 Media ideology functions at the level of form in the separations established between senders and receivers and the supposed non-communication between them. Already, then, in these last few remarks on ideology and media form we can see that Baudrillard’s critique of Enzenberger was also a critique of an uncritical deployment of the terms of the transmission model of communication, that is, as a technical device, a relayer of messages, and thus of communication as a technical rather than a social problem (affecting a decisive social division between two frozen poles of sender and receiver). Models and Series Baudrillard’s thinking about models had two distinct phases. The first belonged to the period of The System of Objects during the late 1960s in which he worked through the difference between models and series; the second, upon which I am focusing in this chapter, emerged in his book For a Critique, which takes him into the early 1970s. Before I turn to the latter work, it is instructive to revisit his early distinction between models and series, since in it one may glimpse the model’s theoretical trajectory from original to simulacrum. Baudrillard introduced the models/series distinction to characterize the modern object of industrial production. Pre-industrial artisanal production of period furniture generated models whose status was imbued with the transcendent social reality of those who owned them. Class separated models from series that did not yet properly exist. With serial production, models lose their exalted status and social specificity and enter into the everyday universe of accessible (through credit) functional objects. Models are diffused through series, and series internalize models and cling to them. Some objects apparently have no models – like small household appliances – while others like certain dresses and automobiles manage to retain luxury and exclusivity. The more specific an object’s function, the less likely the models/series distinction will apply. The more personalized (accessorized) an object is, by selecting cultural markers of distinction like colour or detailing, the more serial objects paradoxically claim something of the status of

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models. Modelling proves to be only a variant of serialization as marginal differences support personalization: ‘Every object is a model, yet at the same time there are no more models.’17 Nonetheless, cultural consumption moves from series to models as the latter are conductive ideas of absolute difference (‘originals’). The model’s singularity is signified by the user’s strategies of personalization by means of serializations in a system-bound, internal transcendence. One of the key markers of serial objects, claimed Baudrillard, is their shoddiness, resulting from the addition of inessential qualities, and they tend to be found in cluttered interiors, while models allegedly last longer, display nuances, and sit well. Similarly, series are mainly pastiche and models have an open-ended syntax. In our world of objects, regression in time unites models and antiques, whereas serial objects belong to the flea market and are hard to date. Ultimately, series will not rejoin models, for ‘the only progression possible here is up the ladder of objects, but this is a ladder that leads nowhere.’18 Antidotes to Non-Communication The model is an embattled figure in Baudrillard’s thought. It is impinged upon by serial production. It should come as no surprise to find him writing: mass media ‘fabricate non-communication.’19 The social divisions thus established preclude a genuine space of reciprocal exchange governed by responsibility: ‘personal, mutual correlation in exchange.’20 This is why Baudrillard is not truly pessimistic: he finds an alternative in this transitive space of exchange and this in turn changes significantly how he sees communication and its modelling: ‘We must understand communication as something other than the simple transmissionreception of a message, whether or not the latter is considered reversible through feedback.’21 Media make exchange impossible; thus, the type of reciprocal communication Baudrillard has in mind is ruled out in the media. Certainly, media permit all sorts of simulated, participatory responses that are integrated into its transmission systems as mechanisms of social control. Mediatic non-communication is unilateral, excludes response, and monopolizes speech. Borrowing and extracting from literature on gift exchange in aboriginal societies, Baudrillard explains that power accrues to those who can give without being repaid, and this unilaterality disrupts the circuit of exchange and the reciprocal space in which giving-receiving-returning takes place as obligatory, often for fear of the severe consequences of breaking the circuit, but just

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as much in the seizure of power as a declaration of war or the loss of face in breaking the circuit. But media organizations seem to have none of these obligations. They mount interactivity (dynamical, interconnected production in the manner of YouTube) as a means to acquire personal information in the form of transactional data, or generate free content from users, thereby reducing costs on their precarious cognitive labourers. Baudrillard differentiates between attempts to democratize, subvert, and restore some measure of transparency to media (i.e., through redistribution) and breaking the monopoly on speech: ‘This is why the only revolution in this domain – indeed, the revolution everywhere: the revolution tout court – lies in restoring this possibility of response. But such a possibility presupposes an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the media.’22 This thesis is grounded in Baudrillard’s earlier work on the theory of symbolic exchange. It is worth revisiting the two pillars of Symbolic Exchange and Death named in its title. Baudrillard’s radical anthropology attempts to recover death and use it as a symbolic counter-gift (often in the form of suicide) that forces modern institutions – unilaterally giving the gifts of work as slow death, social security, and the maternal ambiance of consumption, not to mention the offer of global police services – to receive and respond to in kind with their own deaths. Summoning the code or the system, in Baudrillard’s street rhetoric, to receive the counter-gift makes it strange to itself in being drawn into a domain in which exchange is an incessant circuit of giving, receiving, and responding in kind and with interest. The failure to receive the counter-gift and repay in kind is loss of spirit, wealth, health, rank, and power. Death must be regained through ritual from official agencies of Thanatos such as coroners, funeral parlours, priests, and state statisticians. Baudrillard appropriates from anthropological sources symbolically significant practices (those of the Sara in Chad described by Robert Jaulin, for instance) that he adapts to his own ends, underlining that death is not biological but initiatic, a rite involving a reciprocal-antagonistic exchange. Baudrillard extends this analysis to the de-socialization and ghettoization of the dead in the West and tries to lift the social control over death that separates it from life, because it is from this separation that, for him, all subsequent alienations arise.23 To bring this theory up to date, it is evident that it is the basis for Baudrillard’s controversial reflection on the events of 9/11. The suicide planes that embedded themselves in the twin towers of the World Trade Center were symbolic forces of disorder issuing counter-gifts of mass

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death. The spirit of terrorism is that of symbolic exchange: ‘The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges posed by deaths and suicides.’24 But it is not so much that death is controlled but rather that it is excluded in the monopoly of global power of the ‘good, transparent, positive, West,’ a system whose ideal is ‘zero death,’ as Baudrillard puts it, and which at all costs neutralizes the symbolic stages of reversibility and challenge – to which the terrorists respond with a ‘counter-offensive’ of suicide: of symbolic and sacrificial death, ‘much more than real,’ a kind of death that the West cannot grasp except by placing a value on it, by ‘calculating’ its exchange (against Paradise, against financial support for their families through individual heroic martyrdom, etc.). Baudrillard’s rule-bounded, cruel, hierarchical, and tightly scripted conception of the symbolic may be productively contrasted with more fluid, anarchic, liberatory, and polymorphous ideas in circulation around the same period. For instance, Baudrillard considered Deleuze’s apprehension of madness as an idiomatic, singular form to be incorrect. For him, the question of seeking a radical alternative, a goal that he explicitly shared with Deleuze among others like Guattari and Lyotard in the 1970s, was that while madness disturbed the rules, it was not in deregulation (de-territorialization, proliferation) that his alternative would be found. Rather it was in a form of rule-boundedness, that is, in symbolic exchange, that Baudrillard discovered an anthropologically derived alternative: ‘in a set of rules of the symbolic game, and a dual obligation.’ Baudrillard continued, Deleuze talks a lot about becoming . . . I find this form of becoming very fine, provided that it isn’t confused with the proliferation of desire, which is merely the dispersal of a force. With the rhizome and the molecular, you find yourself faced with a constellation, an infinite host of possibilities. It’s very poetic, but so far as this operation of multiplication to infinity and of de-territorialization is concerned, it happens to be the case that computers and all the new virtual technologies are carrying it out on a grand scale. It seemed to me that, in the guise of libidinal deregulation, Deleuze and Lyotard were simply ratifying the future state of things. As for Guattari’s molecular revolution, I’m sorry, but it has, in a sense, become part of our lives – through genetics, computational biology, ‘mental morphing,’ etc.25

Baudrillard rejected the claims made by Deleuze and Guattari on behalf of becoming as merely, as he mentioned above, dispersion and simple

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change. For Baudrillard, technology’s role is to ‘operationalize’ everything, including philosophical concepts, so that ‘nothing ever really takes place, since everything is already calculated, audited, and realized in advance.’26 The molecular revolution was perhaps not inevitable, but followed several computational strands on the machinic phylum, and this made Guattari, thought Baudrillard, a good futurist adept at prediction (virtual technologies and planetary computerization carried out the molecular revolution with or without Guattari). While global connectivity, cyberspeak, and incessant messaging all contribute to erasing the symbolic capacity of language – which may be spared in vernacular and language’s imperfections and weaknesses – the cost of getting a symbolic dimension back into language was, for Baudrillard, worth paying with forced obligation and deeply conservative and violence-breeding concepts like honour and face (which are in extreme instances saved by killing transgressors, inside and outside of ritual spaces, and thus serve as alibis, i.e., honour killings). It is against this backdrop that Baudrillard attempts to inject a symbolic dimension into his media analysis. Media without response pose and answer their own questions, he thinks, ‘via the simulated detour of a response’27 such as a poll, referendum, phone-in show, or scrolling through search results. Likewise, the consumer ‘takes and makes use of’ but does not give, reimburse, or exchange reciprocally. A functional object does not require a response, Baudrillard maintains, because it has already integrated it on its own terms (controlling rupture), what he characterizes as ‘a reciprocal putting into play.’28 What he suggests here revisits his early hypotheses about the destiny of the consumer object’s perfection in automatism: the user does nothing as the human body becomes less and less a determining factor as physical effort wanes as a requirement of an object’s ‘manipulation.’29 Baudrillard’s next example is that of television as social control: there is no need to worry that it might become an Orwellian telescreen. The important point is that ‘people are no longer speaking to each other, that they are definitely isolated in the face of speech without response.’30 Baudrillard’s McLuhanite formalism is extreme in this example. But it is part and parcel of a rejection of content as potentially revolutionary. This aligns Baudrillard with one tradition of interpreting the general impact of the model of communication: it negated content-based analysis of messages (behaviourally grounded and semiologically naive), especially those on television, for the sake of analysis of the televisual sign.31 For his part, Baudrillard does not align activities undertaken in so-called

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isolation with resistance, no matter how resistance is conceived (fantasy, irony, valued interiority, etc., in short, all of the pleasures and politics of the personal recuperated in one way or another by cultural studies). There is a further matter that requires some clarification before continuing: Baudrillard’s book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign exposed the ideological dimension of use value, repository of the true idealism in Marxism, exposing it as an abstraction that was hidden under the cloak of immediacy and particularity and, despite Marx, already infused with equivalence. For Baudrillard, use value was not incomparable; in fact, use value was an effect of the system and a convenient alibi that allowed it to refer to objective reality. Use value, Baudrillard maintained, is grounded in a naturalness based on utility (immediacy of one’s relationship with things). This was actually highly metaphysical, Baudrillard argued, and ambiguous, and it is here that he turned the tables on Marx by showing that use value was an abstraction rather than connected with the concrete and particular (the latter being the false front behind which it hid). Thus, when Baudrillard considers that Marxists dream of recovering the use value of things beyond the logic of equivalence that governs the exchange of commodities, it is a dream that must remain unfulfilled. And so it goes with the media. The dreams of May 1968 and the Yippies in the United States – all those who have attempted to reverse the media by appropriating them for different ends have operated under a similar ‘strategic illusion.’ Yes, the media spread news of the actions of the student revolutionaries in May 1968, but this does not mean that the media were subversive. They were, on the contrary, Baudrillard argues, discharging their responsibility of habitual social control. The media did this by maintaining their form: ‘By broadcasting the events in the abstract universality of public opinion, they imposed a sudden and inordinate development on the movement of events; and through this forced and anticipated extension, they deprived the original movement of its own rhythm and of its meaning. In a word: they short-circuited it.’32 Symbolic action, like initiation, has a rhythm, a ‘scansion’ of reciprocity.33 When rhythm is stripped of its accents, something original and singular is lost; when the events are reduced to the frame, schedules and mediations of broadcasting and reportage, when potentialities are frozen, transversality and spontaneity captured and channelled, symbolic action is annulled (‘eviscerated’), meaning is no longer produced but reproduced,

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transgression becomes exchange value, politics is depoliticized. Where did the symbolic take place? Baudrillard explains, ‘The real revolutionary media during May were the walls and their speech, the silk-screen posters and the hand-painted notices, the street where speech began and was exchanged, everything that was an immediate inscription, given and returned, spoken and answered, mobile in the same space and time, reciprocal and antagonistic.’34 Artisanal production, graffiti, homemade signage, to-and-fro banter and discussion, new modes of collective activity and expression: symbolic reciprocity destroys media (as intermediary, as technical structure, as social form that swallows meaning). A sobering thought: since use value is implicated in the domain of value, only symbolic exchange stands beyond mediatic communication (only it is incomparable). Indeed, it is the unmasking of use value that leads Baudrillard directly into a theory of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard’s critique of the ‘enlightened Marxist’ Enzenberger continues with reference to his presupposition of a model of communication, formalized by Jakobson, also shared by the dominant ideology against which he struggles. In fact the theory is widely accepted – in the mass culture, in universities, etc. Examples are not hard to find. Think of John Fiske and John Hartley’s uncritical acceptance and grafting onto their analysis of the functions of television of the six functions defined by Jakobson as if these perfectly describe the medium’s semiotic. The authors even go so far as to suggest that not only can all the functions be seen at work on television but ‘indeed many of its messages seem to serve little purpose other than to perform them.’35 For Baudrillard, however, ‘the entire conceptual infrastructure of this theory is ideologically connected with dominant practice.’36 Failure to recognize this has bogged down radical and critical perspectives. Against Jakobson Baudrillard’s version of Jakobson’s model is a simple, thumbnail version:  Transmitter-message-decoder  (Encoder)-message-(decoder) Baudrillard does not so much summarize Jakobson as telescope his concepts into a fatal formula: the ‘vectorization’ of a communication process into a single message issued unidirectionally from either encoder

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to decoder or decoder to encoder. Communication is always reducible, claims Baudrillard, to this ‘simple unity,’ which, despite claims to objectivity and scientific status, is built on ‘ideological categories that express a certain type of social relation, namely, . . . one speaks, the other doesn’t . . . one has the choice of the code; the other only liberty to acquiesce or abstain.’37 Much of the analysis undertaken in For a Critique exposed the ideological imbalances lurking in what appeared to be structural correspondences, such as the homology between the commodity and the sign. Exchange value and the signifier have a ‘strategic value’ greater than the ‘tactical value’ of use value and the signified. Binary oppositive structuration is never symmetrical, since each antecedent term produces its own ‘alibi’ as its consequent term. Use value and the signified are ‘effects’ or ‘simulation models’ of their antecedent terms. They are produced respectively by Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in terms of exchange value alone, while semio-linguistics privileges the signifier as its principle of circulation and regulated interplay of difference. The kind of communication that Jakobson’s model suggests is presented by Baudrillard in terms of single meaning and unidirectionality (of messages), but also, importantly, of a mutually exclusive polarity of encoder and decoder – artificially held apart and just as artificially reunited by an ‘intermedium’ of the coded message: it is this intermedium that maintains both ‘in a respective situation . . . at a distance from one another.’38 The relation in question excludes reciprocity (feedback may be built in, but this changes nothing). In an interesting footnote, Baudrillard directly criticizes the notion of ‘contact’: ‘The two terms [encoder and decoder] are so faintly present to each other that it has proven necessary to create a “contact” category to reconstitute the totality theoretically!’39 The code/message terrorizes communication by positioning the encoder and decoder in an ‘abstract separateness,’ while privileging the sender (strategic value). Jakobson’s phatic function in his model of communication, for instance, is evidence for Baudrillard of the metaphysical distance between the poles and an alibi for the communication that the model promises but actually simulates. Baudrillard claims that it is the code that speaks, since it dictates the unidirectional passage of information and guarantees the legibility, univocality (or multivocality, for it hardly matters for Baudrillard who dismisses ambiguity and polysemy), and ‘autonomous value’ of the message, conceived as information. Elsewhere, in Seduction, Baudrillard has had much to say about the phatic function as it hypertrophies in the cold universe of information

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systems. The zero degree of contact is the tele-dimension: tele-phasis. By the time Jakobson revisited the concept, he had lost its original symbolic sense in the anthropological work of Malinowski, Baudrillard maintains. That is, it no longer involved ceremonial challenges and ritual responses: ‘Language has no need for “contact”: it is we who need communication to have a specific “contact” function, precisely because it is eluding us.’40 The phatic function ‘analytically restores’ what is missing in communication, far, far removed from the ‘frayed spaces’ of symbolic exchange in the pulsing (beyond meaning) ‘tele-space’ of networked terminals (Minitel, Telidon, Internet . . .) at the ends of which classical assumptions about ‘inter-individual logic’ no longer make sense. Ambivalence makes the model collapse because there is no code for it: ‘The entire formulation exists only to avert this catastrophe,’ charges Baudrillard.41 Under the guise of admitting ambiguity and even polyvocality, the model proposed by Jakobson excludes an ambivalent exchange between persons. But in Seduction what makes the model collapse is what once for Baudrillard made it metaphysical: the absence of determinate positions: ‘Only terminals in a position of extermination.’42 Terminals are not interlocutors, and the binary code of 0/1 is no longer language. Symbolic responses between persons take place ‘beyond the code,’ thus overcoming separation (‘abstract bipolarity’) and subsequent harsh articulation (‘diktat of the code’).43 Efforts to make the communication process more ‘supple’ by breaking down and multiplying the poles, introducing reversibility, offering multiple switching points, democratizing the transmission pole by having ‘everyone become a manipulator’ are all inadequate, argues Baudrillard.44 The core issue is ‘an original form of exchange’ that is irreducible to technical and dialectical refashionings, as well as every effort to substitute a more radical content or, as Eco once suggested, as Baudrillard points out, new subversive decoding practices. A subversive reading is still a reading, writes Baudrillard, and it doesn’t address the symbolic need for simultaneity without a message passing from one pole to another; neither is there a univocal decoding, not because ambiguity reigns, but as the result of restoring the ‘ambivalence of meaning and in demolishing in the same stroke the agency of the code.’45 What, then, could possibly meet such criteria? Graffiti seem to answer at least some of them since they respond on the spot and ‘smash the code.’ They are not decipherable like a commercial message. Rather, for Baudrillard, graffiti ‘volatilize’ the code and exist beyond the communicative grid.46 The semiocracy knows no modesty in the city and

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expands everywhere at all times. Graffiti remain one of the few means of symbolic expression, and elsewhere Baudrillard cites early 1970s New York graffiti featuring pseudonyms and numbers: KOOLKILLER 29 – SNAKE I – SUPERBEE SPIX COLA 139 – that meant nothing and were denotatively and connotatively reticent to the extreme, but functioned as a ‘symbolic matriculation number . . . derail[ing] the common system of designation.’47 These empty signifiers erupt in the midst of full signs and dissolve the latter ‘on contact.’ Obviously, Baudrillard retains a certain semiotic language in his description of this phenomenon and does not write in the mode of the symbolic. Writing of rather than as the symbolic, Baudrillard remarks on how graffiti tags travel the city on the sides of buses and subways and are ‘given, exchanged, transmitted and relayed in a collective anonymity.’48 The sudden appearance of graffiti, Baudrillard adds, the ‘savage mobility’ of the spray painting and postering can hijack the wall upon which it appears and annihilate it – think, for a moment, of bathroom graffiti scratched into the wall of stalls as opposed to the corporate inserts of bathroom advertising that have found their way onto entrepreneurial university campuses. Now certain establishments even provide blackboards! This is merely an attempt to curb and contain expression. Official urban renewal projects attempt to tame graffiti by turning them into murals, which may then be recuperated as local art, or multicultural policy or youth development, or historical documents. Baudrillard’s sense of graffiti is not tied to beauty or any other such aesthetic or art market issues. Ultimately, it is an antidote to communication as modelled by Jakobson. Baudrillard has recourse to extreme examples such as the events of 9/11 to give content to his theory of symbolic exchange and in addition creates counter-examples from expressive but romantic street politics that are now quite dated. His most cogent remarks concern the fate of the phatic function under the pressure, indeed the imperative, of communication in a networked society. His major contribution to an understanding of modelling communication is that he makes clear the necessity of investigating the aberrances of the phatic function across the discourses of culture and communication. And it is to this issue that I turn in the next chapter.

5 Phatic (Dys)functions

This chapter focuses on the issue of the (dys)functionality of phatic communication, the terms of which will be familiar from chapters 3 and 4. Beyond the formalism of the Jakobsonian functions, the concept totters perilously on the edge of dysfunctionality, pushed forward by its critique. Strangely, phatic communication realizes itself in a dysfunctionality best appreciated in its application to a further dimension of contact – that is, tactility – and its fortunes in media studies of television, with particular attention to screens themselves. Again, the consequences of contact with the tactile medium of television, while full of potential for valorizing in various ways synesthetic experience, tend toward dystopic elaborations in theory as well as in various kinds of popular practices (pop music and film). And this in the end extends the concept by demonstrating its critical applicability to mediatic features of the network society. The Rise and ‘Fall’ of the Phatic Function from Jakobson to Baudrillard As chapters 3, 4, and 5 present a connected tissue of argumentation, it may be useful at this point to recall a few points. Jakobson derived the phatic function in his poetic model of communication from anthropological source materials based on observations of ‘phatic communion,’ the use of language to maintain social relations through ritualized formulas. The ‘mere purport,’ as Jakobson puts it, of prolonging communicative contact suggests its very emptiness – recall the example from Dorothy Parker. This not only makes the function susceptible to

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atrophy in which there is ‘constant contact without a message,’ what Eco called ‘sports chatter,’1 but in addition suggests that the emptiness of contact has a propitious technical aspect as a test of the system itself: ‘Hello, do you hear me?’ As I underlined in chapter 4, Baudrillard has advanced a telling critique of the phatic function as a ‘simulation pact’ based on ‘tele-phasis.’2 Baudrillard writes, ‘Contact for contact’s sake becomes the empty form with which language seduces itself when it no longer has anything to say.’3 Any sort of vapid yet incessant communication in which one may be totally immersed but has few negative or no substantial consequences will suffice to illustrate phatic dysfunctionality in the time of telematics. Obviously, MSN Messenger and text messaging on mobile phones are rich terrains for this kind of contact, as are tweets on Twitter and pokes and updates on Facebook. In Seduction Baudrillard described how the phatic function hypertrophied in the cold universe of information systems. Jakobson’s function of communication may have been derived from communion but, importantly, it had lost forever its original symbolic sense and power. That is, it no longer involved incessant and metabolic ceremonial challenges and ritual exchanges: ‘Language has no need for “contact”: it is we who need communication to have a specific “contact” function, precisely because it is eluding us.’4 The phatic function ‘analytically restores’ what is missing in communication by reloading it in simulacral form, yet remains symbolically remote from the ‘frayed spaces’ of genuine interpersonal exchange in the clean abstractions and sterile relations of models. Phatic dysfunction seems to describe rather perfectly the pulsing (beyond meaning) ‘tele-space’ of networked terminals about which classical assumptions like obligations of social exchange and definitions of gift exchange no longer make sense. In describing the ‘fall’ of the phatic function, Baudrillard perspicaciously discovered a new descriptor with widespread relevance for media studies of contact in popular culture. Phatic communication is primarily (dys)functional; to put it another way, this function is tied almost immediately to its dysfunction: it holds open the channel but in so doing surpasses genuine communication by passing into simulation. Yet this ‘fall’ is not really a complete loss because it describes the condition of communication as telematic connectivity. The larger question is, how, then, does tactility, another kind of contact, fare in studies and popular visions of television? How useful is phatic dysfunction?

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The Vicissitudes of Tactuality One of the most enduring figures in ongoing efforts to decode the experience of television is the medium’s tactility. Whether it is a trope of stickiness, massage, jolts, and other body blows, or the effects of a protruding gaze of an eye-window-frame-potato processing, Pablumdispensing machine, seems moot. The dominant tropes are not intellectually salubrious yet appeal, perhaps, to influential matters below the belt of cogitation. The idea of the television screen’s tactility entered the technological imaginary when McLuhan theorized its images as projective ‘tactile promptings.’ He wrote of the ‘plastic contour’ of a ‘lightthrough’ device and the ‘ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning finger.’5 Besides the intimation of a coming shift from medium as message to that of massage in the late 1960s, these cryptic remarks on the ‘scanning finger’ at once evoked the continuous process of scanning by means of electrons fired by the cathode ray gun, sweeping across the lines of dots in the phosphor-coated mesh of the picture tube, and the gestural pointer that follows a line of text, the path of an object, or outlines a figure in a dot assembly operation. The ‘finger’ that McLuhan gave us could also be taken too literally because, as he clarified, ‘the tactile image involves not so much the touch of skin as the interplay or contact of sense to sense, of touch with sight, with sound, with movement.’6 The tactility in question was, rather synesthetic tactuality, or, as Derrick de Kerckhove once described it, ‘multi-sensory seduction.’7 But the salient point is that the machine stares down the viewer. Moreover, these ‘scanning fingers’ are being pointed in two directions – first, from the screen to the retinas of the viewers, whom it is said, for De Kerckhove, to ‘prime’ or even ‘irradiate’ with its cold blue light – a light without images – and ‘contaminate’ – ‘mesmerize’ and ‘transitorize,’ the extreme version of which belongs to Baudrillard.8 The TV’s scanning finger is thought to transmutate those at whom it is pointed, turning them into screens and terminals – ‘mediatizing’ them so that they may interface and enter into communication.9 And second, the scanning finger of the TV audience, no longer even permitted to passively vegetate but condemned to the labour of participation, is loaded with remote control zappers; and further, it has its ‘minds’ hands’ full of eyes and glances it continuously throws back at the screen.10 Figures of tactility are creatures of specific junctures in media and communication studies. One version of this argument is that in the transition from a hypodermic to a resonance model of communication

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in the early 1970s, heavily influenced by brain hemisphere research (marking a shift from left to right hemisphere), figures of tactility took pride of place.11 If the injection of a message through some medium by a sender into passively waiting blank slate of a receiver could be reconfigured such that each element was less isolated and, in fact, subject to new combinations emphasizing form over content, and the receiver was less passive and more active (more processual), already full of a complex matrix of codes and subcodes, and hence more actively engaged, then messages could be crafted to draw out to some degree the codes, needs, and expectations they would meet upon their reception. Another version is specific to the development of McLuhan’s own thought and the turnabout from the analyses of The Mechanical Bride to those of Understanding Media as far as the tension between tactility and mechanization are concerned.12 To put it bluntly, for McLuhan, where mechanization was, tactility would be, which is to say if the bride of mechanization was pneumatic and vehicular in a world of looking without touching, then the bride of electronic media was barefoot and braless in a world of multi-sensorial tactuality where looking was touching, and vice versa, and more. McLuhan’s vision of media and popular culture changed radically from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. ‘Tactility,’ as Don Theall has pointed out, ‘is the essential symbol for the intersensory operation of the body’s processing of sensory material.’13 At times the erotic potentialities liberated by tactility were too much for even McLuhan to bear, as Theall astutely observes. Cyberfeminists such as Sadie Plant have traced the migration of images from medium to medium, from the specular toward the digital, in the course of which touch is the choice sense of the ‘immersive simulations of cyberspace, and the connections, switches and links of all sorts.’ Linking McLuhan with Luce Irigaray, Plant pursues the integral through an erotics of 0/1: the zero that touches everything and is ‘the very possibility of all the ones’ (that is, zero is not an absence but the proliferating touch-point of women’s speech and body-sex).14 But tactility also left itself open to critique and distortion in the form of dysfunctional representations of televisual contact. The extension of the senses in technologies in McLuhan’s celebrated sense of outering was also applicable to the television screen and its less-than-felicitous ‘promptings.’ Savvy performance pop band The Tubes used a combination infant cradle chair upon which a small television set was mounted, with a nipple attachment, as cover art on their release Remote Control (1979), as they sang about telecide, while simultaneously helping to

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usher in the era of rock videos. This extraordinary image makes nurturing ambivalent. It also alerts us to another tradition of television studies – English cultural and media studies – in which the medium, in Hoggart’s works, circa 1960, has an educative ‘kneading effect.’ John Hartley explicated this image in a remarkable series of reflections on dough (quoting at length British chef and cookbook writer Elizabeth David on bread making in relation to the couch potato who is warmed, puffy, spongy, and gaseous after hours of viewing) and another sense of the term, relevant to my inquiry: ‘Feline kneading is said to be what kittens do to stimulate mother’s milk – otherwise known as “pap.” ’15 Hartley isolates the ambivalence of pleasurable nurturing and sensuous massage and sucking as a reductive manipulation (after all, pap is slang for soft substance without value, not to mention that dough must be at some point punched down), but reminds us that Hoggart used the imagery in an entirely positive sense, perfused with vigour and stimulation, and engaged in a process (rising), again with reference to dough, of ‘proving popular consciousness.’ Hartley recounts it this way: ‘Television “proves” popular consciousness by aerating it and allowing the mixture of “detailed and intelligent presentation,” and “the texture of other people’s lives, assumptions, hopes” to ferment in the warmth of the suburban kneading-trough until “general education” has occurred.’16 Until, then, the audience rises (or fails to rise) to the occasion. The passage through the universe of orality from the nipple to the pastry passes by way of the television baby set to the television table tray. Perhaps the most extended elaboration on the ‘tactile promptings’ figure in popular culture is David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome (1982). With this example we leave behind the fairly benign figure of dough and even the potential provocations of sensuousness and enter into a more diabolical, yet identifiably Canadian imaginary. Right down to the character of Professor Brian O’Blivion, a parody of McLuhan (crossed with Sigmund Freud) who spouts oracular statements about the television medium and runs the Cathode Ray Mission, which offers daily doses of the tube to the homeless, Cronenberg’s vision shows how tactility hypertrophies into inducing tumours by means of an experimental broadcast called Videodrome. The plot traces the passage from positive promise (therapy and social good) to the deleterious diversions of tactile television that I have been outlining here (Videodrome plays those who watch it ‘like a video recorder’ and then kills them), as Videodrome has fallen into the wrong hands. The special effects of this media horror

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film show the ‘tactile promptings’ of television to originate with a broadcast signal, transferable to a videotape of an episode, and then to any television screen and entire set in which it is played. The throbbing cassette, undulating cabinet, inhaling and exhaling speaker grille, and ballooning screen, into which one may bury one’s head, reach a kind of epiphany of murderous tactility when the screen stretches like a plastic film, conforming to a fist pointing a gun at the protagonist, who is then shot. The film is a parable of immersion in a virtual universe, played at first as induced hallucination, but then graphically and brutally spectacularized as a predatory tangibility. Videodrome delivered a not-incidental content (snuff films) that parodies the standard connection of electro-tactility with eroticism while showing that the content produces death on the level of form (from the signal and its effects on the technologies of video and television). When McLuhan changed his mind about pop culture from the 1950s to the 1960s, his multi-modal sensory understanding of television’s tactility opened a passage to a more general sense of haptic space in which an optical sense assumes non-optical functions and, more generally, tactile opens out to haptic space. The implications of this shift have had profound effects in architecture, for instance, with the theorization of a haptic horizon, realized through hyper-surfaces of screens functioning as walls and ceilings and floors (Freemont Street in Las Vegas or other early examples of pixel-topological architectures), or liquid architectures (Fresh H20 eXPO, Nox Architects, Zeeland, The Netherlands) without horizontal floors and an ‘all-around ground,’ eschewing the distinction between feet and eyes, or a proprioceptive surround – the skin of culture or smooth space.17 In the era at the end of the cathode ray tube’s dominance of the field, new flat screens have emerged in domestic, commercial, and public spaces – the ‘plasma’ and liquid crystal display (LCD) and organic light-emitting diode technologies (OLED). Nothing of the tactile, qua haptic, seems to have been lost in the dying days of the reign of the cathode ray tube, although after the ray gun the ‘scanning finger’ may be lost. Here emerges the possibility of media surface environments, of new televisual mediascapes, of wearable and wrapable television and pliable jumbotrons blowing in the wind. The science fiction vision of ‘wall-to-wall television’ is upon us.18 If we pass by way of Cronenberg into this space via the throbbing, stretching invasive screen, we are again struck by the immediacy of promise and compromise, function (ray) and dysfunction (gun).

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Haptic space has been infested by surveillance and simulation in simveillance environments. Instead of seeing through surfaces or exposing appearances, in simveillance the panoptic gaze is distributed across vanishing surfaces – vanishing in the respect that they are no longer media appearances – no longer obviously screens but are unsupported, without frames or furniture or supports like legs and cords: ‘With simulation we move from the problem of the transparency of the medium, the surface, to a kind of pure transparency – what’s visible is all that’s visible – from a stage of mediated seeing to the immediacy, to the ecstasy, of perception.’19 The medium is no longer the message, because it has been eliminated in a frightening total transparency of hypersensitive smart virtual environments tele-phatically connected. The medium cannot be artificially isolated nor its simulative features controlled. Whether in the end this is more horrifying than Cronenberg’s vision is probably undecidable, for the warning by the short-lived but prescient new wave band The Buggles (1979) about VTR, ‘We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far’ (‘Video Killed the Radio-Star’) into the future anterior of contact is already accomplished, because there is nothing more than that, all the time, everywhere, already, without the possibility of its negation. And in this, then, is a certain kind of horror. Beyond Cronenberg is Gore Verbinski’s horror film The Ring (2002), a remake of Hideo Nakata’s original Ringu (1998), based on the investigation of a series of mysterious deaths – a group of overexposed libidinous screenagers – in which television is made flesh; the latter is, in this case, putrefied. Astute viewers of the film would immediately make the connection with Cronenberg’s Videodrome. What remains difficult to explain is the complex shift in The Ring from the visual to the tactile, to the extent that the mind, imagination, and the screen conflate; the only redemption of this sticky bundle is the principle of repetition. The Ring revolves around the work of an investigative journalist. The subject of investigation is a video, the viewing of which causes sudden death a mere seven days later. The unassuming, unmarked cassette reveals a series of juxtaposed images of surrealistic inspiration. The journalist progressively decodes the images by relating them back to the tragedies to which they only obscurely refer. The scenes in which the tape is viewed by various characters – obviously in the grip of an intensely immersive experience – are echoed imagistically through the film’s deployment of screen-like filters. Especially noteworthy are windshields streaming with rain and the reflections of skies and overhead tress, a gauze screen behind which

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a psychiatric patient moves, the blazing television screens behind the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of high-rise condominiums, etc. Static is seemingly everywhere mediating perception. Two features of the video deserve comment. First, in one of the scenes a fly walks across the corner of the screen, its path captured on video and reproduced like a stain on a lens. The fly seems quite real and the journalist tries to touch it on her monitor, with no resulting contact. During the course of the film the video is subject to a series of tape analyses. In one important scene, the journalist’s co-investigator studies the same fly and successfully picks it off his monitor. The transfer from the image to the biomaterial entity through the screen implodes the visual-tactile distinction and the hand–mind gap. The screen gives the image to the hand as an embodied, living entity. Images, however, come alive in more strikingly oppressive ways later in the film, and that brings me to my second example. The ‘author’ of the images on the videotape is an abused child. Her revenge on those who view her images through the medium of the video is incessant, and only in the end is it discovered that her strongest desire was to be heard. Having her tape copied suffices to ensure this (a convoluted argument against media pirating). However, those who do not copy the tape meet a grisly end as well, as the young girl crawls right out of the image of her grave and then through the television screen. Shimmering like a spectral image with peripheral pixelations jumping like a sparkler, dripping water and blood, and trailing putrescent substances, the girl attacks and kills the viewer, horribly disfiguring him in the process. In The Ring, television and monitor screens are everywhere. Importantly, though, they primarily define private spaces no matter where they are. This film embodies in a curious way Anna McCarthy’s remarks on ambient television, a study of the screens in taverns, airports, department stores, doctors’ offices, laundromats, etc. In a suggestive passage, McCarthy stumbles upon a retail display featuring a reclining chair and a television with the sign, ‘You deserve the ultimate massage everyday.’20 Puzzled about the source of the massage – the chair or television – McCarthy turns to McLuhan’s idea of the medium’s massage of the viewer to excavate motifs of comfort, cosiness, and gendered control by a handy remote: the ultimate private getaway right in the middle of a quasi-public space, which is available for home consumption at a price. Histories of televisual spectatorship cannot underestimate the important role of comfortable chairs, television dinners, and their special

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folding trays, in the philosophy of tactility. Still, in the end, no matter how comfortable you think you are, the diabolical tactile prompting may take its revenge in achieving its transmutational destiny, for to be comfortable is also to be prone. To be prone before today’s recording screens is perfect positioning for new and frightening phatic dysfunctions. These are frightening, with a qualification: not because they are always coded in the horror genre, but because of the constructive disorientations they help bring about. Transductive Television Transmission is not only transportation but transformation. It is also transductive. Tele-phasis has a transductive dimension in which, as the aforementioned examples from horror films suggest, the medium of the screen transports by transforming (converting) images into objects that scramble the scene of viewing. Beyond banal connectivity, transduction in this sense has the capacity to rearrange the already constituted socio-historical assemblage of the scene of reception with its delicate divisions of gender, labour, and generation, all of which are machinically conjoined by overlapping assistive technologies (favourite chairs, remotes, speaker systems). The homebodies are potentialized in how they can go about connecting with the transduced objects. But this potential is unevenly found in the bodies that would realize it in different ways; indeed, these transductions get under everybody’s skin in different ways. Fear is one among many boosts. But so is distraction, because there is typically ‘nothing on TV’ and this makes ‘distraction . . . more catalytically operational.’21 Distraction rapidly collapses and is drawn to the screen’s surface as probing fingers discover that the fly image has come through the screen. The fields of an event’s potential are layered with intersecting and overlapping subfields and codes (informal regularities that govern spaces of reception). A television broadcast is an extremely complex and variable event; what’s on the screen is but a small part. But when what’s on the screen is a transduced object, it is more than the program that arrives in a relatively porous space whose entrances and exists are monitored; a transduced object enters the mix of a collective assemblage with its coded but open enunciations and competing semiotic transmissions. This conversion can be disorienting. Of course, the transduction of objects is only one extreme pole of a continuum that plots the transmission of affect through a medium. The horror genre plays with transduction of objects because an object,

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especially a living thing or person, in a startling way suddenly materializes the force of potential transmitted by the screen, taking it in one concrete direction, a rather obvious one at that, since it is often representational (image-object conformity), yet it still manages to seem strange because it emphasizes becoming in the transmission. Transduction transmits impulses of virtuality from actualization to actualization in a transversal manner. It is remarkable that the concept of transmission survives from its earliest usages within a technological paradigm to the theorization of affect’s emergence and the multiple expressions of its potentiality.22 There is a reason for this, which chapter 7 will reckon with in the line of signaletics from Shannon through Gerbner to Guattari. In the meantime, the contrast between Baudrillard’s restrictive sense of tele-phasis and Massumi’s configuring of transductive conversion reflects a profound gap between the former’s collapsing of the digital onto the virtual and the latter’s insistence on telling a theoretical tale of two distinct virtuals (digitality and potentiality). Transmission is a passage that is populated by transformations, forces of potential, and becomings; and this passage is between multiple unstructured or nonstandardized entities or ‘poles’ in a communication open to variations and codifications and subject to intersections with other transmissions and their transductive conversions.

6 Umberto Eco and Guerrilla Decoding

The writings of Italian philosopher Umberto Eco crisscross studies of the Middle Ages, a wide range of issues bearing upon interpretation in its most general senses, as well as cultural criticism and best-selling novels. Early in his career in the 1950s and 1960s, Eco wrote extensively on medieval aesthetics and avant-garde artistic practices. He also wrote cultural criticism in parodic mode for journals of the Italian avant-garde and regularly contributed articles on contemporary events to mainstream publications. My focus in this chapter is, however, on an idea that has been constant in Eco’s work – the limits of decoding and how to model them. In order to set up the problem in terms of his introduction of an element of what he called ‘guerrilla decoding’ in his model of communication in A Theory of Semiotics, it is useful to provide an overview of his career that highlights how at various stages in his intellectual development he conceived of limits and constraints in his reflections on interpretation. The Limits of Openness The Open Work, originally published in 1962, raised issues to which Eco has repeatedly returned. Eco used examples from avant-garde music, literature, and painting to theorize the concept of openness. The openness of a work is tangible. It is an intentional element of an artist’s production of a work delivered to the performer in the manner of a construction kit. The interpreter or performer participates in completing what is conceived as unfinished. At issue for Eco are works and not random components open to indiscriminate actualizations. Performances of open works will be neither the same nor gratuitously

Figure 4: Semiotic qualifications of decoding (after Eco) Presuppositional effort Private codes and ideological biases of the sender

Expression ambiguities

‘Aberrant’ presuppositions

MESSAGE EXPRESSION as source of information

Subcode A

Subcode B

Private codes and ideological biases of the addressee

Content ambiguities

Subcode C

ADDRESSEE

Aleatory connotations

Interpretive failures

MESSAGE CONTENT as an interpreted text

Subcode D

Subcode E

Subcode F

Knowledge that the addressee should supposedly share with the sender

Real patrimony of the addressee’s knowledge

Circumstances orienting the presuppositions

Actual circumstances deviating the presuppositions

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different. The openness of the work is presented as a field of relations with specific structural limits and formal tendencies. An open work exploits ambiguity, which arises from formal innovations and contraventions of existing values and conventions; disorder arises in relation to the existing order that the work rejects, but the disorder of the new work is organized, while at once avoiding a collapse into chaos and incomprehensibility, and a relapse into the predictability of classical forms. Eco has remarked, ‘This tendency toward disorder, characteristic of the poetics of openness, must be understood as a tendency toward controlled disorder, toward a circumscribed potential, toward a freedom that is constantly curtailed by the germ of formativity present in any form that wants to remain open to the free choice of the addressee.’1 Eco’s influential conception of openness is still used today by cybercultural theorists such as Espen J. Aarseth as a foundational point for the development of a cyborg aesthetics of cybertexts, although Aarseth ultimately finds Eco’s openness to be too restricted, too much clouded by rash anti-formalist pronouncements, and in the end self-subverting, a quality that infects Eco’s later works as well as makes them less relevant for the study of cybertextuality.2 Literary critic Scott Simpkins perhaps hit the nail on the head when he referred to Eco’s ongoing sense of fidelity and respect involved in the freedom of decoding.3 In The Role of the Reader and later in the essays in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Eco revisited the question of openness as an extreme example of how texts produce their model readers. An open text creates a model reader whose interpretive project is purposefully directed by the text’s structural strategy, whereas closed texts have a poorly defined model reader whose interpretive choices are free from constraints. Superman comics and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels are examples of closed texts. The empirical author is manifested in a text as a style or idiolect. Eco displaced the question of the author’s intentions onto the text. The text has an intention about which its model reader makes conjectures. The second task of the empirical reader is to interpret the model reader coinciding with the text’s intention. There are three intentions at issue in interpretation: those of the author, the text, and the reader. In The Limits of Interpretation, Eco added that texts produce two model readers: a naive one attuned to semantic content, and a second who critically and metalinguistically describes, explicates, and enjoys the clues the text employs to attract such a reader. By means of a semiotic modelling of the hermeneutic circle, which essentially repopulates textual interpretation, Eco advances a sober alternative to intentionalist

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interpretation and the structuralist ‘death of the author,’ in addition to warding off the radical freedom and ingenuity of a deconstructive reader of texts. The Open Work, The Role of the Reader, and The Limits of Interpretation all address the problem of the reception of artistic works and literary and theoretical texts. They mark an important transition in Eco’s writing from pre-semiotic to structural and semiotic significations of the dialectic of openness and the various pressures that guide and restrict interpreters. Eco progressively introduces concepts whose purpose is to protect openness against unlimited drift and arbitrary uses of texts. He consistently turns to the Peircean idea of unlimited semiosis to critically reveal the pragmatic limits it places upon free interpretive play and how it transcends the will of any individual in the building up of a transcendental community of researchers who would be, in the long run, in agreement about the meaning of a text. Eco’s Semiotic Model of Communication A Theory of Semiotics lays the groundwork for a general semiotic theory embracing all cultural communication processes and a theory of codes governing the signification systems that makes these and other potential processes possible. The theory of codes borrows concepts from Hjelmslev and Peirce and reveals their respective general features by converting the correlation of expression and content to the correspondence of a sign-vehicle and meaning, and enlisting the interpretant in order to dispense with the metaphysical concept of the referent. This generalization enables Eco to establish the correspondence the code makes between sign-vehicles and cultural units, which are defined relationally, and to delineate their segmentation in a semantic field consisting of denotative (non-extensional) and connotative markers. Cultural units are further generalized into sememes embedded in a network of positions and oppositions within semantic fields to which sign-vehicles refer. The full compositional analysis that emerges enables Eco to model both the syntactic markers possessed by a sign-vehicle and to indicate with encyclopedic complexity its sememe’s tree-like array of denotative and connotative markers and the contextual and circumstantial selections that instruct any decoder possessing such competence. Faced with the problem of ‘infinite semantic recursivity,’ which emerges because the analysis of sememes produces more sememes to be analysed, Eco does not appeal directly to Peirce’s idea of a transcendental community of

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knowers who would be in agreement but, instead, admits the instability and temporality of the compositional tree and acknowledges the vast network of subcodes of which codes consist. Eco’s analysis is limited to the ‘immediate semantic environment’ (almost a semantics of proximity) of given sememes, thus making competence more like a dictionary (only the standard meanings) rather than an encyclopedia. The issue of openness is raised through the problem of the extra-coding or under-coding of a message. Eco reworks the standard transmission communication model by expanding the message as a text subject on the side of the addresser to presuppositional influences (private biases, orienting circumstances, ambiguities relating to the encoding of expression and content planes, the influence of subcodes, suppositions of shared knowledge) and for the addressee to ‘aberrant’ presuppositions (private biases, deviating circumstances, aleatory connotations and interpretive failures, as well as the appeal to subcodes and the actual depth of the addressee’s knowledge), all of which are further subject to uncoded external influences. Eco has in this sense introduced a rich array of semiotic qualifications into communication. John Fiske has made use of Eco’s sense of aberrant decoding in understanding narrowcast (as opposed to broadcast) codes whose features are specialist, intellectual, and status-oriented (exclusive), and which deliver enrichment, or at least present signs of its promise. Communication reached by convention and use sometimes rubs up against the differing subcultural experiences of senders and receivers. Fiske’s first example is blue jeans worn by a young man attending a job interview as an index of his social status, but decoded by the prospective employer, of a different social status, as a sign of resistance to convention, perhaps even as a connotation of rebellion. As Fiske explains, ‘Aberrant decoding results, then, when different codes are used in the encoding and decoding of the message.’ He continues, ‘This encoding [by the young man] fails to recognize that people of different cultural or subcultural experience will read the message differently, and that in so doing they will not necessarily be blameworthy.’4 Aberrant decoding is the exception in narrowcast codes but the rule in broadcast codes, since the range of subcultural experiences is simply too great to guarantee any univocity of meaning. Fiske’s second example of how a message encoded in one culture and decoded in another entails aberrant decoding is equally interesting: prehistoric cave paintings of animals were thought to depict living

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creatures, but ‘our love of living animals and distaste for dead bodies has led us into an aberrant decoding’ since, as Fiske attempts to demonstrate by a series of tracings, the cave drawings appear strikingly similar to what we see as dead animals lying on their sides. Aberrant decoding, especially of the second kind, is much less semiotically interesting than active, subversive forms of decoding. Even the first example of clashing subcodes pales against the image of a guerrilla decoder. Of course, models help one grapple in some manner with multiple readings of texts. But Eco retains an element of revolutionary semiotic resistance against the intentional bombardment of addressees with messages eliciting their acquiescence. He looks into the tactical freedom of decoding born of a change in the circumstances that permits an addressee to reinvent the message’s content without changing its expression form.5 It requires a certain amount of textual excavation to get at this notion in Eco. Buried in the final footnote of the theory of codes, the first half of the book, is Eco’s reference to semiotic ‘guerrilla warfare,’ which is additionally contained by brackets, as if its openness was truly revolutionary. It is worth quoting at length: ‘In an era in which mass communication often appears as the manifestation of a domination which makes sure of social control by planning the sending of messages, it remains possible (as an ideal semiotic “guerrilla warfare”) to change the circumstances in the light of which the addressees will choose their own ways of interpretation. In opposition to a strategy of coding, which strives to render messages redundant in order to secure interpretation according to pre-established plans, one can trace a tactic of decoding where the message as expression form does not change but the addressee rediscovers his freedom of decoding.’6 Tactical freedom in the matter of decoding on the content rather than the expression plane of the message is ‘revolutionary’ inasmuch as it requires the auto-gestation of new references. Essentially, Eco gives a semiotic description of Hall’s globally contrary, oppositional decoding, stratified by the expression/content planes. While Eco’s use of these semiotic terms aligns him with Guattari, his radicalization of content and conservation of expression suggests a semio-linguistic investment of the planes so that content is a signified; this limits the hybridity of the semiotics upon which Guattari insists. The use of the concept of tactics is also significant. Tactical wiliness and ingenuity are set against the strategy of mass bombardment, of serial messages aimed at producing a uniform decoding by an already crystallized subjectivity. Readers of De Certeau will recognize this turn to ‘transverse tactics’ that elude

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the conformity-producing ‘technocratic strategies’ of the workplace, for instance, or through television. Tactical consumption practices are described in a parallel way by De Certeau: ‘A rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called “consumption” and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of the circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature.’7 The image of the guerrilla decoder is a powerful one for cultural studies because it opens, beyond the constraints of Eco’s analysis of the expression form, onto the actual refashioning of expression (grasping the message-text as a source of information-material). Dick Hebdige, for instance, astutely observed in his classic study of Mod subculture how innovation, discovery, and spontaneous creation from ‘below’ – tactical innovation in the decoding of content – was destroyed by the imposition of manufactured accessories from ‘above’ in the form of a strategic imposition of codes (this is ‘Mod style’) refashioned by the pop industry. Staying with Hebdige for a moment, his treatment of the relation of borrowing and redefinition at the heart of cultural studies – active consumption involves appropriating the commodity, redefining its use and value, relocating its meaning in a new context (i.e., in the case of the Mods, the scooter, porkpie hat, Hush Puppies) – is a guerrilla semiotic cultural analysis in which these objects are given new content as well as, especially in the case of certain modes of accessorization (multiple mirrors on the scooters), augmenting the messageexpression plane.8 Ultimately, resignification engages both expression and content, yet it appears that it always rather uncritically settles on meaning substances and does not reach into machinic a-signifying connectivity. In cultural studies, resignification is rarely a-signifying. And where expression modification is concerned, the concept of ‘semiotic disobedience’ – in the tradition of civil disobedience – becomes especially relevant in artistic struggles against property rights.9 Consider, then, the nuts and bolts of Eco’s model. A sender makes reference to presupposed codes (and the circumstances orienting these) and selected subcodes in the formation of a message that flows through channels; this message is a source of information (expression) with contextual and circumstantial settings (which are coded according to cultural conventions or remain relatively uncoded or not yet coded, such as biological constraints). The addressee receives the message and with reference to his or her own presupposed codes (the actual circumstances, which may deviate from the presuppositions) and select

Umberto Eco and Guerrilla Decoding 105

subcodes, the selection of which may be indicated by the context and circumstances, interprets the message text (content). Here, a further borrowing helps Eco redefine the message as text: ‘The results of the coexistence of many codes (or, at least, many subcodes).’10 The structuralist disconnection of the message-text from authorial intention helps to underline Eco’s sense of the interpretive freedom found in certain kinds of decoding that eludes such a point of reference. For Eco, the message is a kind of ‘empty form to which may be attributed various possible senses,’11 given the multiplicity of codes, subcodes, contexts, and circumstantial selectors that inform it: the message ‘he follows Marx’ received by an anti-communist may be literally decoded according to its ideological content that the sender is a follower of Marxism but loaded, all the same, for an anti-communist addressee, with negative connotations (ideological biases forming an ‘aberrant’ presupposition). Messages are the source of different probable contents, depending on the richness of possible choices; definitive interpretations reduce these multiple senses of a message. We could say ‘Baudrillard follows Marx’ when he points out that Groucho’s brandishing of a real sturgeon rather than speaking the password ‘sturgeon’ is an act that ‘put[s] the signifier “sturgeon” to death by its own referent’ and destroys linguistic metaphysics in the name of a poetic exchange.12 Messages are texts, ‘a network of different messages dependent upon different codes’ and subject to reinforcements (verbal messages reinforced by non-verbal gestures and proxemic behaviours) correlated with the same content. The message’s richness as a ‘source of information’ is underlined by Eco, while simultaneously, in keeping with his reading of openness, subject to a ‘network of constraints which allow certain optional results. Some of these can be considered as fertile inferences which enrich the original messages, others are mere “aberrations.” ’13 Eco defines aberrant decoding as a ‘betrayal of the sender’s intentions’ but resists defining it completely negatively. He mentions the possibility that the addressee’s codes and subcodes and circumstances produce an interpretation unforeseen by the sender. In such cases, when the addressee cannot isolate the sender’s codes or successfully substitute his own codes or subcodes for them, the message becomes pure noise. It is at the level of subcodes and actual circumstances that the content of messages can be changed. And on this semiotic ground of the destiny of the received message, Eco looks forward to the study of its ‘highly articulated pragmatics,’ in other words, toward much of what characterizes the ethno-semiotic strain in cultural studies.

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Ethno-Semiotics In the final section of the chapter I want to extend my discussion of Eco by pursuing the implications of his semiotics of decoding within the ethno-semiotic strain of cultural studies developed most recently by Fiske. This insertion of Eco into cultural studies by way of his analyses of decoding addresses issues of both expression and content and brings to the forefront a pragmatics of actual decoders. In Television Culture, Fiske distinguishes between two kinds of subjects: a textual, inactive, and passive subject as opposed to an active, socially formed one (the ‘actual television viewer’ with a history). The former is passive because the text subjects, that is, subjugates, the reader to its ideological power.14 The latter emerges, however, as productive of meaning through, for example, existing subject positions negotiating and grappling with those that the text, echoing Hall, pre-fers. Fiske’s point is that ethnographic methods applied to receivers temper semiotic tendencies to move directly from text to social structure, thus neglecting the contact points between a text’s dominant meaning and a receiver’s social situation. Hence, Fiske considered that method should be ethno-semiotic. In Introduction to Communication Studies, Fiske described his method: ‘Ethno-semiotics links the reading of texts with the everyday lives of their readers.’15 Ethno-semiotics is also political, as senders and receivers are in Fiske’s analysis in a relation of economic and social subordination and antagonistic resistance (the latter ‘under’ the former) by the subordinated (the latter releasing a text’s progressive potentiality, but there is no guarantee of this oppositionality). Fiske wrote about the political vicissitudes of ethno-semiotics in Understanding Popular Culture, ‘There is no guarantee that the politics of any cultural form or practice will be mobilized in any particular reading, any oppositionality may remain “sleeping” potential; and, if mobilized, there is equally no guarantee as to whether its direction will be progressive or conservative.’16 This is what Eco cannot guarantee: whether guerrilla decoding will be right- or left-wing, reactionary or progressive, or somewhere in the middle. It may be ‘revolutionary’ in a suggestive sense, but there are no guarantees. Like Hall before him, Fiske contemplates ‘structures of preference’ that open certain meanings while simultaneously closing off others. Pre-ference is a modality of encoding; it is neither deterministic nor prescriptive. It is a question of constructing some of the limits and parameters within which decodings will operate.17 Formal semiology

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cannot ignore the work of decoding, the management of the semiotic scaffolding it receives. Encoding pre-fers; decoding is constrained by the parameters of encoding, even when it takes flight according to some tactical direction, aberrant or otherwise. Some degree of correspondence exists between encoding and decoding, but it is constructed, and fragile. Viewers-readers-receivers are active in the sense of ‘making their own socially pertinent meanings out of the semiotic resources provided by television [my emphasis].’18 This making is, as it was in Hall’s work, carried forward with reference to a dialogical process. The text’s message is ‘worked on’ by a subject already full of contradictory and partial discourses and their ideological traces, not to mention in the possession of a variety of subcodes. Such making is sometimes a matter of shifting or bending meanings so that they connect with one’s social experience and situation in a way that helps to initiate personal and social changes. The making of meaning may be socially transformative by providing a piece of hitherto missing cultural capital, enabling one to participate in an exchange from/in which one was otherwise marginalized or excluded; indeed, ways of watching television – listening without viewing, sitting glued to the screen, occasionally glancing up from some other project – are ‘regimes of watching’ with social determinations that for Fiske contribute to this process of meaning construction. Meaning is, then, constructed from the ‘conjuncture of the text with the socially situated reader.’19 The text is a ‘resource,’ to use one of Fiske’s cherished expressions, with which a receiver works (extracting, refining, turning, etc.). Working with semiotic resources is a participatory practice: productivity shaped by actuality. Resources are typically cultural commodities like TV shows, CDs, clothes, tourist sites, etc. Such resources carry dominant meanings and interests to receivers but, importantly, they ‘must also carry contradictory lines of force.’20 What is it to be a non-resource? In Fiske’s work on popular culture, the implication is that a non-resource is a failed cultural commodity – failure meaning that it has not become or been made popular. Another way to understand this failure is that a resource’s potential is nil if it lacks characteristics that would allow for its actualization by receivers (i.e., it is too inflexible, closed, ‘nonproducerly’; an artefact’s popular potential may remain ‘asleep’ for some time because the conditions for its productive reception do not yet exist). Here is a good example of the re-insertion of the temporal disconnection that Hall insisted upon in the re-examination of his model that I discussed at the end of chapter 2.

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Generally, Fiske thinks from within Hall’s first position of decoding that operates with the preferred code, augmented by subtle professional codes, of the dominant-hegemonic position. In this sense, Fiske’s active receivers are all subordinate to capitalist exchange relations (capitalistic subjectification), but much is the same for Eco, if we recall his asymmetrical positions within mass communications media (strategic encoding and tactical decoding). If one of the defining characteristics of the dominant position examined by Hall was the globality, grandness, and totality, his second position of negotiated code may be defined in contrast by its reserving of the right to refocus the global in terms of local conditions. In the second position, Hall defined the hegemonic viewpoint as a mental map that is taken for granted (a tracing rather than a diagram). A mental horizon like consumer culture, stamped with legitimacy and naturalness, is essentially what is meant by consent in discussions of hegemonic dominance and is the space in which acceptance and contestation take place. This horizon is a container, a frame that doesn’t appear to have any particular interests. Hall’s second position nicely clarifies a significant feature of dominant-hegemonic meaning: it is actually won and requires care, cultivation, and defence (technically, it is temporary and conjunctural) since the consensus it has achieved tends to erode. For Fiske, receivers are, however, said to ‘make do’ in two ways: through tactical evasions (pleasure over meaning) or resistances (meaning over pleasure). Noting here the same use of Eco’s term tactical, active receivers engage in the ‘activation’ (release and distribution) of a resource’s ‘potentialities’ according to their relevance for everyday life (where text meets the social, and making becomes a ‘vital base’ for redeployments of pleasure and power). The potential of a resource (the measure of freedom it allows one to cultivate) is very much a matter of ‘excess semiosis’ that escapes hegemonic discipline (why pleasure/desire is excessive rather than a flux belonging neither to individuals nor representations is never really made an issue). Fiske writes of a ‘producerly popular text’ that ‘exposes, however reluctantly, the vulnerabilities, limitations, and weaknesses of its preferred meanings . . . its meanings exceed its own power to discipline them.’21 The producerly popular text is undisciplinable at the contact points between lines of social force and the texts in question: the producerly text is a resource for the producerly receiver, in the process making popular culture. It is instructive to revisit Eco’s language here: tactical decoding of the guerrilla type is a matter of ‘rediscovering’ one’s freedom in decoding.

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Rediscovery is crucial, because preferred meanings delivered through redundancies and inducements may have the effect of quieting the very notion of freedom beyond or besides the shallow freedom to consume delivered as the message itself. Such activity needs to be accessed for study in some manner, and here we see a truly heterogeneous array of methods at play in cultural studies. Take Ang’s work on Dallas.22 Ang takes the step of placing an advertisement asking for responses in writing. She acknowledges the gender bias of the selected channel and situates herself among the Dallas viewers from whom she wants responses (which she reads symptomatically). Ang’s own ambivalence (as an intellectual and feminist) about the show is also at issue. What she wants to understand is how the show gives viewers pleasure (the question of the receiver’s pleasure – and pain – is an underappreciated organizing principle in its own right in cultural studies all the way from Barthes to Fiske and beyond). Ang concentrates on content created by the receivers in her study. But there is also activity on the expression plane to be considered. Consider a further example. Henry Jenkins searches for the constraints of fan rewriting and reproducing of television shows and films such as Star Trek. He finds, then, in a vast terrain of fanzines, conventions, and web rings that the activity of fan writing as reworking itself has debts to specific genres (this is most evident in women’s creative recastings). Jenkins uncovers the semiotic constraints of rewriting practices (the borrowings – romantic, utopian, erotic – that themselves shape textual poaching operations or reaping what one has not sown). Activity is socio-semiotically constrained, and it is the task of the ethnosemiotician to creatively uncover and analyse the complex factors that limit resignification, even when the original expression text of the message is actively manipulated, sometimes in highly aberrant ways.23 The power to discipline aberrant decodings of the expression text should not be underestimated, as the legal departments of major media corporations (music and film taking up the cudgels from print) have proved sensitively litigious in some instances of robust fan subcultural decodings. Again, the freedom flagged by Eco is subject to judicial determinations under the sway of assertions of intellectual property rights, not to mention the moral constraints imposed by fan cultures themselves and, conversely, political opposition to copyright (pirate and plunder beyond the cuddlier prospects of poaching and jamming). A guerrilla limited to content is a radical only in name. And an expression pirate is easily bewitched by phantasies of profit. Perhaps

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pleasure/desire is the underappreciated source of the most creatively productive connections (conjunctions and inclusive disjunctions) and disconnections (breaks and flows) that really enlivens the guerrilla and not merely raises questions of freedom in terms of expression and content.24 Hemmed in by constraints, a guerrilla decoder never freely deciphers desire and must settle for a residual share against the overwhelming recuperations of a passively active resistance. Yet it is disappointing to consider the uncritical presupposition of unity, stability, and certainty of agency of a decoding subject – a molar guerrilla. Instead of questioning the identity of the decoder and his or her enunciations, it may be fruitful to remodel this figure by appealing to a more processual metamodel of a subjectivity that consists of processes in which heterogeneous components are assembled before and beyond the individual, that is, beyond the human (technology) and before the person. This non-unified figure is engaged in self-positing activities in relation to other similar yet singular subjectivities and exists alongside the flood of subcodes, ideologies, texts, images, affects, refrains, and part-signs that ethno-semiotics might concern itself with. If the decoder is given without any reference to planes of emergence and new incarnations through which it may invent its autonomy, then ethno-semiotics merely accomplishes a quiet reassertion of the preestablished and fixed receiver pole of the communication model. There is an unanalysed organization and passivity in this presupposition of the identity of the receiver. Remodelling communication as a critical metamodelling calls this into question and clears the way for forces of change, heterogeneity, and singularity to enter into future modellings of a ‘receiver.’

7 From General Modelling to Metamodelling

By the mid-1950s, communication thinkers had become disenchanted with the ‘jungle of unrelated concepts’ and ‘mass of undigested, often sterile empirical data’ of research findings.1 Attempts to extract order from chaos took a number of preliminary forms that, without eschewing utility, took the promise and problem of modelling very seriously. The steps toward the development of a single, general model were hesitant, but those such as Bruce Westley and Malcolm MacLean were compelled to take them, while standing on the shoulders of existing modellers; they attempted to modify and adapt Theodore Newman’s triangular interpersonal ABX model by, to put it bluntly, subtracting A as a person (hence, agent or machine) and adding C as a mediator (-A + C): yet politician A says something of X (event) to B (audience), and C (gatekeeper) gives A the opportunity of airtime (a channel). But X can reach B via C without the purposive initiative of A (communicator). The question why these minor changes were thought to constitute a viable step toward a general model was displaced into the assessment of the remodelling as having a certain diffuse ‘heuristic value’ by its authors and commentators alike.2 This concept can create a certain amount of ambiguity if its meaning is taken literally from scientific contexts in which it is used to make predictions about theoretically existent objects that are later empirically verified. In communication, heuristics is largely part illustration, part practical investigation. It is the relatively informal idea that a given model may without guarantees of any kind (hence the provisionality of models) yield interesting results in the future. In other words, a model is a developmental tool.3 What seems to be lost in the history of this period of modelling was the extent to which it was exemplified by Cold War political posturing.

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Westley and MacLean not only use the ‘for instance’ of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings on ABC the previous year (1954) as a key example, but refer to this event as ‘a commonsense example,’ at least for a unified American viewership. For them, it has formal features that confirm the significance of feedback from B (television viewers of the proceedings) to Cs (television commentators, network executives, etc., who risked showing the proceedings) about the relations between A (Joseph McCarthy and his team investigating the Army through the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations) and X (the events precipitating the proceedings – McCarthy and his counsel’s alleged favouritism with regard to a wealthy young heir, former junior colleague, and Army recruit). Recalling the proselytizing labours of Weaver discussed in chapter 1, it is not at the level of formal adequacy that remodelling may be judged, as if technical problems were independent of the ideological matrix of the creation and use of ideas about communication, but the choice of a televisual example of some notoriety in broadcast and American political history in which the witch-hunting McCarthy was publicly undone. Gerbner expressed many of the same sentiments about the state of communication studies in the mid-1950s but proposed a distinction of some note: between verbal and graphic modelling. Despite his penchant, noted in my introduction, for analogies with model building in physics (without examining the notion of building), the closest Gerbner comes to constructing anything is a mechanical belt-and-pulley graphical system. It is the combination of the ten basic features of the verbal, explanatory model of communication and the fields of study structured by them, and the subsequent graphical version that schematizes, albeit simply and incompletely, the steps of any communicative event, that lays the groundwork for a generalized model. Verbal and graphical models are complementary. Description and iconic representation are condensed into a severe, heavy-lined graphical model of designated circles of an agent or agency that perceives an event (horizontal linkage) and how the agent’s response or reaction by some means conveys some content about the event (vertical link): ‘Someone perceives an event and reacts in a situation through some means to make available materials in some forms and context conveying content with some consequences.’4 Gerbner’s emphasis on consequences or ‘effects’ gives his model its shorthand name – ‘effects model’ (measuring intent and effectiveness and any consequences of communication) – with the proviso that Gerbner was equally interested in the effects on research in

From General Modelling to Metamodelling 113 Figure 5: General graphic model (after Gerbner) PERCEPTUAL DIMENSION Relationship between communicating agent and world of events

M

Selection Context Availability

Channels Media Control

E1 percept

S form

E event

MEANS AND CONTROLS DIMENSION Relationship between communicating agent and communication product

E content

M = Agent E = Event S/E = Statement about Event E1 = Event as Perceived

communication that his model would have (i.e., the model’s theoretical implications). In other words, effects are twofold, and their interpretation requires a normative horizon (which Gerbner argues is vital to the proper framing of consequences in terms of a ‘value-oriented concept of knowledge’: freedom of selection, clear expression of beliefs, and truth of statements in relation to events, vouchsafed by government, art, and science).5 Gerbner’s normative horizon is, in the end, a paean of praise for American democracy.

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Gerbner tells and shows a numbers of things about modelling that cannot be overlooked. If used with care and consistency, Gerbner believed, his categories could be used to successfully trace any kind of communication. However, graphical or schematic tracings involve twodimensional modelling, since communication theorists have tended not to work in three dimensions. While this may seem obvious and not reducible to the means available during the period in question, it complicates analogies with modelling in science. In a survey published in the early 1960s of communication modelling over the course of the 1950s, authors F. Craig Johnson and George R. Klare point out, ‘The models reported on here [including those I have discussed in this chapter] are not physical models like those of the Ptolemaic astronomers, purely verbal models like those used in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, or mathematical models like the ones which Gauss employed in probability theory, but rather are diagrammatic (plus verbal) abstractions.’6 Such diagrammatic models (line diagrams borrowed from electrical engineering) abstract essential features from the ‘real world’ in the form of two-dimensional schematic representations, which were in abundance during the 1950s; the history of modelling these authors tell is beholden to the most important model – Shannon’s (without mentioning Weaver in the text). Questions of Dimensionality Strategies of visualization in communication modelling are short on techniques that convey the third dimension, unlike visualization techniques in science, which today rely on sophisticated software programs. Flatness and flow are not often – but exceptions exist – augmented by the conventions of computer-aided design and a range of techniques that suggest more dynamic features.7 Communication models typically lack scale, whereas in scientific modelling scale is critical.8 Even the most minimal attention to scale can be theorized. For instance, Claude LéviStrauss derived two types of relationships between models and the phenomena they study and control – mechanical (based on the same scale between model and phenomena) and statistical (different scales).9 Interactive graphical computer modelling has supplanted the standard, static representations that date from the post-war years in some areas, especially as far as the Internet is concerned. But as the schematic drawings were generally not attributed, it was not made clear whether the authors created them for themselves or commissioned them from

From General Modelling to Metamodelling 115

artists, or lab technicians accustomed to certain conventions of illustration in their home science disciplines. To what belief can this lack of technico-aesthetic specificity be attributed? My answer is sevenfold. First, communication theorists did not have to confront the drawbacks associated with physical modelling (i.e., gravity’s effects on space-filling models like stick-and-ball or wire that fall apart and sag, thus losing precision)10 or the virtues of tactile interactions with physical models. Most social scientists did not have ‘labs’ where such models could be constructed, and there is little reason to assume they possessed the skills to build them. Second, the supposition of knownness may have necessitated a minimal commitment to representational technologies. That is, the simplicity of the schematic diagrams reflected the relatively straightforward world of communicational relations they described, at least in theory. A few lines, boxes, circles, nodal points, variously sized marks, loop, spirals, and directional arrows sufficed to deliver what was thought to be essential about communication: one dimension beyond words and no more. Third, the conventions of publishing in the field were undoubtedly contributing factors, as illustrations of patterns, flows, steps, and overlapping spheres could be conveyed without photography, colour, and expensive plates, or generative programs, and that pleased the journals and book publishers by keeping page costs down. Fourth, if it may be reasonably maintained that all advances in the domain of communication modelling redraw or reference Shannon and Weaver either implicitly or explicitly (Gerbner obligingly compares his general graphical model with Shannon’s – without Weaver), then the axis of representation at issue is not so much model of an existing real world nor a model for investigative activities and ideas to be pursued, but a model to the reference point of Shannon and Weaver as well as concerning its derivations, in relation to which it may be considered.11 In other words, it is important to not only historicize modelling12 in communication studies but to acknowledge the influence of the ‘original’ model (what cannot be taken for granted) throughout the field and its practices. Shannon and Weaver’s model is exemplary: it is the index model whose status is reaffirmed with each iteration, adumbration, and criticism (the template for Sampson’s rhizomic scribbling). Exemplarity grows in strength over time. It is not simply one among many models, but a general one well-adapted to measuring attempts at generalizing modelling in communication, or scrambling it.13

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Fifth, the appeal to the heuristic value of modelling, especially in the case of general models, is limited by the mode of line drawing. The exclusion of a genuine ‘gestural heuristics,’14 as noted above, contains investigative uses of communication models to cognitive abstractions and discursive elaborations. In the absence of a disciplinary vocational practice that would see in this heuristics the necessity of hands-on modelling or handling of models (even drawing and redrawing, which is neither a prerequisite nor technical skill taught in communication departments), the so-called heuristical value of communication modelling is tightly scripted. Six, the spartan and sparse line drawings and diagrams found along the history of communication modelling provide meagre resources for visual pleasure and promise.15 McQuail and Windahl are resigned about the future of ‘model-building’: they do not hazard a prediction and fall back routinely on the utility of ‘model-making’ without paying much attention to the processes of building or making.16 Still, flatness and rainbow arc-shaped bidirectional flows perhaps herald unknown pleasures. Seven, and finally, modelists in communication studies are interested in general models but remain largely beholden to the Shannon-Weaver type. This predicament reveals two things: one has recourse to modelling when ‘direct interaction between [wo]men and certain objects of their interest turns out to be impracticable or unwanted.’17 Direct control and experimentation within mass communications is rarely possible; of course, there are numerous quantitative and qualitative social science methodologies that involve sampling, interviewing, and selective analysis; therefore, indirect interaction via models provides ease of access and unimpeded operability; as Rostislav Pazukhin puts it, ‘It is also apparent that in cases where a direct interaction with the objects of one’s concern is not impeded, the use of models is simply superfluous.’18 This nostrum has been in circulation for some decades but nonetheless exposes the alienation of the communication researcher when it comes to experimentally intervening in the field of study (changing broadcast schedules, developing new programs, etc.), especially at the level of mass communications. This notion has limited applicability when applied to more interactive and user-friendly media like the world wide web, and various alternative media platforms where direct interventions in creative broadcasting and distribution and ongoing contact with audiences can take place. Recourse to models may, of course, have other motivations, as Pazukhin’s theorization of models as replicas

From General Modelling to Metamodelling 117

suggests a fetishist substitution (models are ‘vicarious objects’). While this speculation is based on degrees of ‘likeness’ and ‘similarity’ between a prototype and its replica, the indexical relation of substitution of part for whole (the shoe for the person) in fetishism may foreground another semiotic mode and, indeed, awakens desire. From Typology to Generality and Beyond Typology and generalization in the management of communication models go hand-in-hand. Face-to-face versus place-to-place (Johnson and Klare) and makeshift-illustrative-discovery-heuristic (Pazukhin) or even primary-secondary-tertiary classifications (Sebeok) capture the range of modelling activities across and beyond which generalizations, perhaps even universal definitions, may be hazarded. Both Pazukhin and Marcel Danesi want to advance foundational claims about human model-building; for the former it is an intuitive, everyday practice – ‘a natural mode of thinking’;19 for the latter it is instinctive, an ‘innate ability to produce forms to stand for objects, events, feelings, actions, situations, and ideas perceived to have some meaning, purpose or useful function.’20 In both cases stability and standardization is the goal of typological classification. Classifications have tended to proliferate – not promiscuously – rather than coalesce and settle into basic, fundamental categories, and figuring out which categories and kinds are the right or primary ones has not been achieved. Concomitant to the naturalness of modelling is the belief that models follow the development of society, that is, they evolve alongside and along with the processes they represent. According to this argument, as society becomes increasingly hypercomplex, so do models.21 Thus modelling as innate or instinctual will respond in kind to changes in its targets. Yet surely this has not been the case for most of the history of communication modelling up to the mid-1980s, during which twodimensional line drawings still constituted standard operating practice in the field. While the challenge of transnational flows multiplied components and their relations, it took some time before attempts by ‘cyber-geographers’ to represent the complexity (i.e., hyperlinks) of the world wide web – for instance, in the atlases of cyberspace – emerged in the 1990s. Strictly, the delineation of types (i.e., structural versus process models) and phases in the development of communication models do not answer, despite the language of ‘evolution,’ to a linear temporal progression (there is some jumping forward, and then backwards

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in time across developmental phases).22 The sense of a progressive refinement of such modelling moves from the linear-mechanical (line) through the circular-organic (circle) towards the joint construction of meaning (contextualized interaction). The advent of computer-aided digital cartography in the mapping of new network spaces and the use of sophisticated 3D and 4D models that visualized technical information still demonstrated recognizable forms. Manuel Castells notes the ‘star’ cluster with the United States at the centre of a technical diagram of the Internet; in a user map, North America displays the greatest density, and Silicon Valley is the technopolis of production.23 Cyber-geographers have made rich use of inverted tree models with roots at the top and leaves down below to map distributed network relations and nodal connections. Virtual to real geographic correspondences have been created by analysing traceroutes (using IP addresses) and ping echoes (return messages from the remote site to which a packet was sent) in terms of where routers are actually located.24 The resource site of Martin Dodge at www.cybergeography.org was a de rigeur reference, as were the Internet ‘weather maps’ of traffic analysis, which were a staple of www.matrix.net; Internet traffic and health reports took a number of models subject to critical scrutiny25 from Mercator and other projections, scattergrams, coloured blocks, floating regional spheres (among the many maps at www.telegeography.com), hyperbolic tree graphs, animated video of ‘backbones’ of global network connectivity, and many, many more. The proliferation of data visualization software programs has made Internet mapping a widespread, trans-disciplinary practice. It is by virtue of the work of Dodge, among others, that such maps may be historicized and the ‘evolution’ of simple wiring diagrams of the ARPANET to the most ‘refined’ digimaps may be collected and organized. Yet one is struck by the continuity of forms such as hierarchies of tree-root thought in this field of practice. In the mid-1970s the concept of the rhizome was borrowed from plant science by Deleuze and Guattari.26 It describes the open, horizontal growth of underground tuber systems like common weeds. In their hands, the rhizome became a kind of critical figure that was contrasted with arboresecent thinking of the tree-root type that has dominated all the Western tradition. The botanical origin quickly spilled over into animals, books, nervous systems, networks, and subcultures. The concept thus acquired flexibility. Tree thought is hierarchical and centred on a trunk and its roots, branches, stems, and leaves – likewise, the backbones and highways of

From General Modelling to Metamodelling 119

the Internet. The relations between these parts are pre-established, as in the trees used in both logic (binary) and linguistics that divide and subdivide branches and fix how and under which conditions, and even when, constants are related, largely by means of dichotomies. By contrast, rhizome thought does not have a centre, since connections may be established at any time between disparate parts. Rhizomes proliferate and their connections multiply, largely unconstrained by hierarchies and pre-existing pathways. Rhizomes connect by conjunctions, whereas trees restrict and define by means of the copula. Tree thinking starts and finishes, whereas rhizomes form new open lines of alliance. Rhizomes are creatures of a non-arrestable moving middle. The theoretical analysis of the Internet as a ‘rhizomatics of cyberspace’27 supplanted technographic description by finding rhizomorphous user practices connecting with technical, hierarchical trees. Nevertheless, if tools such as Skitter28 are considered, the visual models of IP paths and return trips are centred like world-trees; yet, just as a rigorous separation between the tree-rhizome cannot be productively maintained, the technographic cannot be separated from the flights of transversal hypertext linkages investigated but not exhausted by users. Deleuze and Guattari neither go down the road of evolutionary progression, if by this term is meant progress from least to most differentiated (‘refinement’), nor do they suggest regression to a simpler state (‘less refined’). As far as modelling is concerned, their oft-repeated criticism of communication, put succinctly by Luciana Parisi as an ‘antipathy for the [transmission] model of communication,’29 swerves towards the road of involution, that is, of becoming and creativity.30 Such antipathy is related to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in which the transmission of order-words compelling obedience plays a central role, a more important role than conveying information. Their approach relies on the ability to contrastively deploy transmission: ‘Language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words . . . The most general schema of information science posits in principle an ideal state of maximum information and makes redundancy merely a limitative condition . . . We are saying that the redundancy of the order-word is instead primary and that information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of order-words.’31 An involutive as opposed to evolutive perspective on modelling considers the capacity to make and break connections, form novel alliances between heterogeneous components, and work failures of

120 Remodelling Communication Figure 6: Rhizome of transmission (after Sampson)

analogy – the alleged weakness of models that are distant from their target systems – and look for holes in homological parallels, in praise of the softness and worminess of likenesses. A rhizomic, aleatoric score was created by Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti for pianist David Tudor, and this image initiates the first plateau of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. This scribbly, frenzied notation inspired Tony Sampson to scramble the Shannon-Weaver model with a similar script that introduces both chance and choice into the assemblage of components. Sampson’s remodelling is an inspired gesture that wants to shatter the model’s organization (‘the resulting collapse of trustworthy transmission’), reorienting attention onto nonlinear relations or transductions (of viruses, pleasant and unpleasant affects). However, in this attempted scrambling there are also multiple points of entry and exit among and along the model’s components, not to mention experimentation with relationality – movement and passage taking precedence over positionality – by means of how each component connects with the other and with an outside. The rhizome asks us to consider sender–receiver relations independently of the relata themselves, and in terms of passages in and out of the model – the wildlife inside (liar codes that convert and divert messages) and the wildness of the outside network and techno-material flows that communication constantly encounters and by means of which transversal

From General Modelling to Metamodelling 121

relations are forged: the emphasis is on openness, relationality, not completely undefined or uncontrolled, but marked by tendencies and innovative exchanges. A rhizomatic model cannot be, then, represented globally. There are no ‘subjects’ of communication modelling, only assemblages undergoing variations. Ultimately, Sampson’s efforts need to be further advanced because the index of transmission still shows through the aleatoric scribbling. It is only a diagram that does not require the index and can proceed without the assumption of underlying componential identities, that will differentiate itself and in so doing reveal emergent and processual features. While the rhizomatic model sits at one pole of remodelling, it shares with a less dynamic and turbulent pole the feature of the introduction of movement, exchange, and expansion of the circuit. These sorts of inflections sometimes take the form of recursive models of reflexive loops, as Klaus Krippendorff has shown in an effort to outflank transmission and initiate a co-creative, concurrent grasp of communication.32 At other times remodelling follows a route of redrawing that is found in the work of German media theorist Hartmut Winkler on ‘processing,’ using Bühler’s organon model of language from the 1930s. Winkler redraws Bühler’s simple sender-sign (which represents objects or states of affairs) and receiver model by isolating axes of interest that each in turn centralize and marginalize components of the model. In the first instance, the horizontal axis of communication includes sender–sign–receiver relations to the diminishment of the sign’s representational capacity in relation to referents like objects and states of affairs. In the second instance, the tilted vertical axis captures sender–sign–objects/states of affairs relations to the diminishment of the receiver and of communication. This axis enhances the processing perspective, defined as ‘interfering modification,’ and entails redrawing by straightening the vertical axis from sender as producer or semiurgist of media, interfering with or processing a symbolic product – and objects or states of affairs referred to by the product, with the receiver positioned beside the product on the small horizontal axis. Winkler further refines this drawing with a cognitive emphasis on the subject of cognition (rather than sender) and the manipulation of the medium of perception towards a sphere of reference consisting of the aforementioned objects and states (the receiver remains in the same position adjacent to the medium). Unfortunately, this ‘exploration of the world’ through modification of a medium by semio-technical means becomes progressively linear and deterministic in Winkler’s

122 Remodelling Communication Figure 7: Processing and perception (after Winkler, following Bühler)

SPHERE OF REFERENCE objects and states of affairs

MEDIA OF PERCEPTION receiver symbolic product

sender/author SUBJECT OF COGNITION

hands. Rather than linking transformation with transmission, as we saw in reassessments of transmission, Winkler links it with processing. Indeed, Winkler excludes the kind of analysis I made of the WeaverShannon model’s semiotics in chapter 1 by restricting the alignment of transmission with processing, including switching and transcription, but excluding ‘acts of delivery, which do not interfere with the internal structure of what is delivered.’ As I argued earlier, the scene of decoding is complex socially and semiosically and may be included as a genuine modification by addition of signs and significant social characteristics.33

From General Modelling to Metamodelling 123

Strands of Non-Meaning There is an unfortunate tendency in criticisms of the transmission model to claim that it lacks a human dimension because of its elevation of statistics over semantics. Yet this machinic principle of nonsemantic transfer of signals can be a virtue when considered from a de-semioticizing perspective. Signals are the strands of non-meaning that connect Weaver and Shannon and Gerbner with Guattari. However, the de-semioticizing perspective emerged within Soviet psycho-semiotics of M. Pjatigorskij and B.A. Uspenskij, for whom personality types could be designated according to select behavioural tendencies. Those involving auto-reference and the adoption of a rich tableau of observable symbolic actions (semioticizing), or those (de-semioticizing) displaying a tendency toward the simplification of behavioural acts that aimed to ‘eliminate significance,’ even though ‘the behavior of a man with a tendency to desemioticize reality may be highly semioticized from an observer’s viewpoint.’34 Further, a rare a-semiotic type was diagnosed as well: ‘Asemioticity is probably an innate quality that excludes the emergence and growth of tendencies toward semioticization or desemioticization, although to be sure this is no more than a hypothesis.’35 These speculative categories are useful source materials for any consideration of Guattari’s interest in de-semioticization. His categories were developed through a critique of the imperialism of the linguistic signifier within structuralism and involved a hybrid semiotics that draws upon multiple traditions (utilizing the same traditions as Eco in borrowing from Peirce and Hjelmslev) and in the process heavily resignifies concepts such as non-iconic diagrams. Here, though, I want to emphasize Guattari’s de-semiotic types, namely, a-semiotics and a-signifying semiotics. A-semiotic encodings do not exist on a semiotic field stratified by the planes of expression and content divided by the formation of substances through the projection of form onto matter. What does it mean for them to be free of the field of semiosis? Essentially, they have no recourse to an autonomous system of encoding like speech or writing to project onto matter that would result in a substance such as genetic writing that could be translated into other similar substances. Form and matter interlace in natural encodings like highly specialized biogenetic and chemical systems. Guattari’s a-semiotic encoding involves neither language nor subjects and hence differs from the Soviet approach, but his descriptions suggest an acute

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sensitivity to the limits of the application of the concept of the sign itself, and secondarily, of the negative effects of the institution of a mono-semiotic regime across diverse human and non-human domains: ‘It would be ridiculous to suggest that the same system of signs is at work at once in the physico-chemical, the biological, the human and the machinic fields.’36 Guattari’s semiotic metamodel advances behind this critique and sequesters semiosis from signification. In so doing he praises signaletics, which he regains from transmission: ‘The transfer of information belongs to a diagrammatic process that has no direct relation with the significative redundancies of human “understanding.” ’37 A signal has no semantic dimension, no representational figure or higher-level semiotic functions, yet it requires form to work flush with matter but in the semiotic field. Indeed, Guattari prefers signals – which he renames part-signs of a-signifying semiotics – to feeble attempts to reinstitute a semantic dimension in some communication theories that reduce it to mere transmission (a presupposition of modelling senders and receivers), mere information flux that knows nothing of desire.38 Information is opposed to signification; a-signifying semiotics eludes representation. Multiple articulations override the double articulations of linguistics. A-signifying semiotics does not negatively construe semantics and representation in the guise of denying something to some being (i.e., signalling animals or multiplying immune cells). Rather, it explores the triggering of techno-material connections without reference to wellformed substances in a positive light. This connectivity is strict and precise; in most information-technology contexts there is no room for interpretive drift in the automated systems of verification of information networks. Guattari’s specific adherence to de-semioticization is evident in his rejection of the necessity of a subjective (individuated) correlate to signification in the intensive and productive form/matter conjunctions of a-signifying semiosis. What would it mean for a model to be productive rather than representational and thus no longer cut off from the real? How, then, to remodel communication as a machine that is reticent before the demands of meaning? Guattari sets up his unique approach to semiosis according to the classical cybernetic distinction between information and semantics, and he extracts signals from information and keeps them from being centred and substantiated by systems of meaning, while reserving the possibility of contact with the latter. As a critical deciphering of all kinds of modelling, Guattarian metamodelling asks after communication in order to free it from the

From General Modelling to Metamodelling 125

fixed coordinates organized around sender, receiver, message, etc. Metamodelling suggests that models are not separate from what they represent and do not obey the normative relations posed by function types, for instance. Rather, models imbued with the productive and projective force of diagrammatization become metamodels in which functions multiply, semiological and a-signifying signs cross it and connect directly with strands on the technological phylum of communications consisting of interfaces of all sorts between subjectivity and technology, and social and historical forces. The more a model achieves incomparable singularity, the greater its capacity to be moved by diagrammatic force. Metamodelling rejects the essentialist and universalist presumptions of communication models for the sake of a singularizing vision. Metamodelling leads to auto-modelling, the unfurling of the worlds of references of models, the impingements of socio-technical connective tissues upon them, and the ways in which processes of subjectification and objects interact with, make use of, and trust (or doubt) models. Metamodelling is a liberatory project that is intimately linked to the formation of singular subjectivities.39 For Guattari, ‘all systems for defining models are in a sense equal, all are tenable, but only to the extent that their principles of intelligibility renounce any universalist pretensions, and that their sole mission be to help map real existing territories (sensory, cognitive, affective and aesthetic universes).’ All of the large-scale and micro-molecular perturbations of communication are a concern for metamodelling. The rethinking of communication through an involutive, rhizomatic remodelling that puts the emphasis on passage over position and admits de-semioticization as a factor that unfixes coordinates and loosens functions suggests a proliferation of modelling: a thousand tiny singular models each redrawn with variations on recurrent figures, each with different details. These models would not act alone but find ways to cooperate productively.

Conclusion

In this book I have blended perspectives from the investigations of philosophers of science into modelling and the descriptions of modelling by semioticians in order to revisit and reassess communication modelling. This blending was necessitated by the mutual blind spots that philosophers and semioticians experience in relation to each other’s work. My approach to communication has been through detours of well-known models – and extrapolations from them – at the crossroads of communication and cultural theory. The application of the philosophical and semiotic findings to communication modelling pushed modelling beyond representation, critically and creatively redeploying the concepts and problems derived from the detours. Communication theory’s discussion of modelling has not generally been attuned to debates in the philosophy of science, and the latter has not tarried at length with communication and semiotics, but there are important exceptions. I begin this conclusion by turning to a productive exception to the former and then to a longstanding signpost suggested by an example of the latter. It may come as no surprise that an entry for ‘model’ is included in such collections as Key Concepts in Communication. Nevertheless, the definition itself has a number of noteworthy features. At the outset, a model is representational and of a structural type that ‘aims to guide analysis’; it also comes with a number of warnings. Borrowing from Rom Harré’s discussion of modelling as a ‘central but unstable’ practice in science and social science, the emphasis in the above entry is placed on explanatory power. While a model may be of an existent thing (reminding), or an ideal type (referring), it may also explain an inexistent or undiscovered phenomenon. A model is explanatory ‘where there is

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often no exact one-to-one similarity between the two corresponding elements within the comparison process.’1 The danger is the relative ease with which one may mistake an explanatory for a descriptive model and unduly restrict an investigation by taking the model too literally. Models, in other words, must be handled with care. Harré puts a good deal of emphasis in his work on modelling on explanation by analogues of things whose existence is hypothesized (i.e., the mechanism of genetic inheritance). Models in this respect are creative works of a constrained imagination because they draw on something known (source) in order to investigate what is unknown (subject). The difference between source and subject defines what Harré calls paramorph models, as opposed to homeomorph models (which are models of and modelled on what is known) whose source and subject are the same, and whose creative role is ‘residual’ to their representative role; even here, Harré specifies, ‘the structure of the original is expressed in the special way of the model, [and] new relations may be capable of being observed.’2 This ‘special way’ adds hitherto a perhaps at best new, and at least under-appreciated wrinkle. In a similar manner, Harré describes how a paramorph model is flexible enough to be adjusted if it fails a series of checks and the homologies that hold together the source and subject begin to slip (or indeed if the homological fit between the subject and source tighten up suspiciously).3 Harré gives a detailed texture and tension to representation. Both kinds of models are necessary in both science and social science. Harré develops the example of a family quarrel as an ‘enigmatic microsocial episode’ – enigmatic because it is a highly redundant and stylized event for the reaffirmation of status hierarchy about which its participants seem largely unaware – through a paramorph analogue (source) of an explicit ritual with rules: ‘Paramorphs of the natures of people are representative anticipations of a possible reality.’4 The possible reality is the unknown cognitive resources and physiological mechanisms producing the episode; a homeomorph is an ‘abstraction from’ an episode by means of sociological dramaturgy, which Harré privileges, characterizing the quarrel as an ‘informal ritual’: ‘By the exploitation of homeomorphic models of episodes, paramorphic models of the human resources necessary for action in those episodes, we can create model social worlds, complete as they say in the model railway catalogues, “in every detail.” ’5 Harré’s contributions to modelling are only suggested by his inclusion in the standard definition of ‘model’ by the authors of the Key

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Concepts. He raises an important and much neglected issue: modelling is an issue of trust, not of scale and detail and subcultural practices of collectors (model railroads). In what do modellers trust? Simulation. Replication of the real, synthesis of what has been analysed. Harré’s own model of modelling is chemistry, which he calls ‘humdrum’ precisely because it double checks its predictions and then replicates them. This might be applied to social action by means of dramaturgical simulations (homeomorphic) and functionally equivalent analogues of unknown cognitive mechanisms behind behaviour (paramorphs). These ‘pretty good simulations’ and the ways in which they are checked (controlled and monitored) suffice for Harré to warrant trust in modelling. Trusting in modelling is more than an attitudinal emphasis or belief. Trust is borne out in working with models in context. Repetition and productive adjustment engender trust. Repetition is a nuanced redundancy permitting the potential for innovation with each iteration (new ‘wrinkles’). Minimally, models enable their users to learn something about systems and processes of communication. Cancelling or bracketing the naturalness of representation refocuses attention onto the ways in which communication theorists, among others, interact with models, how models arrange around themselves pieces of equipment, or texts, and different kinds of personnel. Interaction is constrained by the specificities of the models themselves and influence the ways in which knowledge is generated. It is not only a question of handling models with care but of taking care in considering how interactions with models influence knowledge and add to it over time and through repetition.6 Handling models suggests that interactions are oriented toward specific media – line drawings or computer graphical interfaces – each requiring different processes and skills. The hallmark of the configurative approach to modelling is that models themselves gain agency in relation to their autonomy from strict representational duty. Agency in the sense used here is an effect of a dynamic networked relationality consisting of a range of practices, subjects, and objects in local configurations. Agency is possessed by neither subjects nor objects but is an ongoing process of reconfiguration within a field of constraints (inclusions and exclusions).7 Such constraints are those of models, their materialities, and their relations, including the simplicity of diagrams that thrive on exclusion: their elegance is expressed in how spare they are. Guattari would add to these considerations of a-signifying enunciations of non-human machines ‘such as equations and plans which enunciate the machine and make it act in

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a diagrammatic capacity on technical and experimental apparatuses.’8 This ‘proto-subjective’ enunciation in which machines talk to machines and guide their operators, like the interpretation and execution of a routine or program, or triggering of a transaction process, needs neither subjects nor objects nor meanings, yet communicates in a complementary way with other similar machines in a machinic assemblage (subjectification, too, is machinic). Semiotic descriptions of computer program language and machine calculation by signs have recourse to meta-programming in order to speak about reflexivity and system selfevolution, which are close to the notion of agency under consideration in this section of the conclusion, but remains an idea that is severely limited in the computer realm yet forms the basis for many computational fantasies.9 The idea that models are key actants in network arrays of diverse material is the context in which the question of trust in modelling may be picked up. The widely accepted principle that ‘most models are oversimplified’ does not entail resignation before modelling to the effect that, well, it’s the best that can be done. Rather, as William C. Wimsatt has suggested in his analysis of false models, the continued trust invested in models that are productively false – despite their simplicity they are valuable starting points; while incomplete, the answers provided by such models may be extended to more complex models; false models may be pooled together to indicate extremes, etc.10 – is tied to two themes I have been developing in this conclusion: productivity (kinds and degrees of falsehood and the insights they deliver) and a refocus on models themselves as adjustable, modifiable, componential entities that may be engineered piecemeal rather than rejected wholesale. Wise uses rather than abuses of false models express the trust that continues to be invested in their deployment in experimental assemblages of various kinds. In this light the Lévi-Straussian nostrum that the best model is the simplest (elegant) and true (it is derived from and accounts for all the facts) seems naively representational.11 Where does trust in modelling originate? Is it the result of cognitive development and the apprehension of a variety of semiotic systems that help model the world, such as language and religion? As V.V. Ivanov wrote, ‘The basic function of every semiotic system is the modeling of the world.’ One learns such ‘world models’ at an early age, and they are internalized and then interact with emerging individual models over the course of a lifetime.12 Is trust perhaps linked to a semiotic system’s ‘modeling capacity,’13 a concept that A.A. Zaliznjak, V.V. Ivanov, and

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N. Toporov attached to degrees so that the lesser the degree of abstraction the greater the modelling capacity, and hence trust? While these distinctions, borrowed from Soviet semiotics, seem highly contingent, they have interesting implications. The focus on questions about modelling in a developmental context stratified by hierarchies and largescale superstructures like religion, language, myth, and mathematics, may suggest just the opposite – models with the maximum capacity are the most abstract. Think of the praise heaped upon Hjelmslev’s glossematics by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus – and in abstracto theorists like these trust. What might be considered a standard semiotic perspective on modelling is contained in the entry on ‘modeling’ in Paul Cobley’s The Routledge Companion to Semiotics. Semiotic modelling is iconic and thus representational (based on similarity and isomorphism). The strongest examples, however, rest modelling upon language (not merely linguistic communication), underlining its biological ‘originariness’ and ‘rootness’ and its basis as a mapping mechanism beyond mere perception.14 However, while this perspective is linked with a bio-semiotics derived from Jakob von Uexküll and carried forward by Sebeok and others, it ventures no further into contemporary philosophy of science or into post-representational theory. Philosophers of science, following upon the insights of semioticians and remaining close to them, provide another perspective on the problem of abstract models. Working within a representational paradigm in which abstract models bear similarities with the concrete systems they model, comparisons reveal relative degrees of replication – sufficient agreements and tolerable differences, context dependency, and ‘approximate truths.’ As Paul Teller explains, the search for the Perfect Model Model – that is, a general, unified model of models, in which trust would be strong and secure because such a model would be exact, comprehensive, having blended together underlying unifying models and unified higher level models – ends badly. Teller concludes this for a number of reasons, since models with different capacities do not combine coherently into a perfect – or nearly so – model.15 Representational comprehensiveness is not the only basis for trust in modelling. False, approximate, and imperfect models also warrant high degrees of trust in the twilight of the models. It is safe to conclude that representational modelling is in epistemological free fall, since quandaries over truth and falsity, distributed agency, multiplicity as opposed to unicity, reinforce the gap between

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artificial invention (model) and empirical fact (raw material). One response to this condition is worth noting, if only in passing. Alain Badiou’s somewhat dated critique of modelling targets both LéviStrauss’s model as image (social structure as a model built from the raw materials of social relations) linked weakly to science (an ‘indirect outcome’ of mathematics, but without measurement) and logical positivism’s inversion by means of semantics of the empirical providing the philosophical category of model in the form of interpretations of a formal system (true statements) for the theorems derived from them according to scientific syntax as fundamentally flawed and, indeed, illegitimate ‘exportations’ from mathematics that ‘degrade into ideology,’ since ‘the concept of model does not designate an outside to be formalized, but a mathematical material to be tested.’16 While Badiou’s interest in the ‘fertile category’ of model may be linked to the place of mathematics in his Platonism, it allowed him to think about its influence and role in the historical processes of formalization in a given science. The overarching argument in this book has required the integration and exploration of aberrances, accidents, noises, falsehoods, dysfunctions, and deceptions into the very substance of modelling itself. The historico-technological arc from WWII to the WWW sketched the transit into a post-representational configuration of communication in a controlled encounter with what might seem to be chaotically deterritorializing, but that ensured no easy recourse to the metaphysical certainties of existing communication models. As Michel Serres reminds us, communication is ‘granular’ in the noise of the empirical domain; transmission is ‘chronic transformation.’17 Regaining the socio-semiotics scenes of decoding, service sector, and Cold War contexts of the transmission model, I underlined the machinic processes at work in transmission in order to critically appreciate the impulses of virtuality of transductive affect otherwise buried in standard accounts. Transportation entails transformation and transversalization of what cannot but be felt along communicational vectors, without presupposing well-formed ‘senders’ or ‘receivers.’ In the process, the so-called (in)essential is regained for the insight it provides into communication. Likewise, Hall’s emphasis on the political moments of decoding, his insertion of temporal heterogeneity into his incomplete model, and indeed the extraordinary admission that the circuit he drew was bottomless, foregrounded the contingency of Hall’s model itself. It is easy to agree with Hall that his model was not grand, since it was never completed. Yet this incompleteness has not become an issue in cultural studies. Surely, the editorial

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vicissitudes of the famous essay must accommodate the theoretical absence at the heart of the demonstration. This does not make the model useless or irrelevant, since it speaks to the limits of representational thought in the face of what Hall perceived at the time as the challenge of apolitical social scientific transmission modelling. As I noted, however, the very choice of concepts – encoding and decoding – already had an underappreciated historical foundation in code breaking with a specific resonance in mid-twentieth-century computing. Swerving around the semantic and referential, Jakobson poetically remodelled the transmission features and fixtures at the heart of communication. Semiosic palpability and felt relationality highlighted the affective dimension of poesis and the limits of structural difference. The autonomy of affect was witnessed in terms of its advent – arriving from someplace, and hard to recognize, in sound play. Extracting the phatic function in order to appreciate its specific accidents – that is, its dysfunctionalities and how they are theorizable in media studies, raises the issue of whether the unexpectedness of televisual transduction in horror films has become a general condition – if not general, then, at least a vital condition, the diagnosis of which cannot be reduced to hypertrophy. In attempting to use the general condition of telephasis in relation to networked life as a criticism of the emptiness of the passage beyond meaning into pure interactivity and the eclipse of metabolic communion, Baudrillard showed that his own critique could not hold. Equating phatic functionality and telematics, Baudrillard sought to critique the simulacral character of communication without the co-. While apparently uncovering mutually exterminating terminals that would play a key role in vanquishing the communication model of Jakobson, Baudrillard seemed to be describing a general accident of interactivity within telecommunications networks.18 Further, the kinds of empty connectivity he criticized against a romantic anthropological and anarchic construction of non-simulated ritual exchange appear to possess some of the characteristics of a-signifying semiotic part-signs perfectly adapted to the start and stop triggers of automated networks. These part-signs are neither exceptions nor semiotically exclusive. Despite himself, Baudrillard appears to offer a rather faithful description of some important features of communication today in which simulation does not entirely subsume representation. Analysis of the creative mistrust of commercial messages has massively shifted communication and cultural analysis to the politics of decoding. From Hall to Eco and Fiske, oppositional and aberrant

Conclusion 133

decodings, for my interests, force a re-theorization of the relations between the exception and the rule relative to the breadth of the context at issue. Freedom of decoding may be ideally democratic (participatory in a robust sense), but it is constrained, practically disobedient; it may be active but it is passively so; it may be subversive but it is soft, tactical, and not strategic. The figure of the guerrilla decoder is not an anti-corporate freedom fighter but a disobedient protester setting up temporary camps along a constrained continuum of resignification that involves appropriation beyond quotation, interruption, redefinition, rerouting, modification, re-creation, sabotage, hijacking, hacking, vandalizing, plundering, jamming, mash-ups . . . It may be somewhat amusing to consider Eco’s essay of 1967 in which he imagines mediatic guerrilla warfare in terms of the occupation of chairs in front of television sets, and his non-industrial vision of the critical, collective resistance of receivers.19 It is, however, impossible to consider cultural communication in the absence of some sort of critical figuration of semiotic disobedience.20 In terms of modelling communication, the transversal blossoming of the receiver is not suggested by Eco’s unfortunately formalistic and mirror-like structures of meaning. Nevertheless, where Hall left his model unfinished and the circuit incomplete, Eco pushed modelling ahead by recourse to expression and content planes, demonstrating the necessity of roughing in the circuit. But a robust remapping would not be beholden to the semiological opposition of expression and content. Indeed, the distinction between biases, random drift, and aberrations as opposed to intentional guerrilla undermining would lose its valency in opening onto multiple articulations and agglomerations of semiotic fragments running diagonally across the planes in both directions, manifesting in various substances, but swerving around substance in other instances, sprouting new shoots and runners. Disobedience is, then, a necessary feature of a communication model yet to be mapped and new realities yet to be forged. And it was also suggested that the subject of these operations could be reconceived as nothing more than a part alongside sign-parts – subjectivity is not individuated in the postrepresentational communicational diagram. In chapter 7, the issue of trust in transmission’s stability for Sampson collapsed in the rhizomatic scrambling of what I have called the index (model to). As I have maintained in my concluding remarks, the necessity of remapping communication brings with it another kind of trust in the positive virtues of experimentation and the creative directions indicated by disobedient swerves, disturbances, turbulence, and singular

134 Remodelling Communication

flights full with complexities and multiplicities not always recognizable, each process propagating itself, unfurling virtual universes in and through and beyond its matted relationships. Post-representational or ‘processual modelling,’ to use Ned Rossiter’s conception, diagrams communication and pushes it beyond specified arrows and boxes, underlining change, deterioration, and indeterminate elements that make it irreducible to retroactive capture by encoding/decoding modelling.21 Rossiter states that ‘all communication is a process of translation.’22 But this is not the translation of languages or even machines, but of forces transduced across domains into singularities that then make connections and in so doing become relatively different, sometimes entirely different. This process of translation cannot be isolated but is a dynamic moment embedded in a series of transformations that begin before it, ripple through it, and continue after it. Representational modelling attempts to seal off this process, rendering the movement and translation of forces static, arresting, ongoing emergence by erecting poles. A post-representational approach to remodelling communication constructively and configuratively looks forward rather than backward, and thus frees coding from solely gathering existing things in some measure, in order to focus the ongoing processes of formation, translation, and diagrammatic potentiality.23 Regaining the inessential is a vital strategy for introducing becoming into communication remodelling.

Notes

Introduction 1 Thomas A. Sebeok notes that the ‘schematic flowchart’ of Shannon and Weaver has been repeatedly copied; Sebeok himself sought to redraw the model of language functions devised by Jakobson via Bühler as a Morley triangle; see his ‘In What Sense Is Language a “Primary Modeling System”?,’ in On Semiotic Modeling, ed. Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell (Berlin: Mouton, 1991), 330. 2 Roscislav Pazukhin, ‘Some Remarks on Theories, Models, and Empirical Data in Linguistics,’ in Sign, System and Function: Papers of the First and Second Polish-American Semiotics Colloquia, ed. Jerzy Pelc, Thomas A. Sebeok, Edward Stankiewicz, and Thomas G. Winner (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), 309. 3 Ibid., 317. 4 Barbara Stanosz, ‘Theories, Models, and Empirical Data in Linguistics,’ in Sign, System and Function, ed. Pelc et al., 387. 5 For example, see Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi, The Forms of Meaning: Modelling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000). The authors develop a three-tiered model of modelling systems (with axioms and principles) based on C.S. Peirce’s categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. 6 Scott Jacobs and Sally Jackson, ‘Building a Model of Conversational Argument,’ in Rethinking Communication, ed. B. Derwin, L. Grossberg, and B.J. O’Keefe (Newbury Park: Sage, 1989), 2:153–4. Here, pithily, structural models replicate, describe, summarize (what can be observed), and explain (account for events). This is thought to be ‘normal.’ 7 Kenneth J. Knoespel, ‘Models and Diagrams within the Cognitive Field,’ in Model-Based Reasoning in Scientific Discovery, ed. Lorenzo Magnani, Nancy J. Neressian, and Paul Thagard (New York: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 65.

136 Notes to Pages 5–11  8 Some of these are explored by Ronald N. Giere, ‘Using Models to Represent Reality,’ in Model-Based Reasoning, ed. Magnani, Neressian, and Thagard, 41–57.  9 Ibid., 55. 10 Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell, ‘Grounding Figures and Figuring Grounds in Semiotic Modeling,’ in On Semiotic Modeling, ed. Anderson and Merrell, 3–4. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 C.W. Spinks, ‘Diagrammatic Thinking and the Portraiture of Thought,’ in On Semiotic Modeling, ed. Anderson and Merrell, 445. 13 Denis McQuail and Sven Windahl, Communication Models for the Study of Mass Communications (London: Longman, 1981), 3. 14 John L. Casti, Would-Be Worlds (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 46. 15 René Thom, Mathematical Models of Morphogenesis, trans. W.M. Brookes and D. Rand (New York: John Wiley, 1983), 115. 16 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I.H. Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 56. 17 Ibid., 92. 18 Margaret Morrison and Mary S. Morgan, ‘Models as Mediating Instruments,’ in Models as Mediators: Perspectives on Natural and Social Sciences, ed. M.S. Morgan and M. Morrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 30. 19 The duality inherent in modelling is expressed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his definition of modelling social structure: ‘The best model will always be that which is true, that is, the simplest possible model which, while being derived exclusively from the facts under consideration, also makes it possible to account for all of them.’ Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf (New York: Basic, 1963), 281. These two principles – derived from the facts and explaining them – puts modelling onto a never-ending struggle to overcome the distance between artefact and the facts outside it by the inadequate simulacra of representation. Alain Badiou trenchantly called this a ‘circle’ of representation in which the ‘facts’ designate the best model, and the best model explains the most facts in the most elegant way. The Concept of Model, trans. Z.L. Fraser and T. Tho (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2007), 16. I will reintroduce some element of this critique in the conclusion. 20 Morrison, ‘Models as Autonomous Agents,’ in Models as Mediators, ed. Morgan and Morrison, 64. 21 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 23. 22 See my discussion of a-signifying semiotics in Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2002), 169ff.; and my Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2009), 89–109.

Notes to Pages 11–17 137 23 This point is made by Morgan in her ‘Learning from Models,’ in Models as Mediators, ed. Morgan and Morrison, 385. 24 Morrison and Morgan, ‘Models as Mediating Instruments,’ 17. 25 Mauricio Suárez, ‘The Role of Models in the Application of Scientific Theories,’ in Models as Mediators, ed. Morgan and Morrison, 170. 26 On this basic understanding of modelling, see F. Craig Johnson and George R. Klare, ‘General Models of Communication Research: A Survey of the Developments of a Decade,’ Journal of Communication 11 (1961): 13. 27 Félix Guattari, L’inconscient machinique (Fontenay-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1979), 68. 28 Ibid., 225–7. 29 All the way from Ogden and Richards to Brian Rotman one finds the Anglo-American triangle at work, with little attention given to the effects of the shape and the relations it triumphs, especially the constitution of the subject. This is especially the case in Rotman’s importation of unanalyzed psychoanalytic figures into his triangular model of mathematical thinking/ writing. See his ‘Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics and Writing,’ in The Science Studies Reader, ed. M. Biagoli (New York: Routledge, 1999), 430–41. 30 Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Human and Robot Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 140–1. 31 Tony Sampson, ‘Senders, Receivers and Deceivers: How Liar Codes Put Noise Back on the Diagram of Transmission,’ M/C 9, no. 1 (2006). http:// journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/03-sampson.php. 32 Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst: An Interview by Philippe Petit, trans. M. Cavaliere and S. Lotringer (New York: Semiotexte, 1999), 91–2. 33 Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, ‘Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,’ Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 4; and see David E. Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 19. 34 Max Black, Models as Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 220. 35 Juri Lotman, ‘Two Models of Communication,’ in Soviet Semiotics, ed. and trans. Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 99–101. 36 A good example is the edited collection by Jussi Parikka and Tony Sampson, The Spam Book (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2009). 37 Tarja Knuuttila and Martina Merz, ‘Understanding by Modeling: An Objectal Approach,’ in Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. S. Leonelli and K. Eigner (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 152.

138 Notes to Pages 17–21 38 Warren Weaver, ‘Information Theory: A Nontechnical Review,’ in Science and Imagination: Selected Papers of Warren Weaver (New York: Basic, 1967), 197–8. 39 Armand and Michèle Mattelart, Rethinking Media Theory, trans. James A. Cohen and Marina Urquidi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 44. 40 Ibid., 68. 41 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd ed. (London: Tavistock, 1980), 96. 42 Margaret C. Morrison, ‘Modelling Nature: Between Physics and the Physical Model,’ Philosophia Naturalis 38, no. 1 (1998): 72. 43 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962). He describes his work with Bigelow at 5–6. Wiener cites the challenges of duck hunting as a good example of how the problem of ‘anticipatory feedback’ is common to all ground-to-air fire (113). 44 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium (London: Routledge, 1997), 281n2. 45 Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams (London: Verso, 1995). See his chapter ‘Guards Officer,’ 86–106. 46 Marxist historian E.P. Thompson was also a tank troop commander in, according to his somewhat famous phrase, an ‘ingenious civilian army.’ As Dennis Dworkin writes, ‘Thompson’s strongest impressions of his army years were the men’s antifascist spirit, their adherence to democratic and often socialist principles, and their resolute anti-imperialism.’ He remembered it as an ‘authentic Popular Front.’ Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 17. 47 Paul Virilio, ‘The Suicidal State,’ in The Virilio Reader, ed. James Der Derian (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), esp. 32–7. 48 Ibid., 32. 49 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 49. 50 David Holloway, ‘The Political Uses of Scientific Models: The Cybernetic Model of Government in Soviet Social Science,’ in The Uses of Models in the Social Sciences, ed. Lyndhurst Collins (London: Tavistock, 1976), 119. 51 Slava Gerovitch, ‘Striving for “Optimal Control”: Soviet Cybernetics as a “Science of Government,” ’ in Cultures of Control, ed. Miriam R. Levin (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2000), 253. 52 McQuail and Windahl, Communication Models, 33–41.

Notes to Pages 21–9 139 53 Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ in Culture, Media, Language (hereafter CML), ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 130. 54 McQuail and Windahl, Communication Models, 79. 55 See Philip Jenkins, ‘Sideways in Sociology,’ American Sociologist 29, no. 3 (1998): 5–8. 56 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre,’ in CML, 20. 57 Roman Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,’ in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 114. 58 Richard Bradford, Roman Jakobson: Life, Language, Art (London: Routledge, 1994), 48. 59 Ibid., 58. 60 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 225. 61 Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,’ in Style in Language, ed. T.A. Sebeok (New York: Wiley, 1960), 356. 62 See Baudrillard, ‘The Perfect Crime,’ in Passwords, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 2003), 62–3. 63 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 141. 64 Franco Bifo Berardi, ‘Schizo-Economy,’ trans. M. Goddard, SubStance 36, no. 1 (2007): 81–2. 65 George Gerbner, ‘Toward a General Model of Communication,’ AudioVisual Communication Review 4, no. 3 (1956): 171. 66 Janell Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between Lacan and Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2009), 9. 67 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977), 183–7. 1. Regaining Weaver and Shannon  1 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).  2 Dallas Smythe, ‘The Role of Mass Media and Popular Culture in Defining Development,’ in Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication, ed. Thomas Guback (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 259.  3 Paul Cobley, The Communication Theory Reader (London: Routledge, 1999).

140 Notes to Pages 31–7  4 Harold D. Lasswell, ‘The Structure and Function of Communication in Society,’ in The Communication of Ideas, ed. Lyman Bryson (New York: Cooper Square, 1964), 42–3.  5 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).  6 See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962). He notes the influence of Shannon, 10.  7 Robert Ash, Information Theory (New York: Interscience, 1965), v.  8 Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 41.  9 Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Communication Theory,’ in On Language, ed. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 495–6. 10 Weaver, ‘Recent Contributions,’ in Mathematical Theory, 7. 11 Ibid., 26. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 27. 14 Colin Cherry, On Human Communication, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 41. 15 Vilem Flusser, ‘On the Theory of Communication,’ in Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl, trans. Erik Eisel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 9. 16 Weaver, ‘Recent Contributions,’ 27. 17 Thom, Mathematical Models, 167. Still, Thom notes that even this ‘fundamental defect’ has an upside ‘in identifying information with negentropy.’ 18 As Michele Martin reminds us in Hello, Central? Gender, Technology and Culture in the Formation of the Telephone System (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991). 19 Cherry, Human Communication, 45. 20 On these and other related points, see British journalist Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), esp. chap. 8 ‘Love over the Wires,’ 120–35. Standage’s writing is interesting on this topic, undoubtedly a labour of love, because of the emphasis he places on emotional connections. Many accounts of telegraphy in the history of communications are bewitched by the purely technical aura of the medium. 21 Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10.

Notes to Pages 37–47 141 22 Ronald E. Day, The Modern Invention of Information (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 45–6. 23 Ian Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication (Buffalo: State University Press of New York, 2000), 77–88. 24 Day, Modern Invention of Information, 78. 25 ‘Full Stop: Western Union Cables Its Last,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 3 Feb. 2006. 26 Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 86. 27 Marshall McLuhan and Wilfrid Watson, From Cliché to Archetype (New York: Viking, 1970), 174. 28 McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws, 111. 29 Marshall McLuhan, ‘Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment,’ in Innovations: Essays on Art and Ideas, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (London: Macmillan, 1968), 124. 30 Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 22. 31 Edward Sapir, ‘Language,’ in Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. D.G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 13. 32 Martin, Hello, Central?, 61. 33 Steven Maras, ‘On Transmission: A Metamethodological Analysis (after Régis Debray),’ Fibreculture 12 (2008): 14. http://twelve.fibreculturejournal.org/ fcj-080-on-transmission-a-metamethodological-analysis-after-regis-debray/. 34 Wilbur Schramm, ‘How Communication Works,’ in The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, ed. W. Schramm (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 10. 35 Ibid., 8. 36 Régis Debray, Transmitting Culture, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 27. 37 Warren Weaver, ‘Communicative Accuracy,’ in Science and Imagination, 183–4. 38 Warren Weaver, ‘Information Theory,’ 207. 39 Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 231–2. 40 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 42–3. 41 Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 92. 42 Cherry, Human Communication, 52. 43 Ibid., 201. 44 Sampson, ‘Senders, Receivers and Deceivers,’ 2. 45 McQuail and Windahl, Communication Models, 18.

142 Notes to Pages 47–53 46 Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, ‘On Anomalous Objects of Digital Culture,’ in The Spam Book, ed. Parikka and Sampson (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2009), 11.

2. Encoding and Decoding Stuart Hall  1 Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ 128–38. The original title was ‘Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse.’ Reproduced as ‘Encoding, Decoding,’ in The Cultural Studies Reader (hereafter CSR), ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 90–103.  2 As Hall himself reports in an interview, ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/ Decoding Model: An Interview with Stuart Hall,’ in Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception, ed. J. Cruz and J. Lewis (Boulder: Westview, 1993), 261. Hall says, ‘It wasn’t a paper which gave its full credentials. So, for example, the “1857 Introduction” and Marx are not mentioned in the original paper at all. So I’m only gradually showing my hand.’ Originally, Hall had published a separate working paper (CCCS #6 [1974]) on the identity of production and consumption in the ‘1857 Introduction.’ These and other changes have been taken up by Maras (see chapter 1), who cites the interesting reflections of Michael Gurevitch and Paddy Scannell, ‘Canonization Achieved? Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/ Decoding,” ’ in E. Katz, J.D. Peters, T. Liebes, and A. Orloff, eds., Canon Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How about These? (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003), 231–74.  3 See CSR, 90–1; CML version, 128.  4 CML, 129.  5 Ibid.  6 Ibid., 130.  7 Ibid.  8 William Leiss, Steve Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising (Toronto: Methuen, 1986), 86.  9 This report is discussed by Helen Davis in Understanding Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 2004), 52–4. 10 CML, 131. 11 Jennifer Daryl Slack, ‘The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,’ in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 125. 12 CML, 131. 13 Ibid.

Notes to Pages 53–60 143 14 On this point, see Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall (London: Polity, 2003), 93–4. 15 CML, 131. 16 Ibid., 132. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 133. 19 Ibid. 20 See V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Tutinik (New York: Seminar, 1973). Hall does not cite a page, but the Marxian critique of linguistics (Saussure’s Enlightenment Project) as an abstract system that studies language as if it were dead (native tongue as if alien, dialogic as if monologic, etc.) certainly appealed to him. 21 CML, 133. 22 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 90. 23 CML, 134. 24 Roland Barthes, ‘The Man in the Street on Strike,’ in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 100. 25 Ibid., 102. 26 CML, 135. 27 Ibid. 28 See my discussion of openness in Deleuze, Guattari, and Eco in my Undisciplined Theory (London: Sage, 1998), 73–96. 29 CML, 136. 30 Ibid., 136. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 137. 33 Ian Connell, ‘Television News and the Social Contract,’ in CML, 155. 34 See Derrick de Kerckhove, Brainframes (Utrecht: BSO Origin, 1991), 42. 35 CML, 137. 36 Ibid., 137–8. 37 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 257. 38 CML, 138. 39 Colin Sparks, ‘Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies, and Marxism,’ in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues, ed. Morley and Chen, 87. 40 Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Cultural Studies and/in New Worlds,’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (1993): 4.

144 Notes to Pages 60–7 41 Michèle Barrett, ‘Sociology and the Metaphorical Tiger,’ in Without Guarantees: In Honor of Stuart Hall, ed. P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg, and A. McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), 19. 42 Hall, ‘Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model,’ 253. 43 Ibid., 255. 44 Ibid, 258–9. 45 Ibid., 260. 46 Ibid., 274. 3. Roman Jakobson and the Primacy of the Poetic  1 These points are outlined in Charles Lock, ‘Roman Jakobson,’ Encyclopedia of Semiotics, ed. Paul Bouissac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 327–30; and David Lidov, ‘Jakobson’s Model of Communication,’ ibid., 330–2.  2 Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), 1–3.  3 Roman Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,’ in Style in Language, ed. T.A. Sebeok (New York: Wiley, 1960), 350–77.  4 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 224.  5 Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement,’ 353.  6 Ibid.  7 For Jean Baudrillard’s idea of communication as a ‘simulation pact’ based on ‘tele-phasis,’ see his Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990), 163–6. Baudrillard writes, ‘The phatic function of language, used to establish contact and sustain speech’s formal dimension: this function first isolated and described by Malinowski with reference to the Melanesians, then by Jakobson in his grid of language’s functions, becomes hypertrophied in the tele-dimension of the communications networks. Contact for contact’s sake becomes the empty form with which language seduces itself when it no longer has anything to say’ (164).  8 Ien Ang, ‘In the Realm of Uncertainty,’ in Communication Theory Today, ed. D. Crowley and D. Mitchell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 198–9.  9 Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement,’ 353. 10 Ibid., 354. 11 Ibid. 12 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 262; Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement,’ 355. And Karl Bühler,

Notes to Pages 67–70 145 ‘The Model of Language as Organon (A),’ in Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. D.F. Goodwin (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 1990), 30–9. Bühler’s focus in explaining the conative function was on how the appeal at issue (i.e., sex appeal) is manifested in the behaviour of the receiver. 13 See A.V. Isacenko, ‘On the Conative Function of Language,’ in A Prague School Reader in Linguistics, ed. Josef Vachek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 88–97. 14 Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement,’ 354. 15 Ibid., 353. 16 Ibid., 356. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 357. 20 Ibid., 377. 21 Julia Kristeva, ‘The Ethics of Linguistics,’ in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardin, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 23–5. 22 Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement,’ 357. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 358. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 371. 27 I do not intend to dwell on the enormously influential nature of these two concepts, selection and combination. However, Kristeva, in the essay cited above, links Jakobson and Freud on the basis of their recognition that language was ‘always already poetic.’ The deployment of the two axes in psychoanalysis has created lively debate and has been taken up by those mining the Lacanian vein. A useful way into this debate is through the dream work. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud develops the processes of the dream work, one of which is condensation [Verdichtung], an operation of spatial compression, reduction, and transformation. The question for psychoanalysis was how to understand Freud’s suggestion that this spatial process is unlike ‘the linguistic’ in general. If condensation is dismissive of discourse, then any attempt to find it in linguistic operations may run against the grain. This was, however, precisely the approach taken by Jacques Lacan. It is the superimposition of signifiers constitutive of the poetic, etc., a position he outlined in ‘Agency of the Letter of the Unconscious,’ in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 160.

146 Notes to Pages 70–3 The Kristevan homage to Jakobson is also found here in a footnote in Lacan’s essay (177n20): ‘I pay homage here to the works of Roman Jakobson to which I owe much of this formulation; works to which a psychoanalyst can constantly refer in order to structure his own experience.’ Lacan converts linguistic into psychoanalytic principles using the two axes to separate metaphor and metonymy, similarity and contiguity, vertical and horizontal, condensation and displacement (in the dream work). A good critical reading of this situation was developed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in ‘The Dream Work Does Not Think,’ Oxford Literary Review 6, no. 1 (1983): 3–35; Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974], 239–61). Lyotard argues against both Lacan and Jakobson. For Jakobson, condensation is aligned with the trope synecdoche, and thus metonymic; for Lacan, condensation is aligned with metaphor. What needs to be interrogated, Lyotard thinks, is the very search for language in a dream work that does not think. 28 Jakobson, ‘Closing Statement,’ 371. 29 Ibid., 372. 30 Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding,’ 129. 31 Bradford, Roman Jakobson, 58; see also Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: The Linguistics of Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 86. 32 Linda R. Waugh, ‘The Poetic Function in the Theory of Roman Jakobson,’ Poetics Today 2, no. 1a (1980): 69. In considering the dual parallelism between sound and meaning equivalences, Waugh accepts duel parallelism (anti-grammaticality) but forbids agrammaticality. In this view, grammatical form always accompanies sound form. 33 Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 112. The ‘event-advent’ refers to the potentiality of creative intensities and the conversion of the virtual into the possible. 34 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 226. ‘Potential is an advent’ in the sense that it is not a reserve that pre-exists its actualization but a virtuality that looms, a crowd of jostling tendencies towards the emergence of a completion. It is the kind of potential at issue in the quasi-cause: a so-called ‘advent’ – unpredictable, non-objectifiable, ‘surprise.’ 4. All Models Are Simulations: Jean Baudrillard’s Critique of Communication  1 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Requiem for the Media,’ For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (New York: Telos, 1981), 165.

Notes to Pages 73–9 147  2 Mark Poster, The Information Subject (Amsterdam: Gordon Breach, 2001), 64.  3 Vilem Flusser, ‘On the Theory of Communication,’ in Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 19.  4 Baudrillard, ‘The Vanishing Point of Communication,’ in Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories, ed. D.B. Clarke, M.A. Doel, W. Merrin, and R.G. Smith (London: Routledge, 2009), 21.  5 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 164.  6 Marshall McLuhan with Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam, 1968), 5.  7 Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. M. Molinaro, C. McLuhan, and W. Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 325.  8 ‘McLuhan on Russia: An Interview [by Gary Kern],’ McLuhan Dew-Line Newsletter 2, no. 6 (1970): n.p.  9 Dallas Smythe, ‘The Role of Mass Media and Popular Culture in Defining Development,’ in Counterclockwise: Perspectives on Communication (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 258. 10 Karl Marx, ‘Fragment on Machines,’ in Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 693. See also Antonio Negri, Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), 139; Paolo Virno, ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’ and Franco Piperno, ‘Technological Innovation and Sentimental Education,’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 21 and 123. 11 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 167. 12 Ibid., 170n16. 13 Ibid., 168. 14 Hans Magnus Enzenberger, ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media,’ in Video Culture, ed. John Handhardt (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop, 1986), 96–123. 15 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 169. 16 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media,’ in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Oxford: Stanford University Press and Polity, 1988), 207–8. 17 Jean Baudrillard, System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 142. 18 Ibid., 154. 19 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 169. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 169–70.

148 Notes to Pages 80–7 22 Ibid., 170. 23 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, see 126–7. 24 Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 17. 25 Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles, Exiles from Dialogue, trans. Chris Turner (London: Polity, 2007), 124–5. 26 Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, trans. Julie Witwer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 38. 27 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 171. 28 Ibid., 171. 29 Baudrillard, System of Objects, 53. 30 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 172. 31 Television semiotics has many nuances and practitioners – for instance, see the narratological approach of Arthur Asa Berger, ‘Semiotics and TV,’ in Understanding Television, ed. Richard P. Adler (New York: Praeger, 1979), 91–114; or John Fiske’s hybrid analysis with the recuperation of resistance in Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1987). 32 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 173. 33 See my comparison with rhythm in Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the semiotic in Undisciplined Theory, 27–30. 34 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 176. 35 John Fiske and John Hartley, ‘The Functions of Television,’ in Transmission: Theory and Practice for a New Television Aesthetics, ed. Peter D’Agostino (New York: Tanam, 1985), 38. 36 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 178. 37 Ibid., 178–9. 38 Ibid., 197. 39 Ibid., 197n27. 40 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990), 164. 41 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 179. 42 Baudrillard, Seduction, 165. 43 Baudrillard, ‘Requiem,’ 180. 44 Ibid., 181–2. 45 Ibid., 183. 46 Ibid., 184. 47 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 78. 48 Ibid., 79.

Notes to Pages 89–93 149 5. Phatic (Dys)functions  1 Umberto Eco quoted by Peter Pericles Trifonas, Umberto Eco and Football (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001), 49.  2 Baudrillard, Seduction, 163–6.  3 Ibid., 164.  4 Ibid.  5 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 72.  6 Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 287.  7 Derrick de Kerckhove, Brainframes (Utrecht: BSO/Origin, 1991), 50.  8 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Holocaust,’ in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glazer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 51.  9 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality,’ in Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artefact, ed. N. Zurbrugg (London: Sage, 1997), 22; Baudrillard, ‘Radicalism Has Passed into Events,’ in Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London: Routledge, 1993), 146. 10 De Kerckhove, Brainframes, 51, 79. 11 For a discussion of this history, see Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1987), 73. 12 This point is developed by Don Theall, Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture, and Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 168. 13 Ibid., 170. 14 Sadie Plant, ‘On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Stimulations,’ in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Fiona Hovenden, Linda James, Gill Kirkup, and Kathryn Woodward (London: Routledge, 2000), 270. 15 John Hartley, Understanding Television (London: Routledge, 1999), 141. 16 Ibid. 17 On the haptic horizon and hypersurface hypothesis, see Steven Perrella, ‘Hypersurface Theory: Architecture/Culture,’ Architectural Design [Hypersurface Architecture] 133 (1998): 11–12; in the same volume, see also Lars Spuybroek, ‘Motor Geometry,’ 50–1; on skin, see Derrick de Kerckhove, The Skin of Culture (Toronto: Somerville House, 1995); and for smooth space, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 492–3. 18 The image of a cyber-Graceland with wall-to-wall television is from Steve Beard, Digital Leatherette (Hove, UK: Codex, 1999), 51. This idea has earlier

150 Notes to Pages 94–103 versions, such as those found in the science fiction of Ray Bradbury and William Gibson. 19 The future anterior of a totally front-loaded simulation is explored by William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35; see also Winfried Pauleit, ‘Video Surveillance and Postmodern Subjects: The Effects of the Photographesomenon – An Image-Form in the Futur anterieur,’ in ctrl[space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 465–79. ‘The photographesomenon thus does not show an event; it indicates various facets of image construction. It does not show a crime either; it shows incidents departing from the norm and deviations that only appear meaningful after the event, but always already contain the crossing of a threshold’ (471). I am trying to imagine a similar account based on tactility. 20 Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 139. 21 Massumi, Parables, 84. 22 Massumi repeatedly refers to ‘media transmissions’ in Parables, 42–3. 6. Umberto Eco and Guerrilla Decoding  1 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 65.  2 Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 51–3.  3 Scott Simpkins, Literary Semiotics: A Critical Approach (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2001), 80.  4 John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 78.  5 I do not intend to take up Eco’s theory of sign production that constitutes the second half of A Theory of Semiotics. However, suffice it to say that it commences with a study of the types of labour presupposed in the processes that shape expression in correlation with content. Eco appeals to Peirce in order to solve the recurring problem of reference arising from mentioning and treats perceived objects as semiotic entities constituted as such on the basis of ‘previous semiotic processes.’ But this appeal also necessitates a critique of iconism because of the naive assumptions governing the so-called similitude of iconic signs and their objects. Eco’s typology of modes of sign production takes into account four parameters: physical labour (acts of recognition, ostention, replication, and invention);

Notes to Pages 103–11 151 type – token distinctions at work in each act; the expression continuum, which is shaped (according to motivated or arbitrarily selected materials); and modes of articulation (coded, over-coded, or under-coded combinatorial units).  6 Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 150n27.  7 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 31.  8 Dick Hebdige, ‘The Meaning of Mod,’ in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. S. Hall and Tony Jefferson (New York: Holmes and Meiers, 1976), 93.  9 Sonia K. Katyal, ‘Semiotic Disobedience,’ Washington University Law Review 84, no. 2 (2006): 493–9. 10 Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 57. 11 Ibid., 139. 12 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 214. 13 Eco, Open Work, 65. 14 Fiske, Television Culture, 66. 15 Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 162. 16 John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 167. 17 Hall, ‘Encoding and Decoding,’ 135. 18 Fiske, Television Culture, 65. 19 Ibid., 80. 20 John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2. 21 Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 104. 22 Ien Ang, Watching Dallas (London: Methuen, 1985). 23 Henry Jenkins, ‘Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching,’ in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 171–202. 24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 26. Desire produces the real and engineers flows; it doesn’t know lack or fixity; it is a machine that cuts into a flow and is itself a flow connected to another machine. 7. From General Modelling to Metamodelling  1 Bruce H. Westley and Malcolm S. MacLean, ‘A Conceptual Model for Communications Research,’ A-V Communication Review 3, no. 1 (Winter 1955): 3.

152 Notes to Pages 111–17  2 Ibid., 10; McQuail and Windahl, Communication Models, 42.  3 See Stephan Hartmann, ‘The World as a Process,’ in Modelling and Simulation in the Social Sciences from the Philosophy of Science Point of View, ed. R. Hegselmann, Ulrich Mueller, and Klaus G. Troitzsch (Rotterdam: Kluwer, 1996), 77–100.  4 Gerbner, ‘Toward a General Model,’ 180.  5 Ibid., 196–7.  6 F. Craig Johnson and George R. Klare, ‘General Models of Communication Research: A Survey of the Development of a Decade,’ Journal of Communication 7 (1961): 13.  7 See Chris Osland, ‘Framework,’ in Scientific Visualization: Techniques and Applications, ed. K.W. Brodie et al. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1992), 15–25.  8 Mary S. Morgan, ‘Afterword: Reflections on Exemplary Narratives, Cases, and Model Organisms,’ in Science without Laws, ed. A.N.H. Creager, E. Lunbeck, and M.N. Wise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 267.  9 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 283–4. 10 Eric Francoeur and Jérome Segal, ‘From Model Kits to Interactive Computer Graphics,’ in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. S. de Chadarevian and N. Hopwood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 412. 11 I am referring to Evelyn Fox Keller’s elegant analysis in ‘Models of and Models For: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Biology,’ Philosophy of Science 67 (2000): S72–S86. She distinguishes between models as verbs (of processes of analysis, experiment design and execution) and models as nouns (as separable entities for new kinds of experiments, questions, etc.). 12 James Griesemer, ‘Three-Dimensional Models in Philosophical Perspective,’ in Models, ed. de Chadarevian and Hopwood, 437. 13 See Morgan, ‘Afterword,’ 268. 14 Griesemer, ‘Three-Dimensional Models,’ 439. 15 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Material Models as Visual Culture,’ in Models, ed. de Chadarevian and Hopwood, 448–9. 16 McQuail and Windahl, Communication Models, 11. 17 Rostislav Pazukhin, ‘A Contribution to the General Theory of Models,’ Semiotica 67, nos. 1–2 (1987): 63. 18 Ibid., 64. 19 Ibid., 78. 20 Marcel Danesi, ‘Global Semiotics: Thomas A. Sebeok Fashions an Interconnected View of Semiosis,’ in The Invention of Global Semiotics, ed. M. Danesi (Ottawa: Legas, 2001), 31.

Notes to Pages 117–23 153 21 See H. Sabelli and L. Carlson-Sabelli, ‘Sociodynamics: The Application of Process Methods to the Social Sciences,’ in Chaos and Society, ed. A. Albert (Amsterdam: IOS, 1995), 117–40. 22 For example, see Wimal Dissanayake, ‘Communication Models and Knowledge Generation, Dissemination, and Utilization Activities: A Historical Survey,’ in Knowledge Generation, Exchange, and Utilization, ed. George W. Beal, Wimal Dissanayake, and Sumiye Konoshima (Boulder: Westview, 1986), 61–75. Phaseal development here means the ability to progressively ‘refine’ models. 23 Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 209. 24 See Shane Murnion, ‘Cyberspatial Analysis: Appropriate Methods for a New Geography,’ in GeoComputation, ed. S. Openshaw and R.J. Abrahart (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 313–30. 25 See M. Dodge and R. Kitchin, ‘Exposing the “Second Text” of Maps of the Net,’ JCMC 5, no. 4 (2000). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol5/issue4/dodge_ kitchin.htm. 26 See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Plateau 1: Introduction: Rhizome,’ in Thousand Plateaus, 3ff. 27 Charles Stivale, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Guilford, 1998), 71. 28 See the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) website www.caida.org. 29 Luciana Parisi, ‘Technoecologies of Sensation,’ in Deleuze and Guattari and Ecology, ed. B. Herzogenrath (London: Palgrave, 2009), 186. 30 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 238. 31 Ibid., 79. 32 Klaus Krippendorff, ‘A Recursive Theory of Communication,’ in Communication Theory Today, ed. D. Crowley and D. Mitchell (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1994), 78–104; see also Jeanette Bopry, ‘A Semiotic Interpretation of Krippendorff ’s Recursive Model of Communication,’ in Global Signs, ed. E. Tarasti (Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute, 2008), 136–41. 33 Hartmut Winkler, ‘Processing: The Third and Neglected Media Function,’ Presentation at the conference ‘Media Theory in North America and German-Speaking Europe,’ 8–10 April 2010, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. http://homepages.uni-paderborn.de/winkler/ proc_e.pdf. 34 M. Pjatigorskij and B.A. Uspenskij, ‘The Classsification of Personality as a Semiotic Problem,’ in Soviet Semiotics, ed. Lucid, 140. 35 Ibid., 141.

154 Notes to Pages 124–31 36 Félix Guattari, ‘Intensive Redundancies and Expressive Redundancies,’ in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. R. Sheed (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984), 133. 37 Ibid., 132. 38 Félix Guattari, ‘Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire,’ in Molecular Revolution, 88–9. 39 Félix Guattari, Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilée, 1989), 27. Conclusion  1 Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, and John Fiske, ‘Model,’ in Key Concepts in Communication (London: Methuen, 1983), 140.  2 Rom Harré, ‘The Constructive Role of Models,’ in The Use of Models in the Social Sciences, ed. L. Collins (London: Tavistock, 1976), 24.  3 Ibid., 38 and 41.  4 Ibid., 28.  5 Ibid., 38.  6 Knuuttila and Merz, ‘Understanding by Modeling,’ 152.  7 Karen Barad, ‘Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,’ Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 818.  8 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 36.  9 See Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii, Semiotics of Programming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 190–1. 10 William C. Wimsatt, ‘False Models as Means to Truer Theories,’ in Neutral Models in Biology, ed. M.H. Mitecki and A. Hoffman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 28–32. 11 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 281. 12 V.V. Ivanov, ‘The Role of Semiotics in the Cybernetic Study of Man and Collective,’ in Soviet Semiotics, 36. 13 A.A. Zaliznjak, V.V. Ivanov, and N. Toporov, ‘Structural-Typological Study of Semiotic Modeling Systems,’ Soviet Semiotics, 47–58. 14 Augusto Ponzio, ‘Modelling,’ in The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, ed. Paul Cobley (London: Routledge, 2010), 270. 15 Paul Teller, ‘Twilight of the Perfect Model Model,’ Erkenntnis 55 (2001): 393–415. 16 Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, trans. Zachary L. Fraser and T. Tho (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2007), 47. 17 Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 70.

Notes to Pages 132–4 155 18 Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, trans. Chris Turner, images by Alain Willaume (London: Seagull Books, 2009). Baudrillard is for the most part concerned in this book with the implications of technological perfection for the image. It follows his thesis about communication in telephasis. He provides the following definition: ‘It is of the essence of the technical object to exhaust its possibilities and even to go quite some way beyond them’ (15). This ‘sooner or later’ throws human beings from the world of artefacts they created, technical perfection turning on its masters, with no longer any need for oppositional structuration or dialectical impetus. The logic is ‘internal,’ Baudrillard insists, yet hidden from ourselves. Although Baudrillard doesn’t mention it, I think of Google: a Promethean project of knowledge that brings about its own disappearance. Google co-founder Sergey Brin once remarked that his plans, as well as those of colleague Larry Page, for the creation of artificial intelligence through search engine research would not turn out badly, like other rogue computing projects: ‘[He] explained that the “ultimate search engine” would resemble the talking supercomputer HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Now, hopefully . . . it would never have a bug like HAL did where he killed the occupants of the spaceship.” ’ Quoted in Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 213. If we listen to Baudrillard, this looks like our future under a rapidly diversifying Google. 19 Umberto Eco, ‘Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,’ in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. W. Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 143–4. 20 This term is used by Sonia K. Katyal, after Fiske, in ‘Semiotic Disobedience,’ Washington University Law Review 84, no. 2 (2006): 489–571. 21 Ned Rossiter, ‘Processual Media Theory,’ Symploke 11, nos. 1–2 (2003): 117–18. 22 Ned Rossiter, Organized Networks (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2006), 209. 23 On viral diagrams, see Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); and on the transduction of information, see Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions (London: Continuum, 2002), 45. The distinction between transmission and transformative transduction is discussed by Gilbert Simondon, Communication et information: Cours et conférences (Chatou: Les Editions de la Transparence, 2010), 159–76; for a redrawing of the signifiersignified by transforming a state into a dynamical process in changing the uniform line of the bar into a nonlinear topology, see Niall Lucy, Beyond Semiotics: Text, Culture and Technology (London: Continuum, 2001), 63.

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Index

Aarseth, Espen J., 100 aberrant decoding, 25– 6, 57, 99, 102–3, 105, 107, 109 accidents, 14 –16, 131–2 advent, 20, 42, 72, 118, 132, 146 agency, 11, 17, 37, 41, 86, 110, 112, 128–30, 145 ambiguity, 64, 85– 6, 100, 111; ambivalence, 86 Anderson, Laurie, 20 Anderson, Myrdene, 6 Ang, Ien, 66, 109 Angus, Ian, 38–9, 43 architecture, 93, 149 Aristotle, 114 articulation, 49, 53 – 4, 60 –1; autonomous, 52; code, 86; double, 13, 124; modes of, 151; multiple, 124, 133 Ash, Robert, 32 a-signifying, 16, 22, 104, 123 –5, 128, 132, 136; asemioticity, 123 Badiou, Alain, 131, 136 Barthes, Roland, 54 – 6, 59, 109 Baudrillard, Jean, 8–12, 24, 26, 65– 6, 73, 89 –90, 97, 105, 132, 144, 155

becoming, 11, 13, 16, 81, 97, 119, 134 behaviourism, 52–3 Bell telephone, 17, 29, 31–2 Berardi, Franco Bifo, 26 Bigelow, Julian, 18, 138 Black, Max, 15, 45 Bradford, Richard, 24 Buggles, The, 94 Bühler, Karl, 67, 121–2, 135, 145 Castells, Manuel, 118 catalytic, 16, 25, 46, 96 cathode ray tube, 90 –3; Mission, 92 channel, 24 –5, 32–5, 37–8, 41–2, 46, 50, 65, 68, 77, 89, 104, 109, 111, 113 Cherry, Colin, 35, 46 –7 circuits, 26, 49, 40, 61, 77, 79 –80, 121, 131, 133; C-M-C, 49 –50; short-, 83 closed, 6, 10, 19, 50; non-producerly, 107; work, 100 Cobley, Paul, 29, 130 code, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 24, 25, 34 – 6, 41–2, 45– 6, 50 –8, 61, 65, 67–8, 76, 80, 85– 6, 91, 94, 96, 99, 101–8, 110, 151; cryptography, 44, 62,

158 Index 132; dominant-hegemonic, 57–8; globally contrary, 59 – 60; liar, 47, 120; negotiated, 58–9 Cold War, 19, 21, 43, 46, 111, 131 commodity, 50, 74, 85, 104, 107 communication before communication, 68, 72 communism, 21, 75; commune-ism, 75– 6 computing, 8, 10, 21, 44, 47, 81–2, 114, 118, 128, 155; programming, 129 Connell, Ian, 58 connotation, 54 – 6, 99, 102, 105; denotation, 54 –5, 66 Cronenberg, David, 92– 4 cultural studies, 18–23, 26, 31, 42, 48, 60, 62, 83, 104 –5 borrowing, 104 –5, 109; poaching, 104, 109 disciplines, 22–3 cybergeography, 118; Skitter, 119; weather maps, 118 cybernetics, 18–20, 32, 35, 76 cyborg, 19, 100 Danesi, Marcel, 117 Day, Ronald E., 37, 39 death, 20, 35, 80 –1, 93 – 4; author, 101; signifier, 105 Debray, Régis, 43 deception, 14, 131 Deleuze, Gilles, 16, 45, 81, 118–20, 130 De Certeau, Michel, 103 – 4 De Kerckhove, Derrick, 90 De Saussure, Ferdinand, 29, 143 diagram, 5, 6, 15, 27, 61, 108, 114 –16, 118, 121, 123, 128; diagrammatic process, 14, 16, 28, 124 –5, 129, 133 – 4; electrical, 10 dictionary and encyclopedia, 102

digital wildlife, 14 discreet girl, 36 –7, 41; telegram girl, 36, 38 Dodge, Martin, 118 drawing, 61, 116 –17, 138; cave, 103; re-, 5, 47, 121, 155 Eco, Umberto, 25– 6, 32, 67, 86, 89, 98, 123, 132, 133, 150 –1 Edison, Thomas, 41 emotive elements (language), 64, 66 –7 Enzenberger, Hans M., 76 –8 ethno-semiotics, 106 –10 excess, 14, 25, 108 Fiske, John, 23, 25– 6, 84, 102–3, 106 –9, 132, 148 Flusser, Vilem, 35, 73 functions of language, 23 – 4, 64, 78, 84 conative, 66, 67, 145 dysfunctions, 14, 24 –5, 88, 131 phatic, 24 –5, 65–8, 85–9, 96, 132, 144; Dorothy Parker, 68, 88; I like Ike, 69 –70; tele-, 94, 132, 155 poetic, 23 –5, 31, 33, 63, 73, 88, 100, 132 referential, 23 – 4, 64 –7, 70, 72, 132 Gerbner, George, 27, 31, 97, 112–15, 123 Google, 155 graffiti, 87 graphic notation, 57 Grossberg, Lawrence, 60 Guattari, Félix, 11, 13 –14, 16, 27–8, 39, 45, 72, 81–2, 97, 103, 123 –5 guerrilla decoding, 25– 6, 98, 103 – 4, 106, 108–10, 133

Index 159 Hall, Stuart, 21–3, 26, 32, 48, 63, 71, 103, 106 –8, 131–2, 133, 142 haptic, 41, 93 – 4, 149 Haraway, Donna, 19 Harré, Rom, 126 –8 Hartley, John, 84, 92 Hebdige, Dick, 104 hegemony, 26, 60 Hoggart, Richard, 22, 92 Holloway, David, 20 horror, 24, 92, 94, 96, 132 icons, 6, 11, 14, 16, 23, 53 inessential, 12–13, 47, 79, 134 Inglis, Fred, 19 Ivanov, V.V., 129 Jakobson, Roman, 23 –5, 33, 63 –72, 73, 84 –9, 132, 135, 144, 145– 6 Jaulin, Robert, 80 Johnson, Craig F. (and George R. Klare), 114, 117 Kittler, Friedrich, 20 Krippendorff, Klaus, 121 Kristeva, Julia, 69, 145– 6, 148 Kroker, Arthur, 76 lab work, 4, 115 Lasswell, Harold D., 27, 31 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 114, 129, 131, 136 linearity, 14, 49 –50, 61, 63 linguistics, 3 – 4, 33, 54, 63 – 4, 68, 71, 85, 119, 124 logarithm, 35 Lotman, Juri, 15 Malinowski, Bronislav, 67, 86, 144 Maras, Steven, 42–3, 142

Marx, Karl, 48–51, 73 – 6, 83, 85, 105, 142; Marxist/ian/ism, 22, 23, 29, 74, 77, 83 – 4, 105, 143 mass communication(s), 3, 6, 21, 22, 49, 53, 61, 108, 116 Massumi, Brian, 25, 46, 72, 97, 150 matching, 34; and making, 39 – 40, 42; anti-environment, 40 mathematics, 3, 5, 7, 44, 46, 130 –1 Mattelart, Armand, and Michèle, 17 McCarthy, Anna, 95 McCarthy, Joseph, 112 McLuhan, Marshall, 29, 49, 61, 73 –8, 90 –3, 95; Eric, 39 – 40 McLuhanism, 44; McLuhanite, 82; Watson, Wilfrid, 40 McQuail, Denis (and Sven Windahl), 6, 21, 47, 116 Merrell, Floyd, 6 message, 13, 16, 20, 23, 25– 6, 29 –39, 41–3, 45–7, 49 –54, 56 – 60, 64 –73, 77–9, 82, 84 – 6, 89 –91, 94, 99, 102–5, 107, 109, 111, 120, 125, 132 Minitel, 73, 86 modelling: ABX, 111 auto-, 27, 125 borrowing, 7, 27 bottomless, 49 components, 3, 6, 12–13, 15, 18, 45, 49, 52, 65, 110, 117, 119 –21 general, 27, 111 heuristic, 5, 6, 15, 111, 116 –17 homeomorph, 127–8 mediating, 10 –15 metamodelling, 27–8, 37, 110, 125 models, of, for, to, 6, 115, 133, 152; founding reference, 17 organon, 67, 121, 145

160 Index paramorph, 127–8 perfect model, 130 poles, 12–13, 33, 38–9, 85, 97, 134; frozen, 78; multiplying, 86 précis, 7 reign of, 9 scrambling, 115, 120, 133 Moravec, Hans, 14 Morgan, Mary S., 9 –10, 12 Morrison, Margaret C., 9 –10, 12, 18 MSN, 89 naturalness, 54, 56, 59, 108, 117, 128 negentropy, 35, 140 Newman, Theodore, 111 noise, 14, 30, 33 –5, 37–8, 41–2, 46 –7, 105, 131 non-communication, 65, 73, 78–9 non-meaning, 123 – 4 objects, 5– 6, 14, 66, 96, 116, 117, 121–2, 125, 128, 129; anomalous, 16; recoding of, 104; serial, 78–9; system of, 78–9; technical, 14; theoretical, 111; transduced, 96; vicarious, 117 opening, 4, 6, 16, 23, 24 – 6, 47, 55– 6, 57, 77, 79, 97, 118–19, 121, 133, 143; work, 98–106 ORTF, 77 Parisi, Luciana, 119 paronomasia, 24, 64, 69 –72 passage, 16, 25, 43, 85, 97, 120, 125, 132 passivity, 90 –1, 106, 110, 133; matching, 42; transversality, 4 Pazukhin, Roscislav, 3 – 4, 116, 117 Peirce, C.S., 6, 29, 53, 54, 101, 123, 135, 150

physics, 3, 4, 9, 27, 112; meta-, 105 Pjatigorskij, M., 123 Plant, Sadie, 91 Poe, Edgar Allan, 63, 71 Poster, Mark, 73 pre-ference, 26, 55– 6, 69, 106 –7 Radio Alice, 77 reciprocity, 57, 74, 82–5; givingreceiving-returning, 79 –80 representation, 6 –11, 13 –16, 34, 38, 53, 55, 67, 72, 91, 97, 112, 114 –15, 121, 124, 126 –30, 131–3 flotation, 11 post-, 16 –17, 27, 130 –1, 134 reference, 4, 6, 8–9, 10, 23, 28, 46, 64, 70, 121–2, 150; auto-, 123; worlds of, 15, 125 referentiality, 6, 12, 23 – 4, 70, 72 rhizome, 81, 115, 118–20 Ricoeur, Paul, 64 Riley, John W., and Mathilda White, 21 Rockefeller Foundation, 17, 44 Rossiter, Ned, 134 Sampson, Tony, 14, 47, 115, 120 –1, 133 Sapir, Edward, 42 scanning finger, 90, 93 Schramm, Wilbur, 27, 43 Sebeok, Thomas A., 117, 130, 135 semiotic disobedience, 104, 133 Serres, Michel, 131 Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver, 3, 14, 17, 17, 29, 115, 116, 135; Weaver and Shannon, 17, 18, 37–8, 62–3, 122–3 signals (and signaletics), 29, 34, 45, 97, 123 – 4

Index 161 sign-particle, 13 –14, 16, 24 –5 sign-vehicle, 43, 101 simulation, 4, 7, 9 –10, 12, 66, 89, 128, 132, 144; as model, 73, 85; DNA, 9; hyperreal, 8; immersive, 91; simveillance, 94, 150 Smythe, Dallas, 29, 43, 76 social scene (of decoding), 31, 36, 40 Soviet semiotics, 123, 130 Spinks, C.W., 6 Stanosz, Barbara, 4 telecommunications, 42, 44, 132 telegraphy, 17–18, 23, 31, 33 –5, 38– 42, 44 –5, 140 (see discreet girl); boy culture, 41; love, 140; marriages, 46; Morse, 33 – 4, 37, 41–2, 45; telegram, 17, 39 television, 3, 21, 26, 33, 44, 45, 48, 50 –3, 56 –8, 60, 77, 82, 84, 88–93, 95, 104, 106 –7, 109, 112, 133; pap, 92; semiotics, 148; transductive, 96 –7 Teller, Paul, 130 Theall, Don, 91 Thompson, E.P., 19 –20, 138 transduction, 14, 25, 41, 46, 96 –7, 120, 132, 155 transmission, 3, 14, 15, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 37, 42–3, 46 –7, 61–2, 78–9, 86, 96 –7, 102, 119, 120 –2, 123 – 4, 131–3 engineering, 3, 18, 26, 32–7, 58, 114 transformation, 27, 43, 46, 96, 97, 122, 131, 134; active, 56; discursive form, 52; dream work, 45; system, 76

transportation, 27, 37–8, 40, 43, 96, 131 transversality, 4, 23, 83 trust, 120, 125, 128–30, 133; mistrust, 132; untrustworthy, 47 truth, 10, 67, 76, 77, 113, 130 false, 22, 54, 61, 69, 83, 131; model 129 –30 validity, 7 Tubes, The, 94 Tudor, David, 120 Turing, Alan, 20 twin towers, 80 –1 UNESCO, 44, 52 Uspenskij, B.A., 123 Verbinski, Gore, 94 Virilio, Paul, 14, 16, 20 virus, 14, 16, 120, 155 vocoder, 20, 37 Volosinov, V.N., 54, 56, 143 Von Uexküll, Jakub, 130 Watson, Janell, 28 Weaver, Warren, 18, 21, 33 – 6, 45–7, 112, 114 Western Union, 36, 39 Westley, Bruce, 111–12 Wiener, Norbert, 18–19, 31–2 Wilden, Anthony, 18 Williams, Raymond, 19 –20 Winkler, Hartmut, 121–2 YouTube, 80 Zaliznjak, A.A. 129