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Brainwash.

ChapterBeyond transmission modesnd mediaennifer aryl Slack

This is not the first time communication has had to rethink itself to remainvital. Faced with the inability to substantiate media effects, Bernard Berelson,one of the found ing fathers of communication, observed in 1959 that thefield was withering away (Berelson, 1959, p. 1) and all the interesting peo-ple had either died or left the field for other disciplines. His epitaph includesan odd feature: after proclaiming that the field has worn out after 25 yearsof great ideas (p. 6), he offers seven curren t lines of which some maydevelop into the major focuses of the years ahead p. 5).1 Berelson's lamentreveals a longing for a time when big questions and great ideas were agreedupon; a resist nce to new directions and questions, for they are not commu-nication; and an astute recognition that the field must change.

Berelson's lament is instructive, for the field of communication, whichclearly did not wither away, is once again experiencing a loss of agreed uponbig questions, resistance to move in directions that do not look like commu-nication, and recognition of the need to do so. Not the first time, and notthe last time. To remain vital the field of communication must be willing torespond to changing conditions of existence with theoretical tools that bothrespond to and constitute communication in new ways, with new ways ofconceiving its object(s) of analysis. Put quite simply, in spite of material andintellectual exigencies that compel us to rethink communication, and abun-dant evidence that the concept of communication is far from settled see,e.g., Shepherd eta ., 2006), the field struggles wit h its loyalty to what it hasaccepted as the big questions and great ideas, which I shorthand here astransmission, modes, and media.Setting aside my belief that it has probab ly always been so, we clearly are

living through an extraordinary moment.2 This is not t claim, as many c u ~ -rently do, that we are in the midst of a technological revolution that ISc h n g i n ~ everything. Rather my contention is that ':hat makes the t i ~ ~extraordmary are major transformations -made possible by both ma_tenaa nd intellectual conditions of contemporary life -occurring in the articula-tion of structures, practices, materia ls, affects, and enunciation._ These trans-formations enable reimagining who and what we are and g ~ t become,and what communication might mean. This reimagining, which IS apparent

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ChapterBeyond transmission modesand mediajennifer aryl Slack

This is not the first time communication has had to rethink itself to remainvital. Faced with the inability to substantiate media effects, Bernard Berelson,one of the founding fathers of communication, observed in 1959 that thefield was withering away (Berelson, 1959, p. 1) and all the interesting people had either died or left the field for other disciplines. His epitaph includesan odd feature: after proclaiming that the field has worn out after 25 yearsof great ideas (p. 6), he offers seven current lines of which some maydevelop into the major focuses of the years ahead (p. 5).1 Berelson's lament


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Beyond transmission modes and media 45

It is interesting to note that Carey's remark appears in the article that contains his quintessential critique of transmission and his proposition that wethink in terms of communication as ritual. A Cultural Approach toCommunication" is among the most cited articles in the history of communication research: the article we cite to demonstrate our allegiance to havingleft transmission behind. Yet, for all the ritual( ) disavowals of transmission,we are still deeply committed to it. Lasswell's (1948) "Who says what inwhich channel to whom with what effect" and Shannon and Weaver's(1949) cybernetic model adapted by Schramm (1954) and others as sender,message, channel, transmission, and receiver - even with the complicatingfactors of encoding, decoding, feedback, and an elaborated context - arealive and well in our understanding of communication.

This commitment is surprisingly apparent in the research tradition I callthe "modes of communication." Modes, an approach that we might sayextends back to Plato and which to some degree includes Carey himself, distinguishes between three eras (or modes) of communication: orality, literacy(subdivided into script and print), and the electronic. At least that is how thethree eras were characterized pre-digital, when the theory drew heavily onthe work of Harold Adams Innis (1951, 1972), Walter Ong (1967, 1982),Eric Havelock (1982), and Marshall McLuhan (1967). A crisis of sorts was


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146 Jennifer Daryl Slackhave been used to characterize orality, literacy, and the electronic do notseem sufficient to comprehend the digital. As Gregory Seigworth has suggested, it may well be that the digital as code was there all along: justunnoticed beneath the conceptual/disciplinary blare of traditional and newmedia studies. This suggests that code is constitutive and not merely symbolic or representational in the way that the electronic mode got taken upand taught (Seigworth, 2011). Yet there is good reason not to abandon allthat we have learned. We ought to be cautioned by Lawrence Grossberg'sreminder that the most difficult task (in conjunctural analysis) is to determine What is new? What is old? What is rearticulated? (Grossberg, 2010,p. 60). Communication scholars might be advised to think in terms of rearticulating our vast knowledge of the field given emerging conditions of existence. Modes, while not irrelevant, no longer serves as the generativeorganizing principle it once was.Modes has become, in a sense, the backbone of communication studies.It drew our attention away from the effects of the message so prominentin transmission and argued instead that a whole way of life is what matters:conceptions of time and space; how relations of power and authority areorganized; the role of memory; the relationship between the acoustic andthe visual, what is valued and what is not; and so on. These have essentially


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symbolic forms (p. 25) bequeaths a concept of culture as representation,and by extension, as produced by the technologies we understand to encodemeaning. The weight of word, image, and text weigh heavily on us. Whenthe modes approach was developed these technologies were understood tobe media: technologies that mediate messages between senders and recei-vers, the legacy from transmission.4 This understanding is rendered unac-ceptable in light of the work of the digital, the biotechnological, and newconceptions of heterogenous species. The new technologies and new waysof conceptualizing heterogenous relationships not only involve the produc-tion of meaning, but they also entail much richer material practices andconcepts of coding and protocol. We are not only talking anymore abouttransmitting meaning using codes. We are also talking about coding andconceiving of life, matter, and communication. These conditions are, or atleast they can be for us, the game changers. If our goal as scholars of com-munication and technology is to understand culture and technology andview these through the lens of something we call communication, we mustlook beyond the special category of media and break away from the disci-plinary straightjacket of modes.


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148 Jennifer aryl Slackalmost disappears altogether, and is supplanted by a networked or distributed body dispersed and shaped by technical, legal, political, social, and cultural practices, codes, and protocols. Protocol, as Alexander Galloway(2004) explains, is a diagram that enables things to happen and involvescodes. t is most obviously a control mechanism, but it is also a management style, a technique for managing the contingent environment and alanguage that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, nd connects life-forms p. 74). Protocols involve codes, which as Eugene Thackerexplains, are a set of procedures, actions, and practices, designed in particular ways to achieve particular ends in particular contexts (Thacker,2004b, p. xii).The body in biotechnological practice is such a diagram: parsed, coded,engineered, bought, sold, and administered within a shifting contingentenvironment where codes and protocols constitute, govern, and administerbodies as sets of procedures, actions, practices, and enunciations. An earlylegal case that made this dramatically clear was Moore v Regents of theUniversity of California in the 1980s which determined that Moore did notown the cells that were removed from his body by his doctors (see Bowen,2005). The case threw into relief the question: what is a body? And it turnsout that the body boundaries we once thought sacred, what Andy Clark


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myriad articulations of practices, forces, relations, affects, and enunciationswithin which bodies can be constituted as molar and which in turn aregoverned by molar structures. Molecular lines also serve to disarticulateand rend asunder constituted molarities.

Thacker's approach to biotechnology asserts that the biotechnologicalbody has become, in fact, the relevant medium. With the term biomediahe resists the delineation of the body and technology as molarities in relationship. Instead, he argues, the body, as biomedia, can be thought of as afabric of biology, concept, and technology (as in tools) tightly interwoveninto a situation, an instance, a 'corporealization. ' He explains that

[t]he body in biomedia is thus always understood in two ways- as abiological body, a biomolecular body, a species body, and patient body,and as a body that is compiled through modes of visualization,modeling, data extractions, and in silic simulation.(Thacker, 2004a, p 13)

It is always a body in process of becoming a particular body, always capableof being rent asunder. In the contemporary conditions of existence, theontology of life has become especially open to interrogation and challenge


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bodies as the physical organization of matter, as much about the symbolicas the machinic. All these interdependent weavings entail articulating life,matter, affect, and enunciation. What, given the enormity of such coconstitutive relationships, justifies limiting our study to a few technologieswe have designated as the media of communication other than affectivehabit and theoretical, disciplinary, and institutional inertia?6

ompanion speciesI want to take this idea of the distributed, networked, or cyborg body one stepfurther by emphasizing, as inspired by Donna Haraway's The ompanionSpecies Manifesto (2003), that the co-constitutive relationships or mergingsare not just about us (even as cyborgs), not just about individual bodies as distributed, but about relationships among a variety of mergings: the mergingand emerging of organisms, the merging and emerging of the organic and inorganic or technological, and the merging and emerging of the corporeal andthe incorporeal.

Haraway organizes her manifesto around an explication of the coconstitutive relationship between humans and dogs in part because dogs arenot about oneself p. 11). She uses the dog/human relationship- companion


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52 Jennifer Daryl Slackincorporeal and the corporeal. The partners come to be who they are in signas well as flesh. History, myth, and the textual play a particularly importantrole in Haraway's accounting of the companion species. In living with animals, we inhabit their/our stories, we cohabit an active history. That is thework of companion species p. 20).Haraway artfully weaves the story of dogs in relation to the human andnon-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom andstructure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject,diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture p. 4). Her project exemplifies a commitment to understanding whatought to be the concern of communication: the process whereby heterogenous elements are woven together with consequences for what is and whatis possible, for what is not and what is not possible.

Communication the machinic assemblage andthe collective assemblage of enunciationWe need a more helpful concept of communication to capture the richnessof what is being mapped here and to provide guidance for those following in


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things being the way things are that makes sense in a given situation. Incautioning us not to understand this too personologically, Seigworth (20 11)suggests we see it as the affective sensibility that attends to the matter-offactness of an existence ... arising in the midst of complex relations betweendiverse entities and flows. These states could easily include matters identified in the modes approach as the variables consistent with different eras.So, for example, the states of things could include the nature and feel oftime, space, speed, mobility, authority, expertize, memory, ambient awareness, and so on. The relevant states of things would be determined as onelooks anew at any particular assemblage, rather than being predeterminedby the variables that modes has already supplied. o states of things mightalso include the nature and feel of the body, the treatment of nonhuman animals or genetic materials, the state of molecular enhancement of bodies withbiotechnology, and so on.Second, assemblage entails little statements, a style or way of talking, astyle of enunciation. This dimension suggests that an assemblage is characterized by the ability to say or think certain kinds of things in certain ways,make certain kinds of statements, and precludes the possibility of saying orthinking other kinds of things, making other kinds of statements. For example, we might consider the appropriate style for talking about something


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ISS Jennifer Daryl SlackShapiro, Lawrence. (2011). Embodied Cognition. New York: Routledge.Shepherd, Gregory J., Jeffrey St. John and Ted Striphas. (2006). Communication s

Perspectives on Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Skloot, Rebecca. (2010). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: CrownPublishers.Sotirin, Patty. (2003 . Suckling Up to the BwO. Pp. 59 74 In Animations [ofDeleuze and Guattari] edited by Jennifer Daryl Slack. New York: Peter Lang.Sterne, Jonathan. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of SoundReproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Striphas, Ted. (2009). The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture FromConsumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press.Thacker, Eugene. (2004a). Biomedia. Minneapolis, MN: University of MinnesotaPress.Thacker, Eugene. (2004b). Foreword; Protocol Is as Protocol Does. Pp. xi-xxiiIn Protocol: ow Control Exists After Decentralization by AlexanderR. Galloway. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Thacker, Eugene. (2010). After Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Weinberger, David. (2007). Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the NewDigital Disorder. New York: Times Books.Wise, J. Macgregor. (1997). Exploring Technology and Social Space. ThousandOaks, CA: Sage.Wise, J. Macgregor. (2005). Assemblage. Pp. 77 87 In Gilles Deleuze: KeyConcepts edited by Charles J. Stivale. Chesham, UK: Acumen Publishing.

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