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THE DRAMA OF SOCIAL LIFE
Essays in CRITICAL DRAMATURGY
CHAPTER THREE
THE STRUCTURE OF DEMOCRATIC COMMUNICATIONS
INTRODUCTION It is trite to say that the media in the last part
of the 2oth Century have failed the democratic
project. Yet in these times, the electronic media; the print
media; as well as the person.al media are oriented to projects
other than the informationally rich and interactionally rich
environment so necessary to authentically democratic engagement.
If symbolic interactional theory helps us understand anything, it helps us know that an undistorted structure of communications is essential to a well constructed social life world. Here social psychology and the public media intersect. Here we can learn how an adequate media industry can help fashion an adequate public sphere...and thus advance the human project.
Of the 25,000 or so media outlets in the U.S.A.; book publishers, newspapers, television stations, radio stations, motion picture companies or billboard companies, most are part of 26 media conglomerates...themselves often part of larger conglomerates. Almost all are for-profit enterprises...and thus must work and print within the logics of capitalism.
It is not a conspiracy that such media push an elitist politics with elitist policies. The men and women who run the media accept and benefit from the sanitized politics with which we are burdened. In the short run...their lifetime at least...such undemocratic politics pay off handsomely.
That others than newspeople or politicians bear the costs of distorted politics; that the poor absorb the price of tax policy; of housing policy; of health care policy; of debt policy; of educational policy...that others pay the price of elitist politics is of small concern to those for whom the system works well and is made to work so well by media people.
But there is another way for the media to work...for those who manage the media to act. The media could be reorganized to create a public sphere; the media could be oriented to develop public opinion rather that mass, alienated, uninformed opinion. The media could help realize the human project instead of parasitizing upon it.
Communication, Culture and Alienation It must be said at the beginning that the central premise made here is that all sources of human alienation reside in concretely existing social relations. A solution to human alienation requires radical transformations of those social relations. This view stands against more ancient and more accepted Buddhist and Christian understandings that alienation is inevitable, or that it involves a separation from God.
The Hegelian view that alienation arises from a failure to know fully the nature and richness of objectively social and physical reality is, as Marx noted, part of but not all of a theory of alienation...a fully human and humane theory of alienation postulates the necessity of an active human participation in the creation of social reality. In more focussed terms, the solution to human alienation requires both understanding and undertaking. The point is not to study the social world in various ways but to change it...and that requires a special kind of communication where symbolic worlds are concerned.
The conditions which make social psychology possible in a society...or impossible...is most relevant to the forms and degree of alienation. In societies where mind, self and society cannot be trineborn; in societies where the self fulfilling prophecy is engineered unilaterally by hirelings; in societies where there are no significant others, only impersonal functionaries; in a world where symbols are turned inside out to make the tyrant a freedom fighter and the freedom fighter, an enemy...in such a society, the basic conditions for social psychology are lacking.
A second grounding premise is that social life worlds exist as a result of human activity. The human activity central to the constitution of social life is shared, intentional, constrained, patterned symbolic interaction. Any social form which excludes people, in part or in whole, from shared participation in that symbolic activity which generates social life thereby alienates people to the same degree from the human process.
Essential to active participation in the construction of social reality are the media with which a symbolic universe might be shared. Only in the last century have the media been so alienated from the social process. There is nothing in nature which requires that radio, television, cinema, theatre or other electronic media be designed and deployed to exclude people from politics, religion, market or university...it is the control needs of capitalist and bureaucrat which dictates the shape of the media; the content of the media; the access to media.
Constructing Reality In all human history, there are four major
language systems which are used to create
social relations including family relations, work relations,
communal relations, political and religious relations. These four
include the voice; the body and its positions; cosmetics and
clothing; as well as complex runs of behavior. These four language
systems are the media which people in history have developed to
define/call forth religious occasions, work relations, state
institutions, as well as whole networks of health, play and
schooling relations.
There are eight or so variables one can control in those sounded plosives we call voice which give us an amazingly wide range of sounds with which we can create the most subtle and complex forms of social life. Frequency, volume, meter, timbre, tone, pace, slope, and timing all provide a multi-trillion information bit inventory which we could, in an unalienated situation, use to create the most wondrous varieties of play, art, science, song, therapy or love.
In conjunction with the languages of face, hands and posture we can say things never before said; if and only if we have the opportunity to participate in symbolic activity. Those structures of media which dimension and limit language dimension and limit the human project. With our body talk, we can say clearly whose turn it is to speak or who is excluded from the symbolic process--all can be signaled by a turn of the head, a wave of the hand or a curl of the lip.
And there is so much that may be said with cosmetics and clothing; what we are doing, who we are, how we feel; whether this is a funeral or a formal dinner, a rehearsal or that which is seriously meant. In New Guinea, tattoos are the gateway between body and the spirit world. Body decorations constitute a third medium with which the solid reality of social occasions can be fashioned. We dress, put on make-up, wear flowers, and apply perfume in order to tell another person that they are special to our lives.
One should not forget that a complex series of activities enacted by an individual or a group can be read out just as a book or a song can be interpreted. The dance is one such line of physical activity with which meaning is constituted and can come to be shared. Ballet and mime can tell engrossing stories about sexual need, gender relations, political conflict or religious agony. Societies around the world use dance to call forth their gods; to enter the realm of the Psychiatrists learn to read the cycles of neurotic behavior that tell of the sources of human anguish besetting us.
In interactionally rich social occasions, these media can be used to create social self, social status, social institutions and whole societies. In interactionally barren situations people are struck dumb, are bored and are boring. . . . They lose whatever potential they have to be or become human. They act as dispirited objects; characters out of the novels of Ionesco, Kafka, Kesey or Camus, out of the paintings of Daumier or Tooker, out of the music of the Clash or the Sex Pistols.
For such persons, the assumptions of a stringent physical or psychological determinism may obtain. On the other hand, when people have a secure and democratic relationship to the means to produce meaning, to produce knowledge and wisdom, to produce joy and delight, they are able to act in ways not possible in the simple models of cause and effect, prediction and probability, necessity and need which are said to model the lives of animals.
While it possible to still the voice, to restrict body decorations, to tame the body or to limit the kinds of behavior in which people engage, nevertheless it is not easy to alienate people from their own symbol systems. It is much easier to alienate people from mechanical or electronic media.
In modern times, new media have been developed which may complement or which may supplant those media over which one has personal control. Voice, clothing, body, and behavior can be eliminated as language media. With the advent of movable type, electronic technology, photography and cinema, laser and micro- processor technology, it is possible to so organize media as to still the human voice. Radios can be built to permit only a one way flow of information. Access to television can give the capitalist and the state functionary control over the symbolic process. Alienation from the means to produce human culture is now possible in ways never before imagined.
Clothing and cosmetics can be eliminated as symbolic systems. Students, workers, soldiers, and prisoners can be made to wear uniforms which effectively limit the information potential of costume. The body can be disciplined in the class room or in the office to say nothing; to mean nothing. Soldiers are made to stand at attention thus muting their body language.
The cycles of behavior through which one lives out one's hopes and/or anxieties can be lost in the impersonality of work and religion. Routines and lockstep in the factory and office can destroy the creativity and intimacy of behavioral sequences. In mass society, the very tools of thought and talk can be alienated from the bodies of men and women.
The most important point I want to make in this section is that language systems can be organized to create a rich information and interactional field within which the uniquely human labor of reality constitution may transpire or the media may be organized to exclude, restrict or to produce patterned activity in non-human modalities.
It is a subversion of the language to call these
preprogrammed, mindless, thoughtless behavior forms
social or human behavior...they are neither.
Whether such activity is, in fact, human activity...or whether human activity is merely economic/political activity stripped of its human character is an empirical question. Not all patterned activity of Homo sapiens is human--not at all.
The way in which information systems are organized determines whether distinctly social life worlds emerge. For that to happen, personal and shared control of the medium is necessary whether it is a single piece of clothing or an entire television network. Only through democratically organized media is human life in its fullest potential possible.
In this historical epoch, the solution to alienation centers around the question of who controls the computer, the camera, the receiver or the microphone, in a word, the knowledge process. In other times control of land, of capital, of the work process, of the ballot and of the surplus value produced was centrally important to an understanding of alienation on human terms.
In the past, alienation centered around exploitation--the alienation of property, wealth and material resources from those who produce them. Even in the worst of times voice, body and clothing were individually owned and individually used. The same cannot be said of the media in mass and class-bound society. For much of the world exploitation in economic relations continues to be the central source of alienation; of poverty, despair, powerless rage and loss of hope.
But more is needed than material wealth to end alienation. That lesson is clear in the rich, capitalist countries and is beginning to be clearly established in the developing socialist countries. Material resources are the beginning but not the end of a solution to human alienation.
Some could gaze and not be sick But I could never learn the trick.There's this to say for guile and guise They often bring their own surprise.It often takes a little while for one to learn of guise and guileand when one learns, it's sad to say the tricksters often get their way....adapted from Housman
INTERACTIONALLY DISTORTED COMMUNICATION In advanced capitalist
societies, there are
five major power relationships which systematically distort
communication. The private/non-collective control over the new
media tends to reinforce these structures of domination.
While the distortions of the knowledge process vary from society to society and take special forms in military dictatorships or in bureaucratically organized socialist nations, in general, the major sources of distorted communications include class privilege, gender preference, racial discrimination, age grade exclusion, and a division of labor which awards authority to a relatively few and mandates compliance to a large majority.
In the classroom, everything from textbooks to intelligence tests are written from a white, male, middle class point of view. The histories of women, of minorities, of workers, peasants and rebels are lost to the knowledge process.
Class and Interaction In class organized societies it is entirely possible for a few thousand people to own the electronic and mechanical means to produce meaning. In the U.S.A., in Australia, Britain, France, Germany and other capitalist countries, the trend is toward concentration of ownership of newspapers, television stations, radio, and computer based information systems. These systems are organized for the mass diffusion of messages on behalf of corporate elites or state elites rather than for democratic communication.
In the U.S. media, socialist failures are magnified by privately owned media and socialist successes are passed over. At the same time, capitalist successes are proclaimed in the news, in the classroom and in the cinema. The failings of the capitalist systems are attributed to individual failings, racial inferiorities or to greedy workers, lazy welfare mothers and to the odd psychopath. Anyone who listens to William Buckley will despair at the distortion of the knowledge process in politics and economics.
Apart from a few university lectures which enrich the knowledge process; a few magazines and journals which repair the damage to human understanding; a few movies and plays which enlarge our views of what is possible, there are few media which give a fair and balanced analysis of differing social life worlds.
The mass format of electronic and print media is not only
interactively distorted but is also informationally poor.
A democratic communications system must be both
interactively rich and information rich.
Over half the nations in the world use torture, terror, and murder to still political dissent. Eight countries in Latin America use murder squads. The U.S.A. is party to the attempt to distort political communication in that part of the 3rd world from which its corporations get profits, raw materials and cheap labor.
The call by the Unaligned Nations for a new international information order is justified by the increasing political and economic inequality between nations in the Northern hemisphere and those in the Southern. The response on the part of the 20 rich capitalist countries to this plea for more egalitarian access to the electronic spectrum falls on deaf ears; The U.S. and other countries insist, in the name of Freedom of Information, on the right to shape the cultural process in 3rd world countries on behalf of the structure of International Capital.
In the factory, store, shop and office, the structure of class relations systematically distorts communication. Workers, having sold their labor power to the employer, also sell their voice. What may be said, to whom one may talk, in what kind of words one may express thoughts, and how often one may speak--all these are part of the package sold to the employer when one takes wages and salary.
Montgomery Ward's forbids its employees from talking to each other about personal life; McDonald's insists that its counter people say exactly the same thing to every customer in every city. All corporations forbid their employees from warning the public about the criminal activity in which the corporation is involved. Employees must learn to speak in the disjointed, impersonal language of business, science or mathematics. Class relations suborn both personal and mass media to the task of producing and concentrating wealth.
Gender Politics and Interaction Gender relations also distort
communication possibilities.
When men talk, people listen; when women talk, people don't listen.
In politics, in church, in academia, in family and at work, what
women say and do are not valued as much as what men say and do.
Apart from the substantive content of the message; apart from its
merit or its cogency, what women as a category, say carries less
weight than what men say.
The structure of gender preference gives males access to offices from which they can speak and are able to enforce their directives. The exclusion of women from strategic positions in society excludes them from the symbolic interactional process by which policies affecting their bodies, their children, their jobs and their health are created.
When women do work for wages, their status in the family knowledge constitutive process improves and their control over the meaning process is better but still not equitable. The data of gender discrimination in professional occupations, in science, art, music, math, and politics clearly say that women do not have full access to the vocal, print, or electronic symbol systems used in most societies to create social reality.
In the family, the politics of marriage all too often produce women who are diminished by the decision making process. The male makes unilateral decisions which affect the family and the woman is to accept such decisions passively. In contemporary society, women become very uncomfortable with such politics; try to circumvent them; absorb this pathology in their body and spirit...or, all else failing...seek divorce only to go to another relationship in which such alienated politics are reproduced.
Racism and Interaction
RACISM invalidates most of the assumptions of Symbolic Interactional theoy. The severity of racist oppression and racist exclusion and distortions in access, use and response to symbolic activity of Black, of Chicano or of age-grade categories is great and continues in even the most liberal capitalist societies. From the earliest days of the nation, brutal and systematic efforts to exclude Blacks from political, religious, academic participation and to exploit Blacks in economic life are well documented.
The exclusion of minorities from school, church, public office and social space is but a device to render them voiceless in a racist world. The shooting, lynching, bombing, beating and burning of minorities in South Africa, in Palestine, In Uganda or in Guatemala all work to still the voices of protest and social policy.
The struggle of Black people to recapture their own institutions and their own cultural processes in America are well known. Central to this struggle is the effort to find a voice which speaks clearly and is heard with careful and authentic respect. The Black Muslims, the Black Panthers, SNCC, the Southern Leadership Conference and the many efforts of Martin Luther King to give voice to outrage and give voice to social justice for our brothers and sisters who ancestors were born in Africa...that effort is well known. But today, there the voice of emanicapatory and affirmative action is seldom heard in the land.
The same distortion of communication is to be found among age- grades. Such distorted patterns of communication are treated as normative; the unilateral origins of symbols, the one-sided compliance in linguistic activity, the variation in authority all are treated as normal and functional to the social process. That democratic forms of communication could be used with young people or with 'the elderly' is seldom a topic of political discussion.
Women, Blacks, workers and Senior Citizens in the United States have all assembled some moral, economic and legal power with which to retain and recapture control over the communication process, the knowledge process and the political process but their successes must not be overestimated. However, since the advent of the accumulation crisis in the U. S., the Reagan administration has worked assiduously to subvert civil and economic gains made in earlier gender, class, and racial struggles.
Bureaucracy and Interaction The rules of the bureaucracy are all
designed to control the flow of
information in such a way as to amplify the voice of the
bureaucratic elite and to dimension the voice of the student, the
patient, the soldier or the consumer. The work of Erving Goffman
on the rules and face rights of those in total institutions offers
graphic evidence of such interactionally meager social forms.
In the corporation, information about its crimes, its pathologies, its petty oppressions are covered-up by the public relations people and refreshed once again to the April day. PR people try to filter out negative information about their clients and try to disseminate positive information...mostly false or misleading about their clients and the products of the client.
The rules of the classroom are designed to give the teacher control over the flow of ideas and of evaluations. Students are taught early on to ask for permission to speak, to sit still, to observe dress conventions and to follow the regime of the school rather than an alternate. When television is used in the classroom, the last possibilities of interaction are eliminated. Even computer based instructional programs permit more interaction than do most classrooms. But interactively rich computer software is not interactively rich human discourse. Sociality is lost in such a place.
The rules of secrecy are designed to limit knowledge, understanding and participation in political affairs in bureaucracies; designed to hide their functions and their flaws. Millions of documents are stamped with various levels of secrecy each year in government bureaucracies. National security is adduced to justify such action. Partisan security is a better term with which to account for such systematic distortion of the symbolic process.
While there has been some progress to put an end to all five structures which distort communicative relations, recent data suggest that progress has halted and, perhaps, reversed in all five domains. Those optimistic forecasts which say that the new information technology will transform these ancient inequalities have not been validated (see Toffler, 1980). If anything, the increased concentration of wealth and class privilege within capitalist societies has been aided by differential control of or access to the media.
In the television and radio programs, bland, safe, unoffensive material trumps that which might lose part of an audience...and part of the profits from the sale of that audience. Controversy, conflict, morality are displaced by consensus and tact as Gouldner so pointedly put it. The endpoints of political thought are truncated and a narrow, safe discourse subverts the search for good answers to hard questions.
Adequate, accurate, reliable, complete, timely, and comprehensible information systems, organized in an interactively rich format, are necessary to unalienated human societies. In capitalist societies, the news media are used more to produce audiences which, in turn, are sold as commodity to help merchants dispose of surplus, high-profit, high-energy, capital-intensive products rather than for the democratic constitution of social life.
Vast power, wealth and social honor still rests in the hands of a small percentage of persons and a shrinking number of multinational corporations. Compared to the MNCs, the power and wealth of even the greatest nation-state in the capitalist bloc is small. As powerful and rich as are the Arab oil states, a few banking groups can crush them. The battle for democratic forms of communication has not been won--the gains only to be consolidated; the benefits of social justice only to be extended to a few isolated groups. There is so much to be done before a strong and vital democracy can energy in even the best society.
Information-Rich Communications There are four kinds of knowledge which must be generated in any society if that society is to be reproducing itself as a self-directed, self-organizing, self- repairing, self-controlling society.
In systems theoretical terms, a system has the potential for ultrastability...a moving and lasting stability...when it draws energy (negentropy; order) from the environment at a level adequate to its life processes and below the breaking point of the environment. In order to escape the second law of thermodynamics which warns that every system tends to collapse, a system must be in match with its environment while not exceeding the capacity of the environment to carry it.
A. These forms of knowledge essential to ultrastability
include first, positive knowledge; knowledge about how the
society actually works, about how it is related to relevant
sectors of its environment, about its structural flaws and
about changes in its relevant environment.
If a society has this kind of positive knowledge, it has the
beginnings of the capacity be constituted as an ultrastable
cybernetic system matched to its environment and competent to
transfer order from environment without destruction of that
environment upon which the system depends.
Economics, politics, sociology, anthropology and history are
the knowledge generating disciplines which offer positive
information on how a society actually works. How successfully
it works is another question.
B. A second kind of knowledge which a society must produce
is hermeneutical knowledge. This is knowledge about how
intersubjective understanding is possible, how shared social
life worlds are created by intending human subjects, when
misunderstandings exist and how they arise and how to repair
unconnected meaning systems, distorted cultural processes or
psychopathogenic relationships.
Epistemology, phenomenology, socio-linguistics, symbolic
interactional theory, semantics, semeiotics, and
ethnomethodology are just a few of the knowledge-producing
disciplines which try to provide this kind of knowledge at the
level of a socio-cultural system. Psychology, psychiatry and
some religious specialties offer information about inner-
subjective states and distorted understanding within
individual systems of thinking.
Since human beings are the most significant environment of
each and all other human beings; and since social life worlds
depend upon shared understandings created by symbol using
creatures we call humans, hermeneutical knowledge is
absolutely essential. It is not possible to have social
systems when people do not understand the meanings of each
other. As Mead so nicely put it, Mind, Self and Society are
twinborn. Symbols must elicit the same meanings, feelings,
and lines of behavior in each person within a society else
society does not emerge from the biological base upon which it
is founded.
Interactionally rich and informationally rich symbol systems
depend greatly upon hermeneutical knowledge if they are to be
well built.
C. A third kind of knowledge necessary to reproduce existing
social institutions and social relations is ideological
knowledge. Ideological knowledge is comprised of all the
ideas about what kind of social relations are appropriate to
a society and what kind of culture is to be produced within
those social relations. Ideological knowledge is embedded in
the mores; in the realm of the sacred.
Ideas about how to do family; how to do religion; how to do
politics; how to do education or how to do economics are all
in the realm of ideology rather than in the realm of theory.
It is true that something called fathers really exist when
males are defined as fathers, treated as if they were fathers
and act as though they are fathers...but the idea of a father
(or a mother or a president or a pope) is an ideological
construct; not an ontologically existing entity apart from the
ideological activity of the people within a society.
Central to the constitution of such ideological constructs is
uncritical belief, naive acceptance, emotionally committed
allegiance, open and ready trust, and a certain readiness to
repress those who don't believe, who won't trust, who are
cynical or manipulative. If social reality is to be created,
faith, trust, and belief are essential. When belief is
subverted; when faith is betrayed; when trust is turned back
against people, their capacity to engage the self-fulfilling
prophecy is defeated.
A society which uses the tactics of theatre in
the service of the sociology of fraud is a
society on its way to collapse.
Most liberal analysis discounts, inappropriately, the
importance of ideology as a basis of a decent society. All
societies must propagate such ideological sets if they are to
reproduce themselves in the generations which follow. It is
not an odious thing to engage in propaganda...it is odious to
elevate the ideas which infuse and inform a society at the
expense of those ideas about how to do society found in other
societies.
The information sectors which create and distribute this kind
of knowledge include parents, politicians, priests, most
teachers, most psychiatrists and professors in the university,
as well as most workers in cultural life; musicians, singers,
actors, writers, counselors, lawyers, judges, social workers,
and most novelists.
Music, poetry, novels, bibles, how-to books, Constitutions,
by-laws, and of course Law itself are the repositories of
ideology. Again, the production of ideology is a noble
pursuit...if the ideology is noble.
D. A fourth kind of knowledge necessary to produce (rather
than reproduce) society is critical, emancipatory knowledge.
Information about the failings of a social form, about
alternative social relations, about new ways to rear children
or heal anxieties, about things which do not yet exist, and
about how to subvert the existing order as well as knowledge
about how to introduce new ways of doing things without
destroying the best of the old are the kinds of knowledge
necessary to human emancipation.
It is not enough to a self-repairing society to have positive
knowledge about how it actually works, to understand perfectly
the intentions of a master or boss, or to believe completely
in one's leaders and their commands. To endure, a person and
a society must produce, store and quickly retrieve information
about alternative family relations, alternative modes of
sexuality, alternative food, energy and housing sources as
well as alternative healing and helping processes.
In these times, the world changes so rapidly that new ways of
organizing human life must be available. The ancient
conservative view that all change is evil is, now, archaic.
Change is permanent; so options must be expanded,
transformations must be accepted and integrations must be well
done. The knowledge process in now central to the survival of
a society in all four dimensions.
New language systems, new words, new institutions must be
developed and tested against changes in the environment else
the second law of thermodynamics wins and the society tends to
entropy--as have so many before. The specialists who produce
emancipatory knowledge range from the clown, the fool and
jokester to the most advanced futurologists in corporate and
military think tanks.
It is an old understanding the prophets produce emancipatory
knowledge while priests reproduce ideology. Teachers
reproduce existing social relations while revolutionaries from
Lenin to Guevera produce new ideas about how to subvert
existing structures of power and to institute new ones.
In a society with structural inadequacies and with bad
politics, emancipatory knowledge comes more from the
underground than from the established respectable knowledge-
constitutive institutions. A rational and decent society
would bring emancipatory knowledge up the its underground cave
and honor it as is honored positive or ideological knowledge.
The measures of alienation give us guidance on when to turn from ideological knowledge to emancipatory knowledge: crime, depression, suicide, infant mortality rates, divorce and bankruptcy rates all bespeak alienated social relations in school, work, family and politics as well as church, state, and market.
The media controlled by those who benefit from the reproduction of inequality carefully exclude emancipatory knowledge from the news and analysis. Instead the columns and the segments in newscasts are filled with social opinion. Social opinion includes any information set which tends to reproduce existing arrangements (Young, 1981).
A democratically oriented society must use its media to create public opinion. In turn that public opinion must be incorporated in the political process in significantly consistent ways else a public sphere cannot be said to exist. The generation of post hoc consensus for policies after the fact cannot be called a democratic politics (Young, 1980).
False Politics When the indices of social collapse increase
at increasing rates, that is the time when
emancipatory knowledge takes precedence over ideological knowledge.
Yet it is precisely the time when the instruments of
social control--army, police, press--are deployed by ideologues to
suppress the production of emancipatory knowledge.
Under these conditions, the elements of 'bourgeois' freedom are essential to all social formations--capitalist and socialist alike. No class or party is a repository of all social wisdom. Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of experimentation...all traditional bourgeois freedoms...all are important to the human project.
Nor do the arguments about time constraints or about advantage of position justify nondemocratic procedures in the production of political or ideological culture. While an inner circle may quickly produce a policy, unless it speaks to the ultra-stability of the entire society, it is merely a false loop in the decision- making process and must be done again. The transfer of the costs for dealing with a problem to another part of the population creates a cycle of false politics which do not end until system and environment are in ultrastable and harmonious equilibrium.
As a case in point, one may consider the Reagan supply side policies to transfer the fiscal crisis of the state to workers, the elderly and the unemployed in order to generate funds to rebuild the economy and to protect the position of U.S. based corporations in the world economy with a strong military establishment.
Supply side economics do transfer capital to private industry and do help obtain markets and raw materials for the transnational corporation. However, if the private sector makes investment decisions on the basis of their private interests, they may use the surplus funds to invest elsewhere; they may invest in luxury goods; they may buy other companies or they may invest in credit instruments. There is no guarantee that private sector investors will invest in just those lines of production necessary to a good and decent society.
The loss in real disposable income to the family unit through the wage workers in a family only transfers the problem; it does not make the system any more stable. Workers must have enough income to buy back the goods they produce or warehouses fill up, factories shut down and economic depressions walk about the land.
Such economics also erode the tax base and the political legitimacy of the state while a variety of crime increases. A political process which answers to the needs of capital and systematically discounts family, community and personal needs of a society creates long range structural (and political) problems which can, in turn, transform into rebellion, fascism, wars of political liberation or into destructive economic warfare.
A false politics is one which answers to the short term needs of a privileged class but avoids responsive change on behalf of the whole society. If the fate of the five percent of the world which enjoys the benefits of such politics were unconnected to the fate of the unemployed, to the fate of the third world or to the fate of the masses, then such a politics would suffice.
However successful such politics were yesterday in a disconnected world system, they represent a false politics today. As the world grows more connected by economics, by transport, by electronic media and by political treaties, the economic problems of any given society come to originate in the world economic system; such a source of problems requires an enlarged and authentically democratic politics...everyday the need for a global democracy grows more necessary.
Basic to a democratic politics is a democratically organized communication system utilizing every technical capacity of electronic, photonic, and holographic media: speed, storage, interactivity, and computational capacities in order to produce and meet the vast informational needs of a connected world society.
An information-rich society is one in which all four kinds of knowledge are continuously produced, continuously available to all sectors of the population and continuously balanced against each other to produce a society located in its own history. Authentic politics is that politics which is so organized.
Such a politics requires that symbol systems--the media--be used for the constitution of a public sphere. We will return to this point in the last section of the paper.
Interaction Rich Communication Systems Returning to an earlier theme, one must keep in mind that social life worlds are produced by intending subjects. If a person or any set of persons are to be or become human, they must take part in the symbolic work out of which social relations emerge. Social reality does not exist apart from that symbolic work. It is the nature of symbolic work that it cannot be done by solitary individuals.
All information systems require encoding and decoding procedures. All communication requires speakers and hearers. Speaking is a subjective activity - but so is hearing. All this boils down to the fact that the construction of social life is, must be, collective. Persons excluded from such activity do not live in the same symbolic framework of those who do participate.
Such excluded persons cannot be said to be friends, parents,
citizens or Catholics. Mass print or electronics media with its
unidirectional, isolated, and narrowly focused and privately
controlled format do not answer to the communication needs of a
society for the shared constitution of the forms of knowledge
produced above or for the forms of social life patterned by that
knowledge.
There is embedded in this statement a Marxist view of the knowledge process. The forms of authentic social knowledge, in this view, do not arise from objective methods of social science disseminated by lecture, books, documentaries, and journals but rather by intersubjective participation in creating social life worlds. One can learn a bit about Eskimo life or about bureaucratic life from print or from film but creative participation in the production process is necessary for knowledge to be authentically, fully, intimately knowable and known.
An ultrastable society must organize its media as
social media rather than as mass media. Mass
media, mass sports, mass religion and mass
education are hostile to the human enterprise.
While media in a massified format can divert people, can entertain them, can persuade them to buy or to vote in this way or that, massified media cannot produce the forms of social knowledge needed to reproduce and to produce new social life.
The necessity for removing any structure which interferes with interaction derives from Ashby's law of requisite variety (1968). Only variety can destroy variety; only new ways of doing society can cope with irreversible changes in the environment of that society. Well organized systems contain enough variety within their information storage facilities (memories, plans, histories, ethnographies and utopias) to cope with any new event in the environment which threatens to interfere with the process by which order in the environment is converted into order in the system--and thus survive.
The structures of class, racial or gender inequality present themselves as constraints in the search for quality variety, the evaluation of various options, the incorporation of selected options and the collective benefits from such variety.
An interactively rich communications system has such characteristics as will promote the search for quality variety since, in Ashby's words, variety is essential to ultrastability. This means that when there is a significant change in the structure of a system or in the relevant sectors of the environment from which a system draws resources, then change must occur in order to regain a balance between system and environment.
If the environment can't be changed, the system must be. If workers can't be pacified, then factory life must change; if students won't be pacified, then the university life must change; if the third world won't tolerate exploitation, then the first world must change else both collapse...since the 3rd world is an essential part of the environment of the 1st world. Some 86 essential minerals come to the U.S.A. from the 3rd world as well as a lot of goods, wealth and profits.
We can suggest some characteristics of communications media organized to promote the quest for quality variety: for the best ways to resolve issues. The first and most general characteristic is that it must be democratically organized. Any class, racial, national or gender structure which discounts information about failings in the factory, home, classroom or neighborhood artificially reduces the pool of options from which to form political policy.
Any knowledge process which dismisses ideas from women or workers about how to cope with failure dangerously cripples the political process. Any decision making system which excludes critique of existing policy programs blinds itself to knowledge about the sources of system distress.
Any program of issue resolution which excludes the very people who must implement the solution is a program which courts failure. All of the above provide an unanswerable demand for democratically organized communication in the creation of public policy.
If democracy maximizes ultrastability of a society,
and if the electronic media are essential to
binding large populations together, then electronic
media must be democratically organized.
First, every individual in the population must have direct access to all other individuals in order to know their needs. There are several collecting formats which provide each person access to all others. Plato IV at Urbana, Minerva at Columbia and the interaction rules of C.B. radio all offer prototypes of democratic access.
Second, every person must have access to those who possess relevant background knowledge. A society which secrets information from its citizens impairs democracy. ln the U.S., the history of women, Blacks, workers and socialists is hidden and all the progressive ideas generated by these oppressed groups are excluded as well from the search for quality variety.
Information about the operation of a corporation doing business with the public, about foreign policy or about quality of life variables in the society must be in the public domain else there is no public domain. Every citizen must have access to persons in business, government and minority groups or the interaction matrix is inadequate.
Third every citizen must have access to similarly situated persons at work, in school, in the marketplace or in the family. Rules which restrict similarly situated persons from talking to each other impose a false consciousness upon such persons. For example, a classroom so organized such that students can't see each other's face or speak except to the professor renders students ignorant of each other's distress at a lecture point or an evaluation procedure. A medical system in which each patient is denied knowledge of the dangers of a given hospital or the failings of a given doctor places all patients in jeopardy.
The same is true of workers in a factory, clerks in a store or consumers in a market. All must have the right to know about the distress of each. A political party provides an interactional format in which people can talk to each other but mass politics does not provide such a format.
People listening to a president speak on a radio or a televised program are isolated from each other and cannot interact sufficiently to understand each other's response--if any.
Generally, there must be richer interaction and richer information across social cleavages than within a given social congery. Isolation from each other renders one division in society indifferent to the fate of another. Since the fate of each part of the population is tied to the fate of every part, such an interaction void renders each group less able to control its own destiny.
The interactional matrix between children and parents (parental surrogates) must be especially rich else the socialization process fails and a generation of savages is created. It is not enough for children to interact intensively with other children although such interaction is important. There must be cross-generational interaction else the transmission of culture fails and the reproduction of society suffers.
In summary, a society is created by the symbolic interactivity of its members. To do the job well, the structure of interaction must provide continuous, intensive, reciprocal, and focussed interaction. To do otherwise is to destroy the very process by which social reality is created.
It is well within the technical capacity of all forms of media from the voice to the holograph that they be orchestrated in an interactive format. Radio, television, newsprint can be collectively owned, collectively controlled and inter-collectively used. It is possible to organize radio as a mass medium or as a social media. Commercial radio is organized as a mass medium while C.B. radio is organized as an interactive social medium.
Film documentaries can be produced in an objective way with a film crew isolated from coalminers, factory workers, women or insurgents or they can be collectively produced with women and workers having a part in editing and screening decisions. There is nothing in the structure of a computer which says only the state, the government or a class elite may have access to its contents. There is something in elitist politics, class control or state preference which so shapes the format of such media.
It is a mystification to label social constraints on interactive format as technical or natural constraints. Only in an interactively rich symbolic environment comprised of the appropriate mix of social knowledge is it possible for self, society and human culture to develop.
Any symbolic system primarily devoted to the information needs of private capital for accumulation of profits or the state for political legitimation thereby detracts from the social process and is, in its own way, as subversive of a society as crime, poverty, terror, or famine. Consumerism is aided by advertising in a mass media format while advertising does produce markets from that mass of isolated viewers for the capitalist corporation but the larger, prior question is whether consumerism takes precedence over the knowledge process and over the social forms which could emerge from a different use of such media.
Temporary consensus on political policies can be extracted from a massified set of separated viewers by means of the massified use of polls and surveys. The prior question is whether those policies speak to the whole social process or merely transfers the problem to another people or another generation. If such policies do not answer to the human needs of all those in a given social complex, recourse to pre-political resistance and rebellion waits in the wings, off-stage, ready to do much mischief to the human process.
It is clear that some of the channel capacity of the various media can be used for advertising and some for private purpose without compromising the social process. The interesting question is how long can a society survive when its media, its best media, are preoccupied with private purposes of class, ethnic, or state privilege.
The answer is found in rates of social disorganization, rates of change in the larger environment, and, more importantly, rates of production of emancipatory knowledge. In systems theory, measures of entropy foretell the end of a system.
Public Opinion, Social Opinion and the Public Sphere. For most
of the time
for most societies, the various media may be usefully oriented to
the production of social opinion--that opinion which reproduces
society and is oriented to ideological knowledge. Cherished
beliefs, cherished traditions and cherished folkways are--must be--
reproduced. It is proper and fitting that the interactive-rich
media be used in school, church, and family to inculcate a rather
innocent and uncritical commitment to existing social forms.
Myths, novels, games, plays, classes, ceremonies and sermons which produce social opinion are necessary to bind people together, to transcend social cleavages and to integrate, to coordinate social labor and to reproduce existing social identities, existing roles, existing institutions and to organize social labor. All this is necessary to the human process.
However, sometimes social opinion is inadequate to the survival needs of society and a public sphere must be constituted to produce public opinion. In times of crisis, or when there is gradual decline in the indicators of social well being, or when the economic and political structures in a larger system following their own transformative laws produce a new international order, or when new technology offers better ways to rear children, heal the ill or create politics, then established ways must be taken out of the social sphere where they are taken-for-granted and brought into a public sphere where they are subjected to a relentless critique.
It is a painful process and it always reorients privileges, duties and rights but for an ultrastable society--a society able to survive a crisis by self-reorganization--a public sphere is essential.
At those times of crisis, it is necessary for the journalists, editors and directors of the various media to change from the production of ideological knowledge to the production of emancipatory knowledge. It does not suffice that a few professors in the university lecture on alternative political and economic, religious and familial, educational and therapeutic possibilities. An entire society must be involved--a public sphere must be created.
It does not suffice that surveys, polls, and samples of a mass of individuals isolated from each other be made. Authentically public opinion requires an interactively rich format and an informationally rich load of emancipatory knowledge.
To conflate mass opinion with public opinion
is as grievous a fraud as to use patriotism to
discourage public discussion on war, welfare,
crime, inflation or women's rights.
Mass opinion, based on individual needs, will not lead to
policies congenial to the general need. Social opinion, oriented
to old ways of doing things will not produce policies leading to
new ways of doing things. Public opinion, based on emancipatory
knowledge leads to descensus, conflict, and political jockeying,
but is absolutely essential to the quest for quality variety.
The trouble and turmoil natural to the public sphere is
preferable to the violence and destruction natural to rebellion,
revolution or the sullen, persistent subversion of the alienated
worker, citizen, student, or bureaucrat. The cost of a poorly
designed public sphere in human life, the harm to the environment,
the waste of property and resources in warfare are high costs to
pay for systematically distorted, poorly utilized media.
CONCLUSION There is nothing in nature, nothing in science and
nothing in social philosophy which requires any
given society be reproduced. There have been 3000 to 5000 distinct
social life worlds each with their own culture in human history of
which several hundred now exist. And, there will be several
thousand more evolve over the long and endless life of the good
earth.
The central question is whether we can design a democratic communications which will enlarge praxis, promote community, maximize peace, advance social justice, respect the physical environment or whether we will continue to reproduce social inequality between rich and poor nations; rich and poor businesses, rich and poor classes; whether we use the media to reproduce privileged gender, ethnic, or age groups and in the same moment reproduce the dangerous instabilities that these bring.
A decent and rational society requires the media organized for democratic communication. Communication is not democratic nor is it communication unless it is informationally and interactively rich. The technology for a democratic communication exists. The resources to assemble a democratic communication exists. The political necessity for a democratic communication increases continuously.
The orientation of the various media in a massified format dedicated to the management of image problems for state and for corporation leads toward the fraudulently dramaturgical society of which we spoke in previous essays. The orientation of the various media to emancipatory content and organization is the future of all media...the only interesting question is how many people must suffer or die before the media themselves are emancipated to the human project.
Only private ownership and/or party control of the media in most societies around the world interferes with democratically organized communication. To date communications technology has not lived up to its potential for democracy. Since Gutenberg, since Marconi, since the Luminiere brothers, since Lee DeForest and Graham Bell, war, famine, poverty and inequality as well as the degradation of the environment have been increased by the highly privileged use of the media.
A media revolution is necessary to reverse and to repair the harm done to the human project by existing forms of media use. With or without violence, a democratic use of the media must replace the oppressive and/or private use of radio, television, and other media by the capitalist class and by the party elite . . . else the human condition continues to deteriorate.
London
I wander thro' each charter'd street Near where the Charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet wounds of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every infant's cry of fear, in every voice, in every land, the class-forged chains I hear.
How the fact'ry workers' cry Every praying monk appalls; And the hapless soldier's sighs runs with blood down banker's walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear how the youthful harlot's curse and the new born infant's tear, runs to fill the banker's purse. John Donne
The People
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and sold again
and go back to the nourishing earth for roothold.
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback
you can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
...Sandberg
