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Thursday, November 10
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COH01 Media and Communication Theory –Revisited?
PP 025
Suggestions Towards a New Ontology of Communication History: Beyond the Habermassian Public Sphere
P. Lodge
1
1
Freelance researcher and writer, Not applicable, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
This paper has two aims: firstly, to discuss the possibility of writing a history of communication; and secondly to argue that, given the obvious reservations
arising from the problematic of engaging with ‘communication history’, the most insightful approach is to locate the historical subject as an event within
an organizational framework. The paper will be illustrated throughout by examples drawn from the author’s research into the intellectual development
of British communication studies from 1959 to today. The initial premise is that what we recognize at this stage as constituting ‘communication history’ is
a essentially a set of factors (message, audience, transmission, cultural and social influences) which are typified only by a common transitariness, expressed
in the Conference Call as an unstoppable flow of permanent changes. The terms which are used to record forms of ‘communication history’ (mass media,
public relations, advertising) are themselves subject to constant change and disruption (social media, network theories). Consequently, a normative agenda
that would provide a reliable relativistic basis for the history of communication events, and the terms in which they are described, is limited by the nature
of those terms and the historiography they allow. The second premise of the argument, therefore, is that to overcome this paradox ‘communication his‑
tory’ as a concept, and writing about that concept, need to be located within an ontological framework which has the power of a legitimating apparatus
(Berger & Luckmann 1991, p.158). Traditionally, the Habermassian ‘ public sphere’has been substituted for such an apparatus without acknowledging that
communication per se is necessarily, in the broadest terms, a conflation of public (production) and private (consumption) spheres. Nor does the concept
of the public sphere allow for the construction of a model of causal relationships which, as Whyte following Kosselleck, argues is the only way in which
“to distinguish between a properly historical account of reality and a nonhistorical, or ahistorical or antihistorical account thereof”(Koselleck 2002,pxii).
The paper argues that much that is presently accepted as communication history is actually not “properly historical” but falls into one of Koselleck’s other
categories. As an alternative to this situation, a properly historical ontology, it is suggested, could be constructed by locating communication history within
an organizational framework derived from the work of the Montreal School. All ‘communication’(and within the organizational context the term itself be‑
comes widely negotiable) is produced within frameworks and constraints best described as organizational. An organization, in these terms, is“a structuring
of the social and cultural world to produce an environment whose forms both express social life and create the context for it to thrive”(Taylor & Every 2000,
p.324). Located between the fixity of the text and the fluidity of conversation, the organization is structured around the principle of communication. This, it
is argued, for the first time allows the development of an ontology of communication history based in an accessible concept of communication, and provides
a much-needed form of mediation between communication history and nonhistorical productions.
PP 026
Failures, Dead Ends, and Parallel Lines – Discontinuities of Memory in Communication Studies. Towards a Negative History of the Field
C. Schwarzenegger
1
, T. Birkner
2
1
Augsburg University, Department of Media- Knowledge and Communication, Augsburg, Germany
2
University of Münster, Münster, Germany
In this contribution we combine sociology-of-knowledge-factors and memory studies arguments to evaluate existing approaches to the history of the field.
We argue that in order to understand the history of communication studies we cannot focus solely on how the discipline is actively remembered but also
have to acknowledge the discontinuities of memory and focus on what is purposely forgotten, side-lined or silenced. We follow Ludwik Fleck’s idea of sci‑
entific disciplines as “thought collectives” (1981). In this sense they are also memory collectives: they have common foundations and a shared reservoir
of memories that helps to develop consolidated criteria of relevance, understandings of problems and ideas of how to resolve them. The field’s memory
of itself is highly functional to provide a shared identity for the highly fragmented and balkanized” (Pooley & Park, 2013) field of communication studies.
Recounting the history of the field always builds on previous versions, thus the narration becomes collective memory and part of education and hence
socialisation and enculturation of new academics into the thought collective. Histories of scientific disciplines however bear tendencies of simplification
and mystification (Brosius & Esser 1998) and they also transform nonlinear developments into a coherent and continuous narrative order. In recent years
the history of the field found brought academic attention. In this expanding body of research we identify three main strands of engagement: First, research
into the intellectual heritage and formative traditions of thought and how a variety of different perspectives merged into the would-be discipline of com‑
munication. A second way of approaching the past relies on biographical research and narrating history according to key players, boosters and founding
figures – fathers (Schramm 1963), mothers (Simonsen 2014)– and how their efforts influenced the discipline in its making. A third line of research deals
with the roles of national and international associations, organizations and institutions in terms of shaping and institutionalizing the field’s identity (Meyen
&Wiedemann 2016)What these strands have in common is their focus on“positive history”. Positive here emphasizes that it is typical to narrate the history
of victors, successful schools of thought and prosperous methodologies, not so much“negative”histories of failures, dead end initiatives, marginalized ques‑
tions and minority positions within the field. Future research also has to account for what was forgotten in the field: In memory studies the role of forgetting
has been highlighted in recent years (Esposito 2012, Rüsen 2005). Forgetting is then seen as a deliberate process and hence forgotten is not the same as
simply unrecalled. In this perspective it becomes important to deconstruct logics according to which certain mythologies and linear narrations of history are
established and to concurrently reconstruct the uses cultivating certain myths and memoires while expelling others provide for the field’s self-awareness.
In the presentation we outline how to integrate discontinuities of memory to complement what is remembered and we demonstrate potential sources and
methodological approaches to forgetting in writing the history of communication as an academic endeavour.
Communication History
(COH01–COH10)