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PP 046
Communitarian Practical Wisdom: The Pragmatic Tradition on Communication and Community
M. Navarro
1
1
Universidad Panamericana, Communication, Mexico City, Mexico
This papers aims to reconstruct a common thread around the ideas of community and communication across different pragmatists (mainly through
the works of Cooley, Mead and Dewey), and to revisit such tradition under the scope of classical practical wisdom. In doing so, it deals greatly on the idea
of community as a collective expression of socialization processes. Community, as an idea, was frequently associated to ancient types of social organization
and opposed in early social theory to the idea of society, which was considered more fit to explain modern and complex industrialized human conditions.
The elements in the pragmatic tradition that lead to the formulation of a theory of contextual action based on the ideas of community and communica‑
tion have not been fully explored, mainly because of the little attention Cooley’s work has received. Cooley departed from the study of the phenomenon
of transportation, which he saw as the cohesion of a collective through the facilitation of access. The profound dynamics of transport relations rested in
communication processes, but while transportation was a physical phenomenon, communication dealt, according to Cooley, with the psychical world. This
conceptualization led to framing Cooley as a mentalist with no real approach to the social. George Mead was a major factor in this depiction of Cooley which
disregarded the latter’s social and interactionist understanding of the mind. Mead’s critique of Cooley was important in redefining intellectual influences
in American social though, relegating Cooley to a symbolic inspirer of sociology. If indeed Cooley was not a refined thinker as Mead, there is a method‑
ological interactionist affinity that provides a basis for revisiting Mead’s social behaviorism from the standpoint of the idea of community or a primary
group, as was Cooley’s aim. While Mead gained much from Idealism, his biological perspective prevented him of grasping an understanding of community
other than a formal locus of adaptation. On the other hand, Dewey’s understanding of community and communication has been generally considered
an important part of his work, but, as with Cooley, there is a tendency towards the evaluation of such ideas as naïve and nostalgic expressions in a shifting
social landscape. Dewey provides a basis from which a better understanding of the pragmatic tradition can be achieved in the concepts of Reconstruction
and Experience. The first aims to overcome dualist perspectives that separate the practical and the theoretical. Experience expresses a collective unveiling
of nature that takes place in a communitarian medium and develops through communicative actions. These reflections on the pragmatic tradition around
the ideas of community and communication could greatly benefit from the reference to classical accounts of intellectual virtues, specifically Aristotelian
practical wisdom. The Aristotelian formulation of phronesis implies that the pursuit of the good through action demands a non-dualistic metaphysics
that considers both the practical and theoretical. The pragmatic tradition, on the other hand, can enrich this view with a clear reference to communitarian
accounts of the experiencing subject.
PP 047
The Problem of Agency in Friedrich Kittler’s Media Theory
K. Kirtiklis
1
1
Vilnius University, Faculty of Communication- Institute of Creative Media, Vilnius, Lithuania
Since mid-20
th
century media theorists are engaged in debates concerning the relationship of media and humans / society: who determines or influences
what and if the influence is mutual – in what proportion? Friedrich Kittler offers radically pro-media answers to these questions. He defines media as infor‑
mation systems for the storage, processing and transmission of messages. According to Kittler, media are more than just infrastructures, they determine our
situation, whereas the humans are merely wetware, programmed and operating according to the algorithms of the prevailing configuration of the media,
which Kittler calls discourse network (Aufschreibsystem) - “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and
process relevant data”(Kittler 1996). But how does Kittler’s media determinism work? Do media have the capacity to act and in what way? Kittler is explic‑
itly against the notion of humans as agents, and rather implicitly against media as agents. In vein of Foucault’s theorizing, Kittler suggests that particular
discourse network (as Foucault’s episteme) arises in consequence of daily practices, yet these are not human practices, but technological media practices.
Kittler’s idea of practice rejects the conception of agent as source of particular action, because it also rejects the notion of intentionality, which, according
to the standard philosophical conception of action is essential for the notions of agent and agency. Kittler’s theory presents purely technological world,
based on algorithms, purged of“so-called humans”and products of their mental activities. Understood this way agency is not a characteristic of the media.
However, I would argue that the analysis of formation and change (which is particularly important to Kittler) of discourse networks suggest that he tends
to retain some notion of agency and ascribe it to the media, on micro, as well as macro level. Firstly, on micro level of particular media, Kittler’s description
of the basic algorithms of electronic media (if condition A is fulfilled then do B) is in fact rewrites the basic teleological principle of human folk psychology
(if you want to achieve A, then do B) in causal terms. This, does not contradict Kittler’s attempt to “expel” the human attributes from the technological
world. However, if one considers discourse network a particular system, which causes particular operations and provides algorithms for them, it is hard to
see how these operation might cause transformations of this system.The impetus for change should come fromwithout, or fromwithin (from the elements
of the system, or from the system as a whole). Secondly, Kittler’s theory emphasizes transformations, but his history of the developments of discourse net‑
works does not seem to be product of contingency, simply because it has too little dead ends and victims of natural selection. Discourse networks seem to
have at least some intentionality -“gods”in their machines, who do not hesitate to appear at the moments, when they are particularly needed, and divert
the path of media development towards its aim - the growth of media convergence.