From broadcast media to distributed systems – John Hartley’s ‘cultural science’ and the future of ‘old’ cultural studies

ABSTRACT

The paper assesses the significance for media and cultural studies of the collaborative interdisciplinary project initiated by John Hartley in the mid 2000s under the rubric of ‘cultural science’. It suggests that, in the case at least of Hartley’s own work, the project could be understood as an attempt to pivot cultural studies from an engagement with centre-periphery conceptual schemas associated with print and broadcast media to an idea of distributed systems. The way it does so is very revealing as to prospects of the concept of culture in the wake of half a century of neoliberal institutional reform. The paper finds the claim to scientificity confused and misleading, inhibiting engagement from what Hartley now calls ‘old’ cultural studies. However, the lines of argument can be pushed further than cultural science has itself been prepared to do, opening new possibilities for cultural studies and new possibilities for how we might imagine our collective future.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural studies
• digital media
• semiotics
• neoliberalism
• John hartley

John Hartley has been a significant figure in media and cultural studies for more than forty years. His early work on television (Fiske & Hartley 1978) and news media (Hartley 1982) contributed to the early ‘curriculum’ of cultural studies in the late 1970s and 1980s. His mid-career writing (Hartley 1992a, 1992b, 1996), took the field in new directions while also offering a provocative reflexive commentary on its general shape and direction. Since the mid 2000s, however, Hartley has taken an unexpected turn, recasting his work as ‘cultural science’. The work so named is now substantial, being represented by an impressive trilogy – Cultural Science co-authored with economist Jason Potts (Hartley and Potts 2014), the sole-authored How We Use Stories and Why That Matters – Cultural Science in Action (Hartley 2020) and The Digital Semiosphere – Culture, Media and Science for the Anthropocene with Estonian semioticians and innovation systems theorists Indrek Ibrus and Maarja Ojamaa (Hartley, Ibrus, and Ojamaa 2021). The project has also been collaborative, as the record of co-authorship suggests. The journal Cultural Science, launched by Hartley in 2008, is now in its thirteenth volume and has seen substantial interdisciplinary and international exchange.

In this paper, I assess the significance of cultural science from the perspective of what Hartley now calls ‘old’ cultural studies (Potts and Hartley 2014, 35–39) – the field he was himself involved in developing but wishes, somewhat ambiguously, to leave behind. I should say at the outset that I find the label ‘science’ misleading, at least as applied to Hartley’s own writing. It is indeed unclear whether he is entirely convinced of it himself. In How We Use Stories, he invites speculation on the question by quoting a self-reflection from the 1970s by Roland Barthes:

Though it is true that I long wished to inscribe my work within the field of science – literary, lexicological, and sociological – I must admit that I have produced only essays, an ambiguous genre in which analysis vies with writing. (qtd Hartley 2020, 135)

What Barthes admits of himself might equally apply to Hartley. In the introduction to How We Use Stories, he pulls back from the implication of the book’s subtitle – ‘Cultural Science in Action’ – presenting the work not as a ‘scientific lab manual’ but as an ‘argument’, and an argument made in terms that are not themselves scientific: ‘its “method” is that of the humanities essay, in which I am trained, rather than computer science or bioscience, in which I am not’ (Hartley 2020, 11).

This confusion over the status of the claim to scientificity presents an immediate obstacle to anyone from ‘old’ cultural studies who might otherwise be interested in engaging with the work. In the overview paper in which the ‘new’/‘old’ distinction is proposed, Potts and Hartley (2014, 36) describe their reading program in developing the project as a ‘gruelling interdisciplinary journey’ and it quickly becomes clear that following them requires a willingness to be taken into unfamiliar and sometimes forbidding territory. Among the fields invoked are various ‘evolutionary’ sub-disciplines – of neuroscience, anthropology, economics, sociology and game theory – as well as ‘complexity science’ and marketing. Why should a media or cultural studies reader sign up to an arduous quest so far from home? Why, in particular, if the expeditionary banner is so baffling and the destination so unclear?

The bluntness of this question may suggest that I am unsympathetic from the start. And there are, admittedly, other points over which I would be tempted to quibble. Potts and Hartley (2014) fault ‘old’ cultural studies for lacking ‘explanatory power’, but it is unclear whether this was ever its primary aim. As their own account makes clear, the field had activist origins. It was particularly associated with efforts to meet new entrants to higher education on their own ground, recognizing differences in experience among those who had been excluded on the basis first of class, then later of gender, race and other dimensions of social difference. We might also ask whether the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ is as bold as it seems. Cultural studies has always had schismatic tendencies. As soon as a set of disciplinary principles has begun to emerge, they have been problematized or rejected, with breakaway factions setting off in new directions. The invocation of ‘science’ may signal an intention, like others before (Bennett 1998), to settle into a more stable disciplinary mode. But the ‘new’/‘old’ distinction could just as well be seen as a further example of a familiar cultural studies pattern.

My reason for opening with these reservations, however, is not so much to launch a critique as to clear the ground so attention can be directed to where the value of the cultural science project does lie. This value, I suggest, is in thinking through the stakes for cultural studies of a shift from centre-periphery conceptual schemas to the idea of distributed systems. The most obvious context for this shift is the transition from broadcasting and print publication to digital media and the internet. As I will outline below, this has been a major context for the development of Hartley’s own work, which has closely referenced forms of media and has broadly straddled the analogue to digital transition. But if the origins of the project are in media studies, its ambition is also wider. The idea of distributed systems is used to identify homologies with a wide range of fields that have adopted ‘complex systems’ conceptualizations of the phenomena with which they are concerned. The central proposition of cultural science is that we might draw down on these conceptualizations while integrating them with the concept of culture.

To this extent, the project might be compared with others that have emerged in the humanities and social sciences over the last few decades. Potts and Hartley (2014, 41) note that Deleuzian assemblage theory shares ‘important observations’ with cultural science, allowing that some kind of translation between the two is ‘not impossible to imagine’. They clearly see a consistency too with Niklas Luhmann’s (1995) systems theoretical approach to sociology. The difference, however, particularly from Deleuzian philosophy, is that cultural science is relatively unconcerned with the independence or status of the humanities disciplines from which it starts out. It might indeed be characterized as heedless in this respect, allowing itself to be drawn into the orbit of the systems thinking most at odds with classical humanities concerns with meaning, values, imagination and collective experience. The most notable of these is Hayekian economics, but others include cybernetic systems theory, data science, cryptography and market analysis.

In developing the project, Hartley has presented himself as a Daedalean figure, laying the foundations for a systematic production of knowledge in a field that has yet fully to emerge. In what follows, however, I cast him more as Icarean. The interest of cultural science from the point of view of an older humanities-derived version of cultural studies is that it takes us closer than is comfortable to tendencies that have threatened to destroy the humanities – that sun which we might for convenience call ‘neoliberalism’. What distinguishes Hartley from others who have tracked a similar course is that he is much more accepting of the risks, spurning critical defences to look the phenomenon fully in the face. On first appearances, the approach appears foolhardy, exposing the wax wings of the humanities in a way that can only lead to a crumpled wreck in the sea below. But it can also be read in quite a different way, as adding weight to a conclusion that is increasingly being drawn in other contexts: that the heat is no longer to be feared as it once was, that the sun has become a faded star whose energies are now seriously depleted.

What other pieces of evidence might we have for this? There are many that might be cited, but a striking Australian example is recent interest by the chair of the Productivity Commission, Michael Brennan (2021), in exploring alternatives to neo-classical economics. As veteran economics columnist Ross Gittins (2021) points out, such a move is extraordinary for the head of Australia’s premier agency of neoliberal reform. It is a move that intersects with cultural science in that Brennan cites Hartley’s co-author, Jason Potts, as a leading exponent of the kinds of alternatives we might now consider. But it is also a move that could be seen as coming from a position of weakness. Over the last half century, the animating program of the Productivity Commission and its precursor agencies has evolved, as John Quiggin (2023) puts it, from ‘an economic policy revolution … to being a dominant ideology, before finally fading to near irrelevance’. The Commission is now, in Quiggin’s view, an agency without a mission: ‘whether it is worth extending the life of a body so thoroughly tied to the era of neoliberalism is an open question’.

The key intuition of cultural science, I suggest, is in recognizing this moment as one of opportunity for the concept of culture. This is not to deny that there are risks in the Icarian approach, for it involves a proximity to intellectual formations that have been structured in various ways to marginalize or exclude the concept. I will outline two problems, in particular, in the attempted synthesis of cultural studies with complex systems thinking. The first is a difficulty in identifying collective forms – what Hartley calls ‘wedoms’ – that are more than statistical aggregations of atomized elements. The second is a difficulty in sustaining an account of meaningfulness at the macro level. These problems mean that cultural science is always pulling apart at the seams, preventing it ever from entirely succeeding as science. As an experiment in what is possible in the current moment, however, it is very revealing, providing much to ponder about possible futures for cultural studies.

A radical Reithian

Hartley’s wish to identify with science is particularly surprising in the light of positions he has taken at earlier points in his career. His work of the 1980s and 1990s (Hartley 1987, 1992b, 1996) was known for its trenchant criticisms of the behavioural sciences, particularly in relation to media audiences. These lines of argument survive in the recent cultural science writing, as in a case for prioritizing the importance of stories:

If you adopt the language of the behavioural sciences, then stories disappear. Instead, you are faced with ‘subjects’ who are ‘exposed’ to media ‘stimuli’ in a controlled experimental situation where their ‘responses’ can be observed and measured … It soon becomes more important to reproduce the scientific method than to understand the story. Without a properly derived and applied methodology, your observations are merely ‘subjective’. (Hartley 2020, 13)

The forest of scare quotes confirms the extent to which Hartley must still hold his nose even to describe the behaviourist paradigm. And against its limitations, he offers a lyrical affirmation of the humanities:

If you adopt the language of the humanities, then behaviour disappears. Instead, you are studying the play of difference among texts, discourses, representations, images, ideas, fantasies and fictions. There is no ‘method’ here beyond copious, continuing and comparative reading … This may have a profound ‘effect’ on you, emancipating you into intellectual freedom, stimulating both curiosity and scepticism, emotional and critical responses, changing your subjectivity, identity and knowledge, inspiring your actions, aptitudes and ambitions. (Hartley 2020, 14)

No scare quotes here, other than in backward glances to the other tendency. It is clear where Hartley’s loyalties lie.

What then makes the evolutionary and complexity sciences so much more benign than behaviourism? Before addressing this question, it is worth backtracking a little to consider the earlier humanities-derived framework out of which the cultural science project has emerged. While most of Hartley’s work of the last twenty years has been concerned with digital media, he was formed as a scholar and writer by his engagement with print publishing and, in his published work, more particularly with broadcasting. His first book, with John Fiske, was Reading Television (Fiske and Hartley 1978), much of his work over the following decade was occupied with television (Hartley 1992b) and there is a sense, even now, that television is the medium with which he is most at home. He returns to it in How We Use Stories, in a chapter that recapitulates themes of his earlier work while attempting a translation into the terms of cultural science. It is clear from the chapter that television remains central to his intellectual and emotional orientation to the world:

TV integrates modern life into some sort of shared, imagined meaningful universe or ‘semiosphere’ … TV coordinates viewers at scale into an inter-knowing subpopulation or ‘deme’ … TV creates the modern subject. (Hartley 2020, 223)

The question that hangs awkwardly here, against the background of the networked, cybernetic world invoked by cultural science, is what happens when television is no more – or, more precisely, when broadcasting is no longer a dominant media form. Is modern life still integrated into a ‘shared, imagined meaningful universe’? Are those who engage with media still ‘coordinated at scale into an inter-knowing subpopulation’? Does the ‘modern subject’ still exist?

It is easy to overlook the potential losses here as they are associated with a development which might only appear a good thing: the collapse of the centre-periphery structure of broadcasting. If there is a single motivating figure in Hartley’s work of the 1980s and 1990s, a foil against which all his writing of the period is pitched, it is the condescending cultural guardian who seeks to use such structures to impose their values on mass populations. It is a figure, admittedly, with a provenance beyond broadcasting, having roots in more venerable and institutionally congealed centre-periphery formations. It is for Hartley archetypally British, having formed within the closely connected agencies of education and empire. But the centre-periphery structure is nonetheless clearly a problem for anyone seeking to resist ‘improving’ designs over mass populations. It is a structure that makes broadcasting all too available for late incorporation into what we might call the imperial-educational complex.

The obvious historical embodiment of the figure in question would be John Reith, founding Director General of the B.B.C. and institutional architect of public broadcasting. Hartley has written about Reith only in passing, but there can be little doubt about his view of the cultural/media formation he bequeathed. In an essay from the early 1990s, for example, he amplifies a position staked out by Adrian Martin (1991) on the ‘British’ idea of television:

‘Britishness’ has the same status for Martin as the academy does in American sitcoms, and for the same reason; it is equated with finger-wagging pomposity and patrician arrogance … [T]his TV Britishness is more than personal prejudice; it’s also institutionalized at the level of national cultural policy in the form of a pervasive polarity between quality and trash. Simply, and in the teeth of the evidence, ‘British’ means quality … , and ‘American’ means the other thing … (Hartley 1992c, 461)

While the distinction here is between national broadcasting systems, it anticipates the more recent distinction between broadcasting as such and network media. If broadcasting is all that is on offer, American television may be preferable in that ‘it leaves you alone, while the British variety does not’ (Hartley 1992c, 461). But from the perspective of the present, all television from the golden age of broadcasting appears paternalist. It was a quality inherent in the centre-periphery, one-to-many structure of the medium. Within such a structure, someone must ultimately decide what is ‘good’ for the many.

What cause for regret could there be then in bidding farewell to the Reithian paradigm? The answer, I suggest, is in two qualities of the latter that are less often recognized but which Hartley’s work allows us to see. The first is a bold imagining of social collectives. In his writing of the 1980s and 1990s, Hartley is acutely aware of homologies between broadcasting and empire. Television audiences, he suggests, are

perhaps the largest ‘community’ in the world that is subject to what Edward Said has dubbed the discourse of ‘orientalism’, whereby disorganized communities which have never developed or won adequate means of self-representation, and which exist almost wholly within the imagination or rhetoric of those who speak on their behalf, become the ‘other’ of powerful, imperial discourses. (Hartley 1992b, 105)

At the same time, he attempts to sift out positive potentials in the social imagining that broadcasting allows. In doing so, he adopts an idea from the Russian-Soviet semiotician Valentin Volosinov. Whatever the problems of broadcasting in its actual realized form, he suggests, it has a value in stimulating what Volosinov calls ‘ideological colloquy of large scale’ (qtd Hartley 1992b, 10).

The second quality of broadcasting embraced by Hartley – a quality, it should be said, that is to be found more clearly in its unabashed British variant than its American form – is an ambition for the audience. It is a quality, again, that he sought to separate out from the finger-wagging, pompous and patrician. If, in the classical Reithian vision, the audience needs guidance from above to become its best, for Hartley it needs rather to be coaxed into realizing its own latent properties. This is not so much a liberation, in which the educator-broadcaster might strike a heroic pose, as an open-minded respect and preparedness to listen. Yet it is also something more than simply ‘leaving the audience alone’. The best example in Hartley’s work is probably his long-running interest in the media cultures of girls (Hartley 2002, 2020, 239–269; Hartley and Lumby 2003). The interest is a risky one given the minefields of gender politics in cultural studies, but it has a clear logic in terms of his wider program. Girls are the audience fraction most likely to suffer from Reithian paternalism; they are therefore also the ultimate test case against which a reformed, non-paternalist idea of the audience might be developed and refined.

My suggestion in what follows is that the cultural science project could be understood as an attempt to pivot a humanities-based perspective on media from an engagement with broadcast to network forms. Given the homologies noted above between media and geopolitical formations, this needs to be seen as an attempt also to pivot from an engagement with imperial imaginings to the idea of a single, interconnected global system in which there are no relations of exteriority. The appeal here of the evolutionary and complexity sciences is that they appear to offer the intellectual resources needed to conceptualize a post-broadcast, post-imperial condition. The question for a humanities-based perspective, as I have indicated, is whether it is able to draw on these resources without combusting, losing any independence of perspective or distinctness of contribution.

Demes and their dangers

The first challenge here relates to the question of collective forms of identity. In the context of the broadcasting-imperial complex, humanities-based approaches were able to work with what might be called ‘found’ collectives. They could assume that the television audience, subject populations of empire – indeed any number of groupings defined by homologous structural positions – were simply there as articulated social formations. As Benedict Anderson (1983) famously argued in relation to the press, and as Hartley (1987) elaborated shortly after in relation to television, these formations were always in a sense ‘imagined’. But they were also orchestrated through an array of technologies, institutions and practices – from transmission towers and national media policies to the nightly communion of millions in front of the soap opera or six o’clock news. They were, in that sense, material.

Given the importance to the humanities of the idea of shared experience, one might expect a humanities-trained television scholar to try to save as much of the intellectual furniture of broadcasting as he could. As many have observed (eg. Couldry 2014), it is not as though this furniture is entirely obsolete. But Hartley attempts something more like the opposite, throwing it overboard in an audacious bid to maintain initiative and stay ahead of history. One of the most radical and interesting features of the cultural science project is its preparedness to abandon the idea of found collectives. The context here, we might assume, is Hartley’s discomfort with the Reithian paradigm. To cede the centre-periphery framework is to imagine a world in which the finger-wagging, pompous and patrician can never rise again. But this is also one of the Icarian moments I flagged at the outset, as Hartley seeks to rebuild a workable humanities-based perspective using intellectual resources – those of Hayekian and post-Hayekian economics – that are organized around a deep suspicion of the very idea of social collectives.

The origin of this suspicion in the key figure of the tradition, Friedrich Hayek himself, was an alarm at the rise of statist ideologies in Europe in the early twentieth century (Hayek 1944). But the program he developed was also deployed against more moderate collectivist forms, notably Keynesian liberal paternalism, and even traditional conservative attempts simply to preserve and maintain inherited forms of collective identity. Hayek’s genius was to answer the obvious objection to suggestions that we abandon attempts to organize collectively: that it would result in chaos. His key idea, building on Smithian market liberalism, was that of a ‘spontaneous order’ arising through countless distributed market-based transactions (Hartley and Potts 2014, 82–83). It is an idea that activates an interest in other unplanned emergences of complex forms, particularly through processes of biological evolution. This last point is relevant to the scientific aspirations of cultural science, as the invocation of biology gives the Hayekian program an aura of naturalism.

The originality of the cultural science project is that it seeks to defend the idea of collectives not by resisting the Hayekian program, as most within the humanities have done (Brown 2015; Davies 2017), but by subverting it from within. The ground for this is prepared, to some extent, by post-Hayekian economics, which has attempted in various ways to reconcile a rigorous market-based theoretical perspective with the empirical fact, even at the heart of micro-economic processes, of social groups and organizations. Examples include Ronald Coase’s (1937) theory of the firm as a mechanism for increasing market efficiency by reducing ‘transaction costs’, James Buchanan’s (1965) account of the utility maximizing function of ‘clubs’ and Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) work on the economic function of ‘the commons’. This is where Hartley’s collaborator on the first book in the cultural science trilogy, Jason Potts, is pivotal to the project. While Potts is an economist, not a cultural theorist, his work is distinguished by a preparedness to push the boundaries in post-Hayekian theorizing of collective formations in market economies (Potts 2000, 2019).

At the centre of the Hartley-Potts collaboration is an attempt to hybridize the concept of culture with post-Hayekian ideas of spontaneously emerging collectives within the flux of unplanned, distributed transactions:

Culture is a system-generating mechanism that everyone uses but no one invents, the model for which is language. In short, we must look for culture at the level of communicating groups and systems, not individuals; and we must revise our understanding of individuals to explain their ‘groupishness’. (Hartley and Potts 2014, 22)

The formulation – and indeed the whole of the cultural science project – has a curious trompe l’oeil quality. It can be read, from a humanities perspective, as a reassuring affirmation of the importance of collectives. Yet the subtle insertion of Hayekian code (‘but no one invents’) leaves open the possibility of something more like the opposite: a view of collectives as mere epiphenomena, emerging contingently from a myriad of dispersed and disaggregated micro-transactions or moments of exchange.

The same ambiguous quality can be found in the idea of ‘demes’ which is used by Hartley and Potts to conceptualize collectives:

We borrow the term ‘deme’ from ancient Greek … , where a deme is a population group within Attica, upon which Athenian citizenship was based. A deme is also a term in bioscience, where it refers to an interbreeding subpopulation of a given species … The word thus links the political ‘demos’ (and its history) with bio-evolutionary population groups that may found distinct cultures. (Hartley and Potts 2014, 35)

On the one hand, the concept suggests a deep affinity with the humanities, invoking classical forms such as the ancient Greek polis in which collective identities are assumed. In terms of Hartley’s earlier work on television, demes can be understood as ‘wedoms’, bringing into play the familiar intellectual resources of cultural studies. On the other hand, demes are conceived as ‘population groups’, in which association is understood as accidental or contingent. The appropriate lens in this case, it would seem, would not be cultural studies but statistical or computational methods.

So long as these two aspects are held in tension, the concept of demes reserves a place for the humanities in the analysis of network media. The concept recognizes the fluid, protean character of group formation when centre-periphery relations can no longer be assumed. It shares in this with others such as ‘flash mobs’ (Duran 2006), ‘neo-tribes’ (Robards 2018), ‘followings’ (Abidin 2015) and viral formations (Graham et al. 2020) that have also emerged as substitutes for the concept of ‘the audience’. In contrast to such alternatives, however, it seeks a certain gravity. Demes, for Hartley and Potts, have deep anthropological roots, going further back even than the earliest known permanent human settlements, to the hunter-gatherer people that preceded them. They are also associated, at least potentially, with serious aesthetic ambition. A further significant input to the cultural science project has been work on ‘digital storytelling’ (Hartley and McWilliam 2009). In Cultural Science, Hartley and Potts cite a suggestion by pioneer in the field Daniel Meadows that digital stories might be thought of as ‘multimedia sonnets from the people’ (Hartley and Potts 2014, 44).

All this is certainly appealing. The question, however, is what heat is applied to humanities-based perspectives by the other, post-Hayekian, aspect of the concept of demes. It should be recognized here that the two aspects do not come together on equal terms. The attempted hybridization by Hartley and Potts follows half a century in which the market-based perspective has gained a very considerable ascendency. At the level of political theatre, the development might be traced to the moment when Margaret Thatcher produced a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty from her handbag at a policy meeting of the British Conservative Party, slamming it on the table and declaring ‘This is what we believe’ (Butler 2019). In more mundane terms, it has involved a pervasive and far-reaching adoption of transactional models of social interaction, the restructuring of public institutions around markets or quasi-markets and a corrosive suspicion of claims on behalf of collectives (‘society’, ‘the people’, ‘the working class’ etc.). We might argue over whether this development should be attributed to a ‘spontaneous order’ or to politically directed forms of intellectual imperialism, but there can be no question that it has placed the humanities in a seriously weakened position.

Hartley’s achievement in opening a dialogue with post-Hayekian economics should not be underestimated. The most interesting aspect of the dialogue is in suggesting the possibility of a reversal, in which humanities-based perspectives find a voice to speak back to market-based perspectives in terms that might actually be heard. There is, however, a price to be paid in reaching this position. The abandonment of the idea of found collectives leaves few resources with which the humanities might claim an independent identity. Theoretically, culture is attributed with enormous agency. The argument of cultural science is ‘that culture makes groups, that groups make knowledge, and that new ideas … occur as the tensioned and conflicted boundary of a group changes’ (Hartley and Potts 2014, 208). It is an argument for which culture is the very sine qua non of social life, knowledge and economic development. Yet the practice through which this agency is supposed to be exercised – story-telling – must somehow conjure groups out of nothing. A story can never assume a ‘we’ group or deme; it must create it in the telling.

It is important to distinguish here between Hartley’s own practice and the positions that cultural science commit him to. In his writing, he continues the practice of a lifetime in the humanities, in which groups are definitely not conjured out of nothing. To cite again his description of this practice in How We Use Stories, it is one of ‘copious, continuing and comparative reading’, a dedicated sympathetic engagement with the inner life of ‘wedoms’ or collectives over extended periods of time. The problem is that cultural science has no way of accounting for this practice, leaving it to fall back on a romantic invocation of a pure creative principle. In taking the deme as their primary unit of analysis, Hartley and Potts rule out an appeal to individual genius, but the deme itself comes to perform a similar function. The creative miracle is seen to occur in those demes least weighed by the traditions from which Hartley draws his own story-telling resources, the paradigm being the digital media lives of children – and again particularly girls. The respectful listening to such groups in Hartley’s work on television begins to look here more like an attempt to frame them as oracles.

The weakness of this position leaves humanities-based perspectives vulnerable to a continued subordination to economic modes of interpretation. While culture is supposed to be the very basis of group formation, cultural science draws its most robust and well-theorized accounts of this process not from the humanities but from its post-Hayekian strand. The main examples here are an appeal to James Buchanan’s theorization of ‘clubs’ and Elinor Ostrom’s idea of the ‘commons’ (Hartley 2020, 10). While the latter share with the humanities in their interest in groups, they start from a very different theoretical position: the assumption, in short, of homo oeconomicus. Group belonging is understood not in terms of ‘the play of difference among texts, discourses, representations, images, ideas, fantasies and fictions’ (to return to Hartley’s gloss of the humanities), but as an outcome of rational calculations of self-interest by relatively alienated actors engaging in social transactions.

Is there meaning in cybernetic systems?

The second challenge in Hartley’s embrace of the evolutionary and complexity sciences is in sustaining an idea of a field in which cultural exchange can occur – an idea, that is, of a ‘shared, imagined meaningful universe’ of the kind he associated with broadcasting. It is a challenge that becomes most pressing in the third book in the cultural science trilogy, The Digital Semiosphere, co-authored with Indrek Ibrus and Maarja Ojaama. The book extends the project of Cultural Science, considering the intellectual recalibration required to pivot from centre-periphery formations to distributed systems. The difference is that The Digital Semiosphere adopts a macro-level focus. It is concerned not with group formation at the local level but with ‘globalization in the digital era’ (Hartley, Ibrus, and Ojamaa 2021, 6). The project is, again, enormously ambitious. The prize, if it could be pulled off, is that cultural scholarship may ‘gain a seat at the table of global deliberations about the digital future’ (8). The danger, if it cannot, is that such scholarship might volatilize and vaporize.

The key question here is how the space of cultural exchange is conceived. On the face of it, as suggested by the title, The Digital Semiosphere adopts a centre-periphery conceptual schema. The space of semiosis or meaning making is taken to be spherical, implying an inner core and and outer edge. Yet Hartley et al push constantly at the limits of this conceptualization, at the same time weaving in intellectual threads in which centre-periphery schemas appear to be specifically denied. At the heart of this tension is the ‘digital’:

By ‘digital’ we mean the constellation of phenomena that now dominate the information or knowledge society, where converged and integrated electronics, telecommunications, broadcasting, computation, the internet, automation and artificial intelligence drive the military, the economy, politics and mediated culture at personal, corporate and international scale. (Hartley, Ibrus, and Ojamaa 2021, 7)

There is no suggestion here that globalization is even. The emerging terrain may indeed be more unequal than the ones preceding it. The point is rather that it is ‘converged’ and ‘integrated’. The lives of the poor, no less than the rich, are coming to be governed by artificial intelligence, predictive algorithms, risk modelling and biometrics (Hartley, Ibrus, and Ojamaa 2021, 7). It is this constant interactivity within the system – an interactivity that brings every point into an immediate relation with every other – that changes the way we need to understand it. The centre-periphery framework is collapsed, requiring the space of interaction to be completely reconceived.

The stakes in centre-periphery schemas can, again, be best understood by considering where they have come from. The intellectual architecture of The Digital Semiosphere is borrowed from Russian-Soviet thinkers and has a certain imperial provenance. This might seem an odd claim to make in relation to the figure adopted by Hartley and his co-authors as their main guide and inspiration: the semiotician, cultural historian and polymath Yuri Lotman. Lotman, who coined the term ‘semiosphere’, was clearly marginalized within the Soviet system. While he was educated at Leningrad State University, the oldest and most prestigious major Russian university, he was excluded from positions there by the fact of being Jewish, ending up on the fringes at Tartu in Estonia. His marginality within the system does not mean, however, that he was not significantly formed by it. The more general conceptualization of ‘spheres’ was taken from Vladimir Vernadsky, son of a Russian imperial economist, assistant minister for education in the post-1917 period and a much more centrally located figure (Josephson et al. 2013, 54–55).

It is no surprise that Hartley should find Lotman’s work appealing. It could be seen as an extended elaboration of the inspiration he (Hartley) had found earlier in Volosinov’s idea of ‘ideological colloquy of large scale’ – an idea that emerged from the same Russian-Soviet gene pool. In this perspective, Lotman performs for empire what Hartley had attempted for broadcasting – embracing the bold imagining of collectives enabled by centre-periphery formations, while resisting their tendency to become vehicles for authoritarianism. It is hard to believe that Lotman could have framed an object with the universalizing scope of the ‘semiosphere’ without having acquired the expansive habit of mind of the Russian-Soviet imperial system. Yet there is nothing in Lotman that aligns with its Stalinist tendencies and, for reasons common to unauthorized figures, he studiously abstracted from political specifics. In doing so, he developed an attractive general model for thinking within centre-periphery formations – a model that takes advantage of their best potentials while avoiding or rejecting their worst.

But Hartley, Ibrus and Ojaama also want to make of Lotman something more than this. They attempt to construct a ‘digital Lotman’ (5) that takes us beyond centre-periphery schemas, offering a guide to our digital globalized future. Licence for this is found in the fact that Lotman became interested during the latter part of his career in cybernetic systems theory, through the work of Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby. This was crucial, according to Hartley et al. (2021, 113), to the development of his theoretical perspective, allowing him ‘to an extent, to detach it from linguistics and thence to generalize and apply it to all communications and forms of information and meaning-processing’. At this point, the Vernadskyan architecture of spheres also recedes, as Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere is supplied with a very different filiation in the form of Ilya Prigogine’s idea of ‘dissipative structures, self-organization and irreversibility’ (113). The latter recognizes no centre-periphery relations, seeking to account for change in terms only of autopoiesis or the reconfiguration of elements within complex networks.

Digital Lotman could be seen as a trompe l’oeil hybrid at the macro level that complements the one developed at the micro level in Cultural Science. It is a construction, again, that reserves a place for the humanities in the analysis of network media. In so far as digital Lotman is still Lotman – the semiotician, the literary intellectual, the classically-trained scholar of European cultural history – it remains connected with deep traditions in the humanities. Yet it is at the same time digital, able to speak fluently in the technical languages of cybernetic systems, networks, artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making. To put it in slightly different terms, digital Lotman is a figure that binds together the meaningful and informational. In Hartley, Ibrus and Ojaama’s formulation just cited, communication in general is glossed as ‘forms of information and meaning-processing’. The ‘and’ here is clearly intended as strongly conjunctive, assisted by the fact that ‘meaning’ has already been hyphenated with ‘processing’. Meaning and information are effectively identified.

There is a question again, however, about just how stable such a hybrid can be. One way of approaching this question is to ask whether meaning is possible without a dialogic structure and, if not, whether such a structure is thinkable without addresser-addressee, centre-periphery relations. There is much in Lotman himself to suggest that the answer in both cases is ‘no’. In Universe of the Mind, he argues that ‘the dialogic situation, precedes both real dialogue and even the existence of a language in which to conduct it: the semiotic situation precedes the instruments of semiosis’ (Lotman 1990, 143). The example he provides is the ‘language of smiles’ between a mother and her breast-feeding infant. Each of the participants in this exchange tries to use the other’s language: ‘the mother makes sounds like the baby’s burbling … the baby’s facial expressions … show that he or she is also imitating the mother’s expressions, i.e. is trying to adopt her language’ (144). The generation of meaning here, as in all semiosis for Lotman, is grounded in asymmetrical relations that have an emotional as well as a merely instrumental dimension.

The significance of this structure is also clear at the macro level. In thinking about European cultural history, Lotman is fascinated by the way different places have at times become cultural ‘transmitters’ and others ‘receivers’. An example of the former is Italy during the Renaissance which

became like a volcano spewing out a great diversity of texts which flooded the cultural oikumene of the West … Italian became the language of the courts and the dandies, of fashion and of diplomacy. It was spoken in the alcoves of ladies and the cabinets of cardinals. Italy supplied Europe with artists and craftsmen, bankers, jewellers, lawyers, cardinals and royal favourites. (Lotman 1990, 145)

It is true that Lotman sees cultures in structural terms, as textual assemblages or ‘meaning-generating mechanisms’, giving his analysis a certain consistency with systems theory. This only means, however, that the structure of address is between cultures rather than between individuals or groups. The continued assumption of a centre-periphery schema is explicit: ‘Asymmetry is apparent in the relationship between the centre of the semiosphere and its periphery’ (127).

If such asymmetry is indeed a condition of meaning – a proposition shared by Hartley in associating a ‘shared, imagined meaningful universe’ with the centre-periphery structure of broadcasting – then the semiotic and the cybernetic might best be represented as opposite ends of a spectrum. While there may be a continuum between them, with various shades of ‘digital Lotman’ along the way, the greater the movement in the direction of the cybernetic, the more the semiotic recedes. If Lotman – that is non-digital Lotman – is a magisterial voice in analysing patterns of cultural transmission in Europe during the Renaissance, it is a voice that is less and less relevant the more one travels towards a digital, networked, cybernetic system. At the endpoint on the continuum, the field would appear to be given over entirely to data scientists, market analysts, AI developers and systems engineers. It is hard to see that the humanities scholar could have anything left to say.

Imagined non-communities

This may appear simply to confirm what some might have suspected from the outset – that Hartley’s Icarian experiment has been a mistake, that cultural studies would be better advised to keep a critical distance from the digital, the cybernetic, the marketized. But the conclusion only follows if the latter are accepted simply as veridical, phenomena to be seen exclusively through the lens of ‘science’. The frontier of distributed systems would have to be thought of, in that case, as a blank facade, offering nothing with which a cultural perspective might engage. The only option in keeping a place for such a perspective would be the defensive approach more associated with the traditional humanities, of limiting engagement with the digital, renouncing the market and fortifying defences around print cultures and remaining holdouts of the Reithian paradigm in broadcasting.

The assumption of the veridical is admittedly one that Hartley himself makes, but it is anomalous in the wider context of his work. It is an assumption he would never allow for the objects of the behavioural sciences (‘subjects’, ‘stimuli’, ‘responses’ etc) which, as we have seen, are rigorously held to account for their imaginative dimension and the framing of social relations it implies. It is an assumption that is also at odds with the role ascribed to storytelling by cultural science. This role is supposed to be fundamental, standing at the base of all human affairs. Yet the evolutionary and complexity sciences are seen, implicitly, as standing outside the space of storytelling, providing a master discourse through which storytelling is accounted for. While the intention may be the opposite, the effect is to entrench the Cindarella status of culture. Culture provides the stories; science speaks for stories, telling us why they matter in the ‘real world’.

But there appears nothing to prevent us from following the momentum of cultural science one step further than it seems prepared to go itself, considering the idea of distributed systems as itself a story. To take this step would not be to question that Hartley, Ibrus and Ojaama’s ‘digital constellation of phenomena’ – computation, the internet, automation, artificial intelligence and so on – is a ubiquitous feature of contemporary life. It would be only to suggest that the technologies in question should be seen in a similar way to the transmission towers, electromagnetic spectrum and cathode ray tubes of the broadcasting era – as technologies that mean little without the imaginative dimension that has accompanied them. This dimension would not of course be that of the Reithian paradigm, of imagined communities, but one that has formed in critical counterpoint, of imagined non-communities – a paradigm we might dub Hayekian. Notwithstanding its resistance to attributions of meaning, the paradigm itself is clearly meaningful, having taken form within a clearly identifiable dialogic structure and locus of social action.

Why does Hartley not take this step? An obvious answer would be that his critical formation so clearly precedes his engagement with digital media. It would be unfair to suggest that his shift in focus from broadcast media to distributed systems has been merely reactive, the latter providing a shallow foil to older, more established objects of interest. The pivot has produced a remarkable late career engagement with economics, evolutionary sciences, digital networks and cybernetic systems. One of the pleasures of Hartley’s writing has always been its irrepressible epistemophilia – a sheer ‘love of knowing’ (Hartley 1999, 231). The point would only be that the organizing animus of the work has remained largely unchanged over forty years. It is one that formed in response to the centre-periphery imaginings associated with a distinctive late twentieth century convergence of print and broadcast media and institutional residues of empire. The idea of distributed systems has figured in this context more for the leverage it has provided over these imaginings than as an imaginative construction of its own.

The opening provided by cultural science is nevertheless there. The interest of this opening is quite different from heavily armed critiques of neoliberalism. Cultural science is distinguished by a kind of intimacy with the idea of distributed systems. The paradox of this intimacy is that it activates powers over the latter that are not available from a greater distance – the discovery, particularly, of a potential to subvert from within. The effect is to release us from the necessitarianism that has been associated over the last half century with markets, networks and decentralized systems – one first asserted from the right, as in Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that ‘there is no alternative’, but in recent years more often echoed from the left, in a grim determinism of market interests and ‘platform capitalism’. What might be done with this freedom is an open question. But humans have been reinventing the forms of their common life for tens of thousands of years (Graeber and Wengrow 2021). So long as the planet remains habitable, we can assume they will continue to do so.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).