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ABSTRACT
Moral conflict theory explains deep moral differences and patterns of communication commonly associated with such conflicts. Moral conflict is defined as a struggle between humans, but we argue that the objects of contention in such intractable conflicts, including texts, physical objects, and places, assume a force of their own. We use actor–network theory to help explain this eventuality and to expand our understanding of moral conflict. Combining actor–network theory literature with moral conflict theory literature helps us understand the complexity of moral orders and the networks of actors involved in the construction of moral conflict. This expansion of literature also allows us to conceive of more possibilities for transcendent discourse.
Notes
1 W. Barnett Pearce and Stephen W. Littlejohn, Moral Conflict: When Social Worlds Collide (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997); Stephen W. Littlejohn and Kristen L. Cole, “Moral Conflict and Transcendent Communication,” in The SAGE Handbook of Conflict Communication, ed. John G. Oetzel and Stella Ting-Toomey (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 585–608.
2 Kristen L. Cole, “Pornography, Censorship, and Public Sex: Exploring Feminist and Queer Perspectives of (Public) Pornography through the Case of Pornotopia,” Porn Studies 1, no. 3 (2014): 243–57; Littlejohn and Cole, “Moral Conflict and Transcendent Communication.”
3 See Peter T. Coleman, “Characteristics of Protracted, Intractable Conflict: Towards the Development of a Meta-Framework–I,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 9, no. 1 (2003): 1–37; Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall, Grasping the Nettle: Analyzing Cases of Intractable Conflict (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 2005); Nola J. Heidlebaugh, Judgement, Rhetoric, and the Problem of Incommensurability (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Louis Kriesberg, Terrell A. Northrup, and Stuart J. Thorson, Intractable Conflicts and Their Transformation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989); John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1988); Laurence H. Tribe, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (New York: Norton, 1990); Robin R. Vallacher et al., “Rethinking Intractable Conflict: The Perspective of Dynamical Systems,” American Psychologist 65, no. 4 (2010): 262–78.
4 W. Barnett Pearce, Communication and the Human Condition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989); Making Social Worlds: A Communication Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
5 W. Barnett Pearce, Stephen W. Littlejohn, and Alison Alexander, “The New Christian Right and the Humanist Response: Reciprocated Diatribe,” Communication Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1987): 171–92; “The Quixotic Quest for Civility: Patterns of Interaction between the New Christian Right and Secular Humanists,” in Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered: Religion and the Political Order, ed. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe (New York: Paragon, 1989), 152–77; Stephen W. Littlejohn, Jonathan Shailor, and W. Barnett Pearce, “The Deep Structure of Reality in Mediation,” in New Directions in Mediation: Communication Research and Perspectives, ed. Joseph P. Folger and Tricia S. Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 67–83; Pearce and Littlejohn, Moral Conflict.
6 Stephen W. Littlejohn, “The Transcendent Communication Project: Searching for a Praxis of Dialogue,” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2004): 337–60; Pearce and Littlejohn, Moral Conflict.
7 Richard Chasin et al., “From Diatribe to Dialogue on Divisive Public Issues: Approaches Drawn from Family Therapy,” Mediation Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1996): 323–44; Littlejohn, “The Transcendent Communication Project”; “Moral Conflict, Communication, and the Management of Difference,” in The Coordinated Management of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of W. Barnett Pearce, ed. Stephen W. Littlejohn and Sheila McNamee (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 183–98; Littlejohn and Cole, “Moral Conflict and Transcendent Communication”; Stephen W. Littlejohn and Kathy Domenici, Engaging Communication in Conflict: Systemic Practice (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001); Carmen Lowry and Stephen W. Littlejohn, “Dialogue and the Discourse of Peacebuilding in Maluku, Indonesia,” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2006): 409–26; W. Barnett Pearce and Kimberly A. Pearce, “Combining Passions and Abilities: Toward Dialogic Virtuosity,” Southern Communication Journal 65, no. 2–3 (2000): 161–75; Linda L. Putnam, “Communication as Changing the Negotiation Game,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 38, no. 4 (2010): 325–35.
8 Littlejohn, “The Transcendent Communication Project.”
9 James R. Taylor, “Coorientation: A Conceptual Framework,” in Communication as Organizing: Empirical and Theoretical Explorations in the Dynamic of Text and Conversation, ed. François Cooren, James R. Taylor, and Elizabeth J. Van Every (London: Routledge, 2006), 146.
10 Ibid., 149, 146.
11 George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938).
12 Ibid., xxvii.
13 See Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993).
14 Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Methuen, 1982).
15 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9.
16 For an overview of theoretical approaches to material culture, see Arthur Asa Berger, What Objects Mean: An Introduction to Material Culture (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2009).
17 Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 17–42.
18 Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites, eds., “Introduction,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 3.
19 See Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 21–41; Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, eds., Rhetorical Bodies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, eds., Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).
20 Brenton J. Malin, “Communicating with Objects: Ontology, Object-Orientations, and the Politics of Communication,” Communication Theory 26, no. 3 (2016): 236–54.
21 See Michel Callon, “Struggles and Negotiations to Define What Is Problematic and What Is Not: The Socio-Logic of Translation,” in The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, ed. Karin D. Knorr, Roger Krohn, and Richard Whitley (Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981), 197–220; “The Sociology of an Actor–Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle,” in Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the Real World, ed. Michel Callon, John Law, and Arie Rip (London: Macmillan, 1986), 19–34; “Actor–Network Theory—The Market Test,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John Hassard (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 181–95; Bruno Latour, “On Actor–Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996): 369–81; Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network–Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Law, “Notes on the Theory of Actor Network: Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity,” Systemic Practice and Action Research 5, no. 4 (1992): 379–93; Jordynn Jack, “Object Lessons: Recent Work in the Rhetoric of Science,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 2 (2010): 209–16; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Graham Harman, Tool-being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002); Levi Bryant, Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
22 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne, Australia: Re.press, 2009).
23 See François Cooren and James R. Taylor, “Organization as an Effect of Mediation: Redefining the Link between Organization and Communication,” Communication Theory 7, no. 3 (1997): 219–60; James R. Taylor and Elizabeth J. Van Every, The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its Site and Surface (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000); Daniel Robichaud and François Cooren, eds., Organization and Organizing: Materiality, Agency, and Discourse (London: Routledge, 2013); Anna Turnage, “Electronic Discourse, Agency, and Organizational Change at Enron Corporation,” Western Journal of Communication 80, no. 2 (2016): 204–19; Laurie E. Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015); Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
24 Cassandra S. Crawford, “Actor Network Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Social Theory, ed. George Ritzer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 2.
25 Taylor and Van Every, The Emergent Organization.
26 Ibid., 157.
27 Ibid., x.
28 Latour, Reassembling the Social.
29 Law, “Notes on the Theory of Actor Network,” 380.
30 Taylor and Van Every, The Emergent Organization, 163.
31 Bruno Latour, “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer,” Social Problems 35, no. 3 (1988): 298–310.
32 Law, “Notes on the Theory of Actor Network,” 384.
33 Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric, xiv.
34 Taylor, “Coorientation.”
35 James R. Taylor and Daniel Robichaud, “Finding the Organization in the Communication: Discourse as Action and Sensemaking,” Organization 11, no. 3 (2004): 397. See also Theodore M. Newcomb, “An Approach to the Study of Communicative Acts,” Psychological Review 60, no. 6 (1953): 393–404.
36 Taylor, “Coorientation”; “Organizational Co-Orientation Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, ed. Stephen W. Littlejohn and Karen A. Foss (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009), 709–13.
37 Taylor, “Coorientation,” 149.
38 Taylor and Robichaud, “Finding the Organization in the Communication,” 397–98.
39 Taylor and Van Every, The Emergent Organization, 161.
40 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans”; Trevor J. Pinch, “Opening Black Boxes: Science, Technology and Society,” Social Studies of Science 22, no. 3 (1992): 487–510; Yuval P. Yonay, “When Black Boxes Clash: Competing Ideas of What Science Is in Economics, 1924–39,” Social Studies of Science 24, no. 1 (1994): 39–80; Richard D. Besel, “Opening the ‘Black Box’ of Climate Change Science: Actor–Network Theory and Rhetorical Practice in Scientific Discourse,” Southern Communication Journal 76, no. 2 (2011): 120–36; Turnage, “Electronic Discourse, Agency, and Organizational Change at Enron Corporation.”
41 Latour, Science in Action, 3.
42 Yonay, “When Black Boxes Clash,” 41.
43 Turnage, “Electronic Discourse, Agency, and Organizational Change at Enron Corporation,” 206.
44 Mike Michael, Constructing Identities: The Social, the Nonhuman, and Change (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 54.
45 Callon, “The Sociology of an Actor Network,” 24.
46 Ibid.
47 Crawford, “Actor Network Theory,” 2–3 original emphasis.
48 Target, “Continuing to Stand for Inclusivity,” A Bullseye View, April 19, 2016, https://corporate.target.com/article/2016/04/target-stands-inclusivity.
49 Alex Hider, “VIRAL VIDEO: Angry Mother Confronts Target About Transgender Bathroom Policy,” NBC26, May 17, 2016, http://www.nbc26.com/news/national/viral-video-angry-mother-confronts-target-about-transgender-bathroom-policy.
50 Anna Swartz, “This Trans Teen’s Selfie in a Target Bathroom Is Going Viral for the Best Reason,” Mic, May 3, 2016, https://mic.com/articles/142383/this-trans-teen-s-selfie-in-a-target-bathroom-is-going-viral-for-the-best-reason#.6MzW53ox7.
51 Ibid.
52 Karin Knorr-Cetina, “The Micro-Social Order: Towards a Reconception,” in Actions and Structures: Research Methods and Social Theory, ed. Nigel G. Fielding (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1988), 40.
53 Latour, Science in Action.
54 Knorr-Cetina, “The Micro-Social Order.”
55 Latour, “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans,” 310.
56 François Cooren and Gail T. Fairhurst, “Dislocation and Stabilization: How to Scale Up from Interactions to Organization,” in Building Theories of Organization: The Constitutive Role of Communication, ed. Linda L. Putnam and Anne M. Nicotera (London: Routledge, 2009), 131 original emphasis.
57 Ibid.
58 Latour, “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans,” 301.
59 Littlejohn, “The Transcendent Communication Project”; Stephen W. Littlejohn and Kathy Domenici, Communication, Conflict, and the Management of Difference (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2007).
60 Anne Fowler et al., “Talking with the Enemy,” The Boston Globe, January 28, 2001, http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/BostonGlobe.htm.
61 Lowry and Littlejohn, “Dialogue and the Discourse of Peacebuilding in Maluku, Indonesia.”
62 Crawford, “Actor Network Theory.”
63 Shawn J. Spano, Public Dialogue and Participatory Democracy: The Cupertino Community Project (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001).
64 Ernest T. Stringer, Action Research: A Handbook for Practitioners (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996).
65 See Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph P. Folger, The Promise of Mediation: Responding to Conflict through Empowerment and Recognition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994).
66 Spano, Public Dialogue and Participatory Democracy.