Interview with Armand Mattelart

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Notes

1. Mattelart is referring to the non-alignment movement of the 1970s, the concerns of which have already been noted by scholars like Herbert Schiller in the 1960s (see The point was that there was largely a one-way flow of information and representations of the world's issues from the West into developing countries, and that “global news” had little to say about any place else. When Mattelart uses the term “information,” the reader should realize that term has several common meanings in French. It can mean information in English senses of the word, or a “piece of information”; however, it also commonly refers to the news or media. The French evening news is referred to as les infos (les informations). Thus, Mattelart does not mean “information” as it is used today in “information sciences” as data compressed into numbers (though that definition of information also exists in French).

2. Mattelart is here referring to Lazarsfeld's empirical sociological approach to communications, which led to a split between critical (Frankfurt School-inspired theories) communication and administrative (sometimes dubbed “positivist”) research. Administrative research, in Lazarsfeld's words, “is carried through in the service of some kind of administrative agency of public or private character” (P.F. Lazarsfeld. 1941. Remarks on administrative and critical communications research. Studies in Philosophy and Science 9: 3–16, in Sonia Livingstone. 2006. On the influence of “Personal Influence” on the study of audiences. London: LSE Research Online. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/1009, 6). Its new statistical methods and surveys not only served business and government clients, but were also funded by them. According to Sonia Livingstone, “for Lazarsfeld administrative research takes the client's problem as given while critical research asks whether the client may be part of the problem.” (On the influence of “Personal Influence” on the study of audiences. London: LSE Research Online. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/1009, 16).

3. Christian Metz. 1964. Le cinema.

4. The journal Communications was associated with the Center for the Study of Mass Communication at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, founded in 1960 by the sociologist Georges Friedmann, who brought Edgar Morin and Roland Barthes there to develop it.

5. El Mercurio was and still is the conservative newspaper in Chile. Partly financed by the CIA, it played a role in the 1973 coup d’État as a major propaganda vehicle against the Allende government.

6. Man the measurer. Adolphe Quételet was influential in several subjects but especially the burgeoning sciences of statistics and criminology. In demography, he originated the concept of “average man,” a concept that produces the idea of a category-specific representative person, through measured variables that adhere to a “normal distribution.” See Adolphe Quételet. 1968. A Treatise on Man. London: Burt Franklin.

7. Armand Mattelart. 1994. The Invention of Communication (trans. 1996).

8. Carey. 1983.

9. Carey. 1989. Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph.

10. Mattelart, Invention.

11. Mattelart, Invention.

12. Mattelart. 2000. Networking the World: 1794–2000.

13. Mattelart, Invention.

14. Mattelart, Invention.

15. Mattelart, Networking.

16. Raymond Williams. 1976. Television: Technology and Cultural Form.

17. Mattelart. 1994. Mapping World Communication.

18. Harold D. Lasswell. 1935. The Person: Subject and Object of Propaganda. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 179 (May).

19. Mattelart. 2011. Globalization of Surveillance.

20. This view is obviously counter to popular clichés that communication is the alternative to violence.

21. This is an allusion to the crowd theory literature linked with public relations and propaganda, from World War I to the present, today including work on “modulating affect” (Gustave Lebon. 1895/2003. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing; Bernays; Stuart Ewen. 1998. PR: A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books; Lasswell; Jayson Harsin. 2006. The Rumour Bomb. Southern Review 39, no. 1: 84–110; Harsin 2009; Harsin 2012); Brian Massumi. 2005. Fear (The Spectrum Said). Positions 13, no. 1: 31–48; Richard Grusin. 2010. Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11. New York: Palgrave; Tiziana Terranova. 2007. Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and Hegemony as Neopolitics. Theory, Culture and Society 24, no. 3: 125–45.

22. Mattelart, Globalization.

23. Foucault. 1975. Surveillir et punir [Discipline and Punish].

24. Mattelart, Invention.

25. See for example, Fernand Braudel. 1992. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. Vol. II: The Wheels of Commerce, ch. 2: “The Instruments of Exchange.” Berkeley: University of California Press.

26. Mattelart is no doubt thinking of Lefebvre's discussion of Foucault in De l'Etat (Henri Lefebvre. 1976–78. De l'Etat, 4 vols. Paris: UGE. 1976, 42; quoted in Stuart Elden. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre. London: Continuum, 239). Speaking of Madness and Civilization in particular, and calling it a “powerful book,” Lefebvre goes on to criticize Foucault: “However, this thesis does not get to the heart of the analysis. It mentions some phenomena but does not discover what is concealed in them … Michel Foucault has retrospectively illuminated a fragment of the historical past from present experience and state repression. A worthwhile step provided that we do not stop there. What characterizes the formation of capitalism in the West is not confinement, but putting people to work.”

27. Naomi Klein. 2007. Shock Doctrine.

28. Matellart is referring to the historic student-worker revolts of May 1968, which literally shut down the country's economy and caused then President DeGaulle to flee the presidential palace, fearing a revolution.

29. Mattelart, Invention, Networking.

30. Mattelart, Mapping.

31. Mark Granovetter. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6: 1360–80.

Jayson Harsin. 2010. That's Democratainment: Obama, Rumor Bombs, and Primary Definers. Flow 10, no. 8. www.flowtv.org/2010/10/thats-democratainment

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jayson Harsin

Jayson Harsin is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Communication at the American University of Paris. His work on media, circulation, rumor, politics, economic discourse and government have appeared in several journals and collections, including Communication, Culture & Critique and Cultural Studies

Jim Cohen

Jim Cohen is a professor of North American and Latin American studies at the University of Paris 3. He is the co-translator of six works by Armand Mattelart

Armand Mattelart

Armand Mattelart worked for many years at the universities of Paris 8 and Rennes 2 until his retirement in 2005. He is the author of several major works in media and communication theory, including (in English translation), World Communications: A History of Strategies and Ideas (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Networking the World, 1794–2000 (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and The Globalisation of Surveillance (Polity Press, 2010)