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Abstract
This essay argues for the need to rethink dialectics as part of our understanding of power relations, and as a fundamental component of critical/cultural approaches in Communication Studies. As a first step in this project, I will critique the main contributions by Michel Foucault, highlighting his influential theorization of discourse, knowledge and power as intrinsically related constructs, as well as how this perspective has enabled the revisiting of other keywords in critical theory—such as Gramsci's “hegemony.” I will then (re)introduce the notion of dialectics as theorized in the work of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams. My goal is to emphasize underestimated aspects of these authors' contributions that, in my opinion, may help us construct alternative starting points for a critical/cultural project in communication scholarship and, more specifically, for a theory of power that can create the space needed to account for people's (in)capability to overcome adverse social conditions.
The author would like to thank Marco Briziarelli and the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this work. A previous version of this manuscript was presented as the top paper in the Communication Theory and Research Interest Group at the Western States Communication Association annual meeting in February, 2012.
The author would like to thank Marco Briziarelli and the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this work. A previous version of this manuscript was presented as the top paper in the Communication Theory and Research Interest Group at the Western States Communication Association annual meeting in February, 2012.
Notes
[1] Raymond Williams, “Communications and Community,” in Resources of Hope, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1961), 19–31.
[2] Admittedly, this is a very broad term that encompasses many different domains of study; see Kent A. Ono, “Critical/cultural approaches to communication,” in 21st century communication: A reference handbook, ed. William. F. Eadie (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009), 74–81. In this paper, I use the term critical/cultural studies to refer to a current generation of scholars, mostly U.S. based, whose work is often featured in the Division of the National Communication Association called Critical and Cultural Studies, as well as in the journal sponsored by this same Association: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
[3] See Rona Tamiko Halualani, S. Lily Mendoza, and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, “‘Critical’ Junctures in Intercultural Communication Studies: A review.” The Review of Communication 9 (2009): 17–35; Raymie McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111; Ono, 2009; Kent A. Ono, “Critical: A Finer Edge.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8 (2011): 93–96.
[4] Rona Tamiko Halaulani and Thomas K. Nakayama, “Critical Intercultural Communication Studies: At a Crossroads,” in The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, eds. Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halaulani (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 1–16
[5] Raymond Williams, “Hegemony and the Selective Tradition,” in Language Authority and Criticism: Readings on the School Textbook, eds. Suzanne de Castell, Allan Luke, & Carmen Luke (London: Falmer, 1989), 56–60.
[6] Dana L. Cloud, “Change Happens: Materialist Dialectics and Communication Studies,” in Marxism and Communication Studies: The Point is to Change it, eds. Lee Artz, Steve Macek, and Dana L. Cloud (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2006), 54.
[7] Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra, “(Un)hinging Whiteness.” International and Intercultural Communication Annual 29 (2006): 166–92.
[8] James Hay, “Introduction.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10 (2013): 1–9.
[9] Because of my specific interests as well as my limited space, my references will be limited to two main areas in communication research: rhetoric and intercultural communication.
[10] Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse as an Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric.” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141–63, 141–42.
[11] See for example, Ronald W. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15 (1998): 21–41; Ronald W. Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2004): 188–206. J. L. Jackson, Real Black. Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke, 2006)
[12] See, for example, Ono, 2009.
[13] Kirby Moss, The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege. (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2003); John Preston, Whiteness and Class in Education (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007); Simon Springer, “Neoliberalism as Discourse. Between Foucauldian Political Economy and Marxian Postructuralism.” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (2012): 133–47.
[14] Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Raymie E. McKerrow, “Foucault's Relationship to Rhetoric” Review of Communication 11 (2011): 253–71.
[15] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, [1969] 1972); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1973[1966]); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1977[1975]).
[16] Mark Philp,“Michel Foucault,” in The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, ed. Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 65–81, 68
[17] In Philp, 1985, 69; See also Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1986.
[18] Philp, 1985.
[19] Michel Foucault, The history of Sexuality: An Introduction (London: Penguin, 1981).
[20] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980), 78–108.
[21] Foucault, 1980, 198.
[22] In Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, 185.
[23] Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” PRAXIS International, 3 (1981): 272–87.
[24] See Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, 10. For a summary of implications in the area of rhetorical studies, as well as responses to these criticisms, see Dana L. Cloud, “Materiality of Discourse,” in Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, eds. Steven W. Littlejohn and Karen A. Foss (London: Sage, 2009).
[25] Cloud, 1994, 143.
[26] William Riordan, “Prolegomena to Sartre's Materialist Dialectic: Towards a Recovery of the Subject” (unpublished manuscript, University of Colorado, 1988), 98.
[27] Terry Threadhold, Feminist Poetics: Poiesis, Performance, Histories (London: Routledge, 1997), 60–70.
[28] Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, 212.
[29] Fraser (1981, 273; 281)
[30] Kerry H. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of Existential Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 301.
[31] Fraser, 1981, 280.
[32] See, for example, Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); John M. Sloop, “‘A Van with a Bar and a Bed’: Ritualized Gender Norms in the John/Joan Case,” Text and Performance Quarterly 20, 2000: 130–50.
[33] See, for example, Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review 100 (1976): 5–78.
[34] Burnham, 1991; Condit, 1996; Cox, 1994; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Zompetti, 1997, 2008); Peter Burnham, “Neo Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order,” Capital & Class 45 (1991): 73–93; Celeste Condit, “Hegemony, Concordance and Capitalism: Reply to Cloud,” Critical studies in Mass Communication, 13 (1996): 382–84; Robert W. Cox, “Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method,” Millennium. Journal of International Studies 12 (1983): 162–75. Joseph Zompetti, “Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Economy,” Argumentation and Advocacy (New York, NY: American Forensic Association, 2008); Joseph Zompetti, “Toward a Gramscian Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 61 (1997): 66–86; Nicholas Thoburn, “Patterns of Production: Cultural Studies after Hegemony,” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007): 79–94. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1986).
[35] Arrighi, 1994; Aune, 2004; Cloud, 1994, 1996; Taylor, 1996). Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso, 1994); James A. Aune, “An Historical Materialist Theory of Rhetoric,” American Communication Journal 6 (2004): 1–17; Dana L. Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in “Oprah” Winfrey's Rags-to-Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 13 (1996): 115–37; Peter J. Taylor, The Way the Modern World Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1996).
[36] Fraser, 1987, 271.
[37] See Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: Verso, 1977); Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
[38] Stuart Hall, “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 5 (1986): 2–24, 15. See, for example, Laclau and Mouffe, 1985. In communication, see Condit's notion of “social concord,” which she defines as “the active or passive acceptance of a given social policy or political framework as the best that can be negotiated under the given conditions,” arguing for need to emphasize the active and voluntary role that people play in accommodating—together with the rest of political entities—into a “best possible concord” that can incorporate the interests of a wide variety of groups. Condit, 1994, 1996; Celeste Condit, “Clouding the Issues? The Ideal and the Material in Human Communication,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (1997): 197–200.
[39] Richard Johnson, “Post-hegemony?: I Don't Think So,” Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007): 95–110, 98. See also Cloud's response to Condit's arguments, where she offers a critique of a “discourse-centered appropriation of Gramsci,” arguing for the need to pay attention to “the limits of compromises within the available conditions,” and the ways in which “a social order remains stable by generating consent to its parameters through the production and distribution of ideological texts that define social reality for the majority of the people.” Cloud, 1994; 1996: 118.
[40] Jackson, 2005; Johnson, 2003; Helene A. Shugart, “Crossing Over: Hybridity and Hegemony in the Popular Media,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2007): 115–41.
[41] Halaulani and Nakayama, 2010, 9.
[42] Terry Eagleton, After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 16.
[43] Antonio Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1971), 190.
[44] Gramsci, 1971, 190.
[45] Anderson, 1976.
[46] Hall, 1986.
[47] David Forgacs, The Antonio Gramsci Reader (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000), 12, emphasis in original.
[48] Gramsci, 1971, 193; 196.
[49] W. John Morgan, “Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams: Workers, Intellectuals and Adult Education,” Convergence 29 (1996): 61–74, 65.
[50] Gramsci, 1971, 202; 209.
[51] See Aune, 1994.
[52] Lawrence Grossberg, “Strategies of Marxist Cultural Inerpretation,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 392–421.
[53] See Aune, 1994, 95; 115.
[54] See Dana L. Cloud, “The Point is to Change It: Reflections on Academics and Activism,” in Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, eds. Jong-Hwa Lee & Seth Kahn (London: Troubador Press, 2010), 66.
[55] See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 45.
[56] See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 83.
[57] See Williams, 1977, 109.
[58] Williams, 1977, 110–13, my emphasis.
[59] Williams, 1977, 5; 109.
[60] Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso. 1976).
[61] See John Higgins, Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (London: Routledge, 1999).
[62] Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Columbia University Press, 1961), xi
[63] Paul Jones, Raymond Williams's Sociology of Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 47.
[64] Williams, 1961, 55.
[65] Williams, 1961, 56.
[66] See Aune, 1994.
[67] Williams, 1961, 99.
[68] Jere Paul Surber, Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 240.
[69] Larry Grossberg, “Strategies of Marxist Cultural Interpretation,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 392–421, 401.
[70] Raymond Williams, “Notes on Marxism in Britain since 1945,” New Left Review 100 (1976): 81–94, 88.
[71] See Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram, and Estella Tincknell, The Practice of Cultural Studies (London: SAGE, 2004), 146.
[72] Ono, 2009; see also Susana Martínez Guillem and Marco Briziarelli, “We Want Your Success! Hegemony, Materiality, and Latino in America,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 29 (2012): 292–312; Janice Peck, “Why We Shouldn't Be Bored with the Political Economy Versus Cultural Studies Debate,” Cultural Critique 64 (2006): 92–126.
[73] Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958).
[74] See Ono, 2009, for a comprehensive review of critical contributions of scholars working away from the Marxist and/or European frameworks.
[75] See Ben Agger, Cultural Studies as Critical Theory (London: The Falmer Press, 1992).
[76] Peter McLaren, “Multiculturalism and the Postmodern Critique: Towards a Pedagogy of Resistance and Transformation,” Cultural Studies 7 (1993): 118–46, 207.
[77] In Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: a Theory for Women?,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (Routledge: London, 1990), 173.
[78] Lillie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 24.
[79] Threadhold, 1997, 553.
[80] Raymond Williams, “The Future of Cultural Studies,” in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1986).