Lewis Gordon's Contribution to the Study of Communication: Beyond Disciplinary Decadence

Abstract

My interest in the present work is to consider how the study of communication necessarily entails an irreducible human presence that not only must be accounted for but which is the only adequate means through which we can assert knowledge and understanding concerning human beings and their inextricable interrelatedness with the social, cultural, and historical world. In developing this point, I feature the work of Lewis Gordon, particularly his notion of “disciplinary decadence,” as a way of suggesting how in the study of communication we can pursue a direct, demanding, and thoroughgoing account of the human presence in our work and therefore also develop a greater capacity to examine the human values conveyed and thusly produced in the immediacy of embodied experience. Through Gordon's work, we can see ways of studying communication that return us to the very vibrancy of life that sustains healthy human communities, both inside and outside of the academy.

Notes

¹My reference to the “communication discipline” is a reference to the work produced under the auspices of the National Communication Association, of which I have been a member for more than 20 years.

²Gordon's explication of “bad faith” as it is at work in antiblack racism and as evasions or denials of the presence and reality of humans other than oneself, is a major theme through his work (see Gordon, 1995a, 1995b, 1997, 2006).

³See, for example, bell hooks's (1990) discussion of how postmodern discourse functioned, in many ways, to usurp the contributions already made by scholars and intellectual leaders within communities of color.

⁴We recognize, of course, that this is one of Foucault's (1972) basic points illustrating how the continual production of critical work simply sustains the power and dominance conditions critiqued.

⁵Gordon is, of course, one of the most important Fanon scholars of our time, and his own work is deeply influenced by Fanon's.

⁶For a full exposition of this issue, see Martinez (2003, 2006).