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6 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
between ‘form and content’ such as ‘ritual’ versus transmission accounts
of communication. The understanding of communication as ‘ritual’ is a
radical paradigm shift from the hegemonic status of ‘transmission’ views
of communication, which all but saturated communication theory for the
most part of the twentieth century. Put simply, ritual views of communi-
cation contend that individuals exchange understandings not out of self-
interest nor for the accumulation of information but from a need for
communion, commonality and fraternity (see Carey, 1989). Following this
approach, transmission models of communication, on the other hand,
view communication as an instrumental act – the sending and receiving
of messages in ways which individual actors are largely in rational
control of.
The latter model of communication, which has in the main dominated
communication theory, has been critiqued, either implicitly or explicitly,
by philosophers of language who have attacked the identitarian, essen-
tialist, ‘logocentric’ and ‘phonocentric’ underpinnings of such a model
(see Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Kristeva, Lacan). The project of Jacques Derrida,
for example, has been to criticize the idea that language affords a stable
stock of meanings for which it is the job of any particular communication
to convey. To characterize communication in this way, as ‘a transmission
charged with making pass, from one subject to another, the identity of a signified
object’ (Derrida, 1981: 23), is to make all kinds of metaphysical investments
in the derivation of meaning and the privileging of communication agents
as rational, autonomous selves. These assumptions are radically criticized
by Derrida and we will return to them in trying to understand the way in
which he claims they are tied to variations in contexts of communication.
At the same time it will be possible to see how Derrida’s work is also
celebratory of a second media age, because the latter’s apparent open-
endedness unmasks the ‘metaphysics of presence’ that is able to operate
in the more restricted (but never totally) contextual setting of broadcast
forms of communication.
However, for the most part, whilst philosophical ‘deconstructions’ of
essentialism are instructive, they have also, it is argued, been overstated.
Instead of only examining the way meaning works within texts, this book
will focus on how technological infrastructures of communication also
need to be examined for an understanding of forms of connection, social
integration and community. These material changes, it is argued, also
offer a challenge to essentialism, and make it harder to sustain. Hence the
need for communication theory which can not only challenge the ‘media
studies’ paradigm, but also show how it is coming to be recast. At the
same time, however, media studies, as a theoretical domain concerning
itself with the first media age and as harbinger of ‘content analysis’,
remains relevant to the fact that broadcast and the nature of spectacle in
modern society are integral to social organization in advanced capitalist
societies.