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38 Charles Ess

obscured, and hegemonic notions of “culture” are presented as
“shared” by all cultural members. (76)

To correct these deficits, Moon argues for taking up critical and feminist per-
spectives which would “allow intercultural communication scholars to em-
ploy more sophisticated and politicized analyses of cultural identity in
general and to examine how these identities are constructed in communica-
tion, as well as how they affect communication” (76). Similarly, Martin and
Flores (1998), in their overview of contemporary paradigms in communica-
tion theory concerning culture and communication, call for an “interparadig-
matic dialogue” to further this study—one that, echoing Moon, calls for the
insights of postmodern and feminist scholarship, as well as critical theory.
The essays collected here are partial responses to these calls for additional
understandings of culture, not only within the postmodernist and feminist
frames, but other frames as well (including Habermas, hermeneutics, and
others).
Pasquali (1985) helpfully explores the possibility of a “philosophy of
culture” appropriate to especially mass communication technologies (i.e., as
distinct in important ways from CMC technologies). For other discussions of
culture, including its relation to language, see Singer (1987), Rosengrun
(1994), and Garcea (1998).
24. For discussion of these and related issues in the debates be-
tween Habermas and Foucault, see Kelly (1994), d’Entrèves et al. (1997),
and Sawicki (1994).
25. For my own sketches of the complementarities between philoso-
phy and communication theory, see Ess (1996), and Ess (1999).

26. Consider, for example, Barlow’s definition of cyberspace: “Cyber-
space consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like
a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is
both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.” This implicitly
Gnostic dualism, and its hostility towards the material world (which Barlow
refers to contemptuously as “meatspace,” in contrast with cyberspace) leads
to a complete rejection of the material order, including the legal system:
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement,
and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is
no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we
cannot obtain order by physical coercion. . . . We must declare our
virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to
consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves
across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will
create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. (1996)

In contrast with the cybergnostic enthusiasm for escaping body in virtual
community, others have also documented the role of embodiment in anchor-