Page 149 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 140
assumption of capitalist modernity as a universal civilization, at least potentially. The
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(democratic) promotion of communication-as-ritual is the recipe for it.
Carey’s model, then, privileges the success, both theoretically and politically, of
communication-as-ritual. In so doing, he tends to collapse communication and culture, as
the title of his book, Communication as Culture, suggests. For Carey, communication
studies and cultural studies are one and the same thing. In this sense, Carey’s solution to
the crisis of the transmission paradigm is a conservative one in that it ends up securing
‘communication’, and thus communication theory, as a privileged theoretical object for
cultural studies.
I would suggest, however, that it is the failure of communication that we should
emphasize if we are to understand contemporary (postmodern) culture. That is to say,
what needs to be stressed is the fundamental uncertainty that necessarily goes with the
process of constructing a meaningful order, the fact that communicative practices do not
necessarily have to arrive at common meanings at all. This is to take seriously the radical
implications of semiotics as as theoretical starting point: if meaning is never given and
natural but always constructed and arbitrary, then it doesn’t make sense to prioritize
meaningfulness over meaninglessness. Or, to put it in the terminology of communication
theory: a radically semiotic perspective ultimately subverts the concern with (successful)
communication by foregrounding the idea of ‘no necessary correspondence’ between the
Sender’s and the Receiver’s meanings. That is to say, not success, but failure to
communicate should be considered ‘normal’ in a cultural universe where commonality of
meaning cannot be taken for granted.
If meaning is not an inherent property of the message, then the Sender is no longer the
sole creator of meaning. If the Sender’s intended message doesn’t ‘get across’, this is not
a ‘failure in communications’ resulting from unfortunate ‘noise’ or the Receiver’s
misinterpretation or misunderstanding, but because the Receiver’s active participation in
the construction of meaning doesn’t take place in the same ritual order as the Sender’s.
And even when there is some correspondence in meanings constructed on both sides,
such correspondence is not natural but is itself constructed, the product of a particular
articulation, through the imposition of limits and constraints to the openness of semiosis
in the form of ‘preferred readings’, between the moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’
(see Hall 1980a). That is to say, it is precisely the existence, if any, of correspondence
and commonality of meaning, not its absence, which needs to be accounted for. Jean
Baudrillard has stated the import of this inversion quite provocatively:

[M]eaning […] is only an ambiguous and inconsequential accident, an
effect due to ideal convergence of a perspective space at any given
moment (History, Power, etc.) and which, moreover, has only ever really
concerned a tiny fraction and superficial layer of our ‘societies’.
(Baudrillard 1983:11)

What we have here is a complete inversion of the preoccupations of communication
theory, of meaningful human interaction as the basis for the social—or, for that matter,
for the global village. As I will try to show below, this theoretical inversion, which is one
of the fundamental tenets of poststructuralist theorizing, allows us to understand the
global village not as a representation of a finished, universalized capitalist modernity