POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION:

A Theoretical Preface

By Majid Tehranian and Andrew Arno
School of Communications
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822

Majid Tehranian, Harvard PhD in political economy and government, is professor of international communication at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research. He can be reached at majid@hawaii.edu.

Andrew Arno, Harvard PhD in social anthropology, is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He can be reached at aarno@hawaii.edu.

ABSTRACT

Theories of the political economy of culture and communication have played an important role in the development of communication theory, but that role has not been fully recognized and explored. Marxist theories and critiques of communication research and practices represent only one highly visible example, but the political economy of culture and communication encompasses a number of distinct theories including Statism, Nationalism, Liberalism, Marxism, Totalitarianism, Communitarianism, and Postmodernism. Theoretical hybrids of these types have emerged in historical formations such as Nazism, Fascism, Islamism, and Thatcherism that have in turn set the agenda for research in communication studies. The other side of the coin is that communication theory itself has had a powerful impact on theories of political economy and culture in the work of such influential writers as Habermas, Foucault, Giddens, and Castells.

Robert Craig's essay on "Communication Theory as a Field" (1999) brings significant coherence to an incoherent field. It also provides an admirable departure from the stale empirical vs. critical discourses of the past (Gerbner & Siefert 1983). However, his map of communication theories has left out an important tradition that we consider central to our understanding of what is happening around us. We may call this theoretical tradition "political economy of culture and communication" (PECC). In Craig's citations, seminal PECC theorists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Harold Innis, Raymond Williams, Daniel Lerner, Dallas Smythe, Fritz Machlup, Daniel Bell, Paulo Freire, and Michelle Foucault are conspicuous by their absence. Although the contributions of PECC theorists cut across the ideological divide, they all focus on the interactions among economic, political, cultural, and media forces in history.

Situating PECC in General Communication Theory

The fact that PECC theories, despite their central importance to the field, are not squarely presented in Craig's otherwise comprehensive paradigm does not strike us as an oversight or mere lack of elaboration. We argue that the only partial or oblique presentation of PECC theories in Craig's metatheoretical scheme is structurally determined by the paradigm itself. Nevertheless, Craig's paradigm, because it powerfully links theory to practice and clearly foregrounds the issue of social construction, does provide an illuminating way of discussing PECC theories in relation to the other traditions of communication theory. Our first point is that PECC theories do not have the same kind of relationship to the traditions included by Craig that such theories have to one another. As first order communication theory, Craig's traditions or theory families specifically refer to the process of communication, but PECC theories are implicitly second order communication theories in the sense that they provide a set of outer theoretical frames within which the inner, first order frames are positioned. The relationship is one of imbeddedness-explicit theories of communication are imbedded in theories of political communication and culture-but not of strict determination. That is to say, a PECC theory provides some limits within which various first order theories of communication can develop, but it does not require a particular theory of communication. In a sense, although a first order theory of politics and economics, it is a theory of several possible communication theories and therefore is, with respect to them, of the second order. To give a familiar example, Aristotelian and Platonic theories of politics and culture are distinct from each other, and each evokes-by providing a context within which certain ideas seem more pertinent than others-distinctive kinds of communication models.

The broad notion that theories of communication arise in reaction to dominant issues posed by social, economic, and political context is a commonplace. However, Craig's discussion of how theory is related to practice-arguing that theoretic metadiscourse grows out of practical metadiscourse-helps to explain in more detail how communication models can be effectively imbedded within PECC theories. Certainly the process is not one of purely logical or deductive determination but takes a path through practice. In the first instance, PECC theories grow out of and recursively guide the development of regimes of poltical/economic/cultural practice. They thereby participate at a formative level in the distinctive communicative practices that in turn give rise to what Craig notes as practical metadiscourse-critiques and stated rules of communication that are integral to such practice itself. Conversation analysis provides rich evidence of practical metadiscourse at the interpersonal level, and cybernetic patterns of organization may represent the analogous form of practical metadiscourse at the institutional level. The explicit, written rules that guide bureaucratic discourse-the routing of forms, complaints, directives, and so on-do not constitute a theory of bureaucracy, just as conversational remarks such as "you didn't answer my question" do not in themselves constitute a theory of conversation. Models and theories of communication, interpersonal, organizational, and so on, however, do arise from practice through being based on-or justified by-the relevant metadiscursive rules of practice. Analogously, the wider economic, political, and cultural practice within which discourse at all levels is framed generates a practical metadiscourse that is the basis for PECC theories, which in this sense of reflexively influencing more narrowly focussed communicative practice, are theoretically prior to communication theories.

The issue of the practical/theoretic priority of PECC theory is critical to our linkage to and expansion of Craig's paradigm, and we feel that the counter positions -- that communication theory/practice has priority or that neither is prior -- deserve careful discussion. The idea that communication is the primary constitutive social process has been an appealing and influential one that has led to important insights. Too often, however, communication has been defined as a purely social phenomenon, governing the social world almost in isolation from the material world. In our view, communication is in essence an interface between the social and physical worlds (Arno 1993: 37). Natural science is a good example of a form of communication that constitutes its object in collaboration with material reality, but we argue that all other forms of social activity -- political, economic, and cultural -- are also constituted by such a collaboration.

Language philosophy provides a convenient conceptual model to illustrate our position because there has been an important debate in the philosophy of language about the relation between language as a system of meaning creation and its other -- sometimes thought of as "the world." From a simple model of language, which might be called the Augustinian model, in which the meaning of a word is seen as the aspect of the world to which it refers, language theory progressed with Saussure to a system model in which the meaning of a word, its "value", is very largely given by its relationships to other words within the language. Translated into social theory, the progression from an Augustinian to a Sausurean perspective is essentially that from positivism -- in which social theory (qua language) is seen as a map or picture of a social reality (qua world) external to itself -- to constructivism -- in which theory (qua language) participates in the construction of social reality (qua social meaning). Pushed to its extremes, as Derrida appears to do, the Saussurean system model becomes virtually closed to its other (presumably the noumenal world in itself), which is relegated to an unfathomable unconscious realm. Extreme constructivism, which lends itself to endless deconstructivism in social theory, makes sense only if one accepts a very clean break between social and material reality. Thus Fish, defending postmodern scholarship from Sokol's famous spoof article in the journal Social Text that pretended to argue that gravity is socially constructed, insisted that of course social construction applies only to the social world and not to the physical. While we readily accept a stratified model of reality -- for example the inner, outer, and social worlds postulated by Habermas and others -- we see communication process arising as a coordinating mechanism between the social and the natural worlds, as much a part of one as the other (Arno 1993). Communication technologies represent a clear example of this coordination, and we argue that one can push the concept of technology-a material mechanism that serves human meaning-to include the biologically given technologies of the body and brain. This is not a position of materialist determinism but rather of co-determinism which ultimately supports our view of the priority of PECC theories vis-a-vis first order communication theories.

Saussure's concept of the arbitrary nature of the sign, we believe, has been the key link between a system view of meaning, which we accept, and the extreme constructivist position of the self-referentiality of communication, which we do not. That link depends on a view of arbitrariness and motivation as an either/or one, while we see it as one of degree. As Beneveniste argues, the categorical arbitrariness of the sign-that is, a relation of pure social convention with no motivation from the object of reference-cannot be maintained if the entire signifying process is taken into account. While the link between a word such as "tree" and the concept of tree has an arbitrary, conventional character, the concept of tree is not arbitrary but is powerfully motivated by the experienced reality of trees outside language. Since the sign is an indissoluble amalgam of signifier, the mental sound image "tree", and signified, the mental concept of tree, the total package is infected, so to speak with external motivation. Saussure himself also observes that the sign is not arbitrary from the perspective of an established language. One cannot use words in an arbitrary way and make sense to other speakers. Thus there are two avenues of motivation that attack the arbitrariness of self referentiality of language or communication generally. One proceeds from the material world of reference, and the other from the social world of prior authority. Of the two, material motivation is the sterner master, less open to constructivist manipulation than is social motivation.

Our view that the conventional, and therefore socially constructed, character of social reality is one of degree leads us to argue that theories of the material world, such as science, are more highly motivated-that is, determined in their form by the object they address-than for example, are theories of the social or psychological worlds, which are more open to social construction. We further argue that theories that are more highly motivated-that is more closely keyed to a reality external to the theory-encompass or imbed, or in some way limit less motivated, more constructivist theories. Thus a theory/practice of economic production and political organization, being closer to the two wellsprings of motivation and constraint mentioned earlier, materiality and social authority, places limits on the communicative practices/theories that are possible within its compass. That is to say, the mode of material production, manifested in a concrete political economy constrains but does not determine the cultural production that arises to make sense of it (Arno 2000).

PECC Perspectives

The political economy perspective has been given important emphasis in communication research chiefly through the work of Marxist or critical theorists, including Dallas Smythe, Herbert Schiller, Vincent Mosco, and others, but such writers have tended to emphasize a relatively narrow segment of PECC theory. This view is very well expressed by Mosco (1996, chapter 3) who has otherwise provided an admirable account of the critical political economy tradition. "The political economy of communication," he writes (Ibid., 132), "covers a wide intellectual expanse and faces numerous challenges. It is an approach that brings together an international collection, if not a community, of scholars united not so much by a singular theoretical perspective or problematic, as by an approach to intellectual activity. One cannot say the approach is constituted by a community of scholars because most work as individuals who come together informally and at the meetings of associations such as the International Association for Mass Communication Research."

We argue that the wider spectrum of PECC theories--of the left and right--represents a broad and more powerful current in communication studies that deserves greater metatheoretical recognition in tracing the history and future prospects of the field. And while PECC theories have profoundly influenced both mainstream and critical communication research, it is also true that communication as a theoretical perspective has an equally profound and powerful influence on PECC theory. In fact, we will argue that, in the work of major theorists of political economy and culture such as Giddens, Habermas, Foucault, and Castells, communication has afforded a way out of a series of impasses that have beset social theory in the twentieth century.

This essay provides a brief outline of PECC's main traditions, their intellectual pedigrees, central problematics, chief propositions, methodology, and practical policy implications (see Table 1). The theoretical contributions have come from a diversity of disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, and communication. Despite their fragmentary origin, however, PECC'S theoretical insights address the common normative tensions inherent in the modern democratic tradition. These include the contradictions among such normative goals as international order, national security, individual freedom, social equality, presumed racial or ethnic supremacy, epistemic community, and cultural identity. PECC theorists thus deal with the contemporary problems of globalization, telecommunication, and democratization, or as Mosco (1996, chapter 4-6) has aptly put it, commodification, spatialization, and structuration. They draw from the main theoretical traditions in the fields of history, political economy, communication, and development. From a normative and policy perspective, PECC theories thus point to the alternative strategies of modernization and democratization in modern history.

INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

PECC's intellectual history can be explored in at least seven competing theories of communication and historical change, namely Statism, Nationalism, Liberalism, Marxism, Totalitarianism, Communitarianism, and Postmodernism. Each school has added some new perspectives to the old. Table 1 provides a synopsis of the major theorists, problematics, axial norms, foci of analysis, propositions, communication focus, methodologies, and policy implications. However, the seven schools should not be considered as mutually exclusive. During the past two centuries, there has been much cross-fertilization among them. In the global competitive marketplace of ideas, each theory has had to adjust its cognitive map to the alternative mappings of its rivals. As in the world of commodities, product differentiation and relevance to current consumer needs cum intellectual fads has proved to be the path to theoretical triumph. Thus, theoretical hybrids have often succeeded better than purist versions. Nazism and Fascism were complex mixes of Statism, Nationalism, Socialism, and Totalitarianism. Islamism currently presents a complex mix of Communitarianism, Marxism, and Totalitarianism.

Nevertheless, the purist versions have laid the theoretical foundations of modern ideological controversy and negotiation. Let's briefly take up each tradition. Statists are theoretically situated in the Hobbesian and Machiavellian worlds in which there is a war of all against all and life is nasty, brutish, and short. In order to obtain order and security for all at the domestic level, this world calls for submission of the individuals' wills to that of a single sovereign: the Prince, the Leviathan, the monarch, the fuhrer, the Ayatollah, or in democratic nationalism, to the constitution. At the inter-state level, Statism requires the pursuit of state interests by all means necessary. Statists (a.k.a. "Realists" in political economy theory) have primarily focused on the geopolitical struggles for power. They have employed the territorial state as their chief unit of analysis and considered international politics as devoid of moral consensus and therefore especially prone to violence. They have argued that the pursuit of national interest in the context of a balance of power strategy is the most effective and realistic road to domestic as well as international peace and security (Morgenthau 1985; Kissinger 1994). In international theory and practice, Statism or Realism has been the dominant school of thought primarily focusing on national strength, armament, and balance of power. For Statists, national security is the primary normative value and historical analysis is the soundest methodology to pursue. The role of communication is auxiliary but highly important, and it is conceived in terms of employing religions, ideologies, propaganda, and public opinion to gain support for state policies. In defense of "national interest," a Statist-Realist statecraft employs all of these tools, including deception and misinformation, in a Machiavellian strategy to obtain a balance of power at the international level.

Nationalists have adopted the Statist strategies with a twist. Their starting point is the myth of the nation rather than the state. In their view, the primordial historical memories, legends, triumphs, and tragedies of a nation perennially call for statehood. The nation-state is thus considered to be the most "natural" political organization, while national self-determination is viewed as a fundamental human right. The international system is thus composed of nation-states, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in conflict. In the works of Morgenthau (1985), Kissinger (1994), Kohaene & Nye (1989), and Ayoob (1997, 1998), the marriage between Statist, Nationalist, and Liberal views has given rise to the so-called Realist, Neo-Realist, and Subaltern Realist in theories of political economy.

By contrast to Statist and Nationalist views, however, Liberals have pointed to the integrating forces of the world market as a new reality creating considerable international interdependency in the postwar period blurring the boundaries between domestic and international. They have argued that increasing levels of international trade, investment, deepening and broadening of interdependency, and need for international cooperation through intergovernmental organizations have rendered the pursuit of a narrow and protectionist policy counter-productive. For Liberals, freedom in speech, property ownership, politics, and trade is the primary normative goal. In their studies of domestic and political economy, Liberals supplement historical analysis with a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods such as time-series, correlation analyses, and simulation games.

By contrast to Statism and Nationalism that have been fixated on the nation-state, the Liberal discourse has focused on the increasing economic and security interdependencies that characterize political economy. It has thus incorporated the increasing role of the non-state actors in the international regimes of energy, transportation, finance, and telecommunications. Fukuyama's (1989, 1992) contentions on the "end of history" represent the logical conclusion of over two centuries of Liberal discourse on the inevitability of historical evolution toward capitalist democracy. If "the invisible hand"of the market is what produces the most efficient and ultimately fair social and economic organization, the demise of communism in the former Soviet Union and increasing privatization in other socialist economies signal the beginning of the ultimate triumph of liberal capitalism worldwide. Democracy in this conception is clearly viewed as libertarian rather than egalitarian or communitarian. While Statists present a Machiavellian view of communication that calls on the Prince to employ methods of deception and misinformation to elicit subservience to his will, the Nationalists view communication in terms of the singular importance of national language and culture. By contrast, Liberal theorists regard communication primarily in terms of persuasion. The entire "media effects" tradition of research is theoretically rooted in the Aristotelian and liberal tradition. Advertising and political consultancy also are clearly based on the tradition of persuasive communication. Communication is thus problematized as persuasive speech in a top-down and linear source-message-channel-receiver (SMCR) chain.

By contrast, Marxist and Critical discourses, aligning themselves in this respect with the Realist position, problematize communication in terms of the role of "ideology" in class struggle and historical evolution. In Marx's well-known proposition, the ruling ideas of each epoch are the ideas of its ruling class (Marx 1947). Although the distinctions between base and superstructure as well as that between false and true consciousness have been criticized by neo-Marxists (Hall 1980), ideology continues to be a central focus of the Marxian analyses of communication (Smythe 1981, Schiller 1985). From this viewpoint, Dallas Smythe has persuasively argued that commercial advertising commodifies the audiences enticing them to entertainment programs in order to deliver them to the advertisers (Smythe 1978).

The Frankfort School and World System theorists broaden the Marxist concerns to focus on the role of cultural industries in global capitalist development. However, they often argue that the failure of the world capitalist system to solve its own inherent cycles of boom and bust, the growing gaps in wealth and income, and the breakdown of the social fabric and work ethics is ultimately the road to ruin. Habermas (1973), for example, has characterized the world capitalist system by a permanent legitimation crisis born out of its delinkage of the economic and political systems leading to contradictory results. World System analysts such as Wallerstein (1974, 1979), Jamieson (1991), and Harvey (1990) have sought to show how "late capitalism" has entered a new post-Fordist phase of "flexible accumulation," producing new economic and cultural crises. The more dire predictions point to the possibility of a worldwide economic breakdown and political rise of neo-fascist movements (Attali 1991). Marxists and Neo-Marxists continue to present powerful theoretical arguments that have had an appeal in the world peripheries. They view domestic and international politics primarily in terms of class conflict within and among nations.

As a fifth school, Totalitarian philosophy and practice has grafted all of the premodern myths of national or racial superiority to the modernist devotion to science and technology to produce one of the most potent political forces in history. In this school, communication is problematized as propaganda and ideational supremacy. Goebell's theory of propaganda, for instance, rested on the credibility of the big lies. Small lies can be soon discovered, but big lies such as racial or cultural superiority are difficult to dispel. If they are repeated often enough and correspond to the existing status and identity anxieties of a population, a powerful myth is borne. Because of high rates of physical and social mobility, industrial societies are particularly prone to identity anxiety and totalitarian forms of identity fetishism. For this reason, in the 20th century, capitalist as well as communist and communitarian societies have fallen victims to this temptation. Witness the rise of Nazism, Fascism, McCarthyism, Stalinism, Maoism, and Khomeinism.

A sixth school of thought and discourse in PECC may be labeled Communitarian. In this theoretical tradition, communication is problematized as dialogue. By that criterion, mass communication is considered a contradiction in terms. In Communitarianism, dialogic rather than monologic communication is the axial norm. In Martin Buber's (1970) apt phrase, only "I-Thou" rather than "I-It" human relations are conducive to dialogic communication. In Gandhi's theoretical framework, by appeals to the innate moral sense of the oppressors, Satyagraha or the truth force of dialogue is believed capable of transforming exploitative relations into just ones (Gandhi 1957). In Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed", conscientization or consciousness raising through dialogue is what can emancipate the oppressed peoples from their own colonized minds (Freire 1972).

Communitarianism may be traced back to the pioneering theories of Ibn Khaldun (1958), a 14th century Islamic historian. Perhaps the first modern social theorist, he viewed history not in terms of episodic heroes, villains, or events but as recurrent patterns. He thus anticipated much of the work of a nascent social science in the 18th and 19th century Europe. His cyclical view of history focused on asabiyya, which may be translated as social cohesion, bonding, or solidarity. The root of this term in classical Arabic invokes the idea of the nerve, with connotations of intense feeling and powerfully effective communication. For Ibn Khaldun, asabiyya is a key factor in understanding the dynamics of history. Without asabiyya, he argued, no individual, group, or state can survive the struggles of life. More specifically, he viewed Islamic history as a recurrent struggle for hegemony between nomadic and sedentary populations. The harsh economic conditions of the nomadic way of life engendered a higher level of asabiyya among the nomads, enabling them to conquer the softer, less integrated sedentary groups. But after several generations of settled life, the easier and affluent life of the conquerors inevitably erodes the fierce asabiyya of their community, rendering them vulnerable to attack from new nomadic challengers.

The rationalist bias in much of modern social theory has neglected the dynamic, affective, and communicative dimensions of social life. In contrast, Communitarian theorists such as Ibn Khaldun, Durkheim, Weber (Protestant ethics), and their Third World counterparts (Gandhi, Fanon, Freire) have focused on the bonds of asabiyya and the epistemic communities of language, culture, and beliefs. From this perspective, it becomes clear why in modern history, despite Marxist expectations, nationalist solidarity has often overcome class-consciousness. Communitarian perspectives also show how revolutionary struggles often led by a small but cohesive solidarity group (the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, or the Shi'a clerics), have over-run other less cohesive rivals.

The Communitarian perspective has been articulated by a diversity of political theorists and activists (Deutsch 1966, 1988; Gandhi 1984; Khomeini 1981; Etzioni, 1993; Haas 1992; Tehranian 1990; Tehranian & Tehranian 1992; Servaes, Jacobson, and White 1996). Although the ideologies of its proponents differ, the centrality of civil society as expressed through community formations is what unifies this theoretical perspective. As expressed in its cultural, communal, and institutional formations, civil society serves as the focus of communitarian democracy.

In the traditional literature of political economy, this school of thought is closely linked to the institutionalist and regionalist perspectives emphasizing the integration processes of world and regional systems (Deutsch 1966). However, it also has manifested itself in a variety of anti-colonial, nationalist, tribalist, localist, ethnic, nativist, and religious movements focused on mobilizing the common historical memories of the peripheries in waging a cultural and political struggle against the centers. The Communitarians emphasize the centrality of political community as a condition for a durable peace at local, national, regional, and global levels. Community is thus the primary normative goal to be pursued, while institution building for world economic, political, and cultural integration is the policy recommendation.

Community formation takes place primarily through the processes of cultural integration, namely development of epistemic communities, i. e. communities of affinity as well as vicinity. Development of communities of interests, norms, and laws can be achieved more effectively at lower rather than higher levels of aggregation. In the words of Joseph Schumacher (1975), small is beautiful! Thus, devolution of power to the lowest levels of human aggregation at the family, neighborhood, village, town, city, and county levels is the Communitarian policy prescription.

However, processes of integration also take place at the national, regional, and global levels. This is exemplified by many regional organizations, including the European Union (EU), North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), South Asian Regional Cooperation (SARC), and Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO). But the Communitarian perspective is going further in emphasizing the critical importance of social as distinct from economic capital in fostering economic development (Tehranian & Tehranian 1992).

Finally, Postmodernism (Lyotard 1980; Harvey 1990) has called into question the truth claims of all grand theories of history, decentering them with a hermeneutics of suspicion. It has left no metanarrative of history unscathed from its scornful and skeptical criticisms. Foucault (1980) and his Postmodernist disciples have questioned the validity of such claims as the inevitability of progress, the march of history towards a classless society, or the power pretensions of the elite. To Postmodernists, power is not a zero-sum game. On the contrary, it is ubiquitous and can be turned into a positive sum game if resisted. However, a deconstructive strategy of unmaking ideologies serves the interest of human liberation better than constructing yet another ideological metanarrative. By leaving no place for power to hide, Foucault and his disciples have provided a radically relativist view of political economy focusing on inter-textual relations for the understanding of world politics. In this view, cultural and identity formations take a central place in the analysis of international/intertextual relations (Derian & Shapiro 1989).

Postmodernism is the latest theoretical perspective to have impacted social and communication theory. Emanating from the Poststructuralist and Deconstructionist schools of thought, Postmodernism is deeply imbued with linguistic analyses of knowledge and power. It therefore highlights the central importance of identity as an axial principle in the globalization and localization of knowledge, truth claims, and power struggles. Generally committed to radical relativism, Postmodernism interprets politics as a process of negotiation of knowledge, power, and identity through military, economic, and cultural arsenals of influence. While some tendencies in Postmodernism are nihilistic, others seek out those universals in global knowledge that could unify an otherwise fragmented world (Vattimo 1991). Plurality of meanings, tolerance of differences, fluidity of identities, and re-combinations of ideas and images from totally different eras and civilizations are thus the postmodern foci of analysis. Postmodernism thus problematizes communication as discourse/practice to negotiate and construct knowledge and power.

The Communication Turn in PECC Theory

Although each theoretical discourse has its own unique set of assumptions and conclusions reflecting competing interests in the international community, global communication has increasingly forced them into a grudging dialogue. Tables 1 and 2 are confined to a typology of the main theoretical strands. However, there are many more theoretical hybrids that have enriched international discourse on world order. It is significant to note that the axial principles of the seven schools of thought together constitute the modernist goals of order, security, liberty, equality, supremacy, community, and identity in the modern world. However, by singling out "supremacy" as the axial norm to pursue at the expense of other values, totalitarian regimes of various kinds (Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism, McCarthyism, and Khomeinism) have demonstrated that all modern political regimes (nationalist, liberal, communist, Islamist, or Hinduist) are prone to the totalitarian temptation. Increasing levels of mass communication, mass education, mass organization, mass surveillance, and mass control characterize the modern world. These features enable centralized industrial powers to employ means that traditional dictatorships could only dream of. If such means are combined with the social psychology of fear, xenophobia, and scapegoatism, a totalitarian regime can find frenzied popular support through the social psychology of "escape from freedom" (Fromm 1941, Robins and Post 1997).

INSERT TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE

Tables 1 and 2 suggest how and why traditional theories have each problematized "communication" differently. Table 1 offers a key to the central concepts employed in each PECC theory for the communication phenomenon in society. Table 2 goes further to show that each theoretical tradition has focused on a different function of communication in society. Coming as they do from a variety of disciplinary orientations, different theoretical schools have highlighted different practical aspects of communication, namely cultural communication (signification), social communication (socialization), political communication (legitimation), and economic communication (accumulation in the exchange system).

In a matrix constructed around social processes and theoretical traditions, Table 2 also identifies some of the best-known communication theories. The table is suggestive rather than exhaustive. It shows how by meandering through the minefields of political economy problems, communication theory has addressed the four major problems of modern social science. Communication theory has thus turned into an intellectual crossroad. Its strength in this respect, however, has proved to be its weakness. By addressing too many problems, communication theory also has become a dispersed and fragmented field of study.

Nevertheless, the contributions of "communication" as an integrating concept in social sciences cannot be overlooked. Social theory in the 20th century has run into some key theoretical bottlenecks that have, over and over again, stalled the excitement of discovery. These recurrent bottlenecks are confrontations among equally valid and powerful theoretic traditions in which each can trump the other, and the result is a stalemate during which each attempts to refute or incorporate the other. In these encounters, social science shifts its attention from social phenomena to disciplinary polemics, and there is a dithering, often heated back and forth debate that goes nowhere. The true measure of the emerging centrality of communication theory among the social sciences can be seen in what might be called the communication turn in social theory, which has been the means of resolving the key theoretic bottlenecks by introducing a new dimension in the discussion. These bottlenecks consist of the dichotomies between structure vs. agency, theory vs. practice, empiricism vs. criticism, idealism vs. materialism, and message vs. medium.

Anthony Giddens' (e.g.1984) theory of structuration is a good example of the impact of a sophisticated view of communication on one of the perennial Gordian knots of social theory. Giddens observes that a major barrier to advancement in social theory has been the confrontation between individual-focused theories that emphasize the role of the human agent in the social process and structural theories that downplay the individual and emphasize the social systems in which people are caught up. Marxist laws of history expressed in the materialist dialectic of successive modes of production are notoriously indifferent to the role of the individual actor. French structuralist theory that looks below the surface level of social life to the deep codes that control and generate interaction and institutions is also fundamentally oblivious of the individual in the web of stupendous structures. On the other hand, the many varieties of American social psychological theories provide a satisfying focus on the actor but are unable to account convincingly for the large-scale political and economic formation in which the actors move. The Marxist might taunt Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical interactionism for ignoring vital problems of social justice while pursuing the trivialities of middle class posturing. But the interactionist can counter with the Marxist's lack of interest in empirical data and fixation on dogma derived from philosophical speculation. The problem can be framed as one of actor versus structure: who can account convincingly for both? Each side claims to be able to, but actually neither is. Giddens' structuration approach appears to at least move the debate off dead center by restating the problem in communication terms. He moves from the existing dualism, in which the two represent a static contrast, to a duality in which each can be explained in terms of the other. Fundamentally, the idea of structuration, in which the actor creates structure but only in a situation that is itself created by structure, is a picture of human communication. Communication can only make sense in social life because of the shared conventions of meaning and institutionalized patterns of action that constitute structure, but that structure only comes to life socially in the process of communicative interaction. The growing point and the actual social reality of language, for example, is the use of language in social situation. This paradigm is expanded in Giddens' structuration theory to account for the whole of social experience.

Another key bottleneck in social theory has been the opposition of theory and practice. This has been an important problem for social scientists because they have relied on the distinction to make sense of their own professional activities. They have assumed a duality of theory and practice because they have been concerned to preserve a sense of objectivity and independence--and therefore a lack of bias--in their studies of social life. Thus, both Marxist and Liberal social theories have sought to deal with the issue by identifying the social engagement of theory as the operation of ideology and then demonizing it. Parsonian structural functionalism (Parsons 1951), the reigning sociological theory of the immediate postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s, proclaimed "the end of ideology" (Bell 1960) and saw itself as above and beyond it--capable of explaining any particular ideology in neutral, unbiased terms. Marxism proclaimed ideology "false consciousness", an instrument of domination, while reserving for itself the unique status of the science of social change. Social theory, whether professional sociology or volunteer folk explanation, has never wanted to accept the necessary linkage between the theory and practice of social life. And that failure to acknowledge the relationship of mutual interpenetration has been a stumbling block in developing a useful understanding of what social theorists are doing.

A communication perspective, however, has helped to transcend the issue. Under Foucault's penetrating gaze, all that is seemingly solid in social life--truth, authority, and social identity--melts into discourse (Foucault 1970, 1979). Once a way of life is identified as a form of discourse, it is possible to see that knowledge and power are inseparable and theory and practice are two sides of the same coin. The privileged sciences of the structural functionalist as well as that of the Marxist are seen to be no more than competing but fundamentally incommensurable discourses. As such each owes its authority and power over people's social choices to its ability to define what knowledge is and to vest certain roles and identities with authority. The realization that social theory does not operate outside human relationships and is inevitably part of it is the essence of the communication turn in social science. Foucault advanced beyond the structuralists because he saw that the paradigm for social study was not pure structural linguistics with its emphasis on language as an abstract system. He proposed that the deployment of language and other codes in social contexts include systems of identity, knowledge, values, authority, and power (Foucault 1980). In other words, Foucault in social theory, like Wittgenstein (1953) and Austin (1962) in the philosophy of language, made the move from language to communication as the paradigmatic object of study (Arno 1993; Tehranian 1994).

A third major social theorist who has used the communication turn to break out of an impasse of stalled debate is Jurgen Habermas (1983). Habermas' theory of communicative action has revived social theory as an instrument and forum of political, economic, and social debate in the public sphere. In a sense, Habermas has rescued the narrative dimension of social theory that had been such a vital, although often unacknowledged aspect of the classical theories of modernity, from Durkheim to Marx and Weber. Although each of these great theorists made strong claims to being scientific, each at a deeper level was telling a version of the great Western tragedy of modernization. Because of this, the sociological literature and debate they spawned held a compelling interest for readers far beyond the academic circle. By the mid-1970s, however, this narrative vitality had virtually exhausted itself in a losing struggle with the numbing quantitative empiricism of the dominant Parsonian tradition in American social science. Parsons had started from the roots of the classic theorists, but he lost the thread of the narrative and got social theory bogged down in details of procedure. Claiming to be above the rough and tumble of political struggle, the standard American quantitative social science abandoned its own narrative function and no longer focused the attention of the reader on the larger historical and human meanings and drama of its findings. But at the same time, the authenticity of empirical research-its acknowledged grounding in observation and objective reality-undercut the impact of the grand tradition in social theory, which seemed intolerably speculative in contrast. Classic social theory could tell its compelling story of what was happening to society in a uniquely realistic mode. This contrasted, for example with fiction, music, and visual arts--because it grounded its account of the social tragedy's content, the problems and conflicts that people were experiencing, in scientific explanation of how and why it was happening. But grand social theory outgrew its scientific cover; its focus on enduring human problems remained, but its claims to empirical validity stretched thin. The failure of Marxism to accurately see the future of capitalism, and the discovery of other varieties of modernism that Weber could not account for took the scientific wind out of the sails of classic social theory. American structural functionalism, on the other hand, dug into scientific validation but lost its grip on the social debate that is its ultimate justification as part of the narrative it studies.

The importance of Habermas is that he has used communication theory to revitalize and reunite both aspects of contemporary social theory-its empirical grounding and its policy focus. By elaborating Austin's speech act theory as a way of studying the social process, Habermas puts social theory in touch with an empirical, researchable situation. The site of Habermas' study is the key event in policy formation, the process of reaching the understandings that necessarily underlie social action in the public sphere. He has chosen the actual process of shaping public policy as the arena of his theory. His choice thus locks social theory into the narrative dimension of social life. At the same time, by close, scientific observation of the conditions of discourse in which the communicative process of reaching understanding can take place, he firmly grasps the empirical dimension that gives social theory its unique critical position. Like Foucault in his later writing on the order of discourse, Habermas shifts scientific attention to the rules of formation that govern discourse.

But in identifying the object of social inquiry as the production of a narrative-and furthermore as the dialogic production of an authoritative narrative of political life-Habermas links up with the narrative revolution that is incipient in social science. As Jerome Bruner (1990) exemplifies in his Acts of Meaning, the computer inspired metaphor of atomized bits of information as the basic unit of constructing both personal identity and social reality has given way to a model in which narrative is the basic stuff of social action. It is in this context that communication theory, as the social science instrument of interpretation and expression, finds narrative most securely within the range of its theoretical resources.

All of these dimensions of the communication turn in social theory are related to what must be called the grand Gordian knot of social analysis, idealism versus materialism. As we have argued, the communication turn in social theory is the result of social science's confronting the mid-20th century crisis of representation manifested by developments in the philosophy of language. Idealism, ultimately Platonic in character, was comfortable with a model of language in which a word or another symbol stood for something that could be referred to as its meaning. A cleverly wrought symbol or set of symbols could, from this perspective, be made to represent any meaning we might have. It represented the meaning, and the meaning, independently of its expression in word or symbol, existed in the realm of ideas. This dualist structure of semantics, formerly almost universally accepted without question, fed the idealism/materialism debate in social science precisely because it validated the idea that there is an independent realm of ideas that contrasts with the material reality of social life. Therefore, the assertion that ideas cause social change and the opposing assertion that material conditions cause it could be entertained as meaningful statements. Wittgenstein's abandonment of idealist meaning encapsulated in his famous dictum, "ask not about the meaning of a word, ask about its use" is a landmark in the development of the communication turn. This new semantics of use transcends the ideal/material debate because, in this formulation, words and other symbols, by the very process of their use in narrative communities, create their meanings, which have no independent existence. Rorty (1967) also has drawn out the political and social policy implications of the new anti-representationalist semantics. Rorty's theory of semantics translates into a new perspective on the roles of ideas and material conditions in social process that, again, is most comfortably within the register of communication's theoretical voice (Rorty 1991).

Finally and most relevantly, the Gordian Knot of "medium vs. message vs. messenger vs. receiver" has given rise to a continuing debate among the theories of powerful vs. powerless and power-linked media. Under the influence of the Orsen Wells' War of the Worlds radio drama, the earliest theorists adopted a hyperdermic needle theory of media effects. In this literature, media messages were assumed to take effect directly and immediately as if they were drug injections. Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), however, found that interpersonal communication in general and opinion leadership in particular ultimately determine media effects. Multiple-step flows of communication were subsequently developed in diffusion research models to demonstrate how opinion leadership critically affects agricultural innovations or family planning practices (Rogers 1962). This led to a tradition of media research that came to be known as "the minimum effects' hypothesis (Klapper 1966). In the continuing debate on media effects on children and violence, the two theoretical positions became particularly polarized around powerful and powerless media neglecting the role of the audiences. Similarly, in the debate on media imperialism, the liberal and Marxist positions both have largely assumed audiences to be inert and undifferentiated masses.

The British cultural studies tradition, by contrast, has refocused the debate on the role of the audiences (Thompson 1995). Its fundamental assumption has been an active rather than a passive audience. In keeping with the research findings of "the uses and gratification" (Blumler & Katz 1974) tradition of media research, cultural studies theorists have argued that audiences have a decisive role in evaluating the media messages. By contrast, the Canadian School (Innis and McLuhan) has argued for a media-centric theory of history that places messages, messengers, and audiences under the spell of evolving media systems from orality to print, and a second orality through radio and television.

Thompson (1995) presents a social theory of the media that may be considered as power-linked. His view of mediated communication opens the door to a kind of ethical responsibility that both powerful and powerless theories have largely abdicated. As he argues, "the development of communication media has fuelled a growing awareness of the very interconnectedness and interdependency which this development, among others, has helped to create. It has created a sense of responsibility, however fragile, for a humanity that is commonly shared and for a world that is collectively inhabited" (Thompson 1995, 264).

Although it encompasses the media system, public communication goes beyond the media. It most vitally depends on a discursive regime and its inner tensions. This is where culture and communication intersect. That juncture has been all too often neglected by media studies. And that is why a turn to theories that provide cognitive maps for discursive regimes is necessary. From this perspective, the importance of the theoretical traditions we have called the political economy of culture and communication can be clearly seen.

In his three-volume work, Manuel Castells (1996-2000) provides an encyclopedic political economy of the emerging "Network Society". As he argues (Castells 1996, 3):

"Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self (emphasis in the original). In this condition of structured schizophrenia between function and meaning, patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress. And when communication breaks down, when it does not exist any longer, even in the form of conflictual communication (as would be the case in social struggles or political opposition), social groups and individuals become alienated from each other, and see the other as a stranger, eventually a threat. In this process, social fragmentation spreads, as identities become more specific and increasingly difficult to share. The informational society, in its global manifestation, is also the world of Aum Shinrikyo, of American Militia, of Islamic/Christian theocratic ambitions, and of Hutu/Tutsi reciprocal genocide."

Habermas, Giddens, and Castells, each in their own idiom, provide a theoretical and practical way out of this morass. Their New Enlightenment doctrine calls for human agency, communicative rationality, dialogic negotiations of meaning, transformative politics, individuation of identities, and evolutionary change. In contrast to the Old Left, they carefully avoid deification of History, Rationality, Technology, and Utopias. They thus put interpersonal and social communication at the center of their theoretical and practical hopes for a better world and a "Third Civilization" (Tehranian 2000).

Conclusion

Until recently, the place of information and communication in political economy theory was rather limited. In classical political economy, information was assumed to be a free good. Buyers and sellers were assumed to have equal and free access to market information, which itself was considered a precondition to perfect competition. The legendary "invisible hand" may be viewed as perfect information. Since such conditions could not obtain among buyers and sellers, perfect competition was as much of a myth as the invisible hand. Similarly, in classical political science, free exchange of ideas came to be recognized as a precondition for democracy. However, neither discipline accounted for the imperfections of information and communication in the functioning of societies, democratic or otherwise.

By contrast, Keynesian economists have increasingly recognized the central place of "expectations" in business cycles. In neoclassical economic theory, information and misinformation about the future play a critical role in determining the levels of consumption, investment, and growth. That is why Keynesians believe in the responsibility of the government to create an atmosphere favorable to sustained growth, employment, and stability by fiscal and monetary policies. Among political scientists, the role of information and communication has been generally confined to studies of ideology, public opinion, and propaganda in struggles for power.

In the last two centuries, economic and political sciences have provided baselines and common points of reference for social analysis. At the turn of the 21st century, however, communication has become the metaphor of choice in social theory. In social, political, and economic theory, the role of information and communication is being increasingly acknowledged. We attribute this phenomenon of the international academic lifeworld to the shift in the global system toward a network, information economy and society (Bell 1973, 1999; Porat 1977; Poster 1990; Castells 1996-2000).

Many such information society theories, however, fail to adequately problematize power and hegemony (Tehranian 1999, chapter 1). Here is where the contributions of critical theorists must complement the findings of liberal theorists to understand who is winning or who is losing in the current technological and social transformation. But a more adequate understanding must also take the Communitarian perspectives into account emphasizing the centrality of solidarity and community. An examination of current trends in social theory shows that what modernist social theorists have generally been calling social solidarity or cohesion is reasserting itself as the primary explanatory principle in social analysis.

The focus on communication and community formation is supplanting the reductionism of rational choice in economic terms or the radical individualism of psychology. Society is increasingly hypothesized as a complex, adaptive, and communicative system that is based on epistemic conflicts of interests, solidarities, and narrative constructions and negotiations of reality. The Keynesian emphasis on the role of "market expectations," Weber's "webs of significance," Deutsch's "nerves of government," Giddens' "constitution of society," Foucault's "discourse and practice" and "discipline and punish," Habermas' "communicative rationality and action,"and Castell's "network society,"all reflect this emerging theoretical perspective. In the evolving lifeworlds of theorists, political economy of culture and communication is gaining a strategic place.

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