METHODS AND CASES

METHODS AND CASES

I turn now to specific, well-executed examples of the history proper of communication. This kind of history draws our attention to the place of communication (in its various guises and dimensions) in human experience. It takes from macro-history its dramatic question: how do communication media constitute the human character? But it takes this question of philosophical anthropology to an historically situated place—how do specific changes not only from one medium to another, but transformations in organization, ideology, economic relations, or political sponsorship within a given medium relate to changes in human experience? Where macro-history asks primarily how the media shape the capacities of the human mind, the history of communication as I am describing it asks how media constitute and are constituted by the self, the experience of time and space, the notion of the public, the concept and experience of politics and society, and the languages through which people understand and experience any part of the world.

Michael McGerr’s (1986) study of the transformation of American political campaigning in the late nineteenth century is an exemplary work in two respects: first, it examines the relationship of a medium to the changing constitution of a field of human experience—politics; second, it refuses to confine its understanding of “medium” to the usual trio of oral, written, and electronic media. The communication medium McGerr is interested in is the campaign—part oral and participatory ritual, part printed exhortation, part party-organized mass spectacle. (Interestingly, it is a medium that symbolically characterizes American culture as a whole: Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg’s first experience in the USA as he disembarks in San Francisco is to be jostled by people in the streets for a campaign rally.)

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McGerr’s intent is “to explain why politics no longer excites many Americans.” He argues that the USA had a very lively political life in the mid-nineteenth century, characterized by a vividly and sometimes viciously partisan press, powerful allegiances of citizens to parties, and “spectacular” political campaigns in which vast numbers of citizens participated. By the 1920s (long before television, one might note), he finds that this “popular politics” has been replaced by “a more constricted public life, much like our own” (McGerr, 1986:vii).

While others have tried to explain the decline in voter turnout and political involvement in the USA after the 1890s, McGerr is original in emphasizing how a new ideology of political elites, concerning what kind of communication an electoral campaign should use, engendered new campaign practices. Urban liberal reformers in the 1870s found fault with the strong party system and the fierce loyalty citizens showed their parties. They initiated independence movements breaking from parties and founded extra-party organizations like good government clubs and municipal reform organizations. As they promoted ballot reform and civil service, they began to create “an alternative political style” (McGerr, 1986:66). They invested not in uniforms and torches for parades as in the past, but in educational pamphlets for widespread distribution. The political campaign, in their model, was an indoor event, centered on reading, not an outdoor carnival. By 1888 a Wisconsin Democratic leader promised “to abstain from such methods of campaigning as address themselves to the excitement of the emotions rather than educating or convincing the intelligence of our citizens” (McGerr, 1986:87). The New York Times praised candidate Grover Cleveland’s emphasis on the tariff issue because “it makes no appeal to the emotions” (McGerr, 1986:89). What contemporaries aptly called a “political Protestantism” set in as campaigning shifted from parading to pamphleteering.

McGerr’s work is instructive for communication studies on several grounds. First, McGerr offers historical perspective that forces a more complex understanding of contemporary life than we sometimes get, demonstrating, for instance, that the decline of voter participation in the USA did not begin with television and TV-centered campaigning. Second, McGerr’s examination of political communication is free from the institutional narrowness of much media history. That is, while he takes the press to be a vital actor in the story he tells, the chief agents in his drama are the leaders of political party organizations. The political party, in McGerr’s work, is itself a medium of communication.

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If a communication medium is an agency for transmitting information from one person or group of people to another, then surely a party is, among other things, a communication medium. (Again, contemporary lessons are easy to draw: in 1990 the political parties are still more agenda setters than the media will ever be in most parts of the world, even in a system with traditionally weak parties as in the USA.) Third, McGerr is also unconstrained by the common distinction in the field of communication between transmission models of communication and ritual models of communication. When he examines the political campaign, he obviously sees both models at work. We could characterize the transformation he documents as a shift from the campaign as a communal ritual, “a process of communal self- revelation,” to the campaign as information transmission, or, in McGerr’s (1986:149) terms, the “educational” and “advertised” rather than “spectacular” campaign styles. This gives the two models of communication a genealogy; abstractions, in McGerr, take on flesh. Finally, of course, his approach integrates the media of communication into a broader political, economic, and social history.

A study of theater as communication has been undertaken by Lawrence Levine (1988) with interestingly parallel results. Levine examines the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in the USA to show that, early in the nineteenth century, Shakespeare was a part of the common culture, the popular culture, not something set aside for educated tastes. In the late nineteenth century, however, Shakespeare was appropriated as “high culture,” taken to be intellectually beyond the reach of the masses. At the same time, theater-going became a more rigidly controlled public behavior. Entertainment as well as politics underwent a protestant reformation, in this case, under the tutelage of an anxious, defensive upper class.

The broader framework for a work like McGerr’s or Levine’s is that of Jürgen Habermas, although there is no indication that McGerr or Levine, situated in independent traditions of American political and cultural history, were influenced by Habermas. The translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989 was an important event, even though the outlines of the book were available to English-speaking scholars earlier from a capsule summary in New German Critique (Habermas, 1974) and from Alvin Gouldner’s (1976) stimulating rendition. Habermas outlines what is probably the single most important model available for placing the media in a larger framework of modern world history. Rejecting the

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conventional liberal theory that the growth of new communications media is necessarily a force for increased human liberty, Habermas is interested in both the emergence and decline of what he calls “the public sphere.” If one believes that human beings should organize their societies so that all people can participate in decision making, with decision making arranged so that communication is as free, full, and fair as possible, then a history of the constitution of the public sphere, coterminous with the emergence of publicly available news media, representative democracy, and limitations on secret proceedings in government, becomes a central subject for modern history.

Habermas (1989) traces the rise of the “bourgeois public sphere” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its decline from the mid-nineteenth century on. In the earlier period, the bourgeois attack on feudal society and absolutist state power was fueled by a belief in principles of rational public discussion and freedom of speech. In the new bourgeois order, newspapers and public discussion carried on in coffeehouses and elsewhere established a public sphere, that is, a physical and discursive space between the state and its agencies, on the one side, and private enterprise and family life, on the other.

In the later period, the bureaucratization of politics and the commercialization of the media repressed the emancipatory possibilities of the bourgeois public sphere (however compromised they were from the outset by confinement to white, propertied males). Public opinion, once arrived at dynamically and authentically in public places, became more and more engineered by bureaucrats, advertisers, and propagandists. James Curran’s (1977) influential essay on capitalist control of the British press offers for one country a concrete illustration of how capitalist expansion in the late nineteenth century repressed radical expression even after direct state controls on the press were repealed. This is consistent with the general position Habermas outlines, although, in recent work, Curran is sharply critical of Habermas and holds that the Habermasian notion of the early public sphere is flawed in part because it neglects the importance and virtues of the radical press (Curran, forthcoming).

Habermas’ work does not adequately address how limited the bourgeois public sphere was in what was (for Habermas) its heyday. The glowing image of the democratic London coffeehouse, where people from all walks of life stopped to read the newspaper and argue with leading intellectual lights of the day, is hard to reconcile with what we know of the small size of the voting public, traditions of

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deferential voting, and the relative secrecy of governmental proceedings. The historical evidence in support of the Habermas view is all too scanty: “So far, historians using the Habermas model usually talk about the public of journalism without ever actually coming into contact with it” (Dooley, 1990:473). Moreover, as John Keane (1984) observes, Habermas also paints too bleak a portrait of contemporary culture, seeing little room for contradiction or resistance in the administered society.

Even so, Habermas offers communication history a persuasive rationale. It is too little rationale to study communication institutions for their own sake—that is a kind of antiquarian motive; and it may

be too much to study communication history as the central constitutive feature of human nature. This latter rationale is indeed a legitimate scientific motive, in my view, but so encompassing as almost to defy actual research and so grand as to dwarf differences among media that make a difference, differences worth talking about and fighting about, say, between a relatively free and relatively closed press.