Download Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication

Anthropology and the New Technologies
of Communication
Brian Keith Axel
Independent Scholar
In various forms, this theme has played a constant role since
the nineteenth century: to preserve, against all decenterings, the
sovereignty of the subject.
—Foucault (1982)
Harbingers of the New
Since the early 1990s, anthropologists have repeatedly issued a call to arms
heralding the arrival of new technologies of communication as an object of study.
These calls enthusiastically announce the possibility of something new, while
tempering their excitement with assurances of the discipline’s adequacy to discern
the significant features of this new object. So insistent are they, that I list some of
them below, if only to demonstrate the reiterative nature of their appeal:
Because the holistic tradition within the discipline justifies integrative approaches to
large scale processes of change, anthropology is well placed to participate in cultural
study of new technology. [Hakken 1993:128]
The discipline is well suited to what must start as a rather traditional ethnographic
project: to describe, in the manner of an initial cultural diagnostic, what is happening
in terms of the emerging practices and transformations associated with rising technoscientific developments. [Escobar 1994:216]
Indeed, anthropology is uniquely suited for the study of socioculturally situated online
communication within a rapidly changing context. [Wilson and Peterson 2002:450]
By insisting that any examination of new technologies be situated within economic,
social, and political contexts where the information and images they convey are consumed, circulated, and signified, these studies demonstrate that anthropology is particularly well suited to investigate the social (and symbolic) dimensions of new technology.
[Cook 2004]
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 354–384, ISSN 0886-7356, electronic ISSN 1548-1360.
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ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 355
These passages do not “quote” each other, nonetheless, they suggest the emergence of a broader anthropological discursive field. What is at stake in these texts is
nothing less than the status of the discipline as a domain of knowledge production.
More precisely, this citationality identifies anthropology, in the singular, as a field
that is substantially (“solidly”) distinct (“unique”) in space (“well placed”) and
time (“tradition”). They invoke a familiar model of ethnographic practice (conceived of as a method in the service of descriptive enterprise) and appeal to a more
general anthropological imperative to attend “diagnostically” to the culture of the
people studied. Likewise, they orient themselves toward a recognizable vision
of the ethnographic text as a “holistic” compendium of propositional knowledge
that refers to, and predicates about, “what is happening” in a culture in relation
to, for example, contextual transformations effected by formerly extracultural objects. Accordingly, these texts, which in themselves represent radically divergent
anthropological projects, make the case that methodologies for the study of new
technologies of communication ought to be derived from traditional ethnographic
approaches designed for the study of putatively older forms of social interaction.
These harbingers of the new draw attention to a critical dilemma. After over
a decade of such declarations, what compels this insistent repetition? Is there not
something about the repetitive quality of each of these instances of discourse and
their articulations of ethnography’s necessity that creates a sense of instability,
uncertainty, or even anxiety? To explain these normative reiterations and their
affective tenor through reference to the supposed intentions or sensibilities of individual authors would be naı̈ve. However, to seek their provenance in the phantasm
of some general disciplinary zeitgeist would be equally simplistic. Rather these
questions invite us to question further the relation of anthropology to modes of
knowledge production concerned with communication and technology.
What I offer in this article is, therefore, a set of reflections, in an archaeological mode, on an emergent discursive field that I call the “modern linguistic
ideology of communication,” and what I wish to question is the self-evidence of
the human as a communicating being. I use the term linguistic ideology, following Michael Silverstein (1979, 1998), to indicate the sets of beliefs about how
language works that focus on reference and propositionality and that understand
these “surface-segmentable” aspects of “perceived language structure and use” to
be the nature of language. As Silverstein has amply demonstrated, such beliefs
are not solely the property of the people or cultures that anthropologists study,
but they are also constitutive of “scientific” statements about language (1979:193;
see also Schieffelin et al. 1998). Therefore, what I am calling the “modern linguistic ideology of communication” is a specific linguistic ideology that limits
our awareness—and constitutes the conditions of possibility—of the forms and
functions of communication.
What is at stake in this exploration is not a refinement of strategies for describing how ethnographic subjects put new technologies of communication to
use. Rather, it is a matter of putting a future ethnography to use as a modality of
356 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
critique of the ethical systems of exclusion that emerge and proliferate in the name
of modernity, global capital, neoliberalism, or multiculturalism. Within these systems, which circulate in the guise of common reason, to be recognizable as human,
communication is a fundamental requirement. Conversely, the identification of a
desire to communicate translates into a demonstration of one’s humanity. Or rather,
it amounts to a demonstration of a desire of the individual to be translated into
the universal, the domain of large-scale labels, the imaginable. Here, communication may be understood as integral to the peculiar dialectic of embodiment and
abstraction characteristic of the liberal logic of citizenship and its privileging of
unmarked identities (e.g., male, white, or normal). A failure to accede to communication results in a foreclosure of the privilege of disembodiment, an imprisonment
within unrecognizable bodies (e.g., nonhuman, monstrous, or queer) and a denial
of the security and pleasure of political representation, cultural diversity, or simply,
becoming understandable.1
With such a project in mind, I examine the connections between two related
moments of emergence: the first concerns Cold War procedures of knowledge production about communication and technology; the second concerns the production
of knowledge about new technologies of communication within specific kinds of
contemporary ethnographic projects.2 I explore three basic propositions: (1) What
we commonly understand to be an essential element of communication (i.e., that
the communicative event is mandatory and prerequisite for the achievement of humanness) is historically specific and belongs to, or is generated within, particular
Cold War social formations. (2) Emerging mutually with this modern linguistic
ideology of communication, disparate configurations of the human sciences, such
as cybernetics, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, have incorporated
that ideology’s basic ontological assumptions within their modes of knowing. They
embody the traces of that ideology and its compulsion to preserve the ontological
integrity of the human. My concern here is to draw the attention of anthropologists to the disparate figurings of the human as sovereign, which have, in uncanny
ways, emerged in contemporary ethnographic texts that assert the unique capacity
of anthropology to study new communications of technology.3 (3) I propose that
these traces of a modern linguistic ideology within analyses of new technologies
of communication may be translated and transformed into productive possibilities
for pursuing more powerful and critical anthropological projects.
Modern Secrecy and Strangeness
This article is an interrogation of communication as a secret sign of the modern, that is, it traces what might be called the “of-courseness” of communication.
As Stuart Hall (1984:8) comments in a different context: “That ‘of course’ is the
most ideological moment, because that’s the moment at which you’re least aware
that you are using a particular ideological framework.” What is at stake in this
questioning, and what linguistic anthropology has so powerfully pursued with the
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 357
notion of linguistic ideology, is the naturalization of communication as an exchange of meaning and the production of the human as a naturally speaking being
and as the material and corporeal origin and agent of communication.
However, if communication is a secret sign of modernity, it is also modernity’s sign of secrecy. I mean this in a double sense. First, modern theories of
communication and technology developed out of wartime projects of cryptography and weapons detection that were organized around the problem of hiding, veiling, encoding, decoding, or controlling discourse (Kittler 1999:246–
263; Mattelart 1996:48–50, 198; Mindell 2002). From the late 1940s through
the 1960s, these theories were grouped together under the rubric of cybernetics. Second, the problem of the hiddenness of the self from itself was elaborated
during the same period by certain configurations of psychoanalysis and linguistics. Together, these domains of Cold War knowledge production articulate the
question of communication in terms of strangeness and otherness. In the first
instance, models of a community of stranger–citizens emerge out of identifications of specific others as enemies of democracy; in the second instance, the
critical issue is not the otherness of other people, but the proposition that we
are strangers to ourselves (Nietzsche 1967; see also Kristeva 1991). They derive
their analytical models not just from a modern linguistic ideological presumption
of the communicative moment as mandatory for achieving humanness but from
analogous postulations of secrecy, strangeness, and desire.4 However, although
cybernetics valorizes a developing ideology of modern communication, certain
modalities of linguistic theory and psychoanalysis subject that ideology to radical
critique.5
Cybernetics is generally identified with the name of Norbert Wiener (1948a).
Wiener developed his models of cybernetics through close and ongoing collaborations with a coterie of anthropologists, linguists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, neurologists, psychoanalysts, and others (including Margaret Mead,
Gregory Bateson, and Roman Jakobson) whose meetings were sponsored by the
Macy Foundation (Dupuy 2000; Hayles 1999; Heims 1991; Mindell 2002).6 Similar to other scholars working on interdisciplinary projects during the Cold War
era (e.g., Mead and Metraux 1953), Wiener did not hesitate to articulate the political utility of cybernetics in establishing a society morally ordered by a stranger
sociability, that is, “a self-reflexive collective agency built around the reciprocal
performative action of participants who, though strangers, have equal and direct
access to one another” (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003:389). According to Wiener,
this “social system is an organization like the individual, that [is] bound together
by a system of communication, and that [has] a dynamics in which processes of
a feedback nature play an important part” (1948a:24). In this view, democracy
responds to, and is a manifestation of, the “overwhelming . . . impulse” to communicate, which Wiener considers both a “fundamental fact . . . built into the brain
itself” and the “essence of man’s inner life” (Wiener 1950:83). This compulsion
to communicate is, for cybernetics, what defines “man as man” (Wiener 1950:83).
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However, as Wiener says, it only “represents a possibility which is built into him”
(1950:76).
Individuals need to learn to use language as a tool to gain access to others, according to Wiener. On the macropolitical level, then, cybernetics envisions
democracy as both a social and pedagogical formation. Communication is not
merely the means by which individuals gain access to each other; it is also an
instrument by which individuals control each other and all social forms in the
struggle against a natural tendency toward disorganization (entropy). It is not only
the “essence of man’s inner life” (Wiener 1950:83) but a compulsory requirement
for the organization of all life, individual and societal. Mirroring the struggle of
individuals “to persist, to multiply, and to organize,” democracy, for cybernetics,
is a “lucky accident,” the ultimate, although fragile, token of a temporary triumph
of the “tendencies of life” over the “general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos, and de-differentiation” (Wiener 1950:95). Hence, Wiener’s vision
of cybernetics as a political strategy was founded on a knowledge of “the limits of
communication within and among individuals” (1950:17), which can be used to
confront threats of both fascism and entropy by developing technologies of secrecy
and democratic revitalization (1950).
The first cybernetic texts portray a Cold War U.S. public that has been seduced by the conquest of fascism into a somnambulistic malaise in which society
blindly worships progress (Wiener 1950:41–42) and individuals are reduced to
relating to each other through “superficial clichés” (Wiener 1950:120). They were
unable to perceive or critically examine threats that, in Wiener’s view, rivaled and
perhaps surpassed the peril of fascism. Such perils included not just communism
and entropy but also the proliferation of such capitalist values as the “standard
American . . . orthodoxy,” the commodification of information (1950:113), and the
resultant misapprehension of the nature and imperative of communication.
Integral to the cybernetic critique of U.S. society, then, is a critique of the
way in which prevailing theories fetishize information as the essential substance
of communication. Wiener argues (following Jespersen 1923) that scholars captivated by this false image of information overemphasize the “semantic . . . aspect
of language . . . concerned with meaning” (1950:79). Pursuing a “misplaced grammatical purism” (Wiener 1950:88), they neglect the “actual performance” of
communication in favor of its “expected performance” (Wiener 1950:24); consequently, what they call scientific knowledge of communication is only a “meaningless simulacrum of intelligent speech” (Wiener 1950:79).7
Against this fetish of information, Wiener defines cybernetics as a “theory of
messages” (1950:77).8 In doing so, he directs attention away from a captivation
with content to the problem of form. A message, in the most technical sense,
“is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time”
(Wiener 1948a:8). More generally, it is a form or pattern of organization that
carries information between nodes of a communication system. The human is a
terminal node within a given communication system. Or, more precisely, Wiener
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 359
argues that the “human being [is a] special sort of machine [where] ordinary
language systems terminate” (1950:70; see also 1948b:214). Consequently, Wiener
suggests that to understand and pursue the development of new technologies of
communication, it is imperative to develop first a precise blueprint of the human as
the most basic technology of communication: “If we could build a machine whose
mechanical structure duplicated [the intellectual equipment of] human physiology,
then we could have a machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those
of humans” (1950:57–58).
Communication, thus, is a self-reflexive or “feedback” process of continual
adjustment by which a human translates an aspect of his or her interiority into a
mobile form and then transmits that form across space to another human, for whom
that form, an exteriority, may be translated into another interiority. The message, as
form, thus has two functions: first, as a container, it determines how information or
meaning circulates and appears, and second, as a vehicle of translation, feedback,
and exchange, the message serves as “an extension of man’s senses,” proliferating
a human’s “receptors for messages coming from outside” (Wiener 1950:98, 23).
Because of this latter function, Wiener understands the human–machine not
in terms of “isolated systems” confined within a corporeal materiality but as
integrated within a “larger world which contains [its] sources of vitality” (1950:28).
For this reason, he suggests that cybernetics may also be understood as a “philosophy of prosthesis” (Wiener 1950:171).
The critical utilitarian aim of cybernetics is to develop a technique for producing and refining a message form that is recognizable and efficient as both a mobile
value-bearing container of meaning and a sensory prosthesis. However, according
to Wiener, information is “subject to disorganization in transit [because of] nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and destroy the meaningful” (1950:17).
The information received is never identical to what is sent. Cybernetics is, therefore, less concerned with the “information actually carried” by the message than it
is to “evaluate the amount of information it carries by determining its probability
in the ensemble of all possible messages” (Wiener 1950:78, 77). Concurrently,
it conceives of the information carried by a message as a measure of its control
(Wiener 1950:21). What this means is that the message is the only means by which
we “can have access to the internal thoughts of another person” (Wiener 1950:81).
To the extent that the most successful message carries the least amount of information, humans can never achieve “equal and direct access to one another.” Hence,
the cybernetic disclosure of the limits of the message reveals a tension within its
own ethical vision of democracy’s stranger sociability: equally compelled toward
egalitarian communication, every citizen, nevertheless, is destined to be equally
barred from total access to each other by the structure of communication itself.
For cybernetics, communication is, in a certain sense, always a failure.
The revelation of this empirical limitation sets up a fundamental object of
cybernetic desire: a message that is pure form so that it carries no information.
This message with no content, with no representation of a subject’s relation to an
360 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
exteriority, is both a pure form of interiority and a pure form of prosthesis. In this
conceptualization, communication is not a matter of a subject sending a message
or gaining access to an other. The pure form of message abolishes all address, becoming a self-perpetuating pattern (Wiener 1950:96). Conversely, the pure form of
prosthesis abolishes all sense. Abolishing all content, information, and meaning,
all otherness and address, and all interventions of sensibility, cybernetics generates
a pure vision of secrecy, the imperative of which, too, is destroyed. The ultimate
form of communication, then, would inaugurate a domain of total commensurability between what is sent and what is received and, ultimately, between the sender
and the receiver as well.
Wiener admits that this vision compels him to “invade the realm of science
fiction” (1950:96). He is convinced that it “is not intrinsically absurd, far as it
may be from realization” (Wiener 1950:103). This pursuit leads him to develop a
secondary concept of human identity that conflicts with both the concept of the
human as machine and the common understanding of corporeal identity. Weiner
claims that “the physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter
of which it is made” but in a physical individuality that is more akin to “a flame”
rather than “a stone” or a “form rather than . . . a bit of substance” (1950:101–102).
In short, the human subject is a message. Thus, Wiener envisions the ultimate
triumph of cybernetics in transmitting a living human being by telegraph:
The difficulties are, of course, enormous. . . . To hold an organism stable while part of it
is being slowly destroyed . . . involves a lowering of its degree of activity, which in most
cases would destroy life in its tissue. . . . The fact that we cannot telegraph the pattern
of a man from one place to another seems to be due to technical difficulties. . . . The
idea itself is highly plausible. [1950:103–104]
Founded on the postulation of an essential human desire to communicate
and consolidating a democratic vision of communication as a mutual relation of
self-reflexive exchange, cybernetics heralds the apotheosis of the modern liberal,
sovereign subject only and ultimately to fantasize the destruction of its body in
a process of pure communicational abstraction. More simply, it redramatizes the
dialectics of the modern citizen form.
Codicil of Death
Wiener’s texts spawned a theoretical industry of supplementation and critique. The excitement of Wiener’s work constituted an electrifying nexus for unprecedented interdisciplinary dialogue and debate. Funded by Cold War agencies
interested in the security of democracy, these activities, despite the brilliance of
Sapir’s (1949) much earlier writings on the topic, made communication and technology into the central problem for scholars who have had a significant impact
within anthropology: for example, Lévi-Strauss, Alfred Smith, Gregory Bateson,
Margaret Mead, Thomas Sebeok, Charles Hockett, Leslie White, Colin Cherry,
Edward Hall, and Clifford Geertz.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 361
By the 1960s, basic concepts derived from Wiener’s texts began to insinuate
themselves into the common reason of the social sciences, particularly in the United
States. For example, in his introduction to Communication and Culture (1966),
Alfred Smith declares not only that “living is largely a matter of communicating” but also that “to live in societies and to maintain their culture [humans] have
to communicate” (1966:v, 1). In the same year, Geertz defines “man” in terms
of a cybernetic vision of prosthesis as the “animal most desperately dependent
upon . . . extragenetic, outside-the-skin control mechanisms . . . for ordering his behavior.” He argues that culture is best seen “as a set of control mechanisms . . . for
governing behavior” (Geertz 1973:44).
Within France, the emergent fields of linguistics and psychoanalysis, despite sharing an emphasis on the “unique acts by which language is actualized”
(Benveniste 1971:217) and on “the form in which language expressed itself”
(Lacan 1977:85), gave cybernetics a much more critical reception.9 Émile Benveniste expresses caution about the “lure” of cybernetics (1971:12). Jacques Lacan,
in directing his students to “read anything by Mr. Norbert Wiener,” warns against
the “curiously deceptive” quality of his texts. Commenting on the “strange myth”
that Wiener presents of “transmitting a man by telegraph from Paris to New York,”
he notes that its “subjective mirage” and “extraordinary confusion” are “sufficient indication that the notion of communication has to be treated cautiously”
(1993:37).
These responses within linguistics and psychoanalysis were guided by a critique of the cybernetic presumption that communication is a natural process of
exchange between two already existing (monadic) individuals within a natural
temporal domain. What remained unchallenged, however, was the basic imperative of the modern linguistic ideology of communication: that the communicative
moment is prerequisite for the emergence of the human subject as such. Yet the linguistics of Benveniste and the psychoanalysis of Lacan significantly transformed
the status and quality of both communication and the human. Most fundamentally,
and in contrast to cybernetics, these analytic models conceived communication
in terms of the complex production of aporetic subject forms, addressivity, and
temporality.
For Benveniste, communication is a problem that language is poised to
solve and not something that instrumentalizes language. Language achieves this
through an ensemble of “mobile” and “empty” pronominal “forms” that “do not
refer to ‘reality’ or to ‘objective’ positions in space or time” (1971:219). These
forms, however, become “full” when a speaker introduces them into each instance of discourse. Or rather, they facilitate the dialectical conversion of language into instances of discourse and, with the utterance of the I, the constitution of the subject in discourse. The I is, therefore, a unique but mobile sign
that “has no value except in the instance in which it is produced” (Benveniste
1971:218). The emergence of the I within the instance of discourse defines the
temporality of the utterance itself as present. This “eternally present moment,”
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as Benveniste calls it, provides the repeated basis for all production of past and
future.
Because the I is a shifter, a term that Benveniste derives from Jakobson (1971)
and Jespersen (1923), the moment of utterance of I includes within itself a critical
element of address. Benveniste writes of this dialectic of displacement: “It is this
condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally
I becomes you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself as
I. . . . I posits another person, the one who, being, as he is, completely exterior
to ‘me’, becomes my echo” (1971:224–225, see also Lee 1997:163–164). This
dialectic, of course, describes the constitution of the subject by means of an other.
The subject is displaced by this process through which the posited exteriority of
the you becomes immanent to the I. The anticipation that you will become the I
temporalizes the you as a futurity. At stake, thus, is a process by which the subject
of the present is generated through its own futurity as other.
These formulations respond to several of Wiener’s premises about communication. For instance, the subject (the I ) cannot be understood as the simple locus
of communication. And “communication,” rather than an exchange between two
preexisting subjects, is the name of the occasion for the fleeting emergence of
the subject as an other within the temporalizing vicissitudes of addressivity. The
intelligibility of a message, the supposed form exchanged in communication thus
appears only as a retroactive product of communication. Conversely, the subject,
constituted in a present by an exteriority and futurity that are immanent to it,
appears as its own prosthesis.
Lacan (in conversation with Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, and Heidegger, among
others) rearticulates and transfigures these fundamental aspects of Benveniste’s
theory of communication (Roudinesco 1997). Unlike Benveniste, however, Lacan,
in his lectures presented between 1953 and 1960, is explicitly working through
Wiener’s model. His work during this period articulates a relentless critique of the
cybernetic fetish of organization and the valorization of “modern man . . . who does
not recognize his very own raison d’etre in the disorder that he denounces” (Lacan
1977:70). At the same time, Lacan appropriates many of Wiener’s categories and
transforms them in novel ways, for example in his proposition of the inhumanness
of the human and his description of the Symbolic as a machine (1988:319–320).
Like Wiener, Lacan’s analysis begins by “postulating a world of
desire . . . prior to any kind of experience” (1997:222). This desire, however, is
neither the cybernetic figure of communicatory impulse as an essential kernel of
life, nor is it a desire for an object. Rather, it is “the desire of the Other” (1977:312).
This “Other” is not the “you” discussed by Benveniste, although it is similar in
that it “has to be posited as exterior” (Lacan 1992:71). It is, more precisely, the
“absolute Other,” which Lacan qualifies as “the first stranger” or extimacy, which is
“something strange to me, although at the heart of me” (1992:52, 54, 71). The “of”
in his formula, “desire of the Other,” signifies that desire is a relation of being to
death that is figured as an unrepresentable form, or a lack, immanent to the subject.
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 363
“This lack,” Lacan claims, “is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack
of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists. . . . Being comes into
existence as an exact function of this lack” (1997:223; see also 1977:103–105).
This desire of death, for Lacan, is a founding principle in the formation of
modern humanism’s investment in identifying the ego with an image of the total body. Because of its provenance in a system of projection and objectification
(Lacan 1988:224), the phantasmatic figure of sovereign wholeness and isolation
functions only to veil unsuccessfully the subject’s inchoate sense of lack. Captivated with the reflection of a self-image that it simultaneously takes as an other,
the psychoanalytic subject is compelled to regard itself with vicissitudes of aggressivity and narcissism. Lacan, thus, offers what may be read as an analysis of
the dialectic between embodiment and abstraction of the modern citizen form:
because of its “captation” within a reiterative structure of misrecognition, narcissism, and aggressivity, the modern human insistently invests itself in the image
of itself as an inviolable corporeality while simultaneously fantasizing that body’s
total destruction (1977:1–7).
For Lacan, then: “Being of non-being, that is how ‘I’ as subject comes on
the scene” (1977:300). Such a formulation radicalizes Benveniste’s portrayal of
the emergence of the I within instances of discourse. For example, although Benveniste suggests that the subject cannot be understood as an origin of communication, Lacan pushes this further to claim that the “Other [is] the locus of Speech”
(1977:313). Because “the subject is spoken rather than speaking” (Lacan 1977:71),
the subject “doesn’t know what he is saying” (Lacan 1997:244). What is at stake
is not only a subject that “doesn’t know what he is saying” but the question of a
subject that “doesn’t know what he is” (Lacan 1997:244). Nodding at Wiener and
with characteristic humor, Lacan argues, “[The subject] himself is, if you prefer, a
message” (1997:283). This subject, however, relates to its message not as sender
but as prosthesis. The “message has been written on his head, and he is entirely
located in the succession of messages” (Lacan 1997:283). He “knows neither the
meaning nor the text, nor in what language it is written, nor even that it has been
tattooed on his shaven scalp as he slept” (Lacan 1977:302). This message, sent
by the Other, is a “codicil that condemns him to death” (Lacan 1977:302). Refiguring desire in terms of the postulation of an Other separated from the subject
by “the wall of language” (1997:244), Lacan presents communication not as a
natural sign of life, intelligibility, and recognition, but as an unrepresentable and
unintelligible “discourse in which it is death that sustains existence” (1977:300).
These differences, however, may also be understood as a transfiguration both of
Wiener’s anxious revelation of the impossibility of total communication and of the
cybernetic wish for human life to be anchored by the nonhuman. Lacanian analysis, in this way, reinstalls communication within a broader structure of compulsory
misrecognition whereby the subject must remain a secret to itself.
It is important to position the work of Marshall McLuhan (2001) at this
nexus of cybernetics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. Similar to Lacan, his work
364 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
represents a creative appropriation of Wiener’s texts. Yet, unlike Lacan, what is
at stake is a critique of “Western Man” in terms of its relation to processes of
colonialism and nation formation.
McLuhan agrees with the cybernetic critique of the fetishization of content
meaning, which “is like a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the
watch-dog of the mind” (2001:18). He likewise places ultimate emphasis on the
message as a form, communicative medium, and prosthesis. However, he criticizes
the premises that the message is a sequence of measurable events distributed in
time and that meaning is the message’s content. Instead, appropriating Wiener’s
vision of a message that is pure form, he argues that the message, as such, has no
“content” other than its own medium. Hence the familiar dictum: the “medium is
the message.”
McLuhan, thus, shifts the focus of inquiry from a theory oriented toward
making technologies of communication more effective to one concerned with
an evaluation of the psychic and social effects of communicational technology.
Among these effects are the very things that Wiener presumes to be natural, such as
space, time, language, and the very possibility of dividing and discerning spatial,
temporal, and linguistic forms into segmentable or sequential units. McLuhan
likewise criticizes not only the concepts of community, nationalism, and the nation,
but also rationality, reason, and, ultimately, “civilized man” with his “ego image”
(2001:84, 289). Each of these, McLuhan argues, is a product of mechanical print
technology, the “gift of Gutenberg” (2001:116).10 In this view, the message is an
extension of the human not because it facilitates the circulation of environmental
information, but because modern “Western man” is a product of technologies of
communication. This is a fact that “he” is compelled to misrecognize because
this prosthetic “outering” constitutive of “man” is also a “self-amputation [that]
forbids self-recognition” (McLuhan 2001:43). Conversely and dialectically, by
misrecognizing them as separate and being seduced by their image of otherness,
humans are compelled to embrace technologies and relate themselves to them as
“servomechanisms” (McLuhan 2001:46). Stemming from the postulation of this
constitutive misrecognition, McLuhan presents an inversion of Wiener’s fantasy
machine that reproduces human physiology: “Physiologically, man in the normal
use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it
and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying technology. Man becomes, as it
were, the sex organs of the machine world” (2001:46).
Communication, then, does indeed help individuals gain access to each other.
For McLuhan, though, what defines any technology of communication “from
speech to computer” is that it “acts to separate man from man.” Moreover, similar to
Benveniste and Lacan, McLuhan argues that language is a technology that divides
the human subject within itself (2001:79). However, for McLuhan this postulation of a constitutive system of misrecognition is not a product of the ontological
structure of being but the result of the historical proliferation of the communicational technologies of “Western power” (2001:85). McLuhan, thus, fantasizes a
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 365
historical future for humanity in a return to a time prior to the “alphabetization” of
the world. He heralds the “implosion” and “retribalization” of humanity through a
communicational matrix by which not only the human body and language but also
“time (as measured visually and segmentally) and space (as uniform, pictorial, enclosed) disappear” (2001:138). Repoliticizing and extending the cybernetic desire
of discorporation, this fantastic moment of pure communication, in abolishing all
forms of strangeness, addressivity, and secrecy, ultimately dissolves communication as such in a “condition of speechlessness that could confer a perpetuity of
collective harmony and peace” (McLuhan 2001:80).
Face-to-Face
I now turn to the second moment in this archaeological exploration, the production of knowledge about new technologies of communication within specific
ethnographic projects.11 This is a moment that, on the surface, appears to be defined by a reiterative calls to arms championing ethnography’s adequacy to discern
a new object. For example, Daniel Miller and Don Slater, two of the most powerful
proponents of a return to traditional ethnography in the anthropological study of
the Internet, view their collaborative texts as constituting a “defense of traditional
canons of ethnographic inquiry” (2000:21) against both the “promulgation of the
ideal of multi-sited ethnography” (2003:50) from within the discipline and the
usurpation of the term ethnography by other disciplines, “such as cultural studies”
(Miller and Slater 2000:21). With this twofold threat in view, their texts reiterate
“a commitment to a much older ideal of holism” (Miller and Slater 2003:56; for
a critique of holism, see Appadurai 1988). In defending a position that Miller
and Slater admit is “relatively conservative” (2000:21)—even “old-fashioned”
and “rather outmoded” (2003:51)—these texts claim that conducting this style
of ethnography, nevertheless, allows one to pursue an enduring anthropological
“ambition towards generalization about the nature of humanity” in a way that is
ultimately “safer” (Miller and Slater 2003:56).
In response to the newness of new technologies of communication, the “new,”
within Miller and Slater’s texts, appears to be transformed into a signifier of both
the ongoing necessity of anthropology’s sine qua non (i.e., ethnography) and the enduring relevance of an anthropological desire to transcribe, translate, and represent
the human experience of diverse cultural worlds in transformation. Written in the
name of discipline and tradition—and published during an era otherwise known for
its epistemological crises, dawning interdisciplinarity, and excitement (or alarm)
at globalization, changing world orders, or clashes of civilizations—these texts
immediately suggest a possibly perilous displacement of the old by the new.
Admittedly, the views of Miller and Slater on ethnographic practice are exceptional, if not somewhat extreme, in their championing of the traditional.12 However,
their texts articulate, explore, and push the limits of the normativity of a certain
discursive formation that conditions ethnographic approaches to the study of new
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technologies of communication. A series of questions may evoke the lineaments
of this normativity: Do not the claims about newness and the well-suited status of
a discipline make sense only against the background of some received notion of
authorizing tradition? May not any anthropological project be called “traditional”
if it requires adherence to a distinctively defined practice of ethnography, whether
it is holistic, highly localized, or multisited, or if it authorizes and makes unique
its disciplinary practice in the present through appeals to its own enduring past?
Put another way: Is it not the case that, to be an anthropologist, one must do or
have done ethnography? Is not any ethnography, then, always already traditional?
Conversely, is the phrase “traditional ethnography” not somewhat superfluous?13
It may be helpful, first, to distinguish precisely what traditional ethnography,
when oriented toward the study of new technologies of communication, succeeds
at transcribing. My argument is that this discursive field, although intending to describe the “reality” of, or “what is happening” in, diverse cultural worlds, instead
produces a transcription of specific elements of the linguistic ideology of communication that, as I have argued in the previous sections, emerged within Cold
War formations of modernity. As a consequence, traditional ethnography, like the
projects of cybernetics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, constitute a metapragmatic discourse about specific pragmatic functions of that ideology according to
which the communicative moment is mandatory and prerequisite for the accomplishment of humanness. By making this argument, I wish to highlight the specific
forms of relations of the post–Cold War ethnographic project not only to the disparate projects of Cold War cybernetics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, but also
to the “limits of awareness” (Lucy 1993, Silverstein 1981) of that modern linguistic
ideology.
A metapragmatic discourse of communication is a reflexive activity that, in
dealing with the appropriate use of communication, signals how pragmatic forms
are to be appropriately interpreted. Often in contradiction to the stated purpose of
its authors, it constitutes an ethical discourse that defines what counts as communication and as knowledge of communication. According to Silverstein, “insofar
as a text represents events, particularly events of using language, the text is explicitly a metapragmatic discourse about such events” (1993:35; see also Inoue
2003b, Lee 1997, Povinelli 2001b). Displaced from its usual object and redeployed in the study of new technologies of communication, “traditional ethnography” constitutes a specific type of metapragmatic discourse. In what follows,
I restrict my discussion to a broad range of instances of ethnographic discourse
that, although clearly not commensurable in terms of the content of their projects,
nevertheless produce texts that represent events of language. In so doing, they are
linked by a circulation, within and between each text, of precisely the same categories of reference and predication that typify a “modern linguistic ideology of
communication.”
One way to understand this specificity is to investigate the ways that this
emergent ethnographic discourse relies on semantico-referential categories of
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 367
instrumentality and extension to describe how new technologies of communication facilitate a prosthesis of individual corporeal identity.14 More precisely, whether discussing telephones, text messaging (Ito 2005a:9), televisions
(Mankekar 1999:78–80; Rajagopal 2001:5), or the Internet (Graham and Khosravi 2002:219), ethnography in this mode has tended toward describing new technologies of communication as particular kinds of instruments that initiate a double
expansion of the individual into a broader community (e.g., national, transnational,
or diasporic) and of a local instance of communication into a world beyond itself.
Hence, the proliferation of ethnographic texts that generate critiques of conventional restrictions on scale and context. These texts portray themselves as providing
new examples that support Anderson’s model of the imagined community whereby,
within the “minds” of members who will never “meet” each other, “lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 1991:6; for a critique of this model, see Axel
2003).
This discourse conjures the figure of the human as a constant comparative
reference for all description of prosthesis. The presence of this figure, however,
appears only partially in the visage of a communicative act that is “face-to-face.”
For instance, in his study of musical communities on the Internet, René Lysloff
(2003:255) states: “Freed from the constraints of real time and real space, so-called
virtual communities are not bound by physical proximity or face-to-face contact.”
Likewise, Paul Leonardi (2003:172), explaining why cell phones are positively
perceived by their users, states simply that they “encourage communication outside
face-to-face contexts.” And Josh Barker describes the “interkom” in Indonesia as
a technology that transforms “older forms of on-land communities” by “extending
them out beyond their usual geographic and social confines” to enable “a new
field of discursive interactions that are not reducible to face-to-face interactions”
(2003:13).
Within the logic of traditional ethnography, the separation of new technologies from the face-to-face is significant for two reasons. On the one hand, it supplements and refines the compendium of propositional knowledge by which a
metapragmatic discourse references and predicates about objects of anthropological inquiry. This manner of comparative description grounds the common claim
that new technologies of communication make possible a collapse of distance and
duration, a transcendence of normative restrictions (e.g., of class, race, gender, and
age), and the creation of new relations (links, connections) and new possibilities
for community formation (as “imagined”). As Ito states in her study of Japanese
youth: “The mobile phone has further revolutionized the power-geometry of spacetime compression for teens in the home, enabling them to communicate without
surveillance of parents and siblings. This has freed youths to call each other without
embarrassment” (2005b:6).
On the other hand, by separating out the difference of the face-to-face, this
descriptive discourse is able to make a simultaneous claim about the commensurability of the new and the old (i.e., prosthesis vs. face-to-face). This claim,
368 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
in clarifying what it is that traditional ethnography is designed to describe, forestalls any confusion about why a methodological model generated out of studies of
face-to-face interaction is “well suited” for the study of something that it otherwise
claims to be radically different. Within this model, ethnography not only describes
objects and their use but also examines the communicative practices by which particular entities are given meaning or become sites of contestation over meaning. Or
rather, unlike the Cold War projects of Wiener, Benveniste, Lacan, and McLuhan,
this method is designed to study meaning as the content, object, and effect of communication. Traditional ethnography’s design does not derive from the specific
form of communication or the specific corporeal and contextual embeddedness
that supposedly typifies face-to-face interaction. Instead, it derives from an attunement to the content meaning or the “information and images” (Cook 2004) that
technologies of communication are said to convey for their putative users. Hence,
ethnography portrays communication—and new technologies of communication
in particular—in terms that are otherwise quite close to Wiener’s cybernetic model
of purposive tools serving interactive creations of subject–referent and sender–
receiver relations: an already existing, isolated individual sends a message that
contains meaning referencing any variety of “objects,” including the sender’s “inner” self to another already existing individual who, in receiving it, comes to share
something with the sender.15
The privilege that the metapragmatic discourses of ethnography accord content meaning not only explains the vicissitudes of a descriptive procedure that both
separates and conjoins face-to-face and prosthesis in a play of difference and commensurability, but it also follows consistently from a trajectory of ethnographic
tradition (e.g., symbolic anthropology’s “thick description”) that, as metapragmatic
discourse, is defined by a “drive for reference” (Mertz 1985:2) and thus is compelled to transcribe immediately perceptible (i.e., semantico-referential) features
of normatively conceived communication onto nonreferential aspects of semiosis
(Parmentier 1985:379). Working within a focus on content meaning, traditional
ethnography strives to insure that its method of description remains consistent with
the reality it describes by limiting the kinds of statements ethnography can make
to propositions derived from a segment of complex social action. As the most
explicit site at which to identify the processes of referential projection and objectification, a privileging of semantic properties of meaning also locates the trace of
a modern linguistic ideology of communication and its conceptualization of the
human, which insinuates itself within ethnographic texts against the intentions of
their authors and functions as an anchor for this descriptive enterprise.
To attend to this specificity, one might consider the precise temporalizing effect of the description of the meaning of prosthesis, an effect that is camouflaged by
emphasis on space as that which is bridged or annihilated or within which individual agency is extended. Within traditional ethnography’s descriptive procedure, the
time of a culture’s communicative practice is now. In relation to this ethnographic
present, what is produced is a specific anteriority, a time before the advent of new
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 369
technologies of communication, a time of the old, traditionally communicative
practices that are limiting, constraining, confining, or binding. “Face-to-face” is
an index of this time before, which is also glossed in terms of “physical proximity,”
“contexts” in “real time and real space,” and types of “contact” (Lysloff 2003) that
are “on-land” (Barker 2003).
Taking “face-to-face” as a part that is yet a metonym of wholeness, it seems
that what confines and limits this anteriority is the postulation of the total human
body—bound by its skin, constrained by the imperative of presence, limited to
mere speech—as both a source and site of communication. Within such a view,
the present of new technologies of communication is liberating, or at least unconstrained. Hence the regular recourse to categories like “revolutionized” or “enabling” (Ito 2005b), “freed” (Lysloff 2003), “outside” (Leonardi 2003), and “out
beyond” (Barker 2003).16 The present, however, is not totally devoid of relation to
the body. As an instrument of self-presentation through extension that must ever
decontextualize and disembody, the present of new technologies of communication comes to be inextricably linked to the anteriority of “face-to-face,” repeatedly
and retroactively producing it as an originary, isolated, and context-bound site
of communication. The postulation of the face (as posited anterior presence distinct from a disembodied present), thus, authorizes an instance of communication
by means of new technologies. The face makes it intelligible as communication
through a link to an authentically intelligible, although limited, subject of vocal
communication.
This is the moment within traditional ethnography that is most complicated
and most difficult to address. For, despite anthropology’s long history of critique of
the hegemonic status of Cartesian thinking and Western culture, a modern linguistic ideology’s project to preserve the sovereignty of the human resurfaces. Consequently, according to the terms of this ideology, speech is preserved and given
primacy as an authentic, unmediated modality of communication, in relation to
which all other modalities of communication are viewed as mediated derivatives.
The body, in turn, is constituted as the condition of possibility for communication; it is a sign of the ontological integrity of bare life (Agamben 1998) prior to
communication and prior to the advent of technologies of communication. The
temporalizing procedures of metapragmatic description, by variously including
and excluding face-to-face “communication,” generate a dynamic ambivalence:
a part (the face) that stands in for a whole (the body, the origin) paradoxically
reintroduces into the present the figure of its other.
Productive Possibility
As an interpretational grid that regiments how we ought to understand “communication,” and as a discursive form following those rules of recognition and
intelligibility, traditional ethnography as a metapragmatic discourse unwittingly
presents a map of a neoliberal regulatory ideal (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Keane
370 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
2003; Lee 1997). According to this regulatory ideal, which is partially consonant
with Wiener’s cybernetics, humans have a natural communicatory impulse, and
new technologies of communication constitute either an inevitable or historically
contingent response to a pregiven human desire to communicate.
This regulatory ideal, however, is not a figment of traditional ethnography’s
analytical imaginary. As metapragmatic discourse, ethnographic procedures of
knowledge production are dialectically related to its basic “descriptive” features
through processes of referential projection and objectification. They read surfacesegmentable patterns off of the normatively conceived structure of communication
and thus constitute (and objectify) communicative practice and its context (i.e., an
objective world of the “really real”) by analogy to semiotic categories of reference
and predication—such as instrumentality and extension (see Silverstein 1979:202,
1998:128).17 Traditional ethnography produces highly nuanced representations of
complex pragmatic systems of compulsory communication organized solely in
terms of semantico-referential types of semiosis. Concurrently, like cybernetics,
it does not attend to the indexical dimensions of language (Keane 2003:519). As
a result, texts surveying widely disparate types of technologies of communication
tend to make very similar statements about how those technologies function as
tools serving humans. One of the unintended yet most consistently veiled portrayals that circulate through this metapragmatic discourse is the figure of the human
as a singularly corporeal, sovereign, communicating being: “the lucid subject,” as
Inoue (2003a:181) summarizes, “who is autonomous and self-consolidating, who
masters language, speaks for herself/himself, founds knowledge, and constructs
(and even ‘shifts’ and ‘negotiates’) his or her identities.” Presupposing the fixity
of this figure, traditional ethnography is compelled to reiterate an ambivalence
embodied in the processes of subjectification that characterizes a linguistic ideology of communication driven by the impossibility of its own regulatory ideals
(a proposition that, provisionally, begins to address the question of a discipline’s
reiterative call to arms).
To the extent that it unwittingly proliferates the exclusionary ethics of this regulatory ideal and to the extent that it brackets what might be understood as broader
formal and functional processes of semiosis, traditional ethnography emerges
through a structure of misrecognition. However, as linguistic anthropologists since
Sapir and Whorf have demonstrated, this situation must not be understood as a failure of anthropology. Rather, misrecognition, in many ways related to what linguistic anthropologists call the “limits of awareness,” is integral to its constitution.18
In other words, it signifies a much broader and irresolvable dynamic tension. As
John Lucy states: “For scientists, philosophers, and others, who use language as a
guide to reality . . . these limitations on awareness are not idiosyncratic, but pattern
in predictable ways as a function of certain semiotic properties of speech” (Lucy
1993:25–26).
The dynamics of this tension may thus be transformed into a productive
possibility by reading this ethnographic modality with an eye oriented toward
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 371
identifying the properties determining its structure of misrecognition. The
metapragmatic discourse itself points us directly to an analysis, incipient within its
text, of procedures of subjectification characteristic of a modern ideology of communication. It does so precisely at the points at which it fetishizes the figure of the
human and thus neglects closer scrutiny of subject formation. By its very presence
in the text, the fetish (of the face, the body, or bare life) constitutes a specific form
of knowledge of the lack that it is otherwise designed to veil. Through this fetish,
the emergence of ethnographic studies of new technologies of communication has
identified a fundamentally important object of inquiry that it has, nevertheless,
been compelled to disavow. These are precisely the pragmatic functions of a modern linguistic ideology of communication that constitute the human subject as a
communicating subject.
Attending to this inquiry, however, does not imply a resumption and completion of a holistic enterprise of description. As Povinelli (2001b:324) suggests, the
semiotic limits of awareness that “influence the apprehension of the social world”
in terms of “semantic and grammatical features of language” are determined by
histories of social power. The processes I have discussed are indicative of a tension that cannot be ameliorated by refining traditional ethnography’s procedures of
description. This ambivalence is only in part a product of ethnographic discourse
itself, which is compelled to explain its utility through appeals to such things as
holism, stability, or a past trajectory of institutionalized practice. With its figuring of
a liberatory politics founded on an ambivalent relation to the “bare life” of the body,
this descriptive procedure indicates a relation to much broader, historically specific
processes. It not only risks reiterating the discorporating–incorporating logic of
neoliberal citizenship, but it also tends to redramatize what neoliberal discourse
considers a definitive event of modernity in which “the humanity of the living is
decided.” This is the moment when, as Agamben argues, “man . . . separates and
opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in
relation to that bare life in inclusive exclusion” (1998:8).
I have offered a critical, yet preliminary, archaeology that identifies historical
moments of transformation in the conceptualization of relations among the human, technology, the message, and prosthesis. This archaeology demonstrates the
convergence around new technologies of communication of post–Cold War traditional ethnography with Cold War era cybernetics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis.
In attending to the historical circumstances for the emergence of these theories in
relation to a modern linguistic ideology of communication, the goal has been to
explore how the categories of this discursive field have arisen within texts and
circulated through them in an effort to conceive of the conflicts and aporias among
them as generating possibilities for future inquiry. None of the sites of questioning
have been conceived of as homogeneous, consistent, or coherent; likewise, the
relations among them are not to be understood as continuous or recuperative.19
Post–Cold War traditional ethnography discloses a modern linguistic ideology’s
productions of (bare) life, corporeality, anterior temporalities, communicative
372 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
intelligibility, and the conveyance of content meaning. Psychoanalysis discloses its
privileging of death, futurity, unintelligibility, and the imaginary; and cybernetics
distills and valorizes its fight against disorder in the formation of good citizens,
the ordering and control of the message as form, and the fantasy of a future when
bodies are dispensable.
Conclusion
My aim has been to draw attention to how metapragmatic discourses, in their
appeal to an ethnographic tradition, end up reconstituting and authorizing not just
semantico-referential categories of a general semiosis, but also the mobile ethical
forms of a historically specific ideology of communication. Attending to these
properties opens a productive possibility for two reasons. First, these semiotic
categories and mobile ethical forms are not singular or universal, and they can
never be finalized. They are provisional and historically emergent, and their potential for constituting subjects is reliant on the vicissitudes of discursive use and
institutional sedimentation. Despite their “of-courseness,” they constitute not prisons of inevitability but sites of possible contestations, appropriations, pleasures,
contextual entailments, and so forth. Second, and more specifically, “traditional
ethnography,” like the fetish of the human and the total body, is itself a phantasm
of referentiality, which functions as an anchor within metapragmatic discourses
that are unanchorable because they too are subject to the same emergent and transformative qualities that characterize the ideology of communication they gloss.
On the one hand, this means that attempts to police “traditional ethnography” and
keep it “safe” may result only in a “meaningless simulacrum” (to borrow Wiener’s
[1950:79] phrase) of a stable, rule-governed, descriptive enterprise. On the other
hand, it means that “traditional ethnography” too is generated through transformative, provisional, and contestatory properties characteristic of “the human use of
human beings” or the “invention of tradition.” The possibility that metapragmatic
discourses may be creatively realigned grounds my conviction that future studies
of new technologies of communication that appeal to “traditional ethnography”
may be put to use for a questioning of the exclusionary ethics of modernity’s
communicational politics of intelligibility.
The archaeology I have elaborated of conceptual transformations and contextualizations demonstrates a set of challenges and possibilities for 21st-century
anthropology. On the one hand, the critical projects I have discussed, which are
otherwise invested in rethinking Cold War normative ideals, tend to reconstitute
neoliberalism’s postulation of stranger sociability and reiterate modernity’s desire
of disembodied citizenship or redramatize its fantasy of communicational apotheosis. Such tendencies threaten to forestall the achievements of today’s ethnographic
practices. On the other hand, these same moments of conceptual transformation
also index fruitful sites of inquiry for future anthropologies of new technologies
of communication. These include but are not limited to, investigations into the
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 373
formations of fantasy and desire, institutions of intelligibility, constitutive systems of misrecognition, and ethical orders of compulsory communication. These
are sites of inquiry around which we may organize a more general critical analysis of the formation of modern liberal subjects, the fetishization of the human
body as the place of origin of communication in the form of speech, and the
projection or objectification of technologies of communication as instruments of
prosthesis.20
By restating the question of a future anthropology of new technologies of
communication in terms of ethics, desire, and intelligibility, I wish to highlight the
basic features of an inquiry that the visage of technological newness invites us to
pursue. In confronting this newness, anthropologists will perhaps wish to ask: How
can we talk about and represent the human and communication in diverse cultural
worlds after the liberal humanist subject is denaturalized? To begin to address this
question, I suggest the following postulates: (1) technologies of communication
(new or old) exist within, and arise mutually with, ethical systems of compulsory
communication; (2) communication is a language ideology that contributes to
the active constitution of the modern neoliberal reality that it claims to serve or
represent; (3) technologies of communication are complex circulatory matrices that
(objectified as tools) at once generate a desire for communication and contribute to
the formation of modern fantasies of space (as distance to be bridged) and time (as
an originary, unmediated moment of communication prior to technology) within
which that desire may be played out.
Phrased in this way, new technologies of communication appear to be fragile achievements that may be interrogated in terms of specific histories of formation, circulation, breakdown, and revitalization. Reframed along these lines,
anthropological studies of these circulatory matrices may be drawn into a conversation with a literature that demonstrates the overlapping of technology and
communication within modern regimes of power and knowledge (Davis 1999;
Innis 1950; Peters 1999; Schivelbusch 1979; Sterne 2003), highlighting, for example, their complex entanglement with histories of religious impulse and the
Enlightenment dream of a perfectible society, colonial projects and capitalism’s
pursuit of efficient transportation as well as with the modern nation-state’s ambivalent configurations of multicultural or postcolonial difference. In heralding the
“collapse of time and space,” these projects have envisioned the future of communicational innovation through a phantasmatic return to a pristine proximity, an
intimate verisimilitude of disembodied face-to-face. Oriented toward processes
of subjectification, further questions follow: To what extent do regulatory practices of communication constitute as natural the internal coherence and distinctive
isolation of the modern subject as the subject of communication? How may we understand the desire to communicate as a normative ideal rather than as a descriptive
feature of experience? Why are communication, the desire to communicate, and
a competence with any technology of communication signs of a modern subject’s
intelligibility?
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These questions indicate the importance of reinvigorating an inquiry into
the category of “face-to-face” that circulates through ethnographies of all sorts.
From the point of view of a future critical practice of ethnography, the issue is
decidedly not whether a model developed for the study of dyadic speech acts between speaker and hearer is adequate for other or all forms of communication,
including large-scale modalities of modern societies (Hanks 1996:201–225, see
Lee 1997 for a critique of Habermas in these terms). For Inoue, “such a distinction
misses the point that face-to-face interaction is just as mediated as other forms
of communication—what, after all, could possibly be ‘natural’ about ‘naturallyoccurring speech’?—and that the supposedly mediated and reflexive is always
present in every face-to-face encounter” (2003b:11; see also Chang 1996; Derrida
1988; Mazzarella 2004; and Sterne 2003). To supplement Inoue’s observation that
face-to-face is always already mediated, we might ask, for instance: To what extent does physical proximity insure direct, or any, access between two speaking
subjects? What neoliberal principles require that this interaction be framed by
mobile forms of mutuality, self-reflexivity, or commensurability? What form of
desire inscribes face-to-face within shifting relations of misrecognition and unintelligibility? How have historical formations of power and knowledge compelled
face-to-face subjects to identify themselves with images of distinct, separable,
total, and isolable bodies?
In other words, rather than configure this interaction “around the representation of voice as the ground of its truth . . . [for] . . . self-disclosing subject[s]”
(Anagnost 2000:396), it may be more fruitful to understand face-to-face as only
one of many possible (and possibly fetishized) forms of social life. However,
this modality of social life is not to be equated with the originary, stable ground
from which to derive and measure all communicative activity. In contrast, we may
wish to investigate the extent to which face-to-face is an incomplete and unstable
product of the circulatory matrices of desire and fantasy (i.e., “technologies of
communication”) that condition the way human beings “problematize what they
are, what they do, and the world in which they live” (Foucault 1985:10). However, by saying this, I am not implying that face-to-face is another example of a
liberating decontextualization, nor am I proffering it as a new point of departure
or return for future ethnographies of new technologies of communication. Understood dialectically as a congeries of unfinished mobile forms circulating within
modern systems of compulsory communication, the figure of face-to-face may be
seen to function indexically with any number of other forms to compel individuals
to constitute themselves as ethical human subjects of intelligible communication,
to produce context, and to proliferate the fantasies of origin, departure, and return.
This kind of project, which I believe is critical for anthropology and its futures,
may be redescribed as an “ethnography of forms,” a phrase coined by Dilip Gaonkar
and Elizabeth Povinelli to indicate the redirection of analysis away from meaning
as a “phantasmatic object” and toward the “power-laden, interlocking levels of
and contestations between cultures of circulation [and] the transfigurations they
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 375
demand on the palpability, intelligibility, and recognizability of texts, events, and
practices” (2003:395). This of course harkens to the most compelling aspects
of the Cold War nexus among cybernetics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. An
“anthropology of forms” would perhaps include a critique of the commodification
of information and meaning; an emphasis on pronominal mobility within and
between instances of discourse; questions of desire and corporeal imaginaries;
the portrayal of media as historically specific circulatory matrices of power and
knowledge; and the postulation that prostheses, rather than extending a naturally
whole and isolated human body, contribute to processes that produce the nature of
recognizable bodies as naturally intelligible.
The pursuit of such a project may very well lead the discipline into new
domains of “nonknowing.” However, because anthropology has established a solid
tradition of interrogating modernity’s exclusionary ethics, it is well suited to the
risk of developing critical ethnographies of new technologies of communication—
even if its emergent procedures for constituting and analyzing objects fail to be
recognized as “traditional.”
Notes
Acknowledgments. Jean Comaroff initially prompted the writing of this article. Although the text may not appear as she would have wished, her encouragement to seek ever
more clarity in anthropological practice remains its inspiration. Much of the questioning
within this article was collaboratively generated and explored with students at Swarthmore College. Conversations with Monet Sexauer, Mary Mandis, Erik Davis, Tom Evnen,
Rebekah Rosenfeld, Paul Livingston, William Elison, Elizabeth Povinelli, Miyako Inoue,
William Mazzarella, Brian Larkin, Warren Sack, Michael Silverstein, and the spirit of
Bernard S. Cohn have influenced my thinking on questions posed here. Michael Silverstein’s work opens new possibilities for questioning the nature of communication, and I
thank him for reading earlier drafts of this article. I also thank Ann Anagnost for support
and critique as well as the anonymous readers for Cultural Anthropology, who challenged
me on almost every point. My footnotes occasionally quote or address the comments of these
anonymous readers, and the body of the text occasionally redeploys the language of their
queries, critiques, or complaints. I take responsibility for any errors, misrepresentations, or
inadvertently uncited phrases.
1. These are processes that have been fruitfully explored in Berlant 1997, Butler 1993,
Povinelli 2002, and Warner 1992.
2. My analysis, inspired by Foucauldian archaeology, does not seek to make claims
about the shared interests of an era or all of the types of studies and texts that were produced
during two distinct periods. It does not follow the demands of a detailed chronology, tracking
the development, continuity, and enduring identity of categories or questions; rather, my
discussions fixate on the particularities of specific instances of inquiry, postulation, and
ambivalence. I have intentionally investigated not one continuous discourse but multiple
mobile categories that circulate within, and make possible, very different domains of an
emergent discursive field that, although united, is heterogeneous to itself.
3. As one anonymous reviewer notes, “anthropology is not alone in its susceptibility
to the insinuations of a modern linguistic ideology’s project to save the ontological integrity
of so-called man—so too are the works of certain philosophers and feminist critics, who,
376 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
driven by the horror of Cartesian/Western culture, celebrate the “body,” the third world
“other,” or “woman” in attempts to criticize the ontologies of the West.” See Cheah 2003
for a broad discussion of these ambivalent formations as they intersect with the romance of
nationalism.
4. See Masco 2002 for a rearticulation of these postulations for the post–Cold War
United States.
5. One critical element to consider for a future inquiry will be models of language
and the human that were elaborated prior to the Cold War apotheosis of communications
theory, including, for instance, Benjamin 2000 and Sapir 1949.
6. It is necessary to emphasize that Norbert Wiener’s texts are not commensurable with
all texts within cybernetics. My point is that during the 1950s, “Norbert Wiener” became
a sign, a mobile indexical icon, of cybernetics, circulating through texts associated with
the names of Lacan, Benveniste, McLuhan, and innumerable others. That said, it is evident
that Wiener’s own texts were emergent, heterogeneous, and contradictory, even within a
single text. This tension opens the possibility for conceptual transformations of, and the
possibility of appropriations by, other, quite dissimilar analytical models, such as linguistic
anthropology. In other words, what allows Wiener’s texts to circulate is not a coherent,
homogeneous, or singular meaning, but a form of discourse that is aporetic.
7. This presaging of the metapragmatic approach to linguistic anthropology and its
critique of analyses that privilege semantico-referential forms of semiosis (discussed in the
second half of this article) is perhaps not surprising, given Wiener’s conversations during
this period with Roman Jakobson who was, himself, rethinking the limits of Saussure in light
of Peirce’s accounts of semiosis. Although acknowledging the radical differences between
Wiener’s and Jakobson’s works, I suggest there is another way to think of the development
of this critique, and of metapragmatics as historically emergent phenomena mutually arising
with the Cold War moment’s linguistic ideology of communication. This topic must be left
for another article.
8. In this context, it is important to mention the work of Claude Shannon (Shannon
and Weaver 1949), Wiener’s student and collaborator. The influence of the research of
each on the other is amply documented. Shannon’s exclusion of meaning from the theory
of communication and his elaboration of the sender–receiver model are critical not just
to the development of cybernetics but also for understanding the multiple emergences of
Jakobson’s speaker/addressee model (1990) and Bateson’s theorization of metacommunicative messages (1972).
9. If we should be cautious in viewing “cybernetics” as a homogeneous domain
commensurable with the texts or name of Norbert Wiener, here also the linguistics of
Benveniste and the psychoanalysis of Lacan were in constant transformation, interacting
with each other and with specific discourses in the human sciences, especially anthropology and philosophy (see Dosse 1997 and Roudinesco 1997). It is significant that, in
1950, Lévi-Strauss introduced Lacan to Jakobson, who, for the following 17 years, frequently stayed with Lacan during his visits to Paris (Roudinesco 1997:276). However,
much more work needs to be done to track Jakobson’s linguistic models as units of mediation and heterogeneous sites of transformation that constitute, react against, interrupt,
and make possible both the modern liberal discourse on language and the antihumanist
critique.
10. McLuhan’s basic argument that print media constituted the possibility of nationalism, the nation’s “image of society,” the displacement of the medieval idea of discontinuous time and space by the modern idea “homogeneous space,” and time as a
succession of “nows” (2001:162, 176, 177), is all too often forgotten. Most surprising
is what appears to be a complete disavowal of McLuhan within Anderson 1991. What
ANTHROPOLOGY AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 377
is, however, more relevant for the present archeology, is McLuhan’s attention to the
ways that analytical models such as structuralism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and cybernetics are products of historically specific social formations. Likewise, his commentary on how analysts are lured not only by meaning but by the immediately discernable elements of language that are measurable, segmentable, and sequential presages
the metapragmatic critique of linguistic analysis as much as it reiterates Whorf’s basic
propositions.
11. The Annual Review of Anthropology has a well-established tradition of publishing
articles on technologies of communication. See Cook 2004, Eisenlohr 2004, Hakken 1993,
Mazzarella 2004, Pfaffenberger 1992, Spitulnik 1993, and Wilson and Peterson 2002. These
texts address disparate histories of analysis that cover the vicissitudes of the 1960–90 period
not addressed in the present investigation. Likewise, it is critical to study the significance
of works of Kittler (1990, 1997, 1999) and Mattelart (1994, 1996), whose interventions
provide fodder for rethinking the relevance of the theories of Shannon, Wiener, Lacan,
Foucault, and McLuhan.
12. For proponents of more diversified and open ethnographic approaches in the
traditional mode, see also, for example, Blank 2001; Eickelman and Anderson 1999; Graham
and Khosravi 2002; Jacobson 1996, 2000; Lysloff 2003; and Wellman and Haythornthwaite
2002.
13. I use “traditional ethnography” as a shorthand for this otherwise highly complex,
discontinuous, and multiply emergent anthropological practice of knowledge production. I
realize that this may be a contentious postulate, particularly for those ethnographers who
justifiably see the moment of new technologies of communication as a critically important
opportunity to deconstruct both “tradition” and traditional ethnography. I can only beg the
indulgence of these latter scholars to take this not as a criticism, but as a questioning of the
powerful influence of the modern linguistic ideology of communication.
14. I am here bracketing an extremely important analysis of semiotic processes that
constitute, project, and objectify what we call reality. Following Whorf, Michael Silverstein
(1979) presents a powerfully precise analysis of instrumentality and extension as semanticoreferential categories that produce the reality or objectivity of objects. For broad discussions
of prosthesis, see Gray with Figueroa-Sarriera and Mentor 1995, Haraway 1991, Nelson
2001, and Wright 2001.
15. Spitulnik’s (1993, 2002) rigorous critique of the sender/message/receiver model
has been consistently unheeded in these studies.
16. These individual authors are not being viewed here as expressing an uncritical embrace of a supposed liberatory power of new technologies. Indeed, many of them question
the valorization of technologies of communication as liberatory. My query is how a modern
linguistic ideology of communication becomes insinuated within traditional ethnography.
The evidence for this is provided by the manner in which analysis or description is limited
to semantico-referential categories of instrumentality and extension, and consequently, new
technologies of communication appear, within analysis, to be used by humans for communicative goals, functioning teleologically to re-create or supplement a supposed originary
communicative state.
17. See also exemplary discussions in Hull 2003, Mertz 1985, Parmentier 1985,
Schieffelin, et al. 1998, Silverstein and Urban 1996, and Urban 1996.
18. Misrecognition, in this case, is the condition of possibility of any subject presumed to know (including the “I” that appears as the author of this text). In this sense,
there is no liberation from misrecognition. My project is not oriented toward the liberation
of anthropology or its subject presumed to know. Instead, by distinguishing moments of
misrecognition within this domain of knowledge production, this reading is intended to
378 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
facilitate a transformation of a dilemma into a productive possibility. For a more thorough
elaboration of the relation between the notion of misrecognition and metapragmatics, see
Povinelli 2001b.
19. This article makes no claim to analyze a culture in its totality, but rather attends
to the particular configurations of a modern linguistic ideology of communication, which,
nevertheless, has had a broad impact.
20. These are also central issues within other domains such as feminism, critical
race theory, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, but as of yet they have barely begun
to be addressed by anthropologists of new technologies of communication. Extraordinary,
although anomalous, anthropological examples include Anagnost 2004; Hull 2003; Inoue
2003a, 2003b; Keane 2003; Larkin 2002, 2004; Mazzarella 2003, 2004; Morris 2002;
Povinelli 2002; Rafael 2003; Siegel 1997; Spitulnik 2002; and Weidman 2003.
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ABSTRACT This article is a set of reflections on how a modern linguistic ideology of communication produces a fundamental misrecognition of the formation
of the modern liberal subject as a naturally communicating subject. I explore
the complex features of this misrecognition as a legacy of Cold War procedures
of knowledge production about communication and technology to suggest that
ethnographies of new technologies of communication unwittingly proliferate presumptions about the ontological integrity of the human prior to communication
and prior to the advent of technologies of communication. This dilemma offers an
alternative point of departure for the study of new technologies of communication
in pursuit of a renewed, critical investigation into the circulation of modern cultural
forms of intelligibility. [anthropology, communication, new media technologies,
modernity, liberal subject]