Download 1 “Sociology at the Crossroads” Yerevan State University, Yerevan

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“Sociology at the Crossroads”
Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia, June
11 - 14, 2009.
Nataliya Ikonnikova
Social and cultural means of communication
State University – Higher School of Economics
(Moscow, Russia)
0.
Good afternoon. I appreciate you all and our chair especially for the
possibility to discuss a theory of a “society of the media” in sociological context.
I’ve been glad to meet such words in panel proposal like, “the focus of the panel
rests mainly on theoretical issues”.
My background is cultural and communication (including “propaganda”)
studies in non-Western societies and non-system (even marginal) communities
in industrialized societies. And I am lecturer in general sociology in State
University – Higher School of Economics and secretary of interdisciplinary
journal. So, my interest is mainly in some theoretical framework, but not in allembracing field description.
1.
Research questions
As far as sociology tries to consider communication as social (or societal)
process, it should reveal institutions and associations (communities, groups) which
accomplish communication in or beyond all those phenomena that we observe and
describe as “communication”.
In other words, really we see exactly social traces, imprints of
communication. Moreover, they are a kind of casts of social relations and personal
meanings involved into communicative processes.
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The analysis of different communicative interactions – intercultural
communication, legal and illegal organization communications, communication of
representatives of some communities (religious, migrant and so on) with majority
(host) societies expose both specificity of each situation and claims to elaborate
some general model (or theoretic frame). The last ought to reflect their structural
and dynamic similarities.
Therefore research questions which I consider are:
 Wherein does, in fact, communicative quality consist of considered social
interactions, and what within them is not communication?
 Should I describe these interactions as cultural, or social, or social by their
form and cultural by content or vice versa?
 What is there within these interactions the role of agents, personalities,
organizations, social institutions, communities, and may be society as a whole (or
people as empirically observed wholeness, but not only statistical or ontological
abstract essence)?
The question is just about mechanism and character of structural
conjunctions of personality (in terms of Niklas Luhmann).
Communication appears to be simultaneously transparent media, included as
an instrument into each interaction, and opaque body, conversing signs in their
own logic (media is message).
2.
I consider communication as the process of construction and/ or imitation
of identity by symbolic means (media). In the process of communication some
social possibilities, information capitals, organizational forms appear. This all
are media for next activities. Therefore, we should reveal not technical or
artificial but social media.
I assist at social critique approach to these oppositions, and I take into
consideration not only “cultural”, regional, Easy-West, ethnic, gender
differences, but as a core factor, - status (or even class) inequalities. I’m not
afraid to be too “class” or rigid Marxist. The epistemological fruitfulness of the
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approach, which doesn’t ignore social stratification in cultural processes and
communication, is demonstrated by many theories, from Adorno, Horkheimer,
Žižek to Gouldner and Bourdieu.
3.
Theoretical framework
Further, I stress the duality of social and cultural processes, possessing both
their specific forms and contents. Margaret Archer have told today about some
similar subject: opposition of culture and organization.
Social and cultural
processes are connected by means of three types of exchanges – communication
(symbolic exchange), management and corporeal exchange (see the scheme).
The framing or modeling is a measure to put “standard” set of research
questions, some of which usually seem to be not relevant particular situation or
event.
I’ve already submitted this frame work at some presentations (in English)
and articles (still in Russian). The need to distinguish them arises from the
awareness of growing degree of complexity of symbolic space and interrelations of
phenomena within it. Transformation of media of communication is not
transformation of techniques, but transformation of its social organization and core
ideas and values.
Symbolic means (values) and social interactions (norms) germinate through
the structure of any objectified act of communication or message (texts, things,
means, etc.). Now then, something corporeal is as well symbolic and socially
stratificated. Moreover, vice versa, no symbol or social relation exists as if it
doesn’t depend on something corporeal; it is always burdened by technology, way
of manipulation, physical or/and physiological conditions. The last trend is
perceived as “the crisis of Spirituality”, decline of High Culture, Ideals, Superior
Values, and culture at all.
As a result, both everyday and scientific discourses seek for something
transcendent as the angle of view and estimation. Trans-active communications,
trans-personality, social transition, trans-culture – and other trans-formations are
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fashion concepts.
4.
The idea of tension as significant feature of social and cultural reality has
been considered in a number of papers on history of society and culture. These
papers fix it in different concepts. The choice of particular concept reflects the
theoretical and evaluating position of the researcher, his readiness to look at
phenomena as aspiration for one of the poles: spiritual (religious, existential)
tension or passionarity (for example, in Lev Gumilev' concept), when the tension is
considered as specific quality of social and cultural environment providing
mobilization of cosmic, biological and other primordial resources for sustainable
and positive dynamics of society. So I may classify the moods of social and
cultural mobilization as social forms and legalizing them from-beyond normative
systems and, further, mechanisms of legitimizing: from mobilized development in
Soviet-type society to religious ascesis.
5.
Thereafter, I focus you attention at ironic consequences of spirituality –
corporeality polarization.
There in Soviet-type society energetic (labour and material) components are
redistributed for legitimizing and consolidation of norms of official ideology, as a
result – the object articles of culture is weakened: materialism destroys material
culture.
6.
Moreover, paradoxically, the reversal side of spiritual orientation is
legitimizing of civil activity and emancipation of forms' creation of set of cultural
artifacts: spiritual orientation creates prosperity. (An example is Weberian
Protestant ethics, which is considered as the foundation of capitalism prosperity.)
7.
I distinguish here four types of media: symbolic (cultural) media, normative
(social) media, institutional (social) media, and corporeal (cultural) media.
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The modification of the frame above in such a way allows me to single out
tension axis connecting and at the same time oppose symbolic components of
communication to its corporeal objectivations.
Therefore, I get some “a la Parsons frame”.
Social – norms and institutions – are the part of process on the frame, which
may be interpreted twofold: as social core of communication and as social media
of communication.
Symbolic media also may be considered, from one point of view, as deep
content of communication, demanding interpretation (even Verstehen), and from
other point of view, as some apparency, unequivocal sign, like in advertising
images, assuming predicted reaction.
Corporeal media is given as message (and by the way given quite open to
decoding) or “opaque body”, hostile to individual and his communication act.
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Symbolic media consists of:
 the value normative code,
 argumentation,
 and affective tinting are aspects of the process.
9.
Social media are classified twofold: what kind of identity is reproduced
(through what structural conjunctions actor is involved to the communication),
and, second, what kind and scale of integrity is established.
At normative level (normative media) I distinguish some types of social
media:
 collective (constructing and imitating different forms of communicative ties
from kin to non-kin groups and collectives);
 organizational (constructing communications, that vary from rigid and
formal organizations, institutions and positions to social nets);
 and personal. Personal social media construct or imitate communications,
which take forms from spontaneous and impartitioned (between social roles
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and participations) “I” to competent (trained, well designed, represented,
played…) and differentiated image (called me).
10.
Analyzing social institutional media, I distinguish types of legal and
legitimate or bastard institutions providing communication as special or
operational activity. These types might be differentiated according to practical
foundation in social relations and functional aim (need) that they satisfy. They are:
 institutions of formal competent (expert) communication;
 institutions of public (civil) communication;
 institutions of inter-, intra-, and trans- individuated dialogue.
11.
Corporeality may be interpreted as double embodiment (Martin Heidegger,
Mikhail Bakhtin, I use the concept in Konstantin Pigrov' interpretation). The
corporeality of personality consists not only of the body of individual, but also it is
doubling by means of signs or social objects (in terms of P. Sorokin). These social
objects are of two types. First type of social objects, both phylogenetic [fai..] and
ontogenetic, is Alter (or Other) – other social mask, identity, group membership.
The corporeality is declined in social relations.
However, thereafter individual (personality) redoubles himself in artifacts.
The corporeality (“social body” of personality or community) is not only body but
also technique (including not only Mass techniques of body) but also all kinds of
techniques (technologies) which are for Martin Heidegger forms of disclosure
(Entbergen) of existence.
The shift to secondary corporeality is the subject of most postmodern
theories – as Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze et alias.
12.
Field testing
The field research to test the suggested model involves some case studies
based on longitude observation. They deal with communication of migrant and
religious minorities with local communities. Some particular features of these
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cases reveals the interrelation and differentiation of “spiritual” and embodies,
corporeal aspects; value and norms discrepancy and mutual impact and so on in
constructing some hierarchically ordered identity.
The “strong” subjects for this theoretical frame testing are religious
minorities. Does indeed spiritual, religious orientation produce material diversity
and prosperity, according to my hypothesis above?
I compare two communities: the Orthodox Old-believers (with special case
of Bashkir) and the Vaishnavas (Krishnaits) community in Russia (with focus for
Moscow commune). Survey and expert interviews have been used. Religious
values and norms structure the social conjunctions of the members of communities
in their interrelation within different social institutes: economic, politic, public,
education, entertainment, family, spare time. These structuring effects have
resulted in the options important and escapable spheres of social activity, modes of
interaction, depth of adoption in them.
Therefore, first, the minor community appears to be “open” as number of
member of large society, but it is close as identity by shared knowledge, values and
norms.
Second, the “communal body” and artificial corporeality are important
media for even religious (not only for so called “youth subcultures”) identity
presentation and, especially, (re)construction.
Third, the strategy of majority toward these identities is their “minorisation”
in each separate sphere of interaction with spontaneous or premeditated ignorance
of the integrity of structural conjunctions by some identity (structural separation).
And forth, in general, the symbolic media determines dimensions of social
norms adoption and moods of the members of community structural conjunctions
with “external” and “internal” social institutions. All these processes stipulate
demonstrated Otherness in body techniques (including dietary, hairdressing, signs
on body and so on) and social coat (including clothes, processions, book sale,
farming, employment overall and so on). Rejecting of common material culture,
the community creates Alter forms of its own. The result is growing cultural
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corporeal diversity. In many cases this diversity don't stay only communal, it is
commercialized and shared by other groups and subcultures.
13.
Conclusions
• Communicative and sociological analysis of social inter-(trans-) actions
reveals both their social (organizational) and cultural (meaningful) aspects.
Social critique is important part of this analysis. It allows to reveal
demonstrative and latent aspects of communication process.
• The idea of tension is a tool to consider the mechanism, assembling
communication process as bidirectional. Both spiritual and corporeal poles
are significant. Social media of communication is the most important from
the point of view of the subject of sociology and the least investigated field
of research.
• To highlight social media of communication is fruitful strategy in situations
of growing complexity of social space in composition (of divergent
elements) and inequality (of status positions).
• The supposed theoretical framework may be applied for study of different
social minorities, value and norm systems, brand advertising strategies,
ideological symbols.