James F. Tracy

Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart. Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction. Trans. Susan Gruenheck Taponier and James A. Cohen. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999. $57.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

For the past ten years media studies scholars have sought to delineate the broad intellectual history of communication studies. The varied (or, perhaps more appropriately, disparate) field of communication inquiry reflects the many epistemological and, to a lesser extent, ontological, debates of our forebears’ understandings of communication, which contributes to our present conceptions and misconceptions of communication studies. The more noteworthy of these works include Hanno Hardt’s Critical Communication Studies: Communication History and Theory in America (1992), Armand Mattelart and Michèle Mattelart’s Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions (1992, orig. 1986), Dan Schiller’s Theorizing Communication: A History (1996), and Armand Mattelart’s The Invention of Communication (1996). Collectively, and regardless of what our dispositions may be on communication and media studies, these ambitious works place in broad relief the intellectual history of the communicative, and the contributions to the field from areas as diverse as political economy, natural science, pragmatism, semiotics, literary theory, and structuralism.

In many respects Armand and Michèle Mattelart’s Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction serves as an accessible, but by no means simplistic, distillation of the above works. This short volume is probably the most comprehensive yet forthright overview of communication theory one will presently find on bookstore shelves. The mere 156 pages of text will be useful for seasoned scholars because of its accompanying bibliography, index, and the concise summations of important debates that directly involved or influenced the development of communication theories. It will be of equal value to graduate students in communication who desire a broad survey of the history and intellectual heritage of their area of study, as well as a leg up around the seminar table. Undergraduates will also find the book helpful in locating the origin of certain paradigms and the main motivations of its theorists. Given the plethora of dumbed down texts on communication theory geared at undergraduate students, this is indeed a scintillating and valuable work.

In the less than three pages of the introduction the authors note that many communication scholars harbor "the widely held illusion that we can reduce accumulated knowledge to a tabula rasa and that, unlike other disciplines, everything has yet to be created" (3). This is likely because the histories of the many theories utilized by communication researchers traverse so many fields, and to acknowledge this is to risk the legitimacy of the discipline itself which, throughout much of the 20th century, has vied for professional recognition by adhering to social scientific methods. But as Mattelart and Mattelart point out, to let this history of the contributions from related fields go unaccounted for will leave us and those we mentor with the task of reconciling "the varied attempts to articulate—or avoid articulating—the terms of what all too often have appeared as dichotomies and binary oppositions rather than levels of analysis" (1-2).

The book is divided into seven chapters that are set up in a decidedly linear historical trajectory. Each chapter consists of two to three subsections that address the development of specific paradigms and debates. For example, chapter 1, "The Social Organism," is divided into two sections, "The Discovery of Trade and Flows," and "Managing the Multitudes." This chapter locates the origins of modern communication in the 18th century, an argument that Armand Mattelart makes in The Invention of Communication. The authors observe, "The notion of communication originally centered on the question of physical networks and was a central element of the ideology of progress" (5). Adam Smith’s theory of the division of labor "represented the first theoretical step," which proposed the unimpeded circulation of goods and services as being "synonymous with opulence and growth" (5-6, 6). The model of the "circulation revolution" evidenced in the internal trade and transportation dynamics of nations and the attendant modernist notion of progress reflected similar conceptions of physiological circuitry, and influenced Darwin and Spencer, among others, to fortify their arguments regarding biological and human social systems.

Chapters 2 through 7 span the past century of communication theory in the U.S. and Europe. In this regard, the book may be somewhat uneven; chapter 1 deals with over one hundred and fifty years of communication’s development as a scientific concept in western thought. Still, the book sheds light on areas of communication theory that are frequently ignored by introductory texts of more social scientific or behaviorist inclinations, which frequently trace the origins of media and mass communication inquiry to World War I. Chapter 2, "New World Empiricism," for example, considers the Chicago School, Charles S. Pierce, and pragmatism’s contributions to the foundation of communication studies and once again how, in this case, the adjacent fields of sociology, philosophy, and semiotics served as the foundation for various understandings of communication.

There are numerous two-page topical asides throughout the book, which profile individual theorists and schools of thought, or explicate decisive theories and debates. Chapter 3, "The Culture Industry, Ideology, and Power," which discusses with intelligence and detail the Frankfurt School, structuralism, and British Cultural Studies, includes several such sections. One of these, "Are the media anti-mediators?" addresses an exchange not in the immediate purview of the three subsections between Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard in the early 1970s on the mass media’s nature and potential for enacting revolutionary social change. Another such profile, "From linguistics to structural anthropology," points to Roman Jakobson’s important, if not transcendent, influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, and how Jakobson sought to give linguistics a scientific status by using "information theory to explain genetic inheritance in terms of ‘programmes,’ codes, and information" (72). Here and elsewhere the authors refer the reader to another area of the book, in this passage to the previous chapter, "Information Theory," in order to illustrate the extent to which communication as a distinct field was conceived by, predicated upon, and directly related to other fields of more formidable research.

Those who are somewhat familiar with Armand Mattelart’s work will not be surprised that Theories of Communication has a chapter devoted to the political economy of communication. This itself is refreshing, for in the conventional history of (U.S.) communication theory political economy and its assertion of "class" as a point of analysis is regarded as little more than a hiccup in a vast sea of empirical and, more recently, ethnographic studies. One of the most significant debates concerning cultural imperialism and the status quo of a "free flow" of information and culture, that which was waged in the UNESCO in the 1970s, figures prominently, as do the figures that exemplified or contributed to the exchange in some way; C. Wright Mills, Herbert Schiller, Paul Baran, Paulo Freire, Salvador Allende, Sean MacBride, and, finally, Ronald Reagan. The authors conclude that by "the 1980s, the issue of the regulation of networks and exchanges was taken over by more technically oriented bodies such as GATT," and refer the reader to chapter 7, where "globalization" is further discussed. Again the literature here and in other areas of the book is copiously referenced.

In chapters 6 and 7 the authors successfully take on an array of paradigms and issues that again share an interstitial status with or have impacted on communication. Interpretive sociology and ethnography are discussed in chapter 6. Here the contributions of scholars including Herbert Blumer, Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas, David Morley, and even feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey are discussed. The breadth of subject matter covered in this chapter alone may make one wonder how it can all be synthesized into a coherent whole under the rubric of "communication theory," but Mattelart and Mattelart prove exceptional in this regard. In chapter 7 the authors explain the continuing struggles between micro and macro epistemological perspectives in and out of the field, including the internal debates by scholars of communication structure, interpretive sociology, and cognitive theory. Elsewhere in the chapter the authors take on "the notion of globalization," which arose in discourse from a "management conception of worldwide economic organization" and "came into widespread use just as communication networks began to be deregulated and privatised" (139). Questioning Fukuyama’s "end of history" thesis, Mattelart and Mattelart assert that, "critical thought rejects this new totalising idea according to which humanity has reached a stage which cannot be surpassed" (140). Similarly, "Post-modernists" are taken to task in an aside for "hav[ing] hardly innovated at all." They have instead chosen to follow "in the footsteps of structuralism" (151).

Mattelart and Mattelart’s critical perspective on thinking about the history of and prospects for communication theory strikes a resonant chord in the book’s brief conclusion, where the authors note that, with the end of a linear notion of progress, "every mediator is influenced by managerial positivism, the new utilitarianism spurring the search for epistemological tools to neutralise tensions through technological solutions" (155). The observation calls to mind the notions of neoliberalism and the past decade’s countless paeans to the "free market," all of which probably serve to obscure rather than inform the polity. Importantly, the way in which we choose to think about communication now will act to either reinforce such conceptions of symbolic empowerment or call them into question. Mattelart and Mattelart conclude that, "political freedom cannot be reduced to the right to exercise one’s will. It also lies in the right to control the process whereby that will is informed" (156). That process is communication itself, and the various ways of theorizing the communicative can only cohere as a collective set of projects that comprise a discernible field if we are able to take stock in such endeavors with works as valuably critical and concise as this.

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