The Art of Communication
in a Polarized World
The
Art of
Communication
in a
Polarized
World
Copyright © 2020 Kyle Conway
Published by AU Press, Athabasca University
1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8
https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771992930.01
Cover image © Suchat Nuchpleng / Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Natalie Olsen
Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: The art of communication in a polarized world / Kyle Conway.
Names: Conway, Kyle, 1977- author.
Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200162683 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200162691
ISBN 9781771992930 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771992947 (pdf)
ISBN 9781771992954 (epub) | ISBN 9781771992961 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Intercultural communication. | LCSH: Translating and interpreting.
LCSH: Communication and culture. | LCSH: Language and culture.
Classification: LCC P94.6 C66 2020 | DDC 303.48/2—dc23
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities and the assistance provided by the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund.
Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at aupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright information.
For K., my compass
For E. and B., world-changers
List of Figures
Preface: What This Book Is, and What It Isn’t
Acknowledgements
Introduction: People’s Minds Are Hard to Change
1 Communication Is Translation (So Please Mind the Gap)
2 Newspeak as a Manual for Translation
3 Translational Invention, Inventive Translation
4 Fake News and Perspective Unmoored
Conclusion: Jumping In
Appendix: Notes on Teaching
Bibliography
Index
Figure 1 Cultural translation
Figure 2 Parallax view
Figure 3 Mural depicting Fatty Arbuckle
Figure 4 Sender-message-receiver model
Figure 5 Encoding/decoding model
Figure 6 Sign and interpretant
Figure 7 Hero 1 asks a question
Figure 8 Hero 2 answers
Figure 9 Hero 1 thinks Hero 2 is a jerk
Figure 10 Hero 1 has had enough, and Hero 2 objects
Figure 11 Hero 2 wonders what went wrong
Figure 12 Translation as transformative substitution
Figure 13 Brecht’s judge devises the correct question for a wrong answer
Figure 14 Translation of emotion words into variations of goodthink
Figure 15 Newspeak cuts someone off from a sign’s interpretants
Figure 16 Winston hears a thrush and thinks of freedom
Figure 17 Winston tells O’Brien he will do terrible things to overcome Big Brother
Figure 18 Sacrifice and freedom take on a new meaning for Winston
Figure 19 Competing frames for understanding 2016 fires in Fort McMurray, Alberta
Figure 20 A climate change skeptic changes her mind when she sees the phenomena in a personalized frame
Figure 21 Petr Pavlenskii performs Segregation
Figure 22 Pavlenskii’s Segregation as interpreted through a psychiatric frame
Figure 23 Pavlenskii’s Segregation as an act of political protest
Figure 24 Pavlenskii’s Freedom as interpreted through a legal frame
Figure 25 Pavlenskii’s Freedom as an act of political protest
Figure 26 Percentage of people who think media are biased, as a function of political orientation
Figure 27 Ngram representing the use of the phrase “fake news,” 1900–2008
Figure 28 Google searches for “fake news,” January 2016–July 2018
Figure 29 Donald Trump’s use of the word Figure 1 animals interpreted through the frame of recent history
Figure 30 Donald Trump’s use of the term animals interpreted through the frame of security
Figure 31 A feedback loop focusing on violence in recent events
Figure 32 A feedback loop focusing on expressions of nativist tendencies
Figure 33 Me, arriving in St. Étienne, France
Figure 34 My workbench
This book is part of an answer to a question I asked when I was redesigning a course I often teach: how might a class, taken as a unit of which a book is merely part, serve as a vehicle for ideas? I was thinking about how different types of writing express ideas differently. A song, a novel, and a comic book can all recount the same events, but they won’t tell the same story. Likewise, a monograph, an article, and a conference paper can all report the same results, but they won’t convey the same ideas. So how might a class—with its books, its syllabus, its assignments, its regularly scheduled meetings, its questions and answers—become a collective, collaborative text? Who could read it? What would they learn?1
I wrote this book with these questions in mind. It’s a trace left by the course, so to speak—an echo that gives some sense of what my conversation with my students sounded like. As a result, the chapters that follow might sound like lectures or, if I’m doing things right, turns taken in that conversation. That’s by design, in that I use this book to demonstrate the ideas I describe. In the introduction, for instance, I give an example of two people trying to come to a shared understanding of an object through a series of back-and-forth questions. I engage in similar exchanges throughout this book. The things I want to understand better are communication theory and cultural translation, and those are the things we talk about in class.
Consequently, my first audience has been the students in the course I was redesigning—a third-year undergraduate course on communication theory at the University of Ottawa. They have been worthy partners in conversation. They are smart people, capable of careful and rigorous thought, if they’re so inclined. They’re willing to work, although like anyone else, they object to work that serves no clear purpose. The most meaningful difference between them and me is that I’ve had twenty more years to spend reading: when I make references they do not catch, it is not because I’m smarter but because I’m older. These things—my students’ intelligence and work ethic on the one hand, and the disparity in our respective levels of experience on the other—explain two choices I’ve made in the pages that follow. First, I’ve explained every reference I think even ten students (out of a class of a hundred) might not catch. I’ve also glossed technical terms they might not have encountered before. Second, I’ve used pictures wherever they are useful for cutting through the abstractions to which I’m prone, and to which the subject matter lends itself, especially in cases of metacognition and metatheory (thinking about thinking and theory about theory). I want this book to demonstrate that clarity and rigour go hand in hand, a lesson for which I have my students to thank.
So is this book a textbook? Not in a conventional sense. Typical theory textbooks are secondary sources in that they present concepts others have developed, along with explanations of context and explications of ideas. Perhaps the best in this genre is Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions, by Robert Craig and Heidi Muller, who organize communication theory into seven such traditions. They reproduce original articles and book chapters to give students more or less direct access to the original expression of each tradition’s ideas. But their contribution—what makes their book a textbook—is the work they have done to organize, summarize, and contextualize the readings. In other words, it’s a secondary source.
This book approaches theory differently. When I teach, I want to do more than give students a set of ideas to memorize.2 I want to engage them in the process of doing theory—of approaching a question the way a scholar would approach it. In my experience, that means responding to, arguing with, and refining ideas other scholars have proposed. The end result is a new set of ideas. The point of this book is to walk students through these steps—to teach by doing. My model has been the books published for the Open University in England in the 1990s, such as Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman and Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.3 Although they were intended as textbooks, adopting a familiar tone and focusing on the building blocks of theory, they are also about the praxis of teaching. They are shaped by a productive tension between pedagogy and originality: because they demonstrate how to think like a scholar and how to produce new ideas, they must be original themselves. In the same way, the exercise I undertake here is meaningful only if I’ve written a book other scholars will engage with as a primary source, which is to say, a book that offers a novel take on long-standing questions.
Thus my second audience has been other scholars (but just as this book is not a conventional textbook, it’s not a conventional monograph, either). I address two groups explicitly: those in communication and cultural studies and those in translation studies, as I write in the introductory chapter. They will already have read the theorists with whose ideas I engage. They will also recognize the debates into which I enter, even when I don’t name them explicitly. I hope they will take this book on the merits of the arguments it presents, although I also hope they will recognize the way my pedagogical goals shape the presentation of my ideas. If I were writing only for them, I would pursue the implications of certain assertions further, whereas here, I see value in showing students the way arguments work without plunging in to the morass of details that come about when people trained to split hairs go about the business of, well, splitting hairs. For people learning the skills of doing theory, it’s enough to read Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” (as I do in chapter 1) without also having read David Morley’s application of the essay in the 1980s, as well as recent revisions of Morley’s application of Hall’s ideas, and so on.4 My students are smart—they are more than capable of doing theory—but they don’t yet have the background to sort through those details. In fact, the point of this book is to give them the skills to acquire that background.
I am responding to a third group, too, namely philosophers of education whose books have influenced the way I think about teaching. I do not address them explicitly. Instead, this book (and the class of which it is part) is itself my response to their work. In particular, I am guided by the idea that
it is time to put what is good in the world—that which is under threat and which we wish to preserve—at the centre of our attention and to make a conceptual space in which we can take up our responsibility . . . in the face of, and in spite of, oppression and silent melancholy.5
I like these philosophers because they issue a call to action. (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways,” wrote Marx in 1845; “the point is to change it.”)6 I’m responding by heeding their call and trying to put their ideas (and mine) into practice. They insist—and I agree—that teaching matters. It matters because thinking matters, and thinking matters because the world is a mysterious place worth exploring and fighting for.
So what is this book? Neither conventional textbook nor conventional monograph, it is a book for thinking with. To complement it (and complete the class-as-text of which it’s part), I’ve included a version of my syllabus in the appendix. This book is meaningful only if people take their turn in the conversation.
With that, let’s jump in.
1 I’ve long admired the students of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist whose Cours de linguistique générale (1916; published in English in 1959 as Course in General Linguistics) laid the foundation for structuralism. He didn’t write the book himself. His students did, based on their notes from the course. His clarity and their dedication showed what a course, taken as a unit, might be.
2 The same is true of Craig and Muller, I’m sure, but whenever I use their textbook, that seems to be what my students expect to do—despite my efforts to the contrary—as soon as they see a list of traditions and their respective readings.
3 Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman; and Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.
4 David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding; and Sujeong Kim, “Rereading David Morley’s The ‘Nationwide’ Audience.” I’ve adapted this example from Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.
5 Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe, and Piotr Zamojski, Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy, 19. Other books to which I am responding are Samuel Rocha’s Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person and A Primer for Philosophy and Education and, in a very different vein, William Caraher, Kostis Kourelis, and Andrew Reinhard’s Punk Archaeology.
6 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” thesis XI.
Thank you to my partners in the conversations that became the soil out of which this book grew. Of these, most important have been my students. At the University of North Dakota, where I started my career, I began developing these ideas in Comm 405: Social Implications of an Information Society, and Comm 501: Theoretical Perspectives in Communication. At the University of Ottawa, where I have taught for the past five years, I developed them in CMN 3109: Advanced Theories of Communication, CMN 5132: Theories and Effects of the Media, and CMN 8111: Theories in Media Studies. I am especially indebted to the students in CMN 3109 during the Winter and Spring/Summer 2018 terms and in CMN 5132 and CMN 8111 during the Fall 2018 term, who read and engaged with drafts of different chapters. I am also grateful to the doctoral students at the Universität Trier for their perceptive engagement when I delivered talks based on chapters 2 and 3 as part of the university’s IRTG: Diversity program in July 2019.
Going back further, I want to thank my teachers who prized rigour, clarity, and, above all, θαυμάζειν, or thaumazein, the sense of astonishment (according to Aristotle) out of which philosophy springs. They include my grade 5 teacher, Mrs. Sprague, Timberwilde Elementary; Mrs. Lorenzetti, my English teacher in grade 8 at Baker Junior High School; Mr. Kornegay, who taught me calculus in grade 11 at Albuquerque High School; and Ms. Parris, my grade 12 English teacher at Albuquerque High School. They also include two of my professors at the University of North Dakota, Kathleen Dixon and Michael Beard, both in the Department of English. Others have been teachers in practice, if not in title, including Brent Christianson, in Madison, Wisconsin, and Erin Burns, in Ottawa. And some are simply my friends, in particular Sam Rocha.
In a narrower sense, I owe a professional debt to Elizabeth Galewski, Joshua Young, and Brett Ommen. If I know anything about rhetorical invention, it is because of them. (But if I can’t get my facts straight, that’s on me.) Liz, with whom I had coffee once a week when we were students at the University of Wisconsin, taught me about tropological invention and the pleasures of irony. Josh, whose doctoral work I had the privilege of supervising in its final stages, taught me to look for invention in unexpected places. And Brett—he was my colleague and friend at the University of North Dakota. We have since gone our separate ways, but one thing (among many) he showed me was that we can pick and choose what we need from the tools of theory to solve the problem at hand. His approach to theory was endlessly inventive.
In a more immediate sense, I want to thank Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed, now at the Universidad Externado de Colombia, and Craig Walker, at Queen’s University. In 2016, Enrique invited me to give the keynote address at a conference on cultural transduction (his term for cultural translation, more or less). That talk became chapter 1 of this book. But the other chapters came from the page of notes I jotted down while listening to Craig’s presentation on Petr Pavlenskii. He is no doubt unaware of the way his talk struck me, not only for what he was saying but for what he was doing: he made me walk around a concept I thought I knew well (cultural translation) and see it from a new angle.
I also want to thank everyone at Athabasca University Press, especially Pamela Holway. This is an odd book—no two ways around it!—and she was its strongest supporter from the moment I contacted her. I had given myself over to writing it, asking only one thing of each sentence and each idea: must this be said, and must it be said this way? It’s risky to draw stick figures in an academic book, but Pamela embraced not just the arguments and ideas but also the spirit of the act that created them. I also want to thank the press’s director Megan Hall for her enthusiasm, and editor Peter Midgley for his generous and sensitive revisions.
Finally, as always, thank you to Kristi and to Ben and Ellie.