Communication Matters
Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena – images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies – mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.
Essays are arranged in four sections:
• Orientations Media/Materiality offers an introductory essay by the editors and features interviews with two leading scholars in the field: N. Katherine Hayles and John Durham Peters.
• Communication Time/Space explores the role of media, communication, and rhetoric in the production of spaces, temporalities, and relations of power.
• Communication Assemblages/Networks develops new theoretical approaches for apprehending the material aspects of communication networks and humantechnological assemblages.
• Communication Mobility/Immobility assesses the development of communication and transportation infrastructures and technologies in relation to practices of mobility, immobility, and control.
Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader ‘‘materiality turn’’ emerging in the humanities and social sciences.
This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.
Jeremy Packer is Associate Professor of Communication at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Mobility Without Mayhem: Cars, Safety and Citizenship, and the editor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality; Thinking With James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History, and Secret Agents: Popular Icons Beyond James Bond.
Stephen B. Crofts Wiley is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University. His work analyzes the production of space and place, focusing especially on globalization in Latin America, and has been published in Communication Theory, Cultural Studies, and Media, Culture & Society.