Chapter 9

---

Beyond transmission, modes, and media

Jennifer Daryl Slack

 

---

This is not the first time communication has had to rethink itself to remain vital. Faced with the inability to substantiate media effects, Bernard Berelson, one of the “founding fathers” of communication, observed in 1959 that the field was “withering away” (Berelson, 1959, p. 1) and all the interesting people had either died or left the field for other disciplines. His epitaph includes an odd feature: after proclaiming that the field has “worn out” after 25 years of “great ideas” (p. 6), he offers “seven current lines of which some may develop into the major focuses of the years ahead” (p. 5).¹ Berelson’s lament reveals a longing for a time when big questions and great ideas were agreed upon; a resistance to new directions and questions, for they are not communication; and an astute recognition that the field must change.

Berelson’s lament is instructive, for the field of communication, which clearly did not wither away, is once again experiencing a loss of agreed upon big questions, resistance to move in directions that do not look like communication, and recognition of the need to do so. Not the first time, and not the last time. To remain vital the field of communication must be willing to respond to changing conditions of existence with theoretical tools that both respond to and constitute communication in new ways, with new ways of conceiving its object(s) of analysis. Put quite simply, in spite of material and intellectual exigencies that compel us to rethink communication, and abundant evidence that the concept of communication is far from settled (see, e.g., Shepherd et al., 2006), the field struggles with its loyalty to what it has accepted as the big questions and great ideas, which I shorthand here as “transmission, modes, and media.”

Setting aside my belief that it has probably always been so, we clearly are living through an extraordinary moment.² This is not to claim, as many currently do, that we are in the midst of a technological revolution that is changing everything. Rather my contention is that what makes the time extraordinary are major transformations – made possible by both material and intellectual conditions of contemporary life – occurring in the articulation of structures, practices, materials, affects, and enunciation. These transformations enable reimagining who and what we are and might become, and what communication might mean. This reimagining, which is apparent in the practices of medicine, law, and economics, especially in relation to biotechnology, can be mapped in the interstices of the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of science, new media studies, and science, technology and society. There is no single version of this emergent reimagining. It is, rather, a convoluted and complex cultural process, developing unevenly in different guises with a variety of motives.

The approach to communication I propose is inspired by and draws on the Deleuzian concept of “assemblage,” an approach that helps us to think the materiality of communication outside of the problematic of representation that invests the triumvirate with its monopoly over communication. In challenging the dominance of representation, assemblage decenters (in the sense of rearticulates or deterritorializes) the transmission of meaning; it decenters the media, the channels of communication by which meaning is transmitted; and it decenters modes, the mediated cultural arrangements by which shared meaning is expressed. Assemblage, understood as an intermingling and arrangement of heterogenous elements – structures, practices, materials, affects, and enunciation – resists the dualism of the material and immaterial and suggests a conception of communication that attends to the conditions of possibility within which these interminglings occur and are effective.

Communication’s comfortable attachments to communication as transmission, modes, and media affectively resist the difficult intellectual work required by this reimagining. Without doing that work, however, the field of communication risks being left behind as other, more forward looking disciplines take up these issues. In this chapter, I explain how and why we are held back by this triumvirate and how the conditions of contemporary life can be used as a path to productively reimagine life, matter, and communication. We can contribute our considerable collective intellect to this project if we are willing to move beyond loyalties to certain old ideas and practices that constitute communication theory. We need, in a sense, to do communication outside communication.

“What we disingenuously pretend they merely describe”

Transmission, modes, and media

Scholarship is produced in and shaped by our historical context: of that most of us would agree. It is more difficult to take in fully the significance of James Carey’s assertion that “our models of communication … create what we disingenuously pretend they merely describe” (Carey, 1989, p. 32). The more potent point is that our models shape reality, even when we do not own up to it. We pretend that they merely describe, even though any model or theory variously shapes our interventions in the world in particular, contingent ways.

It is interesting to note that Carey’s remark appears in the article that contains his quintessential critique of transmission and his proposition that we think in terms of communication as ritual. “A Cultural Approach to Communication” is among the most cited articles in the history of communication research: the article we cite to demonstrate our allegiance to having left transmission behind. Yet, for all the ritual(!) disavowals of transmission, we are still deeply committed to it. Lasswell’s (1948) “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect” and Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) cybernetic model adapted by Schramm (1954) and others as sender, message, channel, transmission, and receiver – even with the complicating factors of encoding, decoding, feedback, and an elaborated context – are alive and well in our understanding of communication.

This commitment is surprisingly apparent in the research tradition I call the “modes of communication.” Modes, an approach that we might say extends back to Plato and which to some degree includes Carey himself, distinguishes between three eras (or modes) of communication: orality, literacy (subdivided into script and print), and the electronic. At least that is how the three eras were characterized pre-digital, when the theory drew heavily on the work of Harold Adams Innis (1951, 1972), Walter Ong (1967, 1982), Eric Havelock (1982), and Marshall McLuhan (1967). A crisis of sorts was provoked by the appearance of the digital, the problem being first, that the electronic and the digital are not coterminous, and second, that the digital exceeds what modes is prepared to predict. To render the digital intelligible, the field has generally taken one of two positions: either discipline the digital to fit into the story of modes, or treat the digital as a wholly new fourth era and ignore hundreds of years of communication history and theory. It may be that the electronic and the digital will eventually be seen as two phases of a third era, the same way that script and print are seen as two phases of the literate era.

Most communication textbooks – the means by which a new generation of citizens and scholars learn what communication is and how it works – take the path of discipline. They are typically organized by considering orality, literacy, the electronic (including telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, and film), and then new media (video games, the internet, etc.) and/or the new digital convergence across media. The section on new and convergent media, once just a single chapter, keeps bursting at the seams, getting longer and more difficult to integrate into the preceding chapters. Increasingly, the new media section has become a textbook of its own.

The second approach, more in evidence in popular writing or in work generated outside the field of communication, treats the digital era as distinctive and is more comfortable dealing with technology beyond traditional media, with biotechnology and nanotechnology, for example. It is thus unhampered by the disciplining work of modes at the same time that it remains unenlightened by the long history of theorizing in communication (see, e.g., Weinberger, 2007). The relevant point is that the variables that have been used to characterize orality, literacy, and the electronic do not seem sufficient to comprehend the digital. As Gregory Seigworth has suggested, it may well be that “the digital as code was there all along: just unnoticed beneath the conceptual/disciplinary blare of traditional and new media studies.” This suggests that “code is constitutive and not merely symbolic or representational in the way that the electronic mode got taken up and taught” (Seigworth, 2011). Yet, there is good reason not to abandon all that we have learned. We ought to be cautioned by Lawrence Grossberg’s reminder that the most difficult task (in conjunctural analysis) is to determine “What is new? What is old? What is rearticulated?” (Grossberg, 2010, p. 60). Communication scholars might be advised to think in terms of rearticulating our vast knowledge of the field given emerging conditions of existence. Modes, while not irrelevant, no longer serves as the generative organizing principle it once was.

Modes has become, in a sense, the backbone of communication studies. It drew our attention away from the “effects of the message” so prominent in transmission and argued instead that a whole way of life is what matters: conceptions of time and space; how relations of power and authority are organized; the role of memory; the relationship between the acoustic and the visual, what is valued and what is not; and so on. These have essentially become the dependent variables in a deterministic model that characterize progressive modes of communication and function as constraints on what we can see and attend to.³ Further, the character of each of these ways of life is given shape by what amounts to a single, independent variable: the technology of communication. In a sense, modes does little more than shift our attention to a particular component of the transmission model: from the message and its effects to the channel and its effects. How does the world change when we communicate using the channels of literacy: script and print? Using electronic channels: telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, film? And now using digital channels: computer, smart phone, RFID? This way of conceptualizing communication articulates powerfully with a culturally pervasive technological determinism and a sense of progress as equated with the development of new technology. While it was clearly not the intention of Innis, Ong, Havelock, and Carey to support the notion that the movement through the various modes represented progress, it is difficult to encounter the unfolding story of modes in communication textbooks without reading it that way. At best you can read against the grain.

In addition to the insidious assertion of transmission, technological determinism, and a commitment to progress, the modes approach perpetuates the assumption that a unique category of technology – communication technology – is essentially responsible for the shape of culture. Carey’s signing on with John Dewey’s advice that “of all things communication is the most wonderful” (quoted in Carey, 1989, p. 13) and his assertion (drawing on Kenneth Burke) that “reality is brought into existence, is produced, by communication – by, in short, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms” (p. 25) bequeaths a concept of culture as representation, and by extension, as produced by the technologies we understand to encode meaning. The weight of word, image, and text weigh heavily on us. When the modes approach was developed these technologies were understood to be media: technologies that mediate messages between senders and receivers, the legacy from transmission.⁴ This understanding is rendered unacceptable in light of the work of the digital, the biotechnological, and new conceptions of heterogenous species. The new technologies and new ways of conceptualizing heterogenous relationships not only involve the production of meaning, but they also entail much richer material practices and concepts of coding and protocol. We are not only talking anymore about transmitting meaning using codes. We are also talking about coding and conceiving of life, matter, and communication. These conditions are, or at least they can be for us, the game changers. If our goal as scholars of communication and technology is to understand culture and technology and view these through the lens of something we call communication, we must look beyond the special category of media and break away from the disciplinary straightjacket of modes.

Communication encounters biotechnology, cyborgs, and companion species

Encounters with the changing material and intellectual conditions of contemporary life ought to urge us to reimagine what communication is and how it works, and how we understand bodies and identities, including the identity “human.” Of the many contemporary, material conditions/practices and intellectual conceptions that ought to compel us to rethink the project of communication, I suggest that these three figure prominently: biotechnology, the cyborg, and companion species. Their progressive consideration makes salient the obsolescent nature of conceptions of communication that foreground humans interacting with one another using technology to facilitate the exchange of meaning. Each also makes salient the need to consider communication beyond an allegiance to media.

Biotechnology

Whether you envision biotechnology as a practice (e.g., in medicine), an arena of regulation (e.g., in law or policy), a messianic opportunity (as in the work of Pierre Lévy, 1997), or a new medium (as in the work of Eugene Thacker, 2004a, 2004b), there is growing agreement on this: biotechnology works with and rethinks the body on a molecular level. As Nicholas Rose writes, “It is now at the molecular level that human life is understood, at the molecular level that its processes can be anatomized, and at the molecular level that life can now be engineered” (Rose, 2007, p. 4). In biotechnological practice, the homogenous, unified body recedes, becomes secondary, almost disappears altogether, and is supplanted by a networked or distributed body dispersed and shaped by technical, legal, political, social, and cultural practices, codes, and protocols. Protocol, as Alexander Galloway (2004) explains, is a diagram that enables things to happen and involves codes. It is most obviously a control mechanism, but it is also a management style, a technique for managing the contingent environment and “a language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms” (p. 74). Protocols involve codes, which as Eugene Thacker explains, are “a set of procedures, actions, and practices, designed in particular ways to achieve particular ends in particular contexts” (Thacker, 2004b, p. xii).

The “body” in biotechnological practice is such a diagram: parsed, coded, engineered, bought, sold, and administered within a shifting contingent environment where codes and protocols constitute, govern, and administer bodies as sets of procedures, actions, practices, and enunciations. An early legal case that made this dramatically clear was Moore v. Regents of the University of California in the 1980s which determined that Moore did not “own” the cells that were removed from his body by his doctors (see Bowen, 2005). The case threw into relief the question: what is a body? And it turns out that the body boundaries we once thought sacred, what Andy Clark (2003) has inelegantly but effectively dubbed “the skin bag,” are increasingly not the boundaries that matter, not in practice and not in theory. What a body “is” has become, in practice, situated in a shifting set of contingent articulations. The dramatic cultural impact of this kind of reconfiguration of the body is explored in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), which maps the interdependent articulations of “skin bag,” law, economics, medicine, family, and memory as HeLa stem cells derived from the “body” of Henrietta Lacks contribute to the generation of the diagram. The subjective experience of the body is independent of but integral to the diagram. Even discrepancies are integral to understanding the relationship of life, matter, and enunciation; they are part of the diagram.

From a standard communication perspective, it may seem that I have shifted the object of analysis from communication to bodies. On closer examination, however, the practice and theory of contingent bodies has enormous implications for communication theory. At the simplest level it highlights the reductive work performed in the process of identifying senders and receivers as homogenous, unified bodies. On a deeper level, it directs our attention to the molecular constitution of those molar bodies. Here I use molecular and molar in a Deleuzian sense, which neither reduces the terms to the (merely) biological nor posits their relation as one of size (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 208–219). Molar lines are those that overcode major dualistic oppositions, such as male and female, technology and culture, body and not body. The effect of molar lines is to identify rigid molar structures, such as the body, technology, and, for that matter, communication. Molecular lines, more supple than the molar, refer to the myriad articulations of practices, forces, relations, affects, and enunciations within which bodies can be constituted as molar and which, in turn, are governed by molar structures. Molecular lines also serve to disarticulate and rend asunder constituted molarities.

Thacker’s approach to biotechnology asserts that the biotechnological body has become, in fact, the relevant medium. With the term “biomedia” he resists the delineation of the body and technology as molarities in relationship. Instead, he argues, the body, as biomedia, can be thought of as a fabric of biology, concept, and technology (as in tools) tightly interwoven “into a situation, an instance, a ‘corporealization.”’ He explains that

It is always a body in process of becoming a particular body, always capable of being rent asunder. In the contemporary conditions of existence, the ontology of “life” has become especially open to interrogation and challenge in a range of ways (see, e.g., Thacker, 2010).

This material and conceptual reconfiguring of the body not only renders obsolete the relevant bodies in transmission and modes, where bodies and technologies are situated as molarities in relation with one another, but it also renders obsolete the concept of medium as a mere vehicle of the transmission of symbolic material. Even though Thacker retains the concept of media in his formulation of biomedia, it is quite different than the one we are familiar with in communication and media studies. Thacker – unfortunately – chooses to hold onto and rearticulate the notion of media, but it is not clear why we need to or that anything is gained by doing so (beyond identifying with what is comfortably – though problematically – defined as communication). The relevant point is that “bodies” (molarities of all kinds) are secured, segmented, and invested with meaning in and through relations of articulations of practices, forces, relations, affects, and enunciations. That could be sufficient as an object of communication studies. It is neither necessary nor helpful to label that process “media.”

The cyborg

Once we acknowledge the molecular body, and the interpenetration of the molecular and the molar, we might notice that a body being molecular – as opposed to its taking a particular molecular form – is not unique to the biotechnological age. In other words, the body as a shifting set of contingent, machinic and enunciative practices and conditions is not a circumstance caused by biotechnology, but rather a more general way to understand the constitution of bodies and identities. Biotechnology contributes the opportunity to reimagine the body in these terms. That work of reimagining is as pertinent to understanding the biotechnological era as it is to understanding earlier eras or previous modes of communication.

The point is that we have never really ever been fully independent, isolated beings, separate from our technologies. Technologies do not exist as tools (with which we transmit messages or perform tasks) wholly outside and independent of our bodies, even when they appear to exist outside the molarities we think of as “our bodies.” Rather, as Andy Clark claims in his popular book, Natural-Born Cyborgs (2003), we have always restructured our bodies, our mental circuitry, and our social and cultural being in relation to organisms and artifacts outside of “the skin bag.” We have always, in that sense, been cyborg.

As a cognitive scientist, Clark is most interested in illustrating our cyborg nature as it involves the brain. Our brains, he maintains, are “especially open to processes of deep biotechnological symbiosis” (p. 62). Our brains become what they are, in material form and function, in relation to language and other so-called tools, such as pencils, pens, paper, filing cabinets, and computers. Our brains are plastic. Given the kind of cognitive shortcuts made possible by language and other technologies, the brain builds (in an evolutionary sense) circuits and solves problems in particular interdependent relationships. Further, it does not matter whether data is stored or the work is performed inside or outside the brain – at least not in making the determination that we are cyborg, although it certainly matters in delineating the particular shape a cyborg process takes. What we are, we are in relationship to things outside our brains, outside our bodies.⁵

In spite of the popular image of the cyborg as a hybrid thing – a human/technology or animal/technology chimera – it is limiting to envision cyborg nature as having a body in the traditional sense at all. Although it is possible to read Clark in this more limited way, I choose to emphasize the position that our cyborg ontology is beyond what is visible. Rather, it is “woven in the rhythms and resonances of scaffoldings and dovetailings that transpire across the surface interactions of existences” (Seigworth, 2011). The processes that constitute the cyborg ontology are as much about the inorganic as the organic, as much about the incorporeal as the corporeal, and as much about the enunciative as the machinic.

Again, the implications for understanding both communication and our conceptions of the human immersed in the process of communication are considerable. Instead of imagining our brains and our bodies as somehow whole, stable, fixed agents engaged in relations of communication, the relationships, rhythms, and resonances that come to constitute those agents as if they were whole, stable, fixed agents become the objects of analysis. And these processes obviously exceed media. That and how we are cyborg is as much about chairs as it is about cell phones, as much about nonmedia technology as media technology, as much about what we conceive of as our bodies as the physical organization of matter, as much about the symbolic as the machinic. All these interdependent weavings entail articulating life, matter, affect, and enunciation. What, given the enormity of such coconstitutive relationships, justifies limiting our study to a few technologies we have designated as the “media” of communication other than affective habit and theoretical, disciplinary, and institutional inertia?⁶

Companion species

I want to take this idea of the distributed, networked, or cyborg body one step further by emphasizing, as inspired by Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), that the co-constitutive relationships or mergings are not just about us (even as cyborgs), not just about individual bodies as distributed, but about relationships among a variety of mergings: the merging and emerging of organisms, the merging and emerging of the organic and inorganic or technological, and the merging and emerging of the corporeal and the incorporeal.

Haraway organizes her manifesto around an explication of the coconstitutive relationship between humans and dogs in part because “dogs are not about oneself” (p. 11). She uses the dog/human relationship – companion animals – as a way to illustrate her larger concept of companion species, in which co-constitutive relationships rule, all the way down. She argues that dogs and humans coevolved, and each is what they are in co-constitutive relation to the other. She then expands the argument to include the ongoing constitution of all aspects of what we typically think of as nature, culture, and technology. She writes:

Co-constitutive relationships involve the merging and emerging of organisms, such as relations between humans and dogs or biogenetic relationships. To illustrate at a rudimentary level: humans and the flora of our intestines have coevolved. Human and flora are what they are “in flesh and sign” (p. 25) in the flows of that heterogenous relationship. No matter that we do not typically consider those flora as us; the “fact” of each is a production of that co-constitutive relationship. Co-constitutive relationships also involve mergings and emerging of the organic and the inorganic or technological, such as the relationship between people and pens, as argued by Clark, or between people and biotechnologies, as argued by Thacker. But co-constitutive relationships also entail the mergings and emerging of the incorporeal and the corporeal. The partners come to be who they are in sign as well as flesh. History, myth, and the textual play a particularly important role in Haraway’s accounting of the companion species. In living with animals, we inhabit their/our stories, we cohabit an active history. “That is the work of companion species” (p. 20).

Haraway artfully weaves the story of dogs in relation to “the human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, freedom and structure, history and myth, the rich and the poor, the state and the subject, diversity and depletion, modernity and postmodernity, and nature and culture” (p. 4). Her project exemplifies a commitment to understanding what ought to be the concern of communication: the process whereby heterogenous elements are woven together with consequences for what is and what is possible, for what is not and what is not possible.

Communication, the machinic assemblage, and the collective assemblage of enunciation

We need a more helpful concept of communication to capture the richness of what is being mapped here and to provide guidance for those following in our footsteps. We need, after all is said and done, to rewrite those textbooks. I want to offer what I think is a more generative way to think about what the study of communication looks like once we have deposed technology from center stage, broken down the distinction between technology and human, turned what we know as the human into a contingent molarity sustained by and governing molecular processes entailing the articulation of a wide range of heterogenous elements, and jettisoned an unnecessarily restrictive loyalty to media. What might an approach to communication look like that would allow us to foreground the conditions of contemporary life and still offer something unique to conversations going on around us? To illustrate what that might look like, I draw on Deleuzian cultural studies, in general on the concept of the assemblage, and in particular on the concepts of machinic assemblage and the collective assemblage of enunciation.⁷

An assemblage, agencement in French, refers to the dynamic collection or arrangement of heterogenous elements (structures, practices, materials, affects, and enunciations) that expresses a character or identity and asserts a territory. Assemblages bring together matter, qualities, enunciations, and affects in particular, contingent relationships that give shape to what is and what is possible. In the French video production L’Abécédaire (Deleuze and Parnet, 1996),⁸ an extended conversation between Deleuze and his student Claire Parnet, Deleuze refers to the assemblage as having four dimensions: the state of things, little statements, territories, and processes of deterritorialization. The dimensions entail the following.

First, assemblage refers to “states of things,” as in there is a state of things that suits us or suits a particular situation. We might think of the “states of things” being the way things are that makes sense in a given situation. In cautioning us not to understand this too personologically, Seigworth (2011) suggests we see it “as the affective sensibility that attends to the matter-offactness of an existence … arising in the midst of complex relations between diverse entities and flows.” These states could easily include matters identified in the modes approach as the “variables” consistent with different eras. So, for example, the states of things could include the nature and feel of time, space, speed, mobility, authority, expertize, memory, ambient awareness, and so on. The relevant states of things would be determined as one looks anew at any particular assemblage, rather than being predetermined by the variables that modes has already supplied. So states of things might also include the nature and feel of the body, the treatment of nonhuman animals or genetic materials, the state of molecular enhancement of bodies with biotechnology, and so on.

Second, assemblage entails “little statements,” a style or way of talking, a style of enunciation. This dimension suggests that an assemblage is characterized by the ability to say or think certain kinds of things in certain ways, make certain kinds of statements, and precludes the possibility of saying or thinking other kinds of things, making other kinds of statements. For example, we might consider the appropriate style for talking about something like privacy. We might notice that there are significant shifts in the style of and possibilities for appealing to the right of privacy in the formulation of public policy. It may well be that as the digital and/or surveillance assemblage evolves it will make no sense to enunciate claims to privacy at all.

Third, assemblage implies territories, which as J. Macgregor Wise has put it, “are more than just spaces: they have a stake, a claim, they express.” And neither are they “fixed for all time, but are always being made and unmade … they are always coming together and moving apart” (Wise, 2005, pp. 78–79). Assemblages are less structures, objects, or qualities than they are lines (trajectories, relationships, and movements). They are constituted as particular, contingent molecular lines secure and undergird characteristic molar lines. Recall, as was stated earlier, molar lines shape and identify rigid molar structures, which, in turn, shape and regulate molecular relations. For example, with an awareness of the work of territorialization, we could explore how the molecular movements of fields, careers, textbook production, and commerce secure the molar identity “communication,” and how that diagram shapes and regulates communication practices, education, and further theorizing in communication.

Fourth, assemblage entails processes of deterritorialization. Some molecular lines are lines of flight. That is, some forces, relations, and practices enact mutations that move out and away from, escape as it were, the territorymaking work of most molecular lines. Lines of flight break up and break away from the reductive molar lines that otherwise code, rigidify, block, and subdue. Change, real change in assemblages, happens when such lines of flight burst forth “allowing something to escape, like bursting a pipe or a boil” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 19), like the line of flight I would like my argument to enable.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explore additional dimensions of assemblage, notably for our purposes, the machinic assemblage and the collective assemblage of enunciation (pp. 75–91). For linearly trained communication theorists, it is difficult to understand that these are not poles, binaries, or distinct types, but dimensions, axes, or aspects of assemblage that function together. The work of articulating these dimensions as regularities, as an assemblage in its entirety, is attributed to an “abstract machine,” defined by the “diagram” of those articulations.

Machinic assemblage relates to the state of the intermingling of bodies, actions and passions, “the aggregate of things and flows from that standpoint of actual, dimensional existence” (Seigworth, 2011). The machinic does not designate materiality as opposed to immateriality, technology as opposed to culture, but includes the corporeal, the incorporeal (which has a materiality), content, and expression (which also has a materiality). Technologies, in the narrow sense of “tool” and grasped as molarities, exist only “in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible.” Those interminglings include “all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 90).

Collective assemblage of enunciation relates to the machine of expression: to regimes of signs, which includes statements, acts, practices, and expressions. Enunciation is not only language or words; rather, language and words must be understood as articulated to a collective “machine of expression whose variables determine the usage of language elements” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 90). Colored scarves worn by gang members have no direct “meaning,” but they are expressions in a regime of signs; they are material and have material effects. Enunciation can thus refer to “incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (ibid., p. 88). To illustrate with an oftused example: when a judge pronounces someone “guilty,” the material transformation is accomplished incorporeally and attributed to the judge.

Enunciation is not a matter of the form of content on the one hand and the form of expression on the other, but a recognition of the interpenetration of content and expression. Even when one assigns an attribute to a body, “one is not representing or referring but intervening in a way” (p. 86). For example, to pronounce programming “news” or “entertainment” presupposes a regime of signs, which both produces the pronouncement and has real material effects that might include who watches it and why, how it is acted on by the audience, and perhaps even how it is regulated and funded. Deleuze and Guattari explain that:

We can now see that to interrogate an assemblage, we examine the interpenetration and articulation of the machinic and enunciative (the work of the abstract machine), attending to the segmentations of the form of content and the form of expression. We attend to how the assemblage expresses the state of things and makes certain kinds of statements possible. But most significantly, we can interrogate how the assemblage territorializes the flows and relationships such that particular molar bodies and identities are invested with power and agency. We can also identify sites where transformations can and do take place, with what consequences.

So how might communication respond? Ironically, because communication has been so focused on the symbolic and the representational, it is particularly well situated to transform that focus into an appreciation of the collective assemblage of enunciation, but only if it is willing to let go of its loyalty to the duality of representation. There is no other discipline better situated to do so. However, I am not proposing that the object of analysis of communication should become the collective assemblage of enunciation. What I have argued for thus far makes clear why that would be unacceptable. To reiterate: enunciation can only be understood as a dimension of assemblage in articulation with the machinic.⁹

If we understand assemblage as the ontology for the philosophy and theory of communication, and the philosophical/theoretical trajectory undergirding inquiry, we are compelled as communication scholars to (1) theorize assemblage further, as the ontology of communication, (2) address old matters in new ways; for example, study media and culture without being mediacentric (see, e.g., Wise, 1997; Sterne, 2003; Grossberg, 2011, pp. 203–226), (3) expand the scope of communication studies to include the extremely important contemporary developments in technological, biotechnological, environmental, and bodily matters that, as addressed throughout my argument, characterize our changing cultural landscape (see, e.g., Sotirin, 2003),¹⁰ and (4) attend to the consequences of territorialization and the possibilities for deterritorialization. As the concept of assemblage suggests, what we have to offer is the recognition of the co-constitutive work of the machinic and the enunciative, the consequences of territorialization, and the possibilities for escaping territories that rigidify, block and subdue. This is what communication could become. This is what, for an increasing number of scholars of communication, it already is.

Acknowledgment

I thank Patty Sotirin, Lawrence Grossberg, Gregory Seigworth, and Steve Wiley for their challenging critiques and generous suggestions as I developed this argument; Gordon Coonfield and the Department of Communication at Villanova University, where I first presented some of these ideas in 2008; and North Carolina State University, especially the Program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, for the invitation to present an earlier version of this chapter as the Rolf Buchdal Memorial Lecture in 2009.

Notes

References

Berelson, Bernard. (1959). “The State of Communication Research.” Public Opinion Quarterly 23:1, 1–17.

Bowen, Leslie M. (2005). “Reconfigure Bodies: The Problem of Ownership.” Communication Theory 15:1, 23–38.

Carey, James W. (1989). “A Cultural Approach to Communication.” Pp. 13–36 In Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Originally published 1975.

Clark, Andy. (2003). Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1995). Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published 1980.

Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. (1996). L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, directed by Pierre-André Boutang. Video Editions Montparnasse.

Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Grossberg, Lawrence. (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Havelock, Eric A. (1982). The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Innis, Harold. (1972). Empire and Communications. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Originally published 1950.

Innis, Harold Adams. (1951). The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lambert, Gregg. (2005). “Expression.” Pp. 31–41 In Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, edited by Charles J. Stivale. Chesham, UK: Acumen Publishing.

Lasswell, Harold. (1948). “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society.” In The Communication of Ideas, edited by Lyman Bryson. New York: Harper and Row.

Lévy, Pierre. (1997). Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, translated by Robert Bononno. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

Mattelart, Armand. (1996). The Invention of Communication. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.

Ong, Walter. (1967). The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Ong, Walter. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen.

Rose, Nikolas. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schramm, Wilbur. (1954). “How Communication Works.” In The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, edited by Wilbur Schramm. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Seigworth, Gregory. (January 25, 2011). Personal communication.

Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Shapiro, Lawrence. (2011). Embodied Cognition. New York: Routledge.

Shepherd, Gregory J., Jeffrey St. John and Ted Striphas. (2006). Communication as … Perspectives on Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Skloot, Rebecca. (2010). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown Publishers.

Sotirin, Patty. (2003). “Suckling Up to the BwO.” Pp. 59–74 In Animations [of Deleuze and Guattari], edited by Jennifer Daryl Slack. New York: Peter Lang.

Sterne, Jonathan. (2003). The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Striphas, Ted. (2009). The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press.

Thacker, Eugene. (2004a). Biomedia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Thacker, Eugene. (2004b). “Foreword; Protocol Is as Protocol Does.” Pp. xi–xxii In Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Alexander R. Galloway. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Thacker, Eugene. (2010). After Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Weinberger, David. (2007). Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books.

Wise, J. Macgregor. (1997). Exploring Technology and Social Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wise, J. Macgregor. (2005). “Assemblage.” Pp.77–87 In Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, edited by Charles J. Stivale. Chesham, UK: Acumen Publishing.