But I am saying that we should look not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice. When we find ourselves looking at a particular work, or group of works, often realizing, as we do so, their essential community as well as their irreducible individuality, we should find ourselves attending first to the reality of their practice and the conditions of the practice as it was then executed. And from this I think we ask essentially different questions. Take for example the way in which an object—‘a text’—is related to a genre, in orthodox criticism. We identify it by certain leading features, we then assign it to a larger category, the genre, and then we may find the components of the genre in a particular social history (although in some variants of criticism not even that is done, and the genre is supposed to be some permanent category of the mind).
It is not that way of proceeding that is now required. The recognition of the relation of a collective mode and an individual project—and these are the only categories that we can initially presume—is a recognition of related practices. That is to say, the irreducibly individual projects that particular works are, may come in experience and in analysis to show resemblances which allow us to group them into collective modes. These are by no means always genres. They may exist as resemblances within and across genres. They may be the practice of a group in a period, rather than the practice of a phase in a genre. But as we discover the nature of a particular practice, and the nature of the relation between an individual project and a collective mode, we find that we are analysing, as two forms of the same process, both its active composition and its conditions of composition, and in either direction this is a complex of extending active relationships. This means, of course, that we have no built-in procedure of the kind which is indicated by the fixed character of an object. We have the principles of the relations of practices, within a discoverably intentional organization, and we have the available hypotheses of dominant, residual and emergent. But what we are actively seeking is the true practice which has been alienated to an object, and the true conditions of practice—whether as literary conventions or as social relationships—which have been alienated to components or to mere background.
As a general proposition this is only an emphasis, but it seems to me to suggest at once the point of break and the point of departure, in practical and theoretical work, within an active and self-renewing Marxist cultural tradition.
Means of Communication as Means of Production
As a matter of general theory it is useful to recognize that means of communication are themselves means of production. It is true that means of communication, from the simplest physical forms of language to the most advanced forms of communications technology, are themselves always socially and materially produced, and of course reproduced. Yet they are not only forms but means of production, since communication and its material means are intrinsic to all distinctively human forms of labour and social organization, thus constituting indispensable elements both of the productive forces and of the social relations of production.
Moreover the means of communication, both as produced and as means of production, are directly subject to historical development. This is so, first, because the means of communication have a specific productive history, which is always more or less directly related to general historical phases of productive and technical capacity. It is so, second, because the historically changing means of communication have historically variable relations to the general complex of productive forces and to the general social relationships which are produced by them and which the general productive forces both produce and reproduce. These historical variations include both relative homologies between the means of communication and more general social productive forces and relationships, and, most marked in certain periods, contradictions of both general and particular kinds.
Three Ideological Blocks
This theoretical view of the means of communication, within a perspective of historical materialism, is, in our own time, overlaid or blocked by three characteristic ideological positions.
First, the means of communication, having been reduced from their status as means of social production, are seen only as ‘media’: devices for the passing of ‘information’ and ‘messages’ between persons who either generally, or in terms of some specific act of production, are abstracted from the communication process as unproblematic ‘senders’ or ‘receivers’. People are seen, that is to say, as abstract individuals, who are then either diagrammatically represented in terms of these abstract functions, or are at best broadly characterised (i) as bearers of a generalized (‘human’) sociality (communication as abstract ‘socialization’ or ‘social process’); (ii) as bearers of a specified but still abstract sociality (communications between ‘members’ of a social group, usually national or cultural, without intrinsic reference to the differential social relations within any such group); or (iii), in an extreme form related to ‘expressivist’ theories of language, as unspecified ‘individuals’ (communication as transmission, but implying reception, by abstracted individuals, each with ‘something of his own to say’). Much otherwise sophisticated work in information and communication theory rests on, and frequently conceals, this first, deeply bourgeois, ideological position.
Then, second, in a more plausible attempt to recognize some means of communication as means of production, there is the now commonplace distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘technological’ means of communication: the former characterized, and then usually neglected, as ‘ordinary, everyday language’, in ‘face-to-face’ situations; the latter grouped around developed mechanical and electronic communication devices and then generalized—with an especially noticeable ideological shift from technical means to abstracted social relationships—as ‘mass communication’. This position has dominated a large area of modern bourgeois cultural science, but it has also, under the same title of ‘mass communications’, been uncritically imported into significant areas of socialist thinking, especially in its more applied forms.
It is theoretically inadmissible for two reasons. First, because the separation of ‘mass communications’ from ‘ordinary, everyday language’ practice conceals the fact that ‘mass communication’ processes include, in most cases necessarily, forms of ‘ordinary, everyday language’ use, to be sure in variably differential modes; and include also the simulation or conventional production of generally significant communication situations. Second, because the grouping of all or most mechanical and electronic means as ‘mass communications’ conceals (under the cover of a formula drawn from capitalist practice, in which an ‘audience’ or a ‘public’, itself always socially specific and differentiated, is seen as a ‘mass market’ of opinion and consumption) the radical variations between different kinds of mechanical and electronic means. In fact, in their differences, these necessarily carry both variable relations to ‘ordinary, everyday language’ in ‘face-to-face situations’ (the most obvious example is the radical difference of usage and communicative situation as between print and television) and the variable relations between the specific communicative relationships and other forms of social relationship (the variable extent and composition of audiences; variability of the social conditions of reception—the assembled cinema audience; the home-based television audience; group reading; isolated reading).
A variant of this second ideological position, associated especially with McLuhan, recognizes the specific differences between ‘media’ but then succumbs to a localized technological determinism, in which uses and relationships are technically determined by the properties of different media, irrespective of the whole complex of social productive forces and