There is then, third, an ideological position which has entered into some variants of Marxism, and which permits some accommodation with the bourgeois concept of ‘mass communications’. This rests on an abstract and a priori separation of means of communication from means of production. It is related, first, to the specialized use of the term ‘production’ as if its only forms were either capitalist production—that is, the production of commodities, or more general ‘market’ production, in which all that is ever produced takes the form of isolable and disposable objects. Within Marxism it is further related to, and indeed dependent on, mechanical formulations of base and superstructure, in which the inherent role of means of communication in every form of production, including the production of objects, is ignored, and communication becomes a second-order or second-stage process, entered into only after the decisive productive and social-material relationships have been established.
This received position must be quite generally corrected, so that the variable, dynamic and contradictory forms of both ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ can be seen historically, rather than subsumed, from a bourgeois habituation, as necessary universal forms and relations. But also in twentieth-century societies, it requires an especially sharp contemporary correction, since the means of communication as means of social production, and in relation to this the production of the means of communication themselves, have taken on a quite new significance, within the generally extended communicative character of modern societies and between modern societies. This can be seen, very strikingly, within the totality of modern ‘economic’ and ‘industrial’ production, where, in the transport, printing and electronic industries ‘communicative production’ has reached a qualitatively different place in its relation to—more strictly its proportion of—production in general. Moreover this outstanding development is still at a relatively early stage, and in electronics especially is certain to go very much further. Failure then to recognize this qualitative change not only postpones correction of the mechanical formulations of ‘a base’ and ‘a superstructure’, but prevents or displaces analysis of the significant relations of communicational means and processes to the crises and problems of advanced capitalist societies and—it would seem—to the different crises and problems of advanced industrial socialist societies.
Towards a History of ‘Communicative Production’
A theoretical emphasis on the means of communication as means of production, within a complex of general social-productive forces, should allow and encourage new approaches to the history of the means of communication themselves. This history is, as yet, relatively little developed, although in some areas there is notable empirical work. Within the ideological positions outlined above, the most familiar kinds of history have been specialized technical studies of what are seen as new ‘media’—from writing to alphabets through printing to motion pictures, radio and television. Much indispensable detail has been gathered in these specialist histories, but it is ordinarily relatively isolated from the history of the development of general productive forces and social orders and relationships. Another familiar kind of history is the social history of ‘audiences’ or ‘publics’: again containing indispensable detail but ordinarily undertaken within a perspective of ‘consumption’ which is unable to develop the always significant and sometimes decisive relations between these modes of consumption, which are commonly also forms of more general social organization, and the specific modes of production, which are at once technological and social.
The main result of a restated theoretical position should be sustained historical inquiry into the general history of the development of means of communication, including that especially active historical phase which includes current developments in our own societies. These remarkable developments have of course already directed attention to the crises and problems of modern communications systems. But in general, within the terms of one or other of the initial ideological positions, these tend to be treated statically or to be discussed as mere effects of other systems and other, as it were completed (or in general completely understood) historical developments. In few fields of contemporary social reality is there such a lack of solid historical understanding. The popularity of shallowly-rooted and ideological applications of other histories and other analytic methods and terms is a direct and damaging consequence of this lack. The necessary work, so immense in scope and variety, will be collaborative and relatively long-term. All that is possible now, in a theoretical intervention, is an indication of some of its possible lines.
Thus it is possible, in considering means of communication as means of production, to indicate, theoretically, those boundaries between different technical means which, as they are drawn, indicate basic differences in modes of communication itself. It should also then be possible to indicate the main questions about the relations of these modes to more general productive modes, to different kinds of social order, and (which in our own period is crucial) to the basic questions of skills, capitalization and controls.
It is useful, first, to distinguish between modes of communication which depend on immediate human physical resources and those other modes which depend on the transformation, by labour, of non-human material. The former, of course, can not be abstracted as ‘natural’. Spoken languages and the rich area of physical communicative acts now commonly generalized as ‘non-verbal communication’ are themselves, inevitably, forms of social production: fundamental qualitative and dynamic developments of evolutionary human resources; developments moreover which are not only post-evolutionary but which were crucial processes in human evolution itself. All such forms are early in human history, but their centrality does not diminish during the remarkable subsequent stages in which, by conscious social labour, men developed means of communication which depended on the use or transformation of non-human material. In all modern and in all foreseeable societies, physical speech and physical non-verbal communication (‘body language’) remain as the central and decisive communicative means.
It is then possible to distinguish types of use or transformation of non-human material, for communicative purposes, in relation to this persistent direct centrality. This yields a different typology from that indicated by simple chronological succession. There are three main types of such use or transformation: (i) amplificatory; (ii) durative (storing); (iii) alternative. Some examples will make this preliminary classification clearer. Thus, in relation to the continuing centrality of direct physical communicative means, the amplificatory ranges from such simple devices as the megaphone to the advanced technologies of directly transmitted radio and television. The durative, in relation to direct physical resources, is, in general, a comparatively late development; some kinds of non-verbal communication are made durable in painting and sculpture, but speech, apart from the important special case of repetitive (conventional) oral transmission, has been made durable only since the invention of sound recording. The type of the alternative, on the other hand, is comparatively early in human history: the conventional use or transformation of physical objects as signs; the rich and historically crucial development of writing, of graphics, and of means of their reproduction.
This typology, while still abstract, bears centrally on questions of social relationships and social order within the communicative process. Thus, at a first level of generality, both the amplificatory and the durative can be differentiated, socially, from the alternative. At least at each end of the amplificatory and most durative processes the skills involved—and thus the general potential for social access—are of a kind already developed in primary social communication: to speak, to hear, to gesture, to observe and to interpret. Many blocks supervene, even at a primary level, as in the different languages and gesture-systems of different societies, but within the communicative process itself there is no a priori social differentiation.