The Meaning Of Culture

Some academics realise that method is not all but the French intelligentsia don't: they have no use of creative work without theories to support it. A case in point is Regis Debray's new discipline mediology which he spells out in Media Manifestoes: On the Technical Transformations of Cultural Forms (Verso paperback, £12.95).

While the exact nature of this discipline is not quite clear, it lies somewhere in the no-man's land between philosophy (how can the French intelligentsia not turn something concrete into something abstract!) and the new sciences of information and communications technology. Debray begins by summing up the evolution of the systems of communication which includes not just the print and visual media but the whole world of images, signs and symbols. What he offers is not a doctrine or even a thesis but simply a method to analyse certain phenomena in social life.

 

Debray breaks down his method so as not to lapse into uncritical empiricism and psychologism with which semiology broke into two parts: For Mediology and In Defense of the Image. It is the first part which spells out the raison d'etre for the sub-discipline. It deals with the question of identity, the rapidly expanding media sphere, whether medium is message or not, its few hidden precursors and the ecology of culture. Part Two is a defence of the method or technique of analysing the cultural effects of a number of phenomena in society.

Debray quotes Umberto Eco, the Italian professor of semiotics: ... culture is essentially communication (that is) emitting messages subordinated to underlying codes. Why? Because all phenomena of culture are essentially systems of signs, a sign being something, no matter what, through whose knowledge we become familiar with something other. But Debray's technique does not analyse conversation because it is brought down to the level of the least intelligent. Besides, human beings are genetically programmed to speak and an analysis of speech would not enlighten us on the cultural effects of new techniques. On the other hand, writing is an intelligence exercise designed to influence the reader and constitutes what he calls intellectual technology: it is this technology that needs to be deconstructed because it explores the invisible infrastructure of culture and history.

If the written language is the map of culture, a mediologist studies the written word (Debray provides a glossary of the terms used in this sub-discipline), which means primarily books and the print media. The word, not the image, goes beyond the economic postulates of Marxism, and helps us understand culture in all its myriad forms: the ways of life and the structures of feeling with its salient features of knowledge, beliefs, law, morals and customs. And a mediocracy is born which is defined as the elite holding the means of production of mass opinion or more widely, the state of society in which the intermediaries of broadcasting and dissemination predominate.

A mediologist's job is to understand the social and collective life that has been shaped by the over-pervasive media. In order to understand the world around us, it is important to study the history of subjects. For instance, the study of computers will help us better understand television, which would help us better understand the printed word, which in turn would tell us more about handwritten manuscripts and the oral tradition. Everything merges into everything else in the audiovisual culture of today's videosphere, which means the transmission of data, models and narratives mainly by viewing the screen. Debray sums up by saying that we mediologists are materialists but we are materialists of the spiritual.

Given the enormous expansion of the print and visual media via cable and satellite communication, and given its spread via camcorders, e-mail, desk-top publishing, video recorders and the Internet, a theoretical understanding of the likely impact of technology-based media is necessary. But Media Manifestoes is dense stuff full of the ponderous prose style that goes with philosophical debate and the peckings of academia. In many ways it is typical French scholarship with philosophical contortions of former leftists that have been described as the sonorities of impotence. Compare this with the late Raymond Williams' Collected Writings on Television and Culture where the partly knowable world of television had brought about a dramatisation of consciousness to make us morons. Williams had described television and its cultural form and politics as the culture of distance and analysed its impact in a language and style that told us what the game the hidden persuaders were playing was all about. Till the eyes tire, millions of us watch the shadow of shadows and find them substance; watch scenes, situations, actions, exchanges, crises. The slice of life, once a project of naturalist drama, is now a voluntary, habitual, internal rhythm; the flow of action and acting, of representation and performance, raised to a new convention, that of a basic need. Debray has none of the incisiveness of Williams about the impact of media on social life; the Manifestoes merely obfuscate issues.