Communication and Power

Power is the measure of one's ability to coordinate meaning and behavior, even against resistance, to realize one's desires.

Similarly, communication is the process of trying to coordinate meanings and behaviors through semiosis within a cultural matrix.

Power and communication are inextricably bound to one another. Often, powerful systems first try to influence, guide, and control channels of communication and therefore guide community visions, meaning, and actions.

Power (especially political and economic power) must be taken seriously in any inquiry which involves conflict among haves and have-nots.

A Dissertation Proposal

TITLE:

Deliberative Democracy & Environmental Justice: A Pragmatic Critique of Superfund Discourse in Butte, Montana

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Introduction: A Bird's Eye View of the Study

Part I

Chapter 1: Deliberative Democracy and Environmental Justice in Butte, Montana
Chapter 2: A Pragmatic Theory of Environmental Communication
Chapter 3: A Pragmatic Approach to Environmental Communication Inquiry

Part II

Chapter 4: The Injured Environment: The Discursive Conditions
Chapter 5: The Discursive Network: A Structural Analysis of the Public Sphere
Chapter 6: The Discourse: Contested Visions of Environmental Remedy
Chapter 7: The Reclaimed Environment: Ecological Consequences of Superfund Discourse

Part III

Chapter 8: A Pragmatic Critique of Superfund Discourse in Butte, Montana

communication is ecological

Communication is an ecological phenomena.

Communication, the semiotic coordination of meanings and behaviors, occurs in living systems.

Maturana and Varela suggest that communication is an attribute of living systems.

Living systems are autopoietic, or self-creating systems. They renew themselves through the process of cognition or "knowing the world."

Life has multiple ways of knowing the world. Biological life is embodied in the physical world. It emerges from and continues to exist within its surrounding conditions--its environment. It continuously renews itself by metabolizing its environment, transforming the elements of life into life itself. This is one way of knowing: biophysical metabolism within the ecosphere.

Humans also know the world through the process of communication: the symbolic coordination of meanings and behaviors; dialogical signification; semiotic behavior; languaging. We come to know the world through the process of meaning-making. Symbols, codes, and languages are mind-tools. This is another way of knowing the world: communication within the noosphere, or the infosphere, or the semiosphere.

The noosphere emerges from the biosphere which makes itself from the ecosphere. Semiotic behavior, languaging, communication, are ecologically situated: conditioned by existence in the ecological world. In this sense, communication is an ecological phenomena.

But communication is ecological in another way. Ecology, for our purposes, is scientific inquiry into the transactional relationships among living systems and their environments. Ecological thought is processual and dynamic and considers the relationships among living systems and their environments. Communication is processual and dynamic and concerns the relationshps among living systems and their environments.

Rorty suggests that communication is the symbolic way we cope with our environment. And signs are the nodes in the causal network that binds us to the immediate conditioins of our existence. This is what Deely (2001) meant when he wrote, "The sign performs its task at the crossroad of nature and culture."

Communication is ecological.