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

-------------------------------------------

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.

Democracy and Communication

Habermas normative notion of the "ideal speech situation" provides a context for a discussion of the communicative environment of great communities. The ideal speech situation, it is assumed, increases the likelihood that ideal communication will lead to rational, mutual understanding that serves the individual and the community.

Dewey's "great community" was "a communicating community."

Communication Ethics

In that communication is the process by which we come to share a world, it is a necessary focus of moral thought.

Communication (languaging) is the process by which we know goodness, righteousness, and virtue.

The way we communicate influences the way we live in relation to one another. There are ways that are better or worse than other ways.

Our current ways have resulted in our current state of dis-ease.

We ought to try and do better than we do now.

Communication and Environment

Community is born in communication.

Community emerges within a specific context--a unique set of environmental conditions.

Community's have a "metabolic footprint" (1)

Thus, communication has a metabolic resonance. (2)

Our ideas and the processes by which we come them have material consequences.

Our worldviews ("Weltanschauung") , in as much as they guide and influence our creaturly behaviors, have environmental consequences.

When your present state is a state of dis-ease, it is commonly held wisdom that you ought to adjust your behaviors and environment with the ultimate aim of improving your condition (your present state and your environmental circumstance).

Given that our current worldviews contribute to our current state of dis-ease, critical philosophers of most schools agree that we ought to adjust our ideals and values and thereby adjust our lived actions.

We ought to do this with the ultimate end of health and wellbeing for ourselves, our communities, and our environment. (3)


NOTES

(1) See McNeil's "Nothing New Under the Sun" for a discussion of "metabolic footprints" as a material measure of an organism or community's biophysical transformation of their environment. Today, BP calls it a "carbon footprint" and suggests we ought to learn about ours and reduce it as we slowly but surely march "Beyond Petroleum." Also see Foster's "Marx's Ecology" for a discussion of the idea of metabolism in 19th century scientific discourse.

(2) See Luhmann for a discussion of intersystemic resonance as a resulty of concurrent and interconnected autopoeitic enaction.

(3) This is, of course, a communitarian perspective and is not shared among all people. Individualist approaches are diverse, and this research does not pretend to be a all-encompassing critique of individualism, "rugged" or "ragged." (3.1) My intent is to describe and interpret within an identifiable normative framework.

(3.1) "Rugged" individualism is much discussed in the United State's self-narrative literature. Ruggedness is a a virtuous state in our mythology. Dewey, however, pointed to pure individualism's downside by referring to "ragged" individualism (listen to Dewey tape)

Communication and Community

Community is born of communication.

Communication is the dialogic process we use to coordinate our meanings and behaviors. Communication as process is well-captured by Maturana and Varela's notion of "languaging"--a way of knowing or "cognition."

Community and communication share a common root: communicare (see Peters, 1999).

Self and Society

Presently, the frontier is moral, not physical, said John Dewey.

The fundamental moral question exists as a frontier between the self and society. How am I to act toward society, and what can I reasonably expect from my fellow citizens? (1)

If one takes Koestler's notion of the holon (2) seriously, then the answer lies in the dialect between self and society. The virutous citizen contributes to the well-being of his community by serving as a nourishing presence in it. The individual fluorishes in community, and communites flourish by and through the healthy relationships among its individuals.

NOTES

(1) Benhabib (1992) suggests that feminists, post-modernists, pragmatists, and communitarians have offered a useful counternarrative to the dominant "unencumbered individual" story. Steiner makes a similar observation. As do Hall and Ames. So too did Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohommed. And in the American tradition, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jeffereson, and John Dewey come to mind.

(2) A holon is any phenomena that is simultaneously an integral whole, and a part of something else. For example, an hydrogen atom is an integral whole, and when combined with another hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom, is a part of a water molecule. People are integral wholes and also parts of the social and cultural systems they inhabit.

Corporate Virtue (and Wal Mart)

Wal Mart's Good Work

Nobody can argue that today's mega-corporations do not do good things.

Wal Mart's "good works" campaign highlighted all of the ways the world's most profitable corporation contributes to our social and environmental well-being.

They give college scholarships to good kids who study engineering at Montana Tech.

They fund environmental education curricula for k-12 education (a convenient way to whisper your corporate narrative into the ears of children).

My question: does doing good work translate to being a good citizen? My answer: of course not.

Why? Because we can easily imagine a person who does good work and makes a show of it, but keeps other aspects of her life away from public scrutiny.

Patterns of behavior comprise one's character, not the stories one tells about one's character.

William James' notion of truth is useful here: truth happens to things, its not an inherent property of the thing itself. The truth about wal mart is not limited to the true stories they post on their web site. Truth transcends narratives about truth. Wal Mart's truth is what we can demonstrate by critical analysis of the documentary record.

Wal Mart's Corporate Web Site

The four main memes on Wal Mart's corporate web site are "company," "people," "community," and "environment." The public relations department has determined that these ideas ought to be emphasized on the corporation's public presence.

Wal Mart is a good company, made up of good people, a corporate citizen doing good things for the community and the environment. It's part of their corporate mythos, its their "corporate utopian narrative."(1)

The question is, in the real world, is Wal Mart a virtuous corporate citizen, or does Wal Mart have sociopathic tendencies? (2)

One would hope for virtue, given the corporation is a legal person with all of the rights and priveleges that come with personhood in the United States and abroad.

Most would grant that when you've been afforded all of the rights of a person you ought to act in for the good of the people--the "common good".(3)

You are, after all, constituted as a part of the civic body, the corpus, so the public interest is your interest too.

Moral Minimum

Doing the moral minimum is not a virtue. We don't say to our children, "Now, go out on that field and do as little as possible." When we're not encouraged to do all we can, we are encouraged to do what we can.

-----------------------------------------------------------
NOTES

(1) See ECY v.1, "Blue Skies, Green Industry"
(2) See the documentary, "The Corporation"
(3) See Cliff Christians, "Common Good as First Principle"

Civic and Environmental Virtues

How do we define virtuous social practice, and what are the hallmarks of virtuous environmental process?

Social Practice is Biophysical Process, or Communication is Ecological

In the 1st volume of the Environmental Communication Yearbook; Peterson, Peterson, and Grant explore the relationship between what they call (inspired by Luhmann), "social practice and biophysical process."

They study how human social systems co-evolve with ecological systems.

They make clear that social systems exist by and through communicative practice. And that social systems emerge from and exist within their environmental systems.

Thus, communicative practice influences and guides environmental change and vice versa.

Which is just another way to say that human social systems co-evolve with ecological systems.

The strands of Western tradition that trace themselves to Plato and Descarte, have made plausible the idea that our thoughts are somehow wholely disconnected from the real world. Peirce once commented that Hegel "had made the trifilng oversight of forgetting the real world exists."

This tendency in Western thought toward dualism has been roundly criticized. Alternatives from Buddhism to Rortian "anti-dualism" exist.

Indeed, social practice IS a biophysical process because humans are "live creatures" that exist in "trasactional relationships" with their environment. We can tell because we leave a metabolic footprint behind. We leave evidence of our transactions with the environment--residue in the historical record.

Virtuous Communities

It is taken for granted that community's have a collective character--they often express traits unique to a people in place.

Conversations about character often turn evaluative: that is, we try to assess and classify community character against some evaluative measure.

Morality is one such measure. What is the moral character of a community? Is this or that community admirable or despicable? Are they worthy of emulation, or an example of what not to do? Is this or that community virtuous or vicious?

Of course, I hyperbolize somewhat. The questions aren't so pointed and the answers aren't so clear.

My point is that most cultures have some notion of the ideal community. Few community's ever come close to living out their ideals. And some are further away than others.

What does the virtuous community look like? This is a question that has resonated across cultures, through space, and time.

Community Health is a Civic Virtue

COMMUNITY HEALTH IS A CIVIC VIRTUE

My research starts with an assumption that Butte, Montana's present circumstances are not optimal and that we could be a better community than we are.

Presently, by most measures of civic health, we are in a state of dis-ease.

We live within one of the country's largest environmental injuries, one we hope is on-the-mend.

We suffer from the post-911 economic mallaise that grips most of the country, but hits post-industrial frontier lands especially hard.

Predatory businesses like pawn shops, casinos, title loan companies, and Wal Mart are a growing and conspicuous presence around town.

For systems to be considered healthy, they must live in a healthy environment. In Montana, its a constitutional right, the health of the environment is constituted in our polity because, to put it simply, we are made up of that which surrounds us. If we renew ourselves in an unhealthy environment, we are less likely to exist in a healthy state--kind of an analog of the digital notion of "garbage in, garbage out."

If community health requires renewal within a healthy environment, then the state of our environment's health can be viewed as resulting from virtuous practice as a community. Community health is a civic virtue, an expression of of our communal character.

Imagining the Next Butte

What were the community visions of Superfund reclamation. The EPA's? ARCO's?

What was the nature of the political process by which community's made their voices heard?

Whose voices were heard? What were those visions of Superfund reclamation?

Whose visions were realized?

Was the "communicative ecosystem" a healthy one? (see Mackin)

Did the discourse occur within an ideal discursive situation? (see Habermas)

Creating the Good Community in Butte, Montana

I intend to use this blog as a practical tool, one that helps me understand and write my ph.d. dissertation. I anticipate posting ideas to this blog about a range of subjects related to my research project. I also hope that this blog might draw the attention of those who might help me understand Butte's past and present, and who might help me craft a virtuous and practical strategy for Butte's future. Consider this an invitation to join the conversation.