CARYNELSON

Poststructuralism and
Communication

Poststructuralist writers have regularly made critiques of widespread assumptions

about the nature of human communication a central part of their projects. Within
the more theoretically and philosophically oriented wing of communication
studies, poststructuralism has, within the past few years, been an important
stimulus in reevaluations of the field. In a sense, then, communication studies and
poststructuralism are already engaged in a limited dialogue. But the possibility that
the two bodies of theory might &dquo;communicate&dquo; with one another more fully is
made doubtful both by their relative styles of theorizing and by post.structuralism’s
very critique of the notion of communication. In rather different ways, both
poststructuralism and communication studies tend to be antiparadigmatic bodies
of theory. PosLstructuralists, despite wide differences among them, often argue for
the temporary, contingent, context-specific nature of theorizing. Mainstream
communication specialists, on the other hand, tend to think they can operate
without an explicit theory, arguing instead for a liberal diversity of methods that
insulates them at once from self-reflection and political commitment. If poststruc
turalism pushes self-conscious reflection toward the limits of what is historically

Cary Nelson is Professor of English and Criticism and Interpretiue Theory at the
University of Illinois at Urbanu-C.hampaign. This paper was presented at the
Annual Convention of the International Communication Associutiorl, Honolulu,
Hawaii, May 1985.

2
tolerable for readers, communication studies is, as Lawrence Grossberg (1982) has
argued, often happy to leave its assumptions unexamined and unthought. It is
these very unthought regions that poststructuralism seeks to invade, problematize,
and empower. The incommensurable logics of the two fields of thought may be
demonstrated by trying to pose a question about communication that simultane-
ously speaks from both positions. The result of such an interaction is inevitably a
paradox: How do you communicate, one might ask, when your paradigm denies
the possibility of communication?
The simple answer to this question is that you don’t communicate under
these conditions. Of course all the activities usually classed as communication-
from writing to conversation to gestures to physical contact-still occur, no matter
what your paradigm is (at least in the behavior of others if not in your own), but
these activities are construed differently within poststructuralism. Similarly, the
social infrastructure for communication, from educational institutions to news-
papers to telephone lines to railway systems to Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
in waiting, still exists, as do such great communicators as the American president,
but either their functions are understood differently, that is they aren’t understood
as facilitating communication, or communication itself is rather differently

inflected. Yet one might take the 1985 program for the annual meeting of the
International Communication Association as some evidence that communication
studies is itself nervous about how efforts to communicate and engage in dialogue
might be misconstrued. Note the effort in the program to differentiate between the
categories of &dquo;respondent,&dquo; &dquo;discussant,&dquo; and, most wonderfully, &dquo;respondent-
bridge.&dquo; Whether this attempt at overdetermination evokes a delerious and playful
effort to celebrate the field’s diversity, or a paranoid effort to mark differences, it
certainly suggests the field is officially uneasy about the aims and results of
communication.
As Raymond Williams points out in his celebrated Keywords ( 1976), recently
expanded, the concept of communication has a long history. Its most general
modern meaning, &dquo;make common to many, impart,&dquo; along with its power to refer
to the object communicated, he notes, has been around since the fifteenth century.
As roads and railways were developed, the term acquired a more abstract meaning,
referring to this physical infrastructure and no doubt as well acquiring instrumen-
tal connotations that still color not only linear but also phenomenological models
of human communication. Williams argues succinctly that the term has an unre-
solved and double valence, suggesting at once a one-way transmission and a
mutual sharing, thus preparing for distinctions between manipulative and partici-
patory communication (Williams, 1983, pp. 72-73). I would argue that in each use
of the term an unstable connotative ground is always already prepared for it, a

3
ground that prevents either of these opposite terms (transmission or sharing) from
wholly dominating or eliminating the other. Thus we are always undecided
whether we are the beneficiaries or victims of communication. Models of com-
munication are in part designed give us the illusion of controlling (or at least
to

structuring) this uncertainty.

In Kyywords the entry for communication is, happily, followed by the entr3’
for communism, a conjunction that helps us to realize how troubled and politically
charged is the modern transformation of their shared root. What, we may wonder,
would the free communication of ideas and resources actually entail? In his 1980
Communication Theory, Ernest Borman cites communication’s special American
history, where it has at times been a kind of god term, a universal popular solution
to every social conflict. It becomes, in effect, a positive substance in its own right, a
structural confirmation at once of social differences and their negotiability. The
kinds of commonplace utterances that draw on this miraculous substance will be
familiar: &dquo;If we can only learn to communicate...What’s needed here is better
communication...Communication is the first step.&dquo; Understanding, negotiation,
and consensus, presumably, will follow upon communication, or so the ideologi-
cal field around &dquo;communication&dquo; in America suggests each time we hear the
term. A democratic consensus based on free communication, we may believe,
reflects what is at once metaphysically best and most essential about human
nature. Still, such confidence is semiotically conflated with an underlying anxiety.
If the connotative field around the term &dquo;communication&dquo; were to be
mapped out, we would have intersecting lines continually renewed by variations
on effects of ruthless manipulation, neutral transmission, and loving intersubjec-

tivity. This is not, as it happens, a connotative field from which it is easy to extricate
oneself. Communication paradigms do not have much luck either in shedding
these diverse and powerfully determining connotations. Classic structuralism, of
course, opted for neutrality itself, unidealized, so it thought, in any way. Levi
Strauss, in StructuralAnthropology ( 1958), taking language as his model, treated
systems of social exchange and systems of meaning production equally as types of
communication. Only 15 years later, Roland Barthes could write in confidence,
thinking of Roman Jakobson’s model: &dquo;No one can claim to reduce communica
tion to the simplicity of the classical schema postulated by linguistics: sender,
channel, receiver, except by relying implicitly on a metaphysics of the classical
subject or an empiricism whose (sometimes aggressive) ’naivety’ is just as meta-
physical&dquo; (Barthes, 1981, p. 36).
In the space between these two positions, a space opened up in part by
political readings of the structured mystique of communication, the transforma-
tion from structuralism to poststructuralism takes place. In a moment, I will

4
summarize poststructuralism’s characteristic stance on the nature of communica-
tion. Let me preface this summary, however, by applying a conclusion from my
opening remarks: Communication is a semantically overdetermined and, inescap-
ably, a semiotically contaminated term. Its multiple valences and its contemporary
political uses inevitably invade and color any attempt to restrict its meaning. Thus,
logically consistent and metaphysically independent uses of it (or paradigms
constructed around it) are impossible. It is a concept that betrays paradigms from
the inside, a Trojan horse by way of which multiple and competing connotations
enter into and destabilize apparently consistent and controlled arguments. There
is, in short, no simple, uncontradictory denotative meaning for the term &dquo;com-
munication&dquo; and no way for any individual theory to establish one. No text can
wholly succeed in limiting the term’s semiotic diversity. Lucky those who, need
one emphasize, claim the study of communication as their life’s work.
The most stark summary of the element of commonality in the explicit or
implicit view of communication in the various poststructuralisms is simple
enough: Poststructuralism largely rejects communication (at least as we have
tended to construe it), whether as an account of cultural process, a model of
information exchange, or a goal or essentializing description of human interac-
tion. Poststructuralism rejects communication because of the assumptions coded
into the term; at times it takes communication as its rejected neutral structuralist
other or, alternatively, its rejected humanistic other, defining itself in opposition to
the possibility of full or uncontradictory communication. Thus poststructuralism
would reject the humanistic goals of the American culturalist wing of communica-
tion studies, a position whose contemporary development is exemplified in the
work of James W. Carey. For Carey (1975), communication is the medium for
achieving a true sense of community; this idealization of sharing and community
presupposes a belief in intersubjectivity. Indeed, poststructuralism tends to deny
the possibility of any genuinely intersubjective component in human interaction;
from that perspective, the kind of modified or &dquo;partial intersubjectivity&dquo; argued for
by Ragnar Rommetveit ( 1974 and 1978) and others seems no less fantasmatic than
a belief in the possibility of full, intersubjective communication.’ At other times,

poststructuralism may try to redefine the concept of communication, trading on

the sense of reversal built into the resulting tensions with existing uses of the term.
Michel Foucault does the latter briefly in his immensely influential &dquo;The
Order of Discourse,&dquo; his 1970 inaugural lecture at the College de France, where he
proposes to define communication as one of the &dquo;great myths of European
culture.&dquo; &dquo;The universal communication of knowledge and the infinite free
exchange of discourses in Europe,&dquo; he argues, in effect, is structurally constituted
in a relation of dominating otherness, self-congratulatorily set &dquo;against the

5
monopolized and secret knowledge of Oriental tyranny.&dquo; The myth of free com-
munication, he claims, &dquo;does not stand up to examination. Exchange and com-
munication are positive figures working inside complex systems of restriction, and
probably would not be able to function independently of them&dquo; (Foucault, 1981,
p. 62). Communication, then, is an effective, often affirmative, term whose invoca-
tions of freedom are constituted within careful, culturally determined boundaries.
In our own moment, its metaphysic is also available, I would argue, to be
articulated to quite specific restrictive programs; thus, for example,- the Pentagon
stands to benefit from the democratic, cheerful, free communication of informa-
tion, all information, of course, except that restricted for reasons of national
security. To the extent the Pentagon convinces us this is a matter of &dquo;improving
communication in a democracy,&dquo; and, to the extent we believe communication is
a transcendent good, a value above history, they may convince us all information
should be &dquo;freely communicated.&dquo; No matter that all military institutions have
unhappy uses for information, no matter that the Pentagon, with its vast banks of
computer memory, is rather more well-equipped to use quantities of data than the
rest of us. Still, communication is a tricky concept; if the Pentagon tries to use it for
its purposes, communication’s own connotative effect may open up uncontrolla-
ble contradictions in the Pentagon’s logic.
For Foucault, communication is a historically constructed and differential
concept, not an eternal and independent feature of human nature. Other figures in
poststructuralism have tried to employ the term as one of several substitute terms
within an antiessentializing description of semiotic process. In this version, post-
structuralism works to textualize the entire social domain, thereby at once under-
mining both any secure links or distinctions between persons and the meaning-
fulness of messages. The linear model of communication, however modified by
context, by models based on reciprocity or interaction, or by recognition of the
possibility of misunderstanding, is here substantially overthrown. Indeed post-
structuralism typically denies the integrity of a coherent individual perspective,
especially one that would claim consistency over time. If we are not fully inte-
grated subjects, we are unlikely to be able to communicate any enduring and
essential version of ourselves; there is no center to human character. Indeed we
are unlikely to be able to formulate a message whose meaning is stable and
determined. And our image of what we might seek to communicate is quite
undependable as well, a recognition psychoanalysis had made available long ago
but one that most communication theories are unable to incorporate.
Of course most theories of communication claim to have abandoned the
simple linear model whereby one individual’s intended meaning is directly
transmitted to another. But it is arguable that this linear model, though modified,

6
qualified, and tinkered with, still underlies most existing models of communica-
tion, including those that acknowledge reciprocity by emphasizing that sender
and receiver each play both roles (Schramm, 1954; Bamlund, 1970). Poststructu-
ralism believes all vestiges of belief in inherent and determinable meaning are
misleading. There is no context-free &dquo;meaning&dquo; available to be transmitted and
realized anew. Miscommunication is the rule, the only result, of communicative
processes, not the exception. Miscommunication is not a failure to communicate;
it is a description of the communicative process, the product of signification.
Poststructuralism’s critique of the subject-a complex positioning of the subject as
an inescapable but unresolvable element of communication, not a wholesale

rejection of the subject, as is often claimed of poststructuralism-puts particular

strain on most communication paradigms. For even sophisticated theories of
communication tend to posit coherent subjectivity and to idealize communication
as a process whereby individuality either can or might be overcome and trans-
cended. This idealism colors most accounts of how shared meanings are pro-
duced, how intersubjectivity or consensual understanding is achieved.
Since it has considerable bearing on the view of communication, poststructu-
ralism’s conception of individuality needs some clarification here. Partly a reaction
against structuralism, partly a development of and intensification of tendencies
always present in structuralism, the two overlapping bodies of theory do, at their
extremes, construct the subject differently. Structuralism’s notorious antihuman-
ism involved a view of the culturally determined nature of human productivity. At
its most extreme, classical structuralism rejected the subject as a determining site
for discursive production, whether in art, interpersonal communication, or in the
broader social formation. Suffice it to say that the subject has returned in poslstruc-
turalism, but not as the fully present, unified conscious agent of traditional
humanism and many communication models. Instead the subject is thought of, in
part, as constituted by multiple partial identities provided to it by conflicting
cultural forces. People are collections of fragments, hallucinatory investments, and
self representations manufactured by the culture. Since there are many poststruc-
turalisms, I do not want to suggest there is a single consistent poststructuralist view
of the subject--a term, by the way, which is historically more neutral than self or
person, allowing human agency to be seen as produced within the culture, rather
than being fully independent and self-determined-but it is useful to note how
individuals might be composed of multiple subject positions rather than as
wondrous and unique identities. Consider someone who is a worker at a factory or
a faculty member. Such positions that subjects occupy give them beliefs they can

utter as their own, a sense of identity within particular institutions, and, in general,
assistance in establishing who they are. But those same persons become someone

7
else family members, and positions like parent or child also come with
as

ready-made speeches we can recite to others. Similarly, nations otter their citizens
other subject positions-positions that may seem wholly self consuming when
nations are at war.2 These varied sites often contradict one another. In poststructu-
ralism, however, they cannot be dismissed; indeed, these subject positions struc-
ture communication.
Poststructuralism is not, one needs to add, simply arguing that individuals
take up different roles in society. Role theory typically assumes the existence of a
separate agent who takes on such roles and who, more importantly, possesses an
inherent, coherently meaningful identity. Thus, despite his belief in a socially
constructed identity, George Herbert Me’ad posits the existence of an &dquo;I&dquo; as a
source of creative expression. Even Erving Goffman, who develops perhaps the

most radical version of role theory, cannot adopt poststructuralism’s vision of

individuals as changing assemblages of contradictory subject positions.
Consistent with this view of subjectivity and with its sense of language,
poststructuralism reinscribes communication as a field of differences, substitu-
tions, displacements, and multiple determinations. &dquo;It deconstructs the language
of communication,&dquo; Barthes writes of textuality, &dquo;representation, or expression
(where the individual or collective subject may have the illusion that he is
imitating something or expressing himself) and reconstmcts another language,
voluminous, having neither bottom nor surface, for its space is not that of the
figure, the painting, the frame, but the stereographic space of the combinative play,
which is infinite once one has gone outside the limits of current communication
(subjected to opinion, to the ’doxa’) and of narrative or discursive verisimilitude&dquo;
(Barthes, 1981, p. 37). Or, more succinctly: &dquo;the plural is directly at the heart of
signifying practice.&dquo; the text is &dquo;a polysemic space where the paths of several
possible meanings intersect.&dquo; It &dquo;cannot be reduced to communication, to repres-
entation, to expression&dquo; (Barthes, 1981, pp. 36-38). Barthes’s image of the plural,
of course, is more radical than the familiar concept of ambiguity, which generally
suggests double meanings that can be specified and that are carefully balanced
against one another. Barthes’s plural, on the other hand, is unpredictable and
everchanging. It multiplies with every reading. Barthes thus emphasizes the
continuing interplay of determinants, rather than their strict hierarchization and
structuration. Unconscious, political, and intertextual determinations occur at the
same level and within the same textual domain. Messages are temporary linguistic
sites within a field of mutually determining and unlimited semiosis. The semiotic
forces working to constitute meaning and facilitate &dquo;communication&dquo; are the very
same forces at work to dismantle and deconstruct communication. Each of us is
constituted by those very forces. Thus terms like &dquo;sender,&dquo; &dquo;message,&dquo; and

8
&dquo;receiver&dquo; are linguistic creations, not simple reflections of reality. They create
fictional, textual stabilities whose verisimilitude, borrowed from the general
culture, is transferred to the discourse internal to communication theory.
It is important to realize just how different this position is from the communi-
cation models that dominate much modern communications research. For exam-
ple, it is widely recognized that the models devised by Shannon/Weaver, Gerbner,
Lasswell, Newcomb, Westley/MacLean, and Jakobson are linear at their core. But
the full implications of this linearity are not so apparent. Moreover, the critiques of
their linearity often miss their deeper and more determining common assump-
tions. Thus John Fiske, in his generally helpful Introduction to Communication
studies ( 1982 ), argues, I think incorrectly, that Newcomb’s triangular model is not
linear. Fiske makes this claim despite the fact that Newcomb’s triangular model is
composed of relational movements between fixed, positive entities. What Fiske
does not see is that, though Newcomb’s model is not limited to unidirectional
transmission, it incorporates the essential object relations of the more simple
linear models. This deeper linearity is apparent in the success Westley and
MacLean have had in rewriting Newcomb’s model in a more overtly linear fashion.
As Joao Natali (1978) argues in &dquo;Communication: A Semiotic of Misunder
standing,&dquo; a powerful essay so far only published in French, communication
theory is &dquo;saturated with positivity. &dquo;3 Though Natali is unlikely to be familiar with
all the American work in the field, his critique is pertinent nonetheless. One might
extend his argument somewhat by noting that positivity saturates communication
research in two ways: first, by dividing communicative processes into elements
and assigning a fixed, separate identity to all the elements it names; second, by
positing within each element an essential unity, an indivisible structure which is
always the real truth of a communicative event. One of the most strikingly
constitutive positivistic moments occurs in the Shannon/Weaver model, when
&dquo;noise&dquo; is depicted as an external, intrusive, extraterritorial force in communica-
tion. The positivity of the message, we are to conclude, can be diverted and
interrupted, but it is nonetheless constituted as positivity. In more sophisticated
models, space is made for noise to be internal to the message, but its ontological
status is then that of an invasive, marginal, secondary other within a desired (and

always primary) positivity. In poststructuralism, on the contrary, noise is the

message; noise is the sender, noise is the receiver. Noise is not outside the
message, nor is it an internal supplement to the truth of the message. Noise is the
semiotic process that constitutes messages; it is their substance; it is irreducible.
This is a radical extension of Saussaure’s argument: There are only differences;
there are no positive terms. For poststructuralism, in the metaphors Jacques
Derrida (1976) uses, ei>cnJ>thitig is secondary, supplementary. Communication

9
theory, conversely, is deeply committed to the positivity poststructuralism would
overturn.
It must be observed, however, that this very reversal inscribes within many
poststructuralist texts the positivity they would reject. It resides there as a rejected
but enabling other. So the positivistic communication model is often explicitly
invoked, and poststructuralism gets some of its rhetorical energy by disavowing
communication. Thus Julia Kristeva (1972 and 1984) refers to communication
negatively, using the term to represent a kind of limited, everyday interchange that
embodies only a meager share of the resources of the language. &dquo;Connotation,&dquo;
Barthes writes in S/Z, &dquo;releasing the double meaning on principle, corrupts the
purity of communication: It is a deliberate ’static,’ painstakingly elaborated, intro-
duced into the fictive dialogue between author and reader, in short a counter-
communication&dquo; (Barthes, 1974, p. 9). If we substitute Shannon and Weaver’s
&dquo;noise&dquo; for Barthes’s &dquo;static&dquo; and their &dquo;transmitter and receiver&dquo; for his &dquo;author
and reader,&dquo; we can see what Barthes gains and loses by inscribing a rejected
positivity within his own discourse. He gains an invigorating adversary but his
discourse becomes dependent on that adversary; his writing becomes a counter-
positivity. Of course Barthes is not a free agent in these matters; the positivistic
heritage is part of the connotative plural of any language he might use. Moreover,
in Barthes’s work communication is actually doubly reinscribed-first as an
explicitly rejected positivity and then as a potentially idealized plural. In this
second reinscription, communication’s name is not specifically invoked. Yet when
Barthes valorizes a &dquo;combinative play, which is infinite once one has gone outside
the limits of current communication,&dquo; the words &dquo;play&dquo; and &dquo;communication&dquo; are
not merely opposed, for the restricted model of communication is modified with
&dquo;current,&dquo; and thus &dquo;play&dquo; is contaminated with connotations of a more free and
unpredictable kind of communication.
Yet this is not altogether to be regretted, for the aim in poststructuralism is
often explicitly oppositional. Here Natali is useful again. The linear model of
communication, especially in its positing of real, independent, and interactionally
separable persons, reinforces wider political structures with its apparently inno-
cent discourse. &dquo;Communication theory,&dquo; Natali writes, &dquo;has become precisely an
effective source of legitimation, within the discursive tide where capitalist social
formations fish for proofs of their legitimacy. Nothing is more providential than the
idea of an individual whose message consciously manifests choices (lexical,
electoral, or libidinal).&dquo; T’his takes us back to Borman’s observation that commun-
ication is imagined to offer solutions to &dquo;problems as diverse as juvenile delin-
quency, marital breakups and loss of faith in political institutions.&dquo; For if our
confidence in the integrity of individuals is sustained by communication models,

10
if we are led to trust in people’s capacity to define and know their intentions, if we
view political and institutional conflict as a communication problem between the
individuals serving those institutions, then we are less likely to challenge the
institutions themselves. Unconsciously at least, communication studies is aware of
this dynamic. Good evidence of that implicit awareness is to be found in the fact
that Jurgen Habermas is the only Marxist critic who has become acceptable within
mainstream communication research. Habermas (1979) of course reduces ques-
tions of power to questions of communicative access and competence.
The issues at stake in the engagement between poststructuralism and com-
munication are thus, ina way, precisely representational ones, though some

poststructuralists would overturn the capacity of the representational function

itself. Other poststructuralists, particularly those with a stronger commitment to
explicitly political interventions, need to argue that theory, at least in specific
contexts can have representational power. Interestingly, it is here that a specific
negotiation between poststructuralism and communication theory can take place,
for the social role of communication theory is partly one of representing interac-
tions between individuals and their relation to institutions. But this negotiation
has no future if communication theory continues broadly to deny the inescapably
political force of its representational choices.
Clearly, in tracking the competing claims of these bodies of theory, we are not
involved in a reassuring and conciliatory dialogue, in an exercise in &dquo;cross-
paradigm communication.&dquo; We are engaged precisely in a political contest over
meaning. This is, of course, generally the case in the current wide interaction
between broadly explanatory paradigms. Testing their powers of explanation and
defining their boundaries in debate with alternative models, paradigms also seek
to dominate one another by subsuming and incorporating each other’s insights
and terminologies. Poststructuralism’s frequent strategy of denying the independ-
ent coherence of any interpretive paradigm, including its own, is thus in part an

aggressive and political act, one that aims to redefine the differential relations
between discourses and the status of individuals, language, and social institutions.
Yet in the effort radically to problematize the concept of communication, post-
structuralism also honors communication by showing it to be a central part of the
ideology that maintains our view of the world. Communication is thus an impor-
tant ground on which the contest for meaning will take place.

11
 NOTES

1. Rommetveit (1978) rather reinforces poststructuralist suspicions that

partial idealization often masks a complete commitment: "We must,
naively and unreflectively, take the possibility of perfect intersubjec-
tivity for granted in order to achieve partial intersubjectivity in real-life
discourse with our fellow men" (p. 31). For an analysis of the role of
intersubjectivity in communication theory, see Grossberg (1982a).
2. For general statements on poststructuralism and the subject, see Coward
and Ellis (1977) and Julian Henriques et al. (1984). My own views
also reflect Hall (1980 and 1985).

3. Quotations from Natali’s essay are taken from the typescript of an

English translation recently completed by David Descutner of Ohio

University.

12
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Quarterly,34

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1983 Keywords: A vocabulary of culture .
and society London: Fontana.

15