Process Communications and the Construction of Advocacy

Tony Conrad 2004

            Knowing as much as we do about the emerging global system, what can we say about opportunities for advocacy, in terms of alternative or oppositional community formation? Adopting Hardt and Negri's Empire as a point of departure, we might follow Saskia Sassen in asking, "Can the global be conceived, constituted, and enacted only on the self-evident global scale? Or is the global actually multiscalar in that it can also be constituted and engaged at the subnational scale--the locality, or particular national state institutions that look national but have in fact ceased to be so?" (Sassen 176) Hardt and Negri themselves, in Empire , distance themselves from the "old analyses of imperialism" and say, "We need to identify a theoretical schema that puts the subjectivity of the social movements of the proletariat at center stage in the process of globalization and the constitution of global order." (Hardt and Negri 235, quoted in Sassen 178-79.)

            The literature of global media development was impoverished in English after the U.S. withdrew from UNESCO in 1984. As Colleen Roach (a former US employee of UNESCO) has pointed out, this move embodied a Reagan administration effort to dismantle the international public sector--a policy aimed, as Herbert Schiller put it, at eliminating "the alternative to transnational corporate enterprise." The American anti-UNESCO drive was an attempt "to weaken public-sector communications structures."

The unilateral withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO...can be seen as the American government's encouragement of deregulation and privatization in the international arena and in the poorer countries especially. (Schiller 115, citing Roach.)

After 1984 much of the global media development discourse shifted into French. Nevertheless, those who seek out reports on the use of media among indigenous peoples will find numberless variations on the same story: that the recirculation of their own video or other images to a group animates the self-confidence of the players and the integrity of the group. Among the earliest such accounts is the often-repeated story of the intervention by Dorothy Hénaut and Bonnie Kline in the Saint-Jacques neighborhood of Montréal in 1968. Seeing video of themselves recounting their difficulties strengthened the resolve of the citizens' group there and facilitated community organizers' efforts; as Dierdre Boyle summarizes the project, "video helped to break down boundaries between individuals and within them, drawing citizens together with a shared sense of purpose and new sense of power." (Boyle 228 n25. Also see Hénaut, Dorothy Todd and Bonnie Klein, "In the Hands of Citizens: A Video Report". Radical Software 1:1 (Summer 1970), p. 11.)

            This general theme is encountered over and over, whether it is in the use of media in consciousness raising among women textile workers in South America, in the documentation and preservation of some group's activities as a gesture and instrument of solidity, or in the shooting and screening of "home movies." It can take many forms. For instance, Robert Huesca quotes an outreach worker in Bolivia who, "reporting on a labour strike where miners took over an interior section of the mine," used "tape recordings, the 'open microphone,' and large 'newspaper murals'--to connect dispersed social actors and to convert audiences into producers:"

We went into the mine to pull out the experience of the strikers: how they felt in that moment, of being exhausted, of hopelessness, of things they were living.... So we'd take in our newspaper murals and they themselves would draw on them. We took their drawings down to the Plaza of the Miner and we displayed them there. It was a constant coming and going, a permanent response between the people on the outside and the people on strike inside. (Marta M., outreach worker at Radio Pio XII) (Huesca 29)

Media tools are employed to serve multiple functions in the context of community development; they may be used for instruction and information, for composing advocacy or grievance messages, or for documenting special events. However, I will focus here on the uses of recorded material in process rather than as product . Rafael Roncagliolo describes this distinction succinctly, in relation to video:

In product video, the purpose...is to create an object to be broadcast, transmitted, received, and consumed. Process video, on the other hand, [uses video recordings] as tools for oral history, collective memories, group consciousness and the process of self-education and self-organization. Process video uses the recording as one element in a circular process of self-enrichment, and the reactions produced by this type of video are in turn recorded, thereby feeding the process of dialogue/consciousness-raising/organization/development. (Roncagliolo 26-27, emphasis added.)  

The feedback element in process communications is a defining element, an "indispensable stage," as Alain Ambrosi writes,

in any valid communication process. This is the often live reaction to the product...and to its producer on the part of viewers, and the influence that they can have on the form and content of future products. The same type of distinction that exists in production between process and product should also be applied to the differing modes of distribution. The fundamental contrast here would be between distribution with and without feedback. (Ambrosi 15)

            The community-constitutive "feedback" structure of process communication, which embodies the group's control over its own representation, can be perceived as a theme running throughout these and other authors' work on process communications; however, since they are concerned primarily with effecting social change, these authors do not isolate the constitutive mechanism in this structure as a principle of community formation . This is understandable; the term 'community' is, after all, thrown around so loosely that it is indeterminate.

I call the social formation that is generated through recursive structures of process communication a n?i-- Greek for we ( -- by analogy with Freud's use of the Greek ego for the introjective constitution of self. The term n?i also resonates with the early Greek nómos , their term for the customs that bound the Greeks together as a people.). More specifically, I will use 'noi' to refer to the socially constituted structure generated by a group's reception of some representation of itself. The noi is reinforced through reiterated communicative steps, as when there is "feedback" from (and to) the noi in the generation or control of further representations of itself, again received by the group.

By describing this induced "community" as a noi, I will be able to derive an understanding of the degenerative impact of commercial communications that is otherwise difficult to assess. The noi produced by commercial TV shows--that is, the "community" formed by those persons who, as they are represented in these shows , also receive the shows--is a diffuse group defined by the commercial interests of the advertisers. So much we already knew. However, if we look to less diffuse viewer groups, defined by locale, gender, or other parameters, the representational accuracy of the TV shows is way less clear, and the generation of the noi is deflected away. If we construe the constitution of a noi by group representations as social or cultural development , then TV shows " de -develop" groups that do not have representational input to the shows; the nois that may have begun to appear within these groups are progressively disabled and contracted.

Following Crane, I regard contemporary "culture" (in the narrow sense) as a community formation divided into "urban" and industrial categories, rather than the more traditional categories of "high," folk, and pop. Crane's notion of "urban" culture is especially useful in viewing culture as a producer of community formation, as I have begun to suggest doing above. Even though today "urbanity" is weakened, as the city is being culturally supplanted in some respects by suburbs and in other respects by media communications and the internet, Crane's historically derived notion of "urban" culture can be compared favorably to the process communications model. "Urban" culture may then be construed as culture that arises in compact communications settings, where the impact of recirculated and reiterated representations will be pronounced--even when these systems are geographically dispersed (as in the case of internet communication groups).

Among noi formations, there are those cases (significant to advocacy communications) in which a message "preaches to the choir;" I am thinking of the display of left propaganda to left groups, of many forms of religious ritual, and of movies or stories in which we identify with characters engaging a social situation. In these instances the nois are reinforced precisely to the degree that the message is perceived as a representation of the group. Notice that by having introduced the noi as a primary term it has become easy to describe how the recirculation of its own image or representation to the group tends to build and reinforce the group's self-identification. This is quite different from what occurs in efforts to describe the same processes in terms of community . Etymologically, the term 'community' alludes to a circulation or sharing of obligations or service among the group's members; in contrast, 'noi' regards the group as a cultural formation produced through an extrinsic means of representation. Community, then, is founded by law, whereas noi is the mechanism by which cultural formations are sustained or reproduced.

In terms of advocacy, "preaching to the choir" is generally understood to be a valid goal and a good starting point, though the reasoning behind this has generally not been made very clear. However, not only does the process formulation offer a good model for "preaching to the choir," it also suggests how advocacy messages might be designed to change the group's self-image. If a succession of messages is used to reinforce or implement the formation of a noi, that is, if successive representations of a group are recirculated to the group itself, it will be possible to make rhetorical, logical, or other shifts within the successive messages, and thereby to shift the self-image of the group. (In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, this process would be called "pacing and leading," where pacing is conforming the message to a representation of the recipient and leading is the modulation of this representation toward a desired end.) Clearly what is at issue here is the potential for acceptance by the noi of the accuracy of its successive representations. If the representations are shifted beyond the range of self-recognition by the noi, the group becomes unstable, resulting in shifts in its membership--that is, the resultant nois will be non-coinciding or overlapping. But if, by hook or by crook, the message maker can carry the recipient group along within the same noi, the result will be a shift in the self-image of the group--an acceptance by the group of new terms of self-representation.

Why should the noi accept shifts in its terms of representation? More to the point, what is the human mechanism that animates the noi, the production of group identity? Although I will set these far-reaching questions aside, it is evident that there is a linkage here to the problem of desire, in that--and to the extent that--desire is tied to self-representation and reflexivity in general. Judith Butler makes this connection.

            Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit introduces the notion of desire ( Begierde ) as the very movement by which consciousness redoubles itself as self-consciousness: "self-consciousness is Desire in general" (Hegel, par. 167). The possibility of having oneself reflected back to oneself is the inaugurating lure of desire; the lure of reflexivity, of mimetic reflection, initiates desire but immediately precipitates desire into a life and death struggle. (Butler 378-79)

The degree to which the noi participates in this economy of self-consciousness is the degree to which it may also display the magnetic forces of same-sex bonding and/or (by the same token) the dynamics of courtship. Butler's "life and death struggle," precipitated as she says by the Other's threat to the singularity of the subject, corresponds in the noi to the entropic process by which any group tends to dissemble if the recirculation of its self-representation ceases.

Ambrosi, Alain. "Alternative Communication and Development Alternatives," in Thede and Ambrosi, pp. 1-19.

Boyle, Dierdre. Subject to Change: Guerilla Television Revisited . New York and Oxford: Oxford UP (1997).  

Butler, Judith, "Desire." In Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (1990, 1995), pp. 369-86.

Crane, Diana, "High Culture versus Popular Culture Revisited: A Reconceptualization of Recorded Cultures". In Michèle Lamont and Marcel Fournier, eds., Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality . Chicago and London: Chicago UP (1992), pp. 58-74.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire . Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP (2000).

Huesca, Robert . "New directions for participatory communication for development," Media Development 2/1996, pp. 26-30.

Roach, Colleen. "The U.S. Position on the New World Information and Communication Order," Journal of Communication , vol. 37, no. 4 (Autumn 1987), 36-38.

Roncagliolo, Rafael. "The Growth of the Audio-visual Imagescape in Latin America." In Thede and Ambrosi, pp. 22-30.

Sassen, Saskia. "The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics." In Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri , ed. Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean. New York and London: Routledge (2004), pp. 175-98.

Schiller, Herbert I. Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP (1989).

Thede, Nancy and Alain Ambrosi, eds. Video the Changing World . Montréal and New York: Black Rose Books (1991).