Mediation

The reality of social relations is a human achievement maintained through our senses and the ways in which we express ourselves in and through the material world. We can perceive this embeddedness of relations in reality through the notion of ‘media’, which is the plural of ‘medium’. But it is these material and social limits on human expression which mean that an idea of pure freedom hovers over any discussion of media.

A medium permits in some way information about two or more subjects to be conveyed between them. In a seance the spiritual medium acts as the go-between for us and a spirit world. A mediator is the medium for reaching agreement between the parties to disputes. Oil paint was the medium Rembrandt used for conveying to posterity his gaze on his own day. Print is the medium for the mass circulation of writing, hence mass media like newspapers, radio, television. A currency is the medium for exchange.

From these varied but cognate senses of medium we recognise that communication is common to them all. Just as power is a feature of the relations between humankind and the world in general, so communication is a feature of all social relations. It exists in tension with power, and it represents a different kind of relation. Power as a relation involves causation, mechanical effects. A relation involving communication permits a degree of free and reciprocal expression. In short we feel that communication is more human than power.

Communication is involved in all our bonds. For a message to be delivered, both have to speak the language and get to the telephone.

For lovemaking each has to learn where the other person likes to be touched and be able to recognise the right moment to touch. To agree a loan, the lender checks your account and the borrower needs to know the going interest rate.

So vital is communication to human society that again, as with power, some have tried to make this the essence of society. But communication and power do not necessarily flow in the same direction. Power may depend on communication, but often enough distorts it. Sometimes power is exercised precisely by excluding people from information, and the control of media is power. Foucault stressed always that it is power which establishes the very terms of discourse.

Because power distorts communication Jürgen Habermas, the most influential German social theorist of the late twentieth century, has argued that the just society will only arise when there is an equalisation of power so that there can be full and free communication. But if this is interpreted to mean that everyone communicates with everyone all the time, in the resulting babel no one would hear anybody else. The inference might then be that we need unequal power in order to communicate.

I think that is a dangerous conclusion to draw. It may well be that the freedom implicit in full communication is in permanent tension with its own essential requirements. It depends always on a medium which is accessible to the parties and belongs to their reality. But if we see social relations defined exclusively by power and communication then the only choice of society we appear to have is between a communication utopia or fascism. There are other things in social relations. In co-operation, for instance, power and communication are involved, and also a common will which is not reducible to either. But participation in common projects is selective, dependent on knowing who is in and who is out, even if membership is freely available.

A huge apparatus of law and institutions builds up around the tension between power and communication. It is the basis of the legal principle of informed consent. When President Clinton denied that he ‘caused contact with Ms Lewinsky’s genitalia or breasts’ he explained that he understood that ‘cause’ implied ‘forcible behaviour’. The problem then becomes that it raises the question of what kind of relations did exist since he also denied having ‘sexual relations’. A British journalist calls these statements ‘baffling wordplay’. They certainly are the outcome of a kind of play—the interplay of law and society.

Sociological theory accepts the principle that human beings find their own solution to these dilemmas in their own way. The author communicates with the reader through the book. Frustratingly you can’t be sure about my intentions and I can’t be sure I have made myself clear to you. This always appears as a constraint on freedom even as it permits communication. The book itself sets the limits of our understanding each other. Of course if we could begin a dialogue over the Internet then the possibilities of understanding change. But we never escape a medium of some kind. So important is the channel of communication that in the words of Marshall McLuhan (1911-81) ‘the medium is the message’.

You might think that perfect understanding might be possible if we could only talk together. But it is an illusion to think that there is communication without a medium. Language itself is a medium, the sound, the grammar, the vocabulary without which we cannot reach understandings, but yet frustrates us in not having the right word for our thoughts and feelings.

When we go beyond spoken language with signs and gestures we still use physical media and rely on the senses which are common, the deep meaning of common sense. In what for many is the most intense communication with another, lovemaking, the surface of the skin is the main medium. Yet we can never be sure…

There is a long history of thinking about society which says that the deepest, most authentic and rewarding relationships are ones which rely on communication with someone in their presence, at its most rewarding when there is physical contact. These are what, following Pitirim Sorokin, ²⁶ we can call sensate relations.

We can contrast these with ideational relations. So a parent-child relation and that between lovers are sensate relations, while student-teacher and senator-citizen are ideational relations. There are other ways to express such a contrast. Some have described the one as primary, the other as secondary, which suggests a time order; infancy as opposed to adulthood, or preliterate societies compared with our own today.

So this is a distinction which brings along both a theory of individual development and also historical narrative. At one time this might have been called the story of human progress, but sociologists in general have taken the pessimistic side of modernity’s outlook on the future. They have been inclined to think that when relations are ideational the more society becomes removed from fulfilling important emotional needs. This is particularly the case when they consider the ideas embodied in technology. The worker in the textile factory is engaged in bodily labour but with physical objects; relations with fellow workers depend on the product of that labour, not on their ideas about each other and still less on their feelings.

Of course ideas are there: the looms are the product of ideas, but not the ideas of the workers working on them. They stand next to each other, overseen by a foreman, under the manager’s surveillance, employed by a capitalist. These are the ‘social relations of production’ made famous by Karl Marx. They are hardly social at all for the workers themselves who, in Marx’s terms, are alienated from them. But they are still in definite relations with each other, positioned in a production system. The machinery becomes a medium for their relations.

This idea of alienation became central to the critique of modern industrial society because it drew attention to the disappearance of old types of social relations where people produced for their own family’s consumption or served others directly, or made objects which they sold. The factory system replaced these with work for wages on products the workers did not own, for people they would never see.

It was a critique of industrial society shared by radicals and conservatives alike which depended on nostalgia. Radicals looked back to a primitive communism such as Lewis Morgan described, conservatives to a feudal past, a society in which everyone knew their place. In each case they felt it was possible to recover what was lost.

Nostalgic critique devalues the present and, since the present is the only time we have on earth, this is depressing or inflammatory. However, it carries an important message, which is that if society as such is too low on our priorities and is pushed out by another life-sphere, such as the economy, technology, religion or the state, then we will lose out on profound satisfactions in human existence.

It is possible to have optimistic critique however. Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells how a father establishes relations with his son by way of mechanics. It suggests that shared mastery of the daily conditions of our lives is not out of reach. In this case Pirsig looks for inspiration not to some primitive state, nor to medieval times, but to ancient Greece and a range of virtues which can kick in whenever we take charge of our lives and explore the media of our relations. But it is a search: ‘We’re related to each other in ways we never fully understand, maybe hardly understand at all’, declares the narrator at the end.

Yet the advance of technology is so rapid we are continually facing the loss of control. We are forced into a permanent state of ambivalence towards change. New kinds of information technology advance systems of impersonal control and surveillance in connection with finance and the state. Our experience of cash cards, ticketing, entry codes, ID numbers, credit ratings is one of an external system penetrating our lives. Habermas describes the way systems penetrate not just our work situation but also the fabric of everyday life as ‘colonization of the life-world’. It is the extension of what some have called ‘system integration’ rather than ‘social integration’, when societies are organised around felt relations or shared ideas.

Technological development does not only facilitate control and co-ordination of systems of relations, it also facilitates the mobilisation of people as individuals. The importance of the mass media is that they provide symbols and enactments of a generalised image of the wider society for local and private consumption. They thus provide the means to realise the opposing tendencies in a mass society of apathetic individualisation or mass mobilisation for causes.

None of these technical advances in communication is as impersonal as social relations mediated by money in a market when any two people can calculate the benefit they get from a deal compared with what they might get in an alternative deal from a hypothetical third person. Both new technology and currency are sometimes taken as examples of the growing dependence of social relations on abstract systems. This recalls an older critique of modern society generally as abstract and removed from human need and sensate relations, associated especially with the philosopher of science Karl Popper.

We have to recall the tendency to pessimistic nostalgia in critiques of old modernity at this point. There is an upside too. In the wake of creating the mass media the new technological means of communication produce countervailing possibilities to old modern forms of central control. The colonisation of the life-world actually enhances personal skills in computer use and information gathering. The Internet and e-mail have opened up new possibilities for information dissemination by radical movements and for maintaining personal relations over indefinite distances.

We have distinguished four broad types of media of social relations: sensate, ideational, technological and abstract systems. It is tempting to see them as successive stages in a history determined by technology. But we should recall our reflections on human collectivities in Chapter 1 at this point: factories, universities, hospitals, offices. Technology always involves configurations of social relations and in collectivities all four kinds of media are combined in different ways. In other words our four types are ‘ideal types’ in Weber’s sense and are always mixed and fused with material things in the real world. Thus all social relations are sensate to some degree. A telephone conversation about the stock market between New York and London involves just as much aural contact as one between next-door neighbours.

Liberty means recognising conditions, opportunities and limits on choice, including other human beings and the choices they make. We have hinted at this already, but only indirectly. In fact our four types of mediation recognise these limits rather unevenly. Sensate relations are often thought of as consensual, both parties consenting, until one remembers violence is also sensate. Ideational relations again also are often thought of as behaviour in terms of shared values or views of the world until one remembers state propaganda.

Technical relations appear to exclude choice altogether as a factor to consider, and with abstract systems we think of surveillance. But we can think of the freedom of e-mail and the choice in ‘free’ market relations. The quote marks around ‘free’, however, alert us to the ideological significance of treating the market or indeed any form of mediation as a matter of liberty alone. We then forget what media do. They provide the means for communication in social relations where people interact. Free choice then is conditioned not just by media but by other people, and this is where we confront the problem of inequality.

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