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Cultural Studies Legacies: Visiting James Carey's Border Country

Sumita S. Chakravarty
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 2009 9: 412 originally published online 19
March 2009
DOI: 10.1177/1532708609332412

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Cultural Studies Legacies: Visiting James
Carey’s Border Country
Sumita S. Chakravarty
The New School, New York

A generally forgotten figure in the proliferating discursive spaces of an

international cultural studies, James Carey was nevertheless one of the
first to explore actively the interstices and to show the overt connections
between media, culture, politics, and society. He integrated the study of
media (and media as technology) into the broader processes of cultural
and educational politics, a kind of convergence that is increasingly being
called for today.

Keywords:  technology; media; cultural studies; international; America

He has never been the theorist others want him to be. He is too working-class in his
upbringing to join in the choruses of praise for American capitalism; too personally
cautious and gradualist to be mistaken for a radical; too American in his intellectual
references and too unassuming in his style to be worshipped as a prominent cultural
theorist. Carey, like Raymond Williams, lives in his own border country.

John Pauly (Munson & Warren, 1997, p. 13)

American and British scholarship was based . . . on a conceit: it pretended to discover

Universal Truth, to proclaim Universal Laws, and to describe a Universal Man. Upon
inspection it appeared, however, that its Universal Man resembled a type found
around Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England; its Universal Laws
resembled those felt to be useful by Congress and Parliament; and its Universal Truth
bore English and American accents. Imperial powers, so it seems, seek to create not
only economic and political clients but intellectual clients as well. And client states
adopt, often for reasons of status and power, the perspectives on economics, politics,
communication, even on human nature promulgated by the dominant power.

James Carey (1992, p. 149)

In this article, I want to reflect on James Carey’s pedagogical legacies in cul-

tural studies by means of the metaphor of the border country.1 I seek to highlight
what is often overlooked in his work: a strong critical strain in his writings on
communication and culture, and particularly on the role that media technologies

Author’s Note: Please address correspondence concerning this article to Sumita S. Chakravarty, The
New School, New York
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Volume 9 Number 3, June 2009 412-424
DOI: 10.1177/1532708609332412
© 2009 Sage Publications

412

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 Chakravarty • Cultural Studies Legacies     413

have played in shaping America’s relationship to itself and the world. A generally
forgotten figure in the proliferating discursive spaces of an international cultural
studies, Carey was nevertheless one of the first to explore actively the interstices
and to show the overt connections between media, culture, politics, and society.
He integrated the study of media into the broader processes of cultural and edu-
cational politics, a kind of convergence that is increasingly being called for today.
And his nimble and inquiring mind dispatched into irrelevance even while it
gloomily anticipated the turf wars between political economy and cultural stud-
ies. Through his work and preoccupations, he may be said to embody a kind of
history of the field, even what the scholar Bill Schwarz calls (and calls for as) a
“‘poetics’ of communication” (Curran & Morley, 2006, p. 19). By seeking to
combine the lived experience of communication as social practice (the human
dimension) with an awareness of the role of geography, economics, and the
imperatives of national development to frame our understanding of media tech-
nologies, Carey’s analyses even presage, in a kind of negative dialectics, our
current era of social networking, technology-centered hopes of new work-life
seamlessness, and perpetual mediated conversation. There is a lively tension or
interplay between the various aspects of his work, and if he did not quite succeed
in a theoretical resolution of this tension, he nevertheless provoked inquiry into
concerns that are central to modern and postmodern life.
Carey’s name is most often evoked in connection with the “ritual view of com-
munication” (1992, pp. 13-36), a view that tends to suggest a preindustrial and
communitarian order of things. Yet Carey was seriously engaged in the here and
now, as his numerous intellectual and practical commitments make amply clear.
I think that, from early on in his scholarly career, Carey was aware of the contra-
dictions at the heart of American national life, if one can even speak of a national
life in a society whose self-image is cast on the idea of difference and diversity. Yet
no society can function on difference alone, and it is the dualities that arise from
such a philosophical and existential conundrum that I believe fascinated James
Carey. Most commentators are content to examine one or the other aspect of this
conflicted historical formation, but Carey could not let go of either side because
they informed each other. In his early article, “A Cultural Approach to
Communication,” he labeled these the “ transmission” and the “ritual” view—a
commitment to spreading messages in space counter-posed to a need to preserve
meanings through time—but I believe Carey used these concepts to signify
America’s divided worldview, its thirst for power and dominance on the one hand,
its deep if often flawed commitment to democratic ideals, on the other. A proper
American cultural studies, to my mind, requires a clear and dispassionate engage-
ment with this overall problematic, and Carey was rare in his desire to do so. By
identifying him solely with his sense of the symbolic or ritualistic nature of
human interactions, I think his critics have done him a disservice and ignored the
more critical cast of his writings. Hanno Hardt, for instance, writes that “Carey’s
theory of communication appears to be mired in a celebration of communication
as community that produces and reproduces society, offering opportunities for

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414     Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • June 2009

participation as inquirers, and reflecting on the process of sharing in a democratic

experience” (Hardt, 1992, p. 202). He goes on to say that “A Cultural Studies
perspective that continues to operate within the dominant system of meanings
and values can only produce a nostalgic vision of the potential of communication
and the power of the community” (p. 203). As I hope to show below, this view is
based on a very selective reading of Carey’s work for it ignores the fact that com-
munication is not the starting-point but the end-point or goal of a social process
which Carey called “democracy.” And any nostalgia was constantly undercut by
Carey’s trenchant critique of power elites in American society that he felt repeat-
edly negated the potential of media technologies to promote social ends and
purposes. As he cryptically notes,

There is virtually no room at the top of the labor market pyramid given the social
relations of work in America, and high technology will be used to preserve existing
relations of power, status, and income rather than to disturb them. (Munson &
Warren, 1997, p. 298)

Carey repeatedly called himself “ethnocentric” in the descriptive sense of that

term, for his intellectual modesty did not allow him to claim that his historical
analyses of media extended to all times and all places; rather, he doggedly adhered
to an American frame of reference to reflect on, and to shape, an American cul-
tural studies.
Given the enormity of this task, it is no surprise that he is often perceived to
have failed, or at least, to have missed the benchmarks of America cultural life.
Yet his interests were broad and extended over the history of ideas, communication
systems, popular culture, journalism education, the university tradition, to name
a few. Through all these, however, he explores again and again, a set of themes
and concerns that have both intellectual and practical value. And he struggles to
relate these to the throbbing pulse of American historical development.
But Carey’s purpose in assessing the discourse of American national life is
always a critical one. By grounding the imaginative life of the nation in its love
affair with technology, specifically media technologies, Carey is able to point out
how deeply misguided or deluded is the “electronic sublime.” Over and over
again, in several of his articles, he finds that the touchstone of American cultural
life is a naïve and overwhelming belief in the power of technology to solve social
and economic ills (“Seeing No Progress,” 2007). This awareness is matched by his
equally compelling sense of the power of narratives to create the very realities that
the stories are meant to subvert. Few scholars have the breadth of vision to
accommodate these competing perspectives, to see them in interaction, and to
read the one against the other. Technology, Carey insists, is always already
cultural, not merely inert and instrumental, just as visions of technology are
unfailingly material in their origins and impact. Neither dismissive of the one nor
the other, Carey is nevertheless sure that this is one story America has elevated
above all others, and the consequences are not pretty. I think Carey has been

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 Chakravarty • Cultural Studies Legacies     415

prescient in this view, as the world today struggles with global warming, the
depletion of the earth’s resources, and new forms of international warfare. It is
perhaps a fact not to be ignored that the digital revolution of the past decades has
gone hand in hand with the rise of elemental hatreds and fundamentalisms of
various stripes. Symptomatically, theorizations and commentaries on new media
and descriptions and analyses of 21st century cultural clashes have occupied
entirely different realms, the one denoting “art and creativity,” the other “politics
and nationalism.” Carey would have recognized these tendencies; he would have
compared the stories being generated to earlier stories of self-congratulation and
self-validation; and patiently, he would have sought to steer the national
conversation in a different direction.
In what follows, I elaborate on two of the themes laid out above: Carey’s
impulse, as I understand it, to build a cultural studies project that is definably
American; and his analysis of technology as the crucible where American identity
is forged and which therefore needs close historical examination. Through these
interrelated themes, my broader aim is to understand the politics of doing, and
representing, American cultural studies in the field of cultural studies in general.
American cultural studies holds a kind of outsider status within the field, and
I ask: Why is American cultural studies of the Carey variety a kind of border
country? My focus on Carey’s “unfashionable” and wary assessment of the
symbolic force of media technologies is a way to retrieve a critical perspective at
a time when a new communications revolution is on us, and in the brave new
worlds opened up by digital media, we could use some cautionary lessons. If
Carey’s voice today signifies the border, he made of the border an enabling space,
a space for the committed intellectual.

American Cultural Studies: Clearing a Space

It may seem strange, at a time when economic and cultural globalization have
emerged as the new paradigms in the social sciences, to insist on the national and
particular as one’s field of inquiry. Why did Carey insist upon being ethnocentric
or “nativist” in his thinking? I do not believe it was out of a sense of nostalgic
adherence to his “teachers” and mentors—Dewey, Park, Innis, Geertz—whose
work informed his own. Rather, Carey held the view that, “All scholarship must
be and inevitably is adapted to the time and place of its creation. That relation is
either unconscious, disguised and indirect or reflexive, explicit, and avowed”
(Carey, 1992, p. 148). In the aftermath of postcolonial studies, such a view is, or
should be, quite unexceptionable, even without the hard political edge given to it
by theorists like Edward Said. Elsewhere, he argued that

the strength of cultural studies in Williams’s hands, and the same applies to Hoggart
and Thompson, was precisely its ethnocentrism. Intellectual work, including both
cultural studies and political economy, is always and everywhere decisively touched
and shaped by the national formation (and the subformations of class, race, gender,
etc.) within which it is produced. This does not deny the importance of transnational

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416     Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • June 2009

and diasporic sites of culture, but suggests that such sites are understood only relative
to the sovereign states which produce, enable, inhibit, warp or merely tolerate such
formations. Cultural Studies at its best attempts to take account of this fact and turn
it into a strength. (Ferguson & Golding, 1997, p.16)

In an article in which he reflects on his own beginnings and efforts in develop-

ing the project of an American cultural studies, Carey notes that he attempted to
create a wedge discipline, to clear a space in the academy for work that was “his-
torical, critical, interpretive and empirical” (Ferguson & Golding, 1997, p. 3). He
chose the American John Dewey and the Canadian Harold Innis as influences
and interlocutors rather than transatlantic or continental philosophies and theo-
ries because he sought to understand the specific nature of the (North) American
cultural formation. He held that “despite all the forces seeking to transcend the
nation, nations remain the sturdiest of collectivities and nationalism the most
rampant ideology of the current era whether we think of it as late modern or
postmodern” (p. 6).
Although Carey may be faulted for not engaging the vast literature on
nationalism as ideology and as reality, adopting in some sense an unproblematized
view of the “collectivity,” this is offset by his sobering rendition of the meanings
of American nationhood. For one can argue that his determination to see America
as one nation among many others departs from its own claims of exceptionalism
and normativity against which all other national entities are to be defined. No,
America, Carey insists, can and should be brought under the scholar’s critical gaze
as a collectivity, as an entity that exists in time and place, and whose primary
purpose is its own regeneration. Carey’s originality lies in his impulse to find,
express, and critically evaluate what might be called the American national
narrative via its forms and ideologies of communication. He does not do so out
of a romantic notion of togetherness and national unity, nor does he evoke a
narrow and parochial view of who or what is “truly” American. Rather, he starts
from the premise that a vast and diverse country cannot function without a
process of consensus formation, and it is the minutiae of this process that he is
interested in. It is too easy, in a sense, to focus on conflict, on self-interest, on the
divisions of class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and national origin.2 There is
nearly too much emphasis in cultural studies on such forms of identity politics,
which when all is said and done, become subservient to the laws of the state, the
calculations of politicians, the bland inducements of mainstream media. Given
these preconditions, how do people manage to get along, how are views
negotiated, how do societies manage to be knitted together and withstand the
pressures of falling apart? Conversely, what are the moments when certain
paradigms of thought and action rule, to the exclusion of others? What are their
consequences? These are Carey’s concerns, and he wants to raise these questions
not in the context of village and community but in the prototypes of such
organizational structures within advanced capitalist society. He asks the unasked
questions of our time3: How can people live and work together to forge a

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 Chakravarty • Cultural Studies Legacies     417

democratic society? How do people live with, and transcend, certain kinds of
difference but not others? What role does communication play in creating a sense
of national life in a country as vast as the United States? For answers, Carey turns
to both progressive and mainstream traditions of thought and research, rejecting
behaviorism and functionalism, deeming Marxism unsuitable for the American
context, and studying the myths and symbols that order everyday life.
In “Mass Communication and Cultural Studies” (1992), an article originally
written in 1977, Carey, typically, tries to find and engage a conceptual vocabulary
that arises out of American conditions. He starts by citing the rejection of the
term “mass communication” by both Williams and Hall, ruefully acknowledging
the mushrooming of mass communication programs in the United States. He
explains the latter by laying out the reigning conventions of thought and method
in the social sciences, primarily empirical sociology and psychology, and their
formulation of the communication process. This process, Carey tells us, was
conceived in the post-war years in terms of individual motivations so that
communication helped people either to desire power or to flee anxiety. In both
mass and interpersonal communication, the aim was to state the conditions under
which attitudes were formed, changed, or reinforced. Also, functionalist ideas of
social equilibrium saw the mass media exclusively in those terms. Carey notes that
matters such as “the historical transformation of these forms, their entrance into
a subjective world of meaning and significance, the interrelations among them,
and their role in creating a general culture” (1992, p. 45) were never entertained
seriously. The imperatives of behavior prediction and control shaped the direction
of mass media research, not the content of forms or the meanings of symbolic
acts. Carey points to Geertz’s work as an alternative to mass communication
research where the focus is on the reading of cultural texts, on doing ethnography,
on the interpretive act of the scholar. Because media ethnography is now a
growing field, one can see that Carey was on the right track.
If Carey took on the social scientific establishment by proposing other
questions and other methods in the pursuit of understanding of the media in
society, his article, “Political Correctness and Cultural Studies,” first published in
1992, is a powerful and impassioned self-examination (indictment?) of the
American academic left at the height of this debate on the fate of the humanities
on college campuses. “Until we admit that there is much more wrong with
universities than is imagined by the most acerbic critic of political correctness, we will
be in no position to mount a counterattack” (Munson & Warren, 1997, p. 274).
Carey faults cultural studies in America for ignoring precisely what should be its
mission, namely, the understanding of American institutions, democracy and
social character in the light of its historical formation. He sees its denial of
anything called an American culture as a retreat and a copout; its exclusive
emphasis on race and gender and on culture as ideology as a new orthodoxy.
“Ideology has swallowed culture, and race and gender have swallowed ideology”
(p. 276). What Carey regrets is that the very heterogeneity that cultural studies as

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418     Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • June 2009

a perspective meant to address is lost in an economistic reductionism. He is

scathing in his charge that the academic left has become devoid of vision or a
political plan of action: “the left is fighting over the English department while the
right occupies the White House” (p. 277). (And we know now with what
disastrous consequences in the present and in the foreseeable future!) Far from the
charges made in the political correctness debate, Carey advances that this actually
distracts from the real issues at hand. He gives a historically nuanced account of
the changes in the functioning of the university, its corporatization, the dilution
of the curriculum, the medicalization of students, the devaluation of academic
rigor, and so on. And he shows that both the right and the left have come to
believe that the university is an apparatus of a political or economic interest rather
than a repository of its own core values. A brilliant, insightful and indeed
depressing account of what is wrong with cultural studies as practiced in the
American academy emerges from this article.
For those of us who face or have faced the daunting challenge of devising and
delivering an undergraduate curriculum in cultural and media studies, Carey’s
admonitions ring true and critical assessments of interdisciplinary fields are
clearly overdue. This is not the place to ask why there is as yet no significant
history of cultural studies in general or American cultural studies in particular.
There is no history of the field of media or communication studies either, its
successes and failures, its gaps and emphases. I want to mention briefly Michael
Denning’s excellent book, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004) that attempts
to chart the emergence of American studies and, by extension, cultural studies in
the period after 1945. Although his purpose is to connect cultural studies to the
social movements of the New Left and to highlight or reclaim a Marxist tradition
of thought in the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, he raises
some issues that resonated with me as ones that Carey also faced and discussed,
albeit without a Marxist vocabulary: the culture wars, American exceptiona­
lism, American democracy. For instance, Denning points out that the notion
of American exceptionalism (itself advanced by Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky,
and Gramsci) foregrounded the question of “What is American?” as central to the
discipline of American studies; answers were sought in terms of the American
mind, the national character, American myths and symbols or American culture.
Americanism substituted for Marxism as an antidote, and the belief that
“American Marxism” is an “absurd proposition” was widely held. Denning
believes that this focus limited the range of questions that American cultural
studies could ask. His own connection to a global left tradition provides a richly
textured historical account or inquiry into the vicissitudes of cultural studies
development in America. Carey’s work does not, I believe intentionally, connect
to a broader theoretical paradigm in this way, and can seem eclectic and parochial
to his critics. If Carey carried his own sense of American exceptionalism, it was a
view that sought to think politics rather than be political, as his approach to the
question of media technology and American development makes clear.

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 Chakravarty • Cultural Studies Legacies     419

The Critique of Technological Progress

Does technology promote democracy and progressive thinking? Can technology

wipe out inequality? What is the role of media technologies in the imaginative life
of the nation? There are three aspects to Carey’s approach to media technologies:
(a) It is rooted in a historical and political-economic understanding of their
development; (b) He sees technology as a social and cultural phenomenon and
hence places a great deal of emphasis on the symbolic nature of technological
thinking; and (c) He draws attention to the ethical and political consequences of
overweening technological pride, both globally and locally. The first draws upon
the work of Harold Innis to explain the structural nature of technology in the
advancement of industrial capitalism. The second analytical thread traces the
metaphoric investment in new technologies that Carey sees as a secular religion
in America and whose proponents follow in the footsteps of Marshall McLuhan.
The third aspect of Carey’s critique is tied to his overall commitment to
communication as the basis for community and derives from his elaboration of
the work of John Dewey. Let us examine each of these aspects in turn.
Carey insists on an understanding of communications technology as, first and
foremost, an economic enterprise that is deeply imbricated in the geographic pat-
terns of trade routes in North America. In this he credits Innis with

creating a conception and a historically grounded theory of communications that

was purged of the inherited romanticism of the Chicago School and that led to a
far more adequate view of the role of communications and communications tech-
nology in American life. (1992, p. 145)

Carey found productive Innis’s conceptual framing of issues of communica-

tions technology in the tensions between metropole and hinterland, center and
margin, and capital and periphery. Every frontier has a “back tier” and North
American economic and communications development was determined by the
struggles waged and the policies crafted in European capitals regarding the staples
of fur, fish, timber, and the like. When power shifted to North America, Innis did
studies of paper and pulp to elaborate on new types of back tier/frontier relations.
Carey credits Innis with being the first to draw attention to media imperialism,
debates around which emerged more forcefully in the 1970s and 1980s, albeit
with more subtlety and awareness of complex negotiations between trading and
communications partners. From the outset, then, technology is not disinterested
but rather the province of particular groups as they seek to create economic and
knowledge-based monopolies.
Carey shows, again citing Innis, how New York’s emergence as media capital
of the United States in the 19th century was partly based on strategic location,
and “secured by the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, and the resultant access to
Chicago via the Great Lakes allowing New York to service and drain the
Mississippi Valley.” It was also strengthened by the construction of the Illinois
Central Railroad from Chicago to New Orleans. “New York and therefore its

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420     Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • June 2009

merchants, firms, and elites controlled an increasingly centralized system of

information that tied the northern tier together and even acted as a source of
supply for many Canadian cities” (Carey, 1992, p. 153). Carey argues that despite
the enormous size of the United States, a particular pattern of geographic
concentration developed that gave inordinate power to certain urban centers.
Concomitantly, local issues were eclipsed as news and entertainment were
increasingly geared to national (and international) audiences, a trend that
continues today.
This is what Innis meant by the spatial bias of modern communication as the
United States prioritized the spread of messages in space for the exercise of power.
Communication, according to Innis, could be seen as the basic staple in the
growth of empire. The routes of trade, Carey explains, were connected to the
routes of culture, for Innis’s research revealed, in the context of North America,
Canada’s subordinate status as supplier of raw materials (pulp and paper) to the
United States, absorbing finished goods in the form of newspapers, magazines,
and books under the doctrine of freedom of trade. Thus changes in the character
of the things thought with (symbols) altered the things thought about (societal
interests) and the contexts for thinking them (communities). A space-binding
culture—literally obsessed with land as real estate, movement and expansion,
empire and control—eviscerated cultures with interests in time and led to a loss
of a sense of history.
Carey was not unaware of Innis’s romantic attachment to the oral tradition,
and he was himself too much of a realist to hark back to a golden age of human
orality. What I believe he admired in Innis is less the latter’s pronouncements on
any specific medium and more the overall architecture of his thinking. At once
empirically grounded and historically aware, highly critical in its approach com-
bined with originality in its interpretations, Innis’s work attains a kind of inter-
disciplinarity and acumen that most scholars of communication can only aspire
to. It is arguable that Innis anticipated newer subfields of study that have emerged
in recent years: cultural geography, the knowledge industry, technology and cul-
ture, performance. Carey wrote,

The strength of the oral tradition, in Innis’s view, derived from the fact that it could
not be easily monopolized. Speech is a natural capacity, and when knowledge grows
out of the resources of speech and dialogue, it is not so much possessed as active in
community life. (Carey, 1992, p. 167)

In a similar vein, Raymond Williams spoke of use of the voice and the body
as more egalitarian because all humans can speak, whereas reading and writing
require specific skills. Unlike Williams, however, both Carey and Innis before him
were less hopeful about the possibilities for media technologies to fulfill an alter-
native vision of society, given the contours of American history in this regard.
The second aspect of Carey’s critical approach to media technologies that I
alluded to above concerns what he called the rhetoric of the electronic sublime.
Technologies, Carey contends, are not just machines that serve instrumental

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 Chakravarty • Cultural Studies Legacies     421

purposes, but ideologies that express and shape world views, attitudes, and agen-
das. Again, he is particularly interested in examining some of this rhetoric in the
context of American history and politics, given the very prominent place that
technological innovation and dissemination holds in the heartland of capitalism.
He sees America’s technological optimism as a secular religion and cautions against
a kind of euphoria that is divorced from rational and critical inquiry. His critique
of McLuhan can be seen in this light. Carey contrasted McLuhan’s transcendent
pronouncements about media technologies to Innis’s painstakingly detailed his-
torical analyses, finding the former entertaining at best, misleading and dangerous
at worst. But McLuhan is only one in a long line of futurist thinkers who

all convey an impression that electrical technology is the great benefactor of man-
kind [sic] . . . they hail electrical techniques as the motive force of desired social
change, the key to the recreation of a humane community, the means for returning
to a cherished naturalistic bliss. (Carey, 1992, p. 115)

He quotes McLuhan as saying, “The electronic age, if given its own unheeded
lee-way, will drift quite naturally into modes of cosmic humanism.” And “The
computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal
understanding and unity.”
Given the resurgence of McLuhan as prophet of the digital age, it is worth
revisiting Carey’s long-standing critique of technological hype. Carey is suspicious
of any attempt to ignore the lessons of the past, and in the dreams and expecta-
tions of the machine in the new land of America, he saw a disconnect between
technological and social forces. He wrote,

During the Civil War and in the decades thereafter, the American dream of the
mechanical sublime was decisively reversed. It became increasingly evident that
America was not exempt from history or isolated from the European experience of
industrialization. The war itself called into question the dream of a continental
democracy. In its aftermath, American cities were turned into industrial slums, class
and racial warfare were everyday features of life, economic stability was continually
interrupted by depression, and the countryside scarred and ravaged by the railroads,
coal and iron mining, and the devastation of forests. (Carey, 1992, pp. 120-121)

Against this historical backdrop, McLuhan’s celebratory encounter with televi-

sion did not ease Carey’s sense of foreboding. Because McLuhan placed his
emphasis on psychic rather than social forces to explain electronic media (the
metaphor of the central nervous system), Carey saw it as one more instance of the
retreat to individualism, to social isolation and, to borrow Susan Buck-Morss’
phrase: “transiency without progress, a relentless pursuit of novelty that brings
about nothing new in history” (1989, p. 96). That intellectuals were unmindful
of their obligations to the social good was further cause for alarm: “The celebra-
tion of the electronic revolution is a process whereby the world of scholarship
contributes to the cults of engineering, mobility and fashion at the expense of
roots, tradition, and political organization” (Carey, 1992, p. 138).

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422     Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • June 2009

Although Carey is not alone in noting the hype and euphoria surrounding
new technologies, it might be said that he sees technology and society as irrevo-
cably opposed rather than imbricated from the beginning. He tended to see
technology as an abstraction, an industrial complex that was the obverse of all
things human, and he was suspicious of the metaphors which technologized
humans or anthropomorphized technology. Carey rarely analyzed media texts,
and given his interest in meanings and the social performance of rituals, it is dif-
ficult to understand why. Theorists of new media have contributed to our under-
standing of both the machinic elements that constitute the digital world as well
as the ways in which users and creators interact with computer programs. In The
Digital Dialectic (2000), Peter Lunenfeld notes that

the computer, when linked to a network, is unique in the history of technological

media: it is the first widely disseminated system that offers the user the opportunity
to create, distribute, receive, and consume audio-visual content with the same box.
(2000, p. xix)

In a sentence reminiscent of Carey’s own poetics of ritual exchange, Lunenfeld

suggests that rather than thinking of the digital media and environments in terms
of stable entities like painting or architecture, “better to embrace their mercurial
qualities and conceptualize them as being somehow evanescent, like theatrical
performances or dance recitals” (2000, p. xx). By such reckoning, Carey’s view is
insufficiently dialectical, for it does not see technology and humans in dialogue
and interchange based on an inner logic of difference.
One might ask, then, given Carey’s view of technology: What is to be done?
What is the answer to American society’s obsession with technology? This third
aspect of his critique relates to Carey’s ethical vision and his ideas about the
functioning of a democratic society. Once again, he turns to Dewey and Innis to
find his answers. He emphasizes a model of nonmediated conversation because he
believes it returns people to a condition of basic equality, as bodies and minds
confront one another: “to speak conversationally is not only to invite and require
a response, but to temper of necessity our criticisms and alienations, our
objections and differences, with expressions, implicit and explicit, of solidarity
and mutual regard” (Munson & Warren, 1997, p. 315). Rather than bringing the
usual charge of naïvete and hopefulness to this vision of sharing and exchange,
one can see this desire for conversation as a necessary antidote to a highly
mechanized and solitary pattern of life.4 Social conversation, for which we
increasingly have less and less time, can lay the groundwork for political
discussions and exchange. Carey is not very enthusiastic about deferring these
imperatives to another turn around the bend, to a new era of communications
technologies. He calls for policies that are more conducive to mutual exchange,
saying that “The bias of technology can be controlled only by politics, by
curtailing the expansionist tendencies of technological societies and by creating
avenues of democratic discussion and participation beyond the control of modern
technology” (Carey, 1992, p. 136).

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 Chakravarty • Cultural Studies Legacies     423

I have tried to show above that, contrary to what is generally believed, neither
Americanness nor American cultural studies as James Carey understood these
are unambiguously centered, whole, unified, secure. On the contrary, they are
inherently unstable and conflict-ridden entities. As Carey noted, “The flash point
of our imagination is the hidden edge of dirt and dissolution, the borders,
margins, and liminal spaces where dissolution most acutely threatens to break
through” (Munson & Warren, 1997, p. 314). Culture is the human process of
imposing or extracting order out of chaos. Insofar as this process helps people
engage with one another, the work of society continues to be done. For Carey, “to
enlarge the human conversation by comprehending what others are saying”
(1992, p. 62) is the purpose of communication.

Notes

1. The occasion to write this article helped me look back on my own history of borders
and crossings. My introduction to what has come to be known as Cultural Studies first
came about at the University of Illinois when I was a doctoral student there in the early
1980s. Those were heady days, as the Institute of Communications Research was the hub
of competing intellectual energies, and there were struggles, if not for the soul, then for the
future of the discipline. The “effects tradition” was being laid to rest; critical cultural
approaches to communication were proliferating, and certain forms of Marxist analysis
were alive and well. As a graduate student, new to the field of communication studies, and
still green from inexperience of American ways of thinking and speaking, I found the
atmosphere enervating. I had recently come from India, where other kinds of battles over
the fate of the university were being waged, and bundhs or closures of the university in my
hometown for months on end were the norm. Those were not so heady days, as education
was subservient to local or state party politics of a vicious kind. I had left partly in frustra-
tion, partly because, like many of my generation, aspirations for a life of the mind inevi-
tably demanded entry into the portals of a U.S. institution of higher learning. What made
the Institute and the College of Communications at Illinois a leading place for the lively
exchange of ideas was the charismatic presence of its dean, James Carey. As teacher first
and then my thesis advisor, Dr. Carey helped me negotiate but not prioritize difference and
borders in a way that I can only appreciate.
2. In this context, it is interesting to note the following comments made by Stuart Hall
in his article, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies”:

Paradoxically, what I mean by theoretical fluency is exactly the reverse. There is no

moment now, in American cultural studies, where we are not able, extensively and
without end, to theorize power –politics, race, class and gender, subjugation,
domination, exclusion, marginality, Otherness, etc. There is hardly anything in
cultural studies which isn’t so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that
this overwhelming textualization of cultural studies’ own discourses somehow con-
stitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself.
(Morley & Chen, 1996, p. 274)

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424     Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies • June 2009

3. During the time that has elapsed between the writing of this article and its publica-
tion, these questions have actually reappeared, and arguably, have been central to the
candidacy, popularity, and election of Barack Obama.
4. It is interesting that in the massacre on the Virginia Tech campus that took place in
April 2007, newspaper reports repeatedly made mention of the fact that the shooter never
spoke to anyone and did not respond to efforts on the part of college students to draw him
into a conversation.

References

Buck-Morss, S. (1989). The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Curran, J., & Morley, D. (Eds.). (2006). Media and cultural theory. London: Routledge.
Denning, M. (2004). Culture in the age of three worlds. London: Verso.
Feguson, M., & Golding, P. (Eds.) (1997). Cultural studies in question. London: Sage.
Hall, S. (1996). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In D. Morley & Kuan-Hsing
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Hardt, H. (1992). Critical communication studies: Communication, history and theory in
America. London: Routledge.
Lunenfeld, P. (2000). The digital dialectic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Munson, E. S., & Warren, C. A. (Eds.) (1997). James Carey: A critical reader. Minneapolis:
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Seeing no progress, some schools drop laptops. (2007, May 4). New York Times. Retrieved
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Sumita S. Chakravarty is associate professor of media studies, and former chair

of culture and media at Lang College, the New School, in New York.

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