The Science of The Commons: A Note On Communication Methodology Muniz Sodré

GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

A PALGRAVE AND IAMCR SERIES
The Science
of the
Commons
A Note on
Communication Methodology
Muniz Sodré
Translated by David Hauss
IAMCR
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Global Transformations in Media
and Communication Research - A Palgrave
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Muniz Sodré
The Science
of the Commons
A Note on Communication Methodology
Muniz Sodré
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Translated by David Hauss
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and

IAMCR Series
ISBN 978-3-030-14496-8 ISBN 978-3-030-14497-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5
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Translation from the Portuguese language edition: A Ciência do Comum: notas para
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Preface
The Science of the Commons is the continuation of a long, academic study.

Four decades ago, we expressed, through a book and in seminars, our
suspicion that the emerging media (principally television) would be
equivalent to a monopoly of speech, that is, to the impossibility of a strong,
symbolic response from the receiver. As in the example of the notifying
power of the process in Kafka’s fictional nightmare, there would be no
possible response to the unilateral nature of the messages. This could be
understood as an allusion to the economically monopolistic system of the
media corporations, which is always made present as a multifaceted real-
ity, heavily scrutinized, indeed, by analysts of various theoretical fields,
from economics to sociology.
In reality, we were not focused on the socioeconomic aspect of the
monopoly, but essentially on the semiotic or cultural aspects, in which
the decision-making power of the discourse is supported by one of the
poles of relation between speaker and listener, the transmitting pole. Not
the discourse of power, but the power of the monopolistic discourse.
The Internet age, however, initially seemed to demonstrate that
“interactivity” (a new word, invented to adjust to an emerging real-
ity) represented a solution to the problem: The generalized connection
between users of the electronic network would break the monopoly of
speech, and the media would become intercommunicative thanks to
unmediated feedback. The hypothesis of an electronic democracy arose
in the stew of this technological possibility of instantaneous, global com-
munication, supposedly capable of setting aside cultural differences in
vii
viii Preface
the dialogic game and, in the political arena, facilitating direct contact
between a transmitter and its receivers.
Now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the situation
is clearly far more complex. In the growing sphere of mediatization
(the media’s structural articulation with social organizations and institu-
tions), electronic communication converts information technologies into
machine learning (a more current expression for artificial intelligence)
devices and, through the electronic network, introduces a new paradigm,
with a structure of invisible interconnection in which everything is, at the
same time, both connection and transition.
At the same time, from the economic and organizational point of
view, the technology for processing and storing data—the name for the
product which sustains the great, new industry of this century—strides
in the direction of private monopolies, as expressed by corporate brands
such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM (the so-called
Big Tech companies), administrators of big data, that is, of the great
masses of data, or macro data, who manipulate complex, artificial intelli-
gence algorithms through the electronic network.
Of course, one can instantly respond to an interlocutor, and the cir-
culation of speech on the networks does appear to break the commu-
nicative monopoly. There is, however, an enormous difference between
the technical aspect of the tool and the cultural device of communication.
As a device, the network is a technological matrix capable of increasing
the physical space-time, amplifying the space, and shortening the time,
which implies the creation of a parallel reality capable of conditioning the
users’ places of speech. In practice, it is a new, immaterial urbs, with its
own norms for the hosting and circulation of discourse.
Thus, there is no symbolic response from the user—an autonomous
behavior in relation to the searched data—to the centralized, electronic
network, where the monopoly has culturally shifted. The increase of
the technical freedom of response for the user—therefore, its individ-
ual “responsibility”—hides the “irresponsibility” of the economic and
technological system, which launched the technologically augmented
individual into the precariousness of social relations deprived of the com-
munal bond. The primacy of circulation within the electronic system is
quantitative.
Quantity indicates the prevalence of digits or numbers, therefore, a
trend toward the equalization of the places of speech, in which agents
are oriented by the equal, in a systematic rejection of the expressive
Preface ix
quality of differences. Dialog, it is worth emphasizing, is not defined as

the prioritized exchange of words, but as the opening and amplification
of the cohesive tie, through discourse and actions, in order to strengthen
the human bond.
At the level of cultural autonomy, it is worth noting that if in tra-
ditional media, manipulation consisted of the unilateral repetition of
messages—an old, basic recourse for ideological, political, or religious
propaganda—now it is the combination of digital patterns which feeds
artificial intelligence. Not the simple monopoly of speech, therefore, but
rather a true oligopoly, at the same time economic and cultural—but pre-
dominantly mechanical—of the variables which compose the subject’s
existence in his everyday life. The potential autonomy of the algorithms
opens the path toward subterranean and humanly uncontrollable dis-
courses, in that the digits amplify their generative capacity from a sepa-
rated reality, gifted with its own logic and “language,” toward a new bios,
specifically a virtual one.
Bios is an Aristotelian and Platonic concept used for designating the
spheres of existence within the Polis: Bios politikos (political-social rela-
tions), bios theoretikos (knowledge, comprehension) and bios apolaustikos
(the sensory, pleasure). Contemporary communication has introduced a
fourth sphere, the virtual bios, which has technologically materialized in
information devices. This book, The Science of the Commons, pursues ele-
ments for a greater comprehension, both methodological and political,
of this virtual bios, inherent to the society it now helps to design.
This current century has brought into the light considerable theoretical
and political reservations to the proclaimed cultural transitivity of the free-
dom of expression, at the same time in which it demonstrated, through
the notable technological expansion of technological devices, the growing
human deficit in comprehending the phenomena of media and communi-
cation, generally taken as culturally “natural” and politically neutral.
This book inquires if there is some reasonable point of divergence
between the prolific German, Anglo-American, French, and Latin
American studies and investigates what comprehensive ground one can
tread upon when the “tectonic plates” of knowledge shift under the
pressure of the capital world’s new laws of motion, of the growing deval-
uation of human labor, of the transformations in social relations and the
dynamics of technological and organizational changes.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Muniz Sodré

Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 A Post-disciplinary Science 9
Sociologists and Anthropologists 18
References 32
3 A Financial Ideology 35
The Communicational Focus 50
More Phenomenon Than Concept 61
Cognitive Dispersion 67
Absence of Episteme 77
References 82
4 A Science for the Virtual Bios 85

A Post-disciplinary Science 94
References 142
5 The Organization of the Common 145

The Binding and the Cohesion 157
The Republican Common 164
From the Thing to the Technique 177
The Ecology Metaphor 188
The Organizing Factor 200
xi
xii Contents
Signifying and Symbolizing 207

Methodological Issues 220
Operative Levels 224
References 238
Index 243
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Unless one intends to develop a science with no name, we believe it

necessary to pause and reflect on the word communication, as it pertains
to a nominal synthesis of a variety of contemporary practices which range
from intersubjective exchanges of words to the technologically advanced
transmission of signals and messages. Embodied in industries, this syn-
thesis continues to unfold in technical terms with enormous social and
academic consequences, without having a name which truly configures
a unit or, to attend to the spirit of the electronic times, a cognitive net-
work focused on the constitution of a positive knowledge.
Originally, to communicate—“to act in common” or “to allow to act
in common”—means to bind, relate, concatenate, organize, or allow
to organize by the constitutive, intensive, or pre-subjective dimension
or the symbolic order of the world. Just as biology describes communi-
cating vessels and architecture envisions communicative spaces, human
beings are communicative, not because they speak (an attribute result-
ing from the linguistic system), but because they relate or organize sym-
bolic mediations—by conscious and unconscious means—according to
a common which is to be shared. In the radical sphere of communica-
tion, these mediations are not reduced to a syntactic or semantic logic
of signs, because they are trans-verbal, oscillating between unconscious
mechanisms, words, images, and bodily affectations.
This is not socially or theoretically evident. First, this is because
reflectivity—traced by a determined line of thought in the very
© The Author(s) 2019 1

M. Sodré, The Science of the Commons, Global Transformations in
Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5_1
2 M. SODRÉ
foundations of the ideological reproduction of modern social systems—

admits that certain terms are capable of producing the reality in which
they are discursively inserted. This is a position which traverses from the
American pragmatists to the British and French sociologists, but is also
found harbored in the thought of Walter Benjamin, for whom ideas are
given in a movement of original perception, in which words, designated,
generate knowledge: “It is to some extent doubtful whether Plato’s the-
ory of ‘Ideas’ would have been possible if the very meaning of the word
had not suggested to the philosopher, familiar only with his mother
tongue, a deification of the verbal concept, a deification of words: Plato’s
‘Ideas’ are - if, for once, they might be considered from this one-sided
viewpoint - nothing but deified words and verbal concepts.”
Thus, the term communication—deriving from the Latin communica-
tio/communicare with the principal meaning of “share,” “participate in
something” or “to put in common”—can end up creating, in the twen-
tieth century, its own reality from the ancient metonymic expansion of
the meaning “thing communicated” with the competition of information
and publicity transmission techniques. The focus on interaction, which is
an occurrence inherent to communicational exchange, ended up overtak-
ing the meaning of message transmission.
Contemporary dictionaries and especially North American scholars
from the beginning of the last century tended to understand commu-
nication as the transmission of messages or information, but from an
ethical and psychological viewpoint, subsumed by the word communion.
This understanding, socially underscored by the development of com-
munication and information technologies in the USA, was strengthened
in Europe, including from competition within the academic community
which, under the influence of linguistics and the philosophy of language,
attempted to find an object common to both, imagining the ability to
found a general science of man. The idea of communication was thus
annexed to the models of signal transmission.
It’s true that the meaning of “transmission” dates back to the
sixteenth century (“to communicate a piece of news”), but its contem-
porary stability most likely stems from the energy of the word infor-
mation, which implies the codified organization of variation—thus, the
endowment in the form of a material or any relation—and the flux of
signals from one hub to another. Today, the term media condenses the
diversity of information devices. Although communicating is not truly
the same as informing, the ideological aspiration of the media system
1 INTRODUCTION 3
is to reach, by means of information, the human horizon of dialogic

exchange supposedly contained in communication.
In fact, although the original root (communis + actio = communicatio)
truly says nothing about the transmission of information or messages,
this dictionary definition in Western languages imposed itself onto the
primordial meaning of “common action” or something like “action in
common.” Appropriated by sociology, it served as a basis for the study
of social relations generated by modern information technologies and
framed in the vague, theoretical body of the pair “communication/
information,” which is simply another name for modern communication,
also called “mediatization.”
The judgment implicit in these definitions receives, logically, the
label tautology. Something like “communication is communication,” or
rather, what is intended by the “science” of communication coincides
tautologically with its own, experienced reality. From the perspective of
logic—more precisely, epistemology—of social thought, all this is a source
of ambiguity and problems for those who aspire to clarify the theoretical
field pertaining to the nebulous entity denominated “communication/
information.” All the more nebulous when one considers that the cur-
rent complexity of social systems, in contexts which are nearly imper-
meable to the establishment of linear relations of cause and effect, is
accompanied by the structural uncertainty related to the predictability of
facts.
The term information requires greater clarification before shedding
some light on its semantic and theoretical indeterminacy. In fact, this
word, constant in biology (neurology, physiology), was incorporated into
journalistic activity, was frequently used in cybernetics, has gained space
as a metric (or quantitative) concept in the mathematical theory of signal
transmission circuits, and ended up reflectively sustaining notions regard-
ing civilization, such as “information society” or “the Information Age.”
The problem is that, despite the socio-discursive effects of reflectivity,
conceptual gaps can appear—that is, in terms of cognitive systematization—
when one says “information.” One could write a grand work on
the “Information Age” without the requisite conceptual categoriza-
tion. In other words, this is not to affirm that the communications
field of research lacks a frame, but that its conceptual framework is
indeed weak.
In the scope of these socially valued effects, a pragmatic approach to
the question could, however, be conducted with the following rationale:
4 M. SODRÉ
it does not truly matter to know what is communication/information,

rather what matters is knowing socio-technical uses in contemporary life.
This is an acceptable understanding for the common sense of a public
which is immersed in what is called “media culture” or in the consump-
tion of technical devices continually dumped on the market by the elec-
tronics industry, from which exudes an aura of irrepressible optimism,
analogous to the emotional atmosphere of the great transformations of
capital. Marx had already observed, however, that “the bourgeois rev-
olutions, like those of the 18th century, precipitate rapidly from success
to success, their dramatic effects overtaking each other, men and things
seem shrouded in the splendor of diamonds, the enthusiasm which
reaches ecstasy is the permanent state of society - but it does not last
long” (18 Brumaire, Luis Napoleon).
Maybe for this reason, even in the sphere of academic knowledge,
it is admissible to release works about the uses which the State and
the Market make of an enormous variety of processes—financial trans-
actions, consumption, business management, cultural dissemination,
media culture, documented records, digital convergence, etc.—with the
general title of communication/information, without conceptually elu-
cidating the described or analyzed object. It seems that the pure and
simple description of processes or practices is enough to assure the con-
tinual management of an interdisciplinary field at the university level or
in external, technical circuits without appealing to “strong” explicative
devices, that is, to scientific systematization. In political or macro-social
terms, it would be enough to evaluate the degree of democratization of
these processes to legitimate them cognitively.
Traditionally, however, even the pragmatic endeavor of the valor-
ization of democracy as a postulate of open, modern societies adheres
to the imperative of redefining or renovating democratic mechanisms.
This implies not only the use, but the continual education of citizens
and perspectives on that which sits beyond the economic, juridical, and
social parameters established by a determined human formation. This
“beyond” the limits of the forms of power, which has been translated in
practice as refined creativity since Ancient Greece, with the perspectives
of man’s happiness, may receive the name ethics.
In this case, the question about what it is cannot be relegated to the
sphere of the remaining conceptualists of Greek metaphysics, because it
is the necessary point of departure for an existential orientation toward
the hypertrophy of power of so-called communication/information,
1 INTRODUCTION 5
and for an eventual line of ethical-political action within the democratic

order. It is not secondary, therefore, to ask what communication truly
means, all the more when one accompanies Wittgenstein in the suppo-
sition that all philosophical questioning addresses the meaning of words.
Beyond this, with an epistemological view, this questioning contrib-
utes, along with the requisite ontological clarification of the phenome-
non, toward deliberating a positive knowledge, that is, a specific science,
albeit one that is not destined to be confined within objective parameters
established by a “normal” episteme.
Something analogous is registered in the history Marxian thought
(in the Grundrisse, for example) when it, in the dialectical formation of
capital, distinguishes capital in general from categories such as value,
labor, money, prices, and circulation. Or rather, it distinguishes the pre-
sumptions from the synthesis of determination, with the caveat that it
is necessary “to fix the determined form in which capital is placed in a
certain point.”
It is this “certain point” which seems to supervene now in the com-
municational field, where signs, discourse, instruments, and techni-
cal devices are presumptions of the formative process of a new way of
socializing, of a new existential ecosystem in which communication
is equivalent to a general mode of organization. Installed as a world of
interconnected systems of production, circulation, and consumption, the
new socio-technical order is fixed at a historical point of the here and
now, not as an index of a new mode of economic production, but as the
continuity, with financial and technological domination, of a commer-
cialization begun by capitalism in the beginning of Western modernity.
In the necessary rearrangement of persons and things, communication
was revealed as the principal organizing form.
We accentuate the “was revealed” because communication means, in
fact, in its radicalism, the organizing action of unpredictable mediations
of the human common, the approximate resolution of the differences
pertinent to symbolic forms. Things, differences approach each other as
communicative entities because they fit into the primordial binding (a
mark of limits, comparable to meaning) established by the symbol.
Symbol is not understood here as a secondary figure of language or
a linguistic epiphenomenon, but as the work of relating, concatenating,
or placing in common (syn-ballein) separate forms, in the form of a gen-
eral equivalency, energetically invested as a value and circulating as cur-
rency, speech, father, monarch, sign, or rather, as primordial, symbolic
6 M. SODRÉ
mediations which develop into the economy, psyche, kinship, politics,

and language.
Language, for example: the word or sign only materializes on the
social record of vital exchanges as a representation with the value of lin-
guistic use because it is symbolically constituted of a condition of possi-
bility, an a priori, which is not a reciprocal convention, but a generative
emptiness (like the number zero), an abstract principle of organization—
the common. This principle is inherent to the human condition and
becomes visible when the man, in any cultural or civilizational latitude,
make an emptiness appear in the totality which is presented as absolute,
simply by thinking.
This revealing reflection does not necessarily stem from a brilliant
individual, but often from a historical constellation. Today, it is the very
occurrence of technological production, its historical veneer as the apex
of Western rationality, urged on by the energy of information as the effi-
cient operator of the financial economy, which reveals the organizing
nature of communication. It is, thus, of a transcendent nature, hidden
from or unconscious of the origin of the organizing principle of the
human common, now reinterpreted by systems powered by electronic
technology.
The living forces of this common can be apprehended as words, ges-
tures, signs, or collected as information and susceptible to quantitative
evaluations (the technical information being a species of circulating cur-
rency), but communication is not defined by these: the actio communis is
an a priori, it is the symbolic dimension, the condition of the possibility
of vital exchange, within which, naturally, lies the system of differences
and substitutions of the linguistic signs.
One may use the “plates” metaphor to present the concept:
communication would be the group of tectonic plates under the sur-
face of the common. They, like their geological counterparts, are essen-
tial, but not eternal, neither in constitution nor alignment. They can
shift by the effect of that which, in Marxian thought, is similar to the
Wechselwirkung, or rather, the reflective action, of the return of the
superstructure over that which supposedly determines it or which, in sys-
tems theory, is described as reciprocal transaction.
Thus, when a notorious American cultural critic (George W. S.
Trow) describes the new American social landscape with this
metaphor—“Everyone knows, or ought to know, that there has hap-
pened under us a Tectonic Plate Shift (…) the political parties still have
1 INTRODUCTION 7
the same names; we still have a CBS, an NBC, a New York Times; but
we are not the same nation that had those things before”—he is refer-
ring to a particular aspect of politics and media, but especially pointing
to the profound movement in the “crust” of the symbolic organiza-
tion. Therein arise grand transformations in educational systems, in the
social production of subjectivities and in the constitution of the public
sphere. But for us, above all, a geographical transformation in the sense
that these “plates,” due to the effects of the temporal compression of
space, form a new “continent,” the eighth, made of bytes, virtual, above
or below all others.
This movement and this reorganization, driven by the speed of elec-
tromagnetic waves, point to the heart of the communicational question.
The phenomena of discursive exchanges or media transformations, habit-
ually treated as a regulatory mark of the academic field, appear to be
important symptoms, but not as the scientific objectification of the prob-
lem of communication, for they are simply the socio-technical results of
an origin which is hardly visible in History.
This work, which we produced within the sphere of research sup-
ported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological
Development (CNPq) and through our activities in postgraduate pro-
grams, intends to contribute to the epistemological and methodological
debate in the field.
Muniz Sodré
CHAPTER 2
A Post-disciplinary Science
Discusses the possibilities of the establishment of a “post-disciplinary” science

of communication, confronted by social and human sciences such as sociol-
ogy, anthropology, and economics.
Since the 1960s, no word associated with ideas of modernity, social bind-
ing, and mass democracy has penetrated the public space deeper than
communication, despite its well-known ambiguity. Within the broader
context of human language, the term is normally associated with the
social exchange of messages. In a broader sense, however, it appears in
the ecological, biological, social, and economic foreground, wherever
there may be a selection and combination of signs and signals, as in the
communicative systems of animals. In common language, the semantic
field of this term is even more extensive and somewhat uncertain: means
of physical access (roads, canals, etc.), instruments of verbal or visual con-
tact (satellite, telephone, radio, television, etc.), school instruction, oral
or written interventions in scientific congresses, exchanges between neu-
ral synapses, diffusion of the general content of a group of devices known
as media, and the ideal of human exchange and comprehension.1
1 This uncertainty, however, led to a nearly picturesque environment, described by leg-

islators of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988. Rushing at the last minute, the constituents
were obliged to make a distinction between “communication” and “social communication,”
because the term semantically encompassed telephones and telecommunications. Without the
distinction of the adjective “social,” the latter industries would be exempt from taxation.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5_2
10 M. SODRÉ
With this vast diversity of meanings, what remains constant is the idea
of transmission, which is indeed ancient (although not primordial) in
the etymology of the word. Possibly for this reason, human communica-
tion, interpreted as discourse and an interactive process—pertaining to the
behavior of an already socially established subject—in the context of a soci-
ety driven by advanced technology and industrially stimulated by desires,
traversed the last century and arrived in this new millennium, as much in
technological materialism as in academic approaches, as an enhanced ability
to produce the transmission of words, images, discourse, and information or,
in a politically republican sense, to achieve a democratic, cultural diffusion.
The burning issue is that even the narrow idea of transmission expands
beyond this imprecise “cultural diffusion,” in light of evidence for another
meaning for the generic “communication” inherent in what has been called
information and communications technology, or rather, the combination of
data processing with electronics and telecommunications. Communication
is constituted here as a form of social life or a technological ecosystem with
human values guided by electronic production. In the scope of the “mobile
ecosystem,” it has been calculated that the number of interactive devices
(tablets, laptops, smartphones, and netbooks) has already surpassed that
of the planet’s population (seven billion people). However, in the global
scope of techno-science, technological forms of transmission and signal
codification place communication at the center of an anthropological met-
amorphosis, which some analysts of the phenomenon have called “post-
humanism.” In this dimension, what is traditionally understood as “media”
is only a small piece of the question, although revolving around it is nearly
the entirety of current communication studies, as much on the level of aca-
demic reproduction of knowledge as that of theoretical work, in which a
notable confusion has existed between communication theory, information
theory, cybernetics, informatics, etc.
The topic of communication already appeared, although without the-
oretical centrality, in the pragmatic thought of the nineteenth century
(William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey), in logical-linguistic
and psychological approaches associated with the problem of human
interaction. Already in the beginning of the last century, there were
indications of a comprehension of the coordinating role of communica-
tion. So much so that, in 1909, Cooley, sociologist and pioneer of social
psychology, defined communication as “the mechanism through which
human relations exist and develop - all the symbols of the mind, together
with the means of conveying them through space and preserving them
2 A POST-DISCIPLINARY SCIENCE 11
in time. It includes the expression of the face, attitude and gesture, the
tones of the voice, words, writing, printing, railways, telegraphs, tele-
phones, and whatever else may be the latest achievement in the conquest
of space and time.”2 While this definition appears to be too broad for the
current academic scope, it maintains the interest in comprising the idea
of communication as an existential basis for human binding, thus as the
idea of the process of transformation of the binding in the act.
On the other hand, even though transmission is not the essential piece
in understanding communication, this data and “diffusion” appear even
today as meanings close to the idea of functional communication, which
Wolton defines as “the necessities of communication in economies and
open societies, as much for the trade of goods and services as for finan-
cial or administrative economic flows.”3 In opposition to this guiding
of efficiency and interests is the perspective of values, which the same
author bundles into the term normative communication, to be under-
stood as “a will to trade, to share something in common and to compre-
hend. The word ‘normative’ does not designate an imperative, but rather
the ideal pursued by each one. The will for mutual comprehension is the
horizon of this communication.”4
Another viable terminology has been presented by Miège:
“Communication/information is something that began to develop in
the middle of the 20th century and which we can call “mediatized com-
munication.” In a way, we certainly cannot separate it from human
communication. Initially, I began calling it modern communication,
but today I prefer to treat it as communication/information, as I believe
it necessary to join the process of communication with information.
Communication cannot be considered on its own, for there are many
ways to view it.”5
These dual characterizations, while restricted to the idea of com-
munication as a psychological attribute of the subject, serve to mark
the misconception of a radical distinction between a “communications
society” and an “information society,” as though they were different
stages of an evolutionary process. While they are different, the notions
2 Cooley (1909, p. 63).

3 Wolton (1997, p. 17).
4 Ibidem.
5 Miège (August/December 2009, p. 122).

12 M. SODRÉ
of communication and information always coexisted, in a way that pre-

serves the original meaning of information, which is to give structure or
form to material, energy, or relation, while communication pertains to
the constitution of the human common. Information is, thus, something
that is socially abstracted in order to be contained or stored within an
inanimate entity.
As Wilden emphasizes, “the concept of information today is extended
to two recent and relatively specific meanings. The first is the strict tech-
nical or technological sense: information as a quantity measured in bit
(binary digit). It is the information metric of classic information theory
[Claude Shannon], the combinatorial theory and information statistics,
based on the logic and mathematics of probability. The second mean-
ing pertains to a diverse approach, which can, however, be served by
the first in applicable cases, as happens, for example, in the logistics of
information transmission through artificial systems, such as radar or satel-
lite communication. The second meaning is, however, always qualitative
more than quantitative, as it in fact should be (after all, quantity is a kind
of quality, whereas the inverse is not true). Far more than a metric or
quantitative meaning, it conserves the quotidian sense of the term ‘infor-
mation’.”6 In quotidian life, this meaning pertains to giving form to a
variety of the material or the relation, which results in practical terms in
the “energy” of exchanges of social relations.
The problem is that, when information is affixed to the idea of a
predominant functionalism and it becomes—like gold in the economic
sphere—a species of “general equivalency” of linguistic exchanges, it
seems to dissolve the communication existent in traditional, symbolic
mediations (language, laws, customs, politics, cultural forms, etc.). Thus,
it appeals to normative communication, which appears to be an ideologi
cal plea (stemming from philosophical idealism) to a transcendence, or
rather, a utopian structure projected in a past, in a manner analogous
to the sociological retro-projection of a community, idealized and placed
in a remote past. In this plea resonates what Foucault called the “will
to truth,” here to be understood as the affirmation of a representa-
tional model which shifts to the media the legitimation of a supposedly
6 Wilden (2001, p. 11). Translated into English from Portuguese version.

reciprocal discourse (that in which the enunciating subjects are symmet-

rical in their dialog) which is “true.”7
The academic idea of “communication” always was and continues to
be conceptually ambiguous. Despite this, the idea of transmission and
persuasion materialized in the technical devices which circulate social dis-
course, with the consequent reception by an ample and heterogeneous
public—therefore, in functional communication or communication/in-
formation—is, from the beginnings, mainly responsible for the effects
paradigm in the academic approach to communication. The expression
“functional communication” is here revealed to be quite adequate, as
this paradigm belongs entirely to the persistent functional positivism of
the North American school of sociology.
This is the theoretical fact followed by the majority of reflective
research and works on communication. It is configured as a small par-
adigm8—that is, as a dominant, conceptual system—where the theories
fit, that is, the groups of presuppositions whose logical narratives derive
from hypotheses, understood as suppositions on relations among variables.
In the case of communication, they are registered, from ancient times
into modernity, as those of active reception, of the social context, of the
institutional context of communication, of the impact of media mes-
saging in the organization of opinions and beliefs, etc. Even politically
activist or praxiological conceptions of communication (which conceive
of communication as an instrument for the attainment of social ends),
whether oriented to the left or the right, enter into this paradigm.
To discuss paradigms are to highlight the problem of the statute of
knowledge implied by communication—first, questioning its reality as a
social practice and, then, how one can understand it—whether as a doc-
trine or scientific field. Here, the crucial points of ontology and episte-
mology are interlocked. First, the degree or measure of implied reality is
philosophically examined, and then, the manner of knowing this reality is
clarified, thus, the position of philosophy on scientific discourse. In the
scientific method, it would be fitting to know the real in a systematically
ordered, and, as far as possible, objective manner.
How can communication be established as its own scientific field?
Before risking a response, one can insert an ellipsis with a recurrent
7 Vide Foucault (1996).

8 There are the large and the small paradigms. One example of a large paradigm is the
Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm, which dominated Western science for three centuries.
14 M. SODRÉ
discussion within the field of hermeneutics: accepting the distinction

made by Wilhelm Dilthey between natural science and spiritual science,
or welcome the lack of distinction between the two, as in the pragmatism
of Richard Rorty.9 The older question may come up regarding the tra-
ditional dichotomy between “social sciences” and “human sciences” (or
simply “humanities”). In the former case, experimental, ethnographic,
and interview procedures are methodologically compared, while in the
latter discursive and interpretive methods predominate.
While a large part of communication studies—mainly in Europe—
utilize a discursive methodology in the form of essays, North American
scholars tend toward the social sciences, even more so when the socio-
logical origin of the current field known as mass communication research
is considered. In this disciplinary field, the prevailing response to the
fundamental scientific question has, for a considerable time, pointed
toward the effects paradigm, that is, to the modeling of consequences
of the media over an ample and heterogeneous public, also described as
“the masses.”
This paradigm has predominated in the academic scene of commu-
nication and thus seeks to maintain itself institutionally, even though
the studies, in their variety, methodologically and theoretically escape
the perspective of the effects. Any and every type of effect tends to be
invoked in order to legitimize the paradigm, as observed by an American
researcher: “Other effects of the media covered by these milestones
include the ability of the media to change votes, the ability of the media
to change how people gratify their fundamental needs, the ability of the
media to change how people get information, the ability of the media
to change people’s attitudes, the ability of the media to change what we
think about, and the ability of the media to make us violent.”10 This the-
oretical straightjacket may be one of the factors responsible for the few
cognitive advances in the area’s research. Consequently, the researcher
emphasizes, “almost the only thing we have learned after 60 years of
mass communication effects research is that the weight of exposure to
almost any specific medium or content influences any given behavior, on
average, very slightly.”11
9 Cf. Rorty (2011).

10 Lang (2013, p. 13).
11 Ibidem, p. 15.
While this paradigm has been epistemologically revealed to be insuffi-

cient for the establishment of the field, it is essential to understand it or
return to it as a founding moment in the history of modern communica-
tional knowledge, provided that we make the history of a scientific field,
with its discursive regularities, one of the indispensable requirements for
epistemological clarification. This insufficiency is clearly demonstrated in
diagnoses such as “communication theory as an identifiable field of study
does not yet exist. Rather than addressing a field of theory, we appear to
be operating primarily in separate domains.”12
This is the opinion of North American scholar Robert Craig, who
provides the example of an analysis produced by his colleague J.A.
Anderson in seven well-received manuals, identifying 249 different
“theories.” According to Craig, “Except within these little groups, com-
munication theorists apparently neither agree nor disagree about much
of anything. There is no canon of general theory to which they all refer.
There are no common goals that unite them, no contentious issues that
divide them. For the most part, they simply ignore each other.”13
Calhoun, another scholar (and president of the United States Social
Science Research Council since 1999), addresses the question in a prac-
tical manner. Consulting the Wikipedia entry on communication, he
decided to treat it as “an academic discipline that (1) Covers everything;
(2) Focuses especially on the distinctions between words and not-words,
people and not-people; (3) Produces textbooks, electronic publications,
and journals; (4) Is a field utterly unable to generate a good account of
itself on Wikipedia.”14 Irony aside, he sees in communication “the most
important field for the study of many key dimensions of social change,”
with a notable diversity of lines of research, but which “has not yet
developed strong enough ways for integrating and benefitting from its
diversity.”
The two diagnoses are relevant in that, more than any other coun-
try, the USA has counted on a long tradition of investment—not only
academic, but also corporate—in various practices which, beginning with
journalism, are encompassed by the generic distinction of communi-
cation. This word belongs to ancient Latin, but it found in the USA,
12 Craig (1999, pp. 119–161).

13 Ibidem.
14 Calhoun (January/June 2012, p. 279).

16 M. SODRÉ
from the first decade of the twentieth century, its modern reinterpreta-
tion, although dissociated from the creation of journalism courses. The
expression “communication course” appears in the first half of the cen-
tury (apparently proposed by Wilbur Schramm, esteemed researcher and
author in the field, but also an academic dedicated to imposing his own
historiographical version of the communication field), while “journalism
course” dates to the middle of the nineteenth century, with the record
of the first attempt at creating a journalism course at the university level.
Various earlier initiatives faced difficulties up to the first decade of the
twentieth century, when the idea of graduate-level education for journal-
ists gained more social value.
What is recorded as the foundation in all this history is the proposal
by Joseph Pulitzer—editor of The New York World and who today lends
his name to the most prestigious journalism award in the USA—to the
University of Columbia to create a course on excellence in journalism.15
Pulitzer basically thought in terms of technical aspects regarding the
preparation of a journal, such as drafting and editing, but his gesture
was the starting point for the large corporations of the North American
press to begin investing in the methodical study of their own activities.
Even the American government demonstrated a prodigiousness regard-
ing the funding of mass communication research, but only at the apogee
of propaganda research. Today, despite the scarcity of funds, there are
various institutes and foundations dedicated to research on journalism
and general communication which have persisted through the decades,
despite the growing crisis in the journalism industry.16
Thus, a paradox is insinuated by the fact that, despite this institu-
tional and corporate consensus on the necessity of excellence in study
and research, Craig’s affirmation about the inexistence of a true scientific
field summarizes the current opinion of North American authors and
researchers in the communication field, completely misled by the strictly
journalistic terminology (as logo-technical practices relative to the applica-
tion of instruments) of communication.
15 The original proposal dates 1902, but the course was only effectively established by the
University of Columbia in 1912.

16 A significant case is that of the Center for Future Civic Media (at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology), which in 2011, in the middle of the North American financial
crisis, received an investment of millions of dollars from the Knight Foundation.
However, it is a position which spans from the oldest research to the

newest. Years ago, Dean Elihu Katz judged that communication research
should be limited to effects, therefore, the consequences of transmis-
sion on reception.17 With a degree in sociology from the University of
Columbia (in the scope of academic pioneering in journalism studies),
Katz speaks with the authority of one who is now internationally recog-
nized as one of the founding voices of the North American sociological
school of mass communication research, which featured Paul Lazarsfeld,
the internationally esteemed author.18
The question of effects alludes, in principle, to psychology, and a large
part of the North American and European models applied by research-
ers to individual human communication truly belong to a psychological
perspective. In fact, traditionally included in the communication field are
authors such as Charles Osgood (creator of the “semantic differential”)
and Kurt Lewin, author of the “field theory”—an explicative model of
individual behavior by internal motivations associated with the dynamic
social field—who enjoyed great repercussion together with thinkers of
systemic communication, such as Gregory Bateson, Heinz Von Foerster,
Norbert Wiener, and various others.
It is also true that the majority of media practices regarding motiva-
tion and convincing are molded by a combination of rhetoric and psy-
chology. In the epistemological dimension of social science, however, the
communicational field—regarding concrete, socioeconomic relations of
production, reproduction, and circulation within the modern market—
leaned more strongly toward sociology (from the institutional prestige of
the communication research school of sociology) although the resulting
studies are characterized by psychosocial evaluations, when not purely
and simply journalistic. On the other hand, suggestions in the sense of
a specific science of communication always arose from other theoretical
spheres, such as anthropology and cybernetics.
An examination of the “social” history of human sciences is indis-
pensable to the theoretical analysis of the communication field, since
the theory of a science cannot be defined without its history being set
against the history of others. Beyond this, whether in social or nat-
ural sciences, scientific activity is an intersubjective activity, as Pestre
17 Cf.
Katz (2001, pp. 9472–9479).
18 See
Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), on the interaction between the public and the means
of communication.
18 M. SODRÉ
emphasizes, “it is within this relation between people that one elabo-
rates the systems of evidence which is recognized as acceptable. Making
a ‘social’ history thus consists of reanalyzing the permanent redefinitions
of what constitutes a legitimate demonstration, of studying this work
which outlines the borders and norms.”19 On the other hand, according
to this same author, the social and physical spaces in which the experi-
mental work of science is produced are determinants in that which per-
tains to the comprehension of results. Consequently, the biographical
and institutional (academic) aspects are not secondary in examining the
possibilities and impossibilities (in that which pertains to epistemology)
for the establishment of a scientific field in the area of social sciences,
which makes the comparison between the origin and the modes of theo-
retical and social affirmation of each one relevant.
Sociologists and Anthropologists
When we consider the sources of modern sociology, for example, we
encounter as many historical-social doctrines from the nineteenth cen-
tury formulated by world-renowned European writers and think-
ers (Montesquieu, Saint-Simon, Herbert Spencer, P. J. Proudhon,
Giambattista Vico, Vilfredo Pareto, and others) as we do research com-
missioned by specific institutions looking for knowledge and data on the
reality they administer. This truly empirical knowledge constitutes the
principal object of demand for societal knowledge by civil and State insti-
tutions searching to explain social functioning and legitimize decisions.
In the academic sphere, where knowledge tends to be systemized as sci-
ence, the activities of reflection and research acquire disciplinary aspects.
It is within this sphere that a disciplinary outline from the historic con-
tinent of social thought constituted itself as sociology (Auguste Comte,
Alexis de Tocqueville, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl
Mannheim, Pitirim Sorokin, Georges Gurvitch, and others) and ensured
the specificity of its theoretical object.
What is the aim of a sociologist? In general, the ability to respond to
a vast spectrum of questions about an object which can be synthetized
as the “social”—or rather, a general space objectified as “society”—
but which in practice is split into a multiplicity of forms (institutions,
19 Pestre (2013, p. 21).

associations, groups) inscribed within a gregarious totality, or in more

generic terms, within the “social reality.” The latter is a historically
new theoretical object, since, after the Enlightenment-era conception
of another human order, beyond natural or religious, these multiple
forms can no longer be thought of as a hierarchical group of bodies and
states (such as that represented in the Ancien Régime), but as the result
of a self-referential reality. No more, therefore, a multiplicity of groups
of belonging, but now of individuals, politically and juridically related
within an organic totality.
Thus, the sociologist responds to this new object—society—which
is moved and transformed throughout History, thusly creating areas
of uncertainty about its own destiny. This response aspires to meet
scientific criteria (expressed in the concept of categories) and a clear,
methodological orientation. In strictly theoretical terms, it is an empiri
cal procedure (instrumental rationality and factual research) compatible
with the positivist rejection of metaphysics as a form of knowledge. It is,
therefore, something associated with the modern crisis in the traditional
foundations of science, which are shifted from internal philosophical
reasoning—ergo, rationalist abstractions—to sociohistorical condition-

ings. In political terms, it is an aspiration for the possibility of predicting
the future occurrence of facts as pertaining to society, thus, the possibil-
ity of a margin of social control.
As it is not a science with a unique theoretical-methodological orien-
tation, sociology is guided by different explicative principal themes: (1)
positivism-functionalism (French) founded by Auguste Comte (in 1838,
he coined the term “sociologie”) and which holds Emile Durkheim as
its principal proponent; (2) comprehensive sociology, of German ori-
gin with neo-Kantian inspiration—for pulling back from scientific posi
tivism and all of metaphysics, accepting the weight of subjectivity and
the value inherent in scientific knowledge—which was founded by Max
Weber with the suggestive paradigm of rationality, defined as the result
of scientific specialization and technical differentiation, and at the same
time connected to the idea of the disillusionment of the world. From
the theoretical-methodological, hermeneutic-comprehensive matrix, this
line was equally well-studied by Georg Simmel; and (3) the line of dia-
lectical explanation begun by Karl Marx, even though he never admit-
ted belonging to (and, in fact, did not belong to, as he would be better
identified by his social philosophy in service of a revolutionary project)
the lineage of sociologists—nor to that of economists, it is worth noting,
20 M. SODRÉ
for what he truly undertook was the theoretical analysis of economic

ideology.
To dialectically surpass eighteenth-century French materialism and
German (neo-Hegelian) idealism, Marx placed himself at the forefront of
any and all sociology regarding the problem of the relationship between
ideas and social practice, proposing an ontological-social method, in which
elucidation of a form’s historical origins is accompanied by a critique of
structure and situation. The objective and subjective emancipation of
man, for him, does not derive from moral or philosophical discourse, but
from self-liberating praxis, which is the revolutionary act.
Evidently, there are different theoretical positions within the same
sphere. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, one of the greatest figures of
nineteenth-century social thought, differs as much from Marx as he does
from Comte in that he focuses his analysis on the idea of democracy, and
not on capitalism or industrialization. Greater, however, are the theoreti
cal shocks between the French and German spheres. The latter has as
an “ancestor,” Ferdinand Tönnies, a noteworthy thinker from the 1900s,
responsible for the introduction of the idea of community which, while
representing a key term in sociology, extends to philosophical, theolog-
ical, and historical discussions. “It will be difficult to find another idea
which represents such a clear watershed between the social thought of
the 19th century and that of the preceding era, which was the Age of
Reason,” affirms Nisbet.20
The community came to substitute the rationality of the social con-
tract (the theory of natural law, according to which man, in his essential,
natural state, “contracted” social relations through his own free will) for
a “pre-modern” or original model, in which social relations stem from
emotional or territorial connections between participants, with a basis
in solidarity. The community contemplated by Tönnies is a theoreti-
cal mediation between the concepts of the “natural” and “social” man.
Different from Durkheim, with whom he debated, he did not hold to
the empirical description of social facts, and he was not worried about
the scientific autonomy of sociology as opposed to other sciences from
the social sphere.
Regarding this autonomy, sociology owes a debt to the philosophi-
cal interest of the nineteenth-century natural sciences, a period in which
20 Nisbet (1984, p. 47).

nature was the object of transformative reflections by researcher-think-

ers such as Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Claude Bernard, Charles Darwin
and others who dealt with conceptions of the evolution of beings.
Sociological models originate in mechanism and organicism, drawing
upon analogies with mechanical and organic systems. Darwinism is par-
adigmatic, in that it represents the apex of the victory of the positivist
spirit over the theological world view. It is worth noting the affinity of
Marx’s thought, even though this has not been duly clarified, with the
scientific project of the earlier sociologist, Comte. In a famous preface
(1859) in which he separates science from ideology (religion, law, pol-
itics, art, and philosophy), Marx affirms the necessity of always distin-
guishing from ideological forms “the material changes which occur in
economic conditions of production and which can be evaluated with the
accuracy of the natural sciences.”21
Even before this preface, Marx had already explained his method, in
a reply to French socialist Proudhon, sustaining that, while society is a
product of the reciprocal action of men, they cannot freely choose their
productive forces, since these forces find themselves limited by a preced-
ing social form.22 In this way, material production should not be inves-
tigated through isolated individuals, but through “social individuals”
(therefore, beings in society), who methodologically constitute agents of
“modern bourgeois production,” ergo as a totality, capable of being eval-
uated with the aforementioned “accuracy of the natural sciences.”
The subsequent history of the European philosopher is divided over
the interpretation of this statement, or at least of its theoretical con-
sequences. On the one side, are the interpreters who opt for the writ-
ings of Marx’s youth and make categories such as alienation and labor
(Hegelian concepts) instruments which are applicable to a “subjective”
or idealistic dialectic, in the sense pertaining to relations between men
and not between things. In the latter case are those who search to rad-
ically oppose Marx and Hegel, making Marxian philosophy (dialectic
materialism) the epistemology of historical materialism. In other words,
it would fall to dialectical materialism to elucidate the scientific nature of
historical materialism, whose scientific objects are the modes of produc-
tion and the forms of transition from one mode to the other. In France,
21 Marx and Engels (1951, v. 1, p. 335).

22 Cf. Marx (2009).
22 M. SODRÉ
from the 1960s, Louis Althusser brought this interpretive position to the
extreme, attempting to legitimate Capital as historical science.
Ensconced in the principal of the irreduciblity of the social to the
individual, Durkheim (born in 1858), also became famous for his pro-
ject treating social facts (morality, religion, customs, etc.) as things, that
is, as elements externally coercive to man and, therefore, independent
from individual will, as what happens with that which becomes a theo-
retical object for the natural sciences. This epistemological position had
already been described in A General View of Positivism, in which Comte
projected a “positivist” (scientifically modeled) politic for the social fact.
Although a positivist, Durkheim was opposed to the positivism of Comte
(along with a whole intellectual tradition which modeled social relations
along the idea of the contract), disregarding his famous “law of three
stages” (the theological, metaphysical, and positive), in which humanity
would pass from the false to the true through continual evolution, and
sustaining that social science should not be guided by philosophical prin-
ciples, but rather by a determined, empirical reality, capable of contextu-
alizing the individual in temporal and spatial terms.
This Durkheimian “disregard” would be better explained in the
twentieth century by Gaston Bachelard with his epistemological rupture
hypothesis (converted into an academic banner by Althusser), in which
scientific truth is distinguished from ideology or phenomenological expe-
rience. The problem in the rupture hypothesis is that its radicalism (ide-
ological in its own right), as an epistemological rupture, or, at least, a
detour from the structure of knowledge, is, in fact, verified in the cir-
cumstances of the ascension of modern science. For example, entering
modernity, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medicine
made its break with religious explanations for the body in including con-
cepts of health and disease.23 The same can be said, as Bachelard already
stated, of other sciences, such as physics and chemistry.
Thus, even before the scientific bet on the epistemological rupture
(which, moreover, was abandoned even by Althusser at the end of the
1970s) with Durkheim, and amidst the backdrop of the success of the
natural sciences beginning in the nineteenth century, sociology aspired to
a methodological rigor which could legitimize its disciplinary specificity
(making its differences from psychology explicit) and the scientific nature
23 Cf. Foucault (1973).

of its discourse. In Durkheim’s theory, this rigor is guaranteed by the

concepts of norms and functions (described in The Rules of Sociological
Method) and assumes the form of statistics. This is very likely the reason
for which the author of Suicide (a standard book of the Durkheimian
tradition) was a greater academic success than his contemporary Fréderic
Le Play who, in studies on the working classes and the socially marginal-
ized (especially garbage collectors), also creatively articulated fundamen-
tal concepts of sociology, although in an analytic, and not quantitative,
manner.
In general, however, to find responses, sociology researches defined
groups without taking a priori decisions, with the objective of establish-
ing precise correlations among variables. Besides these procedures, which
strongly distinguish empirical, North American sociology from its epi-
gones in various countries, a way of sociological thinking has also devel-
oped, which oscillates between social philosophy and concepts inherited
from the tradition of the human sciences, with an emphasis on the phe-
nomenological approach to quotidian life.
And an anthropologist? One can begin to respond with the frank and
surprising position of North American Clifford Geertz, one of the most
influential anthropologists on the international scene over the last few
decades: “one of the advantages of anthropology as a scholarly enter-
prise is that no one, including its practitioners, quite knows exactly what
it is. People who watch baboons copulate, people who rewrite myths in
algebraic formulas, people who dig up Pleistocene skeletons, people who
work out decimal point correlations between toilet training practices and
theories of disease, people who decode Maya hieroglyphics, and people
who classify kinship systems into typologies in which our own comes out
as ‘Eskimo’ all call themselves anthropologists.”24 Despite this apparent
confusion, Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French counterpart to Geertz, could
affirm that “after the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance and
the bourgeois humanism of the 19th century, anthropology marks the
advent, for the finished world which has become our planet, of a doubly
universal humanism.”25
In certain scientific areas, as in the case of France and even England,
anthropologists and sociologists remain connected by a tradition of
24 Geertz (2001, p. 86).

25 Lévi-Strauss (2012, p. 32).
24 M. SODRÉ
conceptual reference to Durkheim, whose methodological rigor pro-

pelled the social sciences from the beginning of the twentieth century. As
is well-known, Durkheim interpreted ancient society (so-called primitive
society) field studies, conducted by ethnographers, from a sociological
perspective, which greatly influenced English anthropology. In counter-
point, Marcel Mauss (his nephew) proclaimed the scientific autonomy of
anthropology.
If we begin with Lévi-Strauss’ definition of sociology—“social sci-
ence from the observer’s point of view”—we may be tempted to think,
inversely, of anthropology as a cultural fact from the point of view of the
observed. Evidently, this is not true, as the anthropologist also brings
his own point of view to the culture he observes. In the same way that
a sociologist follows (social) laws, the anthropologist is oriented by his
search for laws of “human nature” (in the sense of identical elements
or of a continuum), which implies the subsumption of the concept of
“laws” into the symbolic system of the observer. It is undeniable, how-
ever, that the anthropologist seeks an intersection with the discourse of
the observed, not from a generic speculation about the categories of the
human spirit, nor from the distance attributed by sociological methodol-
ogy (Durkheimian), but through the interaction with its concrete expres-
sions, therefore, with the experience of the individuals.
This is, in fact, the terminus ad quem of the long historical path of this
particular knowledge. Its mythic origins date back to Herodotus, who,
while seen as the first historian, represents the precursor to ethnographic
reports which, dozens of centuries later, European travelers and colonial
administrators would make. In closer historical terms, it is a knowledge
which was already announced in the beginning of European modernity
by authors such as Montaigne and Montesquieu with their preoccupa-
tions about the universal specificity of the human being, as well as its
difference from animals, the inhuman. Kant also made reflections of an
anthropological nature (he is, in fact, one of the founders of this disci-
pline), but focusing on the question of civility: it would fall to anthro-
pology to research the civil foundations of human beings. From there
stem the anthropological clichés which led Hegel to affirm that black
people have no morality, religion, or social institutions and that, because
of this, have not reached a state of “self-consciousness.”26
26 It is important to note that these clichés are not exclusive to Hegel. In fact, they
appear in the thinking of fundamental, modern philosophers such as Kant, Marx, and,
In fact, when anthropology asserted itself as an autonomous disci-

pline in the nineteenth century, a sluggish corollary to the progressive
discovery of ancient (non-industrial) societies by Europe, it inherited
a full philosophical tradition which attributed to Africa a “non-histori-
cal” spirit and, therefore, one incapable of development and culture.27
This discipline arose, therefore, as an attempt at the comprehension and
domi nation of “others,” or rather, of other ethnicities and civilizing
organizations, geographically distant and, thus, more easily adaptable to
the removal of the subject and object from understanding, an unavoida-
ble epistemological requisite of the era. Despite this, it was not a merely
“scientific” “endeavor,” in that it attended, in most cases, the interests of
colonial powers, who wished to accumulate knowledge about the way of
life of subjugated peoples.
The first anthropologists were lawyers (Bachofen, Morgan), doc-
tors (Bastian), administrators (Sumner-Maine, McLennan), profes-
sors of Classical Studies (Frazer), or simply travelers (E.B. Tylor). The
lawyer, Morgan, gives anthropology a precise issue: the study of family
relationships. This object remains today at the core of anthropological
research, as does the ethnographic method and literary model enthroned
by Malinowski from his study of the Trobriand societies of New Guinea.
New fields and guidelines emerged over time, especially after the First
World War, with the examination of the relations between the individ-
ual and the cultural norms. Contributions from psychology and psycho-
analysis which seek to establish a “base personality” were integrated into
anthropology, such as those of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Ralph
Linton, Cora du Bois, and Abraham Kardiner.
Regarding linguistics and the anthropologist Edward Sapir, anthro-
pology sought to grasp man in his totality, accounting for the plurality of
complementary aspects—from the biological to the social, traversing the
physiological and the psychological. Sapir took up Marcel Mauss’ sugges-
tions in the sense of a concrete study of global behavior, associating his
work with psychology, psychoanalysis, history, and sociology. Without
admitting the Jungian hypothesis of a collective unconscious, Sapir saw
temporally closer to us, Heidegger, who affirmed that “blacks have no history” or “have as
much history as the monkeys and the birds.”
27 Cf. Sodré (2002, pp. 39–32).
26 M. SODRÉ
in the unconscious the possibility of an objective grasp of cultures which

were entirely different from his own.
Through change and new paths, anthropology continues to reduce
the distance between “us” and the “others” (which already was a reality
and a problem for sociology) and opens itself up to the study of “our-
selves,” that is, of the cultural base of any society, including our own.
“We are all natives now,” proclaimed Clifford Geertz. Contemporarily,
“special anthropologies” are presented to the academic sphere, anthro-
pologies which study archaic societies as well as historic societies and
those based on advanced industrialization. Thus, the anthropological
studies of economics, religion, art, politics, etc. continue to proliferate.
The variety of fields perhaps makes the term “anthropologies” more ade-
quate than simply “anthropology.”
At first sight, this, which appears to be a sign of vitality, may also be
seen as the sign of a crisis, since the end of the eighteenth century, in the
scientific project of anthropology, which was that of embracing the body
of questions regarding the origin, similarities, and differences of man in
his universality. Modern thinkers only belatedly began to manifest sus-
picions as to the validity of an anthropological science, putting in doubt
the epistemological value of the concept of “man.” At the same time,
with the expansion of socially inclusive mechanisms, the object that clas-
sically constituted the object of anthropological knowledge, the “prim-
itive” or exotic society, is slowly disappearing into history. Today, the
concept of “human parks“ (the exhibition of various ethnicities in fairs
and circuses), which fascinated the European public from the middle of
the nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth
century, is inconceivable.
In its theoretical development, modern anthropology is an important
cognitive base for criticizing the cultural world-system, which implies a
system of universalist decisions, ethnically oriented, since the fifteenth
century, by the Christian-colonialist fantasy of an absolute unit of mean-
ing. The work of Claude Levi-Strauss is unequivocal in its (relativist)
demonstration that one cannot evaluate any culture by exterior parame-
ters, or rather, that it is impossible to formulate judgments of the superi-
ority of one culture over another.
In truth, this is a conclusion anchored in part by the preceding theo-
retical lineage, espoused by ethnologists such as Franz Boas, Bronislaw
Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and others, who, through their research,
proved the complex and incomparable singularity of diverse symbolic
forms. Boas was truly a pioneer in meticulous field research, which gave
the anthropologist the charge of monographs aimed at capturing the
micro-aspects of human groups considered in their totality. He joins eth-
nographic empiricism and theoretical elaboration within a framework of
the scientific autonomy of anthropological knowledge. He is also consid-
ered to be the professor responsible for the formation of the first gener-
ation of North American anthropologists, such as Sapir, Kroeber, Lowie,
R. Benedict, M. Mead, and others. He was, indeed, the professor of the
renowned Brazilian academic, Gilberto Freyre.
However, it is Malinowski who, since his first work (Argonauts of
the Western Pacific, 1922), proclaimed himself the founder of scientific
anthropology (although many attribute this title to Radcliffe-Brown)
and became the leading figure of that which could be called the “sci-
ence” of otherness. Tracing the theoretical model of functionalism (as
did Durkheim, although he diverges from him in the inclusion of psy-
chological aspects), he shows that the customs of the Trobriand societies,
while very different from those of Western societies, have coherence and
meaning because they correspond to the necessities of a totality, which
functions even in the moment of observation. In methodological terms,
this total group should be analyzed through a triple articulation of the
social, the biological, and the psychological. As such, Malinowski created
the observatory method of the participant, which implies a personal rela-
tionship with the experience of the observed other.
From there, traditional societies began to lose the label “savage,”
despite the persistence of some ethnological strongholds of Victorian
inspiration, whose idea of civilization solely considers the industrial,
European society. Malinowski represents a watershed moment, in that he
educated the anthropological eye to grasp the cultural sphere as a con-
crete space of the experience of the other. From there, one can affirm, as
did Foucault, that “anthropology, like the analysis of man, has, undoubt-
edly, a founding role in modern thought, for in large part we have still
not detached ourselves from it.”28
Effectively, the “other” of the anthropologist is no longer only the
primitive or the archaic, but the very subject of Western civilization, that
is, the “I while other.” This “other” can be simply the employee of a
business, considered as a cultural microcosm with particular rules, which
28 Foucault (1966, p. 443).

28 M. SODRÉ
must be translated into business terms in order to carry out a corporate

“reengineering.” It could also be the consumer, seen as the “other” by
corporate strategists. Those that practice “social anthropology” have as
their objects the unemployed, the landless, the homeless, urban areas,
etc. The object of sociology is approached, diverging in method and in
theory, but increasingly aimed toward the problematic regions of the
urban world.
In truth, for a long period, there were many anthropologists (e.g.,
Evans-Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, Roger Bastide, and others) who did
not admit any distinction between social anthropology and sociology.
Malinowski, while identifying as an anthropologist, often called himself a
sociologist, as he does in his well-known discussion about the psychology
of sex, in which he criticizes Sigmund Freud’s conclusions on the subject
and even reprimands him for his lack of a “sound knowledge of primi-
tive life, as well as of the unconscious or conscious aspects of the human
mind.” Referring to group marriage, totemism, and magic, he associates
sociological knowledge with anthropology, affirming that “they are all
solid sociological and cultural facts, and to deal with them theoretically
requires a type of experience which cannot be acquired in the consulting
room.”29
Thus, both types of knowledge, sociology and anthropology, appear
as practical responses to specific demands from the State or civil society
(mostly the State) within a determined historical context, and are pro-
gressively constituted within sciences by the theoretical work of leading
academic institutions, which are either directly or indirectly bound to the
researchers and thinkers. Naturally, in the process of scientific autonomi-
zation, inscribed in university terms, they are removed from the function
of responding to specific demands and can travel down critical paths,
such as in the case of the sociology of denunciation, in which the soci-
ologist distances himself from the analyzed society. In anthropology, the
criticism does not appear as a denunciation, but as an incitation toward a
deeper perception of the complexity of the human phenomenon.
On their own, social demands and historical context do not explain
the cognitive and disciplinary autonomy invested in knowing its pro-
gressive development. Understanding of this process becomes more
clear when one appeals to the known concept of the field as proposed by
29 Malinowski (1973, p. 10).

Bourdieu.30 Social or scientific, the field is a social space composed of

objective relations between agents and institutions and is dedicated to
cognitively legitimating their declarations. It is, in fact, a separate uni-
verse with its own laws.
Sociological interest in the concept of the social field concerns its
explicative adequacy for the problem of the transition from the subjective
to the objective in human social sciences. With this concept, Bourdieu
conjoined the analysis of objective structures of social fact to the analysis
of origin, on an individual level, of the mental structures which gener-
ate a determined practice. His theoretical project is, in the end, the for-
mulation of a theory of practice. Three concepts serve as guidelines: (1)
habitus, or the cognitive set of dispositions which motivate practices and
perceptions; (2) social space, or the existential situation of the individuals,
that is, their relational properties or intersubjective differences; and (3)
symbolic capital, or the set of modes of domination, as much on a physi-
cal level as on economic, cultural, and social levels, which are responsible
for the structures of power.
The concept of the scientific field is applicable to any sphere of knowl-
edge. It may be constructed from the demands or the specificity of a
context, but the pure and simple objectivity of the relations do not fully
define it: within it, we discover the importance of the space occupied
by each of its members, therefore, the social space, so that the range of
questions raised is not independent from the cognitive virtue and insti-
tutional weight of the subject who speaks. In this aspect, historical dis-
tortions may emerge, such as what happened in the Stalinist-era Soviet
Union, when Trofim Lysenko, an obscure biologist and agronomist, was
nominated to lead genetic research, while at the same time, he rejected
the rational, systematic studies of the Austrian Mendel for being “bour-
geois science.” In other words, only the social space of the Stalinist dicta-
torship determined the scientific validity of biological knowledge, which
contributed to delaying Soviet research in the sector by decades.
This is, naturally, an exception in the history of the natural sciences,
but the epistemological concept of social space is more evident in the
universe of the science of man. For example, a declaration is considered
philosophical if it responds, with the proper institutional weight, to a
question raised by the traditional field of philosophy. A word taken from
30 Cf. Bourdieu et al. (2007) and Bourdieu (1983).

30 M. SODRÉ
the common vocabulary can be converted into a concept if constructed

as a philosophical problem by a legitimate thinker in the field (ergo, one
with great symbolic capital), such as the term Ge-Stell in Heidegger’s
work, which shifts from its ordinary and current meanings (present in
“Gestell”) in order to denominate the masking of the primordial founda-
tion of existence (the Being) by technology.
In reality, in this particular case, a full, “simple” vocabulary origi-
nating from the modern German language becomes dense, if not her-
metic, in works subsequent to Being and Time, as the thinker intended
to construct a world vision from the originalism or the archaicism of the
words, using his own language as well as Greek as transcendent exam-
ples of language. This procedure ended up approximating philosophi-
cal thought, in a complex way, to poetry, which inserts the thinker into
the field of literary or poetic analysis. Possibly due to this opening of
the field, Heidegger’s work—although the most striking of the last cen-
tury—is no longer seen as unanimously legitimate by the “professional”
field of philosophy: there is no lack of those who call him a literato or
“meta-theologian.”
What becomes clear is that philosophical concepts appear less stable
when lacking the stability of a consensus about them in the institution-
alized field, that is, the legitimated circle of philosophers and academ-
ics. Sometimes, the nearly complete absence of consensus can exclude a
thinker from the philosophical circle, an example being that of Claude
Lévi-Strauss, who may be considered a philosopher of mythology (a
Platonic paradox), but was recognized exclusively within anthropological
circles. In other cases (George Bataille, for example), the variability of
consensus makes academic identification difficult.
Even regarding the work of Nietzsche, one of the main proponents of
modern thought (and who explicitly wished to be recognized as a great
philosopher), the concepts oscillate between philosophical recognition
and literary appreciation, because even now (despite the reinterpretive
efforts of thinkers such as Eugen Fink, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,
Gianni Vattimo, and Massimo Cacciari) his institutional weight in the
field has remained unstable. In a work such as Zarathustra, philosophy,
literature, and religion are practically indiscernible. In Ecce Homo, the
personality of the author is indiscernible from his philosophical findings.
In others, the issue of sickness amalgamates the thought and life of the
philosopher, letting his existential vicissitudes stand out: nearly all books
on Nietzsche are partially biographical.
A division within intellectual work in the field of knowledge is not a

rare thing, as observed by the tripartite scheme conceived for anthro-
pology by Lévi-Strauss: the first level of work is the description (eth-
nography) of a determined culture; the second, its logical construction
(ethnology), and third, the comparative analysis of human groups, or
rather, proper anthropology, whose ultimate goal is to reveal, by the
conciliation of diverse modes of thought, the intelligible structure of the
human spirit under the sign of the universality of the Lights. This is a
formulation reserved for the academic leaders or the renowned intellec-
tual voices, as in the case of Lévi-Strauss, although there is no shortage
of criticism for this type of formulation by those who call themselves
radical empiricists. For the Englishman, Edmund Leach, for example,
Lévi-Strauss is an idealist, in the best tradition of French rationalism.
The reality is that the French field of research, and thus its ethno-
graphic and ethnological work, was always somewhat delayed in rela-
tion to that of the English and the Americans. The Frenchman Marcel
Mauss, for example, never carried out any field work (nor did his uncle
Durkheim in the field of sociology), a task which he reserved for his
assistants, while he left for himself the task of conceptual elaboration.
However, it is important to note that the American Ruth Benedict also
produced, from a distance, her renowned essay on the basic personality
of Japanese culture, an essay which was commissioned by the American
government during the Second World War. It is equally worth emphasiz-
ing that, in the first half of the last century, important ethnologists such
as Marcel Griaule, Maurice Leenhardt, and others arose in France.
No matter what kind, the scientific nature of divulged knowledge is
never a variable independent from the institutional form assumed by the
professorship, department, or university group. Thanks to the depart-
mental division of knowledge, professors, and researchers administra-
tively protect their theoretical object, not only with the justification of
disciplinary specificity, but also considering the distribution of public
funding or the competition which exists in the market for analysis and
research commissions.
Disciplinary zeal can even be exacerbated in the sense that the
boundaries between fields that were once well-demarcated within social
thought can become fluid (a phenomenon analogous to the crisis in liter-
ary genres), as is currently happening between anthropology and sociol-
ogy. In some universities, however, sociology has already begun to switch
its classic designation for the generic title of social sciences—generally
32 M. SODRÉ
for managerial motives and in private universities—where sociologists,

anthropologists, and political scientists are all harbored. The analyses of
the renowned American sociologist Richard Sennett (commonly trans-
lated in Brazil) consist of sociology, anthropology, and history in a narra-
tive style, sometimes close to that of journalism.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1983). Le Champ Scientifique. In R. Ortiz (org.), Pierre Bourdieu:
Sociologia. Ática.
Bourdieu, P., Chamboredon, J. C., & Passeron, J. C. (2007). Le Métier de
Sociologue. Petrópolis: Vozes.
Calhoun, C. (2012, January/June). Comunicação como Ciência Social (e mais).
Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação – Intercom, 35, 277–310.
Cooley, C. (1909). Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York,
NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Craig, R. (1999). Communication Theory as a Field. Communication Theory,
9(2), 119–161. International Communication Association.
Foucault, M. (1966). As Palavras e as Coisas—uma arqueologia das ciências
humanas. Lisbon: Portugalia Editora.
Foucault, M. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception. New York, NY: Pantheon.
Foucault, M. (1996). A Ordem do Discurso. São Paulo: Loyola.
Geertz, C. (2001). Nova Luz sobre a Antropologia. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
Katz, E. (2001). Media Effects. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (orgs.),
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford:
Elsevier.
Katz, E., & Lazarsfeld, P. (1955). Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in
the Flow of Communications. New York: Free Press.
Lang, A. (2013). Discipline in Crisis? The Shifting Paradigm of Mass
Communication Research. Communication Theory, 23(1), 10–24.
International Communication Association.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (2012). A Antropologia Diante dos Problemas do Mundo
Moderno. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
Malinowski, B. (1973). Sexo e Repressão na Sociedade Selvagem. Petrópolis:
Vozes.
Marx, K. (2009). A Miséria da Filosofia. São Paulo: Expressão Popular.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1951). Contribuição à Crítica da Economia Política
(prefácio). In Obras Escolhidas (Vol. 1). Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Vitória.
Miège, B. (2009, August/December). Comunicação e Tecnologia na Sociedade:
uma dimensão transversal (entrevista). Matrizes.
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Pestre, D. (2013). À Contre-Science—politiques et savoirs des sociétés contempo-
raines. Paris: Seuil.
Rorty, R. (2011). A Filosofia e o Espelho da Natureza. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Relume
Dumará.
Sodré, M. (2002). Antropológica do Espelho—uma teoria da comunicação linear e
em rede. Petrópolis: Vozes.
Wilden, A. (2001). Enciclopédia Einaudi (Vol. 34). Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional.
Wolton, D. (1997). Penser la Communication. Paris: Flammarion.
CHAPTER 3
A Financial Ideology
The epistemological problems of the communicational field and the insufficiency

of the informational paradigm adopted for the American sociological school of
communication research. The European field of communication studies in the
sphere of structural semiology. Cognitive dispersion in Brazil. Mediatization as
a concept for a new form of life.
There are those that say communication still has not truly begun to be
studied. It is an emphatic affirmation in terms of the difficulty of estab-
lishing a scientific field for this sector of knowledge, which is related to
the institutional ambiguity of its conditions of possibility. We refer to the
conditions capable of being satisfied within characteristic axes of scientific
research, the knowledge, ontological/epistemological (first, a determina-
tion of that which exists and will be observed; second, the nature of the
implied knowledge), methodology (the formal procedure), and axiology
(values and goals of the knowledge), which correspond respectively to
questions such as “what does the researcher claim to be doing in aca-
demic terms,” “how is it proceeding,” and “why do this?”.
A comparison with what happens in the field of economics may be
clarifying, especially if some aspects of the crisis that struck the North
American financial system at the end of the first decade of this century,
resulting in a global economic slowdown, were closely examined. As
has become widely known, the largest investment banks and brokerage

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5_3
36 M. SODRÉ
houses in the country became insolvent due to fraud and risky opera-
tions, leading to the extreme poverty of millions of small investors.
A large portion of the financial consultants of these organizations,
and also of federal agencies charged with regulating the market, were
economists and professors in the most prestigious American universi-
ties. All of them, who once trusted in the self-regulation of the market
(the economist’s utopia of the “perfect market”) and advocated for
increased deregulation, ended up even richer from the collapse of the
private system, which was eventually bailed out by the US Treasury, that
is, with public funds. Many of them worked as directors or councilors
in the Executive Branch when it was decided to disburse hundreds of
billions of dollars in order to save the financial system. It became clear
that which is called market balance is not an application of “economic
science,” but the effective power of a dominant political coalition.
In reality, the mainstream academic theory of economics—that tends
to result in Nobel Prizes for innovators in the field—does not essentially
differ from that which is practiced in the market, or rather, is supposed in
mathematical formulas that have little to do with the “lifeworld,”1 that
is, with the human life associated to what, since Adam Smith (1766),
has been understood as the “science” of the accumulation of wealth for
the individual or for the nation, thus, a kind of thinking centered on the
collective well-being. It is true that the theoretical perspective of Smith
(as is that of Ricardo) attributes autonomy to the economic cycle, but
without the absolutism that much later was invested by bourgeois econo-
metrics. The counterpoint to this would later be designated “human
economy,” a historical, social, political, and ecological economy, more
alert to the question of inequality in the ways of life.
The fact is that, in the great business schools of today, they do not
actually teach or research an economic “science,” in the broad sense of
1 It is necessary to highly stress that we refer here to a reality present in the current
financial structure of the center of global capitalism, where criticism of political econ-
omy—therefore, an analysis of the social totality and not of economic partiality traditionally
practiced by economic thinkers (conservative or liberal)—is not seen as necessary, a criti-
cism alert to problems such as effective political institutions, economic environments capa-
ble of stimulating innovation, efficient capital markets, and quality education. Naturally,
there are exceptions (currently, Paul Krugman is one of them). In Latin America, this line
of thinking, amplified by the question of autonomous national development, was addressed
by names such as Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado, Eugenio Gudin, Maria da Conceição
Tavares, Paulo Singer, Ignácio Rangel, Antonio Barros de Castro, Carlos Lessa, and others.
3 A FINANCIAL IDEOLOGY 37
this expression, which implies a theoretical elaboration capable of con-

ducting a totality of determinations and diverse relations. If we take as a
theoretical measure the Marxian method of reproduction of the “real”
and the “concrete,” we would say that mainstream academic teach-
ing addresses concepts relative to practical determinations, but rarely to
“abstract determinations which lead to the reproduction of the concrete
by means of thought.” In other words, in the Marxian method, econom-
ics is not the science of technical relations of production, nor of individ-
ual choice under the aegis of a market, but the mode by which agents
produce and reproduce these objects as well as their own relations within
social classes. In more direct terms: the economy not as an autonomous
relation between objects (the trading of one market for another), but as
a relation between living and concrete subjects, capable of leading to a
comprehension of other social relations.
This science is not incompatible with mathematics, which, in many
aspects, can assure the rigor of argumentation. But there also exists the
abuse of the mathematical formula, which provides the appearance of
science to technical economic argumentation. For example, in study-
ing the expectations of economic agents about the future value of vari-
ables, mathematical models appear indispensable, but it is worth recalling
Foucault when he says that “the recourse to mathematics, under one
form or another, was always the simplest way to loan a style, a form, a
scientific justification to positive knowledge.”2
In fact, in the human “lifeworld,” where the expectations of agents
are altered by circumstantial changes in the political economy, the for-
malizations do not truly constitute economic knowledge in that they sup-
press the complexity of the concrete, which is the totality of the relations
of production. The only perceived concrete is the partial reality of the
market, where the production of econometric methods, thus, models of
mathematical science, is applicable to the administration of capital flow,
to businesses and to market uncertainty, deducible from a standardized
macroeconomic model, known as dynamic stochastic general equilibrium
(DSGE). Within the context of mathematical fetishism, one can thusly
summarize this theory: the markets are always right. This is the only
moral of the “new economy,” where there is no true scientific knowledge,
but a practical combination of technologies and information with math-
ematical models created to enhance the functioning of financial markets.
2 Foucault (1966, p. 456).

38 M. SODRÉ
These formulas were internationalized in academic and institutional

terms. For example, the statistical model used by Brazil’s Central Bank
to evaluate the consequences of an external shock to the growth rate of
the national economy is an adaptation of others used by the European
Central Bank and by the United States Federal Reserve.3 It is a statistical
model, a mere empirical resource, which works in practice without any
necessity for scientific legitimacy.4 Despite the eventual complexity of cal-
culation, a construct of this nature does not constitute a theory, but a tool
for the precise execution of a business. The word “theory” may appear—
for example, the theory of inflation targeting, from which a government
calculates interest rates—not connected to the categorical determination
of a field of knowledge (e.g., in physics, an invariance like the gravitational
attraction present in the relation between a star and its planet), nor as a
paradigmatic formula regarding the reality which science observes, rather
it may appear as an abstract result of a political formulation.
If we look to the axes of research listed above, we can say that this
methodology prevails over the others and that, to an eventual question
along axiological lines (therefore, about values), the well-known phrase of
American president Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) becomes an appropri-
ate response: “The business of America is business,” although this refers
to productive capitalism and not what occurs with modern finance. What
should be emphasized here is that, in general, the promiscuity between the
market and the power of the State obviates any epistemological or axiologi-
cal principle for the field of economics, ergo, of any theoretical foundation.
Curiously, when establishment gives any sign of existence, its ori-
gin is European. A good example is found in the economic liberalism
from after the crisis of the 1970s, which included as apostles two Nobel
Prize winners: Friedrich Hayek, from the Austrian school of economics,
3 It is called SAMBA, Stochastic Analytical Model with a Bayesian Approach, or rather, an
“intelligent guess,” based on rational expectations (based on the work of nineteenth-cen-

tury English mathematician Thomas Bayes) regarding the possibility of random variables in
economic function.
4 In truth, the technical practice is capable of dispensing with science in many cases.
For example, the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
were based on arithmetical, astronomical, and geometrical knowledge which had already
been surpassed by British mathematicians, but were still successfully carried out. In mod-
ern times, even a mistaken science (such as that of Lysenko’s “genetics” in Stalin’s Russia)
can culminate in some practical results, exemplified by some of Lysenko’s techniques for
increasing harvest productivity.
and the American Milton Friedman, one of the principle names of the
monetarist school. Famous for his influence in the recovery of stagnat-
ing economies, such as Margaret Thatcher’s England, Friedman was an
important collaborator in the US Republican governments (Nixon and
Reagan), as well as councilor of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from
1975. Despite being historically cited as one of the greatest economists
of the last century, he is seen as inferior to Hayek in what is referred to as
the establishment of the theory of neoliberalism.
In fact, he owes Hayek the majority of his proposals—accepted by dif-
ferent governments in the 1980s—in the sense of shrinking the State’s
public policies regarding social welfare (the concept of the “Minimal
State” or the “Guardian State”), of the neutrality of the State in the face
of social inequality, of the end of subsidies aimed at lowering unemploy-
ment rates, of the deregulation of the markets, and, in a certain way, of
the direction of all economic activities to be conducted by the “invisi-
ble hand” of the market. The political-economic arguments of Friedman
almost always find moral backing in the theoretical discourse of Hayek.
What does this have to do with communication?
To begin with, finance capitalism and communication constitute an
inseparable pair in today’s globalized world. Contemporary capitalism is, at
the same time, financial and mediatized: Financialization and media are two
sides of the same coin, which is called advanced society, that which continu-
ally gains the prefix “post” (post-industrialism, postmodernity, etc.).
There are those who prefer to circumvent the terms “financialization”
and “finance capitalism,” nominating the category of fictitious capital
(studied by Marx in the third volume of Capital) as the key to the cor-
rect understanding of the phenomenon. For the sake of clarification, it is
worth noting that capital carries distinct strains, which oscillate in terms
of the correlation of forces. Productive capital, for example, is the strain
which generates palpable or tangible wealth, driving the chain of produc-
tion and, thus, the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Another
is financial capital, which consists of trade (non-productive) based on
titles of credit (a phenomenon known as “securitization”). This capital
of loans, which is increased with a piece of the profits obtained by the
productive strain, was called “fictitious” by Marx, because it is in fact a
fiction, an image of a capital which has not been effectively produced.
With strictly economic arguments, Carcanholo explains that the
surplus value extracted from the labor force by productive capital
stems from a real value (produced by a truly existing capital), whereas,
40 M. SODRÉ
inverting the logic of production value and placing it in any periodic

income (credit securities, stocks, etc.) as a generator of mass money, a
space is opened for a kind of capital that does not enter into the pro-
ductive process and is incapable, on its own, of producing surplus value;
thus, it is fictitious capital.5 In this way, following Marx, it is maintained
exclusively within this terminological sphere.
There is no doubt that, in a logical-economical model, this argument
is justified in that it reveals what could be expressed as the “dysfunctional-
ity” of the capitalist system. But the deepening of the phenomenon—to its
greatest degree of abstraction in the face of classical productivism—includes
dimensions that are not strictly economical (therefore, something beyond
the mere “fictitious” in capital) which compete for the definition of a new
mode of human existence, corresponding to a new nature of wealth.
This is what can be called “financialization“ and is what requires the
historically unprecedented competition between communication and
information. If earlier, under the aegis of the productivist society, com-
munication and information could be analyzed as an “extra expense” of
capital, today it now occupies an important place in the process of con-
joining the unit, both on a material level (the electronic technology of
telecommunications and media, which contributes to the accelerated rate
of capital turnover) and as an ideological sieve for financialization, that is,
of the new nature of wealth.
Fictionalizing or virtualizing the real in terms of the historical moder-
nity of capital, the pair, communication/information, therefore con-
tributes to “naturalizing” the financial market as a foundation for the
acceleration of economic development and also as a source of the capi-
talist ideology of human welfare in the current penetrative stage of the
structural law of value (capital) in all existential spaces of the individuals.
It thus represents an aspect of the class struggle in which neoliberal mod-
ernization causes the dismantling of the social welfare State and the tra-
ditional organization of productive forces in favor of job insecurity, with
the aim of increasing the profits of fictitious capital.
Evidently, the theory of money or financial operations is not being
addressed as something new within the logic of capital. They have always
existed to guarantee the emission, collection, circulation, and exchange
of the different methods of payment and finance. Consequently,
5 Cf. Carcanholo (2010).

economic agents cannot dispense with the efficient means of payment

(currency) for increasing exchange, for the search for a profitable use of
savings, or for attending to the demands of finance. What is truly being
addressed here is the displacement, by the core capitalist economies, of
the hegemonic weight of the industrial sector in favor of so-called high
finance, which implies a new regime of accumulation characterized by
flexibility, which extends from the productive sphere to the labor and
consumer markets. The value of capital is increased by flexibility, and
thus, by the circulatory velocity of the processes in all instances of the
socius, now immersed in flows, connections, and networks.
In truth, in the second half of the nineteenth century and well before
Capital, Marx had already made a clear distinction between the forms
of money in capital: “Money as capital is different than money as money.
The new determination must be developed. On the other side, capital
as money seems to be a regression of capital to an inferior form, but it
is only its placement in a particularity that already existed as non-capital
and constitutes one of its presuppositions. Money again reappears in all
subsequent relations; but it no longer functions as simple money (…)
This is the universal determination of capital.”6
This trend has already existed since the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, or at least, as a counterpart offered by financial capital to the major
industrial conglomerates. In the beginning of the twentieth century,
Georg Simmel noted in his famous study (The Philosophy of Money) the
centrality of money in modern social life, with consequences such as the
acceleration of time, which would become evident in the case of the con-
temporary grouping of finance with electronic communication.
Indeed, in his also famous and later study on the formation of the
capitalist market economy, Polanyi called attention to the inexistence
of any broader research about what he called the “mysterious institu-
tion,” that is the banking system of the ninetenth century, emphasizing
its importance: “Haute finance, a sui generis institution, peculiar to the
last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth,
functioned in this period as the main link between the political and the
economic organization of the world. It supplied the instruments for a
system of international peace, which was elaborated with the help of
6 Marx (2011, p. 193).

42 M. SODRÉ
the Powers, but which these Powers could neither have established nor
maintained.”7
Therefore, high finance had already shown its independence from
particular governments, and, even without being necessarily pacifist, was
capable of avoiding a generalized war between the great powers while
war was a threat to business. Only after the 1960s, in the midst of the
crisis of the old liberal foundations of the American hegemony, did the
national systems of capital regulations begin to erode, and there emerged
the flexible currency exchange systems responsible for financial globali-
zation, the new nature of wealth. What has been called globalization
has nothing to do with human diversity, but with the capitalist reorgan-
ization of the world according to financial interests. Globalization and
finance are the same thing.
In the general climate of economic neoliberalism (as theorized by
Hayek), this nature is molded by a privatist ideology of State deregu-
lation. It matters little that the spirit of deregulation suffered a strong
blow in the first decade of the new millennium due to the great financial
crisis and the obstacles faced by the center of global capitalism. The ide-
ology remains firm, always electing as the greatest social values produc-
tive efficiency and personal success, moral characteristics of productive
capital, but intensified in modern times by the socio-narcissistic forms of
production of subjectivities. This new economic form opposed the flexi-
ble accumulation regime (which increases, through the speed of the cir-
culatory processes of markets and finance, the appreciation of capital in
both the productive and consumer spheres) to centralized forms, respon-
sible for the capitalist over-accumulation which led to the crisis in the
1970s.
At the level of individual consciousness, it is also an ideology of flex-
ibility, of the abolition of any kind of supposed psychic “rigidity,” ergo,
it is not a merely “conservative” ideology (today, it is commonplace to
think thusly of neoliberal economists, such as Hayek or Friedman), in that
it includes strong modernizing elements. This ideology is placed in the
foreground in the technological and public imagination of social wealth,
beside its reality as a change in the nature of the monetary-financial
system and the modus operandi of the industrial corporation. As has
already been indicated, it is not as new as one may think, given, since
7 Polanyi (2012, p. 10).

the end of the nineteenth century, the capitalist vision of wealth as the
possession of land and equipment has passed to the symbolization of fidu-
ciary currency and financial assets.
Yet there are large differences between now and the past, as Braga
notes: “While current phenomena are comparable to the financial expan-
sions that have already occurred in the history of capitalism, clinging to
the approach which treats this as a mere repetition of ‘old’ financial cap-
ital is theoretically incorrect, in that the past, in absolute terms, does not
determine the present or the future.”8 This warning calls attention to
the fact that, while financial logic (from bank capital to publicly financed
operations) has always been intrinsic to the configuration of the capitalist
system, there are striking differences in the form in which contemporary
capital finance is presented.
This new reality is even detected beyond the academic walls, in the
sphere of contemporary media. A shrewd chronicler of the quotidian is
thus capable of concluding that “the narrative is over, wealth is accumu-
lated among the few and benefits even fewer, and the money, no longer
obliged to make sense or follow any kind of script, produces only mon-
sters (…) The grand narrative of capitalism was exciting while it lasted.
It revolutionized human life, and, together with its barbarities, accom-
plished admirable things (…) But not even Marx predicted that its end
would be this: in the midst of a decaying world, money speaks to itself.”9
In fact, before the 1970s, what we now call financialization did not
exist, nor did financial crisis, which stems from the hypertrophic power
that banks have acquired over social life. In this new reality, accumulated
wealth assumes the exclusive form of money, losing the perspective of the
production and expansion of the social body, although it is possible to
envision different ideological positions between the American/English
(purely financial) and German/Chinese (more industrialist, despite
the USA’s financial dependence on China). In general, therefore, the
Promethean narrative of capitalism (expressive in the era of the tycoons,
or the constructors of imperial empires) abandons the mythology of the
unlimited, universal progress—in truth, progress defined in quantitative
terms, which fetishizes the growth of the Gross Domestic Product—and
is transformed into the monologue of monetary circulation followed by
8 Braga (1997, p. 196).

9 Veríssimo, Luis Fernando. In O Globo, 23/8/2012.
44 M. SODRÉ
information. Different from classical productivism, financialization, in its

enormous abstraction in the face of the social-historical reality, has no
commitment to the nation-state nor to the concreteness of the world.
Money enhances abstraction in social and intersubjective relations
(thus, the sociological metaphor of the “lonely crowd,” of the “mask of
anonymity,” of “liquid modernity“ or philosophies such as “the world
transformed in images”). It is, indeed, the new form of money that is
found behind the well-known philosophical speculation of Deleuze in
the “society of control” as a contemporary substitute for the “surveil-
lance society” described by the confinement of individuals in architec-
tonic forms and widely analyzed by Foucault. The latter corresponds
to the traditional forms of capital accumulation, money presented as a
physical reality, while, in the society of control, its reality is immaterial,
and consists principally of numerical inscriptions in accounting books.
Under the reign of the financial modeling of money, social agents are
more permeable to the dominion of abstract, ideological interpellations
of information.
Now, in the second millennium and in the midst of the intensification
of global capitalism, the financial nature of information is fully unveiled.
In fact, Internet interconnection arrangements did not originate solely
in the exchange of messages, but mainly in that of money. The Internet is,
in fact, a space with two tracks, one public and the other private (the
intranet), whose volume of traffic, many times greater than that of the
public, is practically unknown, except by specialists and economists.
It is not surprising, therefore, to hear the analogy between informa-
tion (quantitative-statistical) and currency, like that made by Wilden:
“Fruit of the war and economy of efficiency, the metric approach of
quantitative-statistical information theory treats information in the same
manner as money treats goods today. In the past, the change in social
relations allowed for a determined good (gold, for example) to become
the “general equivalent of exchange”—unit of measure for all other
goods. The goods became commodities. All the myriad pluridimensional
and quantitative use values of various entities and relations can, conse-
quently, be reduced, as became necessary, to one single, unidimensional
criterion: the economic (or monetary) exchange value. The quantita-
tive information theory obeys the same kinds of rules of transformation.
Although, at times, it is erroneously considered as part of a language,
quantitative information theory lacks the pluridimensionality of language
(and other communications systems). More than a language, one can

speak of a kind of currency.”10
Except that, at the same time, the economic system requires concrete
specifications for buying and selling operations, which raises the com-
munitarian theme, a new way of affirming not only the concreteness of
the particular locality, but also the practical question of hyper-mediation,
between producers and consumers, by the distributors. The power of
the distribution circuits also has its origins in the 1970s when this hyper-
mediation imposed itself by offering, with greater efficiency, an enor-
mous diversity of products to consumers, hijacking an important piece of
the value of production and stimulating advertising investments.
Independent of these data, however, the intrinsic characteristic of
the financial system allows for interpretations of the presence of capi-
tal in the form of money within the origins of capitalism, from which is
deduced the primitive presence of an ideology (subsequently developed)
of the appreciation of the circulation of liquid wealth. It is true that the
systemic pattern of financialization intensified in the second half of the
twentieth century (after the 1960s, when it became clear that the princi-
pal “business” of the USA was finance), but its origins are ideologically
visible by the end of the nineteenth century, bound to the sociological
approaches to community transformations and the new makeup of the
urban public.
Therein stems the incipient practical and theoretical interest in the
communicational issue, in that the circulation of information is crucial
in the urban space ruled by the market and by representative democracy.
In another, more recent context, in which the informational dimension
assumes the meaning of technological advancement, there are arguments
which tend to explain the deep, systemic financial crisis of the capitalist
center as an “information crisis,” that is, lacking productivity due to stag-
nating technology and innovation.
In the USA, the most significant academic institution in the intel-
lectual sphere of caution in terms of communication/information is
certainly the Chicago School of Sociology, which adheres to the prag-
matism of American philosophers such as William James, John Dewey,
George H. Mead, and Charles Sanders Peirce, as well as European soci-
ologists such as Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel, who proposed social
10 Wilden (2001). Translated into English from Portuguese version.

46 M. SODRÉ
approaches distinct from the Durkheimian, Weberian, and Marxian per-

spectives. From 1910 (the year in which Englishman Robert Park trans-
lated Simmel, and also that of the creation of the Columbia journalism
course), the School of Chicago became a distinguished center of empir-
ical and micro-sociological studies (analyses of particular or local situa-
tions) on the phenomena of communication, prioritizing the themes of
the “human community,” of the city as a “social laboratory,” and meth-
odologically opening itself up to disciplinary plurality in the field of social
sciences.
This same environment existed, in coinciding dates, in Europe, where
the important sociologist Max Weber made journalism—in the First
Congress of the German Sociological Association, in 1910—“the pri-
mary theme adequate for a genuinely scientific study,” in that he under-
stood the journals as something more than “simply capitalist businesses
with a desire for profit, but also political organizations that function as
political clubs.”11
American researchers, such as the sociologist Charles Cooley, philos-
opher and educator John Dewey, and journalist-sociologist Robert Park
(the latter heavily influenced by the Europeans, Gabriel Tarde and Georg
Simmel), were initially interested in the social framework of intersub-
jective transmission of meaning, and later began to attribute academic
importance to the emerging media. Decades later, William Thomas
and Florian Znaniecki attempted, in their pioneering work (The Polish
Peasant, 1927), to use the subjective experience of the public (by means
of the analysis of letters and journals, autobiographies, etc.) in order to
explain social processes. Soon after, Herbert Blumer, a name heavily fea-
tured in this school, looked to show how the meaning of social practices
emerged from interpersonal communication.
In principle, communication is a fundamental, anthropological expe-
rience (as there is no social life without communication), followed
by a knowledge about this experience, and, finally, an industrial reality
already manifested by a formidable technological apparatus sustained
by the market. In the USA, ever since the post-Second World War era,
this apparatus is described as “mass communications” that, likely due to
the influence of Nazi propaganda as much as propaganda for American
mobilization during the conflict, made believe that the “masses” would
11 Weber (1972, pp. 80–81).

be led by the competent rhetoric of the broadcasters. Thus, from the

force of mirroring the American techno-cultural reality of academic
knowledge of information stems the lasting effects paradigm.
The knowledge which is fundamentally desired here is the exten-
sion of the media’s discursive power over the populations. In truth, this
existed before the Second World War, although on a reduced scale: since
the first decade of the twentieth century, the questions which those who
studied communicational phenomena sought to answer have originated
in media businesses—thus, private organizations—such as journals, pub-
licity agencies, strategists, and consumer research institutes.
In other words, while the demand for sociological, anthropological,
and psychological knowledge originally stemmed from organizations
linked directly or indirectly to the States (planning agencies, agencies of
territorial administration, of behavior and attitude control, etc.), or from
the academic field itself, communicational knowledge was always priori
tized by the market. There are, naturally, exceptions, such as the studies
and evaluations of foreign propaganda in American territory during the
Second World War. In general, however, it is the market which holds the
highest demand for practical knowledge.
Within mass communication research, this understanding, both
empirical-functionalist and empirical-critical (or rather, in the case of a
critique, based on research and concrete analyses, but with a foundation
of cultural suspicion regarding the means of communication), originates
from European social researchers and thinkers (Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard
Berelson, and others) who emigrated to the USA in the first half of the
last century.
Centering the focus on Lazarsfeld to the aspect of empiricism, Paiva
calls attention to the first work produced in Europe on the social and
mental conditions of unemployment, an empirical study conducted by
three Austrian researchers (Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Hans
Zeisel), who over four months developed a participant observation
in the small town of Marienthal, near Vienna. This is the origin of the
book/report Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community
(1933),12 which marks the transfer of Paul Lazarsfeld (physicist by train-
ing and a socialist, married to Jahoda, as well as one of the founders of
12 Cf. Paiva (2011).

48 M. SODRÉ
the school of communication research) in the same year to the USA,

thanks to a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The welcome reception for this empirical study in the USA marks
Lazarsfeld’s new path as a researcher principally associated with govern-
ment and business research. He became the director of the Princeton
Office of Radio Research. In this position, he worked intensely with var-
ious members of the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School),
who had emigrated from Europe to the USA to flee the Nazis. As Paiva
notes, the discussions on method between Lazarsfeld and his subordi-
nate, Theodor Adorno, are famous, and ended in conflict. The conflic-
tive character of this relationship is exemplified by the passage in one of
the many letters in which Lazarsfeld harshly criticizes Adorno’s “verifi-
cation techniques”: “Your text leads one to suspect that you don’t even
know how one ought to empirically verify a hypothesis.”13
Specifically on empirical research and the Frankfurt School, there is
a passage in which Jay clarifies this question at length, noting that the
Institute, before migrating from Germany to the USA, always made use
of empirical research, much more for the objective of enriching, modify-
ing, and supporting its speculative hypotheses than with the aim of veri-
fying them. Its members admitted to working with primitive techniques,
but already recognized the necessity of improving their method.14 The
main proponent of this group was Adorno, known for his aversion to
empirical research, believing that it minimized the object of his tech-
niques. In counterpoint, Lazarsfeld aligned himself with the various
defenders of American statistical techniques, choosing the empirical anal-
ysis of facts as the ultimate forum for his investigations.
Although the aim of the Frankfurt School was to demonstrate that
both types of research (speculative and empirical) could be utilized
together, the empirical tradition embedded in American pragmatism pre-
vailed due to its greater managerial adequacy for market research geared
toward marketing agencies, media corporations, and governmental,
mostly military, agencies. The concepts of mass communication research
derive from empirical studies, both sociological and psychological, pro-
duced by renowned pioneers such as Harold Lasswell (who inaugu-
rated this line of research with the book Propaganda Techniques in the
13 Ibidem.
14 Cf. Jay (2009, p. 285).

World War), Bernard Berelson, Robert K. Merton, Wilbur Schramm, J.

Klapper, M. Janowitz, C. I. Hovland, Charles Osgood, Elihu Katz, and,
of course, Lazarsfeld. As Wolton said, “some from the industrial voca-
tion, others academic, provided, between 1950 and 1965, theoreti-
cal and analytical framework for the positive and negative effects of the
media, image construction, reception theories, the two step flow, the
gatekeeper, ‘selective attention,’ ‘uses and gratifications theory,’ and the
‘spiral of silence’ that are still highly valued today.”15
These concepts pass by the epistemological question of communica-
tion as well as the philosophical tone of cultural criticism characteristic
of the Frankfurt School. In schematic terms, the American preference is
not for Adorno, but rather for Lazarsfeld. The emphasis is on empiri-
cal findings, which come from an already socially legitimated academic
perspective (sociological or psychological, basically) on the envisioned
communicative process. This process is supported on the informational
level, an interactive model in which two poles (transmitter and receiver)
exchange messages with a necessary backdrop, the channel or medium.
This model enjoys the academic prestige of a concept of informational
calculation presented at the end of the 1940s by mathematicians Claude
Shannon and Warren Weaver.
This linear model, typical of positivism-functionalism, was incorpo-
rated by the researchers. In it, the subject of cognition stems from a con-
stant, which is the external or natural world, or rather, an object to be
known and controlled by research on opinion, panels, surveys, content
analyses, and evaluation of effects. The fundamental concepts of media
studies in the USA, therefore, originate in sociology.
In fact, all intellectual disciplines are supported by a conceptual base
relative to an objective dominion, upon which research and experimental
methodologies are focused. Nisbet calls these fundamental concepts “ele-
mentary ideas,” which obeyed at least four selective criteria: first, they
should be general ideas (figuring in the work of a considerable number
of great thinkers); second, they should be lasting (applicable to the past
as much as to the present); followed by characteristics (to differentiate
disciplines); and, finally, ideas in the complete sense of the term, that is, an
analytical framework more stable than mere “influences” and broader
15 Wolton (2006, p. 49).

50 M. SODRÉ
than methodological tools, as formalized (mathematically) as they can

be.
For Nisbet, there are five elementary ideas of sociology: community,
authority, status, the sacred, and alienation. Each of them opposed an
antithetical concept (community-society, status-class, authority-power,
sacred-secular, alienation-progress), which scientifically allows for the for-
mulation of verifiable hypotheses and politically summarizes the conflict
between tradition and modernity, constituting a theoretical series of the
sociological discipline.
Sociology thus arises from an important, reflective moment—the ide-
ological context of liberalism (autonomy of the individual and affirma-
tion of his rights), radicalism (retention of the masses by the political
power), and conservatism (the defense of traditional values and opposi-
tion to the Enlightenment)—which marks the reorientation of social
thought. In summary, it is a background marked by the social problems
stemming from the French Revolution. More specifically, the passage
from the individual radicalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries (dominated by the metaphysical immobility of reason in the subject
of consciousness) to the social-psychological world vision, which pri-
oritized the social context, from which stemmed the concepts of social
class, kinship, community, etc.16
The Communicational Focus

It can be affirmed, in a very general way, that the focus of American
media studies is the antithetical concept community-society. From the
Chicago School to current mass communication research, the theoretical
interests always emphasize transformations in religion, work, family, and
culture—forums in which primary, face-to-face relations predominate—
as an effect of overpowering societal urbanization, in which emerging
information and communication technologies play an increasingly large
role. The perspective of effects is, in schematic terms, the search for
instruments that evaluate changes produced in traditional, cohesive ties
by the media.
Throughout its evolution over the past century, this perspective has
always sought the identification of structural conditions and cognitive
16 Cf. Nisbet (1984, pp. 17–23).

mechanisms capable of explaining the circumstances in which media

messages can affect the broad, diffuse, and heterogeneous public’s opin-
ions and beliefs. Academic positions oscillate between the supposition of
strong effects and weak or minimal effects, both based on theories which
appeal to metaphors such as cognitive resources.17
The first case (1930–1950), generally attributed to Lasswell, corre-
sponds to the theories of the “magic bullet” and the “hypodermic nee-
dle” (two different metaphors with the same meaning), according to
which the persuasive effects of a message which, like a bullet or needle,
hits its “target,” the mass understood as a heterogeneous agglomerate
of anonymous individuals uprooted from their cultural contexts, would
be immediate. In truth, Lasswell took from the journalistic practice the
formula (rhetorical) of elaboration of the lead (who, what, how, when,
where, and why) to define the act of communication with a behavio-
rist formula (Who? Says what? On what channel? To whom? With what
effect?) and transformed it into a research method.
The second case (1950, 1960) is attributed to Lazarsfeld and his
group of researchers at the University of Columbia, who rejected the
hypothesis that the means of communication held great power over
the public.18 To contest the concept of the mass, which supported the
perspective of powerful effects, Lazarsfeld and his student Katz were
inspired as much by the work of Kurt Lewin (who studied individual
reactions to messages within primary groups) as by the ideas of sociol-
ogist Edward Shils, influential intellectual at the University of Chicago.
Traversing various areas of knowledge, Shils earned the appreciation of
Talcott Parsons, the best known American sociologist of all times and a
disciple of Max Weber. He is also the man who introduced Weber into
American academia. Shils and Parsons authored a “theory of social
action” at the beginning of the 1950s.
In Shils, Parson’s concept of “subsystems of social action” was con-
verted into the concept of “small social group,” similar to Lewin’s “pri-
mary groups,” which allowed for the displacement of the European,
elitist idea of the mass (which originated in the thought of Ortega
y Gasset) to that of differentiated groups. From this began the model
17 The use of metaphor to cope with complex theories is frequent among various scien-
tific fields, but is particularly evident in the theories of communication.

18 Vide Klapper (1960). Lazarsfeld’s disciple, Klapper, summarizes the perspective and
terminology of the theory of minimal effects in this volume.

52 M. SODRÉ
known as the “two-step flow of communication,” by Lazarsfeld and

Katz. Twisting the linearity of the relation between media and the pub-
lic, they adopted a perspective of two distinct processes in communica-
tion (media and interpersonal) and introduced the concept of “opinion
leaders,” a logical consequence of the fact that the model attributed
greater weight to the influence of small groups on individuals. The
People’s Choice, a famous study on the 1940 American presidential cam-
paign, is the seminal work following this analytical line.19 Considering
individual choice in the electoral process, the study reaches the conclu-
sion that a reduced parcel of individuals, the opinion leaders, would have
more influence over the voters than the means of communication.
This conceptual turning point leads to research techniques that
become important to the large media companies, not just for ideological
motives (it allows them to remove the political suspicion of mass media
manipulation), but also from the sociometric perspective of measuring
individual choices. It is worth reiterating here the parallel between eco-
nomic and communicational empiricism, accentuating the prevalence of
the methodology over any other moments of scientific research, making
the science more administrative than critical. Econometrics and sociom-
etry are tools for reducing the historical complexity of social relations
down to numbers, which removes the political phenomenon and opens
the way for the administration of the society by the market.
Supported within this institutional framework is the hegemonic ver-
sion of the history of communication research in the narrow sense, seen
by researcher James Carey as an attempt to “focus, justify, and legitimate
a 20th-century invention, the mass media, and to give direction and
intellectual status to professional teaching and research concerning the
same institutions. But it is hardly an innocent history, for it was invented
for political reason: to cast loyalties, resolve disputes, guide public policy,
confuse opposition, and legitimate institutions; in short, the history that
emerged was a minor episode in the social-political and ideological strug-
gles of the 20th century.”20
Thus, despite many criticisms (excessive generalizations of results,
deliberate data suppression, etc.), but very likely in virtue of its struc-
tural affinity with the spirit of the market, Lazarsfeld’s model became
19 Cf. Lazarsfeld et al. (1944).

20 Cf. Meditsch (July/December 2010).
hegemonic in the academic field both in the USA and in Europe. It is

not at all contradicted by the gatekeeper concept introduced by David
Manning White in 1950, which understood the selection of news as a
personal process on the part of the journalist, defined as the “gate-
keeper” of the informational flow.
In another context, the concept of mediation—a Hegelian con-
cept, introduced into South American cultural analyses by Jesus-Martin
Barbero from the theoretical perspective of an active reception by differ-
entiated groups—allows for expectations regarding the good social use of
the media (the praxiological use, in which the media become an instru-
ment of popular power). Sociologically, this owes a debt to the American
model, in that it merges Parson’s concept of subsystems of social action
with that of small social groups (Shils) on an interpretive level analogous
to the “opinion leaders” of Lazarsfeld and Katz. In another theoretical
direction, the social-philosopher Jürgen Habermas placed the mediation
concept in service of a utopia of rationalist and democratic use of com-
municative action, beyond the capitalist control of the public sphere.
In the end, these conceptions (with the exception of Habermas)
remain within the theoretical framework pertaining to the American soci-
ological school. Relating to Lazarsfeld, however, it is not a homogene-
ous model, in that over time it has behaved as a differentiated typology
of approaches and themes. Something different appears, for example, in
1955 with Warren Breed’s “organizational theory,” in which the journal-
istic product results from the injunctions or pressures exercised by corpo-
rate media over the journalists.
More recently, Neuman and Guggenheim, researchers at the
University of Michigan, criticized the polarity between minimum and
powerful effects as an obstacle to theorizing, as an unknown regarding
important aspects of the last half-century of research, and as a simplifi-
cation of our knowledge of the communicative process. They therefore
propose a six-stage model of cumulative research groups, based on the
extensive literature on the field.21
The first stage includes the group, persuasion theories (1944–1963),
characterized by the hypothesis of direct and immediate effects and a line
that generates studies on the effects of political campaigns, advertising
campaigns, public behavior and attitudes in the sphere of the means of
21 Vide Neuman and Guggenheim (2011, pp. 169–196).

54 M. SODRÉ
communications. The second stage is entitled active audience theories

(1944–1986) which, in a way similar to persuasion theories, formulates
basic hypotheses on the transmission of messages to atomized individ-
uals, but takes into consideration the psychological orientations of the
public, which would justify the adjective “active.” The third, social con-
text theories (1955–1983), is concerned with the way that individuals
support themselves in interpersonal relations in order to interpret com-
municational messages. The fourth, societal and media theories, focuses
on the analyses of the societal hegemony and on cumulative individual
effects over time. The fifth, interpretive effects theories, removes itself
from the pure and simple perspective of effects to focus on how the
media processes its messages, and includes modern, prestigious hypoth-
eses such as agenda-setting and framing, according to which the media
does not only tell the public what to think, but also how to think. The
sixth is the new media theories stage, which focuses on new technologies
and their interactive properties, with special emphasis on the Internet.22
Even with diversified “theories” or angles, media studies walk along
the path of mass communication research, which is a chapter of sociol-
ogy, therefore, only one region of an interpretive system, based on old
predicative knowledge (Aristotelian), which attributes subject-actors to
fact-objects. The first problem is that, in the contemporary heterogeni-
zation of society, not only due to technological reasons, but principally
industrial, the classes analyzed by Marx, as well as the social rules noted
by Durkheim, no longer work as references or descriptive support for
social agents. What appears on the near horizon is the idea of a social
“emptiness,” which Baudrillard compares to the notion of the mass: “It
is in this sense that the mass is characteristic of our modernity, the title of
a highly implosive phenomenon, irreducible by any traditional practice
or theory, maybe by any practice or any theory of any kind.”23 To this,
Zylberberg adds the hypothesis that “all modern systems function with
this nebulous entity, this floating substance, whose existence is no longer
22 Evidently, other classifications can be made, but these are bibliometrically supported,
according to Neuman and Guggenheim, on the Institute for Scientific Information’s data-
base, which contains more than three million citation records. In their study, the authors
researched around 300 political, public opinion, social psychology, communication, health,
and journalism magazines as well as a group of 20,736 articles published over a period of
50 years.
23 Baudrillard (1978, p. 10).
social, but statistical, and whose only manner of approach is that of pub-
lic research. A simulation, on the horizon of which the social has already
disappeared.”24
The second problem is that, from the traditional perspective, the
facts are inscribed on a “thick” or “delayed” temporality (Paul Virilio’s
expression to designate extended time). Now, electronic information
tends to be punctuated by its own technical operation capability (the
speed of transmission) and by the characteristics of immediacy, unlimited
space, and the low cost of the cybernetic network. In this, time is “unre-
alized,” in the sense that the unlimited production of occurrences gives
way to an immediacy that, preventing consciousness from representing
the phenomena within a duration (therefore, within the thickness of
time), effectively abolishes time and, with it, the classic ontology of social
facts.
With electronic technology, there is another spatial-temporal experi-
ence: time shortens and time shrinks. In electronic media, occurrences
always take precedence over the possibility of being interpreted by
individuals, as the social spillage of communication technologies takes
precedence over its interpretation by individual and collective forms of
consciousness. The future repeats technologically over the present, and
the present, by means of digital image treatment, appears to equal the
past. This is the reality with which communications technology has to
deal with, while the classical social sciences reserve themselves in a tem-
poral statute, where it is possible to consciously interpret and know.
Because of this, it seems logical to make a sociology or anthropology of
communication, in that, only in this way, by the current modes of intelli-
gibility, can some “disciplinary” profit be guaranteed.
The “temporality of quotidian life, which includes retro-projections
onto the past and projections into the future, the unstable forms of
memory and imaginary anticipation,”25 is, therefore, that which is
studied by the social sciences forged in the nineteenth century. The
difference between the two temporal formations has epistemological
consequences. Consequently, when someone takes it upon themselves
to carry out a sociology of (or in) communication, apart from anthro-
pology, psychology, economics, and cultural studies, he remains within
24 Zylberberg (1986, p. 16).

25 Jeudy (1997, p. 152).
56 M. SODRÉ
a functionalist perspective, which makes the study of communication

something parasitical to a classical discipline of social thought, therefore
a reductionist knowledge, averse to interpretive pluralism. This commu-
nication is purely “functional,” that is, conceived as the application of an
instrument (radio, journal, magazine, television, Internet, or other) to be
analyzed, or thus as a mere pretext for the resolution of a problem with
the discipline in question, such as that of supplying an analytical need
in the face of the multiplication of information devices in contemporary
culture.
This same technical functionalism was responsible for the success of
the communication phenomenon and its prospective prestige between
the 1960s and the 1980s in the Western world, according to which the
infinite liberty of expression would put an end to all discourse of domi-
nation and society would become fully educated. On the one hand, the
new technical means accelerated the sensation of existential modernity,
liberating the individual from his temporal and spatial restrictions: the
effects of simultaneity, instantaneity, and universality can be described as
demiurgic. On the other hand, from the telephone to the radio, from
television to informatics, communications technology was always per-
ceived by the public and academic spheres as an approximation to the
communal ideal of ethnic and cultural diversity on the planet, accord-
ing to what is inferred from the marketing academic, Marshall McLuhan,
regarding his idea of the “global village.” This is electronically fostered:
the Internet, proclaimed the “supreme arena” for the development
of these techniques, would come to offer interactivity as a technical
response to the problem of the symbolic domination (the monopoly of
speech) of the media over its audiences.
Yet all the potential for thought promised by the communicational
sphere in this period has in some way rung hollow since the last decade
of the last century. The Frankfurt School’s criticism of functional com-
munication, for seeing a threat of inauthenticity in the rise of cultural
industries and the monopolies of communication—the reification of
symbolic production and the suppression of individual capacity for crit-
ical thought—lost its academic force. The same fate struck linguistics
which, since the end of the 1970s in Europe, had driven the academic
dream of a general science of man comparable to the natural sciences.
At its apogee, communication theory seemed to completely identify
with semiology (semiotics is an American designation), contained in the
suggestion of a general theory of signs by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
which he designated “séméiologie.” In 1957, Roland Barthes proposed,

in his Mythologies, the establishment of the theoretical foundations of
semiology, applying its analyses to the product of industrial culture,
to be treated as myths and communicational rites. Similar ideas were
widely accepted in the Centre d´Études des Communications de Masse
(CECMAS), founded in 1960 by sociologist Georges Friedmann and
filled out by critics and researchers such as Roland Barthes, Edgar Morin,
Julia Kristeva, A. J. Greimas, Christian Metz, Eliseo Verón, and others.
In this area, from the end of the 1960s, Jean Baudrillard was an exem-
plary author, looking to reinvent the semiology of Saussure (especially in
For the Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign) as an operation for
the transversality of the disciplines active at the time, such as linguistics,
structural anthropology, psychoanalysis, and Marxist analysis of the pro-
ductive processes. At the same time, in Italy, semiological authors such as
Umberto Eco, Paolo Fabbri, and others worked in this field. The adhe-
sion to semiology has as its base the presupposition that a communica-
tion system is always analogous to the human language, thus differing
from the French, Italians, or Europeans in general.
Why did this theoretical movement surrounding semiology occur in
Europe and not in the USA which, for its part, harbored a fecund tradi-
tion of similar studies, methodologically based on the nineteenth-century
semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, within the sphere of pragmatic phi-
losophy? There is no lack of objections to this inquiry, citing more recent
scholars such as Thomas Sebeok and others, but studies along these
lines not only shy away from the field of media, but also lack the creative
thrust of the French and Italian essays.
An epistemological response should be sought within the French phil-
osophical circle, more precisely in the reaction offered by the structural-
ist method to phenomenology, which was dominant until the beginning
of the 1960s. This explanation is well-sketched by Descombes: “Let
us suppose that we consider linguistic phenomena as communicational
phenomena, and the languages dubbed ‘natural’ as codes used by men
to transmit messages; we obtain semiological structuralism.” If, tak-
ing one more step, we assimilate all of social life into a process of sig-
nal exchange, we find structural anthropology as defined by Lévi-Strauss,
that is, the reduction of anthropology to semiology. And, in a more
58 M. SODRÉ
general manner, the structuralist thesis fits entirely into Jacques Lacan’s
celebrated formula: “The unconscious is structured as a language.”26
A historical review of the communicational field truly cannot pass over
the affinity between communication theory and the structuralist method,
which has been strong since the mid-1960s, but whose origins can be
traced to the earlier “structural” methodology of linguists Ferdinand de
Saussure and Roman Jakobson. Different from phenomenology, which
describes the phenomenon (the lived experience) in search of a meaning,
structuralism is a comparative method which utilizes the mathematical
concept of structure (a set of purely formal relationships. defined by cer-
tain properties) to show that any content, whether an axiom or a cultural
content, is a model which is isomorphic (analogous, similar) to others,
present in different sets. The meaning in a representation or an object is
not sought in this, but simply a comparison between sets. With the com-
parison made, the structure isomorphically reveals itself.
In the Lévi-Straussian analysis of myths, this method acquires an aes-
thetic brightness. Where does it cross paths with communication theory?
In the sign system idea, stemming from Saussure’s linguistics. In Saussure,
however, it is treated more as a suggestion to be developed than a ready
and finished concept. Thus, the system incorporated by the communi-
cational field is the same as that of the mathematical theory of informa-
tion, from engineers such as Shannon and Weaver, outlining problems
in the quality transmission of messages, thus, on questions of codifica-
tion, transmission, and reception. From the point of view of commu-
nications engineering, what truly matters is determining the reception
without noise from the signs or the message, and this implies privileging
the receiver, as this is the measuring pole of transmission. In this pro-
cess, codification should be independent from the users (transmitter and
receiver), as well as the signs or the messages.
Now, with the conversion (since the 1960s) of the disciplines of social
thought (Lévi-Straussian anthropology, Lacanian psychoanalysis) to
semiological structuralism, not only the unconscious, but social life itself
comes to be seen as a linguistic structure, and language is understood
as a communicative code. Prioritizing codification—or rather, making
it superior to the message, to the speaker, and, in the end, to the very
26 Descombes (1979, p. 114).

meaning—as shown by the communications engineers, the code assumes

the status of law in the communication field.
There were fertile consequences in this period due to this conversion
from anthropological, psychoanalytical, and communicational analy-
ses to structural semiology. In anthropology, there was proclaimed the
“death of man” (or rather, of the explanation by the lived experience, as
per phenomenology) and the “life” of structure, which now explained
everything. In psychoanalysis, changing the terminology, the code
received the name significance and this, in turn, preceding the meaning,
subdued the subject. In general, the subject as support of the phenomena
or of the set gave way to the code.
Likewise in philosophy, this topic reverberated in radical criticism to
authenticity which, as shown by Boltanski and Chiapello, “beginning
with different philosophical orientations, they have the common desire
of putting an end to the responsible subject, for whom the alternative
between authenticity and inauthenticity would be presented as an exis-
tential choice, denounced as pure illusion or as an expression of bour-
geois ethos.”27 In J. Derrida, for example, the two authors locate a
process of deconstruction of privilege conferred upon the voice or living
word as a resource of authenticity over the written word as a contingent
artifice which would place the truth in danger. In G. Deleuze, they see
the development of a critique of representation that affirms the impos-
sibility, in the world of simulacra (figures of the code), of the distinction
between an original and a copy. While deconstruction is a concept intro-
duced by Derrida (as a reinterpretation of Heidegger’s Destruktion), it
appears equally in Deleuze when he points to the mode of constructing
philosophical discourse.
Also in communicational analysis, monopolistic capitalism is defined
more by the monopoly of the code than by control of the means of pro-
duction. The hypothesis of a generalized hypertrophy of capitalist codifi-
cation, accompanied by a radical transformation in the mode of meaning,
orients the greater part of Baudrillard’s communicational semiology. One
can speak of a code paradigm, radically opposed to the effects paradigm
considered by the line of mass communication research.
Under the code, the meaning of the world, the individual, and
even the real is presented in channels of disappearance. “Behind every
27 Boltanski and Chiapello (1999 and 2011, p. 610).

60 M. SODRÉ
television and computer screen, in every technical operation with which

he is confronted every day, the individual is analyzed, function by func-
tion, tested, experimented, fragmented, assaulted, ordered to respond
- a fractal subject henceforth dedicated to dissemination on the net-
works, for the price of the mortification of the gaze, the body, of the real
world,” says Baudrillard.28 He addresses what Marshall McLuhan called
the “perpetual test,” administered to citizens of the consumer society by
the media, by studies, and by all protocols of verification and control.
McLuhan, indeed, thought of the new social-technological reality
within this same code paradigm, synthesized in his famous formulation
“the medium is the message.” In clearer terms, the medium—or rather,
the technological tool articulated with the market within a form of life
pre-programmed by the structural law of value—is the expression of the
code, which predominates over the content. One can deduce from this
line of critical analysis that the new technological or digitalized society
is in fact a techno-structure (a notion considered by Keynesian economist
and liberal thinker John Kenneth Galbraith), traversed by the fragmenta-
tion of clippings, the immateriality of a discursive real, and, at the same
time, by the primacy of objects in sociability.
As we know, since the 1960s—when objects became prioritized
in social life as a consequence of the primacy of consumption over
production—major analyses began to arise in the dimension of objects
or the technique of contemporaneity. Baudrillard’s thinking is paradig-
matic in the irreducibility of the object by the traditional disciplines and
approaches to the social life. Implicit in this is the primacy of the objects
or of facts over the participant observer of a theoretical or conceptual
subject, thus another mode of formulating the thesis of prevalence of the
code of structures over the phenomenological conscious.
While acting almost always from the point of view of communication,
the reflective intervention of Baudrillard—more anthropological-phil-
osophical than sociological—was quite broad, in subsequently seeing
that the intelligibility of contemporary society overtook the dominion of
strictly defined semiology.

More Phenomenon Than Concept

In fact, semiotics or semiology is truly only one methodological path,
applicable merely to questions related to the theory of language. The
nineteenth-century insights of the pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce,
the brilliant analyses of Barthes, Baudrillard, and all the instrumental dis-
course analyses by the English (these, since the end of the nineteenth
century, have basically practiced a mixture of literary and culture theory)
and French are still academically seductive, but the resulting semiological
studies, with rare exceptions, end up converted into a closed academic
jargon without a greater perspective of comprehensive knowledge in his-
torical terms.
This whole academic movement did not lead to the constitution of an
“argumentative community”—or a species of “invisible college” where
problems are discussed within shared lines of research—favorable to the
integration of the communicational area with the scientific field. Without
integration and critical reflection, the theoretical shine can produce more
“secret marks of distinction” than intellectual clarification, as Calhoun
observes: “to help integrate its disparate parts and lines of inquiry.
This is not just a matter of laying foundations or pursuing synthesis;
it is also a matter of providing the terms of reference for critical debate.
Lack of integration and critical reflection are problems both for enabling
empirical research to have deep and cumulative scholarly significance,
and for enabling researchers to say why their work really matters.”29
On the other hand, the very technical development of communica-
tion devices has supplied some responses to problems raised by humanist
critiques, such as in the case of interactive techniques made possible by
electronic communication. This, symbolized by the Internet, came to
offer individuals opportunities for the autonomous use of mechanisms
that were earlier assumed to be dominant.
Today, there is wide consensus over the fact that communication, in
practice, is the mobilizing ideology of a new kind of workforce, corre-
sponding to the present stage of the production of commodities by
global command. From the point of view of the bourgeois, liberal State,
it has become an important question for the social, cultural, and politi
cal balance of the Polis placed under the empire of finance; in truth, it
has become much more important than what could have been predicted
29 Calhoun (January/June 2012, p. 294).

62 M. SODRÉ
in the middle of the last century. Of course, with the internal combus-
tion engine and electricity, the weight of technology had already become
quite evident in the transformations of social life, which only increased
with the coming of the train, the automobile, and the plane. Greater
than this, however, is the impact of electronic communication technol-
ogies on society, to the point that the marketing of this technology ends
up naming the very social form—“information society,” “communication
society,” etc.
As Vattimo explains, with reference to German philosopher Martin
Heidegger’s reflections on technology, “the technology which in fact
allows for a glimpse of the possibility of a dissolution of the rigid con-
trast between subject and object is not the mechanical technology of the
motor, with its unidirectional movement from the center to the periph-
ery, but it well could be, instead of this, the technology of communi-
cation, the technology of the collection, ordering, and distribution of
information.”30 Therefore, instead of a center which moves and a periph-
ery which is moved, it is a multidirectional circuit like that which is now
produced in network communication, without the oppressive hierarchy
of unidirectionality. This technology (communicational) is, naturally,
electronic, which evokes the “new technology” referred to by Benjamin
as essentially distinct from the old and characterized, not by the domina-
tion of nature, but by the “regulation of the relation between man and
nature.”31
Vattimo’s commentary goes beyond Heidegger’s explicit intentions
(which, in manifest terms, were pessimistic about technology), but
accompanies the argumentative spirit of the philosopher when he, in
more than one text, describes the specialization of science and technol-
ogy as “the era of images of the world,” that is, as the aim of controlling
the world by calculation tends to dissolve the objectivity of things in
pure abstractions, leading to a multiplication of images and languages.
This equally leads to the multiplication of “interpretive agencies,” which
relativize and reduce the unitary force of hegemonic visions of the world,
dissolving the pretensions of absolute objectivity, whether in science or in
history.
30 Vattimo (2003, p. 26).

31 Benjamin (1993, p. 147). Cf. Rouanet (1981, p. 71).
This line of argumentation clearly contrasts with the pessimism of the

Frankfurt School (emphasizing the ambiguous position of Benjamin)
regarding the effects of communication and information technologies on
contemporary culture. Moreover, it seeks to respond to a more recent
critical current which associates the fetishistic valuation of technology
and the pragmatic hyper-functionalism of advanced, capitalist society to
electronic communication, supposedly responsible for the growing pro-
cess of the emptying of the contemporary subject’s symbolic capacity,
that is, the capacity of the individual to inscribe himself into the geneal-
ogy of meaning by means of the temporal and spatial contextualization
of symbols. Electronic media is the great icon of this process relating to
the current configuration of public discourse and the collective produc-
tion of meaning.
The fact is that this question grew at such a magnitude and evolved in
such a way in relation to modern social life that the academic sphere lost
sight of the limits between the phenomenon and its conceptualization. It
is something analogous, in a certain way, to that which is deduced from
reading a famous poem about Mount Lu, composed by Su Shi, one of
the most influential Chinese writers of the Song dynasty in the eleventh
century. “We do not know the true face of Mount Lu because we are all
within,” reads one of the verses. The mountain is a metaphor for the spe-
cific, local geography in which historical facts happen. The poem intends
to say that the mere description of Mount Lu is insufficient for compre-
hending it, as it is imperative to open oneself up to different angles to
accept different perspectives32; principally to open oneself up to an exter-
nality, from which stem critical, not merely descriptive, voices.
This acceptance appears to accompany the theoretical impetus of
the Europeans. Yet with the caveat of that which the French called “la
théorie,” there was left, in the North and Latin American periphery, the
fragmentary view of dozens of theoretical attempts (each one searching
to present “its own” theory) and of small, functional descriptions, fed by
the obligatory university performance.
Now, it is not surprising to the activists of thought that, for many
years, since the beginning of the twentieth century or so, the university
as a whole has begun to be more of a manager of theoretical questions
than a creative incubator of ideas. This is very evident in the field of
32 Cf. Zang Longxi, professor from the City University of Hong Kong and renowned
specialist in cultural studies, cited in O Globo (5/25/2012).

64 M. SODRÉ
social thought when one considers what Sloterdijk calls “the vectors of
these three bad messages which penetrate the fundamental forces of the
human reality, to which citizens of modernity have rendered accounta-
ble: domination of the relations of production over idealist fictions;
domination of the functions of vitality, indeed, the will to power, over
the symbolic systems; domination of the unconscious or of the pulsa-
tory nature over the human consciousness in itself.”33 These vectors are,
respectively, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who never belonged to the
university sphere.
Evidently, what is being referred to here are the nineteenth-century
authors who raised crucial questions which reverberated into the twen-
tieth century and who were not truly specialists in any one isolated dis-
cipline, but great thinkers tied to a species of prophecy of transformative
truth in the world. This does not mean that creators within the socio-
logical discipline no longer exist, but when they do (Durkheim, Weber,
Simmel, and others), it is not treated as a merely scientific reflection, in
that the axial concepts have close relations to the origins of the great idea
of non-professors or non-specialists, that is, an imaginative origin with
ethical and political foundations.34 In fact, what most contributes to the
affirmation of the social sciences is the ideology (liberal, radical, conserv-
ative) that motivates the ethical confrontations of the world.
“The great ideas of the social sciences have always had moral foun-
dations,” observes Nisbet. In principal, this sounds more like European
thought than American thought, as the sociological environment in the
USA at the beginning of the twentieth century was characterized by a
reasonable social activism, especially visible at the Chicago School. In
this can also be observed the same difference, already noted, between the
European Hayek and the American Friedman. Nisbet says: “It does not
diminish the scientific value of authors such as Weber or Durkheim to
note that they worked on intellectual material (whether values, concepts,
or theories) to which they would never have had access had the moral
33 Sloterdijk(2011, p. 115).
34 In the case of communication, there are many seminal ideas produced beyond the aca-
demic sphere or little recognized in university circles molded by the self-enforced require-
ments of method and empiricism. Jean Baudrillard is a good example, but there are various
others, such as Vilém Flusser, who lived 32 years in Brazil, with little intellectual recogni-
tion. Flusser was radically trans-disciplinarian.
conflicts which shook the 19th century not existed.”35 Stressing that the
great sociologists never stopped being moralists, he notes the moral col-
oration of concepts such as community, alienation, authority, and status
(or social status). Moreover, “they never stopped being artists” in the
sense of the appeal which they made to intuition and imagination, in a
way analogous to the visibility of the modern phenomenon, represented
in literature by writers such as Balzac, Dickens, Poe, Hugo, Baudelaire,
and others.
Yet sociology, anthropology, psychology, or any other name which
could be attributed to the modern disciplines of social thought (ear-
lier ruled by economics and history), were born from philosophy, but
more precisely by a philosophical outlining of the cognitive continent
of History. In other words, they are born of Greek thought (Socratic-
Platonic and Aristotelian), tied to Christian theology and historically
transmitted, like a species of the Olympic torch, from each European
generation to the next. This always works into the framework of the
paideia, that is, of the education or formation of souls, but is not limited
to the academic scope, in that philosophy, in its more creative moments,
is always present, in explicit and implicit ways, in the Platonic analysis of
the relation between individual wisdom and the Good (to agathon) of
the Polis. The ethical and political questions implied in the theories of
great sociologists such as Le Play, Tönnies, Comte, Durkheim, Simmel,
and others belong to the philosophical tradition.
While communication was inscribed into the philosophical field since
antiquity, whether in the technical, political framework of language called
rhetoric or in questions concerning communal cohesion, it does not rise
from the philosophy of the last century, but from sociology, practiced both
by the Americans and the already-mentioned Europeans who migrated
to the USA. This is not to say that reflection on the communicational
practice lacks a socially critical background. Already in the advent of the
reflection on journalism, still in the second half of the nineteenth-cen-
tury USA, the intellectual elite was concerned with the presumably
harmful effects of popular or sensational journalism (the penny press, yel-
low journalism). The creation of journalism courses is not far removed
from a search for a moral and intellectual antidote to a social discourse
considered damaging to the civic conscience, nor from elitist and
35 Nisbet (1984, p. 33).

66 M. SODRÉ
authoritarian aspirations related to the possibility of exercising control

over the press itself.
This same thing occurs when the scope is amplified to communication
as a social phenomenon on a greater scale. In the suspicion of some of
these researchers about the supposedly deleterious effects of the media,
there is something analogous to worries of an ethical nature—or rather,
the care of man’s humanity in all of his creations—on the part of the
great European sociologists of the past. It was these ethics which, jump-
ing into the crisis, brought with them that humanity in the studies which
were undertaken, even in fields such as religion, politics, and art. Because
of this, what predominated in the American sociological panorama was a
social model associated with the trampling of ethics by the economy and
the search for knowledge effective at improving the functioning of the
market, or rather, Lazarsfeld’s position dominated over that of Adorno.
Outside of the USA, there were and continue to be critical-reflective
incursions into the communicational phenomenon. In the second
decade of the last century, German dramaturge and poet Bertolt Brecht
presented, in his pamphlet entitled “Theory of Radio,” the technological
utopia of a society of dialog; by means of radio diffusion, everyone could
reach a consensus, and the masses could directly make demands of the
State.
In the same era, Teilhard de Chardin, Christian evolutionist thinker,
associated the new communication technologies to his idea of the spe-
cies’ progressive path to a planetary human organism, the “ultra-hu-
man.” This mechanical-philosophical, unsacred theology is a mixture of
utopia and communication theory, which is maintained in subsequent
decades, based on the “extraordinary network of radio and televisual
communication” conceived as a true nervous system, a “superior state of
consciousness, diffused in the ultra-technical, ultra-socialized, ultra-cere-
bralized fringes of the human mass.”36 From Chardin (and also Canadian
economist and historian Harold Innis, who had an “ecological” con-
ception of communication) proceeds McLuhan’s idea of the “global
village,” according to which the individual and the world are today
united at the same scale by communications technology. The theological
36 Chardin (1962, p. 362).

foundation remains in this conception of the advent of “a Pentecostal

condition of universal understanding and unity.”37
Between the 1960s and the 1990s, with more visibility within the
movement of French “théorie,” a critical-reflective side of communica-
tion was developed in Europe, which explicitly or implicitly tossed the
Frankfurt School aside, although under the guise of a structuralist semi-
ology, as already indicated. All this began to lose public impetus from the
last decade of the nineteenth century, at the same time that the univer-
sity, in nearly all parts of the world, began to manage the field by means
of the creation of communication courses. Throughout the last century,
the USA always counted on journalism and communication courses in a
broader sense. France, which in the 1960s had few professional, graduate
journalism courses and only one postgraduate course, (today, the Institut
Français de Presse et des Sciences de lÍnformation), began to expand the
sector at the postgraduate level.38 In Latin America and, particularly in
Brazil, the university proliferation of this field at all levels began at this
time.39
Cognitive Dispersion
This university movement does not appear to be directly related to the
specific job market, in that, in an apparent paradox, it continues to grow
in the midst of the journalism crisis and the diminishing demand for pro-
fessionals by the traditional media corporations. We stress “apparent”
because the journalism techniques (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) have
found multiple applications, flowing back from traditional journalistic
business to information businesses (so-called corporate communication
agencies), aimed at public image and client relationship management—
from the private world and in the State sphere—with the corporate media,
37 McLuhan (1979).
38 Authors or professors such as Philippe Breton, Daniel Dayan, Daniel Bougnoux,
Dominique Wolton, Louis Queré, Lucien Sfez, M. Souchon, Bernard Miège, F. Balle, Y.
Winkin, and many others began to progressively occupy the communicational phenom-
enon, always with a sociological perspective. In Spain, authors such as Gonzalo Abril,
Antonio Gutierrez, Fernando Contreras, and others approached more than one communi-
cational perspective.
39 The Interdisciplinary Society of Communication Studies (Intercom) practically became
a special of multinational organization in the area, with annual conferences which some-
times united more than five thousand people.
68 M. SODRÉ
Internet social networks, or even with the traditional public. Even at the
end of communication’s thematic trend, which was strong between the
1970s and the 1990s (the social effects of the McLuhanian discourse were
enormous), the word “communication” was maintained as an academic
rubric in the pedagogic administration of the universities, with an even
greater appeal together with the young population than that of the clas-
sic social science disciplines. The number of communications courses in
Brazil and the rest of the world does not stop growing, apparently not so
much for professional expectations as for the implicit recognition (more in
meaning than argumentation) of the importance of this field in contem-
porary life.
It would be expected that this relative distance from the job market
should be compensated in the academic sphere by an effort at the episte-
mological definition of the field. Yet the communicational phenomenon
also had other institutional commitments, in that, in the theoretical prac-
tice of the universities, it treated the passage of communication from a
species of cultural logic to communication as an applied social science, a
reason for which this shift was welcomed by the first government of the
Brazilian military dictatorship at the end of the 1960s.
Faced from a different angle, communication tends to be perceived
more from the perspective of the organization (corporate, technological)
than the institution, which is defined by the necessary moral and political
framework typical of earlier social sciences. Today, despite some isolated
attempts, the field remains as scientifically ambiguous as before, with
thousands of studies on every imaginable kind of theme, if not directly
related to the industrial practice of media or of the diversified spectacle,
at least capable of a connection with the pair “communication/informa-
tion,” or adjustable to the vague label “cultural studies.” In itself, this
thematic diversity is not a problem, in that it could be considered, on the
contrary, as an indicator of the semiological wealth of communication.
The problem is in the lack of connection between the lines of research,
which prejudices the scientific coherence of the field and induces cogni-
tive dispersion.
One of the causes of this dispersion may be precisely the professional
formation pertaining to the field. Wilbur Schramm, one of the princi-
pal names in academic marketing related to the post-Second World
War communication field, had already called attention to the fact
that Journalism Quarterly, the oldest academic magazine of the field
(founded in 1924 with the name Journalism Bulletin), had not published
over its first 21 years, “a single article on communication theory,” until

researcher Ralph Casey brought to its pages the concept of “mass com-
munication,” developed by sociologist Malcolm Willey, his university
colleague.40 In Brazil and other Latin American countries, as well, the
professional question overshadowed the conceptual issue of this theo-
retical field for many years, but this is not exclusive to communication.
More than one foreign sociology scholar can observe that the excessive
concentration of effort in professional formation (with the aim of pro-
ducing opinion studies, corporate surveys, etc.) has damaging conse-
quences on the long-term reflection of the disciplinary field, therefore,
for the production of sociology as a historical form of intellectual inter-
vention in society.
Four decades ago, Baudrillard detected in the university that which he
called the “first shockwave of the passage from production to pure and
simple reproduction,” but which we can also call the passage from pro-
ductive capitalism to financialization. For him, this first occurred in the
colleges of human sciences, because “there it became more evident (even
without a clear ‘political’ consciousness) that nothing more was produced
and that nothing more was carried out than reproduction (teaching staff,
knowledge and culture, these same factors for reproduction of the gen-
eral system). It is this, experienced as complete uselessness, irresponsi-
bility (‘What are sociologists for?’), downgrading, that fomented the
student movement of 1968 (and not the lack of jobs - there are always
plenty of jobs in reproduction - what does not exist are places, spaces
where one can truly produce something).”41
To situate this argument, it is necessary to keep in mind that the pres-
tige of a social science was never exclusively due to the objectivity of the
knowledge it generated, rather, overall, by its production of social, cul-
tural, and even political value. In this prestige, the university institution
found the center of gravity which allowed it to exercise the republican
function of counterbalancing the dispersion of professional specializa-
tions. Today, under the aegis of global financialization, the sciences of
man tend to become socially superfluous, if not “useless to industry,”
as evidenced, in the first week of 2013, by a Hungarian student move-
ment against governmental measures unfavorable to the social sciences,
40 Cf. Meditsch (July/December 2010, p. 34).

70 M. SODRÉ
including law and economics. In one of the posters raised by the protes-
tors: “I think, therefore I am a problem.”42
The “production” to which Baudrillard refers, therefore, has noth-
ing to do with industrial activity, but with ideas and concepts regarding
the concrete tensions of History, as was the case with social sciences in
their more productive or fecund moments, due to their illumination of
the contrasts between old and new values in the emerging urban soci-
ety after the French Revolution. In such moments, social thought was
still beyond capital reproduction as a form of social relations, which left
theoretical production a wide margin of determinations in relation to
historical reality. Under the influx of pure and simple reproduction, the
theories float like unbacked currency, indefinitely exchanging one for
another, by means of university-style exegesis.43
The same inquiry can be applied to the communication field: what
are communication theories for? An adequate response requires the
invocation of the social space category (the relational properties or inter-
subjective relations between professors and researchers), developed
by Bourdieu as one of the constitutive elements of the entire scien-
tific field. The Latin American beginnings were quite promising: since
the beginning of the 1960s, the International Center of Advanced
Communication Studies for Latin America (CIESPAL), affiliated with
UNESCO and based in Quito, has stimulated academic research and the
search for excellence in the teaching of journalism.44 At the end of the
1960s, in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, intellectuals from various areas,
many of them influenced by Lévi-Straussian structuralism and Lacanian
psychoanalysis, were attracted to the communicational field.
All of this changed, pari passu, with a new type of university bureau-
cratization, in which education—in general, not only pertaining to com-
munication—lost space to research within a techno-scientific model,
42 Cf. journal Le Monde, 3/1/2013, p. 19.

43 This may reach the level of pathetic, as occurs in psychoanalytic societies (the Lacan
ian faction frequently assumes cult status) or as in groups concerned with the philosophical
exegesis of Gilles Deleuze.
44 The promising beginning of CIESPAL did not lead to the continuity of this agency,
perhaps for its overly close connection to the Ecuadorean State. FELAFACS (The
American Federation of Schools of Communication) arose a decade later in Lima (Peru),
searching to remediate the theoretical insufficiency of CIESPAL. It managed to edit a pres-
tigious magazine, but has lost impetus since the beginning of this century.
characterized by the predominance of the circulation and consump-

tion of knowledge regarding its production. This is not a random phe-
nomenon: the emphasis on technological reproduction is stronger than
investment in pure science (which, paradoxically, was behind modern
computation), but the innovations (despite all of the scientific enthusi-
asm in neuroscience and nanotechnology) have a lesser magnitude than
that of the great discoveries, already over a century old.
The fact is that, in this “circulatory” model, resulting from the artic-
ulation of partial discoveries of exact science research with immediate
technological ends, a new way of being for scientific activity is designed,
in which the idea of science as a coherent totality of a cognitive field or
even the idea of a certain epistemological “normative-ness” appears to
disappear. Understanding is no longer consecrated or validated by the
peers of a community of knowledge: the fragmentary results of research
are quoted as shares in a stock exchange and directly indexed by inter-
national magazines, published in English. This is an extensive tendency
in the social sciences, where production of reflections or ideas is substi-
tuted for the numerical productivity of articles, recorded by the univer-
sity bureaucracy and by funding agencies.
This model tends to predominate in the communicational field, with
an evident impact on education. In Brazilian colleges in the area, it is
quite frequent that journalists, publicists, marketing specialists, and oth-
ers who have become professors concern themselves exclusively with the
didactical reproduction of their specific techniques without any academic
requirement for articulating specific knowledge with the implied statute
of understanding. In this fragmentation of the field of knowledge, frag-
mentary perception, which is characteristic of functional communication,
transmutes into a variety of academically reproduced competencies. This
is, indeed, the focus of private universities, concerned basically with the
professional satisfaction of their student “clientele.” Where there is no
republican spirit, the student is a client, and not subject to initiating him-
self into full citizenship.
In some cases, in public education, there is an attempt to break with
the so-called communicational field, prioritizing journalism as a centrali
zed “science,” but without clearly stating what is understood by science,
beyond positivist platitudes. It is equally common that theoretical dis-
ciplines of the curricula simply mirror the particular academic interests
of the teacher, sometimes without any tinge of epistemological coher-
ence. To better address this aspect, an epistemological reflection would
72 M. SODRÉ
benefit from an institutional analysis of public colleges, where the con-

quest of functional stability may signify a letter of emancipation for the
teaching staff from curricular pressures or other academic issues. In other
cases, academic fabrications spread with the technophilic supposition that
technical ideology is the only ideological formation of current society.
In this, one could consider that the Internet represents a new beginning
for media studies, and that “cyberculture” would correspond to all of
communication.
In truth, no technophilic extremism is capable of sustaining itself as
a doctrine, simply because the discourse of doctrine is not as potent as
that of marketing, born directly of the market. In the academic sphere,
the cyberculture discourse is inferior to functional marketing. For some
authors, this results in the extrapolated description of the technical per-
formance of intelligent machines, punctuated by philosophical flourishes.
This does not tend to go beyond the condition of discourse of techni-
cal accompaniment, dressed up as theory, with the tone of a religious
sermon.45
As is inferred, the social space or the set of intersubjective rela-
tions—which Bourdieu held to be one of the requirements for the
constitution of a scientific field—is quite confused in the case of commu-
nication. When one considers the importance of the professorships in the
past in guaranteeing the disciplinary nature of knowledge (a good model
is that of Durkheim’s professorship in Sorbonne), one can think of the
weak, pedagogical authority of the departments in university administra-
tion and, therefore, of the eventual, minimal scientific importance of a
discipline. Yet we highly stress the “past” in relation to the professorship,
in that it is, in fact, a peremptory model of ecclesiastical inspiration and
already substituted by the notion of the line of research in the environ-
ment of postgraduate courses.
In Brazil, at times, the funding agencies—which guarantee research
grants for professors with doctorates or to whom are attributed a zealous
duty for the excellence of the postgraduate program—bureaucratically
attempt to trace epistemological profiles for the field. It becomes, how-
ever, increasingly evident that, on its own, this academic panorama does
not generate the institutional and cognitive conditions necessary for the
constitution of a specific scientific area, legitimated or at least recognized
45 For example, some texts from the Frenchman, Pierre Lèvy.

as such by the more conspicuous authors of other disciplines related to

social thought.
This is not an argument related to voluntarism, or rather, it is not
imputing to the area in question a supposed “lack of academic desire”
as far as the epistemological constitution of the field. It is searching to
affirm an absence of objective conditions, reinforced by the very speci-
ficity of communicational knowledge, which hinders the ability to make
a distinction between episteme and the practical reality of communica-
tions technology, where the “competencies” (practical knowledge-doing)
expand more than understanding in the abstract and universal meaning
of the term. It is a new modality of indistinction between science and
“ideology” (an already outdated term for “false science”), recurrent in
the history of theoretical formulations. As is known, even Gramsci (dif-
ferently from Marx) committed the error of not making this distinction,
transforming “all of human knowledge (even natural science) into an
expression of subjectivity of historically conditioned classes.”46
Laval evokes from this respect the word agency: “This designates the
capacities to carry out a task with the help of material tools and/or intel-
lectual instruments. An operator, a technician, a man of art, all possess
professional skill. In this sense, the skill is that with which an individ-
ual is useful in productive organization. The notion would have as much
pertinence today when transformations of labor, in particular with the
diffusion of new information technologies, break the old ties between a
profession, a branch of knowledge and a diploma, or, moreover, when
they allow the ancient opposition between intellectual workers and
machine operators to be transcended.”47
The academic field of communications is traversed by the ideol-
ogy of skill, stimulated, particularly in the Brazilian case, by the emer-
gence of a technophilic lack of criticism,48 which tends to deposit the
46 Coutinho (1981, p. 82).

47 Laval (2003, p. 73).
48 It may be productive to examine, in light of this ideology, the deadlocked debates from
the end of the last century between the defenders and detractors of the journalism diploma.
If, for some defenders, the diploma is justified by the spirit of the old academic spirit, for
the detractors it would be anachronistic or unnecessary given the hegemonic “compe-
tence.” It is true that the concept of “professionalism” (deontological ballast of the “pro-
fessional journalism” category) seems inadequate to contemporary work conditions, and
it is also true that the very identity of journalism appears threatened, but it is necessary to
consider the regional or national differences. In the specific case of Brazil, the detractors,
74 M. SODRÉ
old hopes of social redemption and inclusion in digital technology. Laval

states: “Informatics and the internet are not seen as technical objects to
be studied and understood, nor even as supplementary tools, useful for
learning, but as ‘revolutionary’ leverage which will radically change the
school and the pedagogy.”49
While, in the century in which sociology arose, conservatives and radi-
cals found themselves with the same moral suspicion regarding industrial
capital and finance, the spirit which presides in academic communica-
tion is, in most cases, similar to that of communicational functioning,
or rather, conservative, with a neoliberal foundation. The fascination for
technical performance and for the spectacle suffocates possible moral
anxieties regarding financialization as a systemic standard of wealth, prin-
cipally due to the fact that this standard—a nature of wealth, with sym-
bolic reach—is very poorly understood by non-economists, who confuse
it with financial globalization, which implies the restriction of its reach
to the purely economic dimension. These “anxieties” are not the idio-
syncrasies of activists or the religious, but are the result of realistic eval-
uations of the failure of economic systems, of predatory exploitation of
the planet, and of the measure of social injustice wrought by neoliberal
practices.
In this psychosocial conjuncture, theorization of the scientific nature
of the field tends to be considered unnecessary in continuing the uni-
versity-level reproduction of partial knowledge, which can change with
the flavor of new techniques laid out by the market. This occurs in other
fields of knowledge: Psychoanalysis, for example, does not explicitly
claim itself to be a science, but as an understanding (strongly articulated
as a clinical practice) which transmits itself in forums of “scientific-ness”
outside the walls of universities (therefore, without a professional diploma
guaranteed by the State), in a social space constituted by the habitus
(practices and perceptions) of private clinics and with a symbolic capital
generated by psychoanalytic societies, some of which have international
connections.
Evidently, none of this interferes with the psychoanalytical method’s
search to increase its symbolic capital, theorizing on preceding works held
whether with technophilic or other motivations, forget or ignore the political status of the
diploma as a resource of resistance to employer discretion.
49 Laval (2003, p. 146).
as very important, among which the Freudian work is seen as an indis-

pensable mark in the foundation of the field. While no one ignores that
all knowledge obligatorily bound to its origins has a mystical basis (as the
foundation has no foundation, speculation becomes interminable), the
professional posture in the social space is scientific, whether in the profes-
sional identification (doctor, psychologist, etc.) of psychoanalysts, or in
the systematic rationalization of the theoretical propositions.50
In the case of communication, the theory is something which imposes
itself only intellectually on what could be designated a mutation of the
dominant systems of thought, on course to the implosion of the tradi-
tional ontology (substantialist) of Aristotelian inspiration. This is not,
however, of the voluntarist impulse to simply theorize, for the impalpa-
ble “will to science.” As there does not exist a single explicative structure
for the phenomenal diversity of communication, this only leads us to the
necessity of testing, in a pluralist way, the explicative capacity of a theory
(conceptual construction or provisory hypothesis on the phenomenon),
confronting it with that which is already called the “differential, explica-
tive capacity of theories related to other systems of intelligibility.”51
This could be considered a “transdisciplinarity” in its radicalism, that
is, a synoptic linking of diverse theories corresponding to different scien-
tific fields, classified by different disciplines, but which now belong to a
comprehensive structure (more than merely explicative), developed by its
own language and guided by a procedural logic: not positivist, and not
predicative on properties which are attributed to physically substantial-
ized objects.
From the beginning, it is worth noting that the techno-culture tends
to definitively expel positivist logic and its methodological rigidity, which
could well be called “methodolatry.” The ideas of disciplinary plurality
(interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity) expanded
starting in the 1960s, not so much with new and consistent epistemo-
logical positions, but as theoretical symptoms of a paradigmatic crisis of
knowledge. In contemporary art, this crisis had already appeared in the
generalization of eclecticism which hybridized artistic techniques and
50 But it is true that one finds, among the great names of contemporary psychoanalysis,
those who claim the statute of full science for this field of knowledge, for example, the
German psychoanalyst Alfred Lorenzer.
51 Berthelot (1986, p. 193).
76 M. SODRÉ
disciplines (cinema, photography, video, sculpture, painting, etc.), but

was still reticent in terms of academic epistemology.
In the 1950s, Cybernetics led to an interdisciplinary eclecticism for
researchers from areas such as biology, engineering, logic, and game
theory. Sometimes, this border crossing is inevitable, as with network
theory, which led mathematics to extend itself over territories earlier
mapped by sociologists and anthropologists, such as problems of social
organization. In general, however, in academic practice, multidiscipli-
narity is more a word of effect, used as a defense against eventual accu-
sations of intradisciplinary entrenchment, than a consistent, conceptual
articulation.
Because of this, there is no lack of those who cling to positions such
as “the research on psychological deformations as an effect of violent
media content is still psychology, and research on the causes of media
concentration is still economics and not communication.”52 In fact,
there is a strong tendency toward feudalization of the territories of
research, which is not avoided even by communication researchers—in
principle, interdisciplinary by obligation due to the plural origins of their
field—who tend to claim any and every subject related to communica-
tion as their own, exclusive object.
Still, even attempting to disciplinarily isolate itself in order to gain
cognitive legitimation—in that academic ideology tends to value disci-
plinary uniqueness—the analytic discourse of communication presents
itself in practice as “synthetic,” in the sense of an aggregation of differ-
ent things or assertions. In this lies the perception that “the members of
our field are conscious of the fact that we are not always taken seriously
by academics from other disciplines” or that “communication is appar-
ently considered, by historical nonsense, political science and sociology,
as having more or less the same merit and, let’s say, the education of a
chauffeur.”53
Despite all of the problems which arise in the construction of a syn-
optic discourse, there are perspectives of a positivist nature, from the
natural to the social or human sciences. Fields once rigidly determined
are redefined in relation to new projects and the advancement of scien-
tific knowledge. It can be discussed whether a determined knowledge
52 Cf. Stanfill (2012). Translated into English from Portuguese version.

53 Ibidem.
corresponds to a single discipline or a multidisciplinary field, but the dis-

cussion often reveals itself to be more administrative or managerial than
cognitive, in that the general operator of connections is only the concept
of “science,” whether natural or social.
Absence of Episteme
Yet neither multidisciplinarity nor methodological expansions resolves
the epistemological problem of communicational knowledge. To treat
it vaguely as a “field” is a tautology in the terms of Bourdieu, in that
every and any scientific knowledge is defined by a field. In some aca-
demic forums, the difficulty tends to be circumvented by arguing that
communication is not a discipline, but an interdisciplinary object, which
mobilizes no less than ten disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, anthropol-
ogy, sociology, law, political science, psychology, history, economics, and
psycho-sociology.54
Consequently, with the lack of academic consensus as to the the-
oretical unification of this field of knowledge in comparison with the
rest, it seems natural to appeal to other social disciplines. It is also nat-
ural that each discipline sees the communicational phenomenon from
its own object of knowledge. Obviously inferred by this is the inexist-
ence of a true episteme, opting for the admission of a common dominion
transparent to the sociocultural sphere of communication. This is what
Habermas called “communicative context,” observing that “the com-
munity of experimentation of the researchers is based on a prescientific
knowledge articulated over a common language.”
The reality today, at the end of the first decade of the third millen-
nium, is that the widely discussed multidisciplinary mobilization does
not have the fecundity nor the continuity that was assumed half a cen-
tury ago, at the peak of communication’s epistemological potential. At
the end of the 1950s, regarding the “state of research in communica-
tion,” Berelson demonstrated his pessimism pertaining to the possibility
of innovative approaches in the USA, distinguishing four major focuses
from the period before 1930: “(1) the focus on political science, rep-
resented by Harold Lasswell; (2) the focus on sample surveys, repre-
sented by Paul Lazarsfeld; (3) the focus on small groups, represented by
54 Cf. Wolton (1997, p. 68).

78 M. SODRÉ
Kurt Lewin; (4) the focus on experimental psychology, represented by

Carl Hovland.”55 However, all of these focuses dwindled when regard-
ing communication, and the cited disciplines continued to close off their
departments, attempting to zealously guard their “disciplinary” objects
of knowledge, paying little or no attention to the communicational
field, which, in its turn, lost the intellectual fermentation of its begin-
nings, reproductively diffracting itself in the specialized crumbs of the
logo-technical knowledge which constitute university curricula.
For better or worse, pertaining to the academic development of this
field, there remains today a sovereignty of the sociological perspective.
While, outside of the USA, the authors who propelled the effects par-
adigm starting in the 1930s are no longer widely read, the sociologi-
cal perspective continues. Now, if the sociological view remains, it also
worsens the problem, which was already noted by socio-anthropologists
such as Jeudy, for whom “sociology continues to treat media as a field
of research entirely apart, avoiding consideration of the mediatization
of society’s phenomena.” In other words, on the one hand, institutional
modalities of social phenomena are studied, and, on the other, the func-
tion of the media, ignoring that “the principle of mediatization orients a
priori the representation and interpretation of the phenomena.”56 Under
this principle, social facts do not have their own ontology outside of its
media reproduction.
However, in the academic field of communications today, a distinction
is made between mediatization and mediation. Contrary to what empir-
ical work may lead one to conclude, this distinction does not imply that
the notions are separate or exclusive of one another.
Mediation is a typically Hegelian concept. To Hegel, who rejects
the hypothesis of an intuitive or immediate knowledge, mediation
(Vermittlung) is a primordial act of any cognition, because the being is
necessarily mediated. What he calls the “real and true man” is the result
of his interaction with others, ergo, the idea that makes itself (its I)
depends on mediation which expresses the recognition of the other.
Peirce’s semiotics is candidly Hegelian in conceding mediation as a
symbolic transition or the “communication” of one element’s property
to another, by means of a third term, which is precisely the sign or a
55 Cohn (2011, p. 225).

56 Jeudy (1997, p. 151).
code, a means of articulating two diverse elements, for example, an

object and an interpretive idea. In this way, mediation implies a com-
plex, semiotic operation—which could also be called a semiosis—which
articulates determinative and representative relations (object, sign, and
interpretation) within the linguistic process, as per Peirce’s repeated
demonstrations in the second half of the nineteenth century.
There is an implicit dualism in the idea of mediation—in that what
is considered is the articulation of two diverse elements—reinforced by
the resulting notion of “intermediation,” or rather, the approximation,
by means of a third, between two separate terms. This is already verified,
although in a non-declarative form, in the introduction of the categories
“small groups,” and later, of gatekeepers (information filters or opinion
leaders) into the American sociological conceptions of communication.
The English culturalist Raymond Williams, interested in materialist
mechanisms present in the conception of reflection between separate cat-
egories (art/society, infrastructure/superstructure), recovered the idea of
mediation that, reinterpreted, “would no longer indicate reflected real-
ities, but realities which pass through a process of ‘mediation’ in which
their original content is modified.”57
Williams ultimately abandoned the idea of mediation, “for consider-
ing nearly insurmountable the problem that, in a less sophisticated form,
already existed in the so-called ‘reflection theories’: an underlying and
presupposed dualist vision of the world, in which reality and speaking of
reality are taken as categorically distinct.”58 Despite this, even without
greater conceptual clarity, mediation is appropriated as a privileged ana-
lytical category of the sociology of culture by Latin American researchers
(Jesus-Martin Barbero and Orozco-Gómez, for example), who use it as
a foundation for studying the reception of products of the culture indus-
try. These studies presuppose the separation between the production and
consumption of messages, which leads to the idea of a conciliatory inter-
mediate, such as “sociocultural mediations.”
This separation disappears in the concept of mediatization. This is
not the transmission of occurrences by means of communication (as
though the temporalized social fact were given first, and then the media,
trans-temporal in a way), nor is it the work of symbolic mediations on
57 Signates (1998, pp. 37–49).

58 Ibidem.
80 M. SODRÉ
the media (as can be understood from the expression “the means and
its mediations”), but a concept which describes the articulated function
of traditional social institutions and individuals with the media. A sim-
ple comparison: in mediation, an image is something which places itself
between the individual and the world in order to construct understand-
ing; in the media, the substantialist ontology of this correlation disap-
pears, and the individual (or the world) is described, on its own, as an
image generated by a technological code.
Yet it is inevitable to observe the fact that this mediatization is not
a metaphor for a substantial totality, but a concept (as media is also a
concept) which describes a process of qualitative changes in terms of
social configuration through the articulation of electronic technology in
human life. It is not a meta-structure composed of media systems, sup-
posedly autonomous and auto-adjustable, as can be understood from
both sociological and cybernetic functionalist arguments. In fact, even
in the major, Western techno-democracies (the USA, England, France,
Germany, etc.) where the media constructs a second or parallel reality,
one cannot speak of diversity of media (journals, magazines, radios, tel-
evision, and Internet) as a coherent and autonomously systemic whole.
Mediatization is, therefore, a conceptual elaboration used to cope
with a new forum of reality orientation capable of permeating social
relations through the media and constituting—by means of the accel-
erated development of the processes of media convergence—a virtual
or simulated form of life, to which we have already given the name of
media bios (or virtual bios).59 Recognizing a forum of this nature leads
to the idea of researching a “media ecology” in the scientific context of
communication.60
The concept of mediatization also fails to solve the epistemological
problem of communication—or rather, it does not guarantee the scien-
tific nature of its statute of knowledge—however, it is quintessentially the
object of media studies, precisely for sustaining the hypothesis of a soci-
ocultural mutation in the current functioning of communications tech-
nology. This concept is not exclusive to radio or television and has not
become obsolete with the interactivity of social networks. Conversely,
it has become ever more pertinent in the digital age, in that cellular
59 Cf. Sodré (2002).

60 The Media Ecology Association was founded in 1998 in the USA.
telephones, laptops, and other devices connected to the Internet, all

capable of producing entertainment (television programs, films, games,
music, etc.), not only changed the panorama of media consumption but
also created their own technologies of mediation.
Even at the family level, the mediation of parents can be delegated
to technical and corporate regulations brought by digital devices, there-
fore, by generalized mediation. What once belonged strictly to the scope
of the psychology of interaction between adults and youths seems today
to have shifted to a new species of technological objectivity attributed
to interactivity. It is likely still too early to evaluate the consequences of
this mutation, attributed to the hypertrophy of communicational devices.
The current negative judgments tend to begin with the identification of
“communication” with “comprehension” in order to achieve the diagno-
sis of “interruptions” supposedly harmful to family interaction. In reality,
changing the concept of communication, one can admit, as does Wilden,
that “in human societies, as in organic nature, communication is a con-
tinuous process and, even though it may present distortions, pathologies,
and misunderstanding, one can never say that it is truly ‘interrupted.’ In
the same way, one may hear that fathers and sons ‘can never communi-
cate with each other’: many times, the true difficulty consists in the fact
that they cannot stop communicating with each other, whether directly or
in their imagination.”61
This was always contemplated by the practice of meditation (whose
most famous technical model is the Yoga-sutra, of Patanjali) in tradi-
tional Hindu knowledge. Meditative postures (asana) of the yogi ini-
tially sought to intercept, by means of isolation of the consciousness, the
points which constitute communication with sensory activity. Or rather,
it abolishes the disturbance of the symbolic duality or of the psycho-
logical “opposites” in order to neutralize the senses and transcend the
“human” or anthropocentric modalities of existence. The temporary
suppression of the very body, analogous to the suspension of communi-
cation, is experienced as a symbolic “rebirth” which, at its limit, becomes
indispensable to a profound ecology of the mind.
61 Wilden (2001). Translated into English from Portuguese version.

82 M. SODRÉ
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CHAPTER 4
A Science for the Virtual Bios
The generalized mediatization or virtual bios and the ethical vacillation

of the communicational field. The shifts in the idea of culture. Interpretive
platform, system of intelligibility and science. The man-machine partner-
ship and the theoretical currents of “post-humanism.”
Well into the twenty-first century, the question as to why a true epistemological
(or canonical) field for communication has not been nor is being constructed
remains untouched.
An initial response may be found in the lack of conditions of the possibil-
ity for constituting a new social science in the midst of the profundity of
the ethical crisis in modernity today. It is a response, therefore, similar to
that which could lead to the question of the possibility of thinking even
today about ethics, in a social order molded by a one-dimensional under-
standing—of an economic nature—of history and of the world. The
empty spaces of morality tend to be filled in by the automatic repetition
of the automatons of capital.
In general, as observed by Moragas, communication studies are
affected by the sociocultural context in which they are developed, in
that they are also a means of understanding the historical evolution of
the world.1 An example of this is found in the American studies, which
sociologically reflect the capitalist intensification of information devices
1 Cf. Moragas, Miguel de. In communication presented at the VIII Sopcom Congress,
Lisbon, 18/10/2013.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5_4
86 M. SODRÉ
and which influenced, thanks to their academic prestige, both education

and research in other countries. Its counterpart, the influence of struc-
tural semiology—a section of anti-phenomenology—was related to the
academic prestige of the French.
A second explicative response points to the aforementioned loss of
reflective potential in the communicational field while confronting the
inertial force of the university bureaucracy, which can institutionalize
media studies—in graduate and post-graduate courses and research asso-
ciations—therefore, it can recruit students and award diplomas without
considering the search for a full solution to the theoretical and historical
problems pertaining to communication. Or rather, the field has not pro-
duced an intellectual consensus as to the great ideas capable of reorient-
ing social thought as did sociology, whose founders were indebted to the
ideologies which marked the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth. There is a social weakness in the moral and political aspi-
rations reflected in the communicational field, which is revealed in prac-
tice in the materialization of an ideology (neoliberalism) committed to
financialization and to the market.
The ethical weakness stems quite possibly from the generalized media-
tization which exists in a different space-time from that which was always
presided over by the concepts of society, politics, and history. This space-
time is, in truth, the finishing of the modern experience, which con-
structs the present and, consequently, the dominion of time over space;
to be modern is to live only in time and in difference related to time,
such as that which exists between the present and the future, which has
truly imported the structural law of value, or rather, capital.
Treated as a valuable commodity, capable of being bought and sold,
time is associated with capital, thus becoming indispensable to the
monopolistic organization of society. In this, the traditional impor-
tance of public information, halfway between production and leisure, is
inserted into the modern logic of the social time structure. The tempo-
ralization undertaken by journalism has always functioned as a synthesis
of continuities, changes, and transitions which, in a dispersed and chaotic
way, defined the quotidian actuality.
What changes in contemporary society is the profound affectation of
the experience of the now by the immediate accessibility of the communi-
cations technologies, which end up transforming the “tool” (the technical
device) into a species of permanent domicile for the consciousness. The
time of existence is inscribed in the rote causality of the electronics. Thus,
4 A SCIENCE FOR THE VIRTUAL BIOS 87
the temporality is accelerated, creating the effects of simultaneity and sen-

sations of immediate occurrences. The “SIG effect” (simultaneity, instan-
taneity, and globality) is already definitively inscribed on our quotidian
temporality, abolishing all the spatial distances with the prevalence of time.
As already indicated, the temporality of the social facts which sociol-
ogy elaborates is not the same “trans-temporality” which characterizes
mediatization. From a spatial point of view, the fixed or stable structures
targeted by the classical social sciences have little or nothing to do with
the rapid circulation of the forms which characterize mediatization.
On the other hand, the field of power of this mediatization has grown
enormous and was already gigantic when it was still defined by visibil-
ity in the public spaces of journalists, publicists, press secretaries, opinion
survey specialists, strategists, or rather, the logo-technical professionals
who controlled public access to journals, radios, magazines, and televi-
sion. With electronic communication, the Internet, in short, is the com-
mon man, without any corporate visibility, who gives the statute of the
new existential sphere (that which we call the virtual bios or media bios)
to the environment of generalized communication and information.
What is in play here is no longer the pure and simple transmission of
something—the “lifeworld” or “culture,” for example—but communica-
tion itself as the ubiquitous presence of code. In the electronic network,
people are connected not to “communicate” some important content, but
for the ecstasy of connection, which does not cease to be a futuristic antic-
ipation of that which was already glimpsed by modern neuroscience: vir-
tual submersion as the long-distance contact of the brain with machines.
Now, generalized mediatization or virtual bios only deepens the per-
verse effect detected by Wolton apropos journalistic mediation: “The
mediators, to protect themselves from the pressures suffered from with-
out, legitimate themselves and consider their choices as objective and
just. They are convinced - and that is true, above all, for the journalistic
elite - that they play an essential role. The enormous communication sys-
tem of our societies thus reaches the paradoxical result that it only illumi-
nates a limited number of problems and interlocutors. Consequently, the
same political, cultural, scientific, religious, and military personalities are
always expressed in the media.”2
This power of self-legitimation has epistemological counter-effects.
In general, the discourse produced by the media about itself upsets the
2 Wolton (1997, p. 198).

88 M. SODRÉ
(Durkheimian) epistemological principle of the unconscious, according

to which the motivation of social agents is inadequate for explaining the
meaning of their actions. This is another way of affirming the separation
between the subject and object of knowledge: a social group objectified
by a scientific analysis cannot generate the sociological meaning of its
actions.
Thus, the epistemological invectives from academics in the sense
that the theoretician or researcher obligatorily criticizes the social rep-
resentations which constitute “common sense” or what Bourdieu calls
the “enormous deposit of pre-constructed naturalized objects, there-
fore, ignored as such, which function as unconscious instruments of
construction.”3
The Durkheimian principle, which would be a requirement for the
theoretical autonomy of communication as a social science specific
to techno-culture, is unacceptable to the logo-technicians (journalists,
show producers, television directors, cultural producers, and others), in
that they produce a discourse supposedly conscious of the meaning of
its practices, but adequate to the media management of that which they
judge to be social, ceasing to recognize any theoretical verisimilitude in
communicational theorization.
Herein occurs, therefore, a conflict (rarely addressed) in the field of
representations which communicational knowledge elaborates about
itself. No science is simply a repertory of statements taken as truth; sci-
ence implies a self-explanatory discourse, which tends to accompany its
integration into technical and industrial systems. Since its beginnings in
the first decades of the last century, modern communicational knowledge
has remained stuck to the system of information production and distri-
bution, the press in all its technical modalities, which today is generically
known as the “media.” The persuasive power of this practice, increas-
ingly amplified by the technological development of artefacts, tends to
impose its own presumed history.
Immersed in an odd continuity between the subject and the object,
the professional medium constructs a narrative about its own activity,
with a pedagogical basis, but certainly different from the educated reflec-
tion (systematic education) which scientific discipline favors, although
so-called quality journalism, pari passu with the generalized decline of
3 Bourdieu (1989, p. 39).

the educational form, has gradually assumed the discourse of the social
sciences.
At the same time, immersed in the omnipresence of information and
the networks, where every individual is potentially capable of expressing
himself, the public does not cease to easily represent objects of analy-
sis, at most agreeing with the descriptions of a functional nature or with
quantifications operated by opinion surveys. Here, knowledge and con-
sumption are manifestly confused, narrowing the space for the emer-
gence of an autonomous field of communicational knowledge, which
should function as a new kind of critical mediation between social actors
affected by the techno-marketing dimension.
With this point, it is worth noting the distinction made by William
James between the two kinds of knowledge—“knowledge of acquaint-
ance” and “knowledge-about,” or rather, common sense opposed to sci-
entific knowledge4—which was incorporated by the sociologist Robert
Park into his studies on journalism in the beginning of the twentieth
century. From the perspective of Schutz, this distinction is valuable for
“illustrating that the knowledge of man, who acts and thinks within
his own quotidian lifeworld, is not homogeneous; it is 1) incoherent;
2) only partially clear and 3) harbors internal contradictions.”5 The
incoherence is due to the fact that interests pertinent to the selected
objects are distributed along different spheres, without an integrative
principle; the lack of clarity stems from the fact that individuals look
for the efficiency of objects and relations, to the detriment of complete
knowledge; the inconsistency is that of the “logic of current thought,”
which does not hinder the transition from one pertinent level to another
within a standardized cultural model. As Schutz observes, “knowledge
corresponding to the cultural model carries its evidence within itself -
or better, is not questioned, given the absence of contrary evidence.”6
To him, it is an acritical knowledge of recipes, but could function as
useful schemes of interpretation.
However, some aspects of the argument which enthrones scientific
knowledge have suffered shocks over the past three decades, as Pestre
notes: “Since the beginning of the 1980s, the universe of scientific and
4 Cf. James (1890, pp. 221–222).

5 Schutz (1987, pp. 220–223).
6 Ibidem.
90 M. SODRÉ
technical knowledge has met a series of profound changes. As much in its

objects, working logic, and instruments as in its relations with individuals
and with the social, with the economic world and the political one.”7
To him, through the crisis in the financial market, the world has experi-
enced the effects of changes in the productive, economic, and financial
regulations which flow back to the very institution of science and to the
university as the definition of “good knowledge.”
On the one hand, in the field of “hard” science, in countries such
as the USA, France, and China, there is a new division of labor in the
research into industrial innovation, in which the long-term effort (char-
acteristic of the laboratory triptych university/national laboratory/
industrial laboratory) is abandoned in favor of fragmentation (and the
short-term effort) together with specialized networks, which sell their
services according to the client’s needs. On the other hand, regarding
the university, “knowledge acquires another meaning, a more pragmatic
meaning aimed towards efficiency in the short term, on the one hand; on
the other, a more diffuse meaning, in that it is open to ‘civil society’ and
to its right to elaborate and defend its own understandings.”8
It is evident that all this affects the institutional identity of the uni-
versity, traditionally pedagogical, disciplinary, and oriented toward inter-
nal research logic. When this evaluation of the “hard” science sector is
transposed to the social sciences, there soon appears a viable example
for communication as a “new field,” where moral and political ques-
tions tend to be suffocated by the seductive practice of the visual and
entertainment machines and where, in university terms, there prevails the
study of instrument application, or rather, the instrumentalization of the
media.
However, nothing assures that the comprehensive horizon of uni-
versity knowledge is limited to uncritically reflecting upon the reality
offered by technology and by the market. At the same time in which the
importance of the sciences in today’s technological world is revealed,
there appears the ethical-political imperative of exploring the statute
of being of scientific objects and concepts, keeping in perspective the
macro-effects of affectation which they exercise over human life con-
joined to planetary technology. Regarding mediatization, it is crucial to
7 Pestre (2013, p. 91).

8 Ibidem, p. 97.
differentiate between looking and seeing, hearing and listening, as well

as between pure emotion and feeling, which is lucid sensibility, because
in this difference is constructed the discernment, or rather, another name
for the critical apprehension of the world. Thus, the social impact of a
new media, such as the Internet, may be immediate, but the evaluation
of its human consequences does not keep up with the technological
speed of transformations.
One of these consequences could be related to the educational order.
It is possible to speculate on some already observable effects such as the
progressive transfer of individual memory to machines (as much in rela-
tion to records as in mental operations), the emptying of contemplation
or pause with increasingly rapid connections, the substitution of inter-
subjective coexistence by technical interactivity, etc. At the same time,
technological development under the aegis of financial capital is accom-
panied by a pedagogical ideology which imaginarily resolves the dichot-
omy between “instruction” and “education” with the use of the generic
term “graduation” (related to the paideia) to legitimate the idea of
human capital.
The purpose of this “graduation” is clarified by Laval: “Of course, the
notion is ancient, and its roots, which evoke the ‘putting into form’ of
the human being by the pedagogic action, are deep. But in recent use
of the term, the professional objective seems to command, in a teleo-
logical way, the stages of ‘graduation’ which lead to it. School educa-
tion is increasingly seen as an ‘initial graduation,’ that is, preparation for
professional graduation, and, ergo, is supposed to legitimately receive, in
feedback, professionalizing injunctions, especially in ‘behavioral’ mate-
rial. The school is there to assure a species of primitive accumulation of
human capital.”9
As is inferred, it is the economic factor, or rather, the corporate organi
zation under flexible capitalism that becomes the “qualifying organiza-
tion” of the personal development of the subject of labor, “freeing him”
as “human capital” (that which supposes permanent self-formation and
social integration by means of technology), to adapt to the new demands
of productive efficiency in a situation of risk or uncertainty in relation to
labor guarantees. It is no longer about knowing (in the humanistic sense
9 Laval (2003, p. 64).

92 M. SODRÉ
of the word), but about becoming competent (knowing how to operate),

or better yet, technologically competent.
The media or virtual bios is the ecosystem of this new form of con-
scious collective. Just as in the economic sphere, the conversion of the
poorest to the theory of the free market increases the cruel human
indifference of economism, the uncritical conversion of society to the
media bios leads, in the communicational sphere, to the false idea that
everything which is humanly important is found in mediatization; only
the discourses legitimated by the articulation of the hegemonic insti-
tutions with the media are considered socially valid. Consequently, the
epistemological effect which restricts the communicational field to media
studies is academically produced, ignoring the evidence that they are
not guaranteed on their own, or rather, the medium does not have the
statute of “object” (tool, instrument, institution), though it oscillates
ambiguously between the concept (something like the Marxian concept
of surplus value, which is not found in any accounting book) and the
concreteness of relational organizations (mediatization). Paralyzed by the
model of results-seeking and that of obtaining products for the market,
the theoretical perspective, myopic in the face of the diverse complexity
of reality, uncritically uses the “glasses” of Anglo-Saxon academics, ced-
ing to the “Westernization” of the science. On the other hand, it loses
public importance if it ceases to connect itself to global issues such as
social inequality and cultural changes.
The apparent democratic virtue of this reality contributes to hid-
ing the fact that true freedom of expression and action consists of the
possibility of also being outside of the mediatization and its symbolic
injunctions. In other words, it is necessarily ethics-politics, and not only
technique, which lead to fundamental inquiries about the intuitive appre-
hension of values in social space, such as compassion (in the radical sense
of focusing on the other) as instinctive and primary solidarity. Since
Rousseau and Kant made it clear to the Western conscience that human
dignity (a value also intuitively comprehensible in the knitting of social
ties) is an inescapable presupposition in the exercise of freedom.
Once more, the association of the communicational field with global
financialization, therefore with the world in which the prevalence of
intangible assets transforms communication in this same volatile market,
becomes pertinent here. To the hypothetical question about what can be
done globally to better our quality of life, the following two solutions are
raised identically: earn more money and consume more material goods.
This is the response contained in the theory of economic growth at any

cost.
But many authors have already noted the limits to economic growth,
and consequently of unbridled consumerism, under the argument that
these two phenomena are irresponsible given the impact on the finite
resources of the planet. This argument even appears in the discourse
of conservative economists today: “It is known today that, from the
moment in which basic necessities are resolved, the increase in income
and the availability of material goods have little correlation with well-
being. Far more than the increase in material consumption, well-being
then begins to be associated with social cohesion, the quality of commu-
nal life, and less inequality. Well-being can certainly be increased without
the growth of material consumption.”10
Along this argumentative line, there is an implicit criticism of the
economistic logic of mediatization, naturally connected with new tech-
nologies, but without distancing itself from the logic of the market,
which uninterruptedly produces a spiral of consumerist desires, connoted
by all imaginable discourse as the only path to individual and collec-
tive happiness. Also implied is the critique of Western society’s guiding
principle from the beginning of modernity: the liberation of nature as a
potential for productive forces. This liberation, which lies at the heart of
the domination of the natural elements by the productive system, now
finds its limits in the depletion of the planet’s physical resources and the
exponential increase of the world’s population.
Arguments which advocate for the reduction of inequality in the
standards of consumption are not exclusively economic, but principally
ethical, when this word is understood as the recognition of the limits of
the canonical forms of domination or of power. Within the social rela-
tions placed under the orbit of the State, ethics does not, in its turn,
dispense with the political mobilization of society. Now, it is equally
ethical-political to criticize the mediatization which invests social forms
with the same values of the new social nature of wealth, or rather, finan-
cialization, indifferent to human nature or the condition of the concrete
lives of the populations which are immersed, in the millions, in the most
absolute misery.
10 Resende, André Lara. “Temos que rever o que consideramos progresso”. Interview in O
Globo (5/2/2012).
94 M. SODRÉ
A Post-disciplinary Science
What does all this have to do with reflecting theoretically on communication?
Does epistemology still provide answers for anything socially important?
An academic discipline is normally distinguished by epistemological
criteria and recognized by its institutional and discursive materiality. It
is instituted pari passu with the process of autonomization of the field
of knowledge, initially associating its language with consensual, scientific
rules. After, a community of peers (also known as an “invisible college”)
is constituted, which exerts control over the production and reproduc-
tion of the researchers, while at the same time socializing them, inducing
them to reference themselves, by means of concepts, terminology, and
mutual citations.
In respect to communication, it is necessary to relativize the relevance
of the concept “discipline,” not because the field is interdisciplinary—
or even “non-discipline” as some suggest—but very possibly because we
are living in a “post-disciplinary” era, if this prefix still has any explica-
tive value after its blanket application to all the terms or concepts weak-
ened by the loss of Western modernity’s vigor. In both the exact and
natural sciences as well as the sciences of man—even if the dominant
definition of science as a context for the justification of stated truth is
maintained—disciplinary frontiers became increasingly flexible, p ointing
to the insufficiency of specialization closed into itself even in the face
of the commutability imperatives of knowledge in scientific research
groups.
Does this mean abandoning the idea of science? Probably not, if this
word is freed from its modern and excessive attachment to technologi
cal production, which is merely an elaboration of the existent (of the
entity, Heidegger would say) or, in simpler terms, if science is freed from
the empiricist reduction of knowledge for its real object, to place it on
the essential dimension of the unveiling or exposition of a truth in that
which existence presents as hidden or covered.
What is called empiricist reduction is equivalent to the form of knowl-
edge which positivism (according to the model of philosophical idealism)
tried to close within the parameters of causal efficacy or rigid empirical
dependency on the facts, unbinding the material with which the scientist
works from the history of its formation. In this way, the existence of a
previous, ahistorical truth is assumed, situated in a “reality” (object of
knowledge), to be extracted by the subject of the knowledge: what can
be seen is that which exists to be seen. The truth would thus be the adap-
tation of the subject to the object, therefore, the adaptation to a reality
exterior to the subject and, in the end, granted to an authority to which
the subject must necessarily submit. In scientific knowledge, the stud-
ied phenomenon should be ordered or objectified by patterns subject to
control by empirical observation.
This manner of conceiving of science is opposed to Heideggerian
thought. This is not the place to attempt to reveal the philospher’s com-
plex argumentation regarding this theme, but rather to take it as a pre-
cious reference, not for academic preciosity, but for the clarification of
that which could benefit the communicational field. Heidegger agrees
that science is a form of truth, but at the same time he inquires if this
truth belongs principally to the scientific statement or to existence. His
response is that “the essence of truth is originally unveiled from the
entity, and this unveiling belongs to the Existenz, to exist of existence or
Dasein.”11
In simpler terms, science is not something which, only after its con-
struction, references human existence; it comes from existence itself (and
not from the mind of a subject of knowledge), understood as a struc-
ture of being or Dasein. This provenance is contingent (not necessary),
in that science itself is a free possibility of existence, and there are, in fact,
other forms of existing and producing truths that are not defined as sci-
entific. The scientific truth is one form of truth, or rather, of unveiling,
that implies the enlightening and opening of human existence.
In Heidegger, this form of truth is an “authentic science” when it
manages to determine a priori the structure of that which is fated to
be its object of knowledge. This is the case of physics, which bases all
of its experiments on a very clear concept—stemming from a historical
“pre-comprehension”—of the being of its specific object, which belongs
to nature. This determination has a mathematical character, which Kant’s
phrase alludes to in the sense that every theory particular to nature is
only science to the extent that it is expressed mathematically.
Heidegger does not interpret this phrase as though the mathemati-
cal method were obligatory for all sciences, but that “the first thing to
be contemplated by all of science is that the entity which it converts
into an object already comes sufficiently determined beforehand in its
11 Vide Heidegger (1999, pp. 169–234).

96 M. SODRÉ
essence, so that every concrete question counts beforehand as a guide-

line around which, in this science, can be its object, that is, the object of
this science.”12 In the case of physics, the being of nature is expressed by
mathematics, because this is the adequate language for the experiments,
in which the observation of facts realized with the help of instruments
requires a verification of coincidences, the measurement.
In the case of a science such as sociology, the “pre-comprehension”
of its object, which belongs to the human sphere, derives from the per-
ceived rupturing of traditional ties and the rise of a new kind of social
relation characteristic of the emerging industrial system. The pre-
comprehension, however, consists of a self-awareness of the presence of
new forms of social reality. Nisbet says, “What resonates among numer-
ous thinkers of the nineteenth century is not only the historical tendency
toward secularism and the growing utilitarianism of values, but also their
rupture, ever clearer, with the concrete roots which, for centuries, had
conferred upon them their symbolic clarity, always facilitating their prac-
tical translation.”13 The crisis of values regarding conformity to social
rules, to honor, loyalty, friendship, etc. is expressed as the ethical back-
ground underlying the social thought of emerging philosophers and
sociologists, giving rise to modern critical theory.
This dispenses with the mathematical formulation inherent to the
sciences of nature: in truth, the suspension of mathematical language
is necessary for the emergence of this new social thought. The tempta-
tions of the mathematical method are, of course, well known in the social
field. Marquis and mathematician Condorcet, one of the first to think of
a “social science,” advocated for the application of calculus to the prob-
abilities of history. Voltaire thought that morality could be reduced to
geometry. Durkheim sought to quantify some of his results (as noted
with reference to Suicide), while articulating the approach to social facts
as “things” as the rule of sociological methodology. Here, however,
mathematics never had and never could have the epistemological stature
it enjoys in a science such as physics. In the social sciences, what truly
matters for the “scientist” is an active imagination while perceiving the
world, which leads to conceptual intuition and the proposition of inno-
vative ideas tied to a particular conception of the world, to a philosophy.
12 Ibidem, p. 201.
13 Nisbet (1984, p. 64).
Sociology is born as much from the supposedly objective description of

social reality as from the sociologists’ readings of their colleagues and
diverse social thinkers, in a way analogous to art born of art or literature
born of literature.
The contingent presence of mathematics does not expel social
thought from the scientific field, in the same way that it is not the use of
quantification that confers the stature of science to economics. On this
point, it is worth spending some time on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
in which he presents science as “a sure path” (to knowledge, evidently)
or on the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to
Present Itself as a Science, where he states “if anyone wishes to present a
knowledge as science, he should initially be able to determine its distinc-
tive trait with precision, what it does not have in common with anything
else, therefore, what is its own; without which, the limits of all science
become confused, and none of them can be treated profoundly, accord-
ing to its nature.”
For Rapaport, there are three meanings for the word science as a
socially recognized theory: (1) theory legitimized for its axiomatic
coherence and deductive rigor, such as mathematics; (2) theory legiti-
mized by experiments, such as physics, chemistry, and biology; and
(3) theory legitimized by its explicative or heuristic value, such as the
social sciences.14 Each of these scientific types has that which Kant saw
as a “nature,” whose distinctive traits and limits have addressed, from
within the philosophical circle, the epistemology which is, indeed, a term
coined by the neo-Kantians.
In this third category of theory—which, since the nineteenth cen-
tury, has given rise to diverse forms of positive knowledge as related to
man—Foucault distinguishes three “sciences,” or, three “epistemologi-
cal regions” which, in turn, are all subdivided and interwoven within
themselves; these regions are defined by the triple relation of the human
sciences in general with biology, economics, and philology.15 In what
particularly concerns us here, it is worth noting that, for Foucault, soci-
ology, in its analysis of power relations, belongs to the economic region,
while philology, understood as the study of meaning and discursive
14 Vide Rapoport (1971).

15 Foucault (1966, pp. 461–462).
98 M. SODRÉ
systems, belongs to the linguistic field and, consequently, that which we

could call, in the broad sense, a science of communication.
The idea of a new science of this kind appears in the 1950s in both
Europe and the USA, always within anthropology or sociology, which
branched off from anthropology, as in the case of symbolic interaction-
ism (George Mead, Herbert Blumer, and others), the founding school
of American pragmatism, focused on the meanings brought by individ-
uals to social interaction. The complexity of the interactive phenomenon
leads to a conception of communication strictly associated with the logic
of the culture as a whole. In this, the orchestra metaphor (“the orchestral
model of communication”) is revealing, in that it discards the unilinear
nature of the informational model adopted by the school of mass com-
munication research in favor of a hypothesis including a complex mixture
of elements in continual interaction, like an orchestra reading an invisible
score, counting on the participation of all the performers.
What Lévi-Strauss conceived of as a “science of communication,”
despite all the differences between European structuralism and symbolic
interactionism, has this in common with the proximity to the concept of
culture, under the aegis of symbolic exchange. Any and all culture would
represent a specific modality of communication. He explains: “in all of
society, communication operates on at least three levels: the communi-
cation of women; the communication of goods and services; the com-
munication of messages. Consequently, the study of the family system,
the economic system, and the linguistic system offers certain analogies.
All three depend on the same method; they differ only by the strategic
level in which each one chooses to situate itself within the bosom of the
common universe.”16
Thus, communication emerged as a “unifying concept, thanks to
which it was possible to consolidate studies considered to be very dif-
ferent in one single discipline, and to acquire certain theoretical instru-
ments and methodologies indispensable to progress in this direction.”17
Earlier, in his extensive analysis of myths, Lévi-Strauss included the met-
aphor of the musical score, which even without a composer or being
16 Lévi-Strauss (1958, p. 326). In the heading of this edition, which coincided with the
centenary of Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss admits having been a “fickle disciple” of the great
sociologist and founder of LÀnnée Sociologique, a publication recognized as the “prestig-
ious workshop where contemporary ethnology received a portion of its arsenal.”
17 Ibidem, pp. 330–331.
written down would be capable of manifesting the unconscious of the

human group.
As becomes clear, it is in the conceptually and methodologically vast
framework of anthropology, and not the narrower environment of soci-
ology, where the suggestions of a science of communication are sketched
out. This is rationally sound, as Foucault observes, “anthropology per-
haps constitutes the fundamental philosophy which has oriented and
conducted philosophical thought from Kant up to modern times. This
disposition is essential, as it is part of our history.” Soon after, how-
ever, comes the warning: “but [this disposition] is in the process of fall-
ing apart in front of our very eyes, as we begin to recognize in it, and
critically denounce in it, both the forgetting of the opening that made
it possible and the obstacle which obstinately opposes itself to the next
thought.”18
This reference to the philosophical foundation of anthropology
strengthens its critical distance from sociology, or, in broader terms,
from the social sciences (therefore, sociology, law, economics), those that,
according to Lévi-Strauss “accept, without reservations, to establish
themselves in the very heart of their society.”19 Even recognizing the dif-
ficulties in distinguishing the social from the human sciences, the anthro-
pologist sees the latter (prehistory, archeology, history, anthropology,
linguistics, philosophy, logic, psychology) as those “which place them-
selves outside of each particular society: whether they seek to adopt the
point of view of any society, or that of any individual in the midst of any
society, or finally, those which, looking to learn from the immanent real-
ity of man, put themselves beneath every individual and every society.”20
The emphasis on this human immanence is philosophical in nature
and may strike a political-philosophical nerve, as with Foucault: “To all
who still intend to speak of man, of his kingdom or his liberation, to
all who still formulate questions about what man is in his essence, to all
who wish to begin with man to gain access to the truth, to all those who,
in contrast, extend all knowledge to the truths of man, to all who do
not propose to formalize without ‘anthropologizing’ (…) to all these
awkward and twisted forms of reflection, one cannot but withhold
18 Foucault (1966, p. 445).

19 Lévi-Strauss(1973, pp. 359–364).
20 Ibidem, p. 360.
100 M. SODRÉ
a philosophical laugh - that is, to a certain extent, silent.”21 Despite

Foucault’s reservations regarding the human sciences, for its “superficial
effect” (he considered them “false science”), it is along this horizon of
the renewal of knowledge that the “truths of man” which, to us, today
configure a science of communication.
Of course, today the very idea of science, in its classical configuration,
is passing through difficulties. What is now known as technoscience (the
immediate connection between knowledge and technology) stems in
practice from a conceptual a priori, which is science as understood by the
philosophers or theorists of academia. The techno-scientific practice is
developed as a laboratorial activity without the requirement of a closed,
theoretical whole, of borders marked by disciplinary flags.
In the practical administration of disciplinary division in universi-
ties, however, the defense of borders sometimes assumes the nature of
a war of positions. There is still no broad recognition of the discussion,
led principally by Rorty since the 1960s, on the sense of what paradigms
fixed by epistemology are being overcome by the hermeneutic attitude.
Since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, it has been discussed whether
epistemology is not simply the kind of thinking exercised within the
circle of accepted paradigms, characterized, in the words of T.S. Kuhn
(an epistemologist with an acute awareness of the historicity of science),
as “normal science.” This is the case of science which solves problems
through the rules of an existing paradigm.
Different from epistemology, hermeneutics ethically and politically
amplifies the reflective view—confined by epistemology to the categor-
ical scope of “normal science”—toward the “lifeworld.” It thus adopts
an aesthetic orientation, approximating the experience of art (on the
trail of Gadamer and Heidegger) as another opening of truth. This is
not, therefore, simply obtaining new paradigms for problem resolution
(although this is also ambiguously placed on Rorty’s horizon), but a
redescription of the real in substantially aesthetic terms. Redescription
arises as the possibility for new metaphors or new comprehensive paths—
not as the evolutionary adaptation of a field, but as a historical opening.
Evolution—understood as the regrouping of diffuse facts by one, singu-
lar principle of organization—is the conciliatory conformity of the new
to the old, while history is the creation of the new by transformation
21 Foucault (1966, pp. 445–446).

or rupture. The historicity of man and his science consists in creative or

transformative activity.
From this creative, hermeneutic path, science thus diverts from the
direction of a closed theoretical totality—or rather, that which is exem-
plified by physical science, in which a system with objects of thought far
above objects of common perception is developed—toward new kinds
of “safe paths.” These would be paths inherent to interpretive systems
which create cognitive spaces for the identification of new social-histor-
ical agents and for the relations with the multiplicity of new forms of
social-organizational agents coexistent today, but hybridized with the
traditional and pre-categorical modes of the lifeworld (the Lebenswelt of
Husserl, taken up later by Habermas). These “paths” are not made one-
way or monologic, but with intersections and tracks induced by different
systems of thought—a hermeneutic koiné—which appeals to pragmatism,
language analysis, the (Habermasian) theory of communicative action,
the theory of community, etc.
To speak of hermeneutics does not necessarily imply an allusion to
the “hermeneutics of truth,” that is, the interpretation of a subject’s dis-
course supported by traditional ontology. For the authors who work with
the hypothesis of de-centering the human to give way to the hypothesis
of the object as subject (Niklas Luhmann is a good example), the sys-
temic field is incompatible with the subject–object relationship, thus,
with the interpretation which can be made of the consciousness of the
subject in the face of its object.
For us, however, it is within the interior of this theoretical koiné that
it becomes possible to reflect upon the historical convenience of a social
science capable of predetermining, as an object, the form of being of an
entity glimpsed in the midst of the crisis of the world’s traditional medi-
ations as an effect of the transition from productive capitalism to finan-
cial capitalism. All this with the full consequences of this passing trance
which encompasses everything from the capital code’s monopoly on
social life to the constitution of a new existential sphere guided by the
technological form of consciousness, which is the virtual bios.
There are many objections to the idea of a particular science within
the interior of the theoretical field of communications, in general stem-
ming from fears related to the cognitive “gravity” of this concept which,
supposedly, would require a specific method and object as epistemo-
logical anchors. Thus, the relevance of the question, “why science?”
And why, precisely in the historical moment in which episodic inquiries
102 M. SODRÉ
have arisen related to the importance of designating a knowledge

as “scientific” (e.g., some time ago, the American Anthropological
Association proposed removing the term science from its official
documents)?
A pragmatic response would point to the dimension of the constant
social space of epistemological inquiry and thus would say that the fram-
ing of a knowledge as science leads to the crystallization or unity of prin-
cipals and procedures which allow for its institutional representation by
researchers in a general manner. This would be strategic in the academic
confrontation with other disciplines within the social field, and in its
appeal together with the funding agencies, businesses, and foundations
which tend to commit to this research. This image of a conceptually
unified group, however, dissolves in any science (including the natural
sciences) when one considers that the variety of the scientific practice
risks being reduced to the unit of the scientific statement, which ulti-
mately is only a cognitive horizon.
Another possibility is discarding the idea of a rigid homogenization
of the field of knowledge in favor of its internal coherence—the inter-
action of the thematic multiplicity in an expressive plane, analogous to
that which Deleuze calls a “plane of immanence”—established by con-
nections, albeit unstable ones, between thematic lines, as well as between
research projects. For this purpose (a “purpose” which is lacking in the
communicational field), integrated theoretical discussions become nec-
essary, whether to agree or dissent at the level of arguments. This is,
indeed, Rorty’s vision in sustaining that it is not the vertical profundity
of knowledge produced on the object that furthers comprehension of it,
but rather the opening of the dialogic exchange.22
This is true as much in the sphere of social thought as on that of tech-
no-science. For researcher Alexander Oettl, of the Georgia Institute of
Technology (USA), a scientist who is discrete, but who helps his col-
leagues with counsel and advice, may be doing more for science than
one who is rarely collaborative and, nonetheless, a star in the pro-
fession. A comment by Oettl based on a short study published in the
magazine Nature (27/9/2012) makes it clear that, “Traditionally, sci-
ence has been an individual pursuit, in which people were valued for
their personal output and achievements. Discovery increasingly relies on
22 Cf. Rorty (2002).

teamwork and yet scientists are still judged only by what they themselves
accomplish.”
On the other hand, an ontological response to the question about the
necessity of constituting a science of communication would say that it
becomes necessary in that this new entity that is seen as something exist-
ent and manifest in front of us—and, therefore, can be known positively
in itself—has something that is still hidden or which we cannot imme-
diately know, but which we should, by the ethical-political imperative,
bring to light by means of a definition of concepts or the expansion of
ideas, as well as through intervention in the public space, as we are politi-
cal subjects, whether we like it or not.
According to this argument, the sociologist Octavio Ianni states:
“If the social sciences are born and developed as forms of a scientific
self-consciousness of the social reality, one can imagine that they can be
seriously challenged when this reality is no longer the same. The coun-
terpoint of thinking of and being thought of, or of logical and historical,
can alter slightly, or considerably, when one of the terms is modified; and
even more so when it is transformed.”23
The thought of and historical, traditionally expressed by the logic of
written signs and argumentative thought, are today transformed by the
effect of what we call “perceptive strategies” used to refer to games
binding discursive acts to relations of location and affectation of sub-
jects within language. In more practical terms, the question can be sum-
marized thusly: who is, to me, this other with whom I speak, and vice
versa? This is the enunciative dimension, which neither linguistic ration-
ality nor much argumentative logic of communication addresses, because
it is viscerally referred to as existential (possible human way of being)
designated by Heidegger as Befindlichkeit (affective situation), or rather,
translated into social terms, a psychic and moral environment which
leads men to feel in this or another way, with one or another affective
tonality (Stimmung). Love is an example of affective tonality.
Comprehension and interpretation are bound to this tonality, pre-
dominant in a communicative regime in which the meaning exchanges
the logical circulation of values of the statement for the somatic and
sensorial co-presence of the subjects. However, every meaning requires
limits (e.g., the limits or thresholds established by the science), as
23 Ianni (1996, p. 171).

104 M. SODRÉ
comprehension requires (in a Kantian way) a point of support on which

it can apply its strengths without falling into emptiness.
On the other hand, conceptions related to a “lifeworld,” understood
as a world of autonomous value systems and, therefore, of the plurality of
languages, lead to the rise of the imperative of an ecology of knowledge
(another, more encompassing name for that which Niels Bohr called the
“complementarity principle,” to be applied to the varied dominions of
scientific research) in the reign of techno-science, in order to extend the
“collectives of citizenship” to the decision-making possibilities which
techno-bureaucratic systems tend to reserve exclusively for specialists. In
the ethical-political imperative of an ecology of knowledge, there arises
the essential question of the formation of the man, of his transformation
into a citizen, which ancient Greek philosophy associated with the
school, the same institution that continues to be indispensable to emerg-
ing or changing urban societies.
In this respect, Sloterdijk makes a retrospective which appears excep-
tionally pertinent to sociocultural contemporaneity: “The pair formed by
Socrates and Plato marks the inception of the new, educative idea. In the
face of the conventionalism and opportunism of rhetorical and sophist
professors, they developed an argument in favor of a global renovation
of man. Paideia, or education as the formation of man for a large world
with the latent or manifest imperiality, is not just a fundamental term
from the ancient practice of philosophy, but also designates the philo-
sophical program as political practice. From this can be discerned the
birth of philosophy, conditioned by the emergence of a new form of the
world, dangerous and charged with power - today, we call it urban cultures
and empires.”24
Sloterdijk, in truth, simply strengthens a point which already belongs
to the discursive tradition of the philosophical circle, and which actu-
ally accommodates a Socratic hypothesis (therefore, Platonic and
Aristotelian) predating even Socrates, as a rationalist attitude born
together with segments of the thinking Greek aristocracy and in coun-
terpart to the decadent spirit of ancient Athens. It’s as though Socrates
had come to give a voice or a language, with the rationalist inflection of
science, to that which could be evaluated as the “anarchy of instincts.”
24 Sloterdijk (2011, p. 18).

A properly “social” science, in that, differently from the pre-Socratic

“physics,” it concerns itself with the human questions of the Polis.
On the other hand, Solterdijk’s text omits mention of modern think-
ers such as Descartes, Condorcet, and Diderot, who pursued a philoso-
phy capable of being publicly shared, with the aim of forming the critical
spirit of the citizen: the idea of man’s emancipation through the exercise
of reason is properly modern. However, it is correct in its construction of
thought: classical philosophy conceived of as a “rite of logical and ethical
initiation,” required by the historical demands of rebuilding the Greek
man according to new urban and imperial realities.25 Thinking does not
restrict one to extracting, in a purely spiritual game, logical categories
of privileged minds, without greater communal or political bindings (as
often happened or happens in the academic history of philosophy), but
indeed accepts the ethical challenge of responding to the complexity of
the world, with all the political risks implicit in the response. The exercise
of this task is called “reflection or temperance” in Greek (sophrosine) and
“humanity” in Latin (humanitas), traversing a philosophical atmosphere
which was equally paideia, that is, “the introduction to this adult reflec-
tion which signifies humanity.” To Sloterdijk, it would be “thoughtless
to see, in the values of paideia and humanitas, ideas of a purely apolitical
character.”26
Putting aside the ideological differences between Sloterdijk (an
essayist with crypto-fascist tendencies) and a communist like Antonio
Gramsci, one can say, however, that both are similar in their understand-
ing of philosophy, in that, for the thinker and militant communist, phi-
losophy is equally ideological (although as a superior ideological form)
for being a “unity between a world view and a set of norms for adequate
conduct within this view (…) Thus, one cannot separate philosophy
from politics: on the contrary, one can demonstrate that the choice and
criticism of a world view are also political facts.”27 Or rather, the German
and the Italian converged on a point of view that what is implicit in
philosophy is the critical task of promoting an intellectual and moral
renovation, destined (in Gramsci’s case) to the constitution of a new
25 Here, we circle around what Sloterdijk could mean by the circumstances of “rebuild-
ing” this way in contemporaneity, since, from the political-cultural point of view, its orien-
tation could allow for an implicit crypto-fascism.
26 Ibidem, p. 19.
27 Cf. Coutinho (1981, p. 83).

106 M. SODRÉ
“historical bloc” led by the working class, and, in the case of Sloterdijk,
the formation of a new kind of man of Greek antiquity.
This perspective of the transformation of man by educative action
approximates common sense to science in the sense that it is converted
into an educational focus open to quotidian life. For the philosopher and
educator John Dewey, education is not defined as preparation for the
future, but as the process of life. It is a rationale which becomes even
more evident in that which regards the mediatized society: the flexibi-
lization of the relations of production and the fragmentation of work
hours regarding the inflection of the productive system to so-called
human capital (a figure of so-called cognitive capitalism) demand contin-
uous forms of knowledge. Contemporary society is in itself instructional.
This is not restricted to technical or professional knowledge. The
existence within the media bios has, as a presupposition, the orientation
(the Aristotelian notion of the bios is seated in the notion of existential
orientation) toward a powerful transformation of the social life by the
combination of financial capital with technological information and com-
munication devices. The technological form of consciousness is essen-
tially communicational, therefore, also an organizer of new forms of
relations not only of men within themselves, but also with things and
nature. The technology of data manipulation or of message transmission
is only one of its aspects.
The analogies between Greek and modern, favored by the commu-
nicational question, puts ancient rhetoric such as the political technique
of language in the Greek Polis beside mediatization as the technological
practice of discourse under the aegis of the market in contemporaneity.
The rhetorical dimension is immediate and visible because it addresses
elocution, the practices of language, discourse which circulates socially,
particularly in what is referred to as audiovisual broadcast and cultural
diffusion in all its forms. The masters of rhetoric and the sophists, to
whom Socrates and Plato were opposed, are equivalent, in terms of
social function, to mechanical communication devices, which equally sus-
tain a new kind of pedagogical discourse. As can be inferred, we are not
addressing here all rhetorical art, but the eristic or artificialist technique
aimed at winning arguments at any cost, or persuading the audience
by means of emotional effects. It is worth noting that, within the very
circle of Greek philosophy, there was a distinction between good and
bad rhetoric, which was understood as dialectic. Both cases, however,
putting aside the due differences, bear the definition of rhetoric as a

political technique of language.
It may seem counterintuitive to evoke the experience of ancient
Greece in proposing the constitution of an ultramodern social science,
when it is known that modern education does not exactly correspond to
the paideia and that the technological framework of the world is being
constructed precisely over the ruins of Platonic thought, that is, of meta-
physics. However, it is worth considering the analogy, already present in
the beginnings of Western political thought, between technical practice
and politics. In texts such as The Republic, The Laws, and various other
dialogs, Plato makes it clear that the practice of governance or politics
is a techne, therefore a practical art, equivalent in terms of its demand
for special abilities to others which are indispensable to the Polis. In The
Laws, he excludes artisans from full citizenship, he compares legislative
action to the work of shipbuilders.
On the other hand, the analogy between the ancient and the mod-
ern is relevant when one takes into account that the new objectivist/
technological order suggests the hypothesis of another form of life, the
virtual bios (resulting from the new technology of social relations) or a
species of “integral telemorphosis of the society” (Baudrillard). In this
case, the analogy presents an inversion, in that it no longer addresses pol-
itics capable of functioning in the form of a practical technique, but the
very techne as politics, functioning to a certain point with its own logic,
self-referential (tautological) to a “territory” made of pure information,
which seduces the public sphere with the ecstasy of connection.
This “telemorphosis” should not be understood as the specific effect
of a special media program, but rather as a mediatization event, that is,
of the exponential articulation of the traditional social institutions with
the set of information technologies coupled with the market.28 Using
other terms, it is a strict association between social practices and the pub-
lic space, activated by technological processes of communication. It is
not a theoretical idiosyncrasy, in that, among communication research-
ers and thinkers, there is a growing sense of an ecological conception
of the relations between media, individuals, and society, or rather, the
“environment” metaphor for complex communications systems.
28 Vide Sodré, Muniz (2006).

108 M. SODRÉ
The virtual bios thus implies a virtualized, spatial totality or a “total

social fact” (expression used by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss to
designate a fact which permeates the economic, political, and cultural
forums of a society), but a continuous duration of a form of life, a bios,
characteristic of a new kind of social order, to which the designation
“society of control” may be adequate, especially when this bios is thought
of as part of the social induction strategies of technical control devices
of the zoe (the “naked” life, natural, animal). In other words, it is a new
kind of attractor or social operator, more temporal than spatial, powered
by advanced technology.
How does one theoretically detect a new bios? A convenient metaphor
for demonstrating the passage from one surface of register (effective real-
ity) to the screen (virtual reality, media) is the Möbius strip. Another is
the musical key: the musical concept of keying, suggested by Goffman,
to address the alteration of any given social form.29 The key, as is well
known, is a sign which marks the pitch and gives name to the notes
in a musical score; it is also the unifying “key” of themes in discourse.
A single, informal conversation can transform into a class if the “key”
of pedagogical power is applied to it. It can equally be transformed into
psychoanalytic material in a doctor’s office (in psychoanalysis, the “trans-
ference” key creates its own space, mixing myth and history) or into
entertainment (for the aesthetic intensification of dialog) in a television
program.
The media bios is a species of virtual key applied to everyday life, to
the real historical existence of the individual. In terms of pure free will,
one can enter and exit it, but within the civilizing conditions in which
we live (intensive urbanization, social-market relations, the prevalence of
the value of capitalistic exchange), we are immersed in media virtuality,
which bestows upon us a vicarious, parallel, form of life, “altered” by the
intensification of audiovisual technology conjoined to the market. This
makes the media bios the lack of distinction between screen and reality—
“traditional” reality, well understood, in that today’s reality is already
constituted under the aegis of the sensationalized or image-based com-
pleteness to which the virtual tends. It is an exacerbated inflection of the
29 Cf. Goffman (1986).

imaginary which, as Deleuze saw clearly, “is not the unreal, but rather
the indiscernibility of the real and the unreal.”30
This bios is not, however, radically defined as the sum of all technically
produced images, but rather as the power of the models (as in the mythic
order, the power is from primordial symbols or archetypes), which is
updated or materialized in determined types of images, historically over-
determined. The growing prevalence of the models in the social order
calls attention to the ambivalence of the image as a sensory base of all
culture. On the one hand, there is the poetic as a valid dimension in the
production of knowledge of the world: Bachelard, one of the greatest
French epistemologists of the twentieth century, reserved first place in
the process of forming rational knowledge to the image.
Just as nineteenth-century economists elaborated on the fiction of
a man defined in terms of production and consumption (the homo eco-
nomicus, initially imagined by the philosophical currents of hedonism,
utilitarianism, and sensualism), it is possible today to theoretically fiction-
alize something like a homo iconicus, with the perspective of the modern
fragmentation of the human being by images and digits (an image con-
sistent with the modern theoretical discourse of “post-humanism” and,
at the fringes of the famed Heideggerian diagnosis of the transformation
of the world into images in the technical era) to adjust it to functional
communication’s research object.
This cultural fiction is not distant from the economic fiction, as the
media images which rule social relations, as well as the constitutive dig-
its of informational flows, stem from the hegemonic models of interna-
tional capital and the global market. In practice, it is, on the one hand, a
material culture (in the sense of a culture in which products assume an
autonomous or objective existence) and, on the other, a true culture of
sensations and emotions, of which is made a more affective than logical-
argumentative experience. This leads to the prevalence of stereotypes,
which are aesthetically condensed, collective emotions, within the imma-
terial territories of the media bios. What is produced is a species of indus-
trial “aesthetic action,” extensive in the social life as a whole, which recalls
American pragmatist John Dewey’s conception of the aesthetic action as
30 Deleuze (1990, p. 93).

110 M. SODRÉ
the interaction between the form and the real-historical, as well as the
circulation of reflections and sensations.31
The mediatized form has persisted over the last decades as a techno-
logical “park” integrated by and adequate for public visibility regimes
and the representation of capital in its financial and globalist phase. It
is the most evident symptom of the civilizing mutation which presides
over the emergence of a new existential orientation (the virtual bios),
economically ruled by financial capital and the market, with the help of
a generalized “aestheticization” through media action (the media bios).
A direct product of the techno-cultural society, this form contributes to
the accentuation of the object crisis in traditional social sciences, attuned
to an early space-time distinct from that in which mediatization has
developed.
In the emerging forms of life, social relations and the production of
knowledge, differently from the sociological episteme (where the fiction
of a homo sociologicus contemplates the social relations between con-
crete individuals), are comprised of human beings and machines, in an
increasingly equal partnership. The sciences placed at the center of the
accelerated mutation of systems—robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnol-
ogy, genetic engineering, and bionics—are inseparable from the techni-
cal object. Today, interobjectivity (the relations between objects) has an
influence as great as, if not greater than, that of intersubjectivity. It is a
perspective which broadens as one considers that the intelligent archi-
tecture of the newest generation of computer servers (intelligent sensors
which allow for online, uninterrupted monitoring of the machines) enor-
mously reduces the necessity of human labor in operating and maintain-
ing the machines.
At the same time, contemporary techno-science navigates the frontier
of what some (exaggeratedly) call “post-humanism” in producing equip-
ment and prostheses which lead to hybrid techno-biologies in the sphere
of physical handicaps, with extraordinary results. Athletes in the 2012
London Olympics (e.g., the Brazilian Alan Fonteles, who defeated the
South African champion) were described by the press as “mutants”: with
their legs amputated and replaced by carbon fiber prostheses (artificial
legs called flex foot cheetahs), they are able to compete with the best run-
ners in the world. Even so, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of
31 Cf. Dewey (1934).

Technology (MIT) bio-mechatronics group maintains that these ath-

letes are using old, low-technology material, given the prostheses are
not properly bionic, as they function without neural command or feed-
back. Bionics would be a simulation of physiological function, therefore,
something beyond nature, with the prospect of human beings guided by
internal microchips, powered by batteries.32
Indeed, after scientists from Duke University, in the USA, and the
Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neurosciences, in Natal
(Brazil), managed to electronically connect the brains of two rats (in
2013), so that one could carry out activities influenced by experiences
acquired by the other, public light was shone on the idea of the “biolog-
ical computer.” For Brazilian neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis, the expe-
rience opened the door to what he calls the “brainet,” that is, an organic
Internet, made of various brains, and capable of working together to
solve problems conventional computers cannot handle. In the future, it
could connect human brains for the transmission of information.33
The prosthetic transformations of the human soma are not episodic
incidents, but rather significant phenomena in a cultural mutation indi-
cated by theorists as well as artists, for example, the filmmaker David
Cronenberg, for whom the body is the dimension of all conflict: “What
happens in the body is the reality.”34 Effectively, beyond somatic pros-
thesis, the prevalence of machines, together with the appearance of
technical objects which simulate life—like the “sensory robot” (capa-
ble of seeing, hearing, and touch) or the artificial jellyfish which mixes
synthetic and biological elements, reproducing nearly to perfection the
swimming of the common creature—adds fuel to the fire of the hypoth-
esis that technology will come to be considered, in and of itself, a social
“actor” (or “actant,” as Latour prefers, probably inspired by semiologi-
cal, “Greimasian” literature), in its uninterrupted activity in the various
processes of existence.
Latour proposed the concept of actor-network (based on the Actor-
Network Theory), which elevates the electronic object to the con-
dition of active participant in the relation of subjects with electronic
32 Cf. revista Piauí, nº 71, August 2012.

33 Cf. O Globo, 1/3/2013.
34 Cf. O Globo, 7/8/2012.
112 M. SODRÉ
technology, and in particular, the media.35 In this context, the so-called

Internet of things has developed: an infrastructure for the dynamic,
global network, based on communication protocols where physical
and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual per-
sonalities. Within, objects can interact among themselves and with the
environment, by means of data exchange. Without direct human inter-
vention, they still react to and influence physical world events. All this
tends to reach unimaginable dimensions when one considers the most
recent developments such as that which has been called “big data,” or
rather, the concept of companies storing and processing data on expo-
nential scales and speeds.
This historical juncture, which implies an irrefutable renegotiation
with nature and with “non-human” elements (thus, the expression
“post-humanism”), displaces the traditional world view anchored in
the idea of the “social,” that is, of a purely intersubjective relationship.
Found in this are elements indispensable to the epistemological devel-
opment of communication as an emerging science, although the major
contributions do not generally appear under the rubric of “communica-
tion,” as Wilden notes: “These contributions include non-mechanistic
interpretations of cybernetics, of general systems theory, systems analysis,
and systems engineering; some aspects of automaton and nerve structure
theory; the qualitative approaches in information science; the study of
non-human communication and the development of kinetics; the double
bind theory on schizophrenia and its derivations; the ecology of systems
and ecological anthropology.”36
Since the 1930s, this systemic perspective has influenced the concep-
tions of American and European authors in different cognitive regions,
for example, Lévi-Strauss and linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure,
leading up to French structuralism. This is derived from that which we
call the “code paradigm,” prevalent in French linguistics and semiology.
Regarding communication specifically, it receives an important, reflective
treatment by the German Medienwissenschaft (media science or theory),
especially in works by Flusser,37 Luhmann,38 and Kittler.39
35 Cf. Latour (2007).

37 Cf. Felinto and Santaella (2012).
38 Cf. Luhmann (2005).
39 Cf. Kittler (2009).

For Flusser, in whom one can glimpse a connection between phe-

nomenology and cybernetics, subjectivity is produced by informational
hybridization with a complex network of social and technological inputs.
For Kittler, who combines mathematical information theory with the
theoretical insights of McLuhan, it is the very subjectivity that dissi-
pates over the systemic communication hegemony, from which stems
the imperative of redescribing oneself to media through technical
mechanisms of world registration and reproduction, in which the bod-
ies, discourses, and technologies are historically articulated by power.
Luhmann, in turn, produced the hypothesis of “non-living autopoietic
systems,” through which he rejects the classic dichotomies of metaphys-
ics (the unreal/real, for example), suggesting a self-referential concept of
form. This emerges from the possible in society and in history, within
psychic and social systems, differently from the medium, which is the
concept for an external space, undifferentiated and completely virtual.
Regarding the electronic network, subject and object, living and
immaterial beings—hybrids—converge, “dialoging,” exercising mutual
influence and strengthening the hypothesis of an electronic “life.” It is a
hypothesis which broadens when one observes the technical and indus-
trial phenomenon of media convergence, in which physical artifacts com-
bine, transforming into a centralizing device. Thus, the relation between
personal computer and user was absorbed into the use of the cellu-
lar phone, which in turn was transformed into a computer and recom-
bined by the Internet in tablets and smartphones. Considering industrial
interests, it is likely that isolated artifacts (optical disks, digital cameras,
landline telephones, keyboards, etc.) will, in time, cease to exist due to
technological advances in virtualization capable of leading to a true “dia-
log” (by means of voice recognition) between user and technological
object. “We will be able to truly converse with gadgets, and they will
possess enough intelligence to interpret the terms of our conversation
and offer us what we need,” according to a specialist.40
This context weakens the historical foundations of metaphysi-
cal opposition between subject and object, as appears, for exam-
ple, in the philosophy of Sartre between the being-in-itself (the thing)
and the being-for-itself (the subject of consciousness) as a condition of
human liberty. Herein resonates the mythic fear of the mastery of the
40 Cf. O Globo (24/9/2012), Caderno Economia, p. 17.

114 M. SODRÉ
consciousness by the thing, which manifests itself in various historical

periods of the European spirit as well as in the popular imagination.
Countering this type of thinking today, in a stronger way than philoso-
phy, is the discourse that the techno-market society produces about itself
through the technocratic doctrine that accompanies the proliferation of
technical objects and publicity geared toward the fabrication of a new
social consciousness. In this, the object, although produced en masse and
available on the common market, is marketed as a value of personalized
use, therefore, as a being-in-itself of the subject, prone to erasing the
difference between the labor and the commodity, and even conferring
another type of urban identity upon a disordered individuality.
In broader terms, contemporary technology suggests that the multi-
plication of artifacts is, in fact, an amplification of the technical exter-
nality’s power over man, and that the threat does not truly stem from
the thing in itself, but rather from the nature of the social and economic
relations in which it is circulated. Thus, within the scope of transfor-
mations arising from mutual influences, it is pertinent to again describe
the concept of the machine in the area of devices which substitute the
mechanical and repetitive memory of human beings.
Already in 1930, the English mathematician, James Jeans, observed
that “the universe now begins to look more like a great thought than a
great machine.” The machine he refers to here is certainly not the same
one that results from electronic technology, which imposes itself as a
thought system in partnership with man, therefore, as a system of enti-
ties without strict, physical dimensions (contrary to what happened with
the machines of the mechanical era) which cannot be “located” in space-
time, as they consist of forms, flows of variations, and information about
the world.
An example similar to this is that of the “universal machine” or the
“Turing machine,” in reality an abstract mathematical structure capa-
ble of making any kind of calculation, proposed (1936) by the famed
English mathematician Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer
science. Turing managed to project and perfect machines (in the mate-
rial sense of the term), but his “universal machine” was, in fact, a meta-
phor for a logical work, which would provide ideas which, decades later,
would be utilized in the construction of the computer. The question as
to whether machines can or cannot think was proposed by him.
In truth, there were various attempts at constructing electronic cal-
culation machines before American engineer Claude Shannon first
explained (1939) how equations and propositions could be expressed

as electronic connections. From the direct application of this research
came the first “electronic calculator” (1947), prototype of the mod-
ern computer and created by Kalin and Burkhart. One year later
(1948), Shannon published an article entitled “A Mathematical Theory
of Communication,” where he uses the word “communication” in
the sense of “information” as well as “circulation of information,”
which ended up leading to confusion between this area and that of
cybernetics.41
In the same year that Shannon published his article, Norbert Wiener
published Cybernetics, defined as “the science of control and com-
munication in the animal and the machine,” which he announced as a
development of Shannon’s “information theory.” Feedback theory is an
extension of Wiener’s thought. Despite the terminological ambiguities
(between cybernetics, communication, and information), from this theo-
retical context is born, in 1949, the communication analysis proposed by
American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, with the objective of
studying human language from the context and internal structures of the
message.
Later, supported by Sapir’s work, biologist, anthropologist, and psy-
chiatrist Gregory Bateson, the most famous intellect of the Palo Alto
School, put communication at the center of his conception of structure
as that which binds living beings. Philosophically a pragmatist, Bateson
considers the separation between substances (subjects) and objects to
be an epistemological error. As information flows in circuits which pass
through the barriers of the individual, including the environment, it
would be absurd to conceive of a world in terms of isolated entities and
objects. Conceiving of communication as an integrated social phenome-
non, he radically diverged from the functionalist and separatist scheme of
the communicative process.42 The expression “communication theory”
appears here as an analysis of behaviors within a natural or group context.
Today, the context is marked by the overpowering presence of the
technical object. Thus, they seem remote from the theoretical preoccu-
pations of cultural thinkers such as Adorno or Marcuse, who guided the
critical spirit of important European and Latin American intellectuals
41 Cf. Mucchielli (1971, p. 16).

42 Cf. Winkin et al. (1981).
116 M. SODRÉ
over the last century toward the apocalypse of the paideia. These wor-
ries, it is worth remembering, had as their objective the progressive con-
version of the culture into a factor of capitalist production, whose most
daunting side received, in the first half of the last century, the Adornian
name “culture industry” (Kulurindustrie) or, to others, mass culture,
which received acerbic criticism from the Frankfurt School and postmod-
ernist thinkers.
In reality, this kind of reflection had already appeared, about a cen-
tury earlier, in the philosophical prophecy of Nietzsche when he referred
to the ways of “abusing culture and making it a slave.” One of these
“is, firstly, the egoism of the merchants that requires the help of culture
and, out of gratitude, in exchange, they help culture, too, wishing, well
understood, to define it, making it the objective and the means. From
there comes the principle and rationale now in vogue, which more or less
says this: the more knowledge and culture there is, the more necessity
there will be, therefore, also more production, profit, and happiness - in
this, the fallacious formula.”43
The current hypothesis on technological power, however, is more of a
“will to power,” in the proper Nietzschean sense of the expression, that
is, not as a practice of domination, or even desire—nothing that dialec-
tic can recover—but rather a force that allows for the expansion of life.
From this, the modern theoretical insistence on the word technology
(Heidegger sticks to technique, although an old German tradition distin-
guishes the order of tools, designated “technique,” from “technology”
as the science of this order), because it better designated the technical
logos, that is, the rationality which emerges from the very instrumen-
tal universe of the machines. Technology, fulcrum of the contemporary
experience, is tool and discourse. The virtual duplication of the world
through images, models, and discourse appears as the will for technolog-
ical potential, as the practical establishment of the hypothesis that tech-
nology, in its growth or expansion, can bring about the reformulation of
the humanist idea of a biological anthropocentrism.
Thus, the “agony” of man (the existential trance of transforma-
tion and passage, as understood by the tradition of thought) assumes
a new form in the Polis and demands a new initiation rite, more ethi-
cal, aesthetic, and political than logical. This is what transpires in the
43 Nietzsche (2009, p. 236).

generalized malaise in the face of the growing evidence that, inverse to

the exponential increase of the technological power and material goods
of the market, is human well-being. Just as the French Revolution is at
the root of the social instability which presided over the emergence of
sociology, the technological mutation presides over the spirit of exis-
tential insecurity in the mediatized society. This insecurity is not a mere
reverie stemming from the idle meditation of thinkers, as the very pro-
ductive system today conceives of professional formation as the acquisi-
tion of skills in order to “solve problems in situations of uncertainty.”
With the impoverishment of symbolic humanist and republican refer-
ences (where administration takes the place of policy), and consequently,
with the progressive loss of institutional legitimacy (basically guaran-
teed by an abstract juridical formalism), uncertainty and obscurity take
hold of the social tie, the cohesive link of human existence, increasingly
permeated by machines and overcome by a market-based universality.
It is this, on the other hand, which opens space for the emergence of a
knowledge directed toward rebuilding the human subject starting with
the communication field.
What is truly shown by the most acute interventions in social thought
is that social thought requires a new system of intelligibility for the pro-
cedural diversity of communication as a specific science for the active
production of knowledge, possibly geared toward rethinking the com-
munal binding or social tie. Whatever particular terminology is applied
to this procedure (Destruktion in Heidegger, deconstruction in Derrida,
archaeology in Foucault, redescription in Rorty, etc.), the core of the
operation consists of a new way of articulating problems, more attuned
to the history of philosophy (as in all these cases, the Heideggerian idea
of Destruktion resonates as the overcoming of metaphysics, that is, of
philosophy itself) than to the classic social sciences, in that central ten-
ets of Western thought are re-read in light of the critical temporality of
metaphysics.
However, in accompanying the Heideggerian orientation of this
Destruktion, consequently, as he says himself, “to open our ears, to make
them free for that which, in the tradition of the being of the entity,
inspires us. Keeping our ears subject to this inspiration, we may situ-
ate ourselves in the correspondence,”44 one cannot remain within the
44 Heidegger (1973, p. 218).

118 M. SODRÉ
interior of the history of philosophy or simply “metaphysics.” If it fell

to the German philosopher, in this same line of thought, to try to make
the radical experience of recovering the origin of the philosophical logos,
it falls to the “open ears” of contemporary reflection to try and listen to
the constitutive voices of the new technological environment inhabited
by man.
The re-reading of the traditional world in light of this environment
is no longer under the monopoly of philosophy, nor of a supposed pos-
itivist autonomy of the social sciences (these, especially sociology, are
in a growing crisis together with the crisis of critical theory), but the
beginning of a new mode of synoptic intelligibility capable of creating
a dialog for the various possibilities of thought. Traditionally, as is well
known, the “first” philosophy or metaphysics elaborated on what exists
while only existing, removed from its properties, whereas science sought
to know or describe the real properties of the existent. The re-reading
of the existent is obligatorily synoptic, that is, “ecosophical,” integrating
diverse forms of knowledge.
Re-reading is equivalent to redescribing (or reinterpreting),45 to begin
again, not simply to “philosophize,” but principally to take something
back from the Nietzschean endeavor of re-evaluating values, with the
aim of elaborating a new educative or self-educative horizon capable of
recalibrating the consciousness of the subject in the face of globaliza-
tion’s semiological violence. Philosophy can enter into this reclaiming as
a resource for rescuing the scientific knowledge of its imprisonment or
its bonds to petrifying presuppositions—the example Jacques Lacan, psy-
chiatrist and thinker of contemporary psychoanalysis, used to liberate the
psychoanalytic field from its biological fixations. He did not construct
any philosophical system (indeed, Freud considered them somewhat
“paranoid”), but he “opened the ears” of psychoanalytical thought
through philosophy and poetry in order to consider the expressive possi-
bilities of the unconscious.
Richard Rorty, although he worked in the field of philosophy, never
identified himself strictly as a philosopher, that is, as though he could
officially record his activity on a business card. The redescriptive oper-
ation which he attributes to contemporary philosophy, however, could
45 The term redescription is constant in the more recent philosophical vocabulary of the
American pragmatist Richard Rorty, while reinterpretation is constant in the texts of the
Italian, Gianni Vattimo.
have a strong role to play in the interpretation of the general phenomena

of knowledge. The scientific field of communications, for example, could
come to define itself more clearly as a device for re-reading traditional
societal issues in light of the cultural mutations brought upon by infor-
mation and communications technology, without the traditional barriers
between the old “disciplines,” but also between scientific redescription
and creation of an artistic nature, with all its imaginative resources, from
which metaphors are not excluded.
The appeal to metaphor deserves a special commentary when con-
sidering the repercussion (mostly of a journalistic nature) of the arti-
cle (“Fashionable Nonsense,” 1998) published by Alan Sokal and Jean
Bricmont, two obscure science professors from the USA, about what
they considered the “irresponsible and inexact” use of scientific con-
cepts by postmodern French thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Julia
Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio, and
Jean Baudrillard, among others. The schoolmasters insinuated that this
improper use was intended to conceal their true scientific ignorance.
Possible obscurities aside, these thinkers did, in fact, appeal to scien-
tific metaphors—as the historical founders of the classic social sciences,
from sociology to anthropology, always did—because, in the constitution
of a new field of research or a new course of thought, metaphors pro-
visionally bring about (although they may eventually consolidate them-
selves in scientific terminology) clear models of understanding for the
territory they uncover. There are limits to this resource, but in scientific
or technological practice, new theoretical paradigms or models may be
generated through metaphors. In the case of communication, the met-
aphorical assertions (or redescriptions) of a new biosocial ecosystem
powered by electronic information reveal themselves to better stimulate
novel thought than traditional sociological schema.
Baudrillard, author of grand ideas and object of great public visibility
after McLuhan, appears to represent a case of metaphorical redescription
of metaphysics’ traditional strongholds. For example, he retakes David
Hume’s endeavor, without citing him (or even knowing him), in what
he says in regard to transforming, with stylistic elegance, the reflective
terminology of the human experience, its rhetorical-sophist hybrid-
ization of scientific, fictional, linguistic, and other images. Likewise,
related to the effort at relativizing the weight of alleged truths, he faced
them in the same way as the English empiricist, as mere regularities of
120 M. SODRÉ
representations, rather than ontological justifications supported by sub-

stance and existence.
On the other hand, within the theme of non-communication (or of
“incommunication”), he shifts Thomas Hobbes’ reflection to the field of
mediatization (also without citing him or presenting him conceptually)
about violence and fear as the principal origins of social functioning. In
Hobbes, the absence of a pacific association among individuals, or rather,
a “non-relation” which dissolves communal ties and transforms the man
in the “wolf of the other,” founded social life. In Baudrillard, non-com-
munication is the principal founder of the societal order as supported by
the means of communication.
This societal order, with all characteristics recognized as hyper-realistic,
is very close to the Marxist concept of fetishism, understood as a spe-
cial, almost magical, power attributed to commodities: “Before all else,
the commodity is an external object, a thing that, by its own properties,
satisfies human necessity, whatever the nature, the origin, whether com-
ing from the stomach or from fantasy.”46 By means of this “mysterious”
property, which codifies the human condition within the theory of value,
not only the labor is converted into a commodity, but also the very social
form, in which production and the market become autonomous in the
face of real producers, giving the relations between human beings the
appearance of relations between things.
Before this definition in Capital, Marx had associated, in a writing
“from youth” (the heavily studied Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,
of 1844), the concept of alienation (responsible for the “reification” or
“making-into-a-thing” of individuals) with the fetishism of commodities.
The historical correction of this phenomenon, understood as a conver-
sion of a lie into a human truth, was much later suggested by the old
existentialism, which imagined a subject of consciousness capable of
authentically resisting the massification of the spirit by things.
The redescription of the concept of fetishism makes the hypothesis of
“authentic” resistance to reification (in truth, one of the various hypoth-
eses of romantic anti-capitalism, typical of Sartre’s philosophy) obso-
lete in that the power is no longer placed in the individual conscience,
but rather in the codified relations (market fetishism) which, preceding
the subject, already articulate subjectivity as commodity. The societal
46 Marx (1978, p. 57).

codification which we designate the virtual bios can well be understood

as a redescription of fetishism in contemporary society. The technological
atmosphere is not neutral in relation to commodities or the market: it
is, in fact, similar to the spectacle defined by Guy Debord, its unfinished
form.47
This idea of the spectacle redescribes, as a harbinger of capitalist
financialization and with the political spirit of 1960s counterculture,
that which the young Marx called alienation, a result of market fetish-
ism. Manifold, the spectacle is, in Debord’s provocative vision, a strong
attractor of desire for the consumption of cultural fragments, which con-
tinuously pressures the consciousness of the young and old. This spec-
tacle is not simply a show or any other product of the entertainment
industry, but the very social relation as molded by consumption, which
has become capable of reprocessing meaning and distributing it as cul-
ture, redefining values and lifestyles. In this psychosocial exponentia-
tion of consumption, sensations which are not necessarily linked to the
commodity’s value-in-use, but to the pleasure of the fantasy implied in
the reality in which it is fabricated, are stimulated. The measuring of the
pleasure of the senses, thus, is increasingly given by the fetishistic enjoy-
ment of the spectacle/commodity—even sexuality is transmuted into the
consumption of simulacra (useful or useless objects) which circulate as
derivations of desire.
Various postmodern analyses of capital and technology’s new ways of
being, indeed, have as a theoretical substratum the centrality of fetish-
ism in the illusion of contemporary production/reproduction, although
always subject to a redescriptive operation. Initially, redescription may
be understood as an invitation to read again, in the terms suggested by
Sloterdijk (although in another context): “All of the fecund new read-
ings take advantage of the changes in angles and the shifts in perspec-
tive which condition our retrospective vision of tradition, in that we are
contemporaries who are conscious of the modern disturbances in relation
to knowledge and the communication of global, telematic civilization on
emerging paths.”48
Here is reiterated the already expressed analogy between the epis-
temic rupture in the old world and the new as the demand for a new
47 Cf. Debord (1997).

48 Sloterdijk (2011, p. 32).
122 M. SODRÉ
mode of intelligibility. One can also, however, imply the construction

of a new system of intelligibility for phenomena thus far submitted to
the predominating logic of comprehension in the current forms of social
power. Added to this is the critical attitude, not as a recurrence of the
epistemic reflectivity of modernity (in that critical reason itself constructs
that which may be criticized), but as the reiteration of a political posi-
tion committed to the aggregation of value and meaning—that is, the
unpredictability, indetermination, or freedom inherent to creation—to
that which, in the world, makes up an event or an occurrence. Without
inventing a new mode of intelligibility, capable of criticizing hegemonic
knowledge, criticism ends up being converted into the administration of
that which is already known and already given.
Invention or creation is that which has, in fact, happened with the
more intuitive analysts of that which may be designated a mutation of
the dominant systems of thought, toward the implosion of traditional
ontology (substantialist) of Aristotelian inspiration. Invention is not
limited to argumentative or conceptual content, in that, within a tech-
nologically constructed bios, the very idea of re-reading may be rein-
vented through the technical possibilities that, today, open up new ways
of reading. As reading today is plural and heterogeneous, re-reading or
redescription bears oral or audiovisual resources, from film to computer
software.
Along these lines, the audiovisual field (which associates writing and
image) has opened the possibility of thinking through image, as sug-
gested by Deleuze in arguing that some filmmakers, especially Jean-
Luc Godard, brought the cinematographic image on equal terms,
as far as thought, to the written reflection of the philosophers of the
past.49 As Machado observes, “the idea of an audiovisual essay has
already appeared, explicitly formulated, in various Philippe Dubois
texts on Godard, brought together in the anthology Cinema, Video,
Godard (2004). In the same way, the anthology Jean-Luc Godard: El
Pensamiento del Cine (Oubiña, 2003) brings together articles from
various Argentinian authors who discuss the ‘essay method’ used by
Godard in his television series Histoire (s) du Cinéma.”50 Machado
applies this idea of the audiovisual essay to the work of filmmaker and
49 Cf. Deleuze (2002).

50 Machado (2012, pp. 111–112).
communication theorist Alexander Kluge, who sought to construct a

“conceptual cinema” (by means of paradoxical collage, overlapping,
“electronic windows,” etc.) and became well known for his audiovisual
analysis of Sergei Eisenstein’s project adapting Karl Marx’s Capital into
the cinematic language.
Even beyond the audiovisual field, within the electronic network, the
idea of the written, theoretical text has suffered modifications: the stabil-
ity of academic articles guaranteed by a community of relatively inactive
peers was disrupted by the speed of commentary, by the ever possible
revision of statements, as well as by the possibility that new texts can sub-
stitute older ones. On the electronic network, interpretive knowledge
produced by redescription may be seen as a path to understanding not
only a work, but the academic community itself, in an interactive man-
ner, capable of illuminating a publicly meaningful response, a collectively
shared response. The meaning does not arise from the correspondence
mirrored between the statement of the supposed factual truth of the
world, but from the functional correlations and interpretive invention
present in the theoretical “cadence” of the observer.
Redescription is not understood, therefore, as the semantic or sensory
apprehension of a stable or fixed reality which enjoys a structural media-
tion, in that “reality” as preexisting interpretation (exactly in accordance
with the Nietzschean statement that “there are no facts, only interpre-
tations”), destined to being shifted by whatever the new interpretation
invents and socially puts into play. The rise of this new “interpreter-rede-
scriptor” is favored by perceptiveness open as much to the overcoming
of academic barriers as to analytic acuity. Whatever the methodological
path, work will define itself as “thought,” more in the sense of “activ-
ity,” as affixed to the word by Wittgenstein, than in the sense of doctri-
nal discourse, not uncommonly a nearly religious “cult” meditative upon
transcendence, as transpires in the de-politicization of academic, philo-
sophical games. The knowledge of the philosophical past, stored and fro-
zen in its own history, may dull the intelligence of the present.
The phenomenon occurs in other regions of the contemporary his-
tory of philosophy and the social sciences. One notable example is that
of Michel Foucault, who as a thinker and thorough researcher (“archae-
ologist,” as he says) passed through the fields of psychology, social his-
tory, sexology, discourse theory, etc., deconstructing timeless models
of the Being as cultivated by transcendentalism, and, in practice, rede-
scribing official philosophy. With communication, something similar
124 M. SODRÉ
is happening: within, outside of, or halfway between the social sciences

and the philosophical field, communication, in its moments of crea-
tive decision (Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, for example), partakes in
the reinterpretive spirit which reflects the modification in the Western
consciousness of history. From there stems the pragmatic attitude: in
observing an object or phenomenon, the interpreter is guided more
by the formulation of a hypothesis than by the analysis of a theoretical
tradition.
In objective terms, what is glimpsed as a science of communication
has its starting point in the sphere of immediate, visible social relations,
an interpretive platform for that which could be called “social relations
of communication/information,” or rather, the relations which, different
from those placed under the exclusive aegis of production, refer to the
organization of social life as codified by the market and by technology to
the organization of the virtual bios, but within a social perspective of the
transcendence of its field of market-based force and within a hermeneutic
(and pragmatic) perspective capable of overcoming the hegemonic, cog-
nitive paradigm.
Along these lines, it is worth bringing attention to Parret, who pro-
duced a criticism rather consistent with the methodological reduction
of the language sciences as operated by the modern epistemological
paradigm, whose semantic value lies in the search for the truth in state-
ments.51 Thus, in speech-act theory (since Austin and Searle), traversed
by the “verifunctional” perspective, the speaking subject appears only
as “a speaker of truth, emptied of his own motivations,” producing a
“reduction of the social and communal subject into a communicator, and
then into an informer, as though the intersubjectivity (or co-subjectivity)
were equivalent to the communicability of all communication, a transfer
of information.”
Consequently, the modern paradigm is characterized by an articula-
tion between veridiction/communication-information/economic games.
In this way, the paradigm “elevates communication to the state of the
ultimate principle of the internal structure of intersubjectivity and
the being-in-community, to then reduce it to a transmission of infor-
mation.”52 Latent within this veridicatating-communicator-informer
51 Parret (1997).
52 Ibidem, passim.
subject is a homo economicus, an allegedly “self-sufficient, asocial atom,

free from all communal determination,” in that he is self-determined by
the “maximization of his ends,” within a being-in-community recon-
structed as “a system of interactions and transactions submitted to the
rules of economic rationality.” This verifunctional model, which represses
the pathos in favor of the logos, passes through the greater part of current
research and teaching in communication, whether at the level of trans-
mitting practical technique or in practical theory.
From this model stems the conception of public space as a technolog-
ically amplified “mirror” of social life, emphasizing the ethical-political
demand of inscribing society’s self-educational horizon in the reflection
to beyond the mere technical repetition of the existent. Thus, the neces-
sary criticism of the mirror metaphor: “When someone looks at himself
in the mirror, he does not see the other of himself, nor even the other of
the other, but only himself.”53 This reduplication of oneself is an empty
circularity, in that it relinquishes the mediation necessary for the full act
of knowing. It is the vision which exists of the pure spectacle—the logic
of media functioning until now—capable of emoting without producing
sensory lucidity or feeling.
It is always strategic to insist on the concept of public space or pub-
lic sphere as a space of communication in which each individual passes
from dual discourse to a discursive relation with the anonymous mass.
The concept of “public” is irradiated with political and social philosophy
for psycho-sociology and sociology, mobilizing authors from quite dif-
ferent disciplinary environments, such as John Dewey, Gustave Le Bon,
Gabriel Tarde, and Robert Park, who more or less converge on the idea
of a sphere formed by people who are enlightened and capable of argu-
ing over the common.
In fact, the common which cements the City together allows the
individual to transpose the limits of duality for communication with the
social anonymous and to assume the representative form associated with
every particular society. In Western modernity, from the eighteenth cen-
tury onward, this form is distinguished between the “mob” (emotional
group) and the “people” (principle of political-national identification),
later configured by political rationality, around that which is developed
in the public sphere as a space of politically common property. Under the
53 Cf. Emmanuel Carneiro Leão in a course at ECO/UFRJ, 10/25/1997.

126 M. SODRÉ
shadow of the Enlightenment, the literary salons, the militant clubs, and
press effectively generated an idea of critical-rational “space,” supposedly
capable of producing a public, political-cultural mediation between civil
society and the State. This dimension is theoretically emphasized and
developed by Habermas, but reinterpreted as the “public sphere,” that
which gives place to the relativization of the physical materiality of space
in favor of technologies which compress space-time, or rather, communi-
cation and information technologies.
The problem is that the new public space as amplified by these tech-
nologies no longer possesses the political nature characteristic of the
period, for it is truly a culturalized sphere (caused by the editorial and
media corporations, in service of the market), which, in the end, pro-
gressively empties the political, converting the public life into life in
public, that is, a mere visibility of that which is considered apt for image
reproduction.
The expression “culturalized sphere” leaves it clear that, in ethical-
political terms, a cultural public space does not exist alongside the polit-
ical public space. In fact, the irruption of the modern public sphere in
History was one of the effects of the Industrial Revolution. It was
aligned with the expansion of bourgeois democracy, to which education
and culture as instruments for conceiving of democracy as a value and
an end, and not only as a government mechanism, were strategic (in the
same vein as the theoretical and political proclamations of Rousseau).
The dissemination of the dogmas of the “sovereignty of the people”
demanded the free movement of public or private ideas, but the pub-
lic sphere was strengthened in Europe throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as a place for manifesting the “popular will” and
not “private will.” Therefore, it was always simultaneously political and
cultural.
In its modern technological unveiling, the communicational phenom-
enon implies a widening of the public sphere, but only in its material or
functional dimension, without true historical correspondence with what
once meant politics and culture. Its industrial functioning demands no
more than the efficiency of informational flows—made possible by elec-
tronic artifacts—and the mobilization of public attention by the diver-
sified rhetoric of entertainment. Its practical reality relinquishes itself of
greater intellectual horizons.
Thus, conceiving today of another interpretive platform for the com-
municational phenomenon requires a “pre-comprehension” (in the
Heideggerian sense of this term) of communication as a human horizon

which has not been drained by the functional dimension; therefore, it
demands a political apprehension (in the best sense of the word) of the
human condition in the environment of new capital and technological
configurations.
The expression “interpretive platform” is close (though not identical,
as it is a conceptual thought) to that which, in Heideggerian philosophy,
is designated as existential analytics, that is, a phenomenological descrip-
tion of the existentials or modes of existing as being-in-the-world, which
encompasses not only the manners of being, but also those of acting,
thus leaving the implicit possibility of an ethic. Using the Kantian desig-
nation of a “secure path” in terms of science, we think at the same time
of the Heideggerian claim of “more secure” paths, therefore, of an ethic,
when philosophy approached that which he calls the complete disorienta-
tion of contemporary man.54
Dissolving the dichotomy between “social science” and “humani-
ties,” communication functions as an analytical base, but not—it is worth
repeating—for an ontological-transcendental investigation, as it does in
the field of philosophy (Heideggerian, especially), because it is not think-
ing of origin (the appearance of the entity, the Being), therefore, it is
not thinking of a totality of possibilities retained in history, but rather
of a questioning of existence in which language as an essential place of
human creativity tends to be absorbed by technology. It is, indeed, a
multifarious redescription (in which diverse theoretical “languages” con-
verge) of the traditional ontology of man’s mode of existing, insecure
in the affective tonality or psychic environment (Stimmung) of its new
technical dwelling, its new bios, despite its attempt to legitimate itself by
the pleasurable ideology of consumption and uninterrupted technologi-
cal efficiency.
On this ideology, there are a vast number of possible, critical re-readings,
such as that of Enriquez: “Sade unveils the world of industrial produc-
tion, not for negating pleasure, but for fundamentally tending to center
everything on pleasure, to make it so that it can only find its effective
realization in the world of fabricated objects and, in the end, reach its
satisfaction, disappearing into repetition and boredom.”55 While this is
54 Cf. Heidegger (1967).

55 Enriquez (2007, p. 141).
128 M. SODRÉ
not the intention of the author, it is worth taking another look at the
Heideggerian problem of modern disorientation. Ethically redescribed,
the imperative of liberation, which from its beginning marked the capi-
talist world organization and persists today in the last forms of financiali
zation, allows a glimpse of that which is beneath the multiplication of
objects, espousing the fetishistic lust of the economy.
However, the insistence on the idea of a science of communication
geared toward the analysis and direct observation of human binding
under the aegis of technology in some way marks its distance from the
pretensions of the explanation of totality by classical philosophy, demon-
strating the proximity to “philosophy as a rigorous science,” as Husserl
said. Science certainly does not correspond to the paradigm of physics,
when the unit of the system is mathematically guaranteed, but rather to
the demand of a uniqueness, therefore a coherent discourse of a “well-
formed language,” as advocated by sensualist thinker Étienne Bonnot de
Condillac.
The sensualist theory of knowledge is one of the marking chapters of
eighteenth-century French thought in opposition to seventeenth-century
philosophy, which advocated the use of reason to solve problems, but
through deductive processes beginning with supposedly innate ideas.
Without disregarding rationality (in fact, it constitutes one of the bases
of Enlightenment), the sensualism of Condillac makes the sensory expe-
rience the starting point for abstract, explanatory systems for reality. The
term sensation designates this experience, measured in different moments
and with different names: attention, comparison, judgment, and reflec-
tion.56 In isolation, a sensation does not result in an idea, but, intercon-
nected with others by means of signs, it is capable of forming language,
which makes judgment and concepts possible.
For the thinker, “the art of reasoning reduces itself to a well-formed
language.” He understands language as “analytical methods, which rea-
son only perfects if they perfect themselves, and the art of reasoning,
reducing to it greatest simplicity, can only be a well-formed language.”57
Thus, algebra is a species of language in that it is an analytical method.
Analysis, therefore, with its inherent power to abstract and generalize, is
the generator of language, of the exact ideas of all species: “It is through
56 Cf. Condillac (1989, p. 50). Vide equally, in the same volume, Tratado dos Sistemas e
Lógica.
57 Ibidem, Lógica, p. 123.
language that we become capable of creating the arts and sciences. Or

better, it is language which created them. Language made all discoveries
and we simply had to follow it. The imagination, to which we attribute
all talent, would be nothing without analysis.”58
It would fall to analysis to correct the abuse of abstract principals in
which determined metaphysical systems articulated by words such as
“Being, substance, natural essence, attribute, propriety, mode, cause and
effect, liberty, eternity, etc.” are incurred. Analysis, presupposed in lan-
guage, implies a path “marked by a sequence of well-formed observa-
tions, and we walk down it with a secure step, because we always know
where we are and because we always see where we are going.”
It is not, therefore, the “well-formed” stylistic creation of literary
rhetoric, but rather of a particular type of objectivity, claimed by Lévi-
Strauss in anthropology as: “(…) not only an objectivity which allows
whosoever practices it to make abstract their beliefs, preferences, and
preconceptions (…) to reach valid formulations not only for an honest
and objective observer, but also for all possible observers (…) to mold
new mental categories, to contribute toward introducing notions of
space and time, of opposition and contradiction (…).”59 Indeed, there
resounds in this “well-formed language” the old, hermeneutic intuition
related to the rationality of the sciences of the spirit (philology, history),
in the sense that the particular can only be understood within the “cir-
cle” of understanding of the group. It is not about cognitively leaving
the circle, but remaining in the interior with just or adequate language,
with heuristic or explicative value.
All this leaves it clear that, to a science of communication, the time
of conceptual work is still that of extended time, of duration. However,
if one may here propose a terminological question related to the adop-
tion of the term science or of something like a system of intelligibility,
as Berthelot suggested, to place the explicative unit of the phenom-
ena of the mass in an explicative structure which “consists, ultimately,
in referring the phenomenal diversity to a logic of process.”60 This
logic is inscribed in an epistemological “relational,” which breaks with
substantialist ontology (that of traditional social sciences) and favors
58 Ibidem, p. 113.
59 Lévi-Strauss(2012, p. 23).
60 Berthelot (1986, p. 190).
130 M. SODRÉ
“epistemological moments” or processes dependent on the structure of

dominant explanation.
He argues: “What is a system of intelligibility? We may be tempted
at first to say that it is a theory. But a theory, even a general one, only
accounts for a determined phenomenal field, while on the contrary,
diverse theories, applied to different fields and relative to various disci-
plines, may belong to the same system of intelligibility. What will define
this belonging will be the utilization, by each one of these theories, of
the same explicative structure.”61 This structure is located not by the
analyzed content (the object of knowledge), but by the relation which it
favors, or rather, by the process which upholds the operation of analysis.
Structure, as is well known, is a stable or crystallized symbolic mediation,
whereas “process indicates the dynamic dimension of the social reality,
that is, the complex interaction between diverse elements.”62
This argument is ingenious in that it allows for different analyses
undertaken by the European theorists (substantialists, the Americans,
therefore, are not considered) in the most prolific period of communi-
cational studies, which encompasses structuralism, semiology, systemism,
etc., to be epistemologically accommodated. With the expression “sys-
tem of intelligibility,” the awkwardness of the word “science” is circum-
vented and it becomes philosophically closer to a “system of thought”
aimed toward accepting the immediate reality of social phenomena and
susceptible to confronting other systems of intelligibility.
To us, whether science or system of intelligibility, it is thus possible
to think within hermeneutics, understood not as methodological intel-
ligence or doctrine of interpretive truth—not even as a universal “phi-
losophy” of interpretation—but as a mode of intelligibility (a sharpened
“tongue”) applied to the phenomena of comprehension caused by the
technological consciousness: thus, a new and redescriptive “hermeneutics
of existence.”
In its more fecund contributions, this hermeneutics has consisted
(a) of the commitment to a redescription of the relations between
man and neo-technologies, which is capable of accounting for trans-
formations of the conscience and of the self under the influx of a
new cultural order, the simulational; (b) at the same time, of the
61 Ibidem, p. 191.
62 Crespi (1997, p. 34).
ethical-political-anthropological endeavor in the sense of facilitating

a comprehension of the sociocultural mutations with an aim toward
self-questioning, guided by the affirmation of the essential difference of
man, of his singularity.
A quite fecund contribution is that of Baudrillard who, with a more
essay-based than epistemological motivation, committed himself to
reflectively researching that which appears irreducible by the logic of
traditional representation: “What in the object is irreducible to the sub-
ject; what in the subject is irreducible to himself, to concept and formu-
las which analyze him or with which he analyzes himself; what in the
exchange is irreducible to the social itself (the cursed part, the critical
mass); what in the political is irreducible to politics; what in history is
irreducible to history; the occurrence; what in sexuality is irreducible to
sex; the seduction.”63
Or rather, what is irreducible to the object of sociology: “The mass is
without attribute, without predicate, without quality, without reference.
Therein lies its definition, or its radical indefinition. It has no sociologi-
cal ‘reality.’ It has nothing to do with any real population, any body, any
specific, social aggregate. Every attempt to qualify it is only an effort to
revert it to sociology and rip it from this indistinction, which is not even
that of equivalence (unlimited sum of equivalent individuals: I + I + I + I -
that is the sociological definition) but rather that of the neutral, that is,
not one nor the other (ne-uter).”64
There are indeed communicational problems which can be caused by
a sociological or political approach (or that of any other traditional dis-
cipline), as is the case of the formation of information oligopolies and
monopolies, in which is manifest or latent the threat to isegoria, that is,
the democratic right that the citizen may express himself or be heard in
the public space, independently of the mediation exercised by the com-
petent discourse of specialists. This is a type of problem connected to the
traditional media organizations.
Another type appears when questions are raised about the control of
the universal mass of information circulating on the Internet, which is
experienced by individualized users as the complete freedom of expres-
sion on the cybernetic network. The reality is that the electronic tools

64 Baudrillard (1978, pp. 14–15).
132 M. SODRÉ
are ultimately controlled—ten cybernetic servers in the USA and two

in Japan, with absolute control over registering Internet users, observ-
ing information traffic (around 500 trillion messages per day, exam-
ined and filtered) and the technical possibility of interrupting the entire
network at any moment—by Internet Protocol, a business tied to the
United States Department of Commerce. Beyond this, as revealed dur-
ing the Barack Obama administration, American citizens and foreigners
are monitored in real time by US electronic espionage as assisted by pro-
viders and social networks which “democratize” cybernetic access. The
facts brought to the public in June 2013 by Edward Snowden, former
American intelligence agent, were a species of “cold shower” for the
technophilic illusions of a new era of civil liberties thanks to electronic
communication.
It demonstrated, for example, the end of privacy in favor of global
security, captained by the most important (and least known) American
spy agency, the National Security Agency (NSA). A secret surveillance
program entitled “Prism” authorized the NSA and the FBI to access the
main servers of Internet companies (Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype,
YouTube, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple), opening the way for the clan-
destine control of user archives, audio, video, email, and photographs.
As Snowden indicated, “The NSA has built an infrastructure that
allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast
majority of human communications are automatically ingested without
targeting.” This infrastructure includes the “Echelon” system, created
secretly after the Second World War by five Anglo-Saxon powers (the
USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) to spy on govern-
ments, political parties, businesses, and organizations around the world.
Beyond this, any email, telephone call, or conversation (around two mil-
lion messages per minute) can be immediately controlled.
Questions along these lines—which pass far beyond the Orwellian
nightmare of total surveillance—thus, like others related to the effects
of the full virtual system, are susceptible to differentiated treatment by
the social field, encompassing economic, sociological, anthropological,
and political interpretations. However, communicational knowledge in
its specificity includes the elucidation or the comprehension of the new
modes of human beings in a world of totalizing technology. The agent of
this knowledge may be called the “critic,” as long as the term is under-
stood as a synoptic position, occupied by a subject (or even an object
which “thinks” us, as Baudrillard would say) capable of argumentatively
and perceptively articulating different practices and systems which

converge on the technological bios.
Why the requirement of a “critic” and not merely that of a descriptive
empiricism such as that practiced by the classical social sciences? Because,
far more than in the social sciences, communication is placed at the heart
of a crisis (the crisis of foundation or metaphysics), and in confrontation
with the simultaneous, instantaneous, and global diversity of the forms
of existence, as manifested in the civilizational confluence led by infor-
mation devices. The virtual bios has created a quotidian, supported by
communicational technology which approximates the subject and object,
provoking knowledge to become a “way of being” and not merely an
aggressive mode of knowing an object. Knowing would thus be a form
of being-with, thus, in Heidegger’s terms, a care or concern (Sorge) with
the Other, within a world. It is precisely this which resonates in the con-
temporary, critical attitudes which do not restrict knowledge to a regu-
lating principle of things, amplifying it to the dimension of otherness to
function as a principle of solidarity.
Thus, traditional scientific descriptions of a theoretical object, those
which are based on authoritatively stated arguments and proofs (with
prescriptive and irrefutable discourse), by a subject of knowledge identi-
fied as an “expert,” no longer suffice. This is, ultimately, only a variation
of that which Coutinho called, in discussing literature, the “intellectual
intimate,” or rather, that which can no longer be debated, “the foun-
dation of power in whose shadow it is free to cultivate one’s own inti-
macy.”65 This “intimacy” is not the mere freedom of thought, in that the
so-called neutral theoretical formulations, or those which have become
socially aseptic through pure, technical description, produce that which
Lukács called the “indirect apology of the existent,” hiding important,
contradictory aspects of the social life.
Therefore, the critical production of material and symbolic media-
tions (which are not spontaneous, as populist culturalism may suppose)
between the virtual bios and the manifold quotidian of existential prac-
tices is fundamental, which implies in practice a free space for dialog
between researcher/thinker and the community. Meaning is produced in
these mediations, and not scientifically generated truth. Scientific truth,
which establishes a state of things following its existence or inexistence,
65 Coutinho (1990, p. 46).

134 M. SODRÉ
does not necessarily generate meaning, which has to do with human life,
of which we create the visceral experience.
“The foundation of the significance (Sinnfundament) of all science is
the prescientific lifeworld (Lebenswelt), the unique and singular lifeworld,
which is at the same time mine, yours, and ours. One can lose all sense
of this founding tie during the development of a science over centuries.
However, in principle, it is susceptible to being brought fully to light
when the transformations of meaning suffered by the very lifeworld in
the continuous process of idealization and formalization, which is the
essence of scientific work, become manifest,” says Schutz.66 It is impor-
tant, however, to relativize the distinction (which appears absolute in
Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action) between lifeworld and
the techno-scientific order of systems, in that today all human relations
have already found themselves as embedded, technical forms of interac-
tion, or rather, even in the body and gesture of the individual—which
appears inappropriate for otherness—traces of total technology make
themselves present.
This, in fact, implies a new mode of intelligibility. Beyond the old
epistemological paradigm, the rise of a scientific self-reflection which
associates its work with the functioning of advanced technology and the
emergence of a new human City in the scope of the new social technol-
ogies which impose upon us, not only in the intellectual sphere, but also
in territorial and affective spheres, to end an old metaphysics case which
burst into social thought: the opposition between the logos and the
pathos, between reason and passion. It is an opposition which progres-
sively loses meaning in the face of the challenge which the new operative
modes of science and method have launched upon Platonic rationalism,
the old guarantee of the separation between the sensation of images and
the intelligible truth of the world.
It is not surprising that the thinker responsible for the densest reflec-
tions on the essence of the “mystery” of the last century’s method, bind-
ing them to the temporality of the human presence, is the same thinker
(Heidegger) who presented the affective situation as a manifestation of
the primordial comprehension of the world. Some of his epigones, such
as the Italian Gianni Vattimo, travel down this same theoretical trail,
emphasizing the secularization of truth as a reduction of the primordial
66 Schutz (1987, p. 171).

violence of metaphysics and, therefore, as evidence of a new paradigm for

the comprehension of human phenomena.
Information, communication, and image, with all its technologies—a
form of knowledge without the requisite hierarchies which were tradi-
tionally indispensable to the formation and circulation of knowledge—
have been progressively imposed upon subjects of theory and practice as
a pretext for deliberating a specific, already alluded to system of intelligi-
bility. Why? Because we are already living fully beyond the era in which
conceptual, deductive, and sequential thought prevailed, without which
we have still managed to elaborate a praxis (concept and practice) com-
patible with this spirit of the time marked by the image and by sensation.
Communicational knowledge is inseparable from the new quotidian sen-
sibility, which emerges historically with the cultural injunctions of all the
new technologies.
This new regime of sensation causes other modes of response for the
classic, enunciative situation, such as “who is, to me, this other with
whom I speak and vice versa?” In the scope of the virtual bios, linguistic
rationality already does not fully account for it, nor do many argumenta-
tive, communicational logics, which make the idea of a science of com-
munication supported by mere discursive structure, and thus, dependent
upon the heuristic processes of revealing a truth of representation,
unacceptable.
The cybernetic post-humanism of Luhmann perceives the possibil-
ity that the subject/object relation may be substituted by operation/
observation, in which the system itself is converted into the observer,
handling the differences and reproducing itself in a self-referential
manner. One cannot fail to see in this conception, in which politics
disappears together with the autonomy of the human element, that crypto-
fascist horizon which has always appeared in the theoretical formulations
of many German thinkers. It was precisely on this political horizon of
National Socialism in Germany when, in the philosophical dimension,
the historical imperative of thinking of the meeting of technology of
planetary irradiation with a possible, new human subject became implicit.
For us, the perspective of abolishing the radical barrier between sub-
ject and object gives way to that which we may designate sensory strat-
egies, which we use to refer to games connecting discursive acts to
relations of localization and affectation of subjects within language.
It is a communicative regime in which meaning exchanges the logical
circulation of values of the statements for the somatic and perceptive
136 M. SODRÉ
co-presence of the actants. This is now imposed as a new regime, but, in

fact, its antiquity dates back to Metaphysics, in which Aristotle, even aim-
ing for the rationalism of the paideia, emphasizes the importance of the
sensory dimension in social relations.
This dimension (which Heidegger called Befindlichkeit, affective
device or situation) can be glimpsed in the opening to the “secure path”
(science) aiming for the intelligibility of the communicational process.
Within a strictly epistemological line, this opening tends to be seen as a
pluridisciplinary (multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary
are all related terms), just as anthropology was always a pluridiscipline.
However, when passing from epistemology to hermeneutics, the opening
may be better defined as a metabolization of the cognitive diversity or as
a reflective synergy of knowledge pertaining to the intelligibility of the
complex, cultural heterogeneity in course.
This intelligibility implies an ethical-political challenge for this field of
knowledge, or rather, the challenge of demonstrating that the techno-
market paradigm—within which we all reside, as in “Mount Lu”—is not
a ready and finished reality, but a tendency, favored by the adhesion to
neoliberal ideology. In the plurality implied by the “lifeworld,” the possi-
bility of feeding and employing the billions of human beings predicted in
the planet’s increasing population depends on high-tech resources, but
also low-tech resources in activities currently uncontemplated by the par-
adigm of hegemonic production.
Scientifically, however, the challenge is to construct a cognitive ecol-
ogy capable of crossing through the different axes of techno-scientific
knowledge and human values, without the reflective discourse being
completely foreign to the common sense of the social agents of commu-
nication, expressed as much in the media as in the diversity of cultural
practices. One may think here in the spirit of an “ecosophy” or a “public
philosophy,” often suggested to the social sciences as a whole, but never
truly accomplished in virtue of the disciplinary fragmentation and termi-
nological closing off which stem from the specialization of knowledge.
The response to this challenge may be more viable in Latin America than
in Europe if we take into account the fact that the new techno-capitalist
societal order only strengthens the monumental—but fragile—burden of
historical culture, inherited from its European past.
Ethically and politically, in order to improve the democratic experi-
ence, a communicational mindset is not dissociated from a self-educative,
critical endeavor, necessary to the human positioning of the subject in
the global world, where even the political idea of citizenship comes to
be redefined by the administrative ideology of consumption. Herein lies
the heart of the problem. If we do not give up democracy as the starting
point for social transformation—a point whose horizon is the reduction
of social asymmetries by means of political action—active citizenship nec-
essarily occupies the place of the subject of achievements. It is, therefore,
a political concept, and not market-based or managerial (which results
in the idea of the passive citizenship of the consumer), in relation to the
mobilization of civil society’s collective energies. These collective ener-
gies represent the political topos of active citizenship.
There is no lack of arguments indicating that we are living in a “post-
civil society” era or that of the disappearance of politics in favor of
aesthetics. Behind these arguments lies a belief in the historical substan-
tialism of the political phenomenon. However, it has always been known
and affirmed that politics is an illusion (since Aristotle, the experience of
the individual in the Polis mediated by sense or “aesthetic”) necessary to
organizing the human plurality in communities and intensified in moder-
nity after the “death” of God as the world’s great communicator. Thus,
there is nothing radically new in associating politics and aesthetics, as
long as it is not understood as an artistic practice, but rather as the regu-
lation of individual visibility in the common space.
What is truly stifled in contemporaneity is parliamentary representa-
tion—therefore, the representation of social conflicts—together with
the political party, which would be the collectivity (the “organic intel-
lectual” according to Gramsci or the “collective intellectual” to Palmiro
Togliatti) capable of interpreting and leading individuals, groups, and
social classes, thus operating the mediations between the productive
forces and the socio-political-cultural conditions of a determined society.
The party, which always survived by means of a bureaucratic domination
inherent to the organizing rationality of the State, dies today in its exces-
sive abstraction in the face of real citizenship.
This does not mean, however, the death of citizenship, which can
change its constitution and aspects, while continuing to synthesize the
free-acting politics of the individual (citizen participation) and, thus,
expanding the constitutive sphere of social life, which may even give
up the designation “civil society,” to the delight of anti-Hegelians or
anti-Gramscians, but remain defined as the irradiating public sphere of
interests and conflicts originating in universities, churches, and, today
more than ever, in the media. The contradiction between active and
138 M. SODRÉ
passive citizenship is broken in the concrete territory of civil society, frag-

ile or threatened by the capital-world, but potentially conscious of the
risks and exclusions inherent to the market logic which the media makes
into the “mouth of the world,” although with all the alibis of the democ-
ratization of the access to cultural patrimony.
Therein lies the historical demand for a critical and self-educative
endeavor by communicational thought. This endeavor supports the uni-
versal access to education (something very different from the supposed
“available universal education” in the cyber-cultural archives), an existen-
tial condition capable of making it clear that culture is not an asset that
is always given, that the citizen would incorporate his individuality by
means of instruction or information as an external value, but rather the
dynamic of struggle in representations of diversity.
Culture politically and cognitively imposes itself, therefore, as a
plethora of possibilities which belong by existential radicalism to the
Community-State (Polis), or rather, the condition intrinsic to the consti-
tution of individuality. The symbol, the meaning, and the real form the
conceptual base of the “culture” category, but only in the sense that each
one of these elements prioritizes the singularity of experience, that is, the
inapprehensible (because it is inexhaustible) which resides in the consti-
tutive process of all action. In traditional societies, the singularity passes
through the mystic, through the regions of the sacred, because it presup-
poses a transcendence, like God. In modernity, it is configured in man’s
dives toward a mark, which is human and immanent of the possible—it is
the ethical foundation present in all cultural realization.
Evidently, this entire human game passes through historical reposi-
tionings toward the development of relations of production in modern
industrial society. In the past, its administration depended on a well-
defined space, controlled by scientists, professors, literati, authors of
various types. Culture was a paradoxical field, ferociously defended by
European civilization—paradoxical in that it was a particular field which
intended to give a universal response to the diversity of experience.
Ferocious, because the control of meaning is an exercise of power whose
function centers on the colonization of space and spirits.
It is not that Eurocentric civilization gave this control up, but the fact
is that contemporary modernity (that which for decades has been called
“post-modernity”) has put in crisis the notion of the rigidly defined field,
whether the public space, the State, or culture, as a place for attributing
value to the symbolic dimension. With the entrance of the transnational,
capitalist market (globalization and its effects), culture has diffracted like
a drop of mercury in all directions toward the market and presented itself
more clearly as “the cultural” (culture as an adjective more than a noun),
or rather, as a resource for confronting differences, whatever they may
be. Here, the ideology of the totality weakens in favor of hybridism or
cultural syncretism, so in vogue in cultural studies from the Anglo-Saxon
viewpoint.
This diffraction is a challenge to the new researchers of culture. It is
no longer only the anthropologists and sociologists, but, mainly media
analysts, to whom falls the task of studying the new shifts in the idea
of culture, in which can be verified the prevalence of the market over
ancient symbolic values, as well as an intensification in the global flows of
volatile commodities. In more direct terms, this is only one new aspect
of the old “ornamentality” of culture, typical of the social class elitism
in which symbolic production and consumption were experienced as a
“party of the spirit.” In the cultural, democratic egalitarianism that today
announces itself under the aegis of technical information devices, the
great challenge is unraveling the intricacy of the fusion between tech-
nology and experience, when, by the immateriality of the technique, the
processes of production of the real are hidden and biological bodies tend
to disappear through genetic engineering and generalized prostheses.
Culture is no longer the mark of difference between man and nature, but
between “naked” life (zoe, homo animalis) and techne.
At the core of the new availability, critical thought is found as a new
disposition or capacity for discerning the various sides of any concep-
tion. Criticism is the Trojan Horse within the walls of singular thought,
whatever the nature. On the new educative or self-educative hori-
zon which has been unveiled, the re-reading of the idea of man can be
placed above that which is implied by the restrictive concept of citizen-
ship (Fernando Pessoa: “The man is above the citizen, no State is wor-
thy of Shakespeare”) and strides in the direction of the “human man,”
to which Thomas Mann refers with his character, Setembrini (in The
Magic Mountain). In his novel, this expression is intended to desig-
nate a depicted democratic activist within a “universal republic,” open
to human rights and the acceptance of differences. However, it is also
potentially understood as the suggestion that, in the sphere of historicity,
the “human” is something more than simply “man.” In more concrete
terms, this means suspending the idea incorporated by capitalist human-
ism according to which the capacity for production, as understood by the
140 M. SODRÉ
European hegemony, would supply the conceptual measure of “man.”

As is well known, the homo humanus of the Roman tradition is that
which results from the meeting of the Roman language with the Greek
paideia, acquiring meaning in opposition to the barbarus.67 Thence is
born the Latin humanitas, which would be taken back up during the
Italian Renaissance and elevated to the condition of universal by the
European economy and culture.
The modern claim of a new humanity derives from the conviction
that “man” is more than his capacity to produce. This, which may at first
appear redundant—the human man—is, in fact, a notion which is vital to
comprehending the lifeworld (the Lebenswelt implicit in Rorty’s herme-
neutics) and which materializes in what Schutz calls the cultural world.
As he explains: “Particularly important to our proposal is the constitu-
tion of the specifically human worlds, that is, cultures, in the mode of
objectivity specific to them (…) the lifeworld appears to me, and to any
other person who maintains a natural attitude, as a cultural world, that
is, as a world of signification which the human being historically contrib-
uted to founding.”68
It is clear that, in a civilizational order of global irradiation radically
penetrated by technology, this “cultural world” cannot be understood
as an “other” world opposed absolutely to techno-scientific systems,
as insinuated by Habermas’ theory. The historical foundation of a new
“world of signification” can only truly consist of the search for human or
communal legitimacy for the entire institutional order supported only in
its juridical or economic systematization. Legitimacy implies ethically and
politically re-founding the institutions through strategies of dissolution
by its fragile, formalist base, without the constituent force of humanity.
Within culture, which is constructed in a mode of objectivity consti-
tuted by information technology, giving a new meaning to the “human
man” most likely does not consist of conceiving of a “post-humanism”
capable of transcending the human, but rather in a redescription of his-
toricity, that is, a society’s capacity for action toward itself, in terms of
creativity and conflict and, from a reasonable distance, in relation to
the State and the hegemonic forms of capital. In practice, it would be
the ethical-political achievement of a humanity open to the symbolic
67 Cf. Heidegger (1967, pp. 35–45).

68 Schutz (1987, p. 178).
diversity of the world (and not the physically and mentally superior
“post-humans”), therefore, the realization of a new political system,
compatible with the technological reality, or rather, a political system
capable of offering space for the struggle against institutionally regres-
sive forms introduced by modern finance capitalism. In cognitive terms,
this opening implies the shift in consciousness from the predominance
of instrumental rationalism mediated by money, in which economy and
technology are combined for sensorial, and not violent, modulations of
existence.
The hermeneutic horizon of this humanity to come is not only in the
universality of the species studied by anthropology, nor in the social rela-
tion defined by sociology as a universal mode of capitalist production
and of the political subject in the bourgeois State, but rather in a sys-
tem of intelligibility capable of animating that which is humanly implicit
in the “lifeworld” in a planet ruled by instantaneous and global connec-
tions, as well as by predominantly sensory cultural strategies: solidarity
and cooperation—not only between men, but equally between men and
things. Alternatives to the predominance of competitive relations char-
acteristic of the market consciousness—the same in which the affirma-
tion of existence is automatically accompanied by the negation of the
existence of the other—which have accompanied the mode of capitalist
production from the beginning of modernity, could emerge from these
strategies.
This does not emerge from the networks as religion, nor as a
trans-historical ideology, but as an effect of time inherent to the current
mode of human presence on the planet. It is not, therefore, the exercise
of a relativist philosophy of culture, nor an abstract lack of realism upon
which some systems of academic thought tend to fall back, but rather a
science of the spirit or of culture aimed toward the greater comprehen-
sion of the nature of the social binding against sociability as orchestrated
by the media, thus, of communication in the original sense of the word,
which regards the radical organization of the common.
This “radicalism” is not understood in terms of mere etymological or
historiographical originalism, on the path of ideological retro-projections
which tend to occur with the idea of human communication. Radical
would be, for example, associating the science of communication with
the science of history, as seen by Marc Bloch: “the science of man in the
passing of time.” To the famed French historian, one of the founders of
the École des Annales, “history is a vast experience of human diversity,
142 M. SODRÉ
a long encounter of men. Life, as science, has everything to gain if the

encounter is fraternal.”69
It is in the direction of diversity, encounter, and historicity (the pos-
sibility of human action toward society) where a science of human com-
munication is formed, from the cohesive binding of the common to the
relations organized by the technologies in vogue which, for their part,
allow for the growing forms of collective activism geared toward the
re-composition of the symbolic connection which upholds the social
formation. In the midst of the fragmentary widening of the frontiers
of work by contemporary, productive processes, under the forms of
consciousness affected more than ever by the mediation of money (the
financialization of the world) and in the face of the regression of the
social being despite technological advances, the theoretical caution with
communication attunes itself to the search for a new politic and a new
Human City.
This does not imply “communicational normativity,” that is, any aca-
demic project to idealistically re-inject “comprehensive” or “dialogi-
cal” elements into the industrial reality of functional communication, as
though the “communication society” were the hypothetical and utopian
double foundation of the “information society.” A science of communi-
cation is simply the result of the historical demand for arriving at an ethi-
cal and political understanding of that which is subsumed within the new
forms of elaborating the common.
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CHAPTER 5
The Organization of the Common
Communication as a redescriptive science of the common man. The Latin

communicatio as a notion of reference to the structural dialog subjacent to
the common. The differences between relation and binding. The community
as emptiness and as a constitutive being-with. The common as immanence
unperceived in antiquity (the philia) and in modernity. The media and
information technologies as avatars of rhetoric and as reinterpretations of
the common in contemporaneity.
As heard in the present time, the question formulated by Hölderlin in
the nineteenth century—“Why have poets in an indigent time?”—can be
understood, in Heidegger’s manner, as an interrogation about the des-
tiny of the language of man traced by its History and, ultimately, about
the protection of the word by the thought of the being, that is, of the
origins of the human phenomenon. On the trans-temporal trail of this
matter which associates poetry and thought (in a clear evocation of the
pre-Socratic philosophers and tragic authors), we may inquire today as to
what purpose communicational thought serves when functional commu-
nication and its machines, in a time of supposed human indigence, free
us from thought—in the manner in which they are able, that is, rational
and calculating.
This hypothesis of the man being thought, rather than sovereignly
thinking himself, is not foreign to the philosophical circle: “The man
behaves as though he were the creator and master of language, while it is

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5_5
146 M. SODRÉ
language which governs him,” says Heidegger.1 In Heideggerian thought,

language is not the same as tongue, nor is it a system of meanings, nor
communicative instrument—in fact, it is not something which renders
a very clear definition. It is, however, a pollachos legomenon, something
which is “said in many ways,” according to Aristotle in his Categories.
We will maintain the provisory hypothesis of language as an undefin-
able order of collection for all differences and exchanges. Undefinable in
that it only shows, without allowing the conceptual capturing of the dis-
cursive practice. Except for its metaphysical resonance and its association
with poetry as maximum lucidity of consciousness, or what Valéry called
the “sensation of universe,” the language of which Heidegger speaks is not
far from the idea of communication as an ontological Logos of reality or as
a species of invisible orchestra which guides us.
However, being governed or thought by this latent order of organ-
ization of differences is not the same as being ruled by modern com-
munication with its machines, a case in which Horkheimer’s warning
rings true: “The machine has expelled the machinist; it is running blindly
in space.”2 Thus, the poetic-philosophical inquiry—why poets, why
think?—reappears when raising the question of the original meaning of
the communicative process, for the purpose of a human lifeworld, coex-
istent with electronic communications technology and finance capitalism,
which brings with it new forms of generating socialization. The term
“human” embeds here the essential question of knowing if, in the tech-
nological trap of the world, we are only “expelled machinists,” following
Horkheimer’s image, if not “acted upon” rather than agents.
The question is politically and scientifically pertinent when consider-
ing that these new forms increase themselves in the direct rationale of
technological and systematic investment of the world, while communi-
cational studies limited to the uses and perspectives of practical instru-
ments of communication/information appear theoretically saturated.
The reduction in the communicative scope to a single, anthropomorphic
dimension—conscious, verbal, restricted to the pair broadcaster/
receiver—allows the complexity of communication to escape its grasp.
On the other hand, systematic approaches, from which the concep-
tions committed to the foundation of a communicational science orig-
inate more incisively, tend to leave aside the potential of the individual
1 Heidegger (1996, p. 172).

2 Horkheimer (1976, p. 139).
5 THE ORGANIZATION OF THE COMMON 147
or the political (in the broad sense, as the possibility of human freedom
of action) in the reinterpretation and re-elaboration of contexts in which
the process of communication occurs. To see only the system and the
machine is to blind oneself to that which, in man, is potentially opening.
This may end up being equivalent to “expelling the machinist.”
Aiming toward a science of human communication, a strategic begin-
ning consists of associating the modern question to the old notion of
communicatio (from Cicero’s Latin) in order to designate social cohe-
sion under the perspective of a transcendence, which is that of “dialog”
between gods and men. Dialog, not as a mere exchange of words, but
as the action of making a bridge between differences, which forms the
opening of existence in all of its dimensions and ecologically constitutes
man in his space of habitation—therefore, dialog as an ethical category.
In antiquity, ritualistic dialog between mortals and immortals was indis-
pensable to the symbiosis of all or to the glutinum mundi, to the glue of
the world which, centuries later, in alchemic doctrine, would supposedly
unite body and spirit, founding the society of men in terms which were
not immediately visible, but essentially ethical.
Athens as much as Rome set a date for the sacrificial offerings to
the divinities, which the Romans denominated dias communicar-
ius or panniioularis. In the medieval context, the communicatio was
the organizing system of relations between all entities, with God—
“communicative” God—as the unifying principle: “God is the source
of all communication; as in the Old Testament, nature is understood
as a ‘great book,’ in which God’s signs are printed, with written infor-
mation waiting to be read, or rather, translated into knowledge. The
cosmic order is perceived as it is because the intercommunication
existent between all beings means that they symbiotically cooperate in
everything. God is not placed in a distant heaven (as in the 17th century),
but is ‘all and totally’ in all parts of the system; it is He who informs it.”3
However, already in the fifth century of the Christian Era, the expres-
sion communicatio assumed a theological inflection, the communica-
tio idiomatum (communication of proprieties), aimed at explaining
the interaction of the divinity with man in the incarnation of Christ:
Christian predicates, properly divine, would be extensive in the world.
In the eighteenth century, however, the important German theologian
J. Hamann, anti-rationalist and anti-Kantian, went further in sustaining
3 Wilden (2001, pp. 130–131). Translated into English from Portuguese version.
148 M. SODRÉ
that these communicatio applied not only to Christ, but to all human
action.4
Today, the expression communicatio in sacris, or rather, communication
or participation in sacred things, has the conciliatory and canonical use
as a collection of liturgical, Christian practices along with other, not fully
Christian ones, which creates the interpretive possibility for expression in
the sense of opening to difference. However, there is also the possibility
of associating it with the modern and positivist (in the sense of “science”)
concept of communication, even bearing in mind that communica-
tio regards an ancient social form, associated with the “integral society”
described by Durkheim, where religion is indispensable to the integrating
process.
It is true that this importance attributed to the religious phenome-
non is not restricted to past social forms. For the contemporary Flusser,
“sense of reality” and religiousness are equivalent. “All of our problems
are, ultimately, religious. If we find ourselves without foundation, we
seek a religious solution without being able to find one. And if we feel
a foundation beneath our feet (thanks to a religion or any substitute for
religion, or simply thanks to the enveloping force of the quotidian), we
will lose the true atmosphere of religion (but, possibly, such a formula-
tion is, on its own, the result of a lack of foundation).”5
Along this line of argumentation, in which religiousness can be associ-
ated with the phenomenological concept of the lifeworld (the Lebenswelt
recurrent in thinkers such as Husserl, Habermas, Schutz, and others), it
is also possible to reflectively install communicatio into the problematic
field of modern communication. However, what is considered here, on
the other hand, is that communicatio, as well as communication, is not the
transmission of information nor is it verbal dialog, but rather a modeling
form (organization of real exchanges) and a process (action) of placing dif-
ferences in common, with the process and action being considered arbitrary
(of free choice) by the individuals, for they imply the force of a transcend-
ence which, in antiquity, was the sacred. This also implies affirming that
the concept of communication is not restricted to the discursive practice.
This discussion, which could well be restricted to “Christology,”
offers itself to contemporary, communicational redescription when
thinking of authors capable of analyzing the social binding through a
4 Cf. Hamann (2007).

5 Flusser (2002, pp. 19–20).
humanity which does not exclude transcendence, whatever its denomina-

tion. For example, the denomination spirit, assimilated to the primordial
Verb by Buber: “The spirit is not in the I, it is in the relation of the I
with the Thou. It is not comparable to the blood which circulates within
thee, but in the air which thou breathest. The man lives in the spirit
when he knows to respond to his Thou. He can do this when he enters
with all his being into the relation. It is only in virtue of his capacity for
relations that man may live in spirit.”6
Even without great classificatory unanimity, Buber has inscribed him-
self along the philosophical line of Christian existentialism. However,
he does not restrict himself to the relation of man with God. His social
activism (he was also an educator, religious historian, sociologist, and
political militant), centered on the search for new types of communal
ties, brought him to that which is implicit in the ancient and dialogic
idea of communicatio, although this Latin vocabulary is not included in
his conceptual terminology. His focus on the inter-human relation makes
him a thinker of communication (beloved by philosophers, anthropol-
ogists, and even theorists of communication, such as Vilém Flusser), a
concept which he affixed to that of dialog, understood as a visceral rela-
tion of encounter between an I and a Thou, thus between singularities.
Intersubjectivity is, to him, the anthropological fact of basis, and his
thought may be described as a philosophical anthropology of encounter.
One may begin a small synthesis of his reflection with the concept of
“words-pairs,” which are pairs of words—therefore, relations—which
constitute the foundations of language. The pair I-Thou, different from
I-It (or I-Thing) is one of these. “The words which are the basis of lan-
guage do not express a thing which exists beyond them,” says Buber,
“rather, once stated, they found an existence.”7 Before the encoun-
ter, nothing exists. Thus, the pair I-Thou founds the world of relation,
whereas the I-It belongs to the world as experience.
Buber’s theoretical proposal should not be confused with the analysis
of discourse. It is truly a philosophy of the person, in which the encoun-
ter and the dialog create the synthesis of the occurrence of eternity, as
Bachelard notes in the preface to his work, explaining: “It is within the
kingdom of vectors, and not in that of points and centers, that one must
place oneself in order to obtain a fair draft of Buberism. The I and the
6 Buber (1969, p. 70).

7 Ibidem, p. 19.
150 M. SODRÉ
Thou are not separable poles.”8 One cannot, therefore, place a Thou in
the past, as is done with something that is used, in that the I-Thou rela-
tion occurs in the immediate, in the duration, in full reciprocity, making
the presence as “a being who waits and remains for us” bloom.
Returning to the question of communicatio as something extensive in
all human relations, we may begin with Buber’s description of thought,
occluding his Hasidic mysticism and his questionable speculations on
“primitives,” compared and surpassed, in his analysis, by children—
evidently, Westernized and Christian ones. This occlusion is justified by
the date in which the work was produced, considering the degree of
anthropological reflection prevalent at the time.
For the affirmation of the communicatio, it is important to empha-
size in Buberism the phenomenal anteriority of relation (which, indeed,
also appears in the communicational vision of Bateson) presented as a
category of the being, a disposition to collecting, a continent, a psy-
chic mold: the innate Thou is the a priori of the relation.9 This cate-
gory results in what Buber calls community, more precisely, a “true
community,” leaving it clear, however, that it does not constitute itself
by any free decision of living in common, nor by the effusion of free feel-
ings. “The true community is not, in fact, born from some people having
feelings for others (although it cannot be born without this), it is born
of these two things: that they are all in living and reciprocal relations
with a living center and that they are connected to each other by the
ties of a living reciprocity. (…) Community builds itself upon living and
reciprocal relations, but it is the living and active center that is the true
worker.”10
A classic anthropological case of the nearly absolute lack of feelings in
a community is illustrated by the ethnography of Turnbull on the Ilks, a
group of subsistence farmers who inhabit the mountains in northeastern
Uganda, by the border with Kenya. In his description, the Ilks appear
devoid of any ethical or moral characteristics, having surrendered to indi-
vidualism in order to survive drought and hunger.11 There is registered
a complete disrespect for family ties, which leads to the abandonment
8 Bachelard, Gaston. Prefácio. In Buber (1969, p. 9).

9 Buber (1969, pp. 50–51).
10 Ibidem, p. 74.
11 Cf. Turnbull (1972).

of the elderly and the expulsion of three-year-old children from the

home. These children, in order to survive, regroup in “age gangs,” with
ages which can vary up to eight years old, intending to obtain food and
defend themselves from other, thirteen-year-old gangs.
Texts from different authors have compared the singular example of
the Ilks to that which occurs or may occur in other societies in cases of
extreme necessity for survival, when individualism emerges as the exalted
characteristic of human existence.12 Others seek to explain the behavior
of these farmers by their forced migration from their original territory,
the result of a ruler’s will,13 allegedly to inaugurate a national park there.
The extreme individualism stemmed from the abrupt fragmentation of
more complex communal ties, anterior to the exodus and the transfor-
mation of their ancient condition of hunter-gatherers into subsistence
farmers.
However, what remains unexplained is the fact that, despite intersub-
jective relations without any traces of cooperation or solidarity, the Ilks
do truly form an ethnic unit, with an unmistakable spatial community,
formed of small, population groups, thus with a constitutive center,
apparently unseen by the ethnographic research. However, anthropolo-
gists have always known that the union of clans, denominated “tribe,”
can seek its identity (and thus differentiate itself from others) as much
in the idea of common ancestry as in name, dialect, territory, worship,
etc. In other words, this group, far more than an aggregation of “fami-
lies” invested in the sentimentality attributed by the Western conscience,
results from a subtle elaboration of bindings, generally unconscious or
invisible, among the living, and between the living and the dead or the
sacred. The binding organization for this problematic common is pre-
cisely communication.
Thus, it is worth returning to the reflection of Buber, to whom the
active, constitutive center of the common or of public life is not made
of feelings, nor of institutions. These are an external dimension, an
“outside,” where there is work, organization, and occurrences, whereas
feelings are the “inside,” the internal dimension, where one relaxes from
the institutional complexity, and the man feels truly “at home.”
The common, then, is made of what?
12 A play entitled “The Iks,” directed by Peter Brook, was shown in Paris, in 1975.
13 Milton Obote, President of Uganda in 66/67 and 80/85.
152 M. SODRÉ
Negri and Hardt provide a response: “By ‘the common’ we mean,

first of all, the common wealth of the material world - the air, the
water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty - which in classical
European political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of human-
ity as a whole, to be shared together. We consider the common also, and
more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for
social interaction and further production, such as pieces of knowledge,
languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.”14 If we apply this
understanding to the case of the Ilks, we will certainly be brought to the
conclusion that, among them, the common—despite the scarce human
interaction—is constituted, beyond tongue, by one or more territories,
occupied after the expulsion from their original lands.
In nineteenth-century Europe, “commons” was the prevailing desig-
nation for the land which was cultivated in a shared manner—therein
would be derived the word, “communism.” Negri and Hardt’s response
was guided by this sharing and has a political scope, but evades a prop-
erly philosophical discernment or a broader explanation. The socio-
philosopher Buber also does not explicitly respond to this question,
probably for conferring a theoretical privilege upon the common of
two or the dual relation (I-Thou). The finality of the relation, to him,
“is its own being, that is, the contact of the Thou.” Thus, “that which
is in the relation participates in a reality, or rather, in a being which is
not uniquely within it nor uniquely outside it. All reality is an efficiency
in which I participate without wanting to appropriate it. Where partic-
ipation is lacking, reality does not exist.”15 This participation coincides
with what sociology and socio-philosophy call the public sphere, that is,
the space of communication in which each individual passes from dual
discourse to the discursive relation with the anonymous mass, constitut-
ing the common.
But what exactly would be that “active and living” center of which
Buber speaks? For an initial response, we consider it opportune to take
the idea of community as the concept of an absence or a “nothing”—
constituting not only that which is visible in the social binding, but
principally the common which is not seen, as an unperceived imma-
nence. It is Castoriadis’ suggestion that, without specifying the term
14 Negri and Hardt (2001, p. 10).

15 Ibidem, pp. 97–98.
“community,” the social be referred to as an “immanent unperceived.”

In truth, it is another manner of referring to the “invisible tie” men-
tioned by Heraclitus as that which “represents all and which is no one,
which is never absent and almost never present as such, a not-being more
real than all beings, that in which we bathe from one side to the other,
but which we never apprehend in anyone” (Fragment 54).16
This makes it possible to imagine a core of unrepresentable meaning,
metaphorized as a collective “heart,” from which we speak when we say
or do something essential in the human group in which we live and act.
This metaphor dates back to the origins of Western thought. Parmenides
used the expression atremes etor (“intrepid heart”) as an ontological anal-
ogy between the being/thought and the Polis (symbolized by the fearless
heart of the warrior), which may be interpreted as man’s propensity to
face the emotional risks of opposition, ambivalence, and the unspeaka-
ble, present in language when he thinks, in that being/thinking would
be remaining intrepid or without fear in the face of incursions of the
not-being.17
In modernity, Pascal conceives of the ordre du coeur (“order of the
heart”) as a core of identity subjacent to all perception and all dis-
course.18 This order is equally a logique du coeur (“logic of the heart”),
to indicate that which is not complementary to the order of understand-
ing, nor of affective content to which one may give the name of “feel-
ings,” but an eternal logic inherent to sensibility, with its own reason,
therein Pascal’s maxim that “the heart has its reasons.” In Heideggerian
thought, this notion—Stimmung, “affective tonality”—is expanded even
more as an existential mode by which the being-in-the-world (Dasein)
ontologically opens itself to itself, exercising the primary revelation of the
world. It is not, therefore, any exteriorization of an internality, any psy-
chic faculty, or any sensory perception, but an affective anteriority which
guides the Dasein to discovering the primordial of the world.
The order of the heart, the unperceived immanence, the affective
tonality, and the invisible tie are different expressions for the common
reference to communal cohesion. To inscribe them upon modern socia-
bility, the word “binding” appears more adequate than “relation,” as it
16 Castoriadis (1996, p. 116).

17 Cf. Song-Moller (2002, p. 73).
18 Cf. Scheler (2003).
154 M. SODRÉ
semantically connotes an obligation or a compulsory force, which is not

revealed in the consciousness of a subject as a visible deliberation. It is
the force from which, not rarely, arise attitudes taken within intersub-
jective relations without the prior recourse to a longer reflection. The
attitude—defined as a mere reflexive act of an affective binding which is
conceptually unknown—precedes the representation.
From the perspective of intersubjectivity (distant, therefore, from
Scheler’s and Heidegger’s reflections), one would speak of a pulse or an
instinct of approximation. Such that, in the theory of personality devel-
opment elaborated by psychoanalyst John Bowlby, contemporary and
dissident of Freud, the binding is defined as an instinct of proximity
(Buber, indeed, speaks of the “instinct of relation” as something prim-
itive in the development of a child) to parental figures. This propensity
to be especially close to the other functions is an important organizer of
socio-emotional activity, which is not necessarily perceived by the sub-
ject, in that it is a vector which is socially immanent to the functioning of
personality.
In group terms, this affective immanence is present in that which the
ancient Greeks called philia, a term whose meaning is not limited to that
of “friendship,” as it encompasses the common tie, tracing a circle of
coexistence and meaning, as much sharing as cohabitation. It is, there-
fore, the commons which “glues” the City (the glutinum mundi of the
alchemists) and allows the individual to transpose the limits of duality for
communication with the social anonymous, with the representative form
pertaining to each particular community.
Thus, the contemporary revival of debates on the community seems
pertinent to the discussion about mechanisms of cohesion of the social
binding in the face of new forms of sociability created by transnational
capitalism and irradiated by media devices. This appears, for example,
in Cauquelin’s reflection on urban formation. To her, when someone
inquires about what could be “first” in the formation of cities, what
appears as a starting point is the “living together,” whose mobile is pre-
cisely the philia—not understood as a mere convention or deal, but as
a predisposition to sociability.19 This predisposition truly results from
communication—also not as a transmission of information, therefore,
not as a secondary or psycho-sociological dimension of behavior, but as
19 Cf. Cauquelin (1988).

the structural imperative of making differences common or of uniting

opposites which, in their dynamic, make the philia circular.
Communicating is, thus, mainly doing—including making silence,
where meaning is also present. From this, a classic reference may be
found in Joseph Jacotot, a French educator who, in the beginning of
the nineteenth century, attracted criticism from the professorial class
for his thought and his odd pedagogy, called “universal education.” To
him, the virtue of human intelligence is more in doing than in knowing:
“Knowing is nothing, doing is everything.” Rhetorical emphasis aside,
what Jacotot truly intended was to criticize the metaphysical contempt
for the spirit through the instruments of work.
This same commitment was demonstrated a century later by Scheler,
a neo-Kantian thinker who, differently from Kant, did not attempt to
found ethics in universal reason, but rather in the lived apprehension of
values. In the theory which describes man as faber (and not Platonically
as sapiens), that which metaphysics calls “spirit” or “reason” is not part
of a system of autonomous laws, as it is, as he said, “a prolonging of
the evolution of technical intelligence (…) the faculty of actively adapting
oneself to new, atypical situations, without prior experience, by the antic-
ipations of objective structures in the environment, with the aim of sat-
isfying, by this indirect, and increasingly more indirect, path, the same,
fundamental instinct of the species and of the individual which are also of
the animal.”20
For Scheler, man is essentially “1st, the animal of signs (language);
2 , the animal of instruments; 3rd, a cerebral being, that is, a being
nd
for whom the mind, especially for cortical function, consumes far more
energy than other animals. The signs, the words, the so-called concepts,
are here also only instruments, more refined, psychic instruments.”21
Along this line of reflection, to which Heidegger would later give its
own course, the thought is originally bound to action, not by an “act of
passage” or by an instrumental application, but by communicative unity
between thinking and doing.
According to Jacotot, man makes “words, figures, comparisons,
to tell that which he thinks to his counterparts”—and this making
20 Scheler(1986, p. 84).
21 Ibidem. Beyond Scheler, it is worth consulting a recent work—Psiche e techne: o homem
na idade da técnica. Paulus, 2006—by the Italian Umberto Galimberti, who thoroughly
develops this line, but supports it in the theory of action, similar to pragmatic thought.
156 M. SODRÉ
is fundamentally an act of communication. “Thus, speaking is the

best proof of the capacity to make anything,” comments Rancière.22
Implicitly, Jacotot contests the model of transmission in the com-
municative act: The man does not transmit a knowledge when he
speaks, but rather translates what he thinks, inviting others to do the
same. Communication is compared to craftsmanship, in the sense that
speech wields the words as tools, using the body as much as the hands.
Comprehending does not imply lifting the veils from things, but rather
the potential for translation which confronts one speaker with another.
It may be opportune to evoke, incidentally, Walter Benjamin’s met-
aphor for translation. Imagine the confrontation of two distinct fields
of trees conceived as two different languages with their respective rep-
ertories of vocabulary. Translating is not transplanting the trees from
one field to another—or the word of one tongue to another—but rather
guessing that which connects all the indices of that which the other has to
say. Within its own field, each language is already operating a translation
of that which it thinks of the words. In the confrontation with another
linguistic field, it in truth yields a “counter-translation,” in that it invents
possible causes of that which is heard or of written traits, as an aesthetic
resonance, analogous to that which one would have between one tree
and another in different fields.
Issued or written, all speech is a translation, and this translation
encounters its meaning in the counter-translation, the (communicative)
process driven by the two master operations of intelligence, narrating
and guessing, or rather, the two basic operations of intelligence in the
communicative act. Guessing is another name for “operatively feeling,”
which presupposes a core of meaning (the “intrepid heart,” the “order
of the heart”) constitutive of the common and made of sensory mate-
rial (or philia), that is, of corporal affections or affect, irreducible to the
linguistic code.
The common is felt before it is thought or expressed; therefore, it is
something directly anchored in existence. Man thinks because he exists,
thus, is in common. The counter-translation, which harbors the mean-
ing of speech, becomes possible through the common sensibility in a
place, ruled by the communicatio, which is the other mode—the dialogic
mode—of saying societas (society). This is referring to the partner (socius)
22 Rancière (1987, p. 110).

who, pluralized, constitutes the pronoun “we” in a human grouping or

complex network of juridical and political relations in which the citizen
of a State is inserted.
The Binding and the Cohesion

Understood as a set of shared rules, the modern “society” is a fiction, a
public and transcendent image, which imposes itself with the emergence
of the individual as a category of agent, to politically represent the collec-
tive tie. It corresponds to the general, centralized, and uniform power,
visible in the concentration of the means of production, property, and
the political organization—a synthesis which is necessary to the idea of
nation as a unique (imagined) community, unique government, and
unique national class interest. The “social” found therein is an abstrac-
tion: What exists in concrete form are the individuals, families, and
associations connected by networks of dependence which, beyond eco-
nomic, juridical, and political reasons, are bonded together by means of
a “common.” At its base is a core of constitutive meaning, from which
differences find their own place to communicate.
Consequently, all communication implies a structural and primordial
binding, established by the philia and coextensive to the place itself. The
philia suggests defining the common as “proper” (okeion)—or rather,
attributed to consanguinity and ethnicity or to values—and as “neigh-
bor” (koinon), which implies territoriality and proximity. These meanings
are bundled together in the concept of sociability (Tönnies) and detached
from socialization, as a politicized form of social organization. The
emphasis on the structure of the binding dates back to what Heraclitus
understood by “common,” certainly not something like the “com-
mon sense” (or public opinion) of a community, but as the unique wis-
dom which refers to the primordial substance, which would be the fire.
Although one could compare the common to the laws of the Polis, the
primordial element of the approximation of the contrary—therefore, the
source of all primordial symbolization—was the fire, capable of serving as
a means of exchange for all things. The common as primordial, ontolog-
ical disposition is not, therefore, the same as the community molded by a
strategy of subjectivation.
However, when taking the “proper” and the “neighbor” in a
hypostatic perspective (in the theological sense of a substantive reality),
the common is seen as a “place,” therefore, as topos, which is spatial
158 M. SODRÉ
and symbolic at the same time, inherent to those who are close, beyond
offering them images and memories (home, temple, monument, etc.),
thus, the common seen as a field of identifications driven by the same lan-
guage. There is, in fact, in the word “community” (from the Latin com-
munitas) a reference to the place, which is the soil of origin, a dimension
exterior to the individuals which forces from them an unconditional sur-
render, a fatality of binding or payment of a symbolic debt (the munus).
The being-in-common is a cum-munus.
From this perspective stems the sociological idea of community as
substantialist objectification of the common (Tönnies). However, while
the communicative tie of the philia is substantially nourished by differ-
ent memories, rites, and marking occurrences, the community is not a
transcendental substance: the common is an emptiness, and on this point,
authors such as Cauquelin and Esposito are in agreement. She affirms,
following Heraclitus’ indication (“the tie which is not seen is stronger
than that which is seen”), that “the common place means something,
but does not say.”
Re-encountered here, without great effort, is the philosophical poem
of Lao-Tse about the emptiness (or the nothing)23: evidently, it is not
the emptiness as lack (or the “negative nothing”), but rather as the case
of the “positive nothing,” of the possibility of filling space or creating
worlds, as implicit in the Stoic idea of emptiness as an incorporeal, there-
fore, as a condition of possibility of the appearance of bodies. The empti-
ness is also the potential for autonomous creativity.
In its turn, in the translation of okeion, Esposito exchanges “proper”
for “improper,” clarifying that “the first meaning dictionaries record of
the noun communitas and of the corresponding adjective communis is,
in fact, that which acquires meaning in opposition to the ‘proper.’ In
all neo-Latin languages, and not only in them, ‘common’ (commun,
comune, common, kommun) is that which is not proper, which begins
where the proper ends: Quod commune com alio est desinit esse proprium.
23 “Thirty convergent rays unite, forming a wheel/ But it is the emptiness between the
rays which furnishes its movement/ Model the mud to make a jar/ The potter makes a
vase, manipulating the clay/ But it is the hollow of the vase which gives it utility/ Cut in
the empty space of the walls, doors and windows so a room can be used/ Walls are masses
with doors and windows/ But only the emptiness between the masses gives them utility/
In this way, the being produces the useful/ But it is the not-being who make it efficient”
(Tao Te Ching).
It is that which concerns more than one, many, or all and that, therefore,
is ‘public’ in juxtaposition to ‘private’ or ‘general’ (but also ‘collective’)
in contrast with ‘particular.’”24
In this dimension of the common, tie or binding is armazein or “har-
mony,” but not translated as reconciliation: when opposing elements (life
and death, bow and arrow) occur, there is no longer only topos, but also
tropos, or rather, a complex set of transformations, driven by an internal
tension (the emotional risks alluded to by Parmenides’ “intrepid heart”)
or by a “blowing” which generates change. Things remain united by the
law of discord, which is rightly the tension of the contrary. “Harmony”
of the “hidden consonance” of the universe or of the cohesive tie is
the contentious dynamic of the approximation of differences, which
Heraclitus calls the ksynon.
This dynamic is subject to being idealized over time as a conciliatory
resolution of the contrary, but is not rarely revealed to be agonistic, con-
tradictory, if not violent. In Parerga et Parilipomena (the expansive trea-
tise of “practical philosophy” which contributed toward popularizing the
philosopher), Schopenhauer presents the parable of the porcupine: in
the Ice Age, these animals huddled close to each other for warmth, but
ended up moving away when getting excessively close due to the sharp-
ness of their spines. However, above the conflicts, multiplicity became
cohesive thanks to the ontological language of life, which is the Logos, or
rather, as much the primordial Verb as the strict measure of all things—
or reason—responsible for the (invisible) tie of the common. This invis-
ible tie is the binding which designs the city as a place, creating other
places proper to the identification of the individual as citizen.
The adjective, “invisible,” can be replaced with “unperceived” or
“abstract.” As explained in Calvino’s parable: “Marco Polo describes a
bridge, stone by stone. ‘But which is the stone that holds up the bridge?’
asks Kublai Khan. ‘The bridge is not held up by this or that stone,’
Marco responds, ‘but by the curve of the arch which they form.’ Kublai
Khan remains silent, reflecting. After, he adds: ‘Why speak of stones?
Only the arch interests me.’ Polo responds: ‘Without stones, the arch
does not exist.”25
24 Cf. Esposito (2000, p. 25).

25 Calvino (1995, p. 45).
160 M. SODRÉ
The parable illustrates the relation of men with divinity, as well as

explaining the abstract force of the common in the diversity of individ-
uals, in the multiplicity of differences. The arch is, at the same time,
abstraction (the result of an architectonic calculation) and material reality
(the common to the support of singular elements, the stones).
All of this resonates in the word “community.” One may speak of the
common or the being-in-common, to avoid the awkwardness of the term
which is politically burdened with negativity (the closed, “communal-
ist” spirit of technological dictatorships such as Nazism or Stalinism, or
that of contemporary, religious fundamentalists, for example the Jemaah
Islamiyah, who preach the return of a caliphate lost to History). In other
words, to bypass the functionalist, “sociologization” of the community,
understood as an organizing entity, whose members recognize each
other and are recognized by others as members of a network of interde-
pendence and identification.
Epistemologically, however, it seems correct to distinguish “common”
from “community,” reserving for the first term the sense of a primor-
dial, ontological disposition inherent to the phylogenesis and ontogen-
esis of the human being, as transpires in Heidegger’s conception of the
Dasein. The community, in turn, is not the institutional modernization
of this primordial common, but something in which we always are, in the
sense that we always communicate, within the distribution of spaces and
identifications which constitute the cohesive tie. Thus, there are various
forms of community: political community, scientific community, juridi-
cal community, artistic community, etc. Each one of them results from
a subjectivation which, in turn, establishes a new common. Rancière
states: “A subjectivation makes common, undoing it. From this log-
ical core, first we understand what makes common is putting in com-
mon that which was not common, declaring as actors of the common
these or those who were no more than private persons, showing issues
which stem from the domestic sphere, etc., as revealing of the public
discussion.”26
Strict epigone of Heidegger, Esposito maintains, however, that the
term “community” is identical to the common, alleging that the con-
cept of community (and not a “communalist” entity) which is said to
be being-physically-together is being-with. Or rather, he does not begin
26 Dias and Neves (2010, p. 425).

with the idea of an “I” or a “not-I,” but with a constitutive “with.”

This is, indeed, implied in the Buberist formula, I-Thou. The perspec-
tive of this constitutive preposition is philosophically developed by
Heidegger in demonstrating how the discovery or uncovering of things
(the truth) coincides with existence: “The truth belongs to existence,
whereas existence is essentially discoverer.”27 The Dasein or existence
consists of being together with that which is present or present-at-hand
(Vorhanden), therefore, together with things to be discovered in a shared
manner, in a way which all being, even the solitary, implies the being-
with (Mitsein).
As noted, this is a philosophical discourse, which allows for objections
or inquiries of other orders under the degree of truth of argumenta-
tion. Frequent, therefore, is the confusion between reality and personal
desire inscribed in the ideas which are produced about the world. Taking
the desirable for the truth or making the profession of faith a truth are
attitudes—thus, inclinations of the “heart”—recurrent in social thinking,
as Courtial observes, to whom even “Einstein, as Lewis Feuer shows,
wished deeply within himself to demonstrate the relativity of the physics
of his time. Only later could he prove the truth of his desire.”28
Heidegger was not unaware of this type of objection, in that he him-
self asked, regarding the being-with, if all this were “anything more than
rather curious and arbitrary theses, which remain simply contradicted by
the facts,” or rather, “how can one affirm that the truth surrounding that
which is present-at-hand, around things, is necessarily something which
an existence shares with others or is shared with others?”29
He explains with a hypothetical case: “Let us suppose that some-
one makes a particular discovery, that he discovers a rare plant and the
places where it tends to grow; it could be that the fortunate discoverer
leaves his discovery a secret all his life and no one else knows of it.”
The discoverer cannot, indeed, do anything but hide or communicate
the discovery. However, even in the denial there already exists a shar-
ing, just in the negative sense. The truth of “uncovering that which is
27 Heidegger (1999, p. 137 on).

28 Courtial (1979, p. 14). Lewis Feuer is the author of Einstein ou le conflit de génération.
Ed. Complexe, 1979.
29 Heidegger (1999, p. 138). The following quotes are from this same chapter, typed in
reiterative and centripetal phrases, indicative of the transcription of an oral discourse.

162 M. SODRÉ
present-at-hand,” in this case, the discovery of the plant, which is not

the property of any particular existence, because the discovery, in itself, is
only possible thanks to the essential opening of all existence.
Thus, the existence is opened or uncovered while existence, “even
when no other existence factually apprehends it.” In other words, the
discovery is intrinsically common, in that existence is Dasein, that is,
being-there, being-in-the-world, which means “bringing with or begin-
ning to bring with it the circle, the sphere of the possible made mani-
fest (and of the existence made manifest), of the possible evidence (or
Offenbarkeit), that is, the ‘there’ (the ‘ex,’ the ‘out’), and only being
with it can the things also be made manifest, or rather, only within it
can that which is present-at-hand (that which there is, the things) also be
made manifest.”
Reiterative, with obscure discursive detours (as is proper of the
Heideggerian discourse), the explanation simply intends to insist on the
argument that the being-with or Mitsein should be characterized in a
peculiar form of being of existence, defined not as naked and raw life,
but as a fundamental reference for possibilities, for a potential-being, or
an exit for the man to the “out,” indicated by the prefix “ex.” Existing is
potential-being. Uncovering or discovering what is present-at-hand (the
things) does not belong to the things, but to existence, which means
that the discovery is already a sharing or a donation. The “together,”
in the expressions “being-together” or “being-physically-together,”
is essentially to be open to the other, as a discoverer. Ergo, to exist is
“being-with” in a “there,” which is not a marked space, but a space
which breaks out as an essential determination of the sphere in which
man moves, therefore, the world.
Thusly arises the sphere which we denominate “community”: one
can only be-with in a specific there. The community is not a historical
modernization of the common, but rather a spatialization which oper-
ates an existential slice and allows for a subjectivation. When the being-
physically-together-with refers to juridically and politically constituted
individuals, the object upon which sociology classically dwells makes an
appearance: the (social) relation between autonomous and concrete indi-
viduals in an abstract all, called society.
It is individualism which creates the possibility of thinking about
society as an aggregation of autonomous units, therefore, individuals as
a new category of agent in History. Tocqueville summarizes: “The aris-
tocracy had made a long chain of all the citizens which rose from the
peasant to the king; democracy broke the chain and separated every
link.”30 Separate, the individuals made themselves politically repre-
sented, and juridically or contractually guaranteed their operations of
exchange.
The community as “the common,” however, cannot be thought
of from the human being already constituted as an individual; ergo, it
is not a substance shared by subjects of the conscience. Consequently,
it is not primordially instituted from a contractual reciprocity (as
Rousseau wanted), because it is itself the condition of possibility for any
exchange—a condition based on total delivery (the primordial donation,
the radical alienation) of the individual to a dynamic of differentiation
and approximation.
In the word “community,” the distancing or differentiation is already
indicated by the prefix com (with). At the same time, however, the com
binds us to others, understood not as ready individuals, but rather as
externalities, to which one primordially opens oneself. In binding, each
one loses himself, in the sense that he lacks the absolute dominion of
subjectivity and identity—therefore, empty or “improper” individuals—
in relation to the opening to the Other. As Esposito notes, “it is not the
proper, but the improper - or more drastically, the other - which char-
acterizes the common. A partial or full emptying of the proper in one’s
contrary. A disappropriation which invests and decenters the proprietary
subject and forces him out of himself. To alter himself.”31
Here, one is beyond the dominion of sociology, more properly in the
specific dimension (the communitas) of a science of communication, in
that one is disposed to thinking of communication in its radical consti-
tution as a symbolic organization of the common. Consequently, the
communitas—to which Esposito refers, along the lines of Heidegger—
is not the (sociological) “between” the being, but the being as “between,”
or rather, not a substantialist aggregation of social identities, but
rather the symbolic, primordial division of the being by the force of
the common—“I is Another,” as in Rimbaud’s verse; or as in the
Bible: “Therefore, leave aside lying and tell the truth to each one of
your neighbors, because we are all members of one another” (Ephesians
4:25–29).
30 Tocqueville (1986, p. 290).

31 Esposito (2000, p. 31).
164 M. SODRÉ
In this sense, it is impossible not to live in community (as well as

impossible not to communicate) even if one does not know of this or
does not want to know, in the illusory supposition that community bind-
ing was relegated to the past by the emerging societal forms in moder-
nity, in the example of the republican form which, intending to be one
and indivisible, attempts to homogenize the diversity of vital activities.
To formulate an essential inquiry about communication (outside of
the informational conception, anchored in sociology), we begin with the
relation or the binding implied in this “com,” which signals the division
of the munus, a task or a gift originally made by each individual to each
other. Communicating is the action of always, infinitely, establishing the
common of the community, not as an aggregated entity, but as a bind-
ing, therefore, as a constitutive nothing, for the binding is without physi-
cal or institutional substance, it is pure opening in the language.
The subject which communicates is the same being as “between,”
ergo, an internality destined for an externality, the Other, to be anthro-
pologically or psychoanalytically understood as a dimension indispensable
to the establishment of the common. In other words, it is the subject of
a structural dialog, inherent to the idea of communicatio.
The Republican Common

The common is not, however, the same as that which is stated in the
phrase “common principles.” Principle, the ultimate foundation of a
proposition, which is presented as unconditional or as truth, is some-
thing which is not demonstrated nor discussed, although it can be dis-
believed. For example, when a historian (Eduardo Lemaître) says about
Colombia that “three things gave this country of countries a nation with
common principles and allow for the existence of a singular unit: the
Constitution of 1886, the Magdalena river, and television,” he is refer-
ring, with a specific there, to geopolitical principles of a national com-
mon. This proposition does not exclude the possibility that formulating
other principles for this “imagined community” called “nation.”
Evidently, modernity sustains different political and geopolitical prin-
ciples to reveal the “emptiness,” which we categorize as the common.
In fact, the modern, republican space is, to the common, a there very
different from that which made dialogism possible between men and
their transcendence, bundled together in the notion of communication.
However, already in the antiquity of Ancient Greece, the political origin
of the concept of the common is found, as stated right at the beginning

of Aristotle’s Politics: “We see that every city is a species of community”
(koinonia). There are various forms of community (man/woman, mas-
ter/slave, among citizens, etc.) subsumed in the ultimate and perfect
form of the Polis.
It is worth returning here to the idea of the common as the concept
of an absence, or a constitutive “nothing,” not only of that which is vis-
ible in the social binding, but mainly of the common which one cannot
see, the “immanent unperceived.” In the ancient philia, this immanence
is not defined as a human self-reference: beyond the eventuality of the
sacred, the transcendence was situated in the Good (to agathon), or
rather, at the point where all the foundational forces of the Polis con-
verge. In modernity, the immanent unperceived is the unconsecrated
common which cements the City and which allows the individual to
transpose the limits of duality to communicate with the social anon-
ymous and assume the representative form pertinent to each particular
society. This form is configured by the republican politic.32
The republican common is invested, from the point of view of the
nation-state, in homogenizing forms of juridical order and territorial
borders, which dissolve or try to dissolve all the other forms assumed by
the communal tie. However, from the point of view of civil society, the
common is invested in the form of the public sphere, which we under-
stand as the space for communication in which each individual transitions
from dual discourse to the discursive relation with the anonymous mass,
therefore, as a cultural space (the modern idea of culture as an autono-
mous field of meaning would be a species of epistemic response to the
fragmentation of the traditional, mythic unit) of politically common
property.
The triumphant ascension of the concept of culture in modernity
is explained in light of this historical redescription of the common. In
fact, politics and culture presided over the reinterpretation of the ancient
koiné in eighteenth-century Europe. The irruption of this new real-
ity in History was one of the effects of the transformation in the rela-
tions of production (the Industrial Revolution), which were aligned
with the expansion of the bourgeois democracy. Strategic were (indeed,
32 Cf. Sodré (2012). The digressions about the public sphere come from Chapter 4 of
this book.
166 M. SODRÉ
in the same vein as Rousseau’s political and theoretical proclamations)

education and culture as instruments for conceiving of democracy as a
value and an end, and not only as a government mechanism. The dissem-
ination of dogmas regarding the “sovereignty of the people” demanded
the free flow of ideas.
Strengthened in Europe through the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies as a place for the manifestation of the “popular will” and not of
“private will,” the public space was always, therefore, simultaneously
political and cultural, a combination of politics and language (in the
broad, and not only literary sense, of the word). Discursively, it was
supported by literary institutions, debate arenas, and editorial media,
as well as the press as an “agent for promoting culture.” The associa-
tion between parliament and language was quite familiar to eighteenth-
century intellectuals.
In the political forum, what was very important, if not essential, as
Dewey sustained, was “the improvement of the methods and conditions
of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the pub-
lic.”33 Or rather, without a particular rhetoric, conditioned to a specific
culture (something like the “good” Platonic and Aristotelian rhetoric),
and, thus, capable of expressing the language of the masses in a pub-
lic space, pure reason would be just another instrument of domination.
Behind this rhetoric is found the educational system.
However, the “rhetoric in itself”—or rather, pure discursive tech-
nique, disembodied from cultural and political creativity, therefore, from
civic activism—was already the embryo of the industries of cultural dif-
fusion, the culture industry, together with the greater public, object of
the reflections of authors such as Tocqueville, Proudhon, Baudelaire, and
others, since the middle of the nineteenth century. In the first half of
the twentieth century, this industrialized rhetoric became a new object of
analysis thanks to the notion of “culture industry,” an expression coined
by Adorno—possibly inspired by the expression “industrial culture,”
which appears in the novel Bouvard and Pécuchet, by Gustave Flaubert—
and theoretically reinforced by the concept of reproducibility, by Walter
Benjamin. The diagnosis of cultural homogenization configures a point of
convergence for this full line of cultural criticism, well represented by the
Frankfurt School.
33 Dewey (1980, p. 208).

Later, the expression was extended to electronic media, due to the

growing importance of radio and television. It lost strength with digital
technology and was progressively substituted by the expression “content
industry.” In the mixing pot that was the transition from the industrial
paradigm (characterized by motor technology) to the information par-
adigm (electronic technology), the public space, technologically ampli-
fied, began to be absorbed by the cultural content industries, with only a
remote connection to the educational system.
Between the 1960s and 1990s, the public space appeared to have
found its principal icon in broadcast television, or information on an
open circuit for a common public. Due to its great capacity for trans-
posing old social barriers (class, creed, sex, and age) and thus constitut-
ing diversified audiences, TV was imposed as the prototypical medium
for mass reach. Critical hypotheses were suggested about its potential for
competition, in educational terms, with the family and the school.
Finally, still in the final decade of the last century, digital technology
began to drive and consolidate the public fragmentation of the tradi-
tional electronic media under the form of communicating or interactive
individualities. The old interaction, ruled by the model of an anonymous
and heterogeneous “mass,” gave way to interactivity, which implies a
graded process of appropriation of communications technology by the
users. The Internet is the medium which synthesizes all expressive pos-
sibilities of the anterior media (written press, radio, and television) and
indicates new modalities of intellectual work attuned to the development
of the world network of computers. Broadcast is, thus, progressively
substituted by PointCast, which is the transformation of the common
audience in points of individualized targets, capable of provoking the
fragmentation of the media-amplified public space.
This substitution, operating in the sphere of the world’s modern
financialization, does not, however, radically affect the cultural homog-
enization already denounced by the Frankfurt School. An economic
viewpoint may contribute to the explanation: “The financial products
(currency, titles, credit) are perfectly homogeneous; the agents are, thus,
not interested in any characteristic of the product other than its price.
Consequently, in the money market, for example, a franc borrowed dur-
ing the day is equivalent to any other franc borrowed during the day. No
bank can define an interest rate higher than those of the market, under
the pretext that the borrowed francs are of better quality than those
offered by the other banks (…) This appears evident, but when one
168 M. SODRÉ
looks toward the non-financial markets, the homogeneity of the product

almost always disappears.”34
This explanation is like an index of the hegemony of rapid informa-
tion, an effect of electronic technology, over the old qualms of sym-
bolic heterogeneity in the cultural sphere. What truly matters is that,
in the capital markets, “the information circulates well and quickly,
because all the offers and demands for the same, homogeneous prod-
uct can be confronted, practically permanently, in the same place
(stock market) or in the same telecommunications network (money
market or exchange market).”35 In this environment, the expression
“mass communication” is only an erroneous result of the confusion
between communication and transmission, for what it effectively des-
ignates is the information (topical, entertainment, diffusion of cultural
content) disseminated by the media.
What is asserted in this environment is the circulatory spirit, which
democratically signals to the masses with supposed “distributional gains”
and affects the old culture disseminated in the public space. The latter,
technologically amplified throughout the twentieth century, progres-
sively freed itself of the civic ideology characteristic of the eighteenth
century which, even monopolized by the ascendant bourgeoisie, har-
bored universalist pretentions (“liberté, égalité, fraternité”) regarding the
heterogeneous scope of the social classes.
It is today properly a culturalized sphere, that is, a source of entertain-
ment and fragmentary content of knowledge with the appearance of cul-
tural life, but without the potential for common reference. “Culturalism”
is the reduction in the dynamic of production symbolic to the distribu-
tion of meaning content, with the aim of a new form of social adminis-
tration. It is operated by media corporations: in the end, the sovereignty
of the market takes the place of political sovereignty, converting the pub-
lic life into life in public, that is, an “aestheticization” of everything and
anything capable of collective visibility.
To the analytical eye, a new reality is configured, in which those who
pontificate basically range from the various age groups of the middle
classes to the youth on the urban periphery, conjoined by alternative
34 Généreux (2001, pp. 121–122).

35 Ibidem, p. 122.
networks of communication based on the Internet, socially extensive by

means of entertainment organization of varied natures (from musical
shows to collective gaming). With the Internet, the effects of big media
(journals, magazines, television) are no longer exercised in the same way
over this new type of public. At first, with what has been designated
“Web 1.0,” the economic-administrative model of traditional media
persisted, in that the informational, online corporations controlled their
content unidirectionally, aimed at passive users. This changed with the
model, “Web 2.0,” in which content was received and principally shared,
and the users were redefined as “profiles.” Antoun and Malini state:
“After the sharing revolution, the power of publication migrated from
the holders of grand audiences to those who accumulated more inter-
actions. The value of the network was no longer calculated only by the
quantity of the site’s public, as the calculation of the quantity of groups
created and mobilized on the internet by someone (profile or collective)
gained more importance, which transformed fans and followers into
partners in the production of an informational agenda.”36
Reality, thus described, has been constituted as a princeps object of
communicational studies. In these, what can be called the “secondary
techniques” of communication—therefore, the media and all informa-
tion and transmission devices—predominate over what sociology always
designated, since Charles Cooley, as “primary processes,” or rather, the
intersubjective relationship, face-to-face, stemming from ties of physical
or personal proximity which characterized the common quotidian.
The common quotidian is a universal, not in the philosophical and
strong sense of rational and abstract prescription, but a concretion (just
as human diversity is a concrete universal) inherent to the being-with,
the being-physically-together: the common universally induces dialog
and action, which are structural moments, spontaneous and necessary
to the human and diverse “art” of communicating, that is, of produc-
ing language, putting differences in common, and opening oneself to
the transcendence—the reciprocal action between the particular and
an external foundation, capable of legitimating, in universal terms, the
specific human group. In this concrete space of the common, it is pos-
sible to think of the public sphere in micro-developments, for example,
36 Malini and Antoun (2013, pp. 212–213).

170 M. SODRÉ
non-governmental institutions, neighborhood associations, symbolic

production groups, etc.
Inversely, the modern means of communication, despite their tech-
nical potential for the globalization of information, are particularist: as
devices from a specific economic and technological order are ruled by a
particular code of social administration. The decanted “global village” is,
in fact, the standardization of a techno-economic code, which does not
allow for transcendence. In this particularism, the media adjusts perfectly
to the modern management of the intersubjective relation in society that,
functioning through pure self-reference, refuses transcendence, or rather,
the hypothesis of a meta-social forum, of a duplication of the social, in
that the social finds its foundation within itself.
Here is found a paradox, as the duplicating forum is not only found
in traditional religious or mythical thought: abstract notions such as
society or social imply the transcendence of the elements which com-
pose them, in favor of a supposed organic totality. Under this light,
one should examine the famous phrase of British politician Margaret
Thatcher—“There’s no such thing as society, there are individual men
and women and there are families”—because what in fact exists on the
place of immanence are individuals and institutions, whereas society
transcends them as an abstraction in which one must believe in order
to exist. It is a transcendence which can be interpreted by the view of
solidarity with a communal foundation, but also from the perspective
of State authoritarianism, as demonstrated in political dictatorships
when the social group, politically muzzled, produces the appearance
of positive consensus regarding the practices of the repressive, state
apparatus.
Sociology is supported on an ethical level for making us believe in this
operative fiction (in this it implies the sharing of rules), however explicitly
renounced by the (neoliberal) statement from the former British prime
minister, who did not admit to believing in anything beyond the self-
referential sufficiency of the market. It is on this ethical level that, despite
its ambiguities, what always appears in moments of great criticism of the
market economy (which is not equivalent to “commercialization”) is
this system which razes and redefines the social cohesion according to its
inhuman parameters. Facing this, some critics see the idea of society as a
“necessity,” such as R. MacIver in his commentary on Polanyi’s master-
ful analysis: “The ‘satanic mills’ [the market economy] discard all human
necessity, except one: inexorably, they begin to grind society itself into its
atoms. Thus, men had to discover society. For Mr. Polanyi, the last word
is society.”37
The same thing occurs with the notion of culture which, despite its
real historical importance as substitute for the determinism of the natu-
ral instinct, remains ambiguous and abstract. Accepting the abstraction
implied in “culture” is in some way taking care that social rules don’t
become absolute or “natural.” The ambiguity of the notion remains,
however, notwithstanding the evident similarities through the different
stages of Western society. The similarities are persistent in modernity,
because, in fact, the idea of culture as an autonomous field is a modern
phenomenon, a form aligned with others (democracy, the school, com-
modities, etc.) which constitute bourgeois society. More precisely, it is
the ideological form assumed by the knowledge which sits within the
bourgeois common. However, its uniqueness is in the fact that it is a form
which passes transversally through all the others in a mode of “trans-
form-ing,” that is, of something which modifies the perception, more
than being recognized and absorbed by it.
It is not, therefore, the same as knowledge. Imagine knowledge as a sea
through which you must navigate: culture is the map, a navigation chart,
with buoys and lighthouses. Before knowledge appears, culture makes
itself present as a guiding matrix for establishing differences and criteria,
but also as a memory map of knowledge pertinent to the reproduction
of the bourgeois conscience. This matrix, or set of publicly available sym-
bolic forms, always presupposes a moral or ethical-political elite, bour-
geois, which effectively represents the leading class and exercises a power
of negativity, that is, the power to criticize (even its own class) together
with the power to universalize its discourse.
However, the religious background is clearly visible: in the grandiose
idea of culture, there is an inclination, at the same time historicist and
theological, to respond to the totality in the moment in which the God
hypothesis ceases to fulfill its function. As problematic as it may be, this
notion enters the space left open by the modern crisis of foundations.
There is no lack of those who think along these lines, suggesting that
culture is “an ambiguous response to the fragmentation of the tradi-
tional, mythically- and theologically-oriented experience.”38 Culture the-
ories would thus be “colluding with the desire to restore the unit which
37 Cf. Preface to Polanyi (2012, p. XII). Translated into English from Portuguese version.
38 Miranda (2002, p. 22).
172 M. SODRÉ
was lost with the institutionalization of modernity: whether geared

toward the past, insisting on community, tradition, a return to origins,
etc. (which characterizes the romantic); or geared toward the future,
which characterizes the modern projectualism which yearns for recom-
posing the experiences with a foundation of strong programs or abso-
lute ideas, such as progress, the emancipation of humanity, etc. (it is this
which demonstrates in itself the various enlightenments).”39
This truly theological idealization of culture was significant in the
nineteenth century, to the point that it contributed conceptually to the
emergence of a new science of man, anthropology, upon whose episte-
mological base culture was stuck as a collective mesh of meaning, an exis-
tential guide, which supplies the subjects of a determined social group
with the referential framework to interpret the world.
Thus, there is no lack of critical positions according to which culture,
in its full sense, has a proper economy, in that its goods circulate in an
“interstitial weave which separates and reconnects the subjects.” This
is, for example, the vision of Mondzain, to whom “culture is the capac-
ity which the subject has to inscribe its imaginary relation with all the
other subjects in time by means of symbolic operations.”40 This implies
an intersubjective temporality in which the place of the other is recog-
nized—understood as the constitution of the subject’s image in the eye
of the other, full of authority—within a common dimension.
This recognition evidently passes through the discourse and implies
dialog, which is not confused with intransitive jabbering, or rather, with
the mere production, distribution, and reception of signs without exis-
tential transitivity—that which Heidegger called Das Geredete, chatter. In
the strong and symbolic sense of the term, social dialog does not dis-
pense with the culture conceived of as a process of recognition of itself
by the presence of the other. The subject of culture would thus be a sub-
ject of memory (of its specific insertion in the world) and of promise, in
the sense of its fidelity or its binding to a world in common. It would be,
therefore, a political subject.
It is a perspective which conceives of a culture’s present as a human
coming-to-be in the creation of a meaning continuously remade between
the past and the future. It therefore implies a formative or “educative”
39 Ibidem, p. 23.
40 Mondzain (2007).
substratum (“education” in the broad sense, as a shifting or traveling of a

subject in the direction of the other), which one could see, for example,
in the origins of the European public space. However, when this inter-
pretation is used as the patrimony of a social class, the idea of culture
is universalized and, idealized, runs the risk of being transformed into a
second nature in service of the domination of a class.
The idealization of European culture persisted through the first half
of the last century, as shown by T.S. Eliot’s polemic text, in which he
attempts to define the concept of culture.41 For the renowned English
poet, three classes—the individual, the group, and the society—give
structure to culture, confronting it or producing mutual exchanges,
but always within an order which is responsible for the cohesion and
advancement of the social whole. According to this model, culture could
be low or high, and, in the latter case, it is the patrimony of a minor-
ity (an elite or a caste), which belongs to a social class which should
be maintained as such, for it falls to them to recruit and form the elite
responsible for high culture. The idea of education as a means of the
universal democratization of culture would thus be naive for necessarily
leading to the reduction in the quality.
The transcendence implicit in Eliot’s definition is still more intense
than the Enlightenment’s conception of culture, because it specifies
the umbilical cord which unites religion and culture, and not just any
religion, but Christianity, which ensured the expansion of European
thought: “Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a
Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the
complete disappearance of the Christian faith.”42
This religious aspect of culture is “an aspiration to transcendence, it
is a wager on transcendence,” as Steiner observes, a little over two dec-
ades later, in his criticism of Eliot’s text, while at the same time accus-
ing him of irresponsibility for passing over the fact that European culture
was associated with two world wars and the Holocaust.43 Deconstructing
the classic illusion that the humanities can humanize, Steiner notes that
the Christian religion is the motive through which anti-Semitism deeply
41 Cf. Eliot (1948).

42 Ibidem, p. 122.
43 Cf. Steiner (1991).
174 M. SODRÉ
pervaded Western culture, thus culminating in the crematorium furnaces

of the Nazis, the Soviet Gulag, and announcing the “post-culture” era.
It would therefore be necessary to believe in this transcendent unit,
designated culture, for it to socially exist. The problem is that “the neces-
sity of and the difficulty in believing are, today, at the heart of social
representations,” as Barel says.44 In the discussion he undertakes on the
clashes between social self-reference and transcendence, he contrasts the
analysts who reject the idea of transcendence (those to whom there only
exist “social relations” today, and not “society”) with those to whom it is
impossible to cease believing and, therefore, those to whom refusing the
transcendent would not be possible.
In this way, “the necessity of ideology, at its most profound degree,
and the failure of science and technique to satisfy it, explain the ascen-
sion of the ‘irrational,’ precisely in the social layers of technicians,
executives, engineers, intellectuals, carriers of scientific and technical
knowledge.”45 Techno-scientific knowledge, at the same time in which
it sustains a certain reality and certain Promethean illusions about capi-
tal, finds itself confined to the immanence of an ideology of performance,
without the power of (critical) negativity in the face of History.
In the midst of this biased rejection of the great transformation (that
which was transmitted throughout the centuries by philosophies and
spiritual systems with the objective of fixing the primordial and ultimate
meaning of life), however, arises that which has already been called the
“spirituality of the quotidian,” manifested in alternative attitudes and
habits, which vary from the reaction to nuclear energy to vegetarianism.
As much in the differentiated groups of the societal landscape as in the-
oretical positions (e.g., the “formalist” sociology of the quotidian), what
is developed is a species of “horizontal transcendence,” in which the
“being-physically-together” (convivialism, pacifism, egalitarianism, toler-
ance, etc.) can be cultivated with a fervor analogous to the traditional
relation with a transcendent god.46
This same horizontalism of the “small transcendence” is observed in
the idea of culture, which leads it to circulate as an affirmative prop-
osition in different modes of definition within the social field. This is
44 Barel(1984, p. 96).
45 Ibidem, p. 96.
46 Ibidem, passim.
owed, in principle, to the fact that that which is today called culture
traverses entirely the social history, indifferent to criticism and univer-
salization, always in a different manner, in that each process and each
“cultural” product are subject to re-appropriations and transforma-
tions, in a dynamic—immanent—which is not sent to anything exterior
to the social practice. The notion is resolved in its own, socio-semiotic
self-referencing, thus also capable of being designated as “semi-
osphere,” that is, a productive and redistributive sphere of social
meanings, capable of serving, as in the case of classical culture, as long-
term collective memory, principally the memory affected by media
consumption.
It is this type of horizontalism which allows the sociological field,
more specifically a sociologist like Canclini, to affirm that “culture
embraces the set of social processes of meaning, or, in a more complex
way, culture embraces the set of social processes of production, circula-
tion, and consumption of meaning in the social life.”47 One could add:
in the condition of “social processes, they materialize in ‘repertories’”
of various levels and classifications, with which one effectively enters in
contact. Within this perspective, the same author mentions four contem-
porary perspectives, which account as much for socio-material aspects as
cultural signifiers:
1. Culture as the forum in which each group organizes its identity.

Putting the question in this form, there is nothing novel, because
this has been the focus of anthropologists since the nineteenth cen-
tury: culture is defined by the frontiers of an ethnicity, and a nation
or a language. Now, however, the focus has shifted to the intersec-
tion of diverse, cultural repertories. It is not only about the culti-
vation of a symbolic forum within a specific circle, but about the
relation and appropriation of different symbolic systems stemming
from different scenarios of identification, such as neighborhood,
city, nation.
2. Culture as a symbolic forum of production and reproduction of the
society. Notice the difference between “the” and “a.” Here, the
culture is not identified with the totality of the social life, but
rather with the signifying dimension which gives meaning to the
47 Canclini (2004, p. 34).

176 M. SODRÉ
social practices. Thus, society’s culture is distinguished, but with-

out a dividing line. The culture is part of social production and
reproduction, but does not respond to all social practice. For
example, the binding between the religious sphere (culture) and
the political sphere, even in Islamic countries, is not necessarily
explicit, nor strictly functional: the Quran does not impose the
burka (cultural fact) on women, this is a political act, an act of
domination, typical of the Islamic State.
3. Culture as a forum of conformation of consensus and hegemony.
Culture here is the scene in which the exercise of power and
counter-hegemonic struggles gain meaning. Thus, when one says
that culture is that which Europe understands as culture (science,
language, and arts), it is exercising cultural power.
4. Culture as a euphemized dramatization of social conflicts. The plas-
tic arts, cinema, song, and sports would be other modes of speak-
ing about conflict, in order to avoid wars. This idea of culture as
theater and representation is present in Bertolt Brecht and Walter
Benjamin, for example.
As it becomes evident that these perspectives do not constitute defin-

itive models of the idea of culture, but descriptions or narratives of how
culture inscribes itself in the social life, what is confirmed here is the
notion (immanent, not transcendent) of the “social processes of mean-
ing,” or rather, how this ambiguous entity called “culture” articulates
itself within the society—therefore, with the economy, the production,
and the State. However, it is not said here that, as far as this self-refer-
encing culture affirms itself as indispensable to the formation of human
capital in the movement of global financialization, an attraction between
culture and patrimonial power is demonstrated, as organized for the
capacity of transmission by specific groups.
Thus, there is a tendency toward the patrimonialization of the field of
culture (by a new type of bourgeoisie or of a diversified “cultural petit
bourgeois”) characterized by the incorporation of a knowing-doing in
specific groups (artists, athletes, event producers, etc.), whose capital is
a language and a technical competence. It is no longer a grand and sin-
gular cultural bourgeois, therefore, but a diversity of patrimonial groups
(the culturalist democracy of the media) which demarcated its territory
by the specificity of its technical-symbolic capacities, mainly in the orbit
of the spectacle.
While differences are seen regarding the rules of pure and simple
industrial capitalism, contradictions do not appear within the game of
finance and of the market. Culture loses the classic potential of negativity
in favor of integration with entertainment and information. Everything,
including that which was once designated “art,” becomes a factor of
integration, under the banner of “democratization of access,” which is,
at its base, a culturalist strategy of erasing social differences through sim-
ulacra of approximation. Inseparable from the media—which performs in
interaction with economic and technological facts, but not directly polit-
ical ones—this culture competes for the maintenance of the hegemonic
political system.
Therefore, in search of a new political perspective, the conception of
Appadurai, to whom culture is not a noun (like a thing or an object), but
an adjective, the “cultural,” can be used as a heuristic resource to speak
of difference.48 Not an essence of a transcendence, therefore, but tex-
tually, the “subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate
group identity.” Instead of a system of meanings (implied in the current
anthropological notion of culture), the cultural sends us to the conflict
of meanings at the edges of the social fields.
All of this—which Barel called “small transcendences”—is something
close to human action and, therefore, the reverse of the superhuman
distance which the grand transcendences maintain between the quotid-
ian and its meaning. He says, “The distance of the quotidian is perhaps
the mark of a grand transcendence, but it is also its weakness, for it is
repressed, without respite, in the human and social imaginary. The small
transcendences, frequently unperceived, aim to reduce this distance and
re-establish a contact of transcendence with the ‘real’ which, if it com-
pletely disappeared, would remove all human legitimacy from transcend-
ence, grand or small.”49
From the Thing to the Technique

Despite this problem’s discussion being long and complex, it is viable
to summarize the part related to the counterpoint between media and
communicatio, affirming the possibility of the human presence (and not
48 Cf. Appadurai (1996).

49 Barel (1984, p. 101).
178 M. SODRÉ
only the superhuman presence) in the transcendence. Included along

these lines are references made by authors such as Fernando Pessoa and
Thomas Mann, who thought of the “human man,” that is, an agent of
historicity conceived not as a meta-social order, but as a type of social
creativity characterized by its distance in the face of the State and eco-
nomic hegemony.
Creativity, therefore, appears as a notion quite different from the
innovation which, in the discourse of economists, is fundamental to the
competitiveness of businesses. However, it is also different, even beyond
this discourse, from the continued innovation in the use of new tech-
nologies, currently imagined as fundamental to the very life of the new
generations. Why different? Basically, because the historicity aimed at the
structural dialog implied in communicatio, ergo, in the binding dimen-
sion of the being-with, associates creativity with the conflict inherent to
the experience of the common, whereas media devices systematically
neutralize this dimension.
Why?
A possible response is insinuated in Buber’s reflection: “The world of
It is coherent in space and time. The world of Thou is coherent neither in
space, nor in time.”50
It designates, for the philosopher, the world of things, referred to in
the “word-pair” I-It (or I-Thing) and distinct from I-Thou, in that the
demarcation line between both “separates the living presence of objec-
tive attention.” The objectivity implied in Buber’s reflection when he
speaks of space-time coherence is precisely this, which allows for the
objective experience and empirical knowledge possible in the dominion
of things, but not in that of men, where reciprocity does not occur as a
causal effect, for it is made of incoherence, conflict, and mystery. Thus,
it is in detriment to the ability to relate (I-Thou) that the functions of
experimentation and utilization by man are developed.
This neutralization of the tensions of the common by media devices
is a phenomenon analogous to Buber’s fear that the causal coherence
of the world of It “diabolically” suffocates the living presence (feeling
and conflict) and the I-Thou relation. However, as Buber warns, “the
fundamental word pair I-It does not come from the Devil, for the mate-
rial does not come from the Devil. What is diabolical is that the material
50 Buber (1969, p. 58).

intends to be the being. If the man allows it to entwine, the world of

It will invade him in its incessant growth, his I will lose him his reality,
until the day in which the nightmare of the It, which oppresses him from
without, and the ghost of the I, which rises within him, whispers the rec-
ognition of his eternal damnation.”51
In a different analog referencing the devil, Flusser interprets indus-
trial and consumer society using the seven deadly sins, betting on the
metaphor of gluttony (or devouring) as a basis for diagnosing Western
civilization.52 It is the principal motor of the “ladder of abstraction,”
which he understands as the progressive annulment of the space-time
dimension of objects that transforms it into technical images, which pre-
side over the immateriality characteristic of the media society. Along this
line of argument, the machines of communication are devices which pro-
duce societal “excrement,” which results from the devouring of nature
and is constituted of trash. Using different terminology, but apparently
with the same, mystic spirit familiar to the Hasidic tradition, Flusser
approaches the Buberian idea of It.
In fact, there is a vast spectrum of Buber’s spiritual suspicion of the It
vectors: the machinery of economic life, the absolute dominion of cau-
sality in the scientific ordering of nature, and, of course, the empire of
objects. “But is the collective life of modern man not necessarily steeped
in the world of It?” is the question he properly investigates, to soon after
respond that such life cannot truly stem from this sphere, but only within
the limits of a legitimate ethic: “The utilitarian will and dominating will
which exist in man act naturally and legitimately only while remaining
connected to the will to relate, and being conducted by this will.”53
In Buber’s vision, a transcendence (the reciprocity of the relation
I-Thou) offers a human exit for the “tyranny” of the It. Only “where
the I and Thou freely face each other in a reciprocity of action which is
not connected to any causality,” only there “the man encounters the
guarantee of the freedom of his being and the freedom of being in gen-
eral. Only he who knows the relation and the presence of the Thou is apt
to make a decision.”54 The freedom manifests itself, just as a (Socratic)
51 Ibidem, p. 76.
52 Cf. Flusser (2008).
53 Ibidem, p. 78.
54 Ibidem, p. 83.
180 M. SODRÉ
becoming what already is, in the sense that it conquers the fundamen-
tal category of being, which is the relation, or rather, “a disposition to
reception, a continent, a psychic mold; it is the a priori of the relation,
the innate Thou.”55
His idea of community is anchored in a living and reciprocal relation
between these two poles. Basically, it does not differ from the socio-
psychological conception of Tönnies, according to which community and
society are different human formations, methodologically applicable to
diverse group aggregations and centered on positively affirmed common
wills. It is true that Tönnies did not make Buber’s separation between I
and Thou, but rather privileges moral qualities and idealizes community
values. In Buber, community is something to be conquered by will and
faith: “The man who aspires to community yearns for God.”56
As becomes evident, Buber’s thinking—supported in the dichotomies
of subject/object (I/It) and subject/subject (I/Thou), characteristic of
existential phenomenology—is punctuated by moral metaphysics (sim-
ilar to romantic anti-capitalism) and by a subjective and mystical tran-
scendentalism, visible in its argumentative thread, mainly in expressions
such as “true subjectivity,” “true community,” “the Face” (the divinity),
the “Christ eternally engendered in the human soul by God,” and the
“mysterium tremendum”. The “devil” is a metaphor for his metaphysical
horror of the world of things, the It, which places “the world on one
side, God on the other,” where only in the “sanctification” of things can
the living God be found. This would not be in the world nor outside of
it, but rather in the Thou, which implies the entire being of the universe.
As much as this doctrinal discourse functions for the moral reception
of something like the communicatio, it reveals itself to be insufficient for
duly contemplating the presence of “things” (technology and economy)
in contemporary man’s new way of being. The problem is not in the
admission of transcendence, but in its mystical limitation, which rejects
the world of tools in the spheres in which the relation is constituted,
determining the world acceptable by means of a solipsistic I, as some-
thing opposed to being-physically-there.
It is inevitable, therefore, to contrast it with the Heideggerian reflec-
tion, according to which, from the beginning, the entities are men and
55 Ibidem, p. 51.
56 Buber (1997, p. 61).
things, although with radical differences related to their way of being.

Transcendence also appears here, for this entity (intra-worldly) is tran-
scended by the essence of the existence of Dasein (the being-there, the
being-in-the-world) which, in turn, maintains an anterior and more fun-
damental relation with the being.
Transcendence is thus a condition of possibility of the original differ-
ence (ontological, says Heidegger) between being and entity. However,
this does not mean that the being-physically-there is a transcendental
subject (in the sense of a pure neo-Kantian subject or Buber’s Thou),
although it makes the world possible through its original opening in
the condition of a transcendence situated in this same world. On the
contrary, Heidegger’s being-there is defined and situated concretely in
History.
Here, the detailing of Buber’s doctrine is intended to expose a phil-
osophical matrix for models of communicational process which can be
found with varying forms in compendiums of the sociology, psychology,
or anthropology of communication, when not in spiritualist approaches
which search for a transcendent path to the being-with or community.
In truth, Buber is a communalist just like all those, mystics or not, who
transcend the community within a perspective of the individual, seeing a
connecting thread between the past and future, privileging the values of
conserving the provenance.
Even in structural anthropology one finds this model, clearly visible in
Lévi-Strauss’ observation: “The future will certainly judge that anthro-
pology’s most important theoretical contribution to the social sciences
comes from this capital distinction between two modalities of social
existence: a genre of life perceived, first, as traditional and archaic, but
which is that of the authentic societies; and more recent forms of appear-
ance, of which the first type is not absent, but in which imperfect and
incompletely authentic groups emerge as little islands on the surface of a
vaster group, one itself struck by inauthenticity.”57
This distinction between authentic and inauthentic is conceptually
authorized by an idealization of the common. Thus, the communal spec-
ificity should be sought, as Veneziani notes, “in the meaning of root-
edness on a social and cultural horizon perceived as a common, plural,
and signifying horizon. Communal is that which attributes value to the
57 Lévi-Strauss (2012, p. 28).

182 M. SODRÉ
social, religious, familial, national tie which does not live as a bond, but
as a resource. For the communalist, the tie is not the chain which impris-
ons us and limits our freedom, but the Ariadne’s thread which connects
us to the other and which sustains us.”58
Heidegger’s differing position is worth noting: “The being-with
should not be clarified through the I-Thou relation, but inversely: this
I-Thou relation presupposes as its internal possibility that the existence,
that which performs the I role as much as that which performs the Thou
role, is already determined by the ‘with-the-other,’ that is, defined by the
being-with, by its Mit-einander, through which we have summoned the
being-with; moreover, including the self-apprehension of an I and of the
concept of egoicity, it begins growing over the soil of the being-with, of
the Mit-einander, but not as an I-Thou relation.”59
In simpler terms, the being-physically-together, an essential moment
of being-with, does not stem from the emotional internality of a man
facing his other, his similar, but rather from a common (e.g., a great
friendship, which grows and is maintained “by an authentic passion for
something in common”) which is imposed. The common thus appears
as the “relation with the same” or “sameness,” that is, something we
call the “same” not for being identical to itself, but rather for being a
point of convergence or a same for various. Saying that the sameness of
something, for example, a pen, is defined by the instrument’s relation to
itself is only an initial approach to the question of identity. The approach
is extended and amplified when we perceive that the pen is necessarily
apprehended by the plural of the existence, or rather, by many.
Community, being-with, being something in common implies relating
with the sameness, which “cannot mean an absence of change, nor the
substantiality of the thing or the permanence of the thing as substance,
nor even the formal identity of an object with itself.”60 In the sameness
is found the ontological structure of the common (Mitsein), or rather, a
multiplicity in which each form of presence or of being in the world is
always permeated by a co-presence (Mitdasein), by a primordial between.
The philosopher does not make the identification between the
“common” and “emptiness” explicit, but it is implicit in his concept
58 Veneziani (1999, p. 9).

59 Heidegger (1999, p. 157).
60 Ibidem, p. 109.
of sameness. Moreover, in what complements the notion of facticity

(Faktiztät) or the factical life (faktisches Leben), which to him desig-
nates the “character of being” and the characteristic “emotion” of life.
The factical life designates, in his philosophy, a fundamental movement
(Grundbewegung), whose possibility is the very emptiness in which it
moves. The factical has nothing to do with a situation, but rather with a
way of being, an existential, proper of the being-in-the-world, irresistibly
bound to the primordial opening of the entities, or rather, the affective
tonality (Stimmung). The diverse affective tonalities constitute the bind-
ing not only between the entities, but in the very existence (Dasein) with
itself, in its infinite possibilities. Heidegger abstains from the notion of
love as founding originality (present in Scheler’s philosophy, for exam-
ple), but does not explicitly refute it.
Facticity does not exclude the object. Leaving the object to be what it
is, as it manifests itself, we participate and share within a sameness (i.e.,
with the other) the uncovering of this specific entity, finding its truth
in the common. “The common is the truth of the entity,” Heidegger
certifies. The truth therefore belongs to that which is present-at-hand
(Vorhandenheit), to the presence in which existence participates and
shares. Here as well, contrary to Buber’s reflection, saying that the
being-there is concrete and historical implies conceiving of it in a world
of people and things: the man is the being-in-the-world, between the
humans and their instruments.61
Therefore, one cannot have a righteous horror of things. The truth
belongs as much to things as to the existence of man. Why? Because
things do not enter the experience of man as independent “objects” (as
a diabolically autonomous “it”), but as tools or instruments, even if they
can be eventually or historically thought of as threats to the “human.”
Scheler and Heidegger stride hand in hand here: artifacts and words are
comprehended as instruments.
The Greeks, Heidegger says, “possessed an adequate term for say-
ing ‘things’: pragmata, that is, that with which one deals (praxis) in
the occupation of the real. However, they did not ontologically clar-
ify exactly the ‘pragmatic’ character of the pragmata, determining it
‘immediately’ with mere ‘things.’ We designate the entity which comes
to the encounter of the occupation with the term instrument. In the
61 Cf. Heidegger (1988, pp. 108–163). This Brazilian version translates Dasein as pre-
sença, or “pre-sense.”
184 M. SODRÉ
way of dealing with things, one finds instruments for writing, measur-
ing, sewing, cars, tools. It is, thus, exposing the mode of being of the
instrument.”62
In Heidegger’s Being and Time (the so-called first Heidegger), the
true mode of being of things should be sought in its instrumentality,
that is, in the “usefulness, contribution, applicability, handling,” in the
structure of the “to be for.” Additionally, any and everything should be
comprehended within the instrumental totality called world. Its objec-
tivity stems from the instrumentality. When a farmer speaks of his plow
as a tool objectively adequate for cultivating the earth, this objectivity is
given by the particular manner of how one determines the instrumental-
ity of the plow. When a scientist says something similar about the con-
cept he uses to know any reality, it is the instrumentality of the concept
which responds to its objectivity. When a journalist speaks of the news as
a textual tool for objectively representing an occurrence, the objectivity
is in the way that this tool is put in service of the journalistic practice.
In the three cases, one does not begin with objectivity, but arrives
there by means of an unequivocally human operation. What happens,
however, if this operation becomes equivocally human, that is, if, instead
of instrumentalizing the object, the man is instrumentalized by it? Would
this be the same hypothesis as Buber’s? No, it is certainly not the same
formulation as Buber’s, because his is quickly distanced by the exit of the
dimension of It, interposing the denial between the man and the thing:
the I-Thou is the non-object.
The other is a Heideggerian conjecture. As we have already seen,
the thinker (the so-called first Heidegger) is optimistic in Being and
Time regarding the human relation with the instrument (therefore,
it is included in the common), because man’s way of being—being-in-
the-world, existence, Dasein—can still be seen as different from the way
of being of things. The man is essentially existence, ergo, is referred to
possibilities, which are not produced in the abstract dialog with himself
but rather, concretely, in the common of things and people, although
with different ways of being between one and others. The alluded-to
conjecture regards the “danger” that the thinker glimpses in technology
(the Technique) as annihilation of values (nihilism) and as a culmination
of metaphysics, that is, of the system of fundamental decision about the
entity’s way of being.
62 Ibidem, p. 100.
Evidently, this no longer addresses the instrument thought by the

“first” Heidegger regarding the domestic quotidian, as an object at the
artisanal level, or, at most, a mechanical artifact. The threat resides in
the technology coinciding with the universalist system of power, which
Heidegger calls the Ge-Stell, essence of modern technique, or rather,
the technical “trap” of the world homologous to the system of thought
(metaphysics) which makes all the real available in relation to a produc-
tive product, hiding other forms of being-in-the-world. In this environ-
ment, in which electronic technology now predominates, the true way
of being of things—which would be the readiness-to-hand or handiness
(Zuhandenheit) and instrumentality—the real is traversed by technique
with its own will or the will to power of technology, guided by the uni-
dimensional conversion of the world into instrument. There, one no
longer has politics or values, which is incompatible with a world inhabit-
able by humans.
This is not the place for Heidegger’s criticism of technology, which
is not, indeed, absolutely apocalyptic, in that, as he himself made clear,
technique has two faces, as does Janus, the Roman deity: where danger
grows, so does salvation (reiteration of a Hölderlin saying). The ques-
tion was sustained because it emphasizes, in the Heideggerian con-
ception of community, things and men associating, when they are not
presented as mere “objects,” but as possibilities which integrate a project
of existence. In the materialization of the common, the “true” encounter
with things implies the “care” (Sorge), which is equivalent to “assuming
responsibilities.”
This is not a moral position, as in Buber’s doctrine and in the charac-
terization of authenticity and inauthenticity present in the contemporary
communalist perspective. Authenticity, in Heidegger, is existential com-
promise with the opening of the world, which happens when one does
not go to things as pure instruments of communication with or manip-
ulation of the entity, but as radical elements of language. Thing is not,
thus, a mere instrumental presence in the space-time of the world, but
something primordially engendered in language.
This recalls the Heideggerian concept (something obscure) of Geviert
(fourfold), about which Vattimo states: “Responding to this concept,
the being thing of the thing is not even the simple presence of which
metaphysics speaks, nor all the instrumentality theorized in Being and
Time, which always begins with the inauthentic way of quotidian exist-
ing (…) the instrumentality is only the beginning of a discourse which
186 M. SODRÉ
should lead to the discovery of its authentic mode of being, that is, of
its way of giving itself in a world which is already not dominated by
the metaphysical. The being of things is already not its instrumentality;
‘things make the fourfold of the four reside together within itself. This
making-live-collectively is the being of the things.’”63 In a way analogous
to the communicatio, the four elements are the earth and the heavens, the
mortal and the divine.
We reiterate our judgment of obscurity, while admitting that, in the
poetic discourse adopted by the thinker, the elements of the fourfold can
be comprehended as directions constituting the opening of the world.
In other words, the being of things is not in its presence within deter-
minant space-time nor in its pure and simple instrumentality, but in the
possibility of opening the world, which happens in language, or better,
in the creative poiesis which originally named the things. This does not
stem from any etymological attraction or “traction” toward the origin of
words, but rather from the refusal of a total explanation of the meaning
of things, of the poetic pulse impeding them from depositing themselves
in the principle of sufficient reason (the will to power of technology) in
order to, together with the “mortal” (human existence, the being-there),
open themselves to otherness.
What resonates in all this within communicational thought is, in
first place, the refusal of characterizing language as a mere instrument
of information, in that language is designated as the place for donating
the being of things. In the quotidian world, this place is hidden by the
ubiquitous presence of information as organizer of variety, in that it is
presented to us, according to Wilden, “in structures, forms, models, fig-
ures, configurations; in ideas, ideals, and idols; in indices, images, and
icons; in commerce and in merchandise; in continuity and discontinu-
ity; in signals, signs, meaning, and symbols; in gestures, positions, and
content; in frequencies, intonations, rhythms, and inflections; in pres-
ence and absence; in words, in actions and in silence; in visions and in
syllogisms.”64
In reality, it is far more than this: in virtue of the hypertrophy of
technological devices of functional communication, information is con-
verted into the very social soil, as a virtual reality. Another geography is
63 Vattimo (1989, p. 126).

constructed, different from that of physics, making virtually “inhabit-

ing” the space of cybernetic networks possible. Or rather, the technical
normalization of the administration of spaces is capable of configuring
a virtual geography, from which stem the urban metaphors describing
the “rental” functioning of electronic devices as the “virtual square,”
designating the interaction of diverse social groups through information
resources such as emails, blogs, and tweets. However, this “geography”
is not confined to cyberspace (ergo, not only mediatized images), in that
the media in network is capable of engendering new spaces, as well as
interacting with the spatial configurations which already exist in the his-
torical reality.
From this problematic framework stem communication/informa-
tion, political-sociocultural speculations about the production of the real
other, and technological dominance. As the reality of Western power
always implied an action (cartographic) of mapping, unmaking, and
remaking territories, the new real also implies a restructuring of space,
which is made to accompany new modes of control or administration
of the social life. In this new “territory,” engendered by the accelerated
development of the technical possibilities of information machines (digi-
tal technology) and by the transformation of the relations of production,
the power of functional communication consists in retaining the eye of the
other, in the infinite capturing of attention, by transmuting the planet in
fiber optics and digits, in a way of instantly making the mind, eye, and
world coincide.
What is here designated as territory is, in fact, a technological uncov-
ering of the Human City, a species of ontological prosthesis for the
re-elaboration of social relations and new subjectivities through infor-
mation. Simmel was probably the first to detect it in demonstrating that
“a space of emission delineates a new region, furnished with its own
social, geographic, and cultural characteristics.”65 From here is deduced
that the switch on the TV set bears a new synthetic order: the world of
the “TV language,” the “TV geography,” and the “TV-community.”
Television creates, thus, a social space—which is, however, of a differ-
ent order than the simple improvement in the family or communal life.
There is not found, before anything else, an influence over reality, but,
on the contrary, the constitution of a reality.
65 Cf. Simmel (1968, p. 524).

188 M. SODRÉ
The Ecology Metaphor

Since McLuhan’s insight into the alteration of the sense and the stand-
ards of perception through technological effects,66 however, the pros-
thesis metaphor was expanded to that of ecology, in that which emerges
today as an externalized double, or technological ecosystem, a virtual
form of life, whose structure and contents cause various shocks on the
ways of being of social groups.
This becomes even more evident when considering, in the cur-
rent practice of “neurolinguistic” programming, the logical levels for
mounting a project or even any form of life. The environment is first:
without it, one cannot constitute the space-time which is indispensable
to the uprooted. The second is the adequate behavior for agents of the
process. In third place, the resources, whether technical or intellectual.
In fourth, the beliefs and values capable of cognitively confirming the
behavior of agents and legitimizing the utilization of the resources. In
fifth is the question of the identity, which socially stabilizes the pro-
duction of subjectivities compatible with the status nascendi of the new
existential form or a new bios. Now, in the framework of this argumen-
tative logic, the media—from its inception in the last century to today’s
advanced forms of electronic technology—is not a point of arrival of
the technical evolution, but precisely a starting point for the constitu-
tion of a new bios with a new type of sociability. The media is, thus, at
the same time, environment and resource, or rather, adaptive elements
of a historical-cultural phylogenesis in tune with the structural law of
value or capital.
A germ of this argument already existed in the texts of thinkers such
as Teilhard de Chardin or G. Simmel. However, in the American envi-
ronment, according to Scolari, “A small mystery surrounds the origin
of the media ecology metaphor.” Postman introduced it at a conference
of the National Council of Teachers of English in 1968. Nonetheless,
Postman recognized that McLuhan had used the concept years earlier in
a personal communication. The idea of considering the relation between
media and individuals from the ecological perspective was probably part
of the conversations within this group of academics in the 1960s. In the
conference, Postman defined media ecology as “the study of media as
66 Cf. McLuhan (1964).

environments” and, three years later, created the first media ecology pro-
gram at New York University.67
Neil Postman, disciple of McLuhan and professor at New York
University (one of his students is Joshua Meyrowitz, renowned theore-
tician of media effects in the USA) and author of two dozen books on
media, culture, and education, was, in truth, one of the shrewdest critics
of the American culture industry. Like Baudrillard, although without the
same analytical brilliance, he tended to explore the angle of the “end” of
determined formations of traditional culture (e.g., the “disappearance”
of infancy, education, etc.), nearly always with an ironic and humorous
text. To him, “technological change is not additive, but ecological,” and
he explained his idea with an example: “A new medium does not add
something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing
press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press.
You had a different Europe.”68
There are, however, at least two complementary interpretations for
the ecology metaphor as applied to media, as Scolari observes: “The
environmentalist conception considers the media as an environment
which surrounds the objects, modeling its cognitive and perceptive sys-
tem. The intermedia version of the metaphor looks at the interactions
between media as if it were a species of ecosystem. Can the two interpre-
tations of the metaphor be integrated into a single structure? In this case,
one should consider media ecology as an environment which includes
different technologies and media (for example, television, radio, the
internet, radiofrequency identification, cell phones, transmission control
protocol/the Internet Protocol), subjects (that is, content producers,
users, readers, and media researchers) and socio-political forces (the great
Hollywood corporations, WikiLeaks, legal regimes, etc.).”69
This association of ecology with media, as well as being innovative,
also touches on the encounter of that which could be described as the
return of the sciences of observation and of global approach over the last
few decades, in counterpoint to the reductionist approaches typical of
the laboratorial spirit of the last century. As Pestre states: “Today, the
sciences grandly occupy the study of ecosystems of all sizes, implying
67 Scolari (May 2012, p. 205).

68 Cf. Ibidem.
69 Ibidem, p. 210.
190 M. SODRÉ
human activities, whose effects they seek to comprehend and limit, as

issues of ecological engineering (…) Dozens of thousands of researchers
work on the Earth system and its balance, on biodiversity and its evolu-
tion (…) The reasons for this laboratory solution are numerous. It ini-
tially deals with the emergence of new information instruments.”70
Regarding communication, it is precisely this conception of an eco-
logically integrated structure which approaches the theories referring to
the social construction of technology, as well as the actor-network the-
ory (Latour) or the German theories centered on speculations about
“post-humanism,” which distance themselves from hermeneutics and
French structuralism, but give a modern update to cybernetic thought,
in that they try to erase the subject from the theoretical scene and think
of the human from the perspective of technology and information. As is
well known, in the functioning of cybernetic systems, information (a sig-
nal of command of the server-mechanism) is a data exterior to the sub-
ject, ergo, a resource for the system to communicate its position to the
other system. There, communication is the influence of one mechanism
over another and not at all related to the human binding nor even to the
semantic aspects of a message.
In this kind of scene, Flusser’s thought is noteworthy as a human-
ism “no longer stomped into the traditional emblems of centrality and
the superiority of the human being in the world,” in that, in his vision,
“the human being is not closed within himself in any solid core, any
identity, any ego, spirit or soul,” for “we are immersed in a collective
psychic field, in which we appear as provisional bubbles which acquire,
process, and pass on information, to soon after submerge again.”71 In
fact, Flusser was correct to refuse the psychological hypothesis of an
individual core, but did not note that this “collective field” is, on the
other hand, a core analogous to the “intrepid heart” referred to by
Parmenides, a symbolic core (organizing, sensory) from which the com-
mon environment is constituted.
For us, the specification of the environmental metaphor as an inter-
media is a step beyond the pure and simple ecological idea of an envi-
ronment capable of producing individual and social effects. In reality, the
integration of media powered by electronic communication/information
70 Pestre(2013, pp. 100–101).

71 Cf.
Felinto and Santaella (2012, p. 168). In this excerpt, the authors cite R. Cardoso
as much as Cyro Marcondes Filho in their analyses of Flusser’s thought.
leads to a reorientation of the modes of thought and feeling analogous

to the formation of another type of Polis, which allows us to re-read
the Aristotelian category of bios—where, beyond the idea of a human,
environmental circle, the meaning of a specific existential orientation is
present—in light of electronic and market-based techno-science. Such
is the virtual bios, of which the media bios is a species. Thus triumphs
the image with a new cognitive statute, which stems from its capture by
the audiovisual order, where icons and indices, inducers of identification
and projection, principal forms of the public’s imaginary participation all
dominate—computational capture as well, where digits and models sub-
mitted to calculus dominate.
What thinkers and poets once called the imaginary is now, thanks to
the resources of information science, the current material of an informa-
tion flow capable of infinitely producing aural, visual, and tactile forms,
without the results being conceived of as another term or another mar-
gin, separated from the real. The ideal materializes in the virtual bios,
constituting the very organic soil of the new type of organic sociability.
Protected by the market, held back from the pure contemplation of the
object as known in the traditional representative dimension, the imag-
inary technologically produces itself, confusing itself with human rep-
resentations of the real life.72
This association between the imaginary and real life differs from the
way ancient or archaic societies lived the experiences with the “other
side”—that is, with the sphere of the invisible, full of fantastical entities,
living and dead—attributing real faculties to that which can be called
“beings of the spirit.” By producing itself technologically, the imagi-
nary is invested in a rationalist guarantee, but without eliminating the
religious experience, which can be expressed on the electronic network
very strongly. Pentecostalism and various other evangelical denomina-
tions expand precisely in conjunction with the empire of images from
television and digital resources. The same happens with the Catholic
Church, where the idea of a “cyber-theology” has already emerged with
the objective of “thinking of the faithful in modern times.” For the
“cyber-theologian” Spadaro, the Internet cannot be used as an instru-
ment for religious marketing, because it is, in fact, an environment: “The
digital environment is as real as it is physical, therefore, the Church is
72 Cf. Sodré (2006).

192 M. SODRÉ
called to be there because men are there.”73 This is not, therefore, mak-
ing media an instrument of evangelization (which supposes a unidirec-
tional flow of messages), but rather substituting the idea of transmission
for that of sharing: “The digital communication of the Pope is an exten-
sion of the physical, this is the key to its success. People recognize him as
a figure close to the real world as well as to the digital one.”
On the other hand, the association between the real and digital
worlds evokes, in some way, the identification which modern bio-politics
promotes between the biological and political dimension, where Giorgio
Agamben discerns an indication of the bio-political modernity, which is
“in fact of the given biological being, as such, immediately and recip-
rocally political.” Of the historical continuity of this indication, what
stands out is the importance of genetic and information technologies,
which now affect the life of individuals through the transgenic manipu-
lation of food, in vitro fertilization, cloning, biological warfare, and, in
public culture, through the media. If the man was once “read” through
his values, as demonstrated in discourse and action, today this reading is
shifted to the body—the deciphering of the genome would thus indicate
the new paths of the human. Except that the public machine in charge
of all this is no longer only the State, but rather all the organizational
machines (businesses, foundations, etc.) of capital, committed to the
reorganization of the world through techno-science and through the
market.
The media is certainly not the result of any deliberate bio-politic,
whether of the State or private organizations. However, it is viscerally
connected to a new type of administration of the life of individuals by
transnational market forces and, implicitly, by a politic understood as
“giving form to the life of the people”—while subjective and cultural
environment—analogous to a bio-politic already introduced in the
past by the first technological dictatorships, which were Stalinism and
Nazism. The body is situated in the foreground. In the case of National
Socialism, it was about guaranteeing the racial qualities and heredi-
tary health of the popular body (Volkskörper), whereas it now attempts
to guarantee the capture of the psychic energy or the affect, appealing
73 Cf. Spadaro, Antonio In entrevista ao Globo (28/7/2013). Autor de Ciberteologia—
pensar o cristianismo no tempo das redes (Paulinas, 2012), editor-in-chief of the magazine
“La Civiltà Cattolica,” Spadaro is the priest-consultant of the Vatican for subjects related to
communication, culture, and technology.
to entertainment and leisure’s quality of pleasure for the masses, available

to the new productive order of consumption.
It does not try to eliminate, as does Nazism, the physical deficiency
or ethnic otherness (whether psychic or sexual), but seeks to aestheti-
cally align the differences through market paradigms of appearance, con-
duct, and thought. Therein is applied Foucault’s concept of “biopower”,
referring to an anthropo-technical administration of individual liberties
supported by devices used to “produce, inflate, amplify the freedoms,
introducing an ‘extra’ in freedom by means of an ‘extra’ in control and
intervention.”74 This is properly the virtual bios, a magnetically affective
environment, a techno-aesthetic recreation of the ethos, capable of mobi-
lizing the moods or states of the spirit of individuals, reorganizing its
focus of interest and habits, in relation to a new universe less psychically
“internalized” and more temporally related or connected by the techni-
cal networks.
Media bios and virtual bios are, thus, adequate expressions for the new
type of life form characterized by an “imaginarized” reality, that is, made
of the flow of images and digits, which continuously reinterpret the tra-
ditional representations of the real with new technological supports. It
is generally a controlled and systematic imaginary, without imaginative
or metaphorical potential, but with a noteworthy illocutionary capacity
(therefore, an imaginary adaptable to the production) which evokes the
dynamics of elementary or primal mirroring.
If the totalitarian State once intended to root itself in the life of the
nation, reunifying (against liberalism) body and spirit, now it is media,
this strong cinematic device, which is culturally rooted in the social life,
by means of a simulating or spectral form of life (the media bios), mobi-
lizing the bodies of the citizenry, instituting an imaginary which is con-
fused with the reality of raw, natural life in a way that constitutes a new
existential sphere fully attuned with capital, where desire is preferentially
imposed by the desire of the market. In this operation within the spe-
cialized world of the aesthetic, the bios, with all the old, spent images, is
recycled, saved in the different optical archives of Western civilization.
There, culture is no longer the buoying form of knowledge, but rather a
vast technical memory, redistributing used content like a chest of bones
brought to light by electronic technology.
74 Foucault (2008, p. 92).

194 M. SODRÉ
Now, through the ever greater techno-rhetorical acceleration of regis-

tration and recuperation processes, everything incites the consciousness,
which is fascinated, impassioned, affectively mobilized to enter the game
of production and consumption of the energetic effects of the real, to
immerse itself in the virtual bios, where the disappearance of experience
deepens. Experience is here understood as that which constitutes human
action—necessarily supported in authority, language, and narrative—
which points to the indetermination and surprise, therefore, of creativity.
Experience makes itself visible in man’s will to be unique, in his choices
and potential for transformation and transition.
In the virtual bios (at least in that which, until now, has shown itself
as an anthro-technique in the service of the market), the human ethos
seems to submerge into the tele-commanded aesthetic, in which the
individual is expropriated from the experience and the singularity, there-
fore from will, creative choice, and symbolic sharing, ergo from a proper
and active corporeality, a generator of meaning, which, today, tends to
be increasingly more genetically and culturally controlled—despite the
exaltation of the body of the consumer by sensorial media automatisms.
The sensorial isolation of the contemporary man, under the gratifying
network of conspicuous consumption and beneath the appearances of
a techno-cultural concentration of the diverse or of the multiple, is the
avatar of individualist extremism which has intensified since the end of
the 1970s.
This seems to confirm the old sociological suspicions that the mod-
ern individual tends to trade deliberate action (full of ethical freedom)
for “reflective behavior,” that is, by conduct based on mere functional
rationality or on the utilitarian calculus of effects, associated with the
convenience of technical systems and of the market. As is well known,
a behavior’s way of being has to do with the ontology of human ways
of perceiving and producing something in the world. The acts of per-
ceiving, feeling, thinking, knowing, and doing imply bringing oneself to
oneself in the encounter (“with”) of a common.
But this traditional encounter with the common has to do with an
ontology of the perception and knowledge dependent on a philosophy
(Platonic or Aristotelian), which defines the being as presence and the
real as all “primary substance” or all “individual” which is represented in
an individualized way. An instrument, as well as a man, is individual. At
the same time, the individual has a body, which makes all and any onto-
logical thought an ontology of the body, whether manifest by faculties
of sensory or intellectual apprehension. Within this ontological scope, a

thought or an action is as corporeal as an object.
Is there a reality without body? No, according to Platonic and
Aristotelian ontology; yes, according to Stoic ontology, this spiritual
materialism (god and material or logos and fire constitute the same real-
ity) which conceives of the world as perfect and agent of itself, driven
only by an active, universal principle (the pneuma or vital breath). For
the Stoics, although all interaction requires corporeality (only the body
is agent and receiver of action), it is possible that something beyond the
being (extra-being) is constituted as incorporeal—whether time, space,
emptiness, or sayable (lekton)—which belongs to the dimension of mean-
ing and, thus, does not require the body to exist. The incorporeal is not
defined as the being (tò ón), but as something (tò ti, aliquid). Without
body, the meanings are excluded from the causal flow of occurrences,
but become conditions of possibility for the existence of bodies.
One can make a partial analogy between this incorporeal reality of the
Stoics and the reality of the media bios, which is conditioned by the mar-
ket, therefore, by a vector which operates through purely formal flows,
corresponding to the logic of the exchange value. Within the bios, con-
sidering the diversity of technical support, the incorporeal has different
levels. On TV, the quasi-presence of the human body is still registered,
with all its signals of meaning. On the network, however, the body dis-
appears and gives way to the rapidly circulating indexation flows which
lack discursive linearity and aesthetic order, which culturally provoke a
fracture of the old and technically tactile logos.
Baudrillard had, indeed, already extended this type of description to
all social life in the context of the media bios: “It is a substitution of the
signs of the real in the real, that is, of an operation to dissuade the full
real process through its operational double, its signaling, meta-stable,
programming, impeccable machine which offers all the signs of the real
and short-circuits all the incidents for it.”75
In this way, when taking in consideration the all of a form of virtual
life, and not the exclusive grammar of a separate means of communi-
cation, the very corporeal reality of the spectator undergoes a sensorial
redefinition: it is instituted as an organic member of an environment
which ceases to function in the traditional scale of the human body, to

196 M. SODRÉ
existentially adapt itself (“point of existence,” instead of the visual van-

ishing point) to the ecstasy or fascination of the immersion, on the scale
of the “neural” system (the interconnection of the many representational
devices, which is given the precarious name “media”), where corporeality
as such disappears. This is tactilely substituted by its many indices, which
favor the intensification of presentational forms (in truth, a new way of
representing or expressing) and, consequently, a new type of individual
and collective sensibility.
This form of life is characterized by processes which, philosophically
considered (e.g., in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari),
sought out a new, deconstructive conception of the rigidity of the object
or the libertarian of the subject (the “schizoanalysis” of the 1970s, for
example, which intended to ethically and politically analyze the prac-
tices which hierarchically rank social life, with a background of recon-
structive processes). Thus, the idea of structure as a fixed form (on the
level of institutions, identities, personality regularities, etc.) evaporates in
the reality of speeds, affects, and rhizomes (connections) circulating on
the electronic network, where structure, occurrence, idea, and meaning
acquire the same statute.
If we conform to a non-philosophical reading of philosophy (i.e., sit-
uated more on the level of comprehension than formal intellection and,
indeed, as suggested by Gilles Deleuze), it will be possible to speculate
on the notable and curious overlap between Deleuze’s sophisticated
thought (the philosophy of desire)—utilized to see the world from the
perspective of the possible and through the invention of concepts which
redescribe aspects and themes of some earlier philosophers (Spinoza,
Nietzsche, Bergson) and artists (Antonin Artaud), such as themes on
the current and the virtual—and the contemporary reality of the elec-
tronic network, whose flows transport neither things nor states of things,
but rather occurrences, therefore, the incorporeal, that is, non-existent
entities, although they constitute effects which fulfill their function. Or
rather, philosophical and artistic conceptions materialize as empirical
variables.
Despite the overlap (strongly preemptive, if not a theoretical symptom
of the reality of the virtual bios), this type of thinking is a moment of phi-
losophy, a detour from Plato toward the Stoics, but it is not theoretical
material for a science of communication. In fact, nothing there seems to
contemplate the cohesive ties of the social, encompassed by the common
and still referential to concrete human bodies, whose psychic and social
existence has been shaken by philosophy, science, the arts, and in the
very market of services, from the multiplication of telecommunicational
devices to organic prostheses.
As the dimension of the language of occurrences is expressed through
propositions, it would be tempting to support a theoretical conception
of communication in the propositions which ultimately aim only at the
meaning, on a level of pure abstraction or in a universally explicative
mathesis of the relations between men and machines, without (ontolog-
ical) focus on the real historical, traditional human: a completely self-
referential virtual bios, without people.
This tendency to wish to conceptually reduce all of reality to flows
of information or to language harbored in a transcendent structure is
present in European thought, from the French to the Germans, starting
in the end of the 1970s, throughout the structuralist vogue, when the
concrete subject is overlooked in favor of the episteme (mainly in Michel
Foucault’s thinking), which requires a perspective which shifts the analy-
sis from the object to the formalism of the rational processes. In theory,
objective reality (therefore, traditional ontology) gives way to a radical
epistemology, which evokes the incorporeal (Stoics), in that it examines
or criticizes the conditions of possibility of the knowledge, but without
considering the role of the subject, which simply disappears in the formal
structure.
All this theoretical inclination contains a large parcel of truth, but only
a parcel, when taking into consideration the lack of a symbolic mediation
(or even any other name which one could give it, keeping in mind the
decaying of the traditional political and social forms) to obtain a broader
and more realistic societal vision of the capital-world. It is unnecessary
to paranoiacally cling to Marxism in order to stay attentive to the move-
ment of conservation and renovation which constitutes the real. It is a
historical fact that the financial and technological markets walked hand in
hand to build their bios, a new existential orientation associated with the
planetary process of capital modernization.
However, it is equally real that this bios coexists with or is hybridized
by (indeed, the mixture is a fundamental category even for the Stoics,
who conceived of the passive principle, as the incorporeal, driven by the
active principle) a historical-social reality as diverse as it is unequal. In
this other reality, concrete bodies, beside that virtual geography con-
structed by electronic technologies, inhabit derelict urban landscapes
lacking in mediating public space, with increasingly reduced incomes due
198 M. SODRÉ
to the regression of work conditions. At the same time, technology—the

last of the capital utopias—is no longer developed as a mix of domination
techniques and a use of the innovations which are offered to the politi-
cally silent majority as an inexhaustible source of consumer gadgets. And
so forth.
Thus, in a landscape which claimed to be radically human, it makes
inconceivable the presupposition of a unique social form (something like
a virtual bios or any other name which one may give this kind of real-
ity), systemically regulated by the structural law of value, that is, the cap-
ital, which converts technology into a dominating force of the few upon
the many. A communicational episteme limited by this exclusive scope
(that which guides the studies on cultural consumption, media reception,
opinions, taste, and public attitudes, the varied practices and effects of
the electronic network, etc.) lends itself to the bureaucratic reproduction
of university knowledge, but is insufficient for the construction of a sci-
ence of communication in that it ignores the central problem of social
cohesion, located in the sphere of the common.
It is important to note that cohesion should not be confused with
the institutional or organizational administration of the society—it is the
very condition of possibility of the socius, even in regimes of domination
or existential precariousness. On the level of this condition, the question
of communication, understood as an action of articulation by the com-
mon through the existential mobilization of differences, is inscribed in
radical terms. It will be a predominantly discursive action, provided it
is understood as a discourse as communication—and not only a seman-
tic system—in its effective functioning as a concept of something which
includes the purely linguistic level (phonological, syntactic, lexical),
but at the same time exceeds it for also diving into the extra-linguistic
dimension, where the social and affective circumstances which preside
over the communicative act reside. Discourse, therefore, is here equiv-
alent to the “social language,” ideologically recognized as “natural” or
inherent to the cultural identity of a specific community.
This is the direction shared by Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism (in
truth, an expression coined to account for Bakhtin’s conception of dis-
course76). Taking into account the fact that the isolated statement
does not exist in language, Bakhtin conceived of discourse dialogically:
that which is said (the uttered) in the act of mobilizing the language (the
76 Cf. Holquist (1990).

utterance) will always be constructed through a dialog with the voice

of others, whether with those interlocutors of the past whose influence
is reflected in the constitution of the current discourse, or with those
present who preemptively influence the persuasive arguments of the
discourse which is directed at them.77 The expression dialogism notes
a difference with the “dialog” enthroned by classic linguistics (e.g., the
conception of language by Émile Benveniste), as it is not, to Bakhtin,
about adopting the I-Thou relation as an interactive base of utterance,
but rather a common, defined by him as the most immediate social situ-
ation and the broadest social means. In reality, dialog does not primarily
mean exchange of words, but the opening and amplification of the cohe-
sive tie in order to strengthen the human binding.
In his own terms, “the situation of the most immediate participants
determines the occasional form and style of the utterance. The most pro-
found states of its structure are determined by the more substantial and
durable social pressures to which the speaker is submitted. The full tak-
ing of consciousness implies an interior discourse, an interior intonation,
an interior style, albeit rudimentary; without appreciative social orienta-
tion, there is no mental activity.”78 Thus, there will always be an implied
common listening, in that all statements are constructed (through the
diversity of intention, the asymmetry of hierarchical positions, the differ-
entiated possibilities of word selection) in relation to the other, which is
not only the individual listener, but all the common.
All discourse is therefore constructed in interaction with others,
which implies having an “improper” (in the understanding Esposito
gives the term, that is, the common) context as a substratum, in which
one can glimpse the articulation of two dimensions: an intra-discursive
dimension, which is related to the way a speaker organizes his dis-
course, by the individual translation of what he thinks and through his
pre-comprehension of the semantic possibilities of language; and an
inter-discursive dimension, in which he offers his communicative act to
confrontation or negotiation (with the objective of confirming or con-
tradicting) with the discourse of the other, to generate effects of mean-
ing. The interface between these two dimensions has its place within the
discursive practices, in the form of heterogeneous voices, which are stated
77 Cf. Bakhtin (1992, pp. 277–326).

78 Bakhtin (1979, pp. 99–100).
200 M. SODRÉ
as dialogs and texts. In Bakhtin’s vision, the statements of these voices

can assume different social forms, but which are already immanent—and
pre-existent—to the polysemy of language inherent to the common.
The notion of dialogism relates precisely to this immanence which
constitutes the common, in which communication is configured as a
regulating form, indispensable to the cohesive tie with the socius or the
coexistence. It is a merely strategic terminological variation, in that dia-
log, in its radical sense, bears a broader meaning than the mere “speech
of two.” In the classical Greek etymology, the dia which comes before
the logos does not mean only “separation in two” (i.e., indeed, the most
archaic meaning), but mainly “penetration in a space.”
Dialog is thus the penetration (not necessarily linguistic) of “reason”
(logos) or the constitutive narrative of the common. For this reason, it
is a notion equally related to the noun communicatio or the adjective
communicarius, which means something divided into two or belong-
ing to the common. Communication, in its heterogeneity, is not lim-
ited to verbal language (although this is privileged in modern, academic
approaches), for it encompasses the binding between being and extra-
being (corporeal and incorporeal), immanence and transcendence, speech
and act. In this, Lacan demonstrates a perfect comprehension in noting
that, while founded in language, discourse is not related to “linguis-
tics” or “text,” for it is a structure “which can very well subsist without
words.”79
The Organizing Factor

This type of thinking which binds communication to dialogism, to the
communicatio and the common, is not absolutely foreign to the philo-
sophical position of the aforementioned pedagogue, Joseph Jacotot
(rediscovered by Rancière), who, at the dawn of the nineteenth century,
advocated intellectual emancipation as a teaching method. In the peda-
gogue’s thought (which was scandalous at the time and possibly because
of this, was ignored by the academic status quo), truth is not the princi-
pal objective, but rather veracity, understood as the privileged relation
of each person with the truth, therefore, as an ethical foundation of the
power of knowledge, which is at the center of the experience of intellec-
tual emancipation.
79 Lacan (1991, p. 11).

Therein is derived a particular conception in which the common—

as cohesive tie—is not commanded by the truth which aggregates
men, but rather by the non-aggregation (or by Esposito’s emptiness).
Rancière comments: “Men are united because they are men, that is, dis-
tant beings. Language does not reunite them. On the contrary, it is its
arbitrariness which, in forcing them to translate, places them in a com-
munication of efforts - but also in a community of intelligence: the man
is a being who is well aware when he who speaks knows not what he
says.”80
The “community of intelligence” is an important category in Jacotot’s
thought. Comparing two men, he says: “I see that, in the first moments
of life, they have absolutely the same intelligence, that is, they make
exactly the same things, with the same end, with the same attention. I
would say that these two men have an equal intelligence, and this expres-
sion, equal intelligence, is an abbreviated sign of all the facts I have
noted, observing the two children of a very young age.”81 Later, he will
be able to verify different facts, as the two intellects do not make the
same things nor obtain the same results. Therefore, one can say that one
is more intelligent than the other, but also assume that his intelligence
simply was not well exercised or was less worked or was the object of
less attention. Summarizing these observations, Rancière says: “The
man is a will served by an intelligence. Perhaps the fact that the wills are
unequally compelling is enough to explain the differences in attention,
which would possibly be enough to explain the inequality in intellectual
performances.”82
For Jacotot, the general principle is that equality of intelligence within
a common against a foundation of diversity of will and in contrast to the
ideology which, making individuality the law of the world, sustains that
intellects are as unequal as each individual human is to his fellow. To the
evidence presented on the differences in intellectual competencies and in
the realization of tasks, the argument of “universal teaching” brings up
that which is opposed by considerations in the sense that a task better
realized than another does not necessarily result from a greater intelli-
gence, but rather from the fact that one of the actors did not work as
80 Rancière (1987, p. 99).

81 Jacotot,Joseph. Langue maternelle In Rancière (1987, pp. 85–86).
82 Ibidem, p. 88.
202 M. SODRÉ
hard as the other, which could be due to the inequality of attention or

even the inequality of will.
“Will” is not defined as an omnipotent motor of “I want, therefore
I can”—therefore, it is not of the metaphysics of subjectivity, which
bestows autonomy upon the reason of power and the will to want—
but rather the potential of an individual or group to act according to
a movement which is proper to it. Knowing oneself, in this sense, is
knowing one’s own will, therefore, its potential in the movement of
transformation which created the identity between being and action.
It is the will to be instructed to do something within the social order
which provokes or commands the intelligence, this egalitarian, intellec-
tual virtuality which consists of the power to see and make pertinent
comparisons. Intelligence and intellectual equality are, therefore, syn-
onymous. No place exists there for an authoritarian technique to aggre-
gate the spirits, such as rhetoric, because everything depends on the
performance of the being of the subjects and not the capacity to be
persuaded.
As would preeminent pedagogues more than a century later (John
Dewey, Paulo Freire, and others), Jacotot placed communication at the
center of his method. To him, an individual who desires to comprehend
a thought mobilizes his will in the sense of translating the discourse of
the other—better yet, in the sense of counter-translating, as the other
first translated that which he thought into words. Comprehension thus
does not appear as a power of unveiling things or of establishing a truth,
but as a potential of translation, therefore, as a potential of the faculty
of exchange, in that translating (transducere) is properly an operation in
which one form is put in place of another. Comprehending, on the other
hand, is a function of the meaning, which may remain intact despite the
difference in the forms in which it is expressed. However, communica-
tion, which presides over the organization of exchanges, is not resolved
in the meaning.
Being thus, whether conscious or unconscious, communication is not
a rare occurrence characterized by the ideal of perfect comprehension, as
a numinous phenomenon, divine, similar to that which Kafka glimpsed
in his Notebooks (1915): “There is no one to comprehend me in the
totality of my being. To have someone who can do this, a woman, for
example, would be to have one’s feet firm on all sides, to have God.”
The great writer is truly speaking of this total comprehension, spoken or
silent and equivalent to communion—not to communication.
In this anthropomorphic reduction in the idea of communication

are found, above all, philosophical positions with religious foundations,
such as the Christian existentialism of Karl Jaspers, for whom existence—
understood as the perpetual overcoming of oneself or as the encounter
of the empirical being with the transcendence—only appears to oneself
and to other existences in communication. The existence always aims
for a communication, but in the end, communication reveals itself to be
impossible. The religious clearly transpires in this type of conception, in
which communication appears to impose itself as a condition of the pres-
ence of the man, as well as the foundation of the social. Apparently, sec-
ular and mystical religion abandoned the first sphere of History to return
under the form of the communicational “religious.” Instead of God, the
small transcendences of desire.
Not so distant from this existential philosophy are the pious visions
about the meeting of souls, the psychological approaches to the phe-
nomenon of comprehension, the cultural theories of social mediations,
the linguistic-rationalist idealisms (from Lévi-Strauss to Habermas), and
the hollow functional sociologisms in American English.
On the other hand, also far from being defined only by the transmis-
sion of a message or a knowledge, communication, guided by the existen-
tial articulation of the common, is an action, an organizing doing. In this
organization, the man “makes words, figures, comparisons, to tell what
he thinks to his fellow,” but the scope is greater than the verbal dimen-
sion. Whether with handmade works or the words of his speech, man
communicates, not because he transmits a knowledge, but because he
makes the translation of that which he thinks, provoking his interlocutor
to do the same, to counter-translate.
Issued or written, all speech is a translation, which finds its meaning
in counter-translation, a (communicative) process driven by the two
master operations of intelligence, of knowledge, narrating and guessing
(another name for “operatively feeling”). It is explained thusly: “The
doing of communication - on the level of representation - appears to us
as speaking, narrating, telling: speaking is the best proof of the capac-
ity to do something.”83 However, this speech is analogous to work,
for it results from the organized activity of translation, in which words
are manipulated by the speaker in a way similar to that which artisans
83 Ibidem, p. 110.
204 M. SODRÉ
work with their instruments. In the act of communicating, the individ-

ual works, exercising himself with words and opening space for the inter-
locutor to “guess” the meaning which is said in his counter-translating
action.
It is, without doubt, communication which makes social organization
possible, but, at the same time, the communicative doing is made possible
by a level of organization which some authors tend to see as a system (an
organized set of elements gifted with their own dynamic), along the lines
of the “general system theory” created half a century ago by Ludwig
Von Bertalanffy and reinterpreted for various applications by theorists
ranging from Americans such as Gregory Bateson to Germans like Niklas
Luhmann and Englishmen like Anthony Wilden.
To Wilden, “Whether in organic nature or in society, specific types of
organizational levels are presented, understanding organization as the
process which unites the structure of the group to that which we call the
system of the group. Within the group there are numerous subsystems,
all structured and organized, and what organizes its organization is com-
munication. In other words, what essentially distinguishes the organized
structure of a living system, which breathes, reproduces, and adapts to a
static structure or a classic machine, is how the system utilizes informa-
tion.”84 In other words, the distinction is in that which Bateson called
the “difference that makes a difference,” or rather, information.
As inferred, this approach—which makes the ecosystem of informa-
tional relations the principle model of communication, as much in the
biological sphere as in the social and economic ones—is analogous to or
derived from Bateson’s conception, in which communication is an ecol-
ogy of words, environment, and meta-communicative codes. The latter,
to him, are neither verbal nor conscious, such as linguistic codes, but
they have the illocutionary force of acts of speech, that is, they mobilize
extra-communicative resources (principally the affects present in orders,
warnings, etc.) to fulfill the intentions in statements.85
The place for the models which are inherent to meta-communicative
codification lies in memory, by means of which the forms of representa-
tion in social systems (as well as in other systems, the genetically codified
forms) are organized. It is important to reiterate that this organization
84 Wilden (2001, p.109). Translated into English from Portuguese version.

85 Cf. Bateson (2000).
(or communication) is neither verbal nor conscious, but implicit in the

relation between communicative subjects. Consequently, it cannot be
something restricted to pure subjectivity, as Uruguayan writer Levrero
poetically emphasizes in a short novel: “The vision of the soul of the
things which occur within and outside of us is far more complete than
our I, so narrow and limited, can perceive. Today, I recovered these dis-
tinct kinds of ruins and I know that with this, the soul is saying that I am
these ruins.”86 The writer is associating the communicational diversity
beyond the semantic and the subjective dominion with the “ruins.” This
is very similar to what one finds in Heidegger’s thinking when he des-
ignates the junction of the proper and the improper in the fundamental
structure of life as Ruinanz (from the Latin ruina, in the sense of “fall”).
Bateson is certainly not the only theorist to reject the hypothesis that
words are at the center of human communication. However, his persis-
tent influence in broad sectors of international thought has built him up
as an icon of this position, precisely in opposition to that other inter-
national icon, the social philosopher Habermas, author of The Theory of
Communicative Action, a species of semantic philosophy of society, in
which communicative rationality, substitute for the subject as enthroned
by the philosophers of the conscience, is converted into an ideal norma-
tive to reach mutual consensus and understanding. Communication is
presented here as a true paradigm in counter-position to the subjectivist
paradigm.
Inspired by Kant (in the effort to rationally found moral rules),
Durkheim (in the idea of an integrated and religiously cohesive society),
Wittgenstein (in the theory of language games), and Austin (in the theory
of acts of speech), and with a phenomenological terminology (Lebenswelt
or “lifeworld,” which encompasses culture, society, and person),
Habermas sees in society a dichotomy between systems (administration,
bureaucratic rationality) and lifeworld, which is the possible space for a
linguistically mediated rationality susceptible to resisting the colonization
of life by these systems.87
This colonization would consist of the dominion of social life by lin-
guistically or symbolically emptied devices (bureaucratic power, the
market, money). Therein, its communicative action consists of a work
86 Levrero (2006).
87 Cf. Habermas (1984).
206 M. SODRÉ
of the rational re-elaboration of discourses, in search of mutual com-

prehension and understanding, in order to renovate cultural knowledge
and for greater social integration. This would be the work of an ethic of
discourse, also called a communicative ethic, presupposing the concept
of communication. According to this ethic, the norms of action which
aspire to validity require arguments rationally ratified by all participants
in a public discourse, structured according to the norms of an ideal situa-
tion of speech or ideal community of communication. Rationally commu-
nicative would thus be the interactions in which social subjects search for
a justified consensus to coordinate their courses of action, whose horizon
is a moral universality.
Habermas is not alone in the theoretical endeavor against ethical sub-
jectivism, guided by what he called the pragmatic-transcendental argu-
ment. The philosopher Karl-Otto Apel accompanied him in this search
for a universalizing principle of action capable of transforming Kant’s
categorical imperative (in Kant, the categorical imperative is a practi-
cal law, which applies without subjective or contingent conditions, but
whose proof is produced in the moral conscience) by means of the con-
cept of communication. Both diverge regarding the philosophical aspects
of foundation.
Possibly due to his greater proximity to sociology, Habermas’ ideas
enjoyed a broad impact on the intellectual scene, offering rational
models for a liberal critique of the social welfare State which, to him,
in interfering with the economy, deepened bureaucratic power, distanc-
ing the State from the formation of popular free will. This will, in turn,
require discursive rationality, presumably indispensable to the formation
of a “procedural” or deliberative democracy, in which popular councils
autonomously make decisions regarding social administration.
It is important to note that economic, political, and juridical systems
are not reduced to systems of meaning and that Habermas’ system is sus-
tainable only when one accepts the reinterpretation of the Marxian con-
cept of work as the pure, technical relation of man with nature, therefore
as a mono-directed rationality. This rationality is tasked with universaliz-
ing, by means of a mediating category of discourse or a praxis of argu-
mentation, a consensus as far as the maxims of action which would be
experienced in practice as moral rules.
Here is not the place to discuss the nature or the political validity of
Habermas’ theory, but rather to show that his “communicative action” is
related to a theory of discourse inherent to the linguistic paradigm, but
not to the concept of communication as systemic organization—visible

and invisible—of the common. The German thinker certainly did not
confuse communication with information, but restricted it to the seman-
tic structure. In other words, his conception of dialog does not put the
totality of the common spatial dimension (the administration, physiog-
nomy, corporeality, mode of inscribing the subject in the world) into
play, in that he includes in it only the signs of language as hegemonic
value.
Signifying and Symbolizing
To further clarify this point, one must impose a distinction between the
sign as linguistic value and the symbolization which structures the social
organism. For Ortigues—exegetical theologian and philosopher con-
cerned with problems of the origin of consciousness—the symbol is an
ordering material, a law of organization: “The symbols are the formative
elements of a language, some considered to have a relation with others when
they constitute a system of communication or alliance, a law of reciprocity
between the subjects.”88 In contrast to the sign, the symbol means noth-
ing, that is, it does not send anything beyond itself, because its primary
function is to organize elements, placing them in opposing interaction as
much as combinatory interaction.
This is the mechanism found at the base of any knowledge, as Piaget
clarifies: “Knowledge does not begin in the object, but rather in the
interactions. While these interactions are made of isolated acts, not coor-
dinated ones, we can speak of neither object nor subject. Insofar as inter-
actions give origin to coordination, there is a reciprocal and simultaneous
construction of the subject on the one hand, and the object on the
other.”89 One may associate this argument with the concept of mimetic
faculty, which Benjamin sees as inherent to the ontogenetic and phyloge-
netic history of man: “Nature engenders similarity: it is enough to think
of the mimic. But it is the man who has the supreme capacity to produce
similarity. In truth, he perhaps has no other superior function which is
not decisively codetermined by the mimetic faculty.”90
88 Ortigues(1962, p. 45).
89 Cf.Evans (1973, p. 65).
90 Benjamin (1993, p. 108).
208 M. SODRÉ
Similarities and dissimilarities operate within the scope of mean-

ing, which, in turn, is not restricted to the semantic field nor confused
with the truth which scientific knowledge seeks to establish. Meaning
demarcates the limits, or a possible, beyond which it does not go. It pre-
sents itself as a force or a work which allows for the dynamic movement
within a system, as much to produce significance as to exterminate it.
For being an unsurpassable limit, it is something which engenders itself:
it is its own condition, without formal prerequisites for its meaning.
It is one of those conditions which Marx called “primordial” (such as
the body of the producer), which place themselves to be later reposted
in History. The meaning is present in any place in which there are dif-
ferences, except that it is not the difference itself, but its condition of
possibility.
In the distinction between sign and symbol, there is the difference between
the functioning of the language and the communication. It is an important
distinction, which theorists in the area tend to miss, obfuscated perhaps
by the contemporary weight of the expression “means of communica-
tion” or by the still more current “means of mass communication,” pop-
ularized by the American school of mass communication research. This
theoretical direction is, in fact, an American creation, academically rep-
licated by various institutions, as is the praxis in the Western university
environments regarding original inputs from the USA. There, slogan is
confused with concept.
It therefore becomes imperative to correctly understand symbol. The
explanation of this term by the combination of two parts (synballein, in
Greek) is already a classic. A man requests another to execute a task, giv-
ing him half of a coin as advance payment: the other half to be given
only after the deal is fulfilled. Together, the two parts find something in
common, a general equivalency or a value, which is the symbol.
The symbol is, thus, an abstraction and, once constituted, functions as
an equivalence for diverse and sparse objects at the same level of exchange
or in a form assumed by the value. However, it logically presupposes a
division (analogous to the two parts of the coin), which is phylogeneti
cally human. In Heraclitus’ fragment ethos anthropos daimon—which
Heidegger translates as “the man lives in the vicinity of the gods” and
others as “the character of the man is his god or ‘demon’”—the word
daimon also means “delivered to the division” or “to the sharing” (of the
verb daomai) as in the Latin communicarius. The symbolic dimension
attests to the primordial sharing in the human condition.
In the properly economic form, the coin is a symbol because it is

equivalent to different commodities, organizing the exchanges. Setting
aside the various differences in the forms of value, the monarch, the
father, the speech, the sign, etc., are all equally symbols which engen-
der complex symbolic mediations. Goux argues thusly in proposing the
hypothesis of a “dialectic logic of the symbolization process, that is, of
a dialectic logic of the successive forms of exchange of vital activities, on
all levels of social organization, and this as much from the phylogenetic
perspective as from the ontogenetic one.”91
To him, “the king performs the role of general equivalent in the polit-
ical world, administrating equivalencies in the face of a group of indi-
viduals who have become his subjects. The genesis of the coin form is
theoretically homologous to the genesis of political representation. It
supplies the principle of the subjection of various to the sovereignty of
one. The legal entity is constituted as the erasure of individual differ-
ences, in the same way that for merchandise, as value, all differences are
erased. The monarch can only judge conflicts of interest if all differences
and distinctions are erased. There is equality before the law (isonomy) in
the group of subjects as there is in the diversified set of merchandise.”92
In this way, where there are exchanges or substitutions, on any level
of the social organism—economic, political, linguistic, and psychic—the
symbolic process is present, that which is metabolized by the socializa-
tion. The metabolic process arises through social interaction, which
is the effect of communication on behavior. The conscious or uncon-
scious perception of what occurs in the interaction affects the behavior
and determines the communicative context. On this level, the level of
interpersonal communication, what predominates are the expressive
acts and the exchange of messages, not necessarily linguistic, in that the
gestures, signals, affects simultaneously compete for the intersubjective
connection.
In Bateson’s vision, communication and interaction constitute
the organizing foundations of the human modes of perceiving the
world, including self-perception or “construction of the Self,” which
involves the projection of a determined image of oneself and its recog-
nition by others. While he does not make a theme of the problem of
91 Goux (1973, p. 69).

92 Ibidem, p. 85.
210 M. SODRÉ
communication, Goux sees the “material” of these foundations in the

symbol. He has in mind what science calls the “modes of substituting” in
human societies, starting from the perspective that “that which can fun-
damentally specify a social formation in all its aspects (economic, juridical,
political, moral, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, sexual, and intersub-
jective) is its mode of substituting. It corresponds, ultimately and gener-
ally, to its mode of economic substitution (its mode of exchange), which
in turn is connected to its technical, global mode of producing.”93
To substitute is to exchange, not only economically, but in the exten-
sive (therefore, beyond the exchange of goods, women, and phonemes)
and multilateral sense of symbolizing, which implies the equivalence or
exchange of one form for another. The symbolic function, in fact, con-
sists of a dynamic of substitution, not only of one element of the real
historical for a sign—as stipulated within the linguistic paradigm—but
essentially in the establishment of an invariance in the differences and
changes. It would be “the enigmatic and decisive possibility to recog-
nize, reencounter, identify the same in another.”94
Evidently, the linguistic paradigm is strong, in that language is the
universal mediation between the symbolic dimension and the commu-
nity, operating the correspondences between things and significance.
However, facing the signs or words, the hypothesis put in play by the
symbolic is a prehistoric condition of language, in which the dimen-
sion of the significance does not have validity, but rather what Benjamin
calls the “pure sentimental life” (reines Gefühlsleben) of the word. In
Agamben’s commentary on Benjamin’s linguistic theory, the idea of a
“pure language” (reine Sprache) or “language of names” (Namensprache)
does not correspond to anything which is habitually understood as
language, or rather, “the significant word as a means of communica-
tion which transmits a message from one subject to another.”95 The
name is taken as “the most intimate essence of language,” but noth-
ing is communicated through it, for it is the language which “commu-
nicates absolutely to itself.” In other words, “the name is the language
of the language”: an “Adamic” language, without content, with objects
beyond the significant, with inexpressive words, in which symbolized and
93 Ibidem,
p. 20.
94 Ibidem,
p. 22.
95 Agamben (2007, pp. 43–47).
symbolizing coincide, as well as the spiritual essence and the linguistic

essence.
Setting aside the terminological differences, this “supra-historical”
vision of language is not altogether different from the aforementioned
symbolic conception which presides over the dynamic of the formation
of the common. The name is approximated there to the symbol, which
is the reduction in the multiplicity to a common measure, without the
dimension of the significant, but with the organizing dimension of the
common. This common is ultimately understood as a general equivalent
or a value, therefore, as an abstraction, an expression completely differ-
ent from its visible aspect.
Thus is the “invisible tie” of which Heraclitus speaks or the abstrac-
tion (also invisible) implied in all relations of exchange, according to
Marx. In fact, in his analysis of the market, the “germinal cell” of the
capitalist mode of production (even defining it in sensory terms as an
external object or a thing, destined to satisfy “the human needs of any
species”), Marx conceives of it as an abstract form (Warenform).96
A thing is abstract when it is differentiated from its use or is separated
from it in time. This is the case of commodities, in this famous analysis,
in the sense that its entire scope—production, circulation, and value—
is not empirical, but ruled by a “quantitative relation, the proportion in
which the use values of a species are exchanged against the use values
of another species, a relation which constantly changes in time and in
space.”97 This relation is the exchange value, or rather, an abstraction,
which incorporates labor to the commodity and determines its value.
While the use value (the utility) of a commodity is concrete, its
exchange value is abstract, and thus, it does not have a geometric or
physical property—it is without qualities—although it is universally appli-
cable to any product on the market. Even though the form is materially
and sensorially manifested in an object, its nature becomes abstract when
constituted as regulatory law, that is, when its action of exchange tempo-
rally differs from its use action (production and consumption), becoming
independent from it. In Marx’s analysis, it is the labor demanded by the
commodity’s production which measures the exchange value between
them, at the cost of its own abstraction.
96 Cf. Marx (1978, pp. 45–121).

97 Ibidem, p. 46.
212 M. SODRÉ
The current relevance of historical materialism to communicational

epistemology is revealed in examining the logic of the symbolization
process, which points to the radicalism or originalism of the exchange
process. This, which was already strongly noted in Mauss’ anthropology
as the very condition of existence of a social phenomenon, heavily influ-
enced French thinkers of communication, such as Baudrillard in his more
brilliant analyses.98 However, Mauss’ ethnological “exchangism” remains
at the level of exchanging items or products (goods, rites, women, signs,
etc.) as a metaphysical order (by means of a simple, formal combination)
which communally rules the validities.
From the perspective of historical materialism, there is an opposition or
a struggle between the individuals of a social group to reach a (conscious
or unconscious) measure capable of being constituted in the value which
organizes the common or symbol. This value, which has the appearance
of a unit, is, in reality, the provisional equilibrium between variable forces
which constantly threaten its invariant or fixed pretense. Heraclitus had
already seen the “invisible tie” as armazein, or non-conciliatory har-
mony, driven by the transformations of the internal tension. What sociol-
ogy today calls the “social relation” is simply the visible surface of this tie
or binding, under which differences and oppositions, the latency of the
transformations, and the passages from one symbolic form to another all
churn.
When proposing the hypothesis that communication is a constituent
social process, what is envisioned is an exchange process which traverses
the visible level of concrete, vital activities (the production of elaboration
of the social movement) as much as the invisible and abstract level of
structural exchanges which compose the symbolic process and assure the
formation of a common (therefore, the possibility of social circulation
which is produced as concrete).
98 However, in the noteworthy speculation that is L´Échange symbolique et la mort
(Gallimard, 1976), Baudrillard points to the symbolic as another theoretical path beyond
the anthropological exchange described by Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan. To him, the
symbolic is not a function of the reality, but precisely something which abolished the
principle of reality as much in archaic society as in modern society. Thus, affirming that
consumption is not supported by the principle of reality (“everything is sign, pure sign,
nothing possesses presence or history”), he shifts the objects of material and historical rela-
tions with people to a symbolic system, where they are converted into signs related only
some with others and without meanings.
Goux says: “In the economic sphere, there is a concrete labor of

production, to which the forces of labor, the techniques, are commit-
ted, and there is a law of product exchange, in relation to the time of
labor demanded to produce it. On the other levels of vital activity and
of exchange, the same opposition [between production and circulation]
is constituted. There is, for example, a force of significant elaboration, a
movement of trans-linguistic productivity, and an abstract ‘arch-writing,’
condition of the full differential system of signs, law of circulation, or of
the substitution of the signs which establish their meaning.”99
The process of symbolization is, thus, on all levels, with different
types of exchange—political, psychic, sexual—and, in all of them, the liv-
ing forces communicate in relation to an abstract measure, a common,
which is the condition of the full differential system and which engen-
ders also abstract and universal expressions of vital activities, or rather,
values. It is this common which allows each social subject to recognize
himself in the other and to anticipate the image of otherness in mem-
ory. This condition of possibility is implicit in the theoretical perspectives
which include the symbolic process as a dimension irreducible to the rep-
resentation or to the meaning in communication, from communication
systems between animals to human communication, where language is
an exclusive form.
Wilden explains: “We pretend that to pretend is exclusively human,
but pretense and deception as such (for example, leaving false clues) are
not exclusively human. Both pretense and pretending to pretend imply
levels of communication over communication (metacommunication).
It is possible to detect a relatively simple form of metacommunication,
not lacking any meaning for the evolution of society, in animal games.
When mammals enter the type of communication expressed in combat,
it is substituted by the communication expressed in games - where the
same action, for example, biting in a fight, becomes innocuous in a game
- it seems that a metacommunicative message is transmitted around the
“scheme” of communication, which is equivalent to something like ‘this
is a game’.”100
This is along the same explicative line as Bateson, who was responsible
for the concept of meta-communication, which is another way of a rguing
with the concept of the symbolic process. Bateson does not disregard the
99 Goux (1973, p. 106).

214 M. SODRÉ
importance of words in linguistic communication, but he subordinates

them to meta-communicative codes, which function—in the same,
non-semantic sphere as symbols—as primordial resources of creation and
of ecological equilibrium within human interaction. A linguistic produc-
tion can be at the same time propositional (in the sense of a rationally
false or true statement, therefore, with a meaning) or relational, under-
stood as an abstract resource, without semantic ballast, to organize
disperse elements in a common form. This is not far from Lacan’s con-
ception of discourse as a social tie which is not necessarily linguistic, albeit
supported in language.
In this way, human relations do not directly stem from a linguistic
matrix (or a linguistic level of communication), but rather meta-commu-
nicative codes implicit in the language and resulting from “negotiations”
(or from the “struggle” around the common measure, from the perspec-
tive of historical materialism) within the sphere of environmental expe-
rience. As these codes do not find a simple translation in the linguistic
system, it makes another system of intelligibility necessary to the com-
municational process.
From American cybernetics to contemporary Germans, passing
through Bateson and arriving at Wilden, to whom we have referred, the
systemic epistemology is fully punctuated by an “organicism.” This “was,
for a long time, the only metaphor available for expressing the systemic-
cybernetic perspective implied in the contemporary approach of commu-
nication noted here; and this for the simple reason that organisms are
the most obvious examples of systemic and adaptive organizations which
imply the use of information (explicitly recognized as such or not). In
the 19th century, for example, the principle organization currently called
information was recognized, but, at the same time, poorly interpreted in
the unsustainable concept of vitalism.”101
Although he insists on inscribing it in a “modern perspective,” organ-
icism is a persistent metaphor in Wilden’s reinterpretation of “Bateson’s”
concept of communication, because, as he himself admits, “organicism
bears, at least implicitly, the ecosystemic and communicational concepts
of hierarchical organization, of structural and functional adaptation, as
well as open systems which self-regulate through the environment.”102

102 Ibidem, p. 120.
The hypertrophy of this hierarchical organization characterizes con-

temporary communication. It is inevitable to ponder that this call by
Heidegger to end metaphysics—the technicist frame of the world or
Ge-Stell—confirms electronic technology coupled with capital as a total,
organizing principle, quite different from the mechanism characteristic of
the classical phase of capital accumulation. By “total organization,” we
want to indicate that it is precisely the mode of organization of the social
life—which is ideologically superimposed over the mode of production of
the classical phase—by means of informational relations. This mode of
organization, in fact, constitutes an information ecosystem, which we
have been calling the media bios, a species or subsystem of the virtual bios
category. The new bios is an ecosystem of adaptation for the man to be in
the world of technology and of the market.
For us, however, despite the instigating elasticity of the idea of com-
munication implied in the system-cybernetic perspective, which overtakes
the models limited to the linguistic exchange of messages, a science of
human communication places its center within the sphere of the bios,
that is, within a specific, existential orientation, where the imperialism
and exploitation latent in Western techno-science call for an analytic
endeavor of systems of thought apparently as diverse as those of Marx
and Heidegger. Consequently, the ethical-political ballast of a science of
human communication may unite, as crucial points of the same problem,
Heidegger’s thinking on the depersonalization of the contemporary indi-
vidual with the Marxian diagnoses of human exploitation by capital and
all neo-Marxist criticism (mainly the Frankfurt School) of the domina-
tion of man by technology and by the market.
However, the focal point of this science is the mutation of the tra-
ditional forms of elaborating the common due to the metaphysical end
implicated by the techno-capitalist frame of the world. From an empirical
point of view, research and reflection cover that which has been called
“media,” because it is a concept (ergo, a general equivalent in cognitive
terms) for the diversity of information devices which struggle over the
ruling classes’ hegemony of representations and for the organization of
social relations in the scope of the market. In the first case, this hegem-
ony presents itself as isomorphic between the varied expressive forms of
informational instruments (or “means”) and institutions of European
origin conceived by seventeenth-century liberalism, with the objective
of assuring the political and juridical legitimacy of the State in emerg-
ing capitalist societies; in second, the hegemony dedicates itself to the
216 M. SODRÉ
amplified reproduction of capital by means of the mass market, which

seeks to legitimize itself by the redefinition of consumption as ideal of
the common good and individual happiness. They are not simple, tech-
nical “supports” or “vehicles” or “means,” therefore, but devices, which
are understood as technological matrices for the formation of meaning.
For having as their principal product the social discourses understood
as “exchange of messages,” these devices have been analyzed through
linguistic models or functional sociology models, which essentially
account for the application of technical instruments—the information
or “media” devices—for the satisfaction of supposed “communicative
necessities.” However, as we seek to make clear, these devices only tech-
nically specify the organizing nature of communication, whose range,
however, overtakes them in its work of elaborating the common. In
truth, these devices are species (thus, the media bios as subsystem of
the virtual bios) of a general equivalency, therefore, of a value, which
articulates the social relations vectorized by technology and the market
through information.
In pluralizing itself as “systems” (human communication systems)
through the pressure of informational “energy,” communication demon-
strated its organizing nature in the twentieth century, complementing,
on the level of collective symbolization, the process of fundamental
restructuring in the mode of capitalist production, which radically trans-
formed the structures of economic exchange and socialization in the
West between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this period, the
restructuring consisted of nearly “naturalizing” capital, submitting all of
economy, labor, and land to the exchange value. This submission receives
the name “commodification,” which is an operator which converts the
use value into the exchange value.
Thus, capital, more than “scarce” commodity or the mere re-ab-
sorption of excess labor value by private production, is the structural
law of organization of the world through the exchange value. Citing his-
torian John Wade, Marx admits that while “labor is an action by
means of which one makes the productive capital of salaries, profit, or
income,” capital “is industry accumulated, ready to develop into new
and equivalent forms; it is collective force. Capital is another name for
civilization.”103 Indeed, from Machiavelli to Adam Smith, moral and
103 Marx (2011, p. 485). Quote from Wade, John. History of the Midde and Working
Classes (London, E. Wilson, 1835).

political thought is fraught with the conviction that the search for
economic advantage is civilizing and indispensable to the stability of
governments.
Consequently, economic capital and its resulting law are the pri-
mary forces which organize the conditions of possibility of social life in
Western modernity. The adaptation of the “civilized” consciousness to
this law implies the creation of a universal ecosystem by means of a uto-
pian, self-regulating market, which had promising moments in the midst
of cyclical crises and the resistance struggles throughout the centuries,
but left its own cycle of domination incomplete. In Polanyi’s terms, this
incompleteness is due to the liberal utopia of the self-regulating market,
which anchored nineteenth-century civilization in “nearly mystical” pow-
ers: the balance of power, the gold standard, and the liberal state.104
The twentieth century saw the advance of the law of capital by means
of the widening market economy, or rather, of an economy which
enhances its own technique, defining itself by the conversion of all use
value into exchange value, therefore, by a regulatory horizon guided
exclusively by market prices. Always linked to the republican virtues of
self-restraint and respect for the common good, this economy extended
from immediate consumer goods to intellectual goods, from the arts to
science and education. That which important cultural analysts—from
the Frankfurt School to the English and the French—critically called the
“culture industry” was the beginning of a subtle “consciousness indus-
try” (which can also be designated as an enhanced mode of subjectivity
production) destined to complete the cycle of commodification of the
spirit. Electronic communications and information technology deepen
the cycle by driving the illusions of free, linguistic exchange through the
streamlining of interactive contact, and also through the intensification
of the speed of access to information files.
The contemporary technological ecosystem is, in fact, a continuity of
the mercantile ecosystem begun in the sixteenth century by the histori
cal structuring of capital. If we conceive of History as the accelerated
movement of this structuring, in the sense of capital’s penetration into
all levels of the social life—by means of the principle of general equiv-
alency or law of value—what we have today tried out as “communica-
tion” could be defined as the symbolic (and not mainly linguistic, which
104 Cf. Polanyi (2012, p. 31).

218 M. SODRÉ
is a complementary dimension) process of organizing or codifying vital

exchanges within the sphere of elaboration of the human common.
This is demonstrated in the civilizing irradiation of electronic technol-
ogy, which provides the possibility of the planetary interconnection of
manufacturing, finance, transport, data transmission, knowledge distribu-
tion, and entertainment systems, capable of being described as a socio-
technical ecosystem, a virtual bios.
In this process, the totality of present technical objects is of such a
magnitude today that what was once pragmatically called “utensil” is ele-
vated to a condition of existential parity which places it outside of simple
utility (ergo, outside of the mere instrumental treatment) and integrates
it within the planetary technology constructed from the perspective of
techno-science. This is properly an occurrence, which appropriates the
world and existential identity, merging them. The fusion reveals, in
Heidegger’s arguments, “Being is to be mundane,” or rather, there is no
metaphysical duality between the primordial being and being here and
now, as there is no duality between mind and body or between exist-
ence and world. In today’s quotidian, orchestrated by the metaphysical
as a system of universal decisions, the technological world and existential
identities are inseparable entities: the technological forms of life progres-
sively make themselves available as existential formats.
Fully placed within the world, existence is always spatially in some-
thing or in some relation, not as an accidental, extended property, but
as an essential determination of its identity. Whether one calls this rela-
tion the “lifeworld” (Husserl, Habermas, Schutz), “connection with
the ground” (Heidegger), or the “use value/body/material” (Marx),
the spatiality exercises a central determination over the being-in-the-
world. In the specific case of communication, the spatiality configured
as mediatization is a starting point, but insufficient for its abstraction
as a reference to concrete and differentiated conditions of life or for the
absence of existential orientation as that which necessarily appears in the
Aristotelian concept of bios.
The concept of “connection with the ground” is indispensable
to a science of human communication committed, beyond cogni-
tion and instrumental application, to the ethical-political relation not
only of citizens of all latitudes (being-with), but also to the opening
of the existential potential-being. On this point, Heidegger’s fourfold
(Geviert—heaven and earth, mortal and the divine) could approximate
the ancient communicatio (heaven and earth, men and gods) to enhance
the symbolic scope of communication to the sphere of comprehension

and the dignifying of the objects placed in a relation of parity within a
new mode of worldly presence. In this scope, the “earth” is as much a
concrete place of the historically-considered human group (the planet
Earth is, indeed, the common “home”) as the transcendental dimension
which presides over the primordial ontology of mortals; “heaven” and
the “divine” allude to the sacred as “separate earth” (sacer, in Latin) and
are rationally inapprehensible, although one can feel its interpellations.
This approximation already presents itself as possibility in assuming
that, as principle, the “affective tonality” (Stimmung in Heidegger’s
terminology) characteristic of communications and information tech-
nology is essentially the same one that is present in the archaic or pri-
mordial configuration of the common, or rather, an affective situation
(which is not equivalent to any individual spiritual faculty, but rather the
sensory charge implied in poetry or in works of art), symbolically open
to the relationship with the world in its diversity. We stress “principle”
because, in its techno-capitalist implementation, the machine of commu-
nication/information tends to neutralize the dynamic of the tropos or the
tensions which constitute the common in favor the homogenization of
access and contacts. However, in the symbolic dimension, it is, in fact,
the sensory which presides over the connections and exchanges.
The vision of the communicational process thus presented certainly
swims against the current of the full humanist (and intellectual) tradition
of thought, according to which any device which gravitates within the
so-called cultural orbit should necessarily be ruled by a teleology of the
transcendence of truth, of meaning, and of power, coinciding with the
most absolute rationality of History.
Of course, there are new and dissident voices. Gianni Vattimo, for
example, proposes the hypothesis that, in an ideal process of emanci-
pation, communication should not head toward a greater truth of its
content, but rather toward an “intensification of itself as an end.”105
Or rather, as in the aesthetic judgment of beauty, “a representation
with finality, but without end.” Likewise, Marshall McLuhan, when he
admits that “the medium is the message,” is saying that there is mean-
ing in the medium itself, ergo, that the technological form is equiva-
lent to the content and, therefore, no longer conveys or transports the
105 Opening conference of the XII Congresso da Associação Nacional dos Programas de
Pós-Graduação (COMPÓS), Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, 6/4/2002.

220 M. SODRÉ
content-messages of a matrix of meanings (an “ideology”) external to

the system, in that the very form is this matrix.
This is, therefore, the meaning or the “content” of technology: a
form of hegemonic codification, which culturally intervenes in the social
life, with a new, sensory world created by the immaterial reproduction of
things, by the divorce of form and material. Culture thus comes to define
itself more through signs of sensory involvement, by the sensory, than by
the appeal to the rationalism of traditional representation, which privi-
leges the linearity of the written word.106 In attending the imperative of
ethical-political cognition, in which a science of human communication
is implied, the centrality of the sensory leads one to rethinking the meth-
odological tradition of the social sciences.
Methodological Issues
Now in the third millennium, it seems that one can already distance one-
self from the authoritarian, positivist summons to the real (nature, cul-
ture, etc.) to “testify” at the court of method, revealing its truth, or from
Bacon’s order to submit natural phenomena to the pillory so that they
“confess” objective truths. Despite all this relativization, the methodo-
logical question imposes itself in the commitment to founding a science
of communication. Multidisciplinarity is what first comes to mind when
setting aside the functionalist paradigm.
It is correct that, in American research institutions, a more effective
collaboration between areas such as biology, philosophy, and literary the-
ory has already been carried out. So much so that, today, a renowned
Stanford literature professor allowed himself to recommend: “I do not
believe in any ‘method’ or (worse) ‘methodology’ - not because meth-
ods or methodology are intrinsically bad, but because they keep one
from thinking independently and from enjoying intellectual liberty on a
dimension of thought which does not allow for rigid regularities.”107 In
some way, this echoes Descartes’ old warning (in a curious anticipation
of the possibility of overly rigid Cartesian regularities), in the sense that
his intent in Discourse on the Method was not to teach “the method that
106 VideSodré (2006).
107 Cf.Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. In Folha de São Paulo, Caderno Mais, de 13/10/2002.
Translated into English from Portuguese version.
everyone should follow to conduct his reason well, but only to show in
what manner I sought to conduct mine.”
This warning is not well known and rarely considered by an episte-
mological practice which attempts to define scientific disciplines through
method. Anthropology, for example: rooted to its favorite technique of
survey or description of a determined human formation (ethnography),
the ethnological field tends to fetishize this technique as the singular,
exclusive method for founding its scientific specificity, repressing the
methodological plurality of anthropology in its more creative origins.
However, the fetishization of method is no guarantee of scien-
tific objectivity. The film Secrets of the Tribe, by Brazilian filmmaker
José Padilha, an “essay on intellectual vanity in indigenous anthropol-
ogy,” demonstrates how the methods which are characteristic of cul-
tural anthropology can be excessively personalistic. He cites the case of
the Yanomami tribe of Venezuela, of which two famous anthropologists
reported diverse ethnographic experiences. For the filmmaker, “if the
anthropology of remote tribes were a mature discipline, new research
would have been done to try to empirically decide between such dispa-
rate ethnographies.”108 According to him, after the scandal, rather than
a procedure of scientific verification, “what was seen were attempts to
win the academic struggle through shouting, morally denigrating the
adversaries.”
Emphasizing the particular reasons of the filmmaker and the case in
point, it is important to reiterate the adequacy of the relativization of
methodology in our era of paradigmatic change in scientific knowledge.
Methodological rigidity, whether in the natural sciences or in the social
sciences, is characteristic of an epistemological paradigm in which the
insurmountable distance between the subject and object of the knowledge
allows for a process of sewing the hypothesis together with the supposedly
universal laboratory experience, by means of a path known as method.
However, already in the 1960s, Georges Dumezil called attention to the
fact that “the method is the path after it has been walked upon.”
Let us consider the abductive method. Baudrillard, as did vari-
ous other brilliant French essayists of generations past (René Caillois,
Roland Barthes, and others), practiced what American pragmatist
Charles Sanders Peirce called “abduction.” With this concept, contrary
108 Padilha, José In O Globo, de 9/2/2013.

222 M. SODRÉ
to induction and deduction, Peirce aimed for a method of discovery by

erratic procedures, eventually chaotic ones, which bear invention, inspi-
ration, and myth. The importance and current relevance of Peirce’s
contribution are demonstrated when analyzing the context in which sci-
entific hypotheses are discovered or proposed. There, abduction is high-
lighted as an axial concept for understanding the dynamic of mediations
between chance and determination, in the formulation of a new scientific
theory.
It is true that this way of thinking has classical precedents: Kant him-
self had already sustained that, without intuition, all concept is “empty.”
Peirce, however, in seeing abduction as “spontaneous conjectures of
instinctive reason,” speaks of it as a species of the primordial logic of the
creative idea, a point of intersection between science and art. What is
called il lume naturale (the natural insight of the laws of nature) stems
from the divinatory, instinctive faculty which is capable of creating.
Baudrillard’s abductive attitude, for example, always kept him close
to the field of communication studies. Driven by the advent of a new
paradigm of economic production and knowledge from the 1960s, ini-
tially regarding mass culture or the culture industry, this field became
the place where, today, theoretical and empirical theories, therefore
ones with an academic verisimilitude, are tested out on a new type of
technology of social relations strongly dependent on the market and
media. While the classic social disciplines revolve around the national
State, religion, and capital mechanisms—still representable by a logic
of substances, predicative and inspired by Aristotle—communication is
developed around something which is not historically and materially sub-
stantial, but which is the discursive reality of media, the coupling of the
market and the mutations it carries within the thrust of the world’s mar-
ket globalization.
Therein perhaps stems the scarce theoretical interest awakened by
communication studies together with traditional academia: a socius not
adjusted to the knowledge of the classical sciences of society. In turn, the
national State, in the midst of its general crisis, does not make of the
communicational field the same kind of demands traditionally directed
at sociology, anthropology, economics, and other knowledge (knowledge
regarding the nature of the mobs and the masses, evaluation of peoples
submitted to the colonial regime, the urban social fact, pathologies of
individualization, production, and market consumption, etc.), except
under the form of a conceptual and methodological reduction. For a
more orthodox sociologist, communication and information are social

epiphenomena—and not a dimension which constitutes a new socius—
therefore, only a specific “focus” of the sociological discipline.
Thus, communication tends to be perceived as a social practice rele-
gated to the fragmentary interests of the market, or, academically, as a
subtheme of the classic disciplines of social thought. It is unknown which
social subject (government, business, hospital, political party, union, etc.)
could be enhanced, as happens with the traditional sciences of society,
by the scientific objectification of the communicational or informational
phenomenon.
The problem of globalized knowledge is something which corre-
sponds, in political economic terms, to new forms of complexity in
production processes, intensified by advanced information and com-
munications technologies, where immaterial labor and techno-scientific
innovation predominate. Discussed by the communicational field in the
sphere of the sciences of man, it allows new administrative strategies of
the social life to transpire, where the actor is no longer the social subject
as individual or collective “performer” in the “theater” of society (as in
classical sociology), but rather a technological, semiotic device, a reality
simulator, which is now offered as a platform for a new type of inclina-
tion over the man and over the social organization.
It is true that this field is comparable to all other social institutions,
which have developed within the very reality which they help to create
and administer, but with one difference: media and, in a broader sense,
the advanced technologies of knowledge live according to the discourse
which they make about their own simulation of other realities. It is not
a discourse on historical representations of substances, but a discourse
on discourse, that is, on the immaterial reality which now permeates the
social conditions of capital reproduction. Therefore, in terms of a the-
ory of knowledge, issues of the relation between subject and object or of
intersubjectivity give way to problems of language and comprehension.
Here appears the word “emergence.” To a group of foreign spe-
cialists, authors of a manifesto on interdisciplinarity,109 the process of
generating knowledge begins not only in the observer, but also at the
point of the object. It is more of an “emergence” than a “production.”
Thus, “any production of knowledge occurs as a co-emergence of the
109 The manifesto which resulted from a congress held at Stanford University and pub-
lished in Caderno Mais, da Folha de São Paulo, 24 November, 2002.

224 M. SODRÉ
phenomenon in question and its observer.” What does this mean? To the
authors, it means that determined phenomena in some way “choose” the
horizons within which they appear. “The properties of an observer must
be consistent with the properties of the observed objects. In this sense,
the universe brings, printed within itself, the image of an observer. As
soon as an observation is produced, therefore, the observer may recon-
stitute a consistent history of the object in question, as though it had its
own existence prior to observation,” says the manifesto.110
Inscribed in this position is a demand for revising the place of the
epistemological observer. Theoretically, nothing impedes the emergence
of sophisticated, non-human observers, which signifies the possibility of
computers coming to have an adaptive behavior and, thus, developing
their own, epistemic intelligence, analogous to that of human observers.
Such a possibility is already sketched out in a general manner within the
universe of communication and information, in that, in the emerging
forms of life (the virtual bios), social relations of knowledge production
are comprised of human beings and machines, in an increasingly equal
partnership.
In principal, it would be paradoxical that this strong advent of
machines in socializations accompanies the ascension of the affective
dimension (emotions, feelings, synesthesia, indexalism, signs of com-
mand and control, etc.) within the sphere of human relations. This, how-
ever, is intelligible when taking into account that the intensification of
communicability occurs by means of the prevalence of the organizing
function of electronic technologies, in which the sensory takes prece-
dence, whatever the mode of production—from corporeal affections to
the algorithms which generate the “incorporeal” and the search engines
in cybernetic space. From traditional media to the Internet, the linguistic
signs which gave meaning to the classical spirit declined in importance
relative to the sensory which constitutes the common or what others may
call the “global synchronization of affects” (Paul Virilio).
Operative Levels
Thus, a perspective essential to the communicational method primarily
leads to the problem of the common, and shortly thereafter to the spe-
cificities of the very mode of intelligibility of the process which produces
110 Ibidem, p. 6.
meaning and social discourse. This results in the methodological tactic

of treating communication as a conceptual object capable of operatively
unfolding into levels we designate (1) relational, (2) binding, and (3)
critical-cognitive or meta-critical.111
1. The relational level refers to the production and reproduction of
ideology in the social system by means of information flows homologous to
the principles of dominant exchange. On this level, we can also situate
the reflectivity characteristic of the enhancement of modernity, under-
standing this term as the framework which compels the thought which
constructs systems reflective of their time. The Englishman, Anthony
Giddens, explores this notion in diverse ways, defining it as a re-exami-
nation and a reformation of social practices in light of renovated infor-
mation, therefore, as a possible path to bettering democratic systems.
Here, however, we highlight, within the reflective phenomenon, the
conformity of the real with the representations previously established by
the devices of social construction, therefore, the mirrored projection of
a semiotic codification of human existence with the aim of ideological
reproduction by means of a hegemonic culture. What characterizes this
level is the prevalence of the socius, that is, of the social relation consti-
tuted by the institutionalized aggregation of individuals.
The culture normally associated with “social communication” devices
corresponds to what we earlier designated as “knowledge,” therefore, as
the universal archive of the repertories of knowledge and information fit
for mass distribution, known as the “democratization of culture.” Here,
the media occupies a central role. What is called the “culture industry”
or even the “consciousness industry” is, in fact, one of the more conspic-
uous aspects of the organizing codification of social relations by means
of “instruments” which, throughout the last century, became known as
cinema, media (press, radio, television, Internet), and publicity.
Driven by the advent of a new paradigm for economic and knowl-
edge production since the 1960s, initially under the aspect of mass cul-
ture or the culture industry, this is the place where one seeks academic
verisimilitude in a new type of social relations technology strongly
dependent on the market and media. While the classic social disciplines
revolve around the national State, religion, and capital mechanisms—
still representable by a logic of substances, predicative and inspired by
111 Cf. Sodré (2002). We now substitute “relacional” with “binding,” and “metacrítico”
with “cognitive.”
226 M. SODRÉ
Aristotle—communication is developed around something which is not

historically and materially substantial, but which is the discursive reality
of media, coupled with the market and the mutations it carries within the
thrust of the world’s market globalization and financialization.
This reality constitutes a specific culture (which has already been com-
monly denominated “media culture,” inherent to a supposed “society of
dialog”), continuous source of essentially descriptive studies, generally
without a critical perspective, of the social relations born in the shadow
of “media” penetration (the term is pluralized and converted into “trans-
mediation”) in the sphere of subjectivities conformed by traditional
resources. Academically, this is the principal territory of neo-positivism
and physicalist descriptions of media. It was within this environment that
American sociology enthroned the concept of mass, but, in fact, noth-
ing which corroborates the expression mass communication truly exists
today.
Flusser already strongly criticized this model, which he called “group-
ing” (Bündelung), as opposed to the “entanglement” (Vernetzung)
model, characteristic of the electronic network and supposedly capable
of liberating the individuals from the passivity inherent to mass con-
sumption, which groups and encapsulates human action. Today, the
very reality of the market demonstrates that, when fully entering a ser-
vice economy, the concept of mass gives way to that of the individual:
electronic media is not “of a collective mass,” but rather of individuals
in mass. Mass individualism is not the traditional kind, in which the sub-
ject is defined alone before the world, but rather the individual with the
world within itself as a consequence of communications technology.
“Empowerment” (an expression that is dear to neoliberal ideology) of
mass individualism is of this nature. However, much modern socializa-
tion appears to favor the mobilization of groups, in reality the subject
enters the group as an individual “empowered” by the distributive sys-
tem of things.
In terms of ideological production, this whole specific culture com-
petes for the construction of a common bio-politic compatible with the
organizing mutations of finance capital and configurable as a new exis-
tential orientation in the urban space, which we call the media bios. What
are the instruments of this construction? From the social-semiotic per-
spective, they are signs, texts, practices, strategies, objects, and forms of
life, or rather, elementary units of signification (words, images, etc.), sig-
nificant formations, courses of actions subsumed in practices, dominant
values, and the coherent centralization of content. To Fontanille, a

specialist in this type of analysis, “one may speak of forms of life when
identifying coherent, recurrent, strategic styles relatively independent
from thematic situations and sufficiently powerful to influence all the
practices and all the semiotic manifestations of a group or a social and
cultural type.”112
For analysts who adhere to the linguistic paradigm of communica-
tion, these instruments are essentially acts of speech or narratives, which
attributes a strictly discursive reality to the common. However, when
taking discourse as a structure which can function even without language
(Lacan) and conceiving of communication as an organizing forum of the
common, it does not take long to perceive that technology asserts itself,
by itself, as an Ersatz of the primordial, symbolic order, approximating,
concatenating, weaving together relations which stem from semanti-
zation, in a performativity with a broader symbolic nature than words.
In the sphere of electronic technology, words, sounds, images, and dis-
course can be converted without depending on strict processes of sig-
nification. The media bios reveals itself not only as a form of life among
others, but also as an existential orientation which attempts to impose
itself in universal terms as coupled with the market.
Evidently, the narrative of mundanity contributes toward molding
styles of life and forms of social action. From the point of view of ide-
ological reproduction, the relational level gives continuity to the old
“republican virtue” which has at its core the guarantee of the right to
property—that is, the constitutional right to enjoy, in absolute terms
(as long as they are not contrary to the law), private use values—now
extended to the sphere of mass consumption. However, also within the
scope of ideological reproduction, the “relational” is expanded as demos,
that is, as a form of subjectivation of that which we tend to call “peo-
ple,” in which predominates a principle (political, juridical) of equality
which levels, in a conflictive manner, the qualitatively unequal. Thus is
the historical territory of citizenship, today shifted by the dominance of
the consumer market.
Reinterpreted as the “free territory” of the contemporary citizen,
consumption today expands into the comfortable framework (without
conflict, contrary to what tends to occur in the sphere of real rights or
112 Fontanille (2013, p. 71).

228 M. SODRÉ
those connected to work) of the insertion of individuals into the mar-

ket, neutralizing or pasteurizing the tense dynamic inherent to the dem-
ocratic game of the active citizenry, therefore opening the sociopolitical
path to the pasteurization of journalism. Consequently, in writing the
Constitution of the United States, the founders of that nation guaran-
teed, already in the First Amendment, the rights to freedom of speech
and freedom of the press, beside four others, as they recognized the
communal tension of difference between society and State.
The social relations adapted to the media bios, which mirrors the logic
or visible and conscious ideo-structure of the market of goods and ser-
vices. These social relations were always implicit in the journalistic prac-
tice, but gained a grander figure in the scope of global financialization
and technology. Today, they constitute the primary object of media stud-
ies, especially in the USA, as specified by professor Ronald Yates, of the
University of Illinois, in justifying the substitution of communications by
media in designating his college: “What we really do in our college is
study and teach ‘mediated communications.’ That includes old media,
new media, emerging media, future media. In short, the College of
Communications is about ‘Media’ (…) the most important in all this (…)
is not to find a precise nomenclature, but to account for the changes which
are occurring (…) these changes in delivery methods and how people
think about new media have driven changes in the scope of communica-
tions as a discipline.”113
Thus, journalism, bicentennial focus of the freedom of speech as con-
secrated by the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen
and ratified in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,
tends to be disregarded as democratic content in favor of the idea of a
service to the consumer, which allows for the opportunity of data jour-
nalism. According to Lima, “even in the field of university professional
training, it was announced at the end of 2010 that the University of
Colorado is looking to close its Journalism school to create a program
which combines journalistic principles and computer science.” The new
course would be something like a “media course.”
According to the same source, at least thirty other schools, includ-
ing Wisconsin, Cornell, Rutgers, and Berkeley, considered modifying
113 Cf. Lima (6/4/2013). Words in italics represent Lima’s commentary, originally in
Portuguese.
the course to adjust to the new trends in the job market. Lima observes:
“In this way, what today appears to characterize professional formation
as much as media and communication research is that they address com-
munication as mediatized by technological tools (mediated communi-
cations). If these technologies defined academic ‘departments’ over the
years - television, radio, cinema, journal, magazine - the digital revolu-
tion and technological convergence of the last decades, beyond having
introduced new ‘technological mediations’ - the computer, the inter-
net, the cell phone - also completely diluted the differences which exist
between the old technologies.”114
This, which can be called “thinking of the tool,” naturally corre-
sponds to the imperatives of technology and the market, leaving aside
the classical, ethical-political horizon of journalistic study. It is assumed
that the technical “object” in itself (the computer, cell phone, social net-
work, the Internet) triggers change in the public sphere, as would an
autonomous “subject.” An ethical-political argument could note that it
is not the simple modern or efficient being of the object which aggregates
social value, but rather its insertion into a mesh of intersubjective and
dialectic relations capable of giving it a transformative course.
Seeking to attune itself to the possibilities of human binding, this
same argument can also conceive of journalism as a greater political pro-
ject than the “journal” itself. Already in 1920, educator and pragmatic
philosopher John Dewey said that journalism had to go beyond the mere
objective reporting of occurrences (within the model in which the press
“reports” and the reader consumes) to become a means of education and
public debate. The press would favor more direct dialog between citizens
and journalists. More than “report,” the journalistic activity would have,
at its core, the promotion of the public “conversation.”
In summary, generally, within and outside of the American panorama,
current media studies, even those which concentrate on so-called cyber-
culture, are placed from the perspective of immediately visible social rela-
tions, which encompass the fields of sociology, psycho-sociology, history,
and cultural studies. They are thus aligned with applied research (private
and public), and academic research geared toward the identification of
media structure (descriptive studies, reception studies, history of the
forms and supports, etc.).
114 Ibidem.
230 M. SODRÉ
In methodological terms, this means that the “tools” of research

are divided between focal studies or surveys, historiography, inquiries,
attitude scales, archives, and discourse analysis, in that the sociological
paradigm of effects is superimposed over linguistic models. “Culture
studies”—which are not disciplinarily defined, as they are presented as
a discursive formation with a multiplicity of themes—, more current in
England and the USA, are generally centered on the political implica-
tions of cultural phenomena, from critical questions of ethnicity, gender,
and lifestyle to the reception of content disseminated by the media.
2. The binding, on the other hand, differs from the social relation in its
modern juridical and political terms, in that it is not defined as “mak-
ing contact,” as something placed “between” the beings identified by their
positions marked within the complex, existential hierarchies, but rather
as a primordial condition of being, henceforth traversed by an empty
externality—the common—which pushes it beyond itself and divides it.
This is not addressing socius, but the binding as a primordial, ontologi-
cal condition. The binding is inscribed upon the communal dimension
and bears the structural dialogism implied in the idea of communicatio,
in which the semiosis, understood as linguistic relation with an “other,”
does not predominate, but rather as a symbolic heterotopy, or rather, as
an occupation of an “other” space and formation of value by sensory
movement.115
Consequently, in the “pre-history,” or in the arche of linguistic forms,
is situated this system of energetic equivalencies or production of gen-
eral forms of value and meta-communication, which is the symbolic
order. The binding includes nothing of semantics, but rather includes
the symbolic, therefore, the energy or force. Operating within it is that
which Parmenides called the “intrepid heart,” and others the “logic of
the heart” and “affective disposition.” On the other hand, binding is
not apprehended only on the plane of consciousness, but equally in the
unconscious mesh or in codifications.
Binding does not refer only to the affect as a primordial disposition
(Heidegger’s Stimmung), but also as something which is globalized by
means of communications technology: the globalization of affects in real
time. It is what Virilio called the “synchronization of emotions,” a sub-
stitute for the democratic sharing of opinion by means of mass media,
115 Slavery, for example, constitutes a relation (juridical, political, social), but not a bind-
ing, due to the impossibility of the master to move hetero-topically toward the slave.
characteristic of the second half of the last century. To him, the speed
inherent to electronic technology opens the possibility of a “democracy
of emotions.”116
This level methodologically demands the comprehensive attitude.
Comprehension—implied knowledge, which is processed by immedi-
ate apprehension or that which is analogous to a phenomenon—is that
which challenges the explanation, supposedly objective and the enemy
of metaphors, to respond to its concrete representations. In Latin, expli-
care properly means “to unfold,” “extend”: from inside out, from a
given structure, increasing the text through logical unfolding, in order
to unveil the meaning by exposing the analytical structure of the object.
Implicare, on the contrary, is to fold outside in, therefore, compre-
hensively involve the interlocutor, to bring him to participate in the pro-
duction of meaning. In the explicative dimension, the other is implied,
but essentially at the level of rational operations of understanding. In an
active form of comprehension, a concrete, subjective action arises, for
the knowledge necessarily includes the subject who knows, and thus, is
obliged to question the constructions of the world taken as objective
facts by the cognitive action.
However, the comprehensive attitude to which we refer does not
maintain the duality explanation/implication (comprehension), when
accompanying the hermeneutic interpretation proposed by Ricoeur.117
To him, there is a dialectic movement between two poles, in that the
awareness of the object is supported in a second moment by explicative
procedures. As such, it is fundamental to take into account the con-
text of the object or of the occurrence which is to be comprehended.
Comprehension does not arise, therefore, from the reproduction of the
object, but from the generation of something new (a new “occurrence”),
which always begins with the self-comprehension of the subject facing
the object.
In the case of communicational binding, what is one truly intending
to know? In principal, the genealogy or sociogenesis of techno-cultural
forms (therefore, mediatization) is the measure in which it is superim-
posed over traditional models of the cohesive tie, reinterpreting them.
Whether in economic, political, psychic, or even media logic, the
116 Cf. Virilio (2012).

117 Cf. Ricoeur (1988).
232 M. SODRÉ
ideological erasure of the genesis is that which gives rise to fetishism.

As Goux emphasizes regarding Freudian analysis, aiming to “revive the
memory of a forgotten period of life,” the question is to retrace (rede-
scribe, we could also say) what was erased: “In the same way which is
central to the analysis of the coin ‘knowing how and why a commod-
ity becomes coin,’ the analysis of psychism is discovering ‘the processes
which result in the choice of this or that object’ and retrace, rewrite the
incidents of a history which ultimately initiates the relation of the subject
in the face of the speech or that which assumes this value.”118
The analysis of binding bears the visible aspects of the common as
much as the hidden or erased dimension of meta-communicative sym-
bolization inherent to the cohesive tie. Differently from the relational
level, it broadens the primordial dimension of the people, not as demos,
but as ethnos, that is, the group-wide consistence of cohesion through
blood, beliefs, and territory. Here is fixed the full dimension (aesthetic?
esthesic?) of the affects produced by corporeality and by human percep-
tion, traditionally relegated to the background by logic and science.
Peirce was the first, if not the only, to note, with his concept of first-
ness, the importance of the spontaneity of the perceptive act. Beneath the
words or the signs, the aesthetic signals expand in emotiveness, superfici-
ality, obscurity, and in the paradoxes which move through all time in the
communicative circuits. In methodological terms, this is mainly aligned
with studies and research regarding communal logic and the affective
dimension of the cohesive tie. The conception of culture implied here is
not ruled by the distribution of knowledge, but by the matrix aspect or
the mapping inherent to this concept.
3. On the critical-cognitive level—or meta-critical, in that the cogni-
tion is implied in the two anterior levels—the varied, reflective interven-
tions have indicated that the field of social sciences requires a new system
of intelligibility for the procedural diversity of communication as a specific
social science in the mode of active production of knowledge towards a com-
prehension of binding and relations, that is, (a) the commitment to rede-
scription of the relations between man and the neo-technology capable
of accounting for the transformations in consciousness and in the self
under the influx of the techno-cultural ordering of society; and (b) at
the same time, the ethical-political commitment in the sense of enabling
118 Goux (1973, p. 79).

a comprehension of the sociocultural mutations within a horizon of

self-questioning, guided by the affirmation of the essential difference
of man, of his singularity. An example: the redescription of the journal-
istic practice could lead to the understanding that classical journalism
inscribed the aggregation of value to information on its cultural horizon.
This has sociopolitical effects, in that value is not only an economic con-
cept, but also an ethical one.
In operations of re-reading or redescription, one verifies that some of
the themes which visual artists obsessed over in the first half of the last
century are today reiterated in the practical reality of the electronic net-
works. For example, the spatial compression suggested by Picasso and
Braque in cubism is in a way materialized in the temporal compression
of space by electronic communication. On the other hand, certain sur-
realist paintings by Magritte prefigure typical Internet phenomena, such
as Les Amants (1927), in which a masked couple kisses, in a way cultur-
ally analogous to the affective relations in cyberspace. Or La Dècouverte
(1929), which shows a lady with a tattooed body, anticipating the mod-
ern reality of extensive body tattoos. In the famous La trahison des
images, also by Magritte, the phrase “this is not a pipe,” written below
the figure of a pipe, the artist intends to liberally point out the difference
between physical reality and its representation.
To Richard Rorty, the redescription of the subject is something fun-
damental to the construction of new relations between peoples, consol-
idated in two movements, as Paiva explains: “The first is the capacity to
retell the stories in which the individuals are inserted, in a way in which
they can be perceived as participants in the construction of a collective
history and, consequently, can be qualified as members of an existing
community, which results from this historical process. The second move-
ment refers to the change in the very vocabulary used to express the
individual, collective, past, and present stories.”119
In general, this is about researching, within the communicational
coherence of a determined economic-social system, the origin of a pro-
cess which is ultimately defined as a symbolic organization and not a
mere device for the transmission of information understood as some-
thing natural and intrinsically necessary to the subject in modernity.
Within this reinterpretive framework, journalism itself, traditionally
119 Paiva (2007, p. 141).

234 M. SODRÉ
defined as the uninterrupted production of “news,” can be seen as a vast,

narrative system aimed at organizing the social “conversations,” that is,
the connective speech or discourse.
In this whole process, one glimpses the isomorphism or the homology of
a common whose symbolic logic operates on different levels of the social
structure. Thus, the redescriptive operation can have a strong role to play
in interpreting the phenomena of knowledge, and the field may come
to be defined more clearly as a device for re-reading society’s traditional
questions in light of the cultural mutations made possible by informa-
tion and communications technologies. Related here are the studies and
research which seek knowledge of global transformations resulting from
the market and media.
In strictly methodological terms, this is privileging (analogically, meta-
phorically) the connections—first between theories and then between the-
ories and phenomena—on the part of the observer, although without the
algebraic demonstrations, which were typical of Lévi-Strauss’ structural-
ism. The theoretical connections do not constitute a mere aggregation of
different disciplines (or multidisciplinarity), but rather the translation of
a specific knowledge to another specificity, having them touch or “stitch
together” (as in the musical form, rhapsody) the homologous or isomor-
phic points of each one. Something similar appears in what Souza Santos,
referring to multiculturalism, sees as necessary to the critical, postmod-
ern theory: “It is by means of translation and by that which I desig-
nate diatopical hermeneutics that a necessity, an aspiration, a practice in
a given culture can become comprehensible and intelligible to another
culture.”120
We opt for hermeneutic translating to designate the methodological
attitude adequate to the redescriptive operation inherent to the mode of
intelligibility or science of communication. Therefore, not a “diatopy”
understood as a passage (dia) through the diversity of places (topia),
when one culture finds another, but the translation of the focal—and iso-
morphic—topics of a determined question which is problematic to the
possible discourse of social thought. It is these connections which, in
their approximating movement, abolish the rigidity of the classical, disci-
plinary frontiers.
One example is Polanyi’s methodological description from his
renowned study on the origins and consequences of the market economy:
120 Santos (2000, p. 92).

“This is not a work of history; what we seek is not a convincing sequence

of important occurrences, but an explanation of its orientation in terms
of human institutions. We feel the desire to address the scenes from the
past with the singular objective of shedding light on current subjects; we
will carry out detailed analyses on critical periods and nearly completely
abandon the periods of time which connect them: we will invade the field
of various disciplines in the pursuit of this simple objective.”121
In the specific case of communication, the aforementioned rede-
scription can provide the opportunity for a fictionalized theoretical
construction, in which the occurrence—in truth, the grand, subversive
occurrence—is susceptible to being taken as a paradigm for a concep-
tual abstraction. Similar to this, for example, are the analogies, oscillat-
ing between fiction and scientific theory, formulated by Jean Baudrillard
in his analyses of the media and postmodernity, which earned him,
along with other inventive thinkers, the accusation of intellectual
“imposter.”
The reason for this accusation is that this methodology presents itself
as frankly abductive, for it invents a language or even fictionalizes the
deductive/inductive science in order to explain. Gregory Bateson, cer-
tainly one of the most original thinkers in communication, denounced
the anachronism in the epistemological premises in which university
education was based, thinking of a science which combined rigor and
imagination. Baudrillard, like various other brilliant essayists from past
generations (René Caillois, Roland Barthes, for example), practiced that
which American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce called “abduction,”
or rather, they started with the facts in the search for a hypothesis capa-
ble of explaining them, which demanded creativity in their essays. They
operated, therefore, in opposition to induction, which begins with a
hypothesis and experiments with facts capable of establishing it. With the
concept of abduction, Peirce aimed for a method of discovery by erratic,
eventually chaotic procedures, which bear invention, inspiration, and
myth.
The importance and relevance of Peirce’s contribution are demon-
strated when analyzing the context in which scientific hypotheses are
discovered or proposed. There, abduction stands out as an axial con-
cept for understanding the dynamic of mediations between chance and
121 Polanyi (2012, p. 5).

236 M. SODRÉ
determination in the formulation of a new, scientific theory. It is correct

that this manner of thinking has classical precedents: Kant himself already
sustained that, without intuition, all concept is “empty.” However, in
conceiving of abduction as “spontaneous conjectures of instinctive rea-
son,” Peirce made it into a species of primordial logic of the creative
idea, a point of intersection between science and art. From what he calls
il lume naturale (the natural insight of the laws of nature), he would
start from the divinatory or instinctive faculty capable of creation. The
abductive attitude always makes itself present in the creative moments
of the field of communication studies, or rather, in the moments in
which the adventure of thought manages to circumvent the speculative
relation—therefore, the reflectivity—between society and theoretical
production.
In contrast to the “treatise” form, which is that of relational studies,
the “essay” form—adequate for these formulations—bears the experience
of limits, such as the accommodation of indetermination, of the hybrid-
ization of heterogeneous conceptual forms, of the contamination of the
text, as in recent literature, by scientific metaphors. This can likewise be
considered a “synoptic” vision of the social process, in which different
modes of looking and participating compete for a specific focus, not of
the exact reality of science, but of its allusive presence.
This here would be the case of asking—under the influx of episte-
mology—if the paradigm could be ruling this type of analytic proce-
dure. Kuhn admits to two different meanings in “paradigm,” the first
being equivalent to something like “disciplinary matrix,” understood
as the set of models and values common to a scientific community.122
In the second, however, as Agamben observes, “the paradigm is a sim-
ple element of the set - Newton’s Principia and Ptolemy’s Almagest -
which, functioning as a common example, substitutes the explicit rules
and allows for the definition of a tradition of specific and coherent
research.”123
Agamben seeks to approximate Kuhn to Foucault, although noting
that the latter sought to distance the concept of paradigm as criteria for
scientific truth from its particular concept of discursive regime, which
122 Cf. Kuhn (1970).

123 Agamben (2008, p. 11).
shifts the epistemological accent from the theoretical form (attribution

and recognition coming from an external sphere, from the subjects of a
scientific community) to the plan of a politic of discourse, where it is the
internal regime of power which determines “the mode in which the ele-
ments aggregate themselves to form a set.”
Always at a terminological distance from Kuhn (despite their concep-
tual proximity), Foucault exchanges, as Agamben observes, “paradigms”
for “epistemological figures” or “epistemological thresholds,” affirming
his own concept of episteme, which does not mean vision of the world
nor structure of thought, but rather the discursive formation, the posi-
tivities and the knowledge in their relations with epistemological figures
and the sciences. For Foucault, “the episteme is, first, the set of relations
which can unite, in a determined era, the discursive practices which give
way to epistemological figures, the sciences, eventually the formalized
systems.”124
Agamben says that Foucault’s episteme “does not define, as does
Kuhn’s paradigm, that which one can know in a certain era, but rather
that which is implied in the very fact of existence of such a discourse
or such an epistemological figure (…) It is correct that, in his book, he
[Foucault] seems to be interested, overall, in that which allows the con-
struction, despite everything, of contexts and sets, in the positive exist-
ence of ‘figures’ and ‘series’.”125
Now, if we take the media or mediatization as epistemological fig-
ure—as Foucault did with the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s archi-
tectonic model—we will initially be led to dissociating them from any
specific use to paradigmatically inscribe them on a mode of intelligibility
for the set of informational devices, which assumes a principle of com-
munication, because, in fact, this mode attempts to organize a new type
of common, compatible with the historical demands of technology asso-
ciated with the market.
Mediatization then appears as that which Agamben calls the exem-
plum: “Festus informs us that the Romans distinguished exemplar from
exemplum: the first, which is considered with the meanings (oculis con-
spicitur), indicates that which we should imitate (exemplar est quod simile
faciamus); the second requires a more complex evaluation in exchange
124 Foucault (1970, pp. 322–323).

125 Agamben (2008, pp. 16–17).
238 M. SODRÉ
(not only sensory: animo aestimatur) and coats it with a meaning which
is overall moral and intellectual.”126
The current fashion in media studies generally adheres to this notion
of “exemplar,” in the sense that it elaborates on that which is immedi-
ately visible, that is, the total or partial set of information devices in its
application to the concept of media. It is not that these studies consti-
tute an error, for their pertinence to aspects of market functioning is well
known, as well as their relevance to the knowledge of practical discourse
which composes the history of a possible science of the common.
However, it is when one aggregates the exemplar and the exem-
plum, as in Foucault’s paradigm—the union of these two notions “not
only exemplar/model, which imposes the constitution of a normal sci-
ence, but also and above all exemplum, which allows for the reunion of
statements and discursive practices in a new intelligible set and a new
problematic context”127—that mediatization opens the path to compre-
hending communication as the concept of a constituent dimension of the
common which is greater than that implied on the surface of technologi-
cal devices and their effects.
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Index
A 132, 189, 195, 212, 221, 222,

Abduction, 221, 222, 235 235
Adorno, Theodor, 48, 49, 66, 115, Being-in-the-world, 127, 153, 162,
166 181, 183–185, 218
Affective tonality, 103, 127, 153, 183, Being-physically-together, 160, 162,
219 169, 174, 182
Agamben, Giorgio, 192, 236, 237 Being-with, 133, 145, 160–162, 169,
Althusser, Louis, 22 178, 181, 182, 218
Anthropology, 9, 17, 23–28, 31, 32, Binding, 5, 9, 11, 103, 105, 117,
55, 57–59, 65, 77, 98, 99, 112, 128, 134, 141, 142, 145, 148,
119, 129, 136, 141, 149, 172, 151–154, 157–159, 163–165,
181, 212, 221, 222 172, 176, 178, 183, 190, 199,
Aristotle, 136, 137, 146, 165, 222, 200, 212, 225, 229–232
226 Bios, 106, 108, 122, 127, 133, 135,
Axiology, 35 188, 191, 193, 194, 196–198,
215, 218
media bios, 80, 87, 92, 106,
B 108–110, 191, 193, 195, 215,
Barbero, Jesus-Martin, 53, 79 216, 226–228
Bateson, Gregory, 17, 115, 204, 205, virtual bios, 80, 85, 87, 92, 101,
209, 213, 214, 235 107, 108, 110, 124, 191, 193,
Baudrillard, Jean, 54, 57, 59–61, 64, 215, 216
69, 70, 107, 119, 120, 124, 131, Bourdieu, Pierre, 28, 29, 70, 72, 77,
88
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under 243

exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14497-5
244 Index
Buber, Martin, 149–152, 154, D

178–181, 183–185 Darwin, Charles, 21
Dasein, 95, 153, 160, 161, 181, 183,
184
C Deleuze, Gilles, 30, 44, 59, 70, 102,
Capitalism, 5, 20, 36, 38, 39, 42–45, 109, 119, 122, 196
59, 69, 91, 101, 106, 120, 141, Demos, 227, 232
146, 154, 177, 180 Deregulation, 36, 39, 42
finance capitalism, 39 Dewey, John, 10, 45, 46, 106, 109,
Chicago School, 45, 50, 64 110, 125, 166, 202, 229
Codification, 10, 58, 59, 121, 204, Dialectics, 21, 106, 116, 209, 229,
220, 225, 230 231
Cohesive tie, 50, 159, 160, 196, Dialog, 13, 66, 107, 108, 113, 118,
199–201, 231, 232 133, 147–149, 164, 169, 172,
Common, the, 5, 185 178, 184, 199, 200, 207, 226,
Communication 229
communication/information, 3, 4, Dialogism, 164, 198–200, 230
11, 13, 45, 68, 124, 146, 187, Discourse, 5, 10, 13, 20, 23, 24, 39,
190, 219 56, 59, 61, 63, 65, 68, 72, 76,
communications society, 11, 62, 67, 87–89, 93, 106, 108, 109, 114,
142 116, 123, 125, 128, 131, 133,
functional communication, 11, 13, 136, 149, 152, 153, 161, 162,
56, 71, 109, 142, 145, 186, 165, 171, 172, 178, 180, 185,
187 186, 192, 198–200, 202, 206,
mass communication, 14, 16, 17, 216, 223, 225, 227, 230, 234,
46–48, 50, 54, 59, 69, 98, 168, 237, 238
208, 226 Durkheim, Emile, 18–20, 22–24, 27,
mediatized communication, 11 31, 54, 64, 65, 72, 96, 98, 148,
normative communication, 11, 12 205
Communicative action, 53, 101, 134,
205, 206
Comte, Auguste, 18–22, 65 E
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 128 Ecology, 81, 104, 112, 136, 188, 189,
Consumption, 4, 5, 60, 71, 79, 81, 204
89, 93, 109, 121, 137, 175, 193, Economics, 9, 26, 35–38, 55, 65, 70,
194, 198, 211, 212, 216, 222, 76, 77, 97, 99, 222
226, 227 Ecosystem, 5, 92, 119, 189, 204, 215,
Critical-cognitive, 225, 232 217
Cultural diffusion, 10, 106, 166 information ecosystem, 215
Culture industry, 79, 116, 166, 189, mobile ecosystem, 10
217, 222, 225 technological ecosystem, 10, 188,
Cybernetics, 3, 10, 17, 76, 112, 113, 217
115, 214 Empiricism, 27, 47, 52, 64, 133
Index 245
Episteme, 5, 73, 77, 110, 197, 198, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 21,
237 24, 78
Epistemology, 3, 13, 18, 21, 76, 97, Heidegger, Martin, 25, 30, 59, 62,
100, 136, 197, 212, 214, 236 94, 95, 100, 103, 116, 117, 127,
Exchange value, 44, 195, 211, 216, 133, 134, 136, 140, 145, 146,
217 154, 155, 160, 161, 163, 172,
Exemplar, 237, 238 181–185, 205, 208, 215, 218,
Exemplum, 237, 238 219, 230
Heraclitus, 153, 157–159, 208, 211,
212
F Hermeneutics, 14, 100, 101, 130,
Financialization, 39, 40, 43–45, 69, 136, 140, 190, 234
74, 86, 92, 93, 121, 128, 142,
167, 176, 226, 228
Flusser, Vilém, 64, 112, 113, 148, I
149, 179, 190, 226 I-It, 149, 178
Forum, 48, 50, 74, 77, 80, 108, 166, Immanence unperceived, 145
170, 175, 176, 227 Incorporeal, 158, 195–197, 200, 224
Foucault, Michel, 12, 22, 27, 30, 37, Information, 2–4, 6, 10, 12, 14, 37,
44, 97, 99, 100, 117, 123, 193, 40, 44, 45, 47, 50, 54–56, 58,
197, 236–238 62, 63, 67, 73, 79, 85, 87–89,
Fourfold, 185, 186, 218 106, 107, 111–115, 119, 124,
Frankfurt School, 48, 49, 56, 63, 67, 126, 131–133, 135, 138–140,
116, 166, 167, 215, 217 147, 152, 154, 167–170, 177,
186, 187, 190–192, 197, 207,
214–217, 219, 223–225, 233,
G 234, 238
Ge-Stell, 30, 185, 215 information society, 3, 11, 62, 142
Geviert, 185, 218 Intelligibility, 55, 60, 75, 117, 118,
122, 130, 134–136, 141, 214,
224, 234, 237
H Interactivity, 56, 80, 81, 91
Habermas, Jürgen, 53, 77, 101, 126, Invisible tie, 153, 159, 211, 212
134, 140, 148, 203, 205, 206, I-Thou, 149, 150, 152, 161, 178, 179,
218 182, 184, 199
Habitus, 29, 74
Hayek, Friedrich, 38, 39, 42, 64
Heart, 7, 93, 99, 133, 137, 153, 161, J
174, 230 Jacotot, Joseph, 155, 200–202
intrepid heart, 153, 156, 159, 190, Journalism, 15–17, 46, 54, 65, 67, 70,
230 73, 86, 89, 228, 229, 233
order of the heart, 153, 156
246 Index
K Mediatization, 3, 35, 78–80, 85–87,

Kant, Immanuel, 24, 92, 95, 97, 99, 90, 92, 93, 106, 107, 110, 120,
155, 205, 206, 222, 236 231, 237, 238
Koiné, 101, 165 Meta-critical, 225, 232
Metaphysics, 4, 19, 97, 107, 113,
117–119, 133–136, 155, 180,
L 184, 185, 202, 215
Lacan, Jacques, 58, 70, 118, 119, 200, Methodology, 14, 24, 35, 38, 52, 58,
212, 214, 227 96, 220, 221, 235
Latour, Bruno, 111, 112, 119, 190 Mitsein, 161, 162, 182
Lazersfeld, Paul, 17 Modernity, 5, 9, 13, 22, 24, 40, 44,
Lebenswelt, 101, 134, 140, 148, 205 50, 54, 56, 64, 85, 93, 94, 122,
Lèvi-Strauss, Claude, 23, 24, 26, 30, 125, 137, 138, 141, 153, 164,
31, 57, 98, 99, 129, 181, 203, 165, 171, 172, 192, 217, 225,
212, 234 233
Lifeworld, 36, 37, 87, 89, 100, 101,
104, 134, 136, 140, 141, 146,
148, 205, 218 N
Linguistics, 2, 25, 56–58, 77, 99, 112, Neoliberal, 40, 42, 74, 136, 170, 226
199, 200 Neoliberalism, 39, 42, 86
Logos, 116, 118, 125, 134, 146, 159, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 116, 173,
195, 200 196
Luhmann, Niklas, 101, 112, 113, 135, Nisbet, Robert, 20, 49, 50, 64, 65, 96
204
O
M Occurrence, 2, 6, 19, 55, 79, 87,
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 25–28 122, 131, 149, 151, 158, 184,
Marx, Karl, 4, 19–21, 24, 39–41, 43, 195–197, 202, 218, 229, 231,
54, 64, 73, 120, 121, 123, 208, 235
211, 215, 216, 218 Ontology, 13, 55, 75, 78, 80, 101,
Mass media, 52, 230 122, 127, 129, 194, 197, 219
Mathematics, 12, 37, 76, 96, 97 Ortega y Gasset, José, 51
McLuhan, Marshall, 56, 60, 66, 67, Otherness, 27, 133, 134, 186, 193,
113, 119, 188, 189, 219 213
Media ecology, 80, 188, 189
Media studies, 49, 50, 54, 72, 80, 86,
92, 228, 229, 238 P
Mediation, 1, 5, 6, 12, 20, 45, 53, Paideia, 65, 91, 104, 105, 107, 116,
78–81, 101, 123, 125, 126, 130, 136, 140
131, 133, 137, 142, 197, 203, Paiva, Raquel, 47, 48, 233
209, 210, 222, 229, 235 Panopticon, 237
Parks, Robert, 26, 89
Index 247
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 10, 45, 57, S

61, 78, 79, 221, 222, 232, 235, Scolari, Carlos, 188, 189
236 Semiology, 56, 57, 59–61, 67, 86,
Pestre, Dominique, 17, 18, 89, 90, 112, 130
189, 190 Semiotics, 56, 57, 61, 78
Phenomenology, 57–59, 86, 113, 180 Sensualism, 109, 128
Philia, 145, 154–158, 165 Sign, 6, 26, 31, 38, 58, 78, 108, 201,
Philology, 97, 129 207, 210
Plato, 2, 104, 106, 107, 196 Simmel, Georg, 18, 19, 41, 45, 46,
Polanyi, Karl, 41, 42, 170, 171, 217, 64, 65, 187, 188
234, 235 Sloterdijk, Peter, 64, 104–106, 121
Polis, 61, 65, 105–107, 116, 137, Social Sciences, 14, 18, 24, 29, 31, 46,
138, 153, 157, 165, 191 55, 64, 68–71, 87, 89, 90, 96,
Positivism, 13, 19, 22, 49, 94, 226 97, 99, 103, 110, 117–119, 123,
Post-disciplinary, 9, 94 124, 129, 133, 136, 181, 220,
Post-humanism, 10, 85, 109, 110, 221, 232
112, 135, 140, 190 Social Space, 29, 70, 72, 74, 75, 92,
Post-modernity, 39, 138, 235 102, 187
Pragmatism, 14, 45, 48, 98, 101 Social Tie, 92, 117, 214
Present-at-hand, 161, 162, 183 Sociology, 3, 9, 13, 17–20, 22–26, 28,
Psychoanalysis, 25, 57–59, 70, 74, 75, 31, 32, 49, 50, 55, 65, 69, 74,
108, 118 77, 78, 86, 96, 97, 99, 117, 119,
Psychology, 10, 17, 22, 25, 28, 54, 125, 131, 141, 152, 162–164,
55, 65, 76–78, 81, 99, 123, 181 169, 170, 174, 181, 206, 212,
Public space, 9, 87, 103, 107, 125, 216, 222, 223, 226, 229
126, 131, 138, 166–168, 173, Socius, 41, 156, 198, 200, 222, 223,
197 225, 230
Public sphere, 7, 53, 107, 125, 126, Socrates, 104, 106
137, 152, 165, 169, 229 Stimmung, 103, 127, 153, 183, 219,
230
Stoics, 195–197
R Structuralism, 57, 58, 70, 98, 112,
Readiness-to-hand, 185 130, 190, 234
Redescription, 100, 117–123, 127, Surplus Value, 39, 40, 92
130, 140, 148, 165, 232, 233, Symbol, 5, 207–209
235 Symbolic capital, 29, 30, 74
Relational, 29, 70, 92, 129, 214, 225,
227, 232, 236
Re-reading, 118, 119, 122, 127, 139, T
233, 234 Techne, 107, 139, 155
Rorty, Richard, 14, 100, 102, 117, Theology, 65, 66, 191
118, 140, 233
248 Index
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 18, 20, 162, W

163, 166 Weber, Max, 18, 19, 46, 51, 64
Transcendence, 12, 123, 124, 138, Wilden, Anthony, 12, 44, 45, 81, 112,
147–149, 164, 165, 169, 170, 147, 186, 204, 213, 214
173, 174, 177–181, 200, 203,
219
Translation, 96, 156, 158, 199, 202, Z
203, 214, 234 Zuhandenheit, 185
U
Use value, 44, 211, 216–218, 227
V
Vattimo, Gianni, 30, 62, 118, 134,
185, 186, 219
Virilio, Paul, 55, 119, 224, 230

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GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN

MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

More information about this series at

Translated by David Hauss

Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936151

Cover image: Dong Wenjie

The Science of the Commons is the continuation of a long, academic study.

quality of differences. Dialog, it is worth emphasizing, is not defined as

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Muniz Sodré

4 A Science for the Virtual Bios 85

5 The Organization of the Common 145

Signifying and Symbolizing 207

Unless one intends to develop a science with no name, we believe it

© The Author(s) 2019 1

foundations of the ideological reproduction of modern social systems—

is to reach, by means of information, the human horizon of dialogic

it does not truly matter to know what is communication/information,

and for an eventual line of ethical-political action within the democratic

mediations which develop into the economy, psyche, kinship, politics,

Discusses the possibilities of the establishment of a “post-disciplinary” science

1 This uncertainty, however, led to a nearly picturesque environment, described by leg-

© The Author(s) 2019 9

2 Cooley (1909, p. 63).

5 Miège (August/December 2009, p. 122).

of communication and information always coexisted, in a way that pre-

6 Wilden (2001, p. 11). Translated into English from Portuguese version.

reciprocal discourse (that in which the enunciating subjects are symmet-

7 Vide Foucault (1996).

discussion within the field of hermeneutics: accepting the distinction

9 Cf. Rorty (2011).

While this paradigm has been epistemologically revealed to be insuffi-

12 Craig (1999, pp. 119–161).

14 Calhoun (January/June 2012, p. 279).

University of Columbia in 1912.

However, it is a position which spans from the oldest research to the

19 Pestre (2013, p. 21).

associations, groups) inscribed within a gregarious totality, or in more

for what he truly undertook was the theoretical analysis of economic

20 Nisbet (1984, p. 47).

nature was the object of transformative reflections by researcher-think-

21 Marx and Engels (1951, v. 1, p. 335).

23 Cf. Foucault (1973).

of its discourse. In Durkheim’s theory, this rigor is guaranteed by the

24 Geertz (2001, p. 86).

conceptual reference to Durkheim, whose methodological rigor pro-

In fact, when anthropology asserted itself as an autonomous disci-

in the unconscious the possibility of an objective grasp of cultures which

28 Foucault (1966, p. 443).

must be translated into business terms in order to carry out a corporate

29 Malinowski (1973, p. 10).

Bourdieu.30 Social or scientific, the field is a social space composed of

30 Cf. Bourdieu et al. (2007) and Bourdieu (1983).

the common vocabulary can be converted into a concept if constructed

A division within intellectual work in the field of knowledge is not a

for managerial motives and in private universities—where sociologists,

Nisbet, R. (1984). La Tradition Sociologique. Paris: PUF.

The epistemological problems of the communicational field and the insufficiency

30 Cf. Bourdieu et al. (2007) and Bourdieu (1983).

19 Cf. Lazarsfeld et al. (1944).