Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Space: The Possibilities and Limits of the Conversation Model

26 Space The Possibil it ies a nd Limit s of t he Conver sat ion Model Angha r a d N. Va l divia When I was asked to write on the keyword space in relation to Jim Carey’s work, I had two somewhat contradictory reactions. One was of flattery. The second was panic and insecurity. Do I know enough to write about Carey and space? I certainly have vivid memories of the courses I took with Professor Carey, who was no ordinary teacher or scholar. Coming straight out of undergraduate studies, I was mostly one of those lost souls barely making sense of what now seems perfectly obvious and, of course, totally brilliant. I envy those who took his courses with the full knowledge and anticipation of his corpus and influence. Carey insisted that intellectual traditions and academic works are a long ongoing conversation—a trope of scholarship as a space of conversation. Mentoring incoming students as new scholars, he urged us to choose our site in that conversation. This choice was based on respect and rigorous grounding, on previous scholarship and conversations and a sense of one’s intellectual relationship to others, present and past. It was not an adversarial location, as in other models that propose to obliterate the opposition, but more of a conversation that had to be carried out and sustained in civility and mutual respect, with room for differences but commitment to Spa c e 27 continuation. That metaphor of conversation as a space for interaction reaffirms Carey’s notion of the ritual mode of communication, a mode highlighting oral culture and time-binding rather than space-binding processes. The shorthand account of Carey’s canonical essay is that it contrasted a ritual, time-bound, conversational model to the space-bound transmission model. The former leads to community, communication, and the formation of a public. The latter foregrounds the coverage of distance and ability to control and leads to topdown , linear communications at the expense of community and ritual. This shorthand, however, underestimates the sophistication of Carey’s contribution. Grossberg asserts that “the binarism between the ritual and transmission has almost been fetishized” (Carey 2006a, 200). Carey responded that he had not intended that binary, adding that his essay was “trying to find a way to say what was neglected and left out” (ibid). Carey did not reject the transmission model but rather infused it with history and culture so as to bridge the gap between space and time. In his daily and professional interactions, Carey deployed conversation as a way to carry out communication and intellectual exchange, as witnessed in his tale of becoming part of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. As a young assistant professor he joined major scholars such as Charlie Osgood, George Gerbner, and Dallas Smythe. He remembered: “You join a program like Illinois and everyone’s got a seat staked out at the table. In some sense, every assistant professor feels the same way. But there was no chair for me. You walk into a room, and everyone sits down, and there’s no chair. Where can I sit? And someone says, you can sit on my lap. But no one was quite the voice” (in Munson and Warren 1997, xiv). The metaphors are so vivid: the lack of space for a new voice, the reluctance to sit on someone’s lap, and having to stand while others are sitting. These questions of location, space, belonging, and relationality remain important throughout Carey’s work. Although he is seldom referenced in contemporary discussions about space, he certainly grappled with the concept since his early scholarship, beginning with his original—albeit never submitted or published—dissertation on Innis and McLuhan. Space, Carey, and Cultural Studies Space is an elusive and packed concept. As dictionaries define it, space is an unlimited expanse upon which everything is located: an empty area, a blank character used to separate words, distance, the interval between two times, place at intervals, a mathematical term. We often think of space in relation to its use in astrophysics, as in “space, the final frontier,” the remark that begins every Star 28 Angharad N. Valdivia Trek episode, announcing the voyages of the starship Enterprise, to “boldly go where no man has gone before!”1 In fact, if one types space in a search engine or a major library database, most of...