Remodeling Communication: From WWII to the WWW (review)

Gary Genosko’s Remodeling Communication revisits information that you might remember from your university studies’ introductory communications lectures. However, many of the grounding theories—semiotic and signal-based—are here reconsidered in ways that actually make them exciting again. Genosko, who is always such an inspirational writer on communication and media theory, and especially Félix Guattari, is able to find fresh insights and passages to Shannon and Weaver, Jakobson, Baudrillard and a range of other theorists. Taking the idea of communication models as the starting point, Genosko not only offers a history of theory—instead, with subtle nods to the actual graphic notation designs and what it means to think in models and diagrams, he is able to position communication theory as a material, historical escort to media themselves.

What is curious about the idea of communication models—often abstract diagrams of what we would consider material, situated, gendered, dynamic communication events or processes—is how integrally they sit as part of the history and development of technical media. In other words, the increasingly engineered abstractions of technical communications and signal processing and transmission are perhaps themselves one “condition” behind the introduction of models that try to pitch in other abstractive forms the event of communication. Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication, famous for its preference for non-semantic signal before semantic meanings, is in this sense emblematic of the translations across technics and diagrams. This assumption of the primary abstractness (even if completely material) is not however entirely how Genosko sees the way models of communication have worked since World War II. With a meticulous eye for details, he is able, using surprising contexts from the seeming fringes of these theories, to grasp something fresh about the role of theories. Placing more emphasis on Weaver than Shannon is one such example, especially when picking up on the notion of the “discreet girl” (the telegraph operator) at the center of an otherwise supposedly completely engineering-based model of communications. The passage from Weaver that Genosko quotes is worth reproducing here:

An engineering communication theory is just like a very proper and discreet girl accepting your telegram. She pays no attention to the meaning, whether it is sad, or joyous, or embarrassing. But she must be prepared to deal with all that come to her desk. This idea that a communication system ought to try to deal with all possible messages, and that the intelligent way to do this is to base design on statistical character of the source, is surely not without significance for this communication in general

(p. 37).

As Genosko elaborates, paying attention to such features incorporated as part of the models is a way to account for all that happens at the fringes of formal theories of communication—the dimensions of “gender and hierarchy of power/knowledge” (p. 37)—and hence to position such theories historically. In this case, a special reference point becomes the telegraph system.

A similar methodology of attention to the material details part of production of models and theory is evident in other case studies of Genosko’s book. A case in point is how he picks up the various reproductions of Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding.” What Genosko points out is that the most-often-referenced and -read versions of that paper are the shortened reproductions in various cultural studies readers, which neglect a range of important links within that model. Such include for instance important references to Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital.

Remodeling Communication works gradually through a discussion of the phatic function of communication (Jakobson) to hammer home key points of transmission as change: transmission is transformation and hence is best understood itself as transductive event. At least by this point Genosko’s Guattarian way of thinking about media and culture comes clear, when he starts to elaborate the multiple materialities (mixed semiotics) of screen cultures:

A television broadcast is an extremely complex and variable event; what...