ACCOZZAGLIA

Prepared 16 February 2009 for Prof. Rick Salutin (UNI221H1S, University of Toronto).

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Discussion

What is striking about Harold Innis’s speeches and Noam Chomsky’s interviews is not so much what each articulates as a systemic control of temporal currency to obscure broader implications of spatial authority, but rather that both initially chose to articulate these ideas in an oral capacity before their audiences. Their observations on control over space and time are manifest by the most sundry of our daily informational transactions. In other words, once a reader, the recipient, learns to parse information critically (i.e., how textual information is procured, arranged, disseminated and, ultimately, consumed) then the uncritical consumption and acceptance of information as knowledge becomes increasingly difficult (Chomsky, 2007, p. 7). This is the idea advanced by both scholars, though neither suggests a joy in so underscoring.

This especially becomes germane when examining non-negotiable structures of monological communication, such as the press, party organs, or religious authorities (Chomsky, p. 85; Innis, 2008, pp. 14, 78, 79). In turn, this shapes, validates, and rationalizes systems of meaning that are negotiated by receiver acceptance. It establishes a hegemonic dialectic wherein authority may be critiqued and questioned under frameworks sanctioned by that authority but is nevertheless venerated and not subject to subversion — that is, not without consequence. Written systems of code (law) affirm these authorities, enabling a repeatable consistency for that information over greater spans of space; the priority of time, meanwhile, is that of currency, owing to a relevance of which codes are now authoritative (Innis, p. 130). News is manifest by its currency of time, since it is constantly replaced by newer events (Chomsky, pp. 152–3; Innis, p. 79). Concern for current events derives from a significance of geography: a war elsewhere, legislative activity at the capital, or oddball, back page stories — despite occurring way off in a remote backwater and being of marginal relevance to daily life locally.

Innis confronted relationships between written communication and empire (or “civilization”) by exercising the opportunity to encapsulate his brief history of history to establish correlations between major power upheavals and watershed technological shifts that made text easier to reproduce and distribute (p. 31). He concluded that when written forms of communication were designed for longevity or were confined to an elite few who could afford means of accessing (and possessing an understanding of) the written word, the remainder of society, not privy to these writing systems, functioned by an oral tradition — a vernacular negotiated daily between people (Ibid., p. 31). In so doing, the relevance of spatial relationships were secondary to a temporal stability managed by centralized power — indeed, timekeeping itself was confined to and monopolized by those few who possessed the means to read (Ibid., pp. 66–7). Only once accessibility to textual communication (and correlating higher rates of literacy) improved did time acquiesce into a role dominated by currency and linear interpretation; the dissemination of this cheaply reproducible text generates socio-political cohesion across territorial space (e.g., paper, newsprint, telegraph, radio, TV, internet, etc.): “Printing has emphasized vernaculars and divisions between states based on language without implying a concern with time” (Ibid., p. 76).

Chomsky’s approach focusses more on ways of critically reading current events as reported by news media and how the manner by which those events are conveyed in turn inform power dynamics more so than they do an objective, unbiased account. He is, in effect, suggesting tools for parsing written communication that is designed to obscure overarching lessons learned over the course of time. To do this, he argued, debate must be encouraged, “but within a system of unspoken presuppositions that incorporate the basic principles of the doctrinal system” (Chomsky, p. 110). By so doing, the recipient of information can both begin to visualize overarching frameworks (Chomsky calls these “presuppositions”) that dictate power relationships, and critically examine how those relationships over time behave in a transparently hegemonic capacity — particularly how textual dissemination reductively limits comprehending complex circumstances and eliminates recognition of its control over discourse: “In a really well indoctrinated society, you cannot consider unthinkable thoughts” (Ibid., p. 117). Innis’s observations on emphasis of space and empire concur here.

Both scholars, however, diverge on cultural, social and civil consequences advanced by this dominance of written communication. Innis expresses pessimism, ascribing an ever-accelerating reliance on written forms of communication to a decline in “western” civilization, adding that “mechanized knowledge ha[s] all but destroyed the scholar’s influence (Innis, pp. 3, 30). Chomsky, meanwhile, exercises a more pragmatic approach and behoves that the recipient — the audience — learns to parse what is read with a critical component of scepticism and assessing whose interests the delivered message serves, rather than whether the message is unbiased.

To acknowledge that the way we consume, process, and filter knowledge is predicated less by face-to-face, vernacular means than by a reliance upon the written word indicates that we are comparatively less inclined to engage in oral exchanges meted by personal interactions. This is not to say we have forgotten how to speak to one another, but increasingly the ease with which technological advances have enabled written communication often supersedes an imperative to face one another, and it deteriorates how much we could genuinely learn from one another. Such oral exchanges can favourably, if not readily, lend to negotiating and understanding systems of meaning which would otherwise find themselves lost in the condensed shorthand of textuality.

Readings

Chomsky, Noam. 2007. What we say goes: conversation on U.S. power in a changing world (interviews with David Barsamian). New York: Metropolitan Books.

Innis, Harold A. 2008. The bias of communication (2nd ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.