VERBING COMMUNICATION: A MANDATE FOR DISCIPLINARY INVENTION

Brenda Dervin

Department of Communication
Ohio State University
319 Neil Hall
1634 Neil Ave.
Columbus, Ohio 43210

614-292-3192 office 292-3400 dept. 292-2055 fax
dervin.1@osu.edu e-mail

This is draftr version of paper which eventually appeared as follows:
Dervin, Brenda (1993). Verbing communication: mandate for disciplinary invention. JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Vol. 43, #3, Summer 1993, pp. 45-54.

Hidden Potentials: Communication's Practical Wisdom

Most of the polarities which divide our field -- universalist vs contextual theories; administrative vs critical research; qualitative vs quantitative approaches; the micro vs the macro; the theoretic vs the applied, feminist vs non-feminist -- are symptoms, not the disease. They are shallow indicators of something more fundamental. Because that which is fundamental eludes us we see both tolerance (a comfortable acceptance of theoretical pluralism) and dissent (ideological and methodological contests) everywhere. It is as of we are all studying a very large elephant. We seem at least marginally aware that we are studying the same elephant while comfortably relegating each of us to our own parts. But every once in a while we bump into each other.
Our contradictions are used both as a measure of our tolerance (after all she does x while I do y) and a measure of our dissent (but she is doing x the wrong way, or her work has these negative consequences). While embroiled in these ricochets between tolerance and dissent, we can pontificate on why media "effects" remain a "black box" or why our research seems irrelevant to practice or why disciplinary status eludes us. It's because "they" use the wrong methodology, wrong theoretic perspective, wrong ideology, wrong.... "They" should become more like "us". What we have is dissent mythologized as tolerance.
At root here is the issue of difference -- both the differences between different sectors of our field and the differences which are at the heart of what we study -- the differences that characterize human beings, their symbolic lives, and their symbolic products. I would propose that it is how we treat the latter differences that confounds our own differences. We are fractionalized into sometimes tolerant camps demarked by polarizations of the sort set forth above. The polarizations revolve around our competing visions of difference -- where to locate it, how to define it, what to call it, and how to look at it.
I would propose that our field and the social sciences in general have for the most part handled difference in ways that are not fundamental. Because of this our theories are weak and we end up attending with much energy to artificial, symptomatic differences, squabbling over turf and status. We end up trying to use the summation of the products of our current work as if they showed the way out. In our periods of tolerance, we call for meta-analyses and syntheses hoping these will point to ties that bind. When they don't we move into one of our periods of dissent. Being unable to deal with difference in a way that fundamentally makes a difference we make no difference.
Thankfully, we are not alone. Witness Rosenthal in his 1984 volume on meta-analytic procedures for social research: "There is a chronic pessimistic feeling in the social and behavioral sciences that, when compared to the natural sciences, our progress has been exceedingly slow, if indeed there has been any progress at all." (p. 1) Or, Bruner's (1990) challenge to what he calls the "segregated parishes" of a psychology fragmented into parts with no common vision.
Ironically, we are not alone in a second sense. Most of the other social sciences in grappling with their own substantial and/or illusive polarities, not unlike our own, point to the phenomena of our field -- communication -- as the way out (e.g. Giddens 1984, Habermas 1987). Bruner clearly does this when he suggests that it is the making of meaning that is the "proper study of man [sic]" (Bruner 1990, chapter 1). One sees calls for the study of communication everywhere. An anthropologist in a recent speech at Ohio State University publicly challenged our field. Anthropology, he pronounced, has found communication and will do it better.
The anthropologist is optimistic. And, some in our field are too pessimistic (e.g. Schramm 1983, Beninger 1990) about the potentials of our field for disciplinary coherency. There is no reason to expect that the other social sciences will change easily, cast as they have been in disciplinary frames now crumbling but with unresponsive structures. Nor is there reason to expect that we, upon confronting our own disarray, can not do something about it if we can recognize that in fact we have strengths upon which we have not yet capitalized. In one sense, it might be said that we can never be a discipline because when the disciplinary frames that are now crumbling fall what must rise are process-driven alternatives based on fundamentals. Clearly, communicating is a fundamental. Thus, everyone may rightly claim it. But, in a second sense, it can be said that if we were not so busy modeling the very disciplinary structure that blinds us, we might find that which is our strength. Why, for example, are the teachings of communication academics of all stripes so useful to practitioners even though often our writings are not? Why, for example, would Giddens (1985, personal communication) say our field is where the action is (even though perhaps not judging us as doing very well with the challenge).
Our field does no better than other academic fields concerned with human beings in bringing the practical together with the theoretic. Yet, no one contests the bounty of practical wisdom embodied in our ranks. Even some of our most theoretic and critical scholars are called upon to make practical judgments in arenas ranging all the way from media design and practice to policy and legal considerations to the conduct of everyday personal, relational, and organizational lives. More often than not there is at least a disparity and sometimes an enormous discontinuity between the guiding academic project and the practical wisdom offered. The gap is filled with the consciousness of the individual communication academic. We call this the theoretic vs applied contradiction and accept it as a given of our field without understanding that this contradiction may mask our greatest strength. It is not that our work ignores theorizing for practice. Rather, we subordinate it to the more pressing academic mission. To theorize the practice of communication would require that we focus on a communication theory of communication practice. We focus, instead, on other kinds of communication theorizing -- sociological, psychological, anthropological, and so on. This essay asks: what if we were able to develop communication theory for communication practice -- if we could bring our practical and our theoretical activities together.
The immediate response -- from within the many caves in our field where our contests are waged -- is that theory for practice is not possible. The reasons would themselves form an array of contradictions. On the one hand, theory for practice would be challenged as too oppressive, prescriptive, modernist, and/or totalizing. On the other hand, it would be challenged as erroneously universalist, leaving important cultural, contextual, and personal factors behind. On the other, it would be challenged as too ambitious and/or too removed from experimental control.
This listing does not exhaust the challenges that can be mounted. Reacting to each of these challenges would require an essay in itself. The important point for purposes of this essay is that these challenges rise out of the same kinds of theorizing about difference that currently plague us with our many unproductive polarities.
It is a major point of this essay that our field embodies a hidden strength and that this strength is positioned at the very cutting edge of the study of the human condition. That cutting edge is the phenomenon of communication. Our hidden strength is that we already know much of what it would mean to develop a communication theory of communicating. To capitalize on that strength we must let go of the theoretical strategies which prevent other fields from looking at communication communicatively and look to our hidden strengths, our foundational interest in how communicating is done.
This essay proposes that we already have within our grasp a variety of coherent theories of communicative practice but the clarity of our vision is clouded with the debris we have imported from other fields. If we can clear this debris away we may be able to reach for a core that in no way will eliminate our contests but will give these contests productive meaning. Our differences would then become informative. They would make a difference. We could begin to turn our attention from unproductive contests (e.g. authority vs chaos, structure vs agency, object vs subject) to productive contests where we argue about what a communication theory of communication would require. In doing so, we might provide guidance as well for a species which seeks ways to transcend the order vs uniqueness polarity.

Metaphors for Difference: Nouns and Verbs

The debates in our field and in the social sciences generally rest on a rotating axis of polarities. The polarizations have between them something common and something uncommon. Thus, for example, the universalist vs contextualist debate focuses on positions that adhere to and challenge the idea that universal theories of human situations can be developed. In contrast, the quantitative vs qualitative debate rages between those who accept vs reject quantification . Those who accept quantification are also more likely to accept the quest for universalist theory while those who use qualitative approaches are more likely to accept the quest for context-bound theorizing.
Because it is normative narrative practice in the social sciences (and more broadly in academia) to make advances by first defeating enemies, there is some utility in looking at how innovative theoretical and methodological work is often built on fortresses of critique. This is as true of advances within literature genres (where, for example, one post-modernist tears down another; or one quantitative study proceeds by challenging another) as it is between genres (as, for example, in the critiques of so-called positivist approaches by advances in qualitative research, ethnomethodology, cultural studies, and post-modern studies (see, for example: Douglas, 1970; Hall, 1989; Lather, 1991; Lincoln and Guba, 1985).
Having identified an enemy is not, however, the same thing as having diagnosed a disease. Unfortunately, however, the metaphors mix and intertwine. If the enemy is positivism, anything that has any of the symptoms of positivism (i.e. quantification, analytic methods, statistical tools) is automatically also called enemy. As a result the polarizations on the rotating axis of contest proliferate. At one end of the polarity we most often find fundamentalism, totalization, modernism, authoritarianism, structuralism, master narratives. At the other end of the polarity we most often find relativism, post-modernism, contextualism, culturalism, post-structuralism.
"Isms" proliferate and in the context of the debate (and the publish or perish mandate that fuels it) words get used so facilely and glibly that it becomes difficult to understand what all the fury is about, particularly when the results of the fury do not seem to advance in significant ways our individual or collective projects.
It is a simplification but one useful for purposes here to suggest that at the center of all these contests is the issue of difference -- where to locate it, how to define it, what to call it, and how to look at it. In our field, and it appears in most of the social sciences, we find that difference is most often defined simply as that which is not the same. The approach is not to identify what difference will make a difference but rather to identify a difference that is not yet claimed as another's turf and to claim it as one's own.
It would be unfair to relegate all of this solely to a turf war for it is as often a genuine concern for difference which has been left untapped and unacknowledged. It is in this context that scholarships of the disenfranchised have had such important force in the social sciences for each has impelled a new voice to the fore as a voice relevant for scholarly attention, a voice heretofore ignored or marginalized.
It is beyond the purposes of this essay to trace the treatment of difference in our literature. The intent here is to be suggestive of our history and pertinent to our present. To do this, I shall focus the methodological moves involved in locating something we define as difference. In the strongest sense, this is a methodological concern which embodies within it acts of defining and labelling and looking. It constitutes a fundamental methodological construction, resulting from a synergy of moves.
Our projects are ultimately about difference. We search for pattern and for deviation from pattern regardless of whether we define ourselves as in the business of description, explanation, or prediction or whether we reject, as does the current author, this too facile division of labors. Some of us search for pattern in a straightforward prescribed manner -- via statistical tools, for example, or authoritative readings, or master narrative theorizings. Others of us suffer qualms of uncertainty for fear our search for pattern disrespects difference. As we get more sophisticated in understanding discourse we begin to understand that even the methodological act of locating difference -- the act of differencing -- is itself an imposition of pattern.
In short, when we difference we must put difference somewhere. In our field right now there are two primary places where we locate difference. One is in culture; the other is in agency (as in the structure/agency distinction). On the surface these look like quite different methodological moves. But from the standpoint of this essay they are construed as being fundamentally identical. They both deal with difference without dealing with difference.
The culture metaphor for difference is really quite simple. Culture is a wonderfully rich term, "warmly persuasive" (this characterization was used by Williams 1976 in his useful archeological dig into the term "community" as well as other "keywords"). When efforts to describe, explain, and/or predict human communication proved alarmingly limited using structuralist frameworks (e.g. class, organizational, personality, and text structures), a reach was made for non-structuralist ways of embodying the differences which were implied by but eluded earlier efforts. Culture has in effect become the latest catch-all. Difference resides elusively there. This is manifested, for example, in quantitative work when cultural factors are added to predictive formulations. It is manifested in qualitative work when, for example, discourse is analyzed as at least culturally anchored if not culturally prescribed.
Culture becomes, thus, a box into which groups of entities (i.e. people, texts) are slotted. The relationship is part-whole. Culture is the whole. Humans and texts are the parts. Culture is frozen at least for that moment, It is conceptualized as noun. The humans and the texts are also conceptualized as nouns. Pattern is framed in these terms as is deviation from pattern. Difference becomes defined as discrepancies between entities conceptualized statically. Culture is at one moment homogenizing structure, at the next resistant difference. Individuals as positioned as homogenized or discrepant.
The structure vs agency distinction (most often identified with the Giddens' 1984 volume although the use here addresses the amalgamation that has become prevalent in our field) is an step forward in that it does not on the surface define agency as deviation from structure. It is important, however, to note that structure still is conceptualized as static, in some senses even more statically than in many conceptualizations of culture. Agency is not structure, structure is not agency. Structure is noun; agency is verb. Constraint and homogenization rest in structure; freedom and variation rest in agency.
The difficulty with both of these conceptualizations is that they still invite the ricochet between fundamentalism and anarchy, authoritarianism and relativism, structuralism and post-modernism. They still posit structure as noun and thus discursively static. Anything which is fluid must thus be in opposition: culture vs individual, structure vs agency, power vs freedom. These ricochets allow the methodology of the moment to advertise itself cloaked in false dichotomies. Interpretive stances must become in this context by definition an abandonment of anything quantitative because anything quantitative must be non-interpretive and ipso facto impositional. Likewise, administrative research resting in structural concerns must necessarily be non-interpretive, anti-critical, and impositional. Alternatively, qualitative analyses must guard against imposition of externally-applied pattern, particularly the non-holistic imposition implied by quantification.
These ricochets confuse method with methodology and theory with ideology. They assume, for example, that those who prefer qualitative approaches don't observe or analyze while that those who use quantitative approaches don't think (Bruner 1990 makes this point when he suggests that John Stuart Mill did not ask those who count to stop thinking). They assume that a particular set of methods is automatically constrained by a certain ideology.
Even when we attempt to move away from these false dichotomies or to more fundamentally move away from the very strategy of polarizing as a way of defining our regard for each other, our contests bind us to a brute portrait. Difference is free; homogeneity is bound. We deny it, often vigorously, but at one end of our axis of polarities is structure, constraint, power, homogenization, order, subject as object; at the other, freedom, variety, chaos, subjectivity. We end up having to choose our entry point. Even in the most recent efforts to bring together different viewpoints as, for example, the critical with the post-modern, the choice remains (e.g. Best and Kellner, 1991). We are unable to stop taking sides and start moving toward multiple perspectives which in the dialogue of their differences might inform each other.
There are many avenues for critiquing the false dichotomies which bind our field. Most damning for us is that these dichotomies lead us away from the study of communication. Pattern gets located in society (sociology), culture (anthropology), individual (psychology); political and economic processes are defined as homogenizing, serving pattern; and freedom is defined reflectively as being removed from constraints, the only place where difference can safely reside. This narrative structure is as dominant in administrative work as it is in critical work.
Because we continue to embody difference as that which is in opposition to structure, we fail to fully capitalize on (even though we give lip service to it) our understanding of the role of communication both in the implementation of order as well as disorder, structure as well as agency, constraint as well as freedom, homogeneity as well as difference. In forcing ourselves to chose one end of the polar axis or the other, we allow our own phenomena of interest to elude us. Because we define both constraint and freedom essentially as nouns, we fail to see that both are made, maintained, reified, and changed in communicating. Because of our noun orientation, we fail to fully conceptualize difference as differencing, as a communicating move, as a fundamental condition of human experiencing.
The irony of this situation manifests itself no more clearly than in the current emphasis in debates on theories of the subject. The question at hand is how shall we conceptualize our human being. Shall this human entity be: cognitive, emotional, spiritual, physical, desiring, unconscious, conscious, discursively created, empowered, or disempowered or some combination. This listing does not exhaust the possibilities nor does it represent any single corner of the debate. Rather, it is designed to represent the diversity in the array and suggest that here again we are focusing on choosing a particular static way (or set of ways) with which to characterize humans. The characteristics are defined as adjectives, attributes of the human nouns.
Discussions have begun to appear about the ever-changing subject but these discussions for the most part posit the subject as moving from one state to the other. The emphasis is on the states, not the moves. Given the nature of the polarities from which we come, this avoidance is understandable. How does one explain a subject who is ever-changing if one has only the conceptual tools of structure (homogeneity) or freedom (difference) with which to work.
What the idea of the ever-changing subject has accomplished is that difference is now being conceptualized as both across time (e.g. one entity differing across time) as well as across space (two entities being different at the same time). What is important about the addition of difference across time is that it begins to force us to attend to difference as fundamental, not as noun but as verb, as differencing. In doing that we can begin to genuinely capitalize on the study of communication.
With such a change, our field might come into its own. Because: difference makes a difference in communication; differences comes into existence in communication; differences rigidify in communication; differences are bridged in communication; and differences are destroyed in communication. Likewise, the structures which attempt to homogenize difference comes into existence in communication; maintain, rigidify, and disappear in communication.
Homogenizing and differencing are reconceptualized as communicatings. Among other possible communicatings are: idea makings and idea repeatings; thinkings and emotings; listenings and arguings; positionings and vascilatings; cooperatings and contestings; polarizings and nuancings; and a host of other ways in which we humans individually and collectively make and break order.
It is the major point of this essay that if our field can refocus itself from communication to communicatings -- from communication as noun to communicatings as verbs -- we can begin to conceptualize in such a way that we can find more relevance (which does not imply more agreement) in each other's work. Further, the move will allow us to begin to transcend the false dichotomies which prevent us from theorizing communication as practice, as the verbings via which humans, collectively and individually construct the bridges across gaps - self and other, self and community, structure and individual, self at time one and self at time two, chaos to order, order to chaos, homogeneity to difference, difference to homogeneity.
Even through in our field we tend to be ashamed of our pervasive and foundational practical side, our field is the field that has always dealt with difference in communicating and that has always accepted both structure and difference and conceptualized communicatings as that which energizes the in between. It is a major point of this essay that we already have the theoretic potential for which this essay makes a call. The potential shows sometimes clearly sometimes through a fog in a variety of recent efforts (e.g. Carter 1991; Craig 1989; Dervin 1991; Tehranian 1991).
In short, we know a lot that we do not know we know. Communicating is where the micro becomes the macro, the macro the micro. It is the in between, the doing, the making, the experiencing. No matter what stripe the scholars in our field wear you can hear them all at some point talking communicatings rather than communication, verbs, rather than nouns. We are where structure and agency meet, both implemented in communicatings. It might be more useful to say we are where structure and agent meeting, both implemented in the agency of communicatings. We are where individual as object and individual as subject meet, both implemented in communicatings. We are where the conscious and the unconscious meet, both implemented in communicatings. We are where hegemony and resistance meet, both implemented in communicatings.

Denouement: When the Species

Our field has already done more to move the social sciences from noun theories and methodologies to verb theories and methodologies than any other field. One difficulty here is that our contributions to other social sciences have been more methodological than substantive. In essence, we have propelled a communicative way of looking at things.
This is a double problem. The social sciences -- particularly US social sciences -- do not value methodology per se. Second, the journals of the social sciences are organized substantively. Our contributions get hidden in the cracks. Another difficulty is that we are so busy taking pot-shots at each other and valuing those in other fields that we have not garnered our strengths or resources. Too, our progress is impeded by the extant disciplinary structure so our movement toward the verbs of communicating is not refined, gracious, or easy. It is being propelled in contradiction and failure. It is impeded by structures heavily in place (e.g. publish or perish) and made worse by the economic and ideological encroachments on the academy which very much characterize our time.
But the bottom line is this: From the beginning we have stood more in between -- the humanities and the social sciences, the social sciences and the physical sciences, the fields within the social sciences -- than any other field. While other fields worry of long time fractionalizations, our disarray is characterized more by an inability to fractionalize stably. Cast in the mirror of current disciplinary structures, all this makes us appear weak. But more than any other field we have been unable to escape the mandate of difference. Psychology can find stable patterns in individuals across time; sociology can find stabilities in societies; anthropology can characterize culture as entity. But we are left in the end with the sternest test of all -- what happens in the elusive changeable moments of human symbolic activities.
While others may be rushing in to claim the ground we have tread, from the beginning we have had to deal with theory and practice, micro and macro, structure and agency. And, from the beginning we have had to deal with process. We have praised process, we have even offered it to the world as practical wisdom. We have only recently begun to acknowledge it and develop it intellectually. It is process, however -- the verbs of communicating -- where we have something to offer that is, if not ultimately unique, at least for now ahead of the others. Because of this, we can lead the way, if only we will. More important, however, as a consequence is that the resulting changes in our work may be more directly illuminating to a species which seems frozen somewhere between order and difference with few effective ideas about how to honor difference while at the same time honoring order. In the long run this is a rightful arena within which to test the viability of a field. Carter (1989, 1991) often makes this point in his long term project focused on the development of communicative ideas about communication. Certainly, the potential survival of the species forms a test far more compelling than disciplinary status. One contribution of our field might be to show how these two concerns could be in actuality one.

REFERENCES

Beninger, J. (1990). Who are the most important theorists of communication? Communication Research, 14(5), 698-715.

Best, S. and Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern theory: critical interrogations. New York: The Guilford Press.

Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carter, R.F. (1991). Comparative analysis, theory, and cross-cultural communication. Communication Theory, 1(2), 151-158.

Craig, R.T. (1989). Communication as a practical discipline. In Dervin, B., Grossberg, L., O'Keefe, B.J. and Wartella, E., Rethinking communication: volume 1 - paradigm issues. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 97-124.

Dervin, B. (1991). Comparative theory reconceptualized: from entities and states to processes and dynamics. Communication Theory, 1(1), 59-69.

Douglas, J., ed. (1970). Understanding everyday life: toward the reconstruction of sociological knowledge. Chicago: Aldine Publishing.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Habermas, J. (1987). An alternative way out of the philosophy of the subject: communicative versus subject-centered reason. In Habermas, J. The philosophical discourse of modernity: twelve lectures. (Lawrence, F., tr) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 194-326.

Hall, S. (1989). Ideology and communication theory. In Dervin, B., Grossberg, L., O'Keefe, B.J. and Wartella, E., Rethinking communication: volume 1 - paradigm issues. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 40-52.

Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge.

Lincoln, Y.S. and Guba, E.G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Rosenthal, R. (1984) Meta-analytic procedures for social research. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Schramm, W. (1983). The unique perspective of communication: a retrospective view. Journal of Communication, 33(1), 6-17.

Tehranian, M. (1991). Is comparative communication theory possible/desirable? Communication Theory, 1(1), 44-59.

Williams, R. (1976). Community. In Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press, 75-76.

AUTHOR NOTE

Brenda Dervin is full professor in the Department of Communication at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio,