Preface
What This Book Is, and What It Isn’t

This book is part of an answer to a question I asked when I was redesigning a course I often teach: how might a class, taken as a unit of which a book is merely part, serve as a vehicle for ideas? I was thinking about how different types of writing express ideas differently. A song, a novel, and a comic book can all recount the same events, but they won’t tell the same story. Likewise, a monograph, an article, and a conference paper can all report the same results, but they won’t convey the same ideas. So how might a class—with its books, its syllabus, its assignments, its regularly scheduled meetings, its questions and answers—become a collective, collaborative text? Who could read it? What would they learn?¹

I wrote this book with these questions in mind. It’s a trace left by the course, so to speak—an echo that gives some sense of what my conversation with my students sounded like. As a result, the chapters that follow might sound like lectures or, if I’m doing things right, turns taken in that conversation. That’s by design, in that I use this book to demonstrate the ideas I describe. In the introduction, for instance, I give an example of two people trying to come to a shared understanding of an object through a series of back-and-forth questions. I engage in similar exchanges throughout this book. The things I want to understand better are communication theory and cultural translation, and those are the things we talk about in class.

Consequently, my first audience has been the students in the course I was redesigning—a third-year undergraduate course on communication theory at the University of Ottawa. They have been worthy partners in conversation. They are smart people, capable of careful and rigorous thought, if they’re so inclined. They’re willing to work, although like anyone else, they object to work that serves no clear purpose. The most meaningful difference between them and me is that I’ve had twenty more years to spend reading: when I make references they do not catch, it is not because I’m smarter but because I’m older. These things—my students’ intelligence and work ethic on the one hand, and the disparity in our respective levels of experience on the other—explain two choices I’ve made in the pages that follow. First, I’ve explained every reference I think even ten students (out of a class of a hundred) might not catch. I’ve also glossed technical terms they might not have encountered before. Second, I’ve used pictures wherever they are useful for cutting through the abstractions to which I’m prone, and to which the subject matter lends itself, especially in cases of metacognition and metatheory (thinking about thinking and theory about theory). I want this book to demonstrate that clarity and rigour go hand in hand, a lesson for which I have my students to thank.

So is this book a textbook? Not in a conventional sense. Typical theory textbooks are secondary sources in that they present concepts others have developed, along with explanations of context and explications of ideas. Perhaps the best in this genre is Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions, by Robert Craig and Heidi Muller, who organize communication theory into seven such traditions. They reproduce original articles and book chapters to give students more or less direct access to the original expression of each tradition’s ideas. But their contribution—what makes their book a textbook—is the work they have done to organize, summarize, and contextualize the readings. In other words, it’s a secondary source.

This book approaches theory differently. When I teach, I want to do more than give students a set of ideas to memorize.² I want to engage them in the process of doing theory—of approaching a question the way a scholar would approach it. In my experience, that means responding to, arguing with, and refining ideas other scholars have proposed. The end result is a new set of ideas. The point of this book is to walk students through these steps—to teach by doing. My model has been the books published for the Open University in England in the 1990s, such as Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman and Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.³ Although they were intended as textbooks, adopting a familiar tone and focusing on the building blocks of theory, they are also about the praxis of teaching. They are shaped by a productive tension between pedagogy and originality: because they demonstrate how to think like a scholar and how to produce new ideas, they must be original themselves. In the same way, the exercise I undertake here is meaningful only if I’ve written a book other scholars will engage with as a primary source, which is to say, a book that offers a novel take on long-standing questions.

Thus my second audience has been other scholars (but just as this book is not a conventional textbook, it’s not a conventional monograph, either). I address two groups explicitly: those in communication and cultural studies and those in translation studies, as I write in the introductory chapter. They will already have read the theorists with whose ideas I engage. They will also recognize the debates into which I enter, even when I don’t name them explicitly. I hope they will take this book on the merits of the arguments it presents, although I also hope they will recognize the way my pedagogical goals shape the presentation of my ideas. If I were writing only for them, I would pursue the implications of certain assertions further, whereas here, I see value in showing students the way arguments work without plunging in to the morass of details that come about when people trained to split hairs go about the business of, well, splitting hairs. For people learning the skills of doing theory, it’s enough to read Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” (as I do in chapter 1) without also having read David Morley’s application of the essay in the 1980s, as well as recent revisions of Morley’s application of Hall’s ideas, and so on.⁴ My students are smart—they are more than capable of doing theory—but they don’t yet have the background to sort through those details. In fact, the point of this book is to give them the skills to acquire that background.

I am responding to a third group, too, namely philosophers of education whose books have influenced the way I think about teaching. I do not address them explicitly. Instead, this book (and the class of which it is part) is itself my response to their work. In particular, I am guided by the idea that

it is time to put what is good in the world—that which is under threat and which we wish to preserve—at the centre of our attention and to make a conceptual space in which we can take up our responsibility . . . in the face of, and in spite of, oppression and silent melancholy.⁵

I like these philosophers because they issue a call to action. (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways,” wrote Marx in 1845; “the point is to change it.”)⁶ I’m responding by heeding their call and trying to put their ideas (and mine) into practice. They insist—and I agree—that teaching matters. It matters because thinking matters, and thinking matters because the world is a mysterious place worth exploring and fighting for.

So what is this book? Neither conventional textbook nor conventional monograph, it is a book for thinking with. To complement it (and complete the class-as-text of which it’s part), I’ve included a version of my syllabus in the appendix. This book is meaningful only if people take their turn in the conversation.

With that, let’s jump in.

1 I’ve long admired the students of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist whose Cours de linguistique générale (1916; published in English in 1959 as Course in General Linguistics) laid the foundation for structuralism. He didn’t write the book himself. His students did, based on their notes from the course. His clarity and their dedication showed what a course, taken as a unit, might be.

2 The same is true of Craig and Muller, I’m sure, but whenever I use their textbook, that seems to be what my students expect to do—despite my efforts to the contrary—as soon as they see a list of traditions and their respective readings.

3 Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman; and Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.

4 David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding; and Sujeong Kim, “Rereading David Morley’s The ‘Nationwide’ Audience.” I’ve adapted this example from Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.

5 Naomi Hodgson, Joris Vlieghe, and Piotr Zamojski, Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy, 19. Other books to which I am responding are Samuel Rocha’s Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person and A Primer for Philosophy and Education and, in a very different vein, William Caraher, Kostis Kourelis, and Andrew Reinhard’s Punk Archaeology.

6 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” thesis XI.