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Communication, Theory, and Htstory Interpersonal Corn m u n icat ion, Theory, and History

by Timothy Stephen and Teresa M. Harrison

What does it mean to take an histori- cal perspective in theorizing about in- terpersonal communication? Posing this question generates two indepen- dent, but related, issues: First, what does history have to do with what we know about interpersonal communica- tion practices? And second, what does the history of a discipline have to do with the process of theory construc- tion in the study of interpersonal com- munication?

With respect to the first question, the answer supplied by traditional pos- itivist methodology is that the history of communication practices is essen- tially irrelevant to the process of knowledge generation within the field. Since what counts as knowledge for positivism are covering laws tested and accumulated over time, “whatever is scientifically relevant [in past in- quiry] should long ago have been ei- ther verified and incorporated into contemporary theory, or falsified and cast into the dustbin of history” (Alex- ander, 1987, p. 11). Thus, history has no bearing upon knowledge genera- tion within a field, except perhaps as a record that might assist in the develop- ment and testing of new theory.

Regarding the second question, positivism holds that histories of theo- rizing in a discipline are also irrelevant to knowledge generation within that field; however, such histories are use-

ful to scientific studies of history itself. That is, law-like interdependencies are assumed to exist between forces in the environment of ideas and the course of development of any particular field. In positivist studies of history, the field in question is the “historical object”; it is “out there” ready to be incorporated, as independent or dependent variable, into the theorizing of the historian-as- scientist.

In contrast to positivism, theorists following a number of interpretive or “social” approaches (e.g., symbolic in- teractionism, hermeneutics, construe- tionism; see Leeds-Hunvitz, 1992, for further examples) have argued that so- cial phenomena, including interper- sonal communication practices as well as theory construction practices, are culturally and historically situated; thus, these processes can be expected to vary across cultural contexts and across time. Although interpretive communication researchers have been quick to follow up with cultural inves- tigations (e.g., ethnographies of com- munication), there have been very few attempts to explore what it might mean to take an historical perspective on interpersonal communication in- quiry (see Lannamann, 1991, and Ste- phen, 1992, for exceptions). We dis- cuss and illustrate a few of the possibilities in this essay.

We begin by noting that the consti- tution of an “historical object” is prob- lematic for interpretive approaches. As Blumer (1969), reacting to positiv- ist methods in social science, first re- marked, “human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings which these things have for them” (p. 2). Thus, it is essential that the histori- cal study of communication phenom- ena proceed from some understanding

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of the meaning of these phenomena for individuals who are participants in the construction of history. Such study can be pursued, albeit imperfectly, through the examination of data pro- vided in diaries, letters, newspapers, autobiographies, and other accounts of participants and observers. The data will never be able to reconstruct the experience of social actors; how- ever, it can provide a basis for discrim- inating among potential motives or in- tentions that form the basis for reasoned social action.

But it is important to recognize, as Hall (1990) points out, that the inter- pretive approach (broadly construed) “pulls in two directions” on the issue of the historical object: “since histori- ans themselves are actors, it follows that a historical account is constituted according to the purposes of the histo- rian constructing it” (p. 26). Research- ers cannot produce historical accounts of communication phenomena with- out drawing upon their own processes of meaning construction. Thus, for ac- counts that trace development of a process or concept over time or that compare past and more current mani- festations of a phenomenon, research- ers construct “ideal types” or “typifica- tions” that “do not represent reality; rather, they offer a way of precipitat- ing out the aspects of reality that may be explained by a given meaningful pattern of action” (Hall, 1990, p. 35).

This need to bridge the gap be- tween the experience of historical par- ticipants and the more modern, schol- arly purposes of the historical inquirer is reminiscent of cultural anthropolo- gists, who, in attempting to make sense of a native’s point of view, rely upon “experience-near’’ and “experi- ence-distant’’ concepts to create a vo-

cabulary for coming into contact with the unfamiliar. Experience-distant concepts are those with which the an- thropologist is familiar, a conceptual apparatus that can serve as a buoy to and from which he or she tacks in an effort to approximate the meaning of experience-near concepts, that is, those concepts that represent the expe- rience of the native (Geertz, 1983). As Bernstein (1983) has pointed out, the juxtaposition of experience-near and -distant concepts is at root a herme- neutic project. Such an enterprise re- quires the inquirer to find resources in language and experience to under- stand what historical participants ex- perienced without imposing his or her prejudices upon them. It requires that the inquirer draw upon his or her own traditions, prejudices, authorities, and historical situation to make sense out of that which is strange because it no longer exists. Thus, just as Geertz (1983) relies upon Western concep- tions of the person to serve as implicit foil for understanding conceptions of personhood in Java, Bali, and Mo- rocco, interpretive historians can treat modern conceptions of communica- tion as implicit foils for understanding historical actors’ experiences of com- munication within their economic, po- litical, and sociocultural contexts.

The interpretive perspective implies that communication processes and practices have not always been the same as those we know and study to- day. And this view requires that we at- tempt to understand historical commu- nication processes from the point of view of the historical social actor, diffi- cult though that may be. What might an historical study of communication following these implications yield? Fortunately, a new generation of cul-

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tural and sociological historians has provided accounts that illustrate the insights that an historical treatment of interpersonal communication might incorporate into theorizing. On the ba- sis of these accounts, it appears that much of current interpersonal commu- nication theory is the short-sighted product of a persistent ahistorical methodological bias.

To illustrate connections between interpersonal communication theoriz- ing and processes of historical develop- ment, we discuss briefly two historical positions that raise questions about as- pects of contemporary interpersonal communication theory. The first his- torical position is relevant to the prop- osition, assumed or discussed almost universally within the discipline’s basic texts, that communication is “sym- bolic”- that meaning is inherently per- sonal. We summarize a line of histori- cal argument that suggests that discourse may have been relatively nonsymbolic in former times; that is, that referents for meanings were at one time located externally to actors. This assessment suggests a need to sit- uate historically a central plank in con- temporary interpersonal theory.

We then consider the historical specificity of the self, a foundational construct in modern interpersonal the- ory. It has been argued that the sym- bolic aspects of communication- the self-referential nature of meaning- emerged in response to the same his- torical forces that spurred the emer- gence of our modern experience of self; that is, as an autonomous being inhabiting a universe populated by other existentially isolated individuals. Historians assert that the “differenti- ated” self is a relatively recent byprod- uct of modernity. After we have sum-

marized this historical position, we will consider the implications for theo- rizing about interpersonal communica- tion that follow from the idea that his- torical context must be taken seriously by communication scholars.

Communication and Self in History The contrast between the character of modern and traditional cultures is of key importance in our historical argu- ment. Modern American culture is generally held to have resulted from a recent (i.e., within the last three centu- ries) and very rapid segmentation of the social world. One difference be- tween modern and traditional cultures is that traditional cultures are charac- terized by low differentiation between social institutions. Distinctions be- tween family and government, for ex- ample, have emerged only gradually in Western societies (Casey, 1989). Simi- larly, one can point to the emergence of sharp lines of division between the natural world and the social world, to progressive secularization (i.e., to the isolation of the world of religious and mystical experience), and to the grad- ual development of the intense plural- ism characteristic of modern societies.

Even the life course itself has be- come progressively segmented. In pre- modern European society, children were considered to be adults in minia- ture, lacking only impulse control and experience, and they assumed adult roles as early as age ten (Mintz & Kel- log, 1988). Urbanization and industri- alization, two primary engines of mo- dernity, moved economic production from the home to the factory and a consequence was the radical extension and redefinition of childhood and, eventually, the creation of adoles- cence. The dramatic elongation of the

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span of life (the average life span has doubled within the last hundred years) has recently further differentiated the life course by creating the senior cul- ture. In addition to divisions of race, ethnicity, and social class, Bellah, Masden, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton (1985) characterize contemporary American society as further divided into a patchwork of “life style en- claves,” which are loose associations of people with similar values, social concerns, occupations, tastes, leisure pursuits, and so forth.

Looking backward in time, one sees an elaborate network of divi- sional lines that structure contempo- rary American culture gradually resol- ving into each other along the way to the colonial period and the relatively undifferentiated society exemplified by the Puritans. Modern Americans think of religion, government, family, and work as distinct contexts. But for the Puritans, religion infused work and government, and government was di- rectly involved in the management of families-even to the point of enacting laws that required single adults to re- side within families (Morgan, 1966); in fact, government was considered a natural extension of family. Social and economic life was governed by na- ture’s rhythms (e.g., the movement of the sun) rather than the arbitrary divi- sions of the clock adopted more re- cently to accommodate the needs of the emerging industrial economy (O’Malley , 1990).

Nineteenth-century industrializa- tion also more sharply divided the roles of parents by removing economic production from the home and taking the father with it; it differentiated blue and white collar labor, divided the week into periods of work and leisure,

and fragmented the work environment by promoting occupational specializa- tion and bureaucracy. The relatively traditional Puritan world of the 17th century was characterized by a degree of consensus unknown in the 20th cen- tury simply because the life worlds of the majority of citizens were quite sim- ilar in this homogeneous, agrarian cul- ture. It is difficult to imagine that a 20th-century American, for whom life is a balancing act between the intense desire for self-definition and the equally intense fear of nonconformity, could be content in such a society. Mo- dernity is expressed in progressively finer segmentation of the social world, the creation of an increasingly differen- tiated (and thereby private) culture, and the socialization of a populace whose patterns of consciousness and communication enable it to function within such a milieu.

Symbolic Communication and the Differentiated Self According to Yi-Fu Tuan (1982), tra- ditional cultures are characterized by objective meaning: “meaning is mani- fest in things, people, and activities; it is not a point of view or the result of a personal investment of energy” (p. 197). Historian Richard Sennett (1976) agrees, arguing that social in- teraction in mid-18th-century Europe “involved spoken words as signs rather than symbols” (p. 79). Sennett notes, for example, that theatrical per- formances were interpreted literally- actors who feigned death were reacted to as though they were actually dead. Even the language of love and court- ship was a fixed system of ritualized lines. According to Sennett (1976), “The phrases carried from one affair to the next to the next” (p. 102)-they

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were not required to convey rich per- sonal meaning as would be the case in modern romance. Sennett believes that discourse in earlier times was uniquely non-self-referential, allowing ideas to be examined without regard for source characteristics. Modernity spelled the end to this, replacing this mode of discourse, which he labeled “public,” with the present system, in which, he argues, it is virtually impos- sible to examine ideas independent of their sources; in which, indeed, every utterance is regarded as a potential window on the character of the speaker.

The idea that verbal or nonverbal communication could be invested with personal meaning and therefore needs to be decoded particularistically did not arise until the early 19th century when American culture had become sufficiently diversified and thereby suf- ficiently private for a strongly differen- tiated sense of self to emerge. Kasson’s (1990) study of the social behavior of Americans in the Victorian period sug- gests that people were preoccupied with the problems raised by the recog- nition that communication was be- coming symbolic-that people might not be who they seemed, that meaning could be the product of conscious ma- nipulation. As the link between sym- bols and their referents relaxed, 19th- century etiquette manuals and social advice columns reflected concern with the problem of decoding others’ behav- ior. At the same time, there are indica- tions of considerable interest in the problem of how to project informa- tion about self convincingly- how to tailor one’s behavior so as to convey a desired social image. At this time there occurred a major change in the rules governing the public expression of

emotion. Public displays of jubilant laughing, weeping, and violent rage were indulged in the 18th century but suppressed thereafter (Kasson, 1990).

Though new at the time, such is- sues of self-presentation are experi- enced by modern Americans as natu- ral elements in everyday life. Hochschild (1983), for example, esti- mates that 30% of American jobs can be classified as involving “emotional labor”; that is, involving the conscious manipulation of emotion and the stra- tegic presentation of self in pursuit of economic ends. Indeed, issues of self- presentation are of fundamental con- cern within our current communica- tion curriculum: the relationship between expression and perception of character, between speaking and credi- bility, between disclosure and inti- macy, the “management” of conflict, and so on. However, historians argue that these problems were simply not relevant within premodern American culture.

minous products of modernity emerg- ing in consequence of the segmenta- tion of the social world and, according to Giddens (1991), in the shift to mo- dernity, the self has undergone “mas- sive change.” As American culture evolved into an elaborate mosaic of specialized contexts, individuals lost their ability to identify easily with oth- ers and they lost their sense of the world as objectively meaningful; that is, as something with firm meaning that most experience in the same way. Isolation and the evolution of personal privacy (see Tuan, 1982) led to a pre- occupation with issues of social com- parison, especially in the newly emerg- ing urban centers. Kasson (1990) notes that prior to the 19th century, of

Personal meaning and self are coter-

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the small percentage of American households that had mirrors, virtually all were to be found in the parlor; by the 19th century, however, mirrors were present in most homes and were diffused throughout the house, assist- ing in the preparation of public dis- plays of self and symbolizing the in- tense awareness of self presentation that was current in the culture. Culley (1985) notes the sudden profusion of women’s dairy writing in the latter 19th century, representing the new awareness of self that emerged along- side the formation the American femi- nist movement. According to Degler (1980), one of the central themes in the history of American social life is this extension of individualism, this “awakening to self,” of women. It oc- curred profoundly with the advent of the urban industrial mass culture dur- ing the 19th century. The number and range of role opportunities available to women was gradually extended, slowly granting access to the frag- mented cultural mosaic previously known only to men.

American culture has evolved from one characterized by consensual expe- rience, objective meaning, and a lim- ited sense of selfhood, to a stage of in- tense pluralism in which social segmentation is so profound that we celebrate it under the rubric of multi- culturalism and in which our focus on self has become intense enough to gen- erate a sustained reaction from conser- vative social critics (e.g., Bellah et al., 1985; Lasch, 1978; Sennett, 1976) who charge that our interpersonal rela- tionships are tinged with narcissism and that America has lost its sense of community. As part of the legacy o f the Freudian psychology that domi-

nated the first half of the century, we have come to see the world as the pro- jected expression of individual con- sciousness-ultimately, our vision of the world is taken to be a subjective ex- pression of ourselves-and this com- pletely reverses the pattern in tradi- tional cultures, in which the individual is generally taken to be an objective ex- pression of the gods.

It is only with life in the modern pe- riod that we begin to see many of the social phenomena that are the stock in trade of interpersonal communication theory. For example, commentators from such wide-ranging perspectives as those of de Tocqueville (1966), Riesman, Glazer, and Denney (1961), and Sennett (1976), agree that in America modernity replaced a gener- ally nonintimate public culture with a culture that gives primary emphasis to intimate relationships, relationships that are created through disclosure of privately held perceptions and mean- ings. Historian Karen Lystra (1989) notes that the creation of romantic love in the Victorian period - with its emphasis on self revelation and emo- tional expressiveness- replaced an ear- lier nonintimate system of marriage. Similarly, Giddens (1991) notes that our contemporary understanding of friendship as an intimate system based on spontaneous choice is a product of modernity. In both of these innova- tions there is an implied shift from a system of external anchors for rela- tionships (e.g., contracts, kin obliga- tions) to one of internal commitments forged and reinforced through commu- nication. The historical specificity of the attention within modern interper- sonal communication theory to issues of intimacy, friendship, disclosure, de-

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ception, commitment, boundary main- tenance, self-presentation, and so on, is thus transparent.

Conclusions The impressive fact is that these sweep- ing changes have occurred, in the main, only within the last two centu- ries-modernity came up with a rush. Given the scope and magnitude of these changes, how is it that interper- sonal communication theorists have al- most universally failed to situate their theories historically? Since so many theories assume a personal, symbolic mode of communication or are di- rectly concerned with self, or, at a min- imum, assume that communication oc- curs within a field of autonomous, existentially isolated selves- how did it happen that theorists of interper- sonal communication failed to take no- tice of macroprocesses of historical change, processes, in fact, that brought into being the very subject matter of their discipline? The answer is straightforward: it is only recently that historians and other social scien- tists have turned their attention to the study of social and cultural practices. The import of the historical picture for the social sciences and humanities is only now beginning to be recog- nized.

is the question of how interpersonal theorists should respond to the need for historical consciousness. Two facts seem undeniable: First, a significant amount of interpersonal theory and re- search appears to be historically spe- cific without being aware of it; and, second, the forces of historical change are not going to stop reshaping the world (Giddens, 1990, refers to mo-

More immediate and consequential

dernity as a “juggernaut”). Unless our theory is responsive, we must confront the possibility of diminishing rele- vance. Just as phrenology is now under- stood as a 19th-century response to deeply felt concerns about how to deter- mine true character in a world awaken- ing to the self and the existential conun- drums of conscious self-awareness, if we do not develop a sensitivity to the re- lationship between interpersonal com- munication and history, today’s inter- personal theory risks becoming tomorrow’s historical artifact.

The process of becoming an histori- cal field will require that we engage in three tasks. First, we must explore and seek to understand, from an interpre- tive perspective, historical precursors to communication practices reflected currently in the field’s empirical litera- ture. Initially through comparisons of past and current practice, and subse- quently by tracing the sociocultural in- fluences implicated in transitions from historical to modem practice, we can begin to be sensitive to trajectories that may identify patterns in communi- cation development. In this regard, it is worth stressing that study of the his- tory of communication practice is only artificially differentiated from studies of present-day practice. As Wallerstein (1987) notes: “All description has time, and the only question is how wide a band is immediately relevant” (p. 314). Leeds-Hurwitz’s (1987) de- scription of the method of “natural his- tory” as applied to dyadic interaction is illustrative in this regard. There seems to be no logical justification for differentiating history and communi- cation as separate spheres of social sci- ence inquiry; indeed, communication should be viewed as an historical field.

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Second, we must link our efforts to achieve an historically informed under- standing of communication to the broader study of social theory, with the objective of reaching a better un- derstanding of the role of communica- tion in history. In a real sense to study interpersonal communication, whether manifest in families, organiza- tions, o r elsewhere, is to study inter- relationships between communication and core processes of modernity. Mo- dernity, as an historical construct, can be described in terms of abstract social processes (e.g., pluralism, secularity, bureaucratization, and globalization) that are, in part, both realized through and reflected in a culture’s communica- tion practices. By locating our inquiry within the context of broad political, economic, and cultural processes that characterize modern life, we create a vantage point from which to observe effects upon communication as well as to consider the role that communi- cation itself plays in the construc- tion of history. As Wallerstein (1987) argues:

The three presumed arenas of collective hu- man action - the economic, the political and the social or sociocultural-are not au- tonomous arenas of social action. They do not have separate ‘logics’. More impor- tantly, the intermeshing of constraints, op- tions, decisions, norms and ‘rationalities’ is such that no useful research model can iso- late ‘factors’ according to the categories of economic, political and social, and treat only one kind of variable, implicitly hold- ing the others constant. (p. 313)

Thus it remains for scholars working in the area of interpersonal communication to begin to relate their work to broader processes that frame it in history.

Finally, we must consider the pro- cess of theorizing itself as it takes place within historical contexts. Al- though interpersonal communication scholars have become increasingly sen- sitive to cultural contexts, they do not appear to have fully appreciated that their theorizing is also located within historically situated intellectual tradi- tions. The interpretive approach sug- gests that choices made in conceptual- izing communication phenomena, in employing particular data collection and analytic techniques, and in the in- terests that research serves are best ex- plained by considering the historical milieus within which theorists work. We are not saying, of course, that his- torical forces determine the direction of scholarship, but rather that theo- rists work in cultural and intellectual contexts that comprise the exigencies within which they make reasoned choices. Becoming sensitive to these choices, and appreciating their in- tended and unintended consequences, creates the potential for “discursive consciousness” (Giddens, 1979); in be- ing able to talk about what theorists are doing, we increase the opportuni- ties for motivated change, perhaps im- provement, in theoretical practice. Herein lies the intellectual contribu- tion of disciplinary histories such as Robinson’s (1988) and Hardt’s (1988, 1989) accounts of the traditions that underlie the current study of mass com- munication, and Leeds-Hurwitz’s (1990) work in intercultural communi- cation. Their histories of the discipline help us to become an historically con- scious field.

Authors Timothy Stephen and Teresa M. Harrison are associate professors of communication

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in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication, Rensselaer Polytech- nic Institute, Troy, N Y 121 80.

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Friendship Matters Friendship and Communication: A Reply to Fitzpatrick (and Rawlins)

by Stuart J. Sigman

I have been asked to step into the dia- logue between Fitzpatrick (1993) and Rawlins (1992) concerning the latter’s book, Friendship Matters. At the out- set I must state that I was impressed with the scope of Rawlin’s work, an at- tempt to synthesize the vast literature from sociology, human development, and communication in order to shed light on the changing “dialectical ten- sions’’ friendship partners experience and must resolve through their ongo- ing communication with each other. Also, my own work (Sigman, in press) is influenced by Rawlins’s and others’ (e.g., Montgomery, 1992) insistence on the value of examining the push and pull that both community and in- dividual expectations hold for human actors; among other benefits, an exam- ination of dialectical tensions, in lieu of rules or grammatical structures, en-

meaning-oriented researchers (of which I count myself to be one), and it raises several key issues about commu- nication scholarship in general.

A number of Fitzpatrick‘s concerns are minor and can easily be resolved. Fitzpatrick (1993) faults Rawlins for not providing details on the single in- terview protocol used with his infor- mants (young children up to senior adults) and for “not interview[ing] dyad partners nor observ[ing] interac- tions between friends” (p. 84). With regard to the former criticism, an ap- pendix containing the interview proto- col might have helped readers under- stand more about the elicitation context of the interview data, as would beginning each informant quote with the exact researcher ques- tion. Several studies point to the cru- cial role played by the interviewer in eliciting informant-based phenomemo- logical data (cf. Briggs, 1986). How- ever, Fitzpatrick misreads Rawlins’s reference to the uniformity of the inter- view protocol; in his introductory chapter Rawlins (1992) notes that “identical interview protocols guided the interactions with all participants within each age group” (p. 3, empha- sis added). There are five distinct age clusters depicted in the book-child- hood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, and later adulthood-with data on the youngest coming from fic- tional accounts and the oldest four coming from interviews; therefore, four distinct sets of questions were em- ployed, not one set as Fitzpatrick sug- gests.

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