Against Legal Fetishism

Mark Neocleous (2006) suggests the idea of a permanent state of exception, or emergency, has “at its heart one basic proposition: that the emergency involves a suspension of the law.”[1] However, Neocleous does not agree with the assumption that this permanent state of emergency is a relatively recent development: “read historically through the lens of emergency power, the current conjuncture is not categorically different to much that has gone on before. As such, the idea that we have recently moved into a permanent state of emergency is historically naïve.”[2] Indeed, continuous emergencies, most often war have allowed for exceptions to established law.

Against the logic of liberalism, which suggests that law can allow for a return from the state of emergency, Neocleous criticizes the “legal fetishism” that suggests law is a universal solution to problems posed by power. This “involves a serious misjudgment in which it is simply assumed that legal procedures…are designed to protect human rights from state violence.”[3] This legal fetishism not only deradicalizes but it also overlooks emergency measures as part of the everyday exercise of power. It is for this reason that a return to normal law is nothing more than a return to political policing of activists, workers, and immigrants. In other words, it is not possible to return to a time when law was not used as power. Do we want to return to the time of the Sedition Act of 1798, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, the Pinkertons, the Alien Friends Act, or the Espionage Act? Neocleous writes “the least effective response to state violence is to simply insist on rule of law… What is needed is a counter politics” against the normality of class power and oppression by law.[4] This counter politics is likely what Walter Benjamin hoped for in number VII of his Theses on the Philosophy of History:

 The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.”[5]

Similarly, Raskin (1976) points out that the United States has organized itself according to emergency rules since 1933, first for economic reasons and later for imperial reason. Going further, he also posits that modern presidential power rests on the “willingness to rationalize class relations…” the recognition that “until 1975, one was not to undermine the military and national security apparatus grouping” and “to recognize [Congress’] legitimizing function and find a means of coopting it into the national security apparatus or the lockstep of the great corporations.”[6]

 

 

[1] Neocleous, Mark, “The Problem with Normality: Taking Exception to ‘Permanent Emergency’,” Alternatives 31, 2006, at 193.

[2] Id, supra, at 194.

[3] Id, supra, at 207.

[4] Id, supra, at 209.

[5] Benjamin, Walter, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 1969, at 257 (emphasis added).

[6] Raskin, Marcus, “Democracy Versus the National Security State,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 40(3) 1976, at 186.

Thoughts on Foucault’s difficulties understanding individuals’ decisions.

Foucault’s perspective is both anti-Marxist and anti-dialectical. In Foucault’s view society does not really have a proper historical progression; rather, society goes through repetitions of the same. Foucault’s primary unit of analysis is discourse – understood as “a system of possibility for knowledge” (Philp:69). His method is to ask what rules allow certain statements to be made and “what rules allow us to identify certain individuals as authors” (Philp:68-69). He is interested in the ways that statements which are considered either true or false impact society.

Key to understanding Foucault is the notion of power. While many other theorists understand power to be something that can be acquired and exercised, Foucault suggests that power runs throughout society. Power describes “relationships in which one agent is able to get another to do what he or she would not have done otherwise” and “operates to constrain or otherwise direct action in areas where there are a number of possible courses of action open to the agents in question” (Philp:74). Because power is an inherent feature in social relations it is always potentially unstable and potentially reversible (Skinner:75). Foucault suggests that “we are subjected to the production of truth through power, and we cannot exercise power except through production of truth” (cited in Philp:75).

For Foucault, power operates relationally through institutions, normalizing procedures, and disciplining practices. Collectively, we become subjects of the power of institutions and power produces the meaning of things. It is through definitions and meanings that modern science disciplines and creates docile bodies that have internalized discipline such that punishment is no longer needed.

Though Foucault is focused on understanding power, he also suggests that there are possibilities for resistance. He suggests that resistance is internal to power and is generated by conflicts between discourses that have produced us as subjects. He suggests that resistance is always localized and operates through the will to not be governed. Because power/knowledge operates on the body, people are produced as subjects. Therefore, Foucault suggests that the body might be a place where resistance can be found. Foucault also suggests that individuals’ ‘agonism,’ or thirst for struggle, ensures they will struggle. Additionally, Foucault understands state power as being “built up from innumerable individual exercises of power which are consolidated and co-ordinated by the institutions, practice and knowledge claims” (Philp:76)

Because Foucault focuses on discourse and power relations it appears that he has a difficult time explaining the decisions that individuals make. This is compounded by the fact that knowledge/power and truth claims impact whole swaths of people in similar ways. However, this impact and the people that it impacts vary with time. Foucault is only able to analyze individual decision in such a way that historical context is ignored. Unlike Raymond Williams and his ability to contextualize decision making, Foucault is focused on discourse, definitions, and power/knowledge such that he is often unable to see some of the real life circumstances that impact decision making. Thus, I believe that Foucault is better able to explain issues of power, society and discourse than individual decision making processes.

Understanding Structuralism Part 3: Louis Althusser, structural Marxism, and Ideological State Apparatuses

Structural Marxism, Ideological State Apparatuses, Interpellation, and the Repressive State Apparatus

Althusser saw the reproduction of labor power as requiring two important elements: the reproduction of the skills required for labor as well as “a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order” (Althusser 1971:132). By this he does not exclusively mean the submission of the working class to the ruling class, but also a “reproduction of the ability to manipulate ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’” (133). This means that schools and other state institutions not only teach skills for production but do so in a way that ensures subjection to the ruling ideology. In the structural Marxist tradition there is a specific understanding of the State. Effectively, the State is the State apparatus, which Althusser understands in the following way: “The State apparatus, which defines the State as a force of repressive execution and intervention ‘in the interests of the ruling class’ in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat, is quite certainly the State, and quite certainly defines its basic ‘function” (137). This understanding illuminates the forms of exploitation of, the subtle everyday domination of, and direct physical violence against the masses. All social struggle, according to Althusser, revolves around the possession of the State and State power. His theoretical goal in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is to advance the theory of the State by making not only the distinction between State power and State apparatus, but to also point out the reality of ideological State apparatuses (ISAs).

For Althusser, the State apparatus is composed of the government, Army, Courts, Prisons, etc., which he opts to call the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA), all of which function primarily by violence. The Ideological State Apparatuses, on the other hand, is comprised of numerous institutions such as the religion ISA, educational ISA, political ISA, communications ISA, cultural ISA, and more. As we can see there are numerous ISAs while only one RSA, which belongs to the public domain, while many if not most ISAs belong to the private. This distinction between public and private, however, is of little consequence for this structural Marxism because, like the structuralism discussed above, it is the function of the system and structure that is of importance rather than the content within the system. The RSA functions through violence, as mentioned, but ISAs differ in that they function by ideology. Like most structuralism, we see here the common trope of definitions through binaries (e.g. RSA/ISA, repressive/ideological, public/private, etc.[1]) continued in that the RSA functions predominantly by repression and secondarily by ideology, while ISAs function primarily by ideology and secondarily by repression. Thus, “there is no such thing a purely ideological apparatus” (Althusser 1971:145). Importantly, the diverse array of ISAs are united because

“the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of the ‘ruling class.’ Given the fact that the ‘ruling class’ in principle holds State power, and therefore has at its disposal the (Repressive) State Apparatus, we can accept the fact that this same ruling class is active in the Ideological State Apparatuses insofar as it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological State apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions” (146).

Thus, the RSA and ISAs tend to work in a mutually reinforcing way. The RSA, by force, is able to secure the conditions that allow for the ideological function of the ISAs. The ISAs are able to secure the production of themselves, the State, and importantly the relations of production, from behind the RSA’s repressive shield.

In the past, the Church was the dominant ISA, now it is the education ISA. Althusser suggests that “behind the scenes of its political Ideological State Apparatus, which occupies the front of the state, what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one i.e. as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has…replaced…the Church” (154). However, all ISAs contribute to the same result: capitalist relations of exploitation. But every ISA does so in its own proper way, the way most appropriate for it as an apparatus. For example, the political ISA subjects people to the political State ideology, democratic ideology in the U.S., meanwhile the communications ISA “cram[s] every citizen with the daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc, by means of the press, the radio and television” (154).

For Althusser, ideology has a material existence. That is, the individual behaves in particular ways and participates in particular practices that are those of the ideological apparatus “on which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen…” (167). To complicate the situation further, “his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject” (169). In other words, ideologies have real consequences in that they are responsible for the ideas that allow people to participate in certain practices or to take certain actions, and the ideological apparatus from which this ideology springs has an interest in the individual taking certain actions and participating in society in a particular way. The individual believes that he is acting on his own will when really it is the will of the ideological apparatus that is priming him through ideology to act in particular way that are beneficial to the ruling class.

Given that ideologies are structures, they are to be studied synchronically, because what is important is not necessarily their content but the function they perform. However, in this case it is safe to say that the fact that bourgeois ideology is internalized by the proletariat is not an ideal situation. Ideology works through what Althusser calls “interpellation.” To interpellate is essentially to “hail” or to call out to someone such that they know they are the one being called on and not someone else. It is in this way that ideology is able to turn people into subjects. Ideology requires not only subjects but Subject. Althusser makes the connection between Subject and God, but Terry Eagleton has suggested that it should be understood more as a Freudian superego, or the ethical/moral other, but it could also be understood as the Lacanian other (Eagleton 1991:144). It is through interpellation that individuals are “called by ideological discourses, which establish specific kinds of subject positions that must be assumed by anyone who wishes to be an individual in order to ‘respond’ or participate in the activities that are governed by those discourses” (Gunster 2004:187). This is important because through interpellation the individual feels that they are being personally called by an ideology, this helps them willingly accept the ideology and become good subjects.

Althusser points out that most subjects work all by themselves, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the ISAs). These subjects “recognize the existing state of affairs, that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise,’ and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience… to the boss, etc.” (Althusser 1971:179). In other words, the individual is interpellated as a free subject so that he freely submits to the requirements (commandments) of the Subject; he freely accepts his subjection, thus he believes he performs the actions of that subjection willingly.

Structuralism is an attempt to understand aspects of culture scientifically, that is, synchronically and antihumanistically. The lack of attention paid to the subject of history by most structuralists has been a cause for criticism, and the refusal to account for human agency has come under fire as well. Additionally, structuralism is a theoretical orientation that necessitates broad inclusion. As we saw earlier, the theories developed by Saussure, Barthes, and Althusser are quite different, but particularly interesting are the ways the latter two theorists approach the question of media power…a topic that will be discussed in Part 4.

Understanding Structuralism Part 1: Ferdinand de Saussure

What is structuralism??

With the arrival of structuralism, the culturalist strand in cultural studies was interrupted (Hall 1980:40). Though it truly arrived in the early 1900s with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, it was the work of Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser that I will be focusing on in this series of posts. However, it is necessary to have some grounding in Saussurean semiotics as well as the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss before moving on, and that is the topic for Part 1 of this series.

Structuralism has been defined a number of ways, but the essence of the theoretical perspective is the attempt to study culture based on structures, understanding the meaning of a particular phenomenon to exist only in relation to other phenomena in that system. Or, as Terry Eagleton suggests, structuralism is “the belief that the individual units of any system have meaning only by virtue of their relations to one another… You become a card-carrying structuralist only when you claim that the meaning of each image is wholly a matter of its relation to the other. The images do not have a ‘substantial’ meaning, only a ‘relational’ one” (Eagleton 1996:94).

Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is often understood as the key work that contributed to the development of structuralism. In it he sought to understand langue (the systemic rules of language), rather than parole (the particular instances of speech.) Saussure hoped to partake in the scientific study of language by focusing his efforts on the rules of the system rather than the uses of speech. Saussure understood language to be a “system of signs that express ideas, a network of elements that signify only in relation to each other. Indeed, the sign itself is a relational entity, a composite of two parts that signify not only through those features that make them slightly different from any other two parts, but through their association with each other (Silverman 1983:6). In Saussurean linguistics the sign is the symbolic representation of a concept or idea. The signifier is what Saussure called the “sound-image” or is the word as spoken or written (t-r-e-e is a sound image). The signified is the concept that the signifier is tied to. That is, when we see the word ‘tree’ we understand what it is referring to, though it is not referring to any tree in particular but rather a general idea of what constitutes a tree. The signifier and the signified combine into the sign, which is distinct from the thing that is symbolized. Additionally, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, thus each sign, if it stood alone, would be meaningless. Signs get their meaning “by virtue of its difference from the others” (Eagleton 1996:97) in the system.

Structuralism is the attempt to apply this linguistic logic to things other than language. For Saussure, and structuralists in general, the system should be studied in its entirety at particular points in time. That is, structuralism emphasizes synchronic investigation of the system at a given point, rather than diachronic investigation of the changes in the system over time. Milner and Browitt (2002) suggest that “what is at issues is not the relation between culture and some other extra-cultural structure of social power, but the social power of discourse, the power of the system of signs itself” (96).

 

An Introduction to Symbolic Interactionism

This piece aims to explain some of the foundational works and ideas of symbolic interactionism. It also aims to briefly examine media power as well as the response to revelations about domestic surveillance through the symbolic interactionist lens.

Symbolic Interactionism

That the media wield great power in society today is nothing new, with the fields of communication and media studies including everything from the study of face-to-face conversations, to the impact of literature on its readers, to the impact of social networking websites on election outcomes. However, just a century ago the field was a mere fragment of what it is today. It was in the 1890s three Americans by the names of Robert Park, John Dewey, and Charles Horton Cooley began to deeply examine communication and its impact in light of the technological advances they were witnessing. What came out of their formulations about the importance and impact of media and communication, among other things, was what would become known as the symbolic interactionist perspective.

Arguably the most famous of the three today is John Dewey. Coming from the pragmatist tradition of philosophy, Dewey felt that the potential of modern communication for the advancement and betterment of society was being underutilized. Additionally, he felt that communication had the capacity to reconcile “individual freedom with social responsibility” (Czitrom 1983:92), an idea that would impact the thought of both Cooley and Park. Setting aside his failed attempts to publish newspapers that sought to combine philosophy, science, and journalism, Dewey understood communication as having an important liberating potential that would allow people to “live in a world of things that have meaning” (Dewey quoted in Czitrom 1983:109). Though Dewey did recognize that the press often worked to serve private ends, “the power of the business entrepreneur to carry on his own business in his own way for the sake of private profit,” (Dewey 1987:270)[1] he also noted that there are some publications that “have an acute sense of responsibility” (Dewey 1987:270). It was in these few publications that Dewey felt the “traditional sense of political and moral obligation might be recovered” (Czitrom 1983:112) especially in the case of organized intelligence and scientific inquiry being made public through those publications. Thus, Dewey recognized the limitations of the press and the economic incentives to pursue profits over social betterment, but he remained tied to the idea that by combining the communication potential of modern media technologies with scientific inquiry, society could effectively be improved.

Robert Park was an influential member of the Chicago School of sociology, after working as a journalist and completing his dissertation “The Crowd and the Public” in 1904. This work “offered the first grouping toward an American theory of collective behavior and public opinion” (Czitrom 1983:114). Park believed that a distinction should be made between the ‘crowd’ and the ‘public, where the former was based on feelings and instincts, and the latter coalesced around the interaction of thinking and reason. In 1921 Park theorized that society could be understood organically (as an organism) and that it had four key components: competition, which resulted in an economic order; conflict, where competitors saw others as rivals; accommodation, where hostilities calmed; and assimilation, where people take on the ideas and attitudes of others in the group, and are incorporated into common cultural life (Park quoted in Czitrom 1983:116). By the mid-twentieth century Park had established himself as a key communication theorist. During the final years of his life Park worked to understand two ideal types of communication: referential communication, how ideas and facts are communication; and expressive communication, where attitudes and emotions are present. It was in referential communication (e.g. news) that Park felt American life could be improved. In fact, he was rather dismissive of expressive communication (e.g. cinema) labeling it a “subversive cultural influence” (Czitrom 1983:119). Like Dewey, Park recognized that not all communication could liberate and improve the lives of Americans, and both thinkers felt that by utilizing the new capacities of media that facts and ideas could be spread in an effort the achieve that goal.

The final member of this trio of early thinkers is Charles Horton Cooley. Though he had the shortest life of the three (1864-1929) his impact on the matter at hand, symbolic interactionism, was the greatest. Though Dewey maintains status as the most notorious of the bunch, Cooley “developed an earlier and far more extensive social theory of communication than Dewey did” (Simonson 2012:4). Czitrom (1983) suggests that although Cooley had a preference for the type of referential communication previously discussed, and had great faith in the positive, progressive potential of modern communication, that he was unaware of how American media was developing, the trend of corporatizing and that trend’s impact on cultural activities. Against this, Simonson (2012) points out that Cooley identified several types of social power, including a tangible social power that derived from organizing capacity, “which may be described as the ability to build  and operate human machinery” (8). Further, Simonson (2012) writes “the capitalist class possesses these and other forms of power, Cooley argues, which range from ‘immediate power over goods and services’ to direct political power, indirect influence over the professional classes and newspapers, and general dominance of the currents of public opinion and sentiment” (8). Thus, rather than understanding Cooley as a theorist that allowed his optimism for the potential of communication blind him to its ills, it appears that he was well aware, and critical, of the way media were used by the capitalist class.

Although Cooley’s contribution to critical understandings of media and power is important, it is for his role in the development of symbolic interactionism that he is most remembered. One of Cooley’s primary concerns was understanding how people are socialized. To understand this, he sought to study persons and society in the imagination. It was from this that his concept of the looking-glass self developed. What this concept described was that throughout the course of its personal development, the self grows and is shaped by the images that other people have of us. Additionally, Cooley developed the concept of the primary group, which was what he used to describe the actual socialization process. Cooley defines the primary group as “those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual’ (quoted in Czitrom 1983:98). Therefore, the self does not grow in isolation, determined biologically, but instead develops with reference to the other members of a society, through the judgements that we feel those other members making against us. Further, it is the primary group of an individual that has the greatest impact on this development of the self. These two concepts are foundational in the development of the symbolic interactionist perspective.

Having elaborated on the history and foundation of symbolic interactionism, it is now possible to examine the perspective itself. Following Dewey, Park, and Cooley, two key theorists are notable for further developing the perspective. First is George Herbert Mead and his understanding of the roles communication plays in social organization. Second is Herbert Blumer and his understanding of the ways humans define and interpret actions rather than merely reacting.

Mead believed, like Cooley, that people are influenced by the attitude that others have about them. It is the “appearance of the other in the self, the identification of the other with the self, the reaching of self-consciousness through the other” (Mead 1934:253) that is required for human social organization. Taking the role of the other allows for social control through self-criticism, which allows for the individual to be integrated into society, or into a particular social group. This self-criticism “is essentially social criticism, and behavior controlled by self-criticism is essentially behavior controlled socially” (Mead 1934:255). Taking the role of the other also allows people the ability to consciously direct their conduct. The organization of society depends on the capacity and ability of its members to consciously direct their conduct and take the attitude of other community members as a whole, rather than just the attitude of a single member – the latter concept is what Mead terms a generalized other. The generalized other can be the anticipated organized set of responses from the society, the community, or an institution, and it is how people are tied to society.

Though Mead recognizes the oppressive potential, and reality, of many institutions he does not believe there is any inevitable reason why they should be so, or why they should be progressive either. He suggests that “social institutions, like individual selves, are developments within, or particular and formalized manifestations of, the social life-process at its human evolutionary level” (Mead 1934:262). Finally, Mead understands society to “represent an organized set of responses to certain situations in which the individual is involved” (270). These responses are developed by taking the role of other members in society, and the individual knows what is appropriate in any given situation because of the ability to take the role of the other.

Herbert Blumer followed up on Mead’s work and coined the term symbolic interaction, for which there are three foundational presuppositions: first, individuals with selves constitute society; second, individual action is built up through taking the role of the other and is not spontaneous; third, group action aligns individual action since the individual takes the role of the other in deciding an action. With these in mind, Blumer writes that symbolic interaction refers:

to the peculiar and distinctive character of interaction as it take place between human beings. The peculiarity consists in the fact that human being interpret or ‘define’ each other’s actions instead of merely reacting to each other’s actions. Their ‘response’ is not made directly to the actions of one another but instead is based on the meaning which they attach to such actions. Thus human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one another’s actions” (Blumer 1969:79).

Blumer points out the importance in realizing that society is comprised of individuals because he feels that “practically all sociological conceptions of human society fail to recognize that the individuals who compose it have selves…” (1969:83). As a consequence, sociologists tend to understand social action as taking place in a particular unit of society, group action/group expression, rather than as the result of individuals “who fit their respective lines of action to one another through a process of interpretation” (Blumer 1969:84) as the symbolic interactionist understands action. Indeed, the symbolic interactionist understands group actions to be the collective action of individuals. So, just as individuals act in regards to a particular situation, groups do the same though it is via the individuals in the group rather than the group having a consciousness of its own. This is important because if the situation is not adequately defined in a single way the members of the group, or the actions of the individual members of the group are not congruent, collective action will be impossible. The implications of this understanding of action and individuality reach far, from politics to social movements. The symbolic interactionist understands “structural features such as ‘culture,’ ‘social systems,’ ‘social stratification,’ or ‘social roles,’ set conditions for their action but do not determine their action” (Blumer 1969:87-88).

Symbolic interactionism can make some important contributions to the understanding of the nature of media power. The perspective would conceptualize the problem of media power by examining the media as important conduits through which individuals can know their world, how individuals develop selves, and against which individual actions can be judged. Walter Lippmann importantly pointed out that the real world is too large for us to know, so we must use fiction to understand it. Therefore, what each person does is based on the pictures in their head rather than on reality proper.

At its core, symbolic interactionism is the perspective that all social happenings are the result of individuals adjusting their action to match the actions of the others. For the symbolic interactionist the media, then, should be of primary importance. While it is true, as Cooley suggested, that the individual develops in reference to how he imagines others picturing him and interpreting his actions, the number of ‘others’ that any individual had to imagine in his time was markedly smaller than the number today, with social networking and various other new media technologies. The power of media for the symbolic interactionist should come from its current status as a core institution in American life. The media give individuals myriad pictures of reality, and many of them are inaccurate. Being a humanist perspective, symbolic interactionism does give ultimate agency to the individual to determine how to interpret, but this does not account for the correct interpretation of an inaccurate picture. The potential for individuals to act incorrectly based on incorrect information increases with media penetration and media inaccuracy.

Understanding that media as an institution operates with a particular social and economic logic should lead the symbolic interactionist to question the impact that media, particularly images, have on the development of self, but also on action. We know the world through the images in our heads, those images are often media representations of real-life events, but ultimately they are fictions. The economic logic of media works to further manipulate and transform events into something easy to consume, sell, etc. If this is true, then the development of the self and the actions individuals take are necessarily distorted, assuming also that the media constitute one of the primary reference groups of the individual.

To understand the problem of media power, the symbolic interactionist might investigate the discrepancies between the representation of an event in the media and how it unfolded in reality. Another question might be “to what degree is one’s self or identity tied to media products, including physical commodities as well as symbolic?” Finally, and most importantly, the symbolic interactionist is not so much interested in the hypothetical impacts of media, but rather the actual impacts, the real, measurable impacts.

In examining the issue of government surveillance programs carried out by the US government, a symbolic interactionist like Herbert Blumer would ask why there is no social or group action being taken to stop it, assuming the surveillance is undesirable. The symbolic interactionist explanation would be that, since group action is actually the unified action of the individuals that comprise the group, there must be an inability to define either the situation or the appropriate action in a single way. Or, perhaps the situation and action is defined in a single way but that the definition is that surveillance is not bad or that no action is the correct action. The next question, which gets more at the power of media, would be to ask either why is this definition unattainable? Or, why is the definition that surveillance is not a problem? In the first case, the symbolic interactionist would understand that the different companies that comprise the media will consider different representations of events to be appropriate, thus contributing to why the individuals might have different pictures in their heads – not everyone consumes the same media. In the second case, homogeneity of media messages can be assumed. To understand inaction, it would be necessary to understand who the individuals in the group are understanding as the generalized other. If it is the media then it is important to examine the messages that are being broadcast. However, no matter what the examination leads to, if the results cannot be empirically verified with the individuals then it is not a course that the symbolic interactionist would pursue. Additionally, the key interest for the perspective as it exists today is collective action (McCall and Becker 2008:9)[2]. If the questions cannot explain the action of the group, they should be reformulated to better meet that end.

[1] John Dewey, Later Works, Volume 11, ed. Boydstrom.

[2] Becker, H. S., & McCall, M. M. (Eds.). (2009). Symbolic interaction and cultural studies. University of Chicago Press.

Becker, H. S., & McCall, M. M. (Eds.). (2009). Symbolic interaction and cultural studies. University of Chicago Press.

Czitrom, D. J. (1982). Media and the American mind: from Morse to McLuhan. Univ of North Carolina Press.

Herbert, B. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. Berkeley (USA): University of California.

Dewey, J. (2008). The later works of John Dewey, Volume 11, 1935-1937. SIU Press.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist.[Edited and with an Introduction by Charles W. Morris]. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London, 18, 1972.

Simonson, P. (2012). Charles Horton Cooley and the Origins of US Communication Study in Political Economy. Democratic Communiqué, 25(1).