Communication and Hegemony:East and West
dillonph who-is-at smtplink.laccd.edu
Thu, 30 May 96 14:21:49 pdt
Since joining XMCA I have lurked, fascinated by the ongoing exchanges
and looking for a place to enter while wondering if some people do
anything other than spend time reading the sometimes copious posts
while generating an equally if not larger contribution. As the old
song says, "Nice work if you can get it."
The East/West thread intrigues me because its topic seems somewhat
distant from the bread and butter, education/communication strands.
Yet the underlying theme of cultural differences, economic power,
hegemony and legitimacy weave themselves in the broader dialogues on
the socio-organizational uses of symbolic communication . Angel Lin's
post from Hong Kong directs our attention to the power and ideological
underpinning of U.S. concern for "human rights"--as opposed to what?
Property rights! One needs only remember how concerned our government
was about human rights in Chile to see the double-faced quality of
this official position.
But isn't there something more to it? Isn't communication also a
vehicle of liberation and hence doesn't model/representation at its
core contain an element of truth? And what about the truly different
forms of human social organization?
The cultural models of *just* social organization, sedimented in
history and embodied as habitus, clearly differ from region to region
throughout the world. The anthropologist Louis Dumont countered the
West's model of HOMO OECONOMICUS with and Indian model of HOMO
HIERARCHICUS. The western concern with "independence" and "freedom"
could thus be seen as ideological expressions of the macro-cultural
willingness to allow *economic* relations to order the society. The
traditional absence of these concerns in India and the importance
attached to fixed destinies given at birth (dharma and the caste
system) correspond, in Dumont's analysis, to an acceptance of
inequality in human existence and the establishment social
hierarchical principles in their own right at the heart of the social
system. Clearly both East and West have their rich and their power,
their powerful and their powerless. Calvinism and its watered down
variants merely phrase the "why" of this in different terms than
Hinduism.
On the other hand, the communicative framework of culture as a medium
for human adaptation (whose evolution was powerfully proposed in
Arne's 1994 MCA publication) can become blocked by the ideological
machinations of economic and political interest groupss in their
manipulation of social and economic relations. In this broader
context I have constantly wondered--what do people on XMCA think of
Habermas' theory of communicative action? Is there a level of
discourse whose function is only to clarify the possibility of
reaching consensus that can transcend the specificity of the cultural
bases of communication? The question has gnawed at me as I have read
many of the threads posted here. I guess in the context of the
East/West dialogue and a lull in other activities I am finally asking
it.
Paul H. Dillon
dillonph who-is-at laccd.edu