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On Communication in the Modern Age:Taylorism and BeyondKai ErikssonPublished online: 14 May 2007.

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JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2 (APRIL 2007)

ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/07/020125–15© 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14797580701362088

On Communication in the Modern Age: Taylorism and Beyond

Kai ErikssonTaylor and FrancisRCUV_A_236100.sgm10.1080/14797580701362088Journal for Cultural Research1479-7585 (print)/1740-1666 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & Francis112000000April 2007KaiErikssonkeriksso@mappi.helsinki.fi

It is possible to see “the speaking machine”, as the telephone was often calledin the contemporary press, as having formed a speaking machine of the wholesociety at the end of the nineteenth century. This is because it provided apattern not only for electric communication in the modern age, but also for thesocial system viewed as a whole. The telephone can be seen as an intersectionof powers in and through which both the modern communication and industrialorder — which are not to be treated as separate from each other — assumed theirshapes. It is my intention here to bring out the path of development throughwhich communication, seen as both the object and means of political projectsduring the age of telephone’s heyday, was given a pivotal position in the self-descriptions of society.

In what follows, I will investigate communication and its changing conditions withrespect to the thinking of the political community in the United States in the ageof the telephone. The telephone can be seen as an intersection of powers in andthrough which both the modern communication and industrial order assumedtheir shapes, and yet it has been largely neglected in the research literature.1

The analysis here is not centred around the telephone as such, as technology —although this aspect cannot be cut off from the emergence of the moderncommunication and social order, but, on the contrary, constitutes its precondi-tion. The emphasis is rather on the changes in and of communication during thetaking shape of the industrial system. The central purpose is to deliberate uponthe relation between communication and a specific communication system, thatis, telephony, in view of a question of a community and its history. Communica-tion never takes place as if detached from the rest of the society, but is alwaysmediated through different communication systems and practices of which thetelephone system and the related cultural forms and discourses are central forthe point of view taken in the paper at hand. In this sense, the analysis presented

1. See Pool 1977, 1983, Fischer 1992, on the spread of the telephone in the US, and the difficultiesand contestations surrounding that.

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here bears a resemblance not only to those conducted by Michel Foucault butalso to those by Friedrich Kittler (1990), who is renowned for his studies on tech-nological “mediality” as a precondition for factual discursive occurrences. MarkPoster’s work (e.g. 1995) on “the mode of information”, concerning the implica-tions of the new media in the light of social theory, also deserves to bementioned in this context. The line brought up in this paper, which finds itsculmination at the system created by Frederick Taylor, is important for it was inthese discursive frameworks where the foundation for considering of communi-cation primarily as a hierarchical system was laid—an idea that marked most ofthe twentieth century. Thus, the paper tries to shed some light on the processduring which the ideas connected to Taylorism, the technology of telephony, andthe images of a political community were fused through ideas about “efficiency”and “hierarchy”.

Communication as a Social Force

The position of the telephone is central in the modern history of communication.Being the first real interpersonal communication system, it assumed at the begin-ning similar functions to the telegraph, but soon turned, after the creation oftelephone networks predicated on the exchange principle, into a general conver-sational medium (Cherry 1977). This personal accessibility brought about theimmense constitutive effect the telephone had on the functioning of the socialrealm. This provided the prerequisites for it to be considered not only as aninstrument enabling new forms of organization to be founded, but as a centralinstitution by way of which the social organism could organize its inherent beingaccording to a conscious rationale. This is why the telephone system, “a greatcommunication machine” (Casson 1910, p. 156), was not just an institutionamong others. Its significance resided in the fact that it allowed social institu-tions to adapt themselves to the changed circumstances of modern society in adesired way: by rationalizing operations and increasing their efficiency. On theother hand, it was to a great extent the very improvement in communication thatset in motion the dissolution of the previous social order.

By the time the telephone system was established it had become clear that theinfluence of the new communications and transportation technology, coupledwith machine industry, on the transformation of the social conditions of Americansociety was fundamental. Specifically, the evolution of the telephone systemalong with other communications systems was an integral part of the transforma-tion of the era’s “information regime”, in the term of Bruce Bimber (2003, p. 74;see also Carlson 2001). Modern communication systems were not only vehicles ofchange, because they formed the preconditions of the thinking of the social reor-ganization itself. This idea was articulated in contemporary writing mostly as anotion of communication as the factual site of the political. It was also theconclusion to which the progressive historians Charles and William Beard, forinstance, came in 1930, for according to them the improved means and forms of

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communication had created an “intellectual climate in which governments makeand execute policies” (Beard and Beard 1930, p. 6). The new communicationsystems were conceived as having become established as the essential environ-ment for political action. It seemed apparent that communication resided in thecore of the modernization process that permeated the whole society.2

The renewal of communication in a new technical mode appeared as a two-pronged question. On the one hand proliferation of connections speeded up thegeneral economy and increased the complexity and fluidity of social and indus-trial processes. Thus it multiplied the “burdens of government” (Beard andBeard 1930, p. 6) and enhanced the need for organization and planning. On theother hand, communication, especially in the form of developed communicationtechnologies, could be seen at the same time to be the central tool for resolutionof this problem.3 This was because communication systems such as the tele-phone enabled better control by increasing the efficiency of coordination.Furthermore, telephone systems constituted in themselves a giant industry thenetwork structure of which provided a recognizable representation for graspingthe new conditions of societal activity in which distant actions seemed to haveimmediate and perceptible effects. Therefore they could be viewed as modelsfor making the governance of society more effective and business-like, whichwas what the contemporary critique desired in opposition to the “corruption” ofthe government.

The instrumental and conceptual means provided by communication systemswere connected with “scientific method”, as successfully pursued in the naturalsciences. One of the most significant features of this method was that it sepa-rated the incidental and insignificant from what was essential and necessary.Thus it replaced contingent, subjective opinion by a “rational” and “objective”procedure that did not leave room for individual interests or preferences. Thanksto the idea that the laws of communication could be unveiled, communicationwas considered as capable of being brought within the sphere of consciouscommand. Let us move now to the Taylor System, as it was within this particularformation that a new rationale for linking communication and law came intobeing.

American System of Communication

The history of modern communication — and thus of community, the idea ofwhich is based on that of communication — is read here as having most partbeen a history of centralization, differentiation and control, although there

2. By “communication” we understand a social activity, which became as a distinct theoretical andpolitical concern during this period and became institutionalized into scientific research and admin-istrative practice. It should thus be understood broadly as referring to a historically changing set ofinterrelationships between a concept, a social phenomenon, different technological systems andultimately certain images of society.3. As for technology in general, see Soule (1932, p. 269).

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have always been movements in the opposite direction as well.4 New techniquesof rational management and control were envisioned as integral to modernsociety at least since the progressive era (Jordan 1994). It was FrederickWinslow Taylor who formulated a sophisticated conception of control whereinthe requirements of efficiency and methodical clarity were combined into theform of a regimented, scientifically managed organization.5 Scientific manage-ment synthesized engineering method, the “scientific” approach, and the previ-ous doctrines of efficiency experts and job designers into a consistent system.It is of utmost importance from the point of view of the history of communica-tion to take cognizance of this development, as it was in factories and work-shops in which the formalization of communication took its first steps. This isrelated to the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century it hadbecome apparent that the possibility for scientific planning of social develop-ment was based on the factual structure of communication, not on its assumedimmutable principles (Karl 1963, p. 60). The Taylor System provided the contextwherein this structure could be translated into specific laws in order to ratio-nally direct not only industry, but the whole nation, as the method of gover-nance was seen to be basically identical in both cases (see Valentine 1912,p. 407). The charm of Taylorism from the administrative point of view was natu-rally that it suggested the possibility of specifying the “one best way” for anysocial activity.

Seen from the point of view of the constitutive, that is, ontological dimensionof communication, Taylorism is to be understood not only as a theory of workmanagement but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a way of thinking aboutcommunication within the circumstances of modern industrial society. Althoughit may seem unusual to make Taylor a communication theoretician, here I amexamining his thinking from the point of view of the conditions of communication.

4. Despite some notable exceptions, such as John Dewey and Charles Cooley, it has been customaryfor contemporaries to consider communication through a rather consistent conceptual model, oftenderived from the rapidly improving technological systems which facilitated control and coordination.However, it was especially Dewey who understood communication in more ontological terms as theprecondition of a community: he conceived community fundamentally as communication, existing incommunication, not just by communication (see Dewey 1917), although he also believed in rationalsocial management. A number of voices speaking up on behalf of democratic governance, as opposedto social control, were articulated during the first half of the twentieth century. For instance, MaryParker Follet elaborated her concern with the democratic government in terms of managerial prac-tice through her writings in the 1910s and 1920s (Miller and O’Leary 1989, pp. 257–8). Later on,Harold Laski of the London School of Economics and Frank Knight of the University of Chicago resistedthe application of science to society in order to facilitate control, yet they failed to reorient thesentiment that was animated by the possibility of scientific social control (Jordan 1994, pp. 157–65).It was not until the 1940s that the rational planning model no longer served as the primary referentfor modernized reform.5. It is not our concern here to delve into the discussion of what was the exact contribution of aputative sole creator — in this case, Frederick Taylor — to a given theory or system and what werethe roles of other people often ignored. It is our task here to investigate the conceptual displace-ments and the administrative practices these ideas provoked, especially from the point of view ofcommunication, not to trace their assumed origins or to identify the right persons to be credited.Taylor suffices to identify the movement in question, although surely he was less the creator ofscientific management than he claimed.

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What is, then, Taylor’s relevance to thought on communication? It can be said tobe at least two-fold. First, by formulating a consistent approach to the workprocess he made communication, for the first time, a legitimate category in thehierarchical structure of work organization. Although he was not the only theoristto incorporate communication into a hierarchical system as a distinct category,Taylor is, however, the best representative of the rationalization efforts of theearly twentieth century, the object and means of which communication increas-ingly became too. Secondly, by systematizing the diverse attempts made at thetime towards a more rational, foreseeable system, the model constructed byTaylor provided a general comprehension of how social communication shouldbe organized according to a hierarchy of rational rules. The Taylor System, basedon differentiation, specialization, and repetition, grew into a general culturalparadigm beyond efficiency engineering discourses proper, becoming a founda-tion from which communication and community began to be thought of as asingle whole.

Taylorism articulated a perspective which enabled communication to bethought of as a regular activity controlled by a general law which could be fullyrevealed in each particular case by the methods of science. Taylor was firmlyconvinced that “laws of this kind, which apply to a large majority of men,unquestionably exist, and when clearly defined are of great value as a guide indealing with men” (Taylor 1967, p. 119). These laws were not, however, imposedon action from above, as a principle foreign to it, but stemmed from the specificprocedures and motions needed in a given task. So the law, gathering communi-cative relations and events under one conceptual whole, was fundamentally alaw derived from the activity in question.

It was by and through the scheme introduced by Taylor that a line between asystem and its “outside” was drawn. The system represented what was rational,ordered, and efficient, whereas its outside comprised all that was not in linewith these characteristics. What exactly was this externality, this “other” of thesystem, then, with respect to Taylorism? By the systematic organization of workand communication Taylor sought to efface (1) practices based on habits, (2)subjective, incongruent activities, and (3) differences in views and inner incon-sistencies.6 This can be perceived as a crucial move in the politics of communi-cative administration and the administration of communication, beingincessantly reiterated, applied, and elaborated later. Through it, the mecha-nism of a system was synthesized and formalized out of its previously heteroge-neous parts and described in terms of its intrinsic nature, seen as a logicalwhole. For the first time in a “scientific” sense, communication assumed athoroughly rational structure.

6. By stressing the engineering method as a model that could replace social contention, rationalreform movement wanted to eliminate, among other things, the power of tradition, irrationalbeliefs, dumb luck, the existing relations of opposition and oppression, partisanship in appointmentsand “politics” in the practice of government, imprecise qualitative judgments, partisan infighting,favors and debts, empty rhetoric, the profit system, emotions, and a “wealth of discussion” (Jordan1994, pp. 39, 40, 85, 114, 115, 120, 128).

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An impersonal, uniform structure was to displace time-consuming and incoher-ent traditional practices that, from the point of view of a rational system, usuallyonly led to confusion, disagreement, and endless negotiations. “Scientificmanagement will mean”, argued Taylor, “the elimination of almost all causes fordispute and disagreement between men” (Taylor 1967, p. 142). These differ-ences of opinion and disordered practices constituted, according to Taylor, theultimate enemy of a perfect system. And it was communication, first and fore-most, which provided the means of overcoming the state of disorder, for “morethan all other causes, the close, intimate cooperation, the constant personalcontact between the two sides [a manager and a workman], will tend to diminishfriction and discontent” (Taylor 1967, p. 143). Yet the infinite exchange of viewsto be eliminated, in this connection, is precisely what could be called politics.From the point of view of Taylorism, politics made the functioning of a systeminefficient, expensive, or dishonest (Karl 1963, p. 19).

It is clear that what fuelled the appeal and spread of this approach wasprecisely the vision of the possibility of reconstructing the whole system as amachine. It was Taylor who gave work and communication, understood in termsof a system, a mechanistic foundation. It tied the manager, workers, factory,machines, and the actions and routines needed for the work to one and the samemechanistic whole. As a consequence, man and his work, as well as the meansand methods of production were all conceived as part of a consistent mechanisticsystem through physical and functional separation of tasks, standardization ofproduction, and through bringing time in as an essential factor in production. Inthis way, if technology was previously viewed, to some extent, as a resourceexternal to work, now Taylor built it into the organization of work itself.

Dynamic Model

Scientific management was consequential in its effects on organization andgovernance in American society (Kanigel 1997, Banta 1993). For public adminis-tration, it was an “inspiration, model, and source”, according to Dwight Waldo(1984, p. xxxiii).7 The wave of rationalization permeated gradually a whole rangeof governmental practices with the introduction of management techniquesrelated to reorganization of offices and rationalization of work flow (Karl 1963,p. 148). Moreover, communication was interpreted along the lines articulated byTaylor in industry and in the systems that made a business of it: the ideas ofscientific management were an essential way of comprehending the natureof the industrial production of communication. The American Telephone andTelegraph Company (AT&T), for instance, actively implemented the theories ofscientific management (see Pool 1983, p. 59). It seemed that if social develop-ment was capable of being planned centrally by using “scientific” methods, so

7. He goes even so far as to propose it having been “a significant, perhaps a major, input to thesociopolitical realm of the United States” (Waldo 1984, p. xxxi). See also Wilson (1980, p. 26).

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the telephone system, insofar as it were to keep pace with development, mustbe similarly centrally directed as a single entity.8 As Roger Burlingame, a histo-rian of technology, put it in the 1940s, AT&T became “a symbol of the collectivephase” (Burlingame 1940, p. 120), for it crystallized the impetus toward scien-tific administration in a way that created a model for social governance ingeneral. This is also why the telephone as a system became important as animage.

The idea of the telephone company as the model for governance had beenpresented already by Charles P. Steinmetz, the most famous engineer afterTaylor. According to him, the government should take as its model the corpora-tion, and thus introduce supposedly disinterested and unambiguous methods fordecision making (Steinmetz 1916, p. 156; see Jordan 1994, pp. 57–8). AT&T (orin general “the Bell System”) was proposed as an explicit model for the success-ful management of an immense organization especially in the TechnocracyStudy Course, a book that encapsulated the central ideas of the technocracymovement in the 1930s (Technocracy Study Course 1934, pp. 221–2). The BellSystem established a pattern by way of which rational coordination was prac-ticed successfully against a background of continuous and uninterrupted trans-formation of the whole system. This was not, however, a novel perception asHerbert Casson, for instance, had emphasized the dynamic structure of thesystem in question as early as 1910 (Casson 1910, pp. 140–1). The exemplarymodel of this giant monopoly as regards style of management and satisfyingcustomers’ needs did not escape other contemporary commentators’ noticeeither (see Brooks 1911).

The question of social change was an immediate political problem of the time,which is why it was vital, as Wallace Donham (1932, p. 26) said in 1932, “to intro-duce into our American industrialized social organism methods of dealing withchange without loss of fundamental economic and consequently social stability”.For the technocratic branch of progressivist thinkers, in any case, the Bell Systemcame to serve as a model for a dynamic organization which mastered its owndevelopment through formalization of action. In so doing it exemplified the basicdesign, as anticipated and planned by the technocrats, for the larger social realmto come. Let us now attempt to outline the relationship between the moderncommunication and the social sphere from the point of view of the rationalreform and especially of Taylorism.

Taylored Systems

From the communication perspective, the rational reform movement wasconcerned with institutionalizing communication in a way that would correlatewith industrial organization. The conditions of communication appeared no

8. See Burlingame (1940, p. 118). This view was linked to the attempts to legitimate the concept of“natural monopoly”, in the light of which AT&T came to be conceived over decades.

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longer as a set of unchanging natural laws but instead for the first time assubordinate to rational design. In this way, as the progressives articulated soci-ety as an administrable whole, the need to take the reins pushed the dimensionof communication as an instrumental means to the foreground. This field ofgrowing technicization, of course, laid the very foundation for the generalpossibility of the idea of being able to control the direction of society.

Communication research took shape in and through this perspective of admin-istration and control. As Herbert Croly expressed the view that the extremeconcentration of industrial and financial power had resulted in the disintegrationof political order and that what should be done was to restore social stability anda sense of national unity (Bowman 1996, p. 81), communication as a socialprocess was immediately politicized. So, communication research was given asocial function within the political movement that was only strengthened duringthe World War II: to provide knowledge about communicative means, practices,and effects in order to maintain the stability of the political system (Hardt 1992,p. 17). Here, there was a notable break with communication as understoodwithin the framework of the natural-rights doctrine of liberty of contract, whichpositioned it as an inter-individual mechanism.

On the other hand, the demands of industry resulted in the development ofmethods and techniques that would aid in rationalizing production systems.Communication, particularly new communication technologies, if they seemedsupport this objective, were integrated sooner or later into this scheme. This isalso why the Taylor System must be seen as applying directly to communicativepractices, too. Taylorism created an environment also for prosecuting broaderpolitical interests along the lines of progressive thinking. As Scott Bowman haspointed out, underlying the practical application of the idea of social balancewas the norm of efficiency. This was the source of the attractiveness and viabil-ity of Taylorism and other efficiency schools: they supported the political causeby providing mechanisms to restore social balance (Bowman 1996, p. 84).Where previously there was a loose set of connections between rationalizedindustrial plants and practices, one should create a comprehensive and consis-tent social machinery. This is how social stability was combined with a hierar-chical principle of organization (Bowman 1996, p. 89), and with this conceptualbond communication as a social process was connected to a hierarchical systemas well. Although this kind of total system was not, of course, brought intobeing, Taylorism provided a model that framed the political discussion on howto retain the beneficial consequencies of efficiency without its detrimentaleffects.

Thus, in his book Progressive Democracy, Croly (1915, pp. 378–405) argued forthe creation of “industrial democracy” within a system of “scientific manage-ment”. These two terms were not independent of each other but, on thecontrary, seemed to be inherently linked by their common goals of efficiency andstability (Bowman 1996, pp. 87–8). If scientific management was first and fore-most a political technique, then its practical application was not restrictedto management of business but was felt essential for industrial democracy in

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ON COMMUNICATION IN THE MODERN AGE 133

general. There was also a second reason why scientific management seemed tobe suitable for Croly as a political technique for maintaining and engenderingdemocracy. This is that scientific management — not unlike Croly’s progressivism— rested on the idea of a single whole. For Croly, harmonious social structureimplied a concept of society as an interrelated and efficient totality (Bowman1996, p. 89). Scientific management seemed to provide a theory not only forsetting it up, but also for continuously thinking about the various social processeswithin one conceptual framework.

Now, along with the move from an individual to a group, the telephone —together with other communication systems — appeared as a technique whichwould engender political communality. If communication constructed thecommunity, as was acknowledged, then by controlling the means and structureof communication one could keep the social as one governable whole. Thisidea, although not often explicitly articulated, was reflected in various formsin contemporary developments. It found expression in early discourses on thetelephone, especially those produced by telephone companies and which firstattacked social conversations over telephone lines. Chat, so telephone compa-nies and probably most of the people at that time believed, only kept linesbusy and conflicted with the idea of their economical use. Therefore, in orderto maintain the “efficiency” of the communication system, chat had to beeliminated. Thus, the editorial of the Telephone Engineer in April of 1920(XXIII, p. 4), for instance, regarded proposals to “eliminate such abuse of thetelephone privilege” as a “brilliant reform [idea]”, though judged it as proba-bly “unworkable”.

Although it is obvious that this urge was motivated partly because of thetendency to continue to think of the telephone in terms of its telegraphic heri-tage as strictly a tool of business (Lebow, 1995, p. 56), there is also anotherreason for this. It is possible to regard this episode as a way in which argumentsabout a communication system attempted to direct and maintain the governabil-ity of the social — at least by establishing limits — following the ideals of ratio-nalization. The rise of efficiency discourses during the time resulted in chatappearing as the enemy of well-ordered communication facilities: like politics,it represented the same endless exchange of opinions that only seemed to under-mine the most economical use of the system. The influence of Taylorism is thusclearly visible.

Communication took centre stage in the organization of community, and thetechnical means of doing this were naturally in the spotlight. Of course, engen-dering forms of the social must not be understood narrowly, here, as in theUnited States this meant largely strengthening and unifying the national basis ofcommunication and, as is the case here, supervising and preventing unwantedpractices from taking place. As this activity, however, took rather prolongedforms which did not change until after World War I when the use of the telephonefor social purposes began to be actively encouraged, systematic monitoring ofthe use of communicative means must be viewed in its politicality: it expresseda concern of the social viewed as a whole.

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Communication and Control

The rise of communication as a theoretical and administrative concern must thusbe seen against this background. During this period communication becameconceived of as a distinct and determinable object of systematic discourse. Ifcommunication proved an attractive object to diverse administrative and schol-arly practices, it was the development of new communication technologies andsystems, coupled with advances in scientific research, that was the context forthis rising interest. What gathered these scientific interests and technical meansof communication into one distinct issue, was the perspective of control, whichwas only emphasized during the World War I. In fact, the birth of communicationresearch as an academic discipline has been attributed to the study namedPropaganda Technique in the World War, written by Harold D. Lasswell in 1927.In this work, the author construed propaganda as one of the most influentialforces of modern world: one which welds separate individuals together into anintegrated mass (Lasswell 1938, pp. 220–21). It has been noted in variouscontexts that the beginning of mass communication research in the 1930s — forwhich the Propaganda book prepared the way — and the break it caused withprevious thinking on communication with its emphasis on empirical research, wasoccasioned by the administrative need for concrete social information.

In this period, the political technologies of communication established, for thefirst time, the theoretical basis of communication viewed as a structured system.“Communication” constituted an object of ever increasing theoretical interestand became part of the administrative structure both in business and politics.Along with the strengthening of the federal government, Taylorism paved theway for the generalization of the idea of planning at national level, with HerbertHoover becoming the first president to develop consistent national engineeringwithin a scientific framework (Wilson 1980, pp. 28–9). Here, communicationserved as a resource in the general process of rationalization.

How, then, was the question of the limits of communication addressed inTaylor? Taylorism distinguished between what was common, that is, objectiveand defined, as opposed to what was not, that is, to its “other”. A mechanicalsystem was not only a mechanism for producing standardized artifacts, it alsointroduced identity and consistency into the system in question by excluding allthat did not belong to this system. Typically, hierarchical systems depend onmechanisms of exclusion. They establish an interior which abolishes and subvertssomething that can be interpreted as politics, aiming at substituting law fordiscussion. Yet, at the same time, the other — what is left out, what is abolishedand displaced — always remains inside the system that establishes the norm — asa trace that cannot be totally eliminated because it is essential to the functioningof the mechanism of exclusion. Thus subjective opinions and habits, the realenemy of an efficient system, constitute, as the human element, the veryprecondition of a system.

For communication, at least within the tradition outlined here, the rise ofTaylorism implied that it became difficult to separate communication from

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managerial problems: the modern history of communication was interweavedwith the politics of governance. What is more, problems relating to managementand control were precisely what allowed communication to appear as a distinctconcept and a category of action; it was through discursive chains of manage-ment and control that communication was conceptualized — first as a tiebetween individuals, then as a mechanism of the social itself. In both cases,though, communication served as a method of engendering and organizing thesocial as a whole and, at the same time, assumed a status of its own in the courseof this very process.

Communication Machine

As it became evident that the parts and processes of society were linked togetherlike the components of a machine, biological analogies were gradually replacedby mechanical ones, or at least were interpreted in the light of them. The imageof society as an enormous, “highly integrated machine” or “mechanism”(Arkright 1933, p. 81) made possible a new understanding of communication as ahierarchically organized system rather than as a set of “organically” developingrelationships. In this way, distinct communicative phenomena, even thoughsuperficially independent of each other, could be understood as ultimately form-ing a dynamic whole. Hence, for instance, according to the abovementionedTechnocracy Study Course (1934, p. 221), “the general function of communica-tions […] — mail, telegraph, telephone, and radio — automatically constitutes afunctional unit”. In social order, each event and instance had its own place andfunction: the concept of the system became the absolute measure of the organi-zation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American society (seeMarcus and Segal 1989, pp. 133–40; Miller and O’Leary 1989, p. 257).

Systemicity was not only a neutral, intrinsic principle of the structure of soci-ety, but also something desirable in itself. Mechanisms that increased systemicityby multiplying interconnections between components of the system was seen ascontributing to the functionality of the whole. Improvement of communicationswas naturally the key goal, the significance of which had become evident by the1920s. Rexford Tugwell, for instance, a social planner who acquired fame partic-ularly during the New Deal, regarded communication, against this background,along with transportation and exchange markets, as the nerve and coordinatingcentre of the economic organism. As it develops, “the organism functions in amore complete fashion, more intelligibly, more as a whole. […] When, then, welink a continent with telegraphy and especially telephony […] we quicken thenervous system” (Tugwell 1927, p. 172). Insofar as division of labour, specializa-tion of function, standardization of technique, and rationalization of operationsbecame the basis for industrial production (Marcus and Segal 1989, p. 140),communication became a system that was definable in mechanistic rather thanbiological terms and prepared the ground for models inspired by the mechanicalautomaton.

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The crux of this changed conception resided in the insight that society had anintrinsic functionality at a systemic level. It was believed that there was morethan one social coordination point and that the harmonious functioning of societywas based on some kind of logic of cooperation at a systemic level. This under-lined the need for an overall centralized control over interlinked parts andprocesses, which society, as opposed to the biological body, did not possess. Thebiological analogy proved unsatisfactory because at the time there was no “brainfor our social organism” (Donham 1932, p. 49). Machinery with adequate connec-tions existed, but the social body seemed not to have a central organ correspond-ing to the physical facilities in order for it to be feasibly likened to a biologicalbody. It was, however, exactly this kind of coordinating organ that was desired,for the social organism “must have a mind” (Donham 1932, p. 31). The idea of acentre implied an unprecedented importance in the operational position of, inthe words of the abovementioned Wallace Donham (1932, p. 49), a “centralthinking agency” as it would “anticipate the slow trial and error of organic evolu-tion”. In this line of thinking, the notion of a rational centre was strengthened.The center did not itself generate the functionality of the system but could onlyuse precepts based on social laws which social research would discover overtime. Hence, the analogy of a machine introduced the idea of system rationalityinto concepts of society in which the theme of a coordinating center figured evermore strongly.

The machine-likeness of communication was reflected in the concept of acommunicative whole that consisted of interconnected parts differing function-ally from each other. This manifested itself after Taylor mainly in the separa-tion of planning from doing, with the communicative relationship betweenthem consisting largely of instructions from the former domain to the latterone. This arrangement established formal and unequivocal chains of commandand by so doing set free the potential for more efficient functioning of thewhole. It emphasized the functional separation of action as the basis of commu-nication: a whole should be as adapted to its purpose and program as possible.Division of tasks was implemented through the way the mechanical assemblagestandardized goals, specialized roles, routinized practices, and regularizedcommunication.

Conclusion

During the period marked by the telephone the conception of communication wasconveyed through a strong instrumental sentiment: whether communication wasunderstood as neutral or as positive, it was in any case a vehicle for prosecutingcommunal interests. Because these interests were thought to be presentable onbehalf of the common — which amounts to saying that a social consensus, basedon an objective common good, was perceived as possible — communication lentitself naturally to the service of the realization of this objective. Thus, it waspossible to continue to consider the community in terms of a unity (if not already

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of an accomplished unity, then at least of a reachable one): it could be presentedby the word “we”, which at the same time referred the subject of the socialhistory.

Seen in the above context, communication has been inherently connected tothe history of control and domination. This is so not least because of the fact thatit was largely in the sphere of institutional intercommunication that the systems,discourses, and images of communication that were subsequently generalizedand established culturally were brought into being. The threats and hopesinvested in these were the main object of commentary by contemporary intel-lectuals. This was emphasized with the improvement of communications whenthe technological “system” seemed to assume a strongly consistent and evenautonomous character. Subsequent developments and especially the advent ofcomputer networks altered, however, this general pattern and undermined theconcept of the dominating centre. Thought about community could not rely anylonger on the idea of a strong centre, method, or law.

Insofar as occidental history has been closely tied to the formulation of evermore precise definitions and formal analytical frameworks, it is inevitably alsoabout the multiplication of these forms and practices and the emergence of novel,mutually incompatible and alternative discourses. This is exactly what GianniVattimo referred to when speaking about the birth of new centres of history inhis La società transparente.9 As a result, although these discourses incessantlygenerate ever more accurate fields of calculation, as Martin Heidegger holds, itis not possible to conceive any general and unifying perspective. This is due tothe fact that rival interpretations render impossible any single and consistentframe of analysis. Although discourses have perhaps become more technical,there is nothing holistic in this as the processes of technicization are numerousand heterogeneous.

In any case, an essential transformation in the ontology of communicationsince the Taylor System seems to have occurred. Hand in hand with the develop-ment of new information technology, with its undermining effects on hierarchicalstructures now viewed as rigid and inflexible, a whole literary genre criticizinghierarchical systems emerged. As opposed to the telephone, informationnetworks do not have any single model to provide in order to render society intoa consistent whole. The contemporary communicative environment consists ofdistinct overlapping and parallel strata that cannot be unified under any singleconceptual principle. Whereas the systemicity pertaining to the telephonesystem still had identifiable boundaries, current computer networks are in astate of constant alteration with continuously shifting boundaries. This is why, inthe age of computer networks, technology and the attendant images and meta-phors forfeit their former consistency and can no longer provide any single, total-izing model for society (see Eriksson 2005). Insofar as “network” is the figurethrough which we can conceive our society today, there is nothing uniform in thisas the metaphor of network resists the presupposition of a closed system.

9. The Transparent Society. Translated by David Webb. Polity Press, 1992.

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It was not until the information technology became common and until the ideaof the constitutive dimension of communication got buoyancy, that communica-tion was possible to be perceived not only as a tool, but also, and more signifi-cantly, as a constitutive condition of community, for now it did not get“objectified” or embodied in a single figure, of which “we” could use to commu-nicate our interests. Rather, it has become our general environment, in which wecan articulate, after having became, prior to it, already articulated ourselves. Inthis way a new opportunity is presented for the thinking of community. It is notnecessary any longer to be considered in terms of a never attainable unity, butrather as a “sharing”, which simultaneously unifies as well as separates, not as abeing or a goal, but as the structureless structure of being.

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