The Irony of The Canon: reflections on the book “Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These?”
In Medicine, Aviccenna, a renowned polymath scholar who mastered the science of medicine, philosophy, maths, astronomy, music and others, has written several books that were regarded as canons. One of his books, titled “Canon of Medicine”, was even the mainstream medical reference in Europe till the late 17th century and not surprisingly the word Canon is a phonatic utterance of the same Arabic word “قانون” (Derakhshan et al., 2019). The word means system of rules created to govern, regulate and provide a structure to any context or field. The irony in reading a book titled with an Arabic word as the main index identified while discarding any contribution to media research from other cultures outside European perspective is striking. An ironic reflection on a book’s name that struck me the moment I laid my eyes on the content, probably because of my own Arabic background. As I am an Arabic speaker myself I noticed the reference.
Like any canon(s), these books aim to establish some sort of systemised approach to a field in order to help advance knowledge and research. However they also face criticism for the same reason, as such canons may to a great extent be selective in nature. Unlike the modern Canons , the Arabic ones functioned as exhaustive detailed referential encyclopaedic sources of knowledge that aim at documenting the governing knowledge about a certain topic at the point of its conception to make sure the next generation are able to build upon its contribution. I could argue, and suggest, that the internet as a medium became our new canon in which the role of modern canon writers would curate knowledge with hashtags and handbooks.
The canon of media research has worked its way to build a chronology or discipline based with emphasis on the term “schools”. The book lacks to position those media schools with the philosophical “schools”. A core function of media is arguably representation. The philosophical schools and political relationship define how we mediate among one another. The relationship between audience and producers of media as an exchange process or relationship where information is the content and medium is the form could be described in each and every school of media research with a state of symmetrical and asymmetrical availability.
The Frankfurt School may resemble an asymmetrical relationship between producers of information and the audience. This might be evident in the access to mediums such as broadcasting technology or access to content dissemination roles such as access to the broadcast platform and messages. Hence the reality in this school is suggested to be available in the producers’ side rather than the media audience side i.e. consumers. An asymmetrical relationship where reality is constructed by those who own the media content and form. One argues that the message in the Frankfurt School in itself holds the reality it represents and consequently acts as an object of reality while consumers are merely recipients of a crafted reality. The message as an object holds the reality in its construction.
Columbia and Chicago Schools arguably belonged to the same philosophical school, that of the Frankfurt one, but with a different shift to its research inquiry and beneficiaries. Here the content and form still are asymmetrical between the producers and consumers of media. The research turned its investigative inquiries to the recipients of messages i.e. content. Arguably, both these schools may have turned into different inquiries and methodologies to approach the same idea that messages in themselves are the reality but with few exceptions that they turned into what and how listeners, readers or consumers of such messages do with the messages. However these schools did not create new realities, they still regarded the messages as an object of reality in itself.
The Canadian School is the first school to depart from the concept of realism in content, i.e. messages, to realism in the form, i.e. medium. Here the messages as objects of representation of reality are constructed by the form as opposed to its content. Since this era has seen new technological advancements, the asymmetrical relationship between producers and consumers of media still tips towards the producers; as they have access to content dissemination and production and yet another asymmetrical relationship.
The school that departed from realism in content to an interpretative reality of messages i.e. meanings, was the British School. It shifted the media representation from pure realism to a subjective one. Culture as a collective individual attitude to the world and everything and nothing (Raymond, 1983) opened the door to adopting media research that acknowledged the epistemic turn in constructed reality. Reality now moved from the message (content), form (medium) to the subject (media consumer), a Kantian or Hegalen approach to the world. Later on to discursive reality and others branched from this school of thought. The school may in this regard followed the epistemic turn in literature theory and philosophy and gave more power to the audience hence a balanced relationship but arguably asymetrical.
This book has opened my eyes on media as a representation domain but also at the limits of media canons at the moment to fully explain the field. Reality and representation encompass the world as we know and perceive hence media research on canon should be tracked as a project from the antiquities till postmodernism or even to the Nihilistic scepticism period we live in at the moment. And above all decolonising western sciences and increasing the voice of the subaltern’s contribution in such a wide field.
References
Pooley, J. D. (2005). Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These?. Journal of Communication, 55(1), 199–203.
Williams, R. (1983). Culture and society, 1780–1950. Columbia University Press.
Derakhshan, A. R., Yousefi, M., Dehghan, S., Zargaran, A., & Khodadoost, M. (2019). Digestion process and causes of indigestion based on Avicenna’s view and modern medicine. Traditional Medicine Research, 4(3), 140.
Spivak, G. C. (2003). Can the subaltern speak?. Die Philosophin, 14(27), 42–58.
