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The Unwritten History of Cold War Media Theory, Vol. 26 - 2019, No. 4

Guest Edited by Hannu Nieminen and Arvind Rajagopal

, pages: 347-362

This article discusses the impact of the Cold War and its legacy on international communication research. Critically reconstructing the history of the Cold War in political-ideological terms, it demonstrates that this research area has been characterised by a battle between liberal internationalist theories and theories of imperialism, which has occurred in two stages. During the Cold War, Western liberal notions of modernisation were challenged by theories of media-cultural imperialism. The end of the Cold War led to a return of liberal notions in international communication research—though they appeared in a less Western-centric form—in association with globalisation theory. The article argues that with the demise of the post-Cold War globalisation zeitgeist and the return of major geopolitical conflicts, theories of “new imperialism”, which focus on the interplay between “capitalist” and “territorial” imperialism, offer a fruitful foundation for understanding the early twenty-first century international media and communication order.

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, pages: 363-369

We are still living in the situation informed by the Cold War in art: The Cold War between good and bad, between dispassionate contemplation of the medium and use of this medium for propagation of messages, contents and affects—the war between medium and message. The question remains to what degree it is possible to purify the medium from any content and any affect. To discuss this, I will to turn to the writings by Wassily Kandinsky. Before I show how Kandinsky influenced the further course of the Socialist Realism, I will remind us on the main tenets of his art theory.

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, pages: 370-374

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, pages: 375-390

The question of the scripts that preceded the theorisation of “media” in Cold War era West Germany has often been discussed in terms of the emergence of a novel philosophy of technology since the interwar period. The high-minded humanism of Dilthey's and Gadamer's “hermeneutics”—human minds at full capacity, in dialogue—was forced to admit that the crude material sites of textuality added and warped meanings. A reckoning with the technological advancements of the World Wars and the Cold War as their continuation is often credited with triggering this intellectual shift. One problem with this account is the simplistic construction of the supposedly superseded position. A less complacent historical examination would reveal that hermeneutics, when it was raised to philosophical dignity, was actually a cover for a fragile position. Nineteenth-century philology, as a field marked, in the period, by the rapid expansion of orientalist research, had crucially unsettled previous understandings of linguistic meaning. This unsettling resulted in notions that informed the historicised ontology, and other patterns of discourse, that continue to recur even in recent media theories. The article identifies some of these patterns and, using Friedrich Kittler and Günther Anders as case studies, tracks some of their manifestations.

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, pages: 391-406

The aim of this essay is to recognise similarities between Cold War Hollywood movies and major sources of the US communication theory. By analysing works by Erving Goffman, David Riesman and Paul Lazarsfeld from the 1940s and 1950s and films by Don Siegel and John Frankenheimer it is argued that both science and fiction shared a concern about potential fragility of the human self. Although the sources of fragmentation that were identified in these works were different, ranging from an extra-terrestrial life form and parent–child relationship to fundamentals of human interaction and dependence on others’ opinions, it appears that they all addressed the same problem of the constitution of the self. The films and academic works are situated in the Cold War context of the United States. The claim is made that they can be understood as reactions to Cold War anxieties and the generalised fear of cultural deterioration by uncontrollable forces. Occasionally these works use the theme of fragmented self as a form of social criticism besides making it a central element in social analysis.

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, pages: 407-419

The generalisation of “media” as a term for all forms of communication technologies occurred in part as a result of Cold War history. The implication was that every medium was in some abstract sense equivalent, whether it was print, radio or television for example. Media acquired emancipatory connotations, as if their growth would bring progress in its wake. Alongside, however, paradigms for research on media proliferated, and became increasingly hard to bridge; one outcome was the increasing marginalisation of media and communication studies from the social sciences and humanities in general, even as media scholars grew in number. This marginalization reflected a historical problem, but, interestingly, the remedies sought for it are often theoretical, drawing for example on science studies or on critical race theory. It is as if the Global South and North that have been set adrift from each other, with scholarly sanction from the academy. But for understanding the forms of contemporary globalisation, an account of Cold War media theory’s historical formation is indispensable.

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, pages: 420-434

In the context of the Cold War that affected the first steps of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), journalism education was the topic dealt by attendees from West and East Europe during the 1968 conference in Pamplona, Spain. Paradoxically professors from communist countries spoke openly in an event partly sponsored by Spain's anti-communist regime. Indirectly, the lack of press freedom in the late dictatorship caused some incidents due to some Spanish professors’ critical speeches. Beyond these controversies related to domestic issues, depoliticisation—in accordance with the original spirit of IAMCR—became a key strategy for the conference success as a whole. The election of Pamplona, located in a non-aligned country, as the conference's venue meant a break in the struggle to gain power and influence within the organisation. This story, based on unpublished documents from the University of Navarra's School of Communication, sheds light on several intertwined issues such as international academic cooperation beyond the post World War II East–West confrontation, and press liberalisation in authoritarian regimes through journalism education. It is also a contribution for a more accurate knowledge of the life of IAMCR as a worldwide organisation in the field of communication research.

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