are now available at relatively low capital costs. Beyond these there is a dynamic area of technical development which is socially and economically more ambiguous. From computer typesetting to the electronically direct composition of type—and beyond these, perhaps, though it is still some years away, direct electronic interchange, each way, between voice and print—there are now changes in the means of communicative production which at once affect class relations within the processes, and lead also to changes—indeed a rapid rise, at least in the first phase —in the necessary level of capitalization. Thus the relationship between writing and printing, developed in traditional technology, has been an outstanding instance of what is at once a technical and a social division of labour, in which writers do not print, but that is seen as only a technicality, and, crucially, printers do not write but are seen as merely instrumental in the transmission of the writing of others. The class relations within newspapers, for example—between editors and journalists who have things to say and who write them, and a range of craftsmen who then technically produce and reproduce the words of these others—are obvious and now acute. There is an ideological crisis within the capitalist press whenever, on important occasions, print craftsmen assert their presence as more than instrumentality, refusing to print what others have written, or, more rarely, offering themselves to write as well as print. This is denounced, within bourgeois ideology, as a threat to the ‘freedom of the press’, but the terms allow us to see how this bourgeois definition of freedom is founded, deeply, in a supposedly permanent division not only of labour but of human status (those who have something to say and those who do not).
Yet now, in the new technology, journalists, who ‘write’, may also, in a direct process, compose type. Traditional crafts are threatened, and there is a familiar kind of industrial dispute. Its terms are limited, but in any pre-revolutionary society the limits are an inevitable consequence of the basic social division of labour. Theoretically the solution is evident. Any gain in immediate access to print is a social gain comparable with the gains of direct transmission and reception of voices. But the capital costs are high, and the realities of access will be in direct relation to the forms of control over capital and the related general social order. Even where these forms have become democratic, there is still a range of questions about the real costs of universal-access communication, and obviously about the comparative costs of such access in different media. Much of the advanced technology, is being developed within firmly capitalist social relations, and investment, though variably, is directed within a perspective of capitalist reproduction, in immediate and in more general terms. At present it seems more probable that self-managing communication systems, with forms of universal access that have genuinely transcended the received cultural divisions of labour, will come earlier in voice systems than in print systems, and will continue to have important economic advantages.
‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect’ Communication
Thus far we have made only a first-level comparison between amplificatory and durative systems, on the one hand, and alternative systems, on the other. This comparison takes us a long way into the problem, but there is an important second-level comparison to which we must now turn.
The technical forms which are primarily amplificatory and durative include, as we have seen, within any class-divided society, certain social conditions which qualify their abstract definitions of general availability. Amplification can be, and indeed almost everywhere is, highly selective; only some voices are amplified. Duration is radically affected by this and by further selective processes. But what has then to be distinguished, theoretically, is a qualitative difference, within the means of communication as means of production, between the amplificatory (and to a lesser extent the durative) and those alternative systems which now include not only such modes as writing and print but modes which in some of their uses seem to be only amplificatory or durative.
Thus in radio and television there can, technically (leaving aside, for the moment, the powerful processes of social control and selection), be direct transmission and reception of already generalized communicative means: speech and gestures. But most radio and television—and this tendency is necessarily strengthened when a durative function is in question—involve further labour of a transforming or partly transforming kind. The processes of editing, in the broadest sense—from shortening and rearranging to the composition of new deliberate sequences—are qualitatively similar, at least in effect, to fully alternative systems. Yet this is very difficult to realize just because what is then transmitted has the appearance of direct transmission and reception of the most generalized communicative means. We hear a man speaking with his own voice, or he ‘appears as himself on the screen. Yet what is actually being communicated, after the normal processes of editing, is a mode in which the primary physical resources have been—usually in what are by definition hidden ways; the edited-out words cannot be heard—transformed by further intermediate labour, in which the primary communicative means have become material with which and on which another communicator works.
It is not only a matter of excision and selection. New positive relations of a signifying kind can be made by the processes of arrangement and juxtaposition, and this can be true even in those unusual cases in which the original primary units are left in their original state. In film, in which by definition there is no direct transmission of primary physical communicative resources—since all are intermediately recorded—there is a variation of this general position, and the central communicative act is customarily taken as precisely this composition, in which the primary communicative processes of others, whether or not under specific direction, are in effect raw material for communicative transformation by others.
It is in this sense that radio and television, in all forms other than the simplest direct transmission, and then video and film, have to be seen finally as alternative modes, rather than as simply amplificatory or durative. Even in direct transmission in television, so apparently technical a matter as the positioning of the camera is a crucial signifying element. In a confrontation between police and demonstrators it matters absolutely, for example, whether the camera is placed (as so regularly) behind the police, or, as in a different social perspective it can be, behind the demonstrators, or again, which can sometimes happen, in impartial relations to both. What is ‘being seen’ in what appears to be a natural form is, evidently, then in part or large part what is ‘being made to be seen’. The traditional alternative systems, in which speech is rendered or recorded in print, or in which, by habituation, there is direct communicative composition for print, are then often easier to recognize as alternative systems, with all their initial social difficulties of acquiring the necessary skills, than these effectively alternative systems in which the appearance of direct communication has in effect been produced, by specific processes of technical labour.
Thus Marx’s revolutionary perspective, within which modern universal communication can be subordinated to individuals only by surbodinating it to all of them, raises problems of a new kind in addition to those problems which are inherent in any such social transformation. We can foresee a stage of social development in which general appropriation of the means of communicative production can, by integrated movements of social revolution and the utilization of new technical capacities, be quite practically achieved. For example the creation of democratic, autonomous and self-managing systems of communal radio is already within our reach, to include not only ‘broadcasting’, in its traditional forms, but very flexible and complex multi-way interactive modes, which can take us beyond ‘representative’ and selective transmission into direct person-to-person and persons-to-persons communication. Similar though perhaps more expensive systems can be envisaged for teletext, where there is a broad area for the general appropriation of communicative and especially durative means of production. Yet at the same time, within other modern alternative systems, which include many of the most valuable communicative acts and processes, there are problems in the modalities of any such appropriation which are of a more intractable kind. It is true that modes of communal autonomy and self-management will go much of the way, within the intrinsically transforming processes, to alter the generally existing character of such production. But whereas in the simpler and more direct modes there are readily accessible forms of truly general (universal)
