Fassi friends, was not just social connection facilitated by linguistic and media technologies. The Fassis among whom I worked viewed communicative media and language as central elements of social relations on multiple scales: familial, interpersonal, intraurban, national, coreligionist, and transnational. Communication was tied to moral ways of knowing and being through social interaction (see Chapters 2, 3, and 5). However, they didn’t agree about what moral ways of knowing, and being connected as Moroccans, meant. Fassis shared with me various perspectives: that media was a tool of consumerism, secularist politics (see Episode 2 in this chapter), Muslim extremism, or state-directed political apathy (see Episode 2 in this chapter). Each of these critiques evoked an embedded assumption that media should connect Moroccans. Even the state-run media and its quasi-privatized stations articulated an explicit connection ideology: media and modernization or development ideology, in which communicative channels should be mobilized to create modern citizens (Lerner 1958). After the 2004 media reform law, designed to shift national media from state to private control and expand independent television and radio domains, media production continued to operate with state political oversight (Zaid 2015): media should educate the public as much as entertain; media should promote state policies for the listening/viewing Moroccan public; and commercial advertising should be clearly articulated as separate from informational and entertainment programming. Whether seeking to promote consumer-citizens, civic engagement, or literacy, maintaining political power, or providing leisure, media was about moral relationality.
Many communication scholars have critiqued this ideal of media as social connection. Mattelart argued that the field of communication technology was born within European nation-state “modernizing” projects, striving to create a universal social bond, enlightened rationality, social regulation, and technosocial development in the service of capitalism (Mattelart 1996).6 Latin American theorist Jesús Martín Barbero has argued that even the terms “media,” “communication,” and “information” have become objects, powerful entities with mystical powers to dupe the masses, extend state and corporate power, or liberate through active reception practices (Barbero 1987; see Zaid 2015 for an analysis of Moroccan media ideologies). In each of these scholarly frameworks, communication was a medium for connection, though not a neutral channel. The term had problematic baggage. Briggs and Hallin have labeled these ideologies about the relationship between discursive practices and social relations “communicability” and argued that we need to explore the everyday ideological explanations of how communication is produced, circulated, and received in order to understand the way power works (2007, 45). This book is one such attempt to explore everyday Fassi understandings of communication as failing to connect Moroccans appropriately and how that shaped political and social projects. As I hope to show, their notions of what that meant varied quite a bit.
The Fassi perspectives about communicative failure I describe in this book could be viewed as reproducing these state-led modernizing ideologies of communication and language as social connection and “modernization” tools or handmaids of capitalist elite control. That certainly appears in some perspectives expressed by Fassis when they criticize “the media” for failing to make good Moroccan citizens. But the kind of social connection Fassis described did not always fit the modernist models of societal progress, consumer citizens, or universal rationality described in European and American media and communication scholarship. In fact, they often sought to articulate themselves in opposition to notions of universal rationality (Schulthies 2013), or an inevitable march toward social progress (Schulthies 2014a; see also Newcomb 2017). Certainly, they had idealized models of sociality that informed their laments of communicative failure (which I describe in more detail throughout this book). Their lived understandings of mediated connection both engaged and reworked modernist ideas, through which emerged critiques such as distributed literacy (Chapter 2), wisdom of the unschooled (Chapter 3), graphic-sonic social mediascapes (Chapter 4), and Moroccan Islam as tolerant social progress (Chapter 5). They engaged and evoked multiple communicative ideologies in their efforts to shape Moroccanness. As presented in Chapters 2 and 4, there were different kinds of “listening subjects”: people who set themselves up as critics of communicative channel failure in order to advance their notion of appropriate moral relationality. Moroccan listening subjects drew on aspects of European communication and media ideologies, but also incorporated other media and relationality traditions. This was not a straightforward process of identifying a communicative theory origin, but rather a selective appropriation and deployment, what I like to call a calibration, of multiple rationales in the practice of social relating in a climate of perceived communicative failure.
You might ask why I am focusing on a national relationality (Moroccanness) rather than a religious (Muslim or Jewish), ethnic (Amazigh or Arab), or situationally salient connection (such as neighborhood, hometown), especially since my research was in a specific context: Fez. All of those kinds of sociality occurred in the interactions I analyzed, but during the last decade, Fassis evoked the national scale as a ground within or against which they related other kinds of social relatedness in my study of media interactions. This was partially because most of the Fassis among whom I worked engaged national media outlets and press agencies regularly, despite widespread access to transnational media for more than three decades (see Abu-Lughod 2005 for a similar argument with regard to Egyptians), and local radio, newspaper, and internet sites since 2004. Even if they rejected the assumptions of colonial nation-state formations embedded in national media outlets (identifying themselves within the Muslim, Arab, Amazigh, and African worlds), Fassis still expressed themselves in relation to the nation-state framing of Moroccanness. We’ll see this clearly in the chapters that follow, where Fassis debate what kinds of listeners can participate in civic life via news consumption; whether gender parity as a civic virtue can emerge from a rhyming register of old folks; what forms of writing Moroccan Arabic (notice the national framing) in social media and books are doing politically; and what kinds of clothing, speech, and comportment bundles should be adopted as the Moroccan model of Islamic practice.
It may seem like a contradiction that a widespread pattern of lamenting communicative channel failure led to multiple politically uncoordinated Moroccanness relationality projects—but that is the core set of practices and perspectives I explore in this ethnography. These laments didn’t follow a scholarly-identified genre of “song punctuated with sobs and words … to evoke audience sympathy” at moments of shock and sorrow (Wilce 2007, 124). Instead, I came to recognize these longing and loss expressions as calibrations of Moroccanness.7 They also evoked media ideologies (expectations about what media is or should do, Gershon 2010b), and communicative ideologies (modalities of connection, Keane 1995) in their laments of what was and should be.
These social acts of Moroccanness in Fez were both conscious, mundane, and routinized. In her study of the social work of talk among clients in an urban Chicago addiction recovery program, Carr noted that social workers taught participants to use specific ways of speaking to demonstrate their sobriety. Only when they used language properly did therapists view clients as honest in their recovery; the clients subsequently were granted access to critical legal services and economic aid. In the process, clients’ heightened awareness of what some forms of speaking could do improved their performance skills so that they could flip the script and use it against the system (Carr 2011, 196). This meta-awareness was not about the clients’ abilities to articulate or describe the social work of sobriety talk, but rather a conscious, acquired, embodied practice like manual muscle memory of riding a bicycle—the ability to adjust their talk to do things.
I viewed Fassi communicative laments as similarly conscious, mundane, embodied efforts to
