Love and Communication. Paddy Scannell

Introduction

This is the final volume in a trilogy that I planned years ago, as I worked out the books I wanted to write. And I should say (it seemed obvious then, and I did not need to mention it) that I meant academic books about the field I worked in: communication or media studies. The first, Media and Communication (Scannell 2020 [2007]) was a textbook pitched at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, in which I laid out the academic development of the field itself in the last century, in North America, the United Kingdom and (partially) Europe. I followed it with Television and the Meaning of “Live” (2014), written for colleagues as an historically informed theoretical account of live television. Subsequently, as time and I were getting on a bit, I retired from academic life and began to think about the final book I proposed, back in 2007, in the preface to the first book. Each stands on its own legs, and is independent of the others. But if you were to read them all (I’m not saying you should), you would see there is a continuum to them. Love and Communication was the title I came up with for this final volume long before I ever got round to writing it. I knew that I wanted to write about this at least twenty years ago, but when I eventually started work on it, both the world and I had changed, and I found myself writing something rather different from what I first intended. There is a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes and others – Karl Ove Knausgaard (2004) for instance, point out – and I instinctively felt that love and communication were matters best left until my academic career was over.

       I

Being an academic was something that, at the time, I took entirely for granted, but as I got older, I felt an increasing tension between my academic self (me the professor) and my human self (the me-that-I-am, the nonacademic self, a usual person like everyone else). And this tension between my institutional and noninstitutional self runs right through this book. I took the title from a longish review essay, “Love and communication,” that I wrote in 2005 about Speaking into the Air by John Durham Peters (1999). This was and is a book I deeply admire, and especially because it unashamedly brought religious thought into the usual thinking of the academic field I worked in. At that time, it was preoccupied with the politics of communication, the media as cultures of power, and so on. Peters’s book was different. It was focused on religious and philosophical thought in relation to communication, and particularly communication as love, and divine and human versions of it: the difference, as he puts it, between agape and eros. He takes Jesus and Socrates as two paradigm figures who express this difference – Jesus and divine love, Socrates and human love. Their distinctive forms of communication capture the difference between agape and eros.

Socrates to this day is known as a talker, whose mode of philosophizing was dialogue. He famously preferred speech over writing, as Plato (who wrote his dialogue) made clear in what is known as the Phaedrus. As a communicative method it is quite distinct from that of Jesus, whose manner of speaking was exemplified in the parable of the sower. It was a parable about parables, Jesus’s own justification of his method as a communicator. In this story (as written down by his followers), Jesus speaks to a multitude (a mass of people) by the lake of Galilee. Two different approaches to communication. Socrates goes for talk between two people in each other’s presence (the young Phaedrus, and himself) – talk as dialogue. Jesus speaks as one to many – talk as teaching – and it is a one-way, not a two-way process. These two modes of communication are distinguished as insemination (Socrates) and dissemination (Jesus). We, I supposed, naturally prefer two-way over one-way communication. It seems more personal, more genuine, and authentic than one-to-many discourse. But Peters prefers the latter: dissemination over insemination. I had never thought of it this way, but it is surely right. One-way communication is, by definition, nonreciprocal. And in this sense, it is like agape, the love of God, who “gives” without any expectation of thanks and recognition. This for me was a trope for public service broadcasting. The BBC, whose beginnings I had studied in detail, was exemplary (Scannell and Cardiff 1991). In Britain, radio and television were and remain broadcasting institutions. It is a one-to-many communicative system, in which the apparatus “speaks” and multitudes listen and watch. They do not engage in argument. They are not obliged to take heed. The indiscriminate scatter of broadcasting, as in the sowing of seed in the parable, goes everywhere. It is for anyone and everyone, not just some. Insemination (the planting of seed in another) is for the chosen ones, but not radio or television, who began the process of full, democratic, communicative inclusion.

      Broadcast radio and television defined (communicatively

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