Primal Scenes of Communication

Ian Angus is Associate Professor of Humanities and Sociology at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of many books, including most recently A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality and Wilderness.

"Through a rigorous deployment of comparative media study, Ian Angus develops a conceptual scheme of mediation and articulation that addresses the key questions at the forefront of the philosophy of communication. Readers in any discipline who take the social and political practice of communication seriously with respect to questions of identity and new social movements will learn from this valuable book." — Ramsey Eric Ramsey, author of The Long Path to Nearness: A Contribution to a Corporeal Philosophy of Communication and the Groundwork for an Ethics of ReliefM"This book's focus on the materiality of communication is a central but often undertheorized problematic that haunts communication studies. The author's argument as to the primacy of the media of communication is a novel and effective answer to the charge of communication studies' inability to account for the 'real.' Angus's use of political examples and problematics is a nice change of pace from much of the social constructionist work in communication studies which tends to focus on interpersonal and organizational contexts." — Darrin Hicks, University of Denver

• Acknowledgments 1. Language and Institution in the Human Sciences Part I: The Materiality of Expressive Forms 2. Medium of Communication 3. Comparative Media Theory 4. Technology and Social Identity 5. Phenomenology of Communication Part II: Loss of Mediation in Consumer Society 6. From Competitive Capitalism to Consumer Society 7. Reduction of Culture to Information 8. Representation versus Constitution 9. Consumer Identities Part III: Social Movements 10. Three Strategies of Resistance 11. New Mediations 12. Discourse and Identity 13. Conclusion Notes Index