Treating communication failures as technical faults masks a partisan political choice

Evidence

The educator or cultural policy maker is performing one of his most partisan acts when he colludes with the re-signification of real conflicts and contradictions as if they were simply kinks in the communicative chain. Denotative mistakes are not structurally significant. But connotative and contextual “misunderstandings” are, or can be, of the highest significance. To interpret what are in fact essential elements in the systematic distortions of a socio-communications system as if they are technical faults in transmission is to misread a deep-structure process for a surface phenomenon. The decision to intervene in order to make the hegemonic codes of dominant elites more effective and transparent for the majority audience is not a technically neutral but a political one. To “misread” a political choice as a technical one represents a type of unconscious collusion with the dominant interests, a form of collusion to which social science researchers are all too prone. Though the sources of such mystification are both social and structural, the actual process is greatly facilitated by the operation of discrepant codes. It would not be the first time that scientific researchers had “unconsciously” played a part in the reproduction of hegemony, not by openly submitting to it, but simply by operating the “professional bracket.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 812

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ostensibly neutral ‘improving communications’ and social-science professionalism are unconscious political collusion with hegemony is dense and paradigm-shifting for understanding media policy.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what would it concretely look like for an educator or researcher to refuse the ‘professional bracket’ and treat connotative misunderstanding as structural rather than technical?