ABSTRACT
To repeat: the major issues facing students of mass communication, the macro issues, concern the entire framework within which our studies proceed and, therefore, the nature, purpose, and pertinence of the knowledge we profess. To reorient this framework, I have been making an argument for a particular and distinctive point of view toward the mass media-for something I call, without originality, cultural studies. Much of that argument, made by indirection, has suggested that we would better serve the study of the mass media if we pretty much abandoned our commitments to certain forms of explanation that have dominated the enterprise over the last fifty years or so. We have had our quest for the Holy Grail: the search for a positive science of communications, one that elucidates the laws of human behavior and the universal and univocal functions of the mass media. It is time we give it up, to happily relinquish what John Dewey a couple of generations back called the “neurotic quest for certainty.” To abandon the traditional framework would not only invigorate our studies; it would also liberate us from a series of bad and crippling ideas, particularly from a model of social order implicit in this framework, a twisted version of utilitarianism, and from a rhetoric of motives that I have earlier called a power and anxiety model of communications. I am suggesting that we unload, in a common phrase, the “effects tradition.” To show how and why, let me first develop the particular form of utilitarianism that undergirds media studies.
