ABSTRACT
THE TITLE FOR this chapter is borrowed from a 1962 essay by Paul Goodman (1911-1972), and reworked slightly to identify a crucial intersection of historical and personal meanings. Goodman was speaking in the present tense about the “general culture as a climate of communication,” and frankly asked: “What happens to the language and thought of young Americans as they grow up toward and through adolescence?”2 His prescient response to this question echoed the urgency with which many dissident scholars came to regard the individual and social implications of the emerging mass society in the postwar period, and his response remains highly relevant today. Embodied here was not only a sharp critique of the prevailing “universe of discourse,” but also the exceedingly narrow, and ultimately dehumanizing, definition of communication proffered by most experts in this new field. “Communication” came to be regarded, both in theory and practice, as the simple transfer and exchange of processed information; increasingly lost, in both the actual operations of the existing culture and in the dominant academic interpretations, was the view that genuine communication was a necessary precondition for authentic selfhood and public transcendence.
