We Have Never Been Mediatized 305 Many people seem to assume as a matter of course that there is, first, reality, and then, second, com- munication about it. We degrade art and learning by supposing that they are always second-hand activities: that there is life, and then afterwards there are these accounts of it. […] We need to say what many of us know in experience: that the life of man, and the business of society, cannot be con- fined to these ends; that the struggle to learn, to describe, to understand, to educate, is a central and necessary part of our humanity. This struggle has not begun, at second hand, after reality has oc- curred. It is, per se, a major way in which reality is continually formed and changed. What we call society is not only a network of political and eco- nomic arrangements, but also a process of learning and communication (Williams, 1966, p. 19). Just as Verón, Williams insists on seeing communication as a non-separable part of human activity and of social re- ality. Fellow cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall (1973/2021) aligns with this approach, and even gives reference to Verón, in his paper “The Determinations of News Photographs”. The cul- turalist approaches of both Williams and Hall with their focus on meaning-making are well in line with the anthropological approach of Verón and his followers and puts human interpreta- tion at the centre. We shall recall that Stuart Hall’s (1973) most well-spread ideas in his ‘encoding/decoding’ model of communication has ‘text as meaningful discourse’ at its centre. In a similar way to Verón and Williams, Bruno Latour (1991/1997) – in his critique of science, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes – argues for an anthropological, holistic view on the relations between nature, society, and discourse, pointing to the false separation of these from each other. What Latour refers to as “discourse”, is equivalent to what Verón calls “semiosis” and Williams terms “communication”. Furthermore, with the state- ment that “we have never been modern”, Latour points to the fact that the separation between nature and society that were made during modernity – by what he terms “the moderns” – is increasingly difficult to uphold, and that it in fact never was a
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