Metropolis and the Hinterland

Abstract

Cultural studies scholar James Carey is known for an approach to communication that drew on Harold Innis for understanding relations between the metropolis and the hinterland and John Dewey for understanding community and culture. Despite the value of his approach, Carey’s theory has a blind spot at the intersection of community and politics. He collapsed notions of community and the public and bracketed the politics of meaning-making at the local level. Consequently, his theory takes the politics out of local community, where identities are formed and political issues identified. Dewey’s explanation of democracy as both associated life in the local community and a form of government that grows from it offers a better political vision for a theory of communication.

Keywords

community public democracy James Carey John Dewey metropolis hinterland

In an interview reflecting on his life and career, cultural studies scholar James Carey explained his move in 1992 from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to Columbia University in New York City as a move from the hinterland to the metropolis. For 30 years at Illinois, he said, he had been looking at the metropolis from the hinterland, and it was time to look the other way, “to try to see life more from within” (Carey & Grossberg, 2006, p. 27).

And so Carey, perhaps best known in the field of communication studies for his attention to Harold Innis on technologies of space and time and his essay inspired by John Dewey on the ties among the words common, community, and communication, revealed much about the significance of his biography to his concept of community (see Carey, 1981, 1989c, 1999). This quintessentially “man of the city,” said John Pauly (2007) in eulogy, was animated in his thoughts by city life in ways that have not been appreciated (p. 183). As the product of life in a working-class Irish Catholic family living in Providence, Rhode Island, Carey’s thinking about communication and culture entangled him in questions about the relations between economics, geography, and meaning; in an appreciation of the grand sweep of history in making and remaking communities and their hold on our imaginations and place in the republic; in an understanding of the long arm of the market and the dignity of ordinary women and men making sense of their own lives. He turned to Harold Innis and John Dewey to draw out those entanglements by way of Innis’ work on the metropolis and hinterland and Dewey’s on community and democracy. Despite his often eloquent plea for the place of local community in the exercise of democracy and for reconstruction of a conversational public articulating public interests, in the end, Carey could not integrate the two sets of insights about geography and community, thus rendering his theory of communication and community incomplete, at best.

For all the good that he did in calling our attention to community, Carey, much as he justifiably accused Walter Lippmann of taking the public out of politics (Carey, 1997a, p. 22), took politics out of the community. Contrary to some recent criticisms, it was not that Carey got Lippmann wrong; he did not get Dewey right.¹ Lippmann drew a conceptual political boundary between public and private on the far end of the spectrum, separating the public (a “phantom”) from the elite, relegating the public to the private realm of domestic spectators with the elite acting in its name (Lippmann, 1922, 1925, 1955). On the other hand, Dewey construed a generous political boundary at the opposite end of the spectrum, incorporating both community and the public into the democratic process. Carey, however, drew his conceptual boundary between the two, community and public. Despite or perhaps because of his fondness for the urban neighborhood, Carey’s increasing disdain of identity politics led him to argue for a line between what he saw as the apolitical and political, severing conceptual ties between community and public, leaving community as the unscrutinized site of identity formation and cultural politics (Rakow, 2010). This was Carey’s blind spot. Disagreements precipitated by his influential interpretations generally fail to see the point at which Carey’s analysis went astray. By collapsing community and public in his historic account, then bracketing questions about the politics of meaning-making in his conceptual account, that is, about the politics of culture, he eviscerated rather than restored democracy at its fundamental level, the local. In doing so, he perpetuated a classical liberal understanding of the individual and the changing social order (a view not held by Dewey) that arose in the face of industrial capitalism and admission of new groups into public life, from the end of the Civil War through the suffrage amendment for women.

Numerous scholars, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, characterized this period and the response to it in sociological and political terms, frames whose grip has been hard to loosen. For Robert Wiebe, it was a “search for order” (Wiebe, 1967); for Morton White and Lucia White, it was “the intellectual versus the city” (White & White, 1962); for Jackson Wilson, it was the “quest for community” (Wilson, 1968). These sociological approaches have led to continuing dismissal of concerns about local community as an unsophisticated and nostalgic remnant (Rakow, 2002). Other scholars have wanted us to see the period as the heyday of liberalism and progressive reform, usually by zealous social engineers (see Forcey, 1961; Levine, 2000).² Most fruitfully, some political scientists viewed it as a clash between theories of democracy, elite or participatory (Bachrach, 1967).

This latter view is most compatible with feminist and critical race scholars who have seen deeper political issues of race, gender, and culture in the new social order, in which local communities as real phenomena survived but were effectively “feminized,” shut off from access to power and politics while relegated to the world of kith and kin, creating an anxiety about loss of (White) masculine status when vestiges of the political citizen were threatened (see Douglas, 1977; Sennett, 1974). Classical Enlightenment liberalism had set the stage, a theory designed to exclude those not in the fraternity of the self-contained individual man, served by his domestic satellite of women and slaves whom he represented in the world of politics and economics (Pateman, 1989, pp. 33–57). The theory needed to be improvised in an American context of an expanding geography, population, and citizenry. Hence, social and political boundaries were redrawn to police differences and defend privileges, as more and more political outsiders were successful in attaining formal recognition. Such was behind the new versions of public and private spheres, in which the private was to be the domestic realm of family, emotion, custom, cooperation, and consumption in contrast to the public realm of economic and political concerns of White male elites, reason, production, and competition (see Elshtain, 1981). Such was behind post-Civil War southern segregation and a system of color lines; shifting policies regarding American Indian relocation to reservations, assimilation, and individual parcel allotments; grudging tolerance of urban immigrant and migrant neighborhoods; the loss of status and independence of rural areas to corporate systems of markets and distribution. These boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, identity and difference, and autonomy and dependence were and continue to be played out at the level of local geographic communities where people live, whether urban neighborhoods, suburbs, reservations, or rural towns and villages. Geographic communities have been made and remade but unfortunately not usually in conditions of their own making.³

Innis was correct, in part, in identifying newly drawn metropolis and hinterland geospatial relations of economic and political subordination (Innis, 1950, 1951). Carey, however, set aside the additional grounds of culture and identity on which such relationships were being played out, turning to an apolitical reading of Dewey on community and democracy to argue for a politically and nationally engaged public absent a local context. Thus, Carey’s story of community and democracy, while one of the few serious attempts in the field to give credence to these issues, needs careful review and revision. This contribution first presents Carey’s theory of community and the public, constructed from three decades of his published work, followed by critiques of his notion of community and public by other scholars. A much-needed close reading of Dewey’s philosophy shows that while Carey wanted to reconnect the public to democracy, Dewey argued for the need to connect the democracy of community to political democracy by way of the public, a critical difference. Finally, the implications for communication theory are suggested using Ferguson, Missouri as an example to support the argument that local communities and local governments have not gone away but fall far short—sometimes tragically so—of the democratic model of self-determination that Dewey rather than Carey best articulated.

Carey’s Geographic Communities

Carey’s history of community in the United States is a story of creation and maintenance, destabilization and reformation, beginning in the 19th century and spanning three phases. Notions of democracy were imported to the frontier from their origins in eastern cities in the 18th century, where, Carey (1987) explained, a bourgeois public life was to be found in coffee houses and taverns. The gossip of a crowd of regulars—a society of strangers—both responded to the news of the day and helped supply it. As a bourgeois public, it was restricted by class, race, and sex, a fact that, he acknowledged, now required freeing from its limitations.

Carey characterized this phase of democracy as both a real historic phase and a bucolic ideal that served through the first phase of frontier community building. As he described it:

This image of the pub, the publican, and the publisher all rolled into one, presiding over the meetinghouse where the public gathered to discuss the news, representing in his person the public interest, and publishing a public newspaper that summarized and reprinted public opinion—what people were saying in public—this was the classic conception of democracy and the press … (Carey, 1997e, p. 241)

While Carey used the term strangers when describing this historic and ideal public, he noted in one essay (Carey, 1987) that those who were gathered were not necessarily in fact strangers, but rather, because of the public nature of the activity, their presence needed to be taken into account through a particular discourse. This sphere of political power was located in the world between the state and the private sector of the household and the company, the only sphere in which, he said, “private interest might, even in principle, be transcended” (p. 10).

Drawing on the work of Dewey, Carey (1999) explained that on the rural frontier, strangers came together to negotiate a new world and to establish physical communities, with buildings, institutions, manners, and customs that would hold them together as self-sufficient and mostly autonomous towns in new and undefined situations. There was, however, a rootlessness in those communities, a desire to escape from the authority of what had been created, as Carey was fond of pointing out, in that Americans are forever building a city and then making plans to get out of town (p. 88). In this first phase of community building, democracy was confined to small geographic areas and small populations, much as the Greek city-states were limited by the size required for a citizen to travel to the city center and back in a day (Carey, 1989a, 1997e).

A second phase of community building was to change all that at the end of the 19th century, during which the network of communities that had been created was dismantled and cities took on prominence as they grew in size and importance relative to the rural (Carey, 1999). The frontier of urban life would henceforth supply the cultural and imaginative materials for a new phase of community and politics. Major cities had been connected by the telegraph and railroad, while “island communities” were tied into a national system of transportation and communication. Carey acknowledged there was resistance, but communities needed to accept the integration or be circumvented and left to die. Local politics, local business, local newspapers, and local culture lost their autonomy and unique identities. Benedict Anderson’s (1983) history of the rise of the nation-state as the imagined communities of modernity provided for Carey (1997f, 2002) the means to show how a narrative of the national and a semblance of commonality across distance became the superimposed representation of the republic, replacing older more local and regional notions of community and democracy.

To understand relations within the nation-state, Carey turned to Innis to explain the reasons and consequences for the shift from rural communities to cities, and with it the creation of monopolies of power and knowledge. To Innis, metropolitanism meant the emergence of a city dominating its surrounding countryside as well as other cities and country sides, controlling communication, trade, and finance. Smaller cities accomplished something similar but less extensive, in a chain of successively smaller center-margin relationships (Carey, 1981). Carey counter posed Innis’ notion of the space binding bias of the technology of print, which made the control of empires possible, with Innis’ notion of the time binding bias of speech, which maintains communities in time, arguing for a return to community and the oral tradition. Such a return is needed to counter balance monopolies of knowledge and communication, which displace or appropriate local knowledge from direct experience and concrete particulars, he argued.

Carey further drew on ideas about the history and idea of community from Dewey, particularly as expressed in Dewey’s 1927 book, The Public and its Problems. According to Carey (1989b), Dewey never left behind, in his concern about the eclipse of the public and the decline of face-to-face direct interaction, that whatever the scale of society, “democracy demands and rests upon the foundations of group life” (p. 273). It is the local community which is the medium for the social intelligence required by democracy. Dewey, he believed, saw the network of small-scale groups as a prelude to transcendence, “the capacity to accept but transcend the particular, to join a wider community of citizens without sacrificing our private identity as members of particular, if limited, social formations” (Carey, 1997a, p. 31). Dewey, like Innis, believed that local communal life was necessary if we were to achieve democratic communities and an articulate democratic public, Carey (1997b) pointed out. Carey, while himself sometimes critical of Dewey’s romantic ideal of the small town, nonetheless chided modern intellectuals for their disdain for community and the small town, an attack of the later progressive movement that achieved an ambiguous and unquestioned image of the small town as either barren or romantic (Carey, 1989b, pp. 276–277).

Carey’s history of community didn’t end with this second stage although his analysis of the loss of local community and the publics to participate in democracy remained. In later essays (Carey, 2002, 2005), he picked up changes occurring to community in a third wave, beginning with the satellite era ushered in during the 1970s and the advance of the Internet across the globe. The result has been a world rebordered as the power of nation-states to patrol their borders has declined and advanced electronics invade remaining local and traditional communities. While a new transnational political, social, and economic order redraws the world, no community can remain self-sufficient, and traditional communities no longer provide a satisfactory way of life. Meanwhile, new kinds of community are surfacing in the United States, including affluent nongated communities without schools and with their own police and fire services, reflecting residents who have withdrawn from the social contract (Carey, 2005, p. 453).

Carey’s Concept of Community

Not only did Carey address communities in their geographic contexts in these three successive waves, but he also used ideal types of communities to make an argument for how communities can and should connect to democratic practice. He acknowledged the contested and difficult nature of the word community, as well as observed that Americans apparently want a virtual community that simulates qualities of a common life and culture without the physical or emotional geography of the small town. Maintaining the necessity of the geographic and local, Carey (1997c) criticized the imagined community of cyberspace, which parasitically lives off geographical communities: “But until we transcend our biology, we will by necessity live in real neighborhoods with real neighbors, real buildings with real tenants, with whom our lives are structurally intertwined” (pp. 13–14).

Drawing from Robert Fowler’s (1991) categories in The Dance With Community, Carey described five types of community: participatory, community of roots, religious community, ecological community, and a community of one. He found none of these ideas of community satisfactory because they are utopian and shorn of history, representing too little participation or too much. He settled on a sixth type, the republican community, a type that fit best with his own story of the history of community in the United States. As he described it, the notion of the republican community holds on to the truism that we live interdependent lives:

To live in a community is to be aware that one’s life depends on the uncoordinated decencies and actions of others; that life would constantly fail without the invisible contributions of others who with us inhabit the polity and the economy. (Carey, 1997c, pp. 4–5)

With Dewey, on whom he depended for the insight, Carey accepted a human need for community and culture, saying that community “has the social task of cultivating respect for the intelligence and capacity of ordinary men and women.” If need be, we should overestimate the ability of ordinary men and women because “there is more wisdom in a community of tradition, in the shared and pooled intelligence of people, than there ever can be in any individual or small group, however elite” (pp. 8–9). Carey ascribed both social and political dimensions to this republican community. Socially it calls for common social space as a counter to the exclusive emphasis on private life and provision of human needs in that private life. Politically it would carry out Thomas Jefferson’s vision of democracy through Tocqueville’s insight about little republics within a larger republic (Carey, 1997e).

It is here where democracy originates among ordinary people in acts of conversation, who “begin to question the disparities between their experience and what politicians and intellectuals are currently feeding them” (Carey, 1995, p. 88). The struggle over meaning and the power to define reality can be found in such local contexts. While community is the place for meaning-making, Carey (1989d) seemed to recognize the limitations on that meaning-making at the local level:

It is fine to be told we are the species that actively create the world and then simultaneously to be told that we are part of the subspecies denied access to the machinery by which this miracle is pulled off. (p. 87)

clarifying that he meant class and status divisions. Dewey, on the other hand, seemed so innocent of the role of class, status, and power in communication, Carey concluded, that Dewey’s notion of public life was naïve.

But Carey’s concern about power in community is limited to this recognition of class, making it clear in especially his later writings that race and gender should be irrelevant both to community and democracy. Despite his earlier assertion that the historic public sphere had to be freed of restrictions of class, race, and gender, his later works show Carey likely meant freeing it from purely formal barriers. He became increasingly insistent that discussion in this republic community needed to transcend private identity and that, indeed, there is a biological fixity to identities of race and gender that are trivial and irrelevant to communal life (Carey, 1997d, p. 270). He argued for a politics of the common good over a politics of rights and interests through a return to the civic republican tradition (Carey, 1997d).

Carey’s Community and its Problems

After this reconstruction of ideas from Carey’s work, it would seem that Carey has, rather than a blind spot for community, a warm spot for it, or more a passion that places community at the fulcrum of his theory of communication. Culture is formed and expressed through communities and our notions of them; technologies of speech, print, and electronics bind them in competing and relational ways in space and time; and a press is needed that encourages and carries on the conversation of the culture, linking the public to democracy (Carey, 1997g, p. 220). Of value is his concern for local community and the loss of democratic connections of the local to the national and global; his analysis of power relations between the metropolis and the hinterland, margins and centers; his regard for the capacities of ordinary women and men; his rebuke of those who are dismissive, cynical, and neglectful of community and the small town.

But there are gaps, contradictions, and conflations in Carey’s account, despite much that is compelling and appealing. In the end, he did not make it possible to move beyond current dismissals of community because he, too, dismissed the political nature of local community, the blind spot in his history and theory of community and communication which occurs at the intersection of the relationship between community and public. Despite his affinity for local community and expressed sympathies for the small town, Carey gave up too easily on local politics and succumbed to his urban view of the republican community in which the private relational and affective world of family and neighbors is bracketed from the public, masculine (if not necessarily male), individualist world of strangers, without the very ties and common meanings from local community that he claimed to be essential to democracy. His republican community transcends the local to attend to political issues of the metropolis and the national, stripping the local (even within the metropolis) of democratic participation and the national of knowledge from the local. Carey, while using Dewey’s work extensively, missed the critical way in which Dewey made a distinction between two conceptions of democracy and the role of local community, with implications for understanding identity, power, and politics.

The argument made here is not the same as the direct or implied criticisms of Carey’s ideas about community and democracy by Gretchen Soderlund, Michael Schudson, and Nancy Fraser. Soderlund (2006) asserted that Carey reified the notion of community and neglected the extent to which community is not necessarily a social good with shared benefits, especially for women.⁴ If Carey reified the notion of community, he was no more or less guilty than other theorists and the concepts they use. He did, however, strip the concept of community as a lived experience of its inherent political nature and its political potential. He certainly neglected problems of community, especially for women. Soderlund’s critique reminds us of the flaw of Carey’s essentialist notions of identity and difference. But we do not need to abandon local community because of these problems; rather we can try to rectify the thinking that leads to them.

Schudson (1999), on the other hand, criticized Carey for retreating to community from the politics of the public. Schudson set community and public against each other, “better understood as opposites than as twins” (p. 128). Despite what Schudson saw as differences from Carey, he both agreed and disagreed with Carey in contradictory and equally disturbing ways:

James Carey writes that we must recognize the story of our lives is both “part of a narrative of a public community, a community of general citizenship rather than one restricted by class, race, gender, and so on” and at the same time that “our lives are also embedded in communities of private identity—family, city, tribe, nation, party or cause.” Here Carey states the problem exactly right. But then, almost immediately, he subordinates the community of general citizenship to the richer, warmer communities of private identity. For him, “the expansion of individual rights and the erosion of common identifications, the growth of entitlement and the erosion of common judgment, is not a recipe for social progress.” (p. 129)

Even with what Carey would call the politically correct position on the rights of women and people of color, Schudson himself did not recognize, as Carey did not, that these political movements are not about individual rights but group rights and that there is no private identity to be had, no ideal public where private identities can be transcended or private interests set aside for the greater good or greater identity of citizen-at-large. It was always a fallacy that privileged men were setting aside private interest in the public sphere. Gender and race are social categories that have their expression at the intersection of experience and meanings. In the end, then, Schudson, like Carey, also got the relation between community and public wrong.

Nancy Fraser’s (1990) relevant critique of Habermas’ civil republic ideal takes us further in understanding Carey’s blind spot. She saw that public spheres are not places of “zero degree culture” but places for identity formation and enactment (pp. 68–69). The formal removal of restrictions on participation on the grounds of gender and race do not obviate other ways in which, by way of social identity, people are marginalized or silenced. The private or personal cannot be an arena of freedom for women because the personal is where gender identities are produced and where the structure of society is reproduced by the labor of subordinated economic and cultural classes. Public spheres, except those counter spheres identified by Fraser, have traditionally been built on the backs of those who are denied or have limited access to the very arena in which the subject of their condition can be discussed and revealed. Carey, who criticized Dewey for an analysis that seemed innocent and naïve of class, status, and power in communication, provided an analysis himself that is suspicious of any political claims to it, blind to the ways in which social identities structure the public and private distinctions that undergird his theory. Dewey’s analysis, on the other hand, makes such an insight about power and culture possible, through his argument for local face-to-face community as a necessary condition for a participatory democracy.⁵

Dewey’s Community and Public

Dewey’s work on the problem of community and democracy neither began nor ended with his landmark 1927 Public and its Problems, despite those who start and stop with it. From his earliest work on democracy, he was laying the cornerstones of his public philosophy, which included the notion of human nature as open and contingent, of associated life as the only universal of the human condition, and the necessity of each person having “a share in determining the conditions and the aims of his own work” (Dewey, 1903, p. 233). His theme from early on was that there are two ways to understand democracy, as a form of government and, more broadly, as a principle of social organization.⁶ Democracy as a form of government grows out of and into democracy as a form of social organization (Dewey, 1892–1893, p. 178).

Later, Dewey (1916) explained it this way:

Democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activities … (p. 94)

Democracy is a name, Dewey argued, for the fact that human nature is developed only when its elements take part in directing what is held in common: “The principle holds as much for one form of association, say in industry and commerce, as it does in government” (Dewey, 1922, pp. 309–310). Commerce needs to be released from bondage to private interests; political democracy is only one form of democracy although the most commonly associated with its failures (Dewey, 1920, p. 200).

Dewey’s theory of the individual, at odds with classical liberalism, is critical to understanding his theory of democracy. The individual is never autonomous, never preexisting associated life but derived from it. He said, “An individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made. It is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical …” (Dewey, 1935, p. 291). From social institutions, proverbs, laws, language, and literature, the individual obtains convictions and habits, but the mind is not an empty vessel, it develops its own theories and ideas. “Reflective intelligence” is needed to question and point out inconsistencies, incoherencies, compromises, and failures between the actual practice and the theory at the basis of this practice (Dewey, 1891, pp. 357–359). Consequently, a reflective education that critiques existing theories and histories is necessary for the kind of social intelligence needed for a democracy. The capacities of each individual are to be set free to develop, Dewey said, “without respect to race, sex, class or economic status” (Dewey, 1920, p. 187).

Dewey told us that a community is not just a physical juxtaposition but a number of persons with an awareness of shared interests and a common end. It is in the everyday affairs of a community that these common feelings and understandings are generated (Dewey, 1949, p. 245). Democracy is the idea of community life itself, he reminded us. In fact, “democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (Dewey, 1927, p. 368). There are, however, many modes of such community life, according to Dewey. Friendships and other attachments and associations result from local contiguity producing consequences different from those of isolated behavior. The nature of the interconnected behavior is transformed when the consequences are appreciated. The public as a state derives from the characteristic of consequences that involve others beyond those directly engaged. The public is not, then, the community as a whole, but rather the community is the source of a public, which, when the consequences are projected beyond those directly concerned, becomes organized into a state with special agencies created to take care of or regulate the consequences. As he said, “Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences” (Dewey, 1927, p. 314). The organized public, distinguishable from other modes of community life, gives a community its political dimension, a link to or expression of democracy as a form of government. Democracy as community life is tied to democracy as government through its bridge, the public.

Of course, Dewey, as Carey explained, saw that such consequences had multiplied as changes brought about by industrialization and national systems of communication and transportation overwhelmed local community life and eclipsed the ability to respond to so much of consequence across such distances of geography and understanding. The public is in eclipse because local community life is no longer available to supply the basis for understanding and action. Because conditions and consequences are so diffuse and unintelligible, social inquiry and “full and moving communication” are essential to provide the social intelligence needed to address the conditions that affect association and to function as the precondition for formation of a true public and a democracy (Dewey, 1927, p. 350). But because the community is the medium for such social intelligence and local community life is disrupted, the public cannot form, and participation in democracy as a political form is severed. Hence, Dewey’s analysis and solution: “Unless local community life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself” (pp. 371–372). Only then can democracy in both its forms, as community and as government, be realized and joined.

Carey’s Blind Spot of Community

Carey of course was under no obligation to adopt Dewey’s ideas whole cloth. Nonetheless, he did draw on Dewey in significant and influential ways and apparently believed he was being faithful to Dewey’s conception of community and public. What he did not see was how Dewey made the connection between the two. Dewey’s local community is not innocent of social identity and social conflict but provides the means for addressing both if the conditions of social inquiry, social interaction, and other conditions of full communication are present. Indeed, Dewey (1927) told us that addressing the conditions of participation of all members in the life of the community is critical for reaching the understanding that makes community and hence a public possible: “Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of the creation of a true public” (p. 350). Dewey’s local community provides for participation in local political life and beyond, through formation of the public to act on those issues with consequences beyond those directly involved. Hence, the public can and should act locally as well as be tied to other local publics to carry concerns and local knowledge forward and to achieve the perspective and discussion relevant to democracy as government at a national level. To complete the cycle, social inquiry and full communication are needed to bring back to the local community knowledge from beyond its purview to inform its understandings and its actions, connecting the geography, knowledge, and participants of the local and the distant.

And so we have Carey’s blind spot of community. Carey’s republican community, by claiming it could transcend so-called private identity and interest, is disconnected from the democracy of local meaning-making and connected primarily if not only to the democracy of the metropolis writ large. The common good that Carey believed could be addressed through a republican community can be established only when the needs and interests of all of a community’s members are known and taken into account, not bracketed and ignored. The republican community is an urban one and not particularly communal because Carey assumed that the participants are strangers, as least in principle, to each other. But strangers who engage in conversation in local (rural or urban neighborhood) settings either move on or they are no longer strangers. In any event, as strangers they fail to share the meanings of the local context. Yet, this is precisely the problem of local democracy. When people living in proximity are strangers as the result of inadequate or nonexistent means for coming to know and understand each other, no community of shared meaning exists, and no political public representing its interests can emerge. This is the first communication problem that needs to be addressed, if we follow Dewey’s reasoning.

In the face of such an unlikelihood of routine urban stranger civicness for local political purposes, a return of attention to local communities (rural and urban) is in order, to ground democracy in local knowledge and local meaning-making. Attention to local communities does not mean that other kinds of communities should not be of interest and of value and that democracy cannot and does not benefit from them (e.g., Antonova, 2013). Local community life, in all its social, economic, and political dimensions, has been derailed because of the structuration of the built environment, closed and established political processes, private decisions by business and industry, and inadequate and ineffective means of communication. Yet, the makings are there. Many people do feel they live in a community, not just a setting. It is a term that is dear to people around the globe, even if misused for political and rhetorical purposes and difficult as an analytical category (see Goodwin, 2012). Worries about loss of community continue. The popular book by Marc Dunkelman (2014), The Vanishing Neighbor, like Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone before it, decries the loss of connections at the middle ring of associations with shopkeepers and other local relations between the personal and the distant, the result of new economic and social relationships fostered by changing technologies, accomplished with little reflection and certainly without local public discussion. Meanwhile, changing patterns of migration and immigration continue to bring more strangers together but with little attention to the need for Dewey’s “full and moving communication” that would make entrance into an existing community possible, enriching it in the process.

But, with or without communities of shared meaning with the capacity to direct their efforts, political units of democracy grind on—units that are local and dispersed from the federal government and large city centers. Political decisions are accomplished in townships and incorporated towns, cities, and states across the country. Besides 50 states functioning as governments with their various internal county governments, the U.S. Census Bureau (2013) tells us that incorporated towns and cities numbered 19,516 in 2012, of which only 289 were cities above 100,000 residents, or fewer than 1.5%. In addition, there were 16,519 town or township governments in 20 states, with some geographic overlap with municipalities in 11 of those states (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). What, we should ask, is the connection between local community and these many units of governments? What is the connection between democracy as community life and democracy as local government? For all the critiques made of the fallacy of thinking of communities as geographically bounded, government is a geographically bounded, nested layer of institutions.

Implications for Communication

These gaps between political decision making and people’s experiences make Dewey’s analysis of the eclipse of the public because of failures of community all the more relevant today. Consequently, we are unlikely to find existing models of his vision for how democracy could work, but examples do abound of failures of local democracy as the result of disconnection from the lives and meanings of residents. It took national media coverage of resident outrage in Ferguson, Missouri in the past year to call attention to the failures of democracy and local communication in that community of 21,000, a suburb (hinterland) of the metropolis of St. Louis. A police officer shooting of unarmed Black teen Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, dramatized the relation between city government and its agencies and its residents. According to the city’s website, the community is 70% African American, but it had only one seated African American among its six city council members until the April 2015 election galvanized voters to elect two more. An NBC News story about the time of the shooting reported the police department had only three Blacks on its 53-member police force (Blankstein, Winter, & Seville, 2014). The story painted a picture of the Ferguson police against the public, quoting the president of the St. Louis County Police Association saying the department had “no established lines of communication with community leaders.” The blog of a past president of the Public Relations Society of America lamented the lack of public relations preceding the events that would have built “emotional and cultural bridges during moments of calm, connecting people and ideas, communicating, joining to address weighty issues and building credibility and trust between and among citizens and government.” He concluded, “Ferguson is but an extreme example of a community’s failure to communicate” (Cherenson, 2014). These samples of public discourse suggest it is obvious to many that some derangement of community and communication is at play in the ongoing and not isolated controversy. More efforts by city officials and agencies to bridge the gap between government and citizens might produce some palliative effect, but those efforts will not change the model of democracy behind it and replace that model with one of communal self-determination through participation. Outsider attention from national news media and citizen-generated social media certainly was important to making the problem a public issue beyond the city limits of Ferguson, but community members lacked the prior means—resulting in protests and demonstrations—to become a public, to be heard, to inform and be informed of the issues that affect them, and to direct officials to their remedy.

It was John Dewey who best understood these problems of local community and democracy. Dewey reminded us that the local is the only universal. Local community, growing out of the human condition of associated life, gives or should give democracy its legs. Carey reminded us that we need local communities, but he abandoned both the local and community, the place of what he considered private interests, in favor of his republican and urban version of a discourse of strangers. But strangers are not a community and cannot become a public that represents the shared meanings from which it derives. What happens at the local level is of tremendous import to those who live there, which is all of us, and to the interrelationship with those terrible and seemingly intractable issues played out at the national and global level. The metropolis and the hinterland is not simply a spatial metaphor; it is a political one that has been used to conflate the urban with national interests and the hinterland where most of us live (whether near or far from those seats of power) with local and irrelevant interests. For all his insights, Carey’s blind spot obscures rather than clarifies the point. What will we do to revive community and its connection to democracy at the local level and then to the national and beyond? Identity formation and politics begin at home, to paraphrase Dewey, and that home is the local community. While Carey was blind to such politics of meaning-making, it was Carey (1995) who gave us our charge: “The aim of cultural studies is to renew a democratic conversation outside of the media, and to begin that renewal in the universities, but it extend it to a wider civic and civil discourse” (p. 88). In doing so, we need to remember that civic discourse must begin in the hinterland, tying local communities of meaning to local, national, and global politics.

Footnotes

Author Note

A version of this article was presented as part of a panel on James Carey at the annual conference of the National Communication Association, Chicago, IL, November 2014.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editor and anonymous reviewers of this journal for helpful suggestions. She also thanks the University of North Dakota for time to pursue this research with a developmental leave.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Lana F. Rakow is professor of communication and director of the Center for Community Engagement at the University of North Dakota. She earned a PhD at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, under the direction of James Carey. The author or editor of four books on gender, feminist theory, and technology, she is currently working on a book about John Dewey and communication.

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