Smash-and-grab,truth and dare …

Introduction

Notwithstanding calls by scholars for ‘de-Westernizing’ (Curran and Park, 2000) and ‘Southernizing’ (Rodny-Gumede 2015, 2013) communication studies and attempts at validating theory form the South (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2011; Connell 2007), communication studies remain mired in paradigmatic approaches that cement the global North as the norm upon which communication theories are founded.

In line with quite established African traditions of critical scholarship (Appiah, 2010; Mbembe 2015, 2001; Mudimbe 1998; Wa Thiong’o, 1993, etc.) that have not yet found favor in communication studies in the global North, we challenge and dare scholars to move beyond the Western ramparts of archaic, patriarchal, and decidedly racialised ideas of the West and the rest.

We do not endeavor to speak either for the South or the North, we merely draw inspiration from African scholarship, to offer radical epistemic grounding for communication studies that is more contextually relevant. Our contribution is to daringly advance what we call a ‘smash-and-grab’ approach to take truths that dominant regimes proscribe. As the reader will see, we do this in ways that reclaim the common humanity of scholars and that legitimate the ‘smashing and grabbing’ of usable and valuable insights from anywhere while viably calling for schema that are locally relevant.

The Western insularity of communication studies

It is concerning that studies of communication are bound up in Western histories and trajectories, in what McLuhan (1994: 41) described as narcotic and narcissistic fallacies. This is reflected in scholarship as well as theories of communications where the global North is taken as the norm for the development of scholarship in the global South, as an example we cite Rogers’ (1994) coruscating biographical history of communication study and its distinctly Western orientation. Equally, perspectives emanating from the global South have for long been neglected in the scholarship and communication curricula in both the global North and global South. The global which serves as the norm upon which research training and curricula are based rarely means ‘universal’ but frequently refers only to the global North at the cost of denying the global South (Sreberny, 2000: 114–115).

In this context we see, for example, that Carey (2009: 2) disavows telling the story of human communication as though it is a history of technological innovations but yields ‘to a useful ethnocentrism’ that gives priority to Western histories and experiences. In the view of Adam (2009: xix), this drove Carey to deliver an intellectualization of communication that ‘reflects a fundamental preoccupation with an American question and an American answer’. Similarly histories of communication, such as those of McLuhan (1994) are presented as claims about Western epochs and trajectories that deny different cultural experiences of communication technologies, while using purported experiences of non-Westerners in conveniently, insular and pejorative ways. The theoretical point is that deliberately or otherwise, the dominant Western scholarship of communication reflects Northern histories as though the rest either do not exist or only exist to the extent that this either aids or does not interfere with Northern doctrinal theorization, denying our common humanity, shared history, and future.

What is explicit is that communication scholarship often puts scholars into entrenched positions. Thus positioned, scholars are unlikely to see beyond the ramparts of compartmentalizing social structures, social molds and institutional boundaries which hence blinker them. In African settings, in particular, people are violently dominated by what Mbembe (2001: 25) calls the commandement, which one-sidedly works to establish, maintain, and secure laws and orders with ‘virtually infinite permutations between … right and not-right’. In the upshot, even research on communication on the HIV/AIDS epidemic – the worst health crisis to have faced Africans in recent memory – Chasi (2011, 2014) laments how the othering of Africans, and research that is primary based on Western conceptual schema, have combined to yield bodies of scholarship that fail to (a) develop into new theory/ways of thinking and to (b) recognize how Africans ask existential questions in the midst of experiences that beg questions of how life should be lived and died.

It is time we recognized that experiences and scholarships of the global South are not only equal to, but also necessary for the advancement of communication scholarship as a whole.

Moving the center of communications scholarship

Clearly, it is time we move the center by ‘swimming, towards … the sea of our connections with our common humanity’, by recognizing that diverse peoples with their situated knowledges are not an island unto themselves (Wa Thiong’o, 1993: 47). It is to this end that we recognize the need for developing new methodologies and theory for communications research (cf. Couldry, 2007: 249; Rodny-Gumede, 2015) and teaching (cf. Rodny-Gumede, 2013) and propose breaking down existing epistemology of communications scholarship in order to grab hold of truths that matter to humanity – us.

The question is, how? How do marginalized scholars, in the global South, with an interest in communication studies conduct research when its histories and epistemologies severely privilege Western ideas?

In Africa, what appears immediately ironic is that ‘there is a sensory experience of our lives that encompasses innumerable unnamed and un-nameable shapes, hues and textures that ‘objective knowledge’ has failed to capture’ (Mbembe, 2015: xvi) also in the field of communication studies. But the sense of irony dissipates when one recognizes that Africans seek ‘joy before death’ to distract and abstract in ways that deny the facticity of how people culturally craft unexpected bridges ‘between abstraction and concreteness’ (Mbembe, 2015: xiv).

Smash-and-grab epistemology recognizes, and makes something of, the concreteness of experience that finds and extracts value in the disruptions inherent in processes of signification, meaning, and communication. So we propose, beyond masks of irony, a smash-and-grab epistemology that seeks to open communications scholarship up to ‘unforeseen directions’ and that works ‘with … fault lines, to feel the chaotic touch of senses, to bring the compositional logics of our world to language’. (Mbembe, 2015: xiv).

Smash-and-grab epistemology

We contend that if communication scholars are to break through the policed and disciplined insularity of present communication studies, they will have to act out known movements by which smash-and-grab burglars extract valuables from heretofore secure orders. We think it is possible for scholars to do this with ‘Robin-Hoodist’ intent. Even in using communication scholarship often produced in the West or for the West, marginalized scholars can, á la Jenkins' (1992), become textual poachers that grab their own critical meanings. There is honor when these scholars poach valuable insights in order to ‘feed’ the multitudes who are starved of a scholarship that bears, not only on them, but humanity itself. After all, we are writing this in a sensor-sphere filled with messages of renewed conservative Western fears of the ‘empire striking back’ allowing violent hordes of colonialized, provincialized and marginalized peoples to smash through boundaries that were previously praxeomorphically thought to house only an imagined (insular) Western civilization.

No doubt some will be made uneasy by the use of the terms ‘smash’ and grab’. Amidst anticipated defensiveness by established scholars who may think that ‘smash-and-grab’ scholarship ‘sounds’ too primitive, what is easily lost is that, human beings ‘uses tools, technology, to wrest a living from nature’ (Wa Thiong’o, 1981: 8). This is to say that at least since the emergence of lithic primates, the genus homo is defined by the ways in which it smashes and grabs with ever increasing cultural abstraction and sophistication enabling physically weak humans to shape the world in dominant ways Human scientific developments evidence how humans have culturally evolved by complexly enabling normal and revolutionary ideas to emerge and smash into each other and by grabbing hold of new insights and truths. Science is in many ways founded up on mimetically reducing (smashing) things into their component parts and by conceptually ‘grabbing’ component parts together again. Indeed, scholars such as Feyerabend (1993) and Goodman (1983) have shown that the science by which humans dominate the world grows by breakthroughs/counter intuitions (or smashing thought-acts).

If scholars are prepared to ‘smash-and-grab’ for meanings and truths hidden or yet to be established they can reveal who, what, and how people are enmeshed in social, cultural, material, and political systems. After all meanings arise where disturbances that ensue in one realm are related to states or actions in another (Grice, 1957; Searcy and Nowicki, 2005; Sperber and Wilson, 1995).

If communication scholars are to recover their humanity and that of others from manifest orders of misanthropy, they would do well to learn from the practices of contemporary ‘smash-and-grabbers’. Further, routine activity theory (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1981; Cohen and Felson, 1977) shows that smash-and-grab ‘artists’ are most successful when they use knowledge acquired in their everyday routines or through diligent surveillance to opportunistically identify goods of high value that are not protected by guardians.

To enable us to break with supposed orthodox praxis and paradigms and embrace the multiple possibilities for research that a ‘smash-and-grab’ epistemology opens up, it is useful to briefly think of the disturbing yet archetypical figure of the trickster, which according to Jung (2003: 165) is expressive of a mythical ‘psyche that has hardly left the animal level’. We think that the ‘trickster’ is a useful analogy for thinking about ‘smash-and-grab’ epistemology precisely because they are ambiguous moral figures who are known to steal, joke, and morph into multiple ‘human’ forms that may at first appear ‘sub-human’ but often show us hidden truths. Raconteurs frequently position trickster’s ambiguous yet shifting boundary positions in ways that challenge dominant social orders by showing that social orders are fragile and that they are achieved with/by individual actions (Pieterse, 2010). By way of example, undercover journalism or ‘Wallraffing’ might entail illegal actions yet be ethically permissible to reveal hidden truths. Also, interesting to note is that primates feature as boundary figures in both Darwinian evolutionary accounts and in trickster narratives (Grau, 2014: 106).

We know from study of pirates and other brigands that pioneering smash-and-grab ventures are likely to be followed by imitators and other laggards (Dawdy and Bonni, 2012). As the numbers of those who seek to use opportunities increases, the attention of guardians is soon drawn even as the opportunities themselves become more limited and contested. Knowing this, ‘smash-and-grab’ scholars must become adept at moving to new ventures before they are made innovation martyrs, crushed by evolving knowledge-power regimes which soon take up the innovations and use them to perpetuate the dominance of power elites. One can take it that scholars who conduct research that advances marginalized peoples and causes should identify topics that are both valuable and that have not fallen under the guardianship of Western scholarship and epistemology.

Conclusion

We have argued that present communications scholarship have embraced truths that marginalize not just people in the global South but humanity itself. We have, above, briefly intimated that ‘smash-and-grab’ is a ‘foundational’ human practice and proposed that through such an approach marginalized scholarship and scholars can grab hold of meanings and truth that matter to them, this to recover their own dignity and worth.

The development of this new epistemic approach to heretofore proscribed truths will take courage. It will take daring. It will take moves that shutter known frameworks to reveal uncomfortable truths about our shared present and future. It will inevitably smash links that anchor many scholars to dominant truths, but in doing so, it will enable the brave and willing to grab new vistas of possibilities. It will open paths of no return for people who can, or will once again, become ‘smashers and grabbers’, as they dare to find truths in infinite ways.