TRANSPORTATION OR COMMUNICATION?

SOME NOMENCLATURE CLARIFICATION

As I’ve been prone to do over the years, I sometimes dedicate brief posts to clarifying some set of ideas or definition refinement so that in future posts I don’t need to either reiterate such nomenclature refinements whenever they appear or to refer readers to some longer, other-focused post in which the refinement is somewhere buried. It was after complaints from readers who have had to deal with the later solution that I’ve decided upon the current approach. So, apologies to anyone who finds this post a bit obscure or insubstantial, but in terms of easy reference in the future it seems to me worthwhile to dedicate this short post on the topic at hand.

And the topic at hand, as you might imagine is one that will present itself repeatedly over the next year as we explore the various dimensions of the spatial revolution. It may seem a bit precious if your attitude is that I’m only saving a word or two in each instance, but those words or two do add up and if we’d insist upon a more inclusive approach the syntactic effects after a while become annoying at least.

By no means the only, but obviously a significant part of the story of the spatial revolution (Schmitt himself identified the psychological and cultural manifestations) is the constructing of a physical infrastructure that binds places of the world together – effectively reducing the space (or at least perception of space) between them. If we think of the technical means of such binding, two descriptors come to mind: transportation and communication. In most people’s minds, at least today, the former refers to the moving of things (e.g., goods or people) while the latter refers to the movement of information (e.g., ideas or symbols). It’s immediately obvious though that such a distinction isn’t as clear cut as it may first seem. Prior to the invention of the telegraph, long distance movement of ideas or images relied upon movement of things: i.e., goods or people.

Ideas of philosophy, for example, were embedded in books carried by book owners (as well as the minds of said owners) across the oceans from the very beginning of the Age of Discovery. Locke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, did not write down their ideas in America, but those ideas found their way to America in the books (and minds) carried by transatlantic travelers. Likewise the first great mass medium was not the newspaper per se, but rather the marriage of the newspaper to the railway network which carried those papers into what might be called news hinterlands.¹ And if one wants to quibble, even the movement of ideas across the telegraph or telephone still involve the movement of things: electrical pulses along wires. Electricity is still a thing.

So if the terms are not as easily parsed as it might seem at first glance, and I want a more parsimonious option than endlessly repeating “transportation and/or communication” or even “transportation/communication,” it seems a choice is required. My choice is to use communication to refer to both forms of long distance movement. As it happens, and you won’t be surprised, I’m sure given our familiarity with Schmitt’s premise that the global spatial revolution get underway with the 15th-16th century beginning of the Age of Discovery, that the widespread use of both terms originates from this period.

According to Etymonline.com, transportation emerges in the 1530s as a reference to an “act of conveying from one place to another.” Though the sense of a “means of conveyance” is only recorded in 1853. In contrast, communication is said to have arisen in the 15^th century, with the usual contemporary associations of conferring or discussing. Though it also even then carried a connotation of imparting. Which is particularly interesting because they trace the word back specifically to the Latin root communicare, which literally means “to make common.” This notion is further boosted in Raymond Williams fascinating book, Keywords², in which he provides an etymology of terms he’s identified as important for doing cultural analysis:

...communicationem, L, a noun of action from the stem of the past participle of communicare, L, from rw communis, L – common: hence communicate — make common to many, impart. Communication was first this action, and then, from 1C15, the object thus made common: a communication. This has remained its main range of use. But from 1C17 there was an important extension to the means of communication, specifically in such phrases as lines of communication. In the main period of development of roads, canals and railways, communications was often the abstract general term for these physical facilities.

So, as a matter of historical record, the term communication has been used (indeed during the very historical period that interests our examination of the spatial revolution) to refer to transportation of things. Compared to the more constricted etymology of “transportation,” I think that fact alone recommends it as the preferred term to stand in for both modern definitions. Additionally, though, I am attracted to this root notion of “making common.” For it is precisely the claim I’ll be making around the spatial revolution, at least as it relates to the engineered infrastructure, that it shrinks and tends toward homogenizing the world. In that sense, at least, the spatial revolution is distinctive precisely for its operative tendency to make both the things and people of the world more common to a rapidly growing population of space biased experience.

So that’s why I’ll be using “communication,” going forward to refer to both the movement of things and information, at least when both are implied or there’s no clear grounds for distinguishing. I may well occasionally use transportation if it exclusively refers to the movement of things. Though, as mentioned above, such a proposition, if examined deeply enough, doesn’t likely stand up to close scrutiny. (Still, everyone gets sloppy occasionally.)

Sorry if that was a bit dry, but as explained above, I now have a post to which I can refer readers without having to repeat all this, even in short hand. So, thanks for your patience if you’ve read this far. And next we’ll start getting into the weeds of the communication revolution that conveyed Schmitt’s spatial revolution. So, if you don’t want to miss that, and haven’t yet, please…

And if you know someone else who’d be interested in the topics discussed here, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. Those interested in the latter point might want to check out the pioneering work of the Chicago School of Sociology which developed a methodology that turned the charting of such news hinterlands into a model of organic social analysis. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Robert J. Sampson, The City, First Edition, Enlarged (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019); Roderick D. McKenzie, On Human Ecology: Selected Writings, First Edition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1968).

2. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).