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Thus far we have made only a first-level comparison between amplificatory and durative systems, on the one hand, and alternative systems, on the other. This comparison takes us a long way into the problem, but there is an important second-level comparison to which we must now turn.

The technical forms which are primarily amplificatory and durative include, as we have seen, within any class-divided society, certain social conditions which qualify their abstract definitions of general availability. Amplification can be, and indeed almost everywhere is, highly selective; only some voices are amplified. Duration is radically affected by this and by further selective processes. But what has then to be distinguished, theoretically, is a qualitative difference, within the means of communication as means of production, between the amplificatory (and to a lesser extent the durative) and those alternative systems which now include not only such modes as writing and print but modes which in some of their uses seem to be only amplificatory or durative.

Thus in radio and television there can, technically (leaving aside, for the moment, the powerful processes of social control and selection), be direct transmission and reception of already generalized communicative means: speech and gestures. But most radio and television—and this tendency is necessarily strengthened when a durative function is in question—involve further labour of a transforming or partly transforming kind. The processes of editing, in the broadest sense—from shortening and rearranging to the composition of new deliberate sequences—are qualitatively similar, at least in effect, to fully alternative systems. Yet this is very difficult to realize just because what is then transmitted has the appearance of direct transmission and reception of the most generalized communicative means. We hear a man speaking with his own voice, or he ‘appears as himself on the screen. Yet what is actually being communicated, after the normal processes of editing, is a mode in which the primary physical resources have been—usually in what are by definition hidden ways; the edited-out words cannot be heard—transformed by further intermediate labour, in which the primary communicative means have become material with which and on which another communicator works.

It is not only a matter of excision and selection. New positive relations of a signifying kind can be made by the processes of arrangement and juxtaposition, and this can be true even in those unusual cases in which the original primary units are left in their original state. In film, in which by definition there is no direct transmission of primary physical communicative resources—since all are intermediately recorded—there is a variation of this general position, and the central communicative act is customarily taken as precisely this composition, in which the primary communicative processes of others, whether or not under specific direction, are in effect raw material for communicative transformation by others.

It is in this sense that radio and television, in all forms other than the simplest direct transmission, and then video and film, have to be seen finally as alternative modes, rather than as simply amplificatory or durative. Even in direct transmission in television, so apparently technical a matter as the positioning of the camera is a crucial signifying element. In a confrontation between police and demonstrators it matters absolutely, for example, whether the camera is placed (as so regularly) behind the police, or, as in a different social perspective it can be, behind the demonstrators, or again, which can sometimes happen, in impartial relations to both. What is ‘being seen’ in what appears to be a natural form is, evidently, then in part or large part what is ‘being made to be seen’. The traditional alternative systems, in which speech is rendered or recorded in print, or in which, by habituation, there is direct communicative composition for print, are then often easier to recognize as alternative systems, with all their initial social difficulties of acquiring the necessary skills, than these effectively alternative systems in which the appearance of direct communication has in effect been produced, by specific processes of technical labour.

Thus Marx’s revolutionary perspective, within which modern universal communication can be subordinated to individuals only by surbodinating it to all of them, raises problems of a new kind in addition to those problems which are inherent in any such social transformation. We can foresee a stage of social development in which general appropriation of the means of communicative production can, by integrated movements of social revolution and the utilization of new technical capacities, be quite practically achieved. For example the creation of democratic, autonomous and self-managing systems of communal radio is already within our reach, to include not only ‘broadcasting’, in its traditional forms, but very flexible and complex multi-way interactive modes, which can take us beyond ‘representative’ and selective transmission into direct person-to-person and persons-to-persons communication. Similar though perhaps more expensive systems can be envisaged for teletext, where there is a broad area for the general appropriation of communicative and especially durative means of production. Yet at the same time, within other modern alternative systems, which include many of the most valuable communicative acts and processes, there are problems in the modalities of any such appropriation which are of a more intractable kind. It is true that modes of communal autonomy and self-management will go much of the way, within the intrinsically transforming processes, to alter the generally existing character of such production. But whereas in the simpler and more direct modes there are readily accessible forms of truly general (universal) appropriation—by direct access to a technology which utilizes only primary and already distributed communicative resources—it must for a long time be the case, in those processes which depend on transformations, that a relatively abstract appropriation is more practical, and therefore more likely, than that more substantial appropriation—general and universal—of the detailed means of production which such systems necessarily employ. Of critical importance, in this respect, and as the necessary ground for any effective transition, is sustained discussion and demonstration of the inherent transforming processes involved in, for example, television and film. The modes of ‘naturalization’ of these means of communicative production need to be repeatedly analyzed and emphasized, for they are indeed so powerful, and new generations are becoming so habituated to them that here as strongly as anywhere, in the modern socio-economic process, the real activities and relations of men are hidden behind a reified form, a reified mode, a ‘modern medium’.

But critical demystification can take us only part of the way. Reification will have to be distinguished from the open, conscious composition of works, or the only results will be negative, as in some contemporary semiotic tendencies, which demystify the practice by calling all such practice into question, and then predictably fall back on ideas of universal (inherent and unsurpassable) alienation, within the terms of a pessimistic and universalist psychology. The critical demystification has indeed to continue, but always in association with practice: regular practice, as part of a normal education, in this transforming labour process itself: practice in the production of alternative ‘images’ of the ‘same event’; practice in processes of basic editing and the making of sequences; practice, following this, in direct autonomous composition.

We shall already have entered a new social world when we have brought the means and systems of the most direct communication under our own direct and general control. We shall have transformed them from their normal contemporary functions as commodities or as elements of a power structure. We shall have recovered these central elements of our social production from the many kinds of expropriator. But socialism is not only about the theoretical and practical ‘recovery’ of those means of production, including the means of communicative production, which have been expropriated by capitalism. In the case of communications, especially, it is not only, though it may certainly include, the recovery of a ‘primitive’ directness and community. Even in the direct modes, it should be institution much more than recovery, for it will have to include the transforming elements of access and extension over an unprecedentedly wide social and inter-cultural range.

In this, but even more in the advanced indirect communicative modes, socialism is then not only the general ‘recovery’ of specifically alienated human capacities but is also, and much more decisively, the necessary institution of new and very complex communicative capacities and relationships. In this it is above all a production of new means (new forces and new relations) of production, in a central part of the social material process; and through these new means of production a more advanced and more complex realization of the decisive productive relationships between communication and community.