Interview with Dr. Robert N. St. Clair by Li Mengyu
1. Dr. St. Clair, you are a distinguished professor in the Department of Communication, University of Louisville and you have a wide range of interests in research, could you please introduce your major research fields as well as your major achievements in these fields?
I approach scholarship as a search for insight into solving problems that I am working on. This commitment means that if I need to learn another language in order read documents in their original language, I will study another language. When I received my BA degree, I was comfortable in 11 languages. I have now studied 28 and my 29th will be Chinese. In terms of content areas, I will sit in classes in other fields and read voraciously in other fields when I am trying to solve interdisciplinary problems. My home field is linguistics but I am comfortable with such fields as philosophy, communication theory, sociology, political science, and bilingual education. It has taken me years to become competent in these fields but the journey has been worth the travel. I am now looking at sign theory from the perspectives of structural epistemology and structural ontology. I want to expand on the work of Hjelmslev and redo the model of Charles Sanders Pierce. I want to revise the model of symbolic interactionism to include a philosophical statement about human cognition and information processing. This is the current problem that I am working on.
2. You have your own academic website, until now more than 65,000 people have paid a visit to your website; it shows that your research has exerted a great influence in the internet as well. You also have your intercultural Forum website, what role do you think the internet has played in making your academic research widely known to the scholars as well as the ordinary readers?
One of my areas of commitment has been to language renewal. I did my doctorate on Eskimo and I have studied seven of the indigenous languages of North America. As a consequence, I belong to an organization of Teachers of Indigenous languages. In that organization, we hold a conference with about 200-300 teaches of the indigenous languages of the Americas and shortly after that we publish the proceedings for each member. Two weeks later, those same proceedings are place on the internet. The result has been phenomenal. The number of people at the conference amounted to a few hundred. The number that accessed that information over the internet amounted to millions of scholars around the world. This speeds up the process of problem-solving. We all learn from each other and information sharing plays an important role in contemporary research programs. I have created website with the intent of sharing information. I created an institute (The Intercultural Forum) in which we have online journals, online monographs, and online textbooks. All of these are peer reviewed and refereed. We are in the process of obtaining ISSN and ISBN numbers for these publications. Scholarship is not jeopardized by this process.
When I was in Harbin for an international conference, one of the professors from Iran came up to me and said that he uses many of my publications in his classes in Teheran. I believe more scholars should share their knowledge through the internet. In Western thinking, people own ideas. They copyright their works and claim ownership to them. This is not a problem because scholars should be recognized for their creativity. What is a problem, however, is the commercialization of ideas where they are financially controlled and placed in journals that demand expensive access to the materials. This leaves out scholars from countries that are beneath a certain economic scale. It is a capitalistic model of access to knowledge. It is a model of the few, by the few and for the few. It is not a model that is open to all scholars. Hence, I favor more online journals.
There is another reason why online journals should increase among intellectuals. It has to do with the fact that many countries are moving rapidly from Print Cultures to Media and Visual Cultures. Online journals are about the new communication paradigm. In my classes, I used course management software through which my students post their papers on an intranet system. They are allowed to use audio files, film clips, graphics, charts, hyperlinks, and a rich array of hypertexts. This is the future of communication. The internet is driving this new paradigm.
3. It seems that you have been greatly influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology. For instance, I notice you focus more on the study of culture, language, communication from sociology perspective, why do you think the sociology perspective is so important in these areas?
Westerners love to think of themselves as individuals. They love to think that what they have achieved is due to their own hard work. They think that they are self-made. This is a form of mental blindness in Western thinking. The fact is that for every successful person there are six or seven layers of people who played an important role in making that person successful. In Asia, this view of life is obvious. People life in a society in which there is a strong social self and one must take others into consideration while doing things. One does not act alone. One acts as a member of a social group. One has a social self and the individual self is involved in a matrix of relationships with others. Harmony has to do with the role that the individual self plays in a larger social context. One needs to respect those who also participate in this social matrix. The Chicago school of sociology is something unique to American scholarship. It provided a model of the social self in American culture. Irving Goffman provided wonderful models of the dramaturgical self (the egocentrical self) while his colleagues went on to further articulate the role that the social self plays in modern society. Related to this research was the model taken by the New School for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, in which it was argued that the self is socially constructed. These sociological traditions fascinate me. It provides great insight into how human beings see themselves. What I find missing in this model, however, is a lack of detailed social structures. It is not enough to know how reality is socially constructed and distributed I want to know how these structures relate to other kinds of social and linguistic patterns. As a consequence, I have been working on social script theory because such a model does provide detailed information on how human beings pattern their lives. It articulates the various roles that human beings play in society. Most sociological models just admit that roles exist. This is just the beginning of a far more interesting journey of discovering those roles, articulating them, and relating them to a coherent model of social and cultural life.
4. One of your research fields is linguistics; could you tell me what the main approaches in contemporary linguistics study are? Again, it seems that you focus more on the sociology of language, what do you think of language as a social system? Particularly what do you think of the significance of phenomenological sociology language theory raised by Foucault?
This is not an either or situation. There have been wonderful ideas that came out of formal linguistics. The various model of generative grammar have been intellectually exciting. My own research paradigm goes beyond the confines of formal linguistics. I am not against it. I just want to expand it so that it includes more sociological information. I make a distinction between sociolinguistics (society as seen through language patterns) and the sociology of language (language as a function in society). The latter begins with social theory. It places language within a social system and not as an isolated entity (sociolinguistics).
My focus on Foucault is not about the sociology of language. It is about his brilliant insights into society. He belonged to the Annals School of History, an interdisciplinary model of historiography. He was able to articulate how the middle ages transformed human cognition (les mots et chose). He was able to develop a model of social change that sees culture in the form of layers of cultural space (l’archeologie du savoir). He was able to document has social forces that began in the past continue to influence power in the present. Foucault has made great contributions of historiography. I use these insights in my own writing. Many use Foucault as a device to push their postmodern philosophies. I consider these acts of justification as a distortion of the contributions made by Foucault. He is much more than postmodernism. The label does not do him justice.
5. In one of your books, you illustrate how cultural metaphors can be combined to create a cultural profile for a cultural system. Could you please explain it in more detail?
There are many social metaphors but they are not all used in the same way. The metaphor of the journey, for example, exists in modern American culture, but it is not a major metaphor. It is not a cardinal metaphor. It is not ingrained in American culture. The metaphor of growth, however, is a cardinal metaphor. It is part of Western thinking. The metaphor of progress is about 300 years old and it is a related metaphor of growth. It forms an intrinsic part of how Americans see the world. The metaphor of the journey may function as a cultural metaphor (a cardinal metaphor) in Asia, but it does not do so in the US. For this reason, I found it insightful to look at those cardinal metaphors that constitute a culture. In the US, they are the metaphors of growth, the machine, the world as a stage, linear time, and Euclidian space. China has its own cultural metaphors and one of my doctoral students is working on that area of research right now. He is documenting the cardinal metaphors of China and demonstrating how they combine to create a cultural profile of Chinese thought.
6. Could you make a comment on the present research status of intercultural communication in the United States?
Linguists love to deal with theory and systems of thought. Most communication scientists fail in this regard. They create research projects and provide them ontological status by layers of quantitative research. They do not really address the far more important questions of the philosophy of communication. I just created a new website where I am beginning to address those issues. I begin with sign theory and the role that structure plays in human communication. I am in the process of developing my model of intercultural communication theory and it should be completed in about a year. I have the global outline worked out and I am now documenting the details. For example, intercultural communication is not recent. It began in the trade routes of ancient empires. I am researching this process and documenting how the model began and how cultural knowledge and interaction styles were created in these contexts and shared through cultural diffusion with others.
7 It seems that the Chinese scholars as well as the Japanese scholars are very active in the field of intercultural communication at the present time, what do you think of their researches as well as contributions to the field?
There are certain individuals who led the way in their own countries in the area of intercultural communication. In Japan, Masanori Higa (University of the Air) was an outstanding scholar. He lived in several countries and was fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. He did much to create awareness of intercultural communication in Japan. Also, Nobuyuki Honna (Aoyama Gakuin Daigaku) led the way in developing this way of thinking in Japan. Both Higa and Honna were active members of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies that I led as Executive Director for over a decade. These are the people who started the research model in Japan. Honna has gone on to do research in the various forms of English emerging in Asia. He has done excellent work but his model is not fully recognized outside of Japan. If his journal was made into an online journal, his contributions would be better recognized.
In China, Prof. JIA YuXin of Harbin Institute of Technology has been an active leader in the area of Intercultural Communication Theory. He has hosted two very successful conference in China as a member of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies. The conference in Harbin had over 700 participants. Prof. Jia has also directed many doctoral dissertations in this area. He played a large role in creating intercultural communication as a research paradigm in China. Jia is now the President of the Chinese Association for Intercultural Communication (CAFIC). That organization will be holding an international conference in Beijing in June of 2009. Professor HU Wenzhong , the Honorary President of CAFIC is another very important figure in the study of intercultural communications in China. His research has drawn the national media in China and he is well respected for his many publications in this area. The role that Professor Hu has played in the development of intercultural communication studies in China needs further articulation as his contributions have been many.
Professor Guo-Ming Chen, the current Executive Director of IAICS and a faculty member in the Communication Department at the University of Rhode Island is another active person involved in the development of intercultural communication studies in China. He works with the faculty in intercultural communications in Guanzhou and has done much to bring this area of research to the forefront in China.
Finally, one should mention the program in Shanghai headed by Kulich and Professor. Both have worked with the aforementioned scholars to develop intercultural communication studies in China.
The research models in intercultural communication studies are excellent. What is needed is for these scholars in China to make their organizations more international and to command important international journals that emanate from China. The problem is not one of quality, but of recognition.
8. There is a growing tendency toward globalization in the modern era, what do you think of the influences globalization has exerted towards culture and communication in the world? What do you think of various globalization theories?
Globalization is not new. There have always been patterns of cultural diffusion. There are two things about the current models of globalization that merit comment. One is that the scale of diffusion is extraordinary. The rate of cultural exchange and influence has been amazing. This is due, in part, to the cultures of modernity in which information exchange and product exchange is massive. The second thing that merit comment is that the model of globalization that being promoted by scholars is too narrow in its focus. It is essentially an economic model. It provides an unbalanced picture of what is going on. One of the things that it overlooks is the fact that a new culture of modernity is being developed internationally. This new models is driven by several forces: the business models (the seven cultures of capitalism), global business exchange, modernization of building, highways, traffic, air travel, etc. I am currently working on articulating his model of cultural modernity.
9. Visual communication has been paid more and more attention; could you please tell me why it is important? What role does it play in communication?
In Western thought, logic plays a huge role in the philosophy of language. Logic is based on hypo-deductive thinking. This is where one has a major premise, minor premise, and a conclusion. It was assumed that this rational model of thinking was adequate in explaining how people think. There have been several reasons to challenge this model. One comes from the study of metaphor. This is a form of analogical reasoning. One takes some concept, idea, form, or pattern as a source and creates a new object in the process through analogy. One begins, with the solar system, for example, in which planet circle around the sun and then one uses this model to create the new model of the atom in which electrons circle the nucleus. What is important about analogical thinking is that it is a dominant model of how people negotiate themselves through life. They go from the known to the unknown by creating analogies. Visual communication is important because it also uses analogical thinking. However, visual thinking differs in many ways from verbal analogies. In visual thinking, one creates a cognitive space and organizes objects within that space. It is the organization of objects in a cognitive visual space that provides the source of visual analogies. In Western thinking (Cf. Rudolph von Arnheim), one look at the center of a square visual space and balances objects around that space. Visual artists are aware of this process and use it in their visual productions. The problem, however, becomes challenging when one realizes that not all cultures use the von Arnheim model of the visual center. There are many cultures in which visual space is vertical and organized from right to left, etc. Visual communication in the context of intercultural communication is in need of a new research paradigm and that is why I am fascinated by this area of research.
10. Could you introduce or make a remark about the “Cultural Network theory”?
If one looks at systems theory, one finds that things do not operate alone and in isolation. Everything is connected into a larger network of connections. The components within a system interact. Currently, most researchers in culture theory are unaware of system theory. They are unaware of the fact that a human system differs substantially from non-human systems. In the areas of business and advertising and mass media, these two kinds of systems are conflated. They provide a challenge as theoretical constructs. Cultural network theory is the beginning of this research paradigm. It attempts to see culture as a system and it attempts to describe the components within that system and how they interact. In addition to these concerns, there are systems that are creative and they proliferate into new systems. This is true of both human and non-human systems (the second generation of systems theory). More scholars should engage in systems thinking in order to develop better models of human communication and intercultural communication.
11. You have also another research focus, it is called “Media and Cognition, The Embodied Mind”, could you illustrate in more detail about it? What do you think of the American media industry and its impact toward the contemporary American culture?
These are two different things. The Embodied mind has to do with the fact that the brain is not limited to the cranium. It is connected to the whole of the human body. My interest in this are of research has to do with the fact that most linguist infer biological information from their linguistic models. What is needed is for one to study language from the inside out. One needs to look at how phonation or audition works physiologically and then develop a model of linguistics based on that information. Current linguistic work on the biology of language is mostly inferential. It lacks physiological and biological depth. The model of the embodied mind that I am working on with my colleagues in the medical school begins with biology, physiology, and chemistry and works outwards towards linguistic theory.
The question about the media and its impact on American culture has to do with socialization. Mass media plays a major role in the socialization of people within a society. It provides social scripts and tells people how to perform them. Most people are unaware of these influences and how it is changing American culture. Once I have articulated social script theory in sufficient detail, I will be able to articulate just what these influences are and how they operate. One needs structure and patterns in order to articulate this paradigm. We are not yet there.
12. More and more visiting scholar from different countries have come to your institute working under the supervision of you, what do you think of their visits?
We all learn from each other. We are all experts in our own areas of study. When we come together, we share our search for insight and understanding. We create our own think tanks and explore wonderful ideas. It is not a matter of supervision as much as a matter of learning together. We are all experts in something but we are also children in other areas of life. One may be a brilliant linguist, for example, and know little or nothing of systems theory or sociological theory. By coming together, we learn from each other. These are the values that visiting scholars bring with them when they come and join us.