On the Death of James W. Carey

He was magnetic. He was the smartest person in any room. He was the best-liked person you’ve ever known. Sure, he was a fine husband and father; but he was an incomparable teacher and mentor.

One of my favorite pieces to teach from is his essay, ‘A Plea for the University Tradition.’ It was initially published, like many of his essays, in a relatively obscure journal, and then republished as his Presidential Address to the Association for Education in Journalism in that organizations main journal, Journalism Quarterly. It was his first and (I think) only JQ publication, a fact that always tickled Jim, who would recall that he had previously submitted many things to JQ, but they had all been rejected, usually with great condescension: ‘the author is not ready,’ but ‘we encourage you to keep working.’ As I’ve read and reread that piece, I’ve come to realize that every interesting thought that’s been worked over in the field of media communication over the past quarter century is somehow contained in there. I’ll return to it.

One of my favorite things to do in the classroom as I teach that essay is to imitate Jim Carey. Not that I’m very good at it. And, now that it’s been more than a dozen years since he left my campus, my students don’t recognize the impression anymore. They still laugh appreciatively, however, probably because it’s just funny to see someone trying to imitate someone else.

I never took a class from Jim, but I did sit in on his seminar one semester. This was around 1990, and our campus had just played host to the conference that produced the volume ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ (jokingly referred to as the White Pages because of its size, or as the Yellow Pages because of its entrepreneurial spirit, or as ‘Cultural Studies: If Not Now…’) He had that conference and its aftermath on his mind. Like most of his seminars in them days, he’d improvise on the syllabus, bringing in photocopies of half a dozen pieces each week and distributing them to start things off. ‘This is what we’ll read for next week.’ Eyebrows would lift. Raymond Williams again. Hannah Arendt. Darnton and Eisenstein. Foucault and Benjamin. C. Wright Mills. Then he would ask the class if there were any questions, and someone would pop one. He would begin to answer, and usually you could see him shifting gears as he worked up to speed. First gear was a kind of bland offering of relevant immediate wisdom. Then his face would twist slightly and he shift gently into second gear, which usually took him back to the Enlightenment. Now the heads around the seminar table would tilt sideways, and the students would lift their pens from the paper, listening intently. What they were hearing was the setting. Then third gear, the story. When making a point, Jim always told a story. As the narrative unfolded, the pens remained suspended. Then fourth gear, the payoff, where, having built his podium out of story, he’d deliver his sermon. Then he’d pause, say something like ‘enough, let’s take a break,’ people would look at their watches and realize that an hour had passed, glance at their notebooks and see that they’d written NOTHING down, and then go have a cup of coffee. Ten or fifteen minutes later, we’d reassemble, and Jim would ask, ‘Are there any questions?’ and often the same process would repeat. Just as often, a dialog would break out. Jim’s seminars always attracted great students from across the campus, and the give and take could be remarkable. Nothing that anyone would write down, however. After the class, students would go out for a drink with their blank notebooks and have the most interesting conversations.

These seminar performances always seemed spontaneous, but of course the first hour, the apparently off the cuff answer to the apparently random question, was always based on rigorous preparation. Likewise, the apparently casually improvised syllabus always had a carefully thought through logic to it. So there was an element of misdirection to the teaching, and I think that had a lot to do with Jim’s classroom charisma.

The classes I teach at Illinois are all classes that he taught—History of Communication, Media and Democracy (formerly Mass Communication in a Democratic Society), Freedom of Expression (formerly History and Theory of Freedom of the Press)—or courses prepared under his supervision while Dean of the College of Communications—Historiography, and US Media History. This last seminar he sat in on the semester after I’d sat in on his. He took an incomplete, and later told me that things had gotten busy in the Dean’s office so he’d had to skip the last five or six weeks. This was ok with me. When he wasn’t in the classroom, I could do my Jim Carey imitation. And I wouldn’t worry as much about saying something stupid. If you have ever seen Jim hear something stupid in a public setting, you will recognize the reaction I’m about to describe. Always one of the world’s great fidgeters, he would go positively spastic if he heard something stupid. He would chew on whatever was ready to hand—his glasses, usually—and twist around in his seat, and his face would burst out in a series of extraordinary tics and grimaces. I set him off once in my seminar when I was making an argument about the commoditization of news in the nineteenth century and the importance of the reporter as a means of production. I spent a few hours afterward trying to figure out what was so stupid about what I was saying. Never did figure it out, but came to suspect that I had sounded like a doctrinaire Marxist, which might have pissed him off. He hated cant. Perhaps he failed to appreciate its ritual uses.

This year I’ve written two essays for collections inspired by James Carey’s work. One, for a ‘keywords’ collection, describes his thinking on communication history, and notes how the disparate stories and actors in his histories can hold together as an overall theory of comm. history only through an act of faith. Here I meant to tweak him on our shared Roman Catholic tradition, which he took more seriously than I do (at least I pray so now). (That was also one of the reasons why I chose the title Last Rights for a book I edited that he dropped out of.) The other is for a collection of essays on communication history edited by two graduates of the University of Illinois from more recent years, Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson. That essay begins with A Plea for the University Tradition and discusses civic culture and the ‘party period’ in US history. It again makes a kind of faith-based argument, this time referring to the importance of a faith in the public as a ‘regulative fiction.’

This was the big question that Jim spent his life trying to answer: How can communication, or journalism, or the media (the subjects differ in interesting ways) preserve community, or democracy, or the public (the objects differ too)? He formulated this question in different ways, depending on his mood. Often he was in a Canadian mood, and would phrase the question like this—what can we ask of journalism that will help us overcome the erosion of the public caused by the media? Often he was in a Habermasian mood and would ask the question like this—how will communicative action allow public deliberation to overcome the challenges posed by late modernity’s working out of the Enlightenment? And more and more in recent years he was in a kind of Columbian mood and would ask the question like this—how can journalism be practiced in a way that will both protect its integrity as a vocation and yet prevent its monopolization by a profession? Or better—how can journalism make us better citizens?

The last time I talked with him directly was in the spring of last year, when he flew out to Illinois for what turned out to be his final visit. My colleague Anghy Valdivia, also a former student of Jim’s, had recruited him for two purposes: to lecture to our doctoral proseminar, and to do a demo recording for an audiobook project. I helped her set up the demo recording and generally worked as a go-between, and went to lunch with her and Jim. Anghy and I bitched about the office, and Jim listened sympathetically. I thought we were doing him a favor by reinforcing his decision to leave Illinois, a decision about which he never displayed any regret, to my knowledge. While he worked at Illinois, he fully inhabited the commitment to public education he saw in the land grant universities. When he went to Columbia, he fully inhabited the commitment to the life of the mind he saw in the Ivy League; he was also fascinated by the covert ethnic warfare he detected everywhere there. (Not that he was inconstant in his loyalties, but he instinctively recognized loyalty itself as a good thing, and could be a Yankees fan in New York and a Red Sox fan at the same time.) He did not waver in his keynote educational belief—the belief that journalism education was liberal arts education and not technical education, a belief that was rooted in his analysis of the history of communication, the media, and journalism.

On that last visit to Illinois, Jim told me that he was working on a book. It would be something of a textbook. It would survey US history for aspiring journalists, trying to give them the stuff they should know to be able to do their work in the most responsible and citizen-friendly way. I thought this was a great idea. I hope somebody finishes this book.

I hope somebody finishes all of Jim’s books. Once I asked him one time about his essay, ‘The Problem of Journalism History,’ which claims at the beginning to be a fragment of a much longer project. What became of the project? He told me that he’d been working on it at the dining room table for half a year, and it had gotten up to about 100 pages, when the editors of the new journal Journalism History called to ask him for an inaugural essay. He went to that manuscript and chose his favorite 11 pages (‘because that’s how much you could send in the mail for one stamp’) and sent them off. This self-effacing story can’t be strictly true, can it? It’s too good a story not to tell, though.

Previous and subsequent book projects usually went well to he’d gotten up to about 100 pages. Then they would stall. Perhaps because Jim would lose interest. He detested boredom. He loved big fat books and could read anything of whatever density or weight very briskly, and had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the complexities of professional discourses, but when something became ponderous, well, that was that. He eventually reached this point with Marx’s Grundrisse, which nagged him for most of 1983, I think.

Dave Nord at Indiana has described Jim as the kind of writer Innis would have been if he could have thought in units larger than a paragraph. Jim thought in units of essay size. He was not a book writer. Thank God. Could you imagine how dull a book ‘Two Models of Communication’ would have been? Or ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph?’ The insight-to-stuff ratio of his prose rhythm is perfect for an essay.

But I’m very sorry he didn’t finish his last book, and I’m very sorry he didn’t record his audiobook. Both would have been wonderful. I think his last book would have had the appropriate insight-to stuff ratio, because it would have been written for students and not for academics. Most of his published material was pitched as programmatic, as blueprint material for colleagues or grad students to reverse engineer into the framework of their own research projects. For someone who thought and wrote so much about the great public, he wrote very little for that great public, and his best material doesn’t necessarily play well to a general audience. Once I sat in the second to last row while he delivered one of his nicer pieces, ‘A Republic, if you can Keep it,’ to a convention of the Illinois High School Press Association. The two high school journalists behind me got into a competition to see who could make the best farting noises. They were virtuousi; I’d never heard such tooting, and I used to work in a chili parlor. His audience wasn’t them, it was us. He could play to journalists, too, but in person, not so much in writing.

The written work pays off for us only partly on its own merits. If Dave Nord, to name a blameless journalism historian, had written ‘A Plea for the University Tradition,’ it would not have the same meaning—just as if he’d written Satanic Verses, no ayatollah would have bothered with a fatwa. Jim’s authorship was augmented (‘author’ and ‘augment’ are etymologically related) by his oral and oratorical persona. He was such a lovely person, and everyone who knew him liked him. He was such a smart person, and it didn’t take long for you to realize it. He was a very warm person, too. People liked him because he liked people. ‘I like everyone,’ he used to say. And he had such a voice. He was an amazing orator, the kind that just doesn’t exist anymore, and pretenders like Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson are trotted out to remind us of. So among the readers of the essays, there are two sorts: the ones who’ve heard him speak—and all of us have been touched by his charisma—and the ones who’ve just read him.

Those of us who knew him a bit knew him as a cheerful presence. Some of us would try to infect him with our gloom, but he never let us get away with it. In his New York years, though, as the Republic staggered through its Monica days and then went apeshit over Ay-rabs, and the current Pres-o-dent made sausage out of words like liberty and community, his optimism was strained. But I don’t think he ever lost his faith in the power of thought, of talk, and of civilized discourse.

Which returns me to the essay I began with, ‘A Plea for the University Tradition.’ Throughout that piece, civilized discourse is losing ground in a long war with the bureaucratic rationality of the state, on the one hand, and the instrumental rationality of the media, on the other. What prevents the unconditional surrender of community and democracy is, on the one hand, the university tradition, and on the other, journalism in its most elevated sense. His intellectual life was dedicated to nurturing the union of these two cultural institutions. Did anyone do it better? Can anyone left living do it as well?