Except, of course, they’ve had more than a whiff of it.  Take a look around.  Breathe in.  A sullen, knowing scepticism is everywhere in the air.  Bowdlerized and bastardized perhaps, but the essential tenets of media theory have permeated the contemporary culture the very theory purports to explain.  Is there a couch potato alive who isn’t attuned by now to the ulterior motives in media content or the sheer pointlessness of all that yammering?  When your six-year-old picks up from the Zeitgeist that there is something troublesome about her beloved Barbie – when something akin to shame starts to nuzzle up to desire that early in life – the cultural theorists have done their work.

And the places where they make their home, the multiplying university departments of communications and media studies, are growth industries devoted to the denunciation of the “mainstream,” the celebration of the “transgressive,” the promulgation of perceived contemporary “crises” of epochal proportions, and the willy-nilly salting of “meaningful” quotation marks in term papers and journal articles.  The result is legions of undergraduates versed – often badly – in the modish vocabulary of the decentred self and the death of the author. They have no trouble justifying at length and in arch theoretical terms why being addled on Ecstasy with Vick’s VapoRub smeared on your chest in the company of 1,000 other people in the middle of the night in an abandoned warehouse in a bad part of town is a “dissident” act – rather than merely the sort of juiced-up mayhem young people have enjoyed since the invention of mead.  But if you put a gun to their heads, most of them wouldn’t be able to tell you how a broadcast licence gets awarded, describe the economics of an advertising agency, or explain why there’s still a Canadian magazine industry.  These more prosaic aspects of communication practice are worth knowing about in their concrete detail, but it’s difficult to appreciate that – or even to notice it – if you have your head stuck up Jacques Derrida’s derrière.

As you can imagine, then, I am not the type to think kindly of a book like J. David Black’s The Politics of Enchantment, yet another treatise on the arcana of media theory by a recent Ph.D. (York) teaching at a start-up program in communication studies (Wilfrid Laurier), trying to make a name for himself.  Lord preserve us from the premature hardcover publication of precocious theoretical musings.  Personally, I do not care, for example, whether in her seminal essay on how cyborgs walk amongst us, collapsing human/machine dualities, Donna Haraway’s “post-structuralism tends to overwhelm her good materialist intentions, leaving that materialism largely gestural” – and neither should you.  Life is too short to learn German, and it’s too precious to waste slogging through an entire book of that sort of claptrap.

That said, it is my grave duty to announce to anyone who will listen that The Politics of Enchantment is a very good book, a very good book indeed.  With nothing more than wit, clarity, economy and perspicacity, it gives the claptrap a good name.   In the end, one may still suspect that what is at stake in the grand debate is merely the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, but in Black’s handling one cannot help but admire the choreography.

At its core, the book is an audit of critical theory, charting the various strains of cultural studies and communication deep-think in relation to one another, from the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and its antecedents in E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, through the Frankfurt School and its progeny in political economy, the investigations of subcultural practice, the turn to post-structuralism and post-modernism, and the latest attempts to make theoretical purchase on the rise of entirely new concourses of computer-mediated communication.  In itself, this is nothing new.  The various skirmishes in the theory wars have been well documented elsewhere, but it is the verve Black brings to the telling that elevates his work above competing accounts.  Most treatments of communication theory are stone-faced, grinding, portentous affairs that sag under the weight of their own self-aware seriousness of purpose.  Without in any way sacrificing gravity, Black’s work is playful in the way that puzzling over an intellectual problem should be.  He makes this stuff interesting.  He makes it, if he won’t mind my saying so, fun.

That alone goes some way toward rescuing communication theory from itself, and Black pulls it off in large measure purely by virtue of the fact that the book is extremely well written.  This is not simply a cosmetic attribute and it cannot be over-emphasized.  The clarity of Black’s own arguments and his accounts of others’ is a consequence of the clarity and the charm of his writing.  Too much of cultural theory is rendered with either a willful or inept obscurantism, as though if it doesn’t induce a migraine the author will count the work a failure.  This is simply unwarranted, since the ideas the high theorists are trading in aren’t really that difficult.  It’s not brain surgery, after all.  It just feels like it much of the time.

More than merely clear, however, Black’s writing is marked by a felicitous turn of phrase and a dab hand at metaphor.  In contrast to the tank-tread prose that is all too characteristic of the discipline, there is more than a touch of the romantic in Black, and that is precisely the point, because The Politics of Enchantment is not simply a lively survey of the theoretical terrain but an argument in its own right; a novel take on what’s missing in the dense thickets of the literature.

Between the twin tracks of cultural theory – the stop-making-sense nihilism of the post-structuralists on the one hand, and the righteous paranoia of the political economists on the other – Black claims to have detected a heretofore buried third rail.  Though submerged, he argues that this strand of thinking has already influenced communication theory in a variety of subtle ways, and that brought out into the open and polished up for a new generation it holds the promise of revitalizing an otherwise stalled theoretical project.  What he points to with such enthusiasm is Romanticism, the mad aunt in the attic of Western thought.

Romanticism, he points out in his introduction,

originating in Germany during the late eighteenth century, and then passing like a fever to England and beyond in the early nineteenth century, was the first Western philosophical tradition to engage capitalism, to take up culture as a problem for analysis, and to question rationality and how it is implicated in our major political, economic and social phenomena.  These features would be enough to recommend romanticism to our contemporary era, a time when capitalism is remarkable in its unchallenged scope, when culture has emerged as one of the most embattled concepts in both the academy and the crowded world alike, and when postmodernism has again pressed the familiar charges against reason.  Reading poetry written by its German forebears, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (known by his pen name, Novalis), or in the Anglo-American intellectual world, more familiar figures like William Blake and John Keats, we forget that romanticism was a philosophy, although one expressed in florid language and pithy epigrams that bear little resemblance to conventional scholarly prose.

What Black proposes is nothing less than the resuscitation of this forgotten intellectual tradition as a cure for what ails not only the contemporary condition but current media theory.  As Black sees it, the triumph of Enlightenment reason over the Romantic sensibility was the wrong turn the West took way back when, with the result that there is no longer any room for the fiery aesthetic temperament to breathe, while social order and social relations are subjugated to an unfeeling instrumentalism that chokes the life out of what makes life worth living.  In a nutshell, Black argues that the rise of reason as the exclusively privileged mode of addressing the world has led to a numbing and constricting cultural straitjacket that denies true freedom of thought and action.  More than that, the inadequacies of communication theory stem from the fact that theory itself is steeped in the rational tradition.  This is a fascinating position.  In effect, Black is arguing that contemporary theory falls short because it literally cannot understand the carnivalesque goings-on it seeks to explain.  “[R]elying on reason alone to correct a problem it inadvertently caused in the first place is a kind of intellectual homeopathy that invites more trouble,” he says.  “That is, simply making rational sense of irrational phenomena like cyberspace or rave culture constantly misses the point.”  This much, at least, Black shares in common with every other inhabitant of Theory Town: the insistence that everyone else is wrong.