Contenu du sommaire : Il était une fois la théorie.

In this paper Liora Salter traces differences between communication studies in Canada and elsewhere. She locates a common problematic in the Canadian discipline centering on culture as the study of the relations between messages, social experience, and social context. Discourse analysis, she argues, is a common methodological orientation, but discourse analysis is cast broadly to include the study of the social, political, and economic conditions affecting the production, content, use and understanding of messages.

Paul Attalah attempts to demonstrate that, in the study of the Quebec referendum, the relationship between the choice of scientific theories and academic, in truth political and institutional, constraints is typical of the existing research policy within Québec universities.

From an anthropo-sociological viewpoint, Paisley Livingston points out that Metz, while claiming to break new methodological grounds, has, in fact, sunk back into the traditional thematic studies of cinematography. Livingston outlines a critique of the concept of representation as the epistemological substratum of a theory of communication.

William Leiss reviews some recent literature that suggests we can understand much of consumption behaviour in contemporary society with the use of anthropological categories. In this perspective, material objects are seen as carriers of «social meanings » or as «communicators ». The paper describes a research project on advertising imagery for the period 1900-present, whose objective is to study the changing composition of the symbolic mediations used in advertising for representing the relations between persons and objects.

Bernard Schiele refuses to recognize an academic status to scientific popularization on the grounds that : scientiñc popularization represents the hegemonic penetration of the capitalist discourse in the public realm ; scientiñc popularization is a misrepresentation of scientific truths.

According to Raymond Morrow, Habermas turned to Peirce and to the development of his pragmatics in America in search for an interactionist basis to his theory of society. By so doing, Habermas believes he may thus displace, in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer, the referential epistemological context of their neo-positivist materialism and of their prelinguistic theory of consciousness.

Christian Kristen believes that the present crisis in communication research stems from its ingrown incapacity to represent, to mediatize reality. Kristen therefore suggests that the study of communication should lie within the historical dialectical process of society.

In this study, Wladimir Krysinski attempts to describe the way in which Michel Serres thematizes communication in the fírst volume of his essays published under the generic title of Hermès. Using a specifíc strategy of the philosophical writing, Michel Serres demonstrates the necessity of rethinking communication within a new context involving various complexities of a philosophical, linguistic, cultural or scientific nature. Communication is presented as both an encyclopedic object and a cognitive one.

Paul Heyer explores the possibility of developing further a study of the relationship between communications and history. Harold A. Innis and Marshall McLuhan are given credit for a preliminary definition of this field. The author suggests that much can be learned in communications/history studies that take into account the work of Michel Foucault on discourse and power/knowledge technologies.

Harold Adams Innis' Presidential Address to the Royal Society of Canada, in 1947, bears the title «Minerva's Owl ». In his Address, Innis outlines a new fíeld of communication research in which media history is related to its cultural, economic, political and military context.