The role of cultural knowledge stems from, e.g. the socio-individual nature of communication phenomena. This way, our cultural knowledge – which consists of views (representations) on communication – shapes, regulates and determines the communication practices and their particular realizations. However, the cultural knowledge is always created in specific socio-historical circumstances and, therefore, the knowledge itself is subject to the them. Thus, it follows that the way of understanding and recognizing what communication “is” (or rather how it is “perceived”) undergoes historical transformations. In other words, a way of describing and defining communication is not universal. The assumption about the regulatory role of cultural knowledge with respect to communication actions and practices has also other essential consequences. It is essential that the cultural knowledge can be (re)constructed from descriptions of past communication events or formations, artefacts of communication itself. In fact, researchers analysing past communication phenomena have only enough access to do just that: naturally, we can not access past communication actions, and most often do not have any recording or descriptions of these actions (such as audio or video). Therefore, we can talk about past communication phenomena only from the perspective of the ways to perform communication actions, the ways to use the media. We can access the mental states of neither the past nor the present communicators. In the media (such as a written piece of paper) no “immanent knowledge of communication” is contained. We can only reconstruct it or construct on the basis of the established cultural knowledge. Whether it will be a reconstruction, or – stronger – a construction of historical knowledge, obviously depends on additional assumptions.
This assumption can be understood both as the foundation for a theoretical study as well as the establishment of other assumptions. It is simply a metacondition, as it determines not only the research framework of practice itself, but also sets the boundaries for the remaining assumptions and conditions. For I assume that the culturalist definition of communication is only a starting point, merely a heuristic tool serving as a guidepost. It is therefore not a real definition, although sometimes it can claim to be so. This means that I accept that during the subsequent analyses I may encounter situations which are diffi-
