The aporia of ‘public communication’: an attempt at epistemological de-objectification and systemic modelling in Communication and Information Studies

Abstract

The theoretical framework of Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) comes up against the porosity of its conceptual boundaries when the discipline incorporates terms that have been largely co-opted by managerial practice. This article examines the heuristic viability of the phrase ‘public communication’. Gradually stripped of its critical substance through instrumental use, this term now struggles to denote anything other than the engineering of institutional legitimation. Rather than dismissing it, we propose to ‘de-objectify’ it: an epistemological gesture, distinct from mere deconstruction, which combines the Bachelardian rupture with the reflexive objectification inherited from Bourdieu, in order to wrest the concept from the self-evident nature of its managerial use and re-situate it within a framework of complexity theory. On this basis, the institution is no longer viewed as a sovereign sender delivering an unambiguous message, but as an open system whose communication — intrinsically shaped by cultural foundations and informal logics — constitutes the regulatory mechanism through which the organisation absorbs the entropy of its social environment. We demonstrate that what managerial rationality regards as ‘noise’ is in fact a form of structural miscommunication, and that public communication functions less as a bridge to the citizen than as a membrane tasked with rendering the asymmetry between state norms and social practices tolerable, and thus sustainable. This theoretical analysis draws illustratively on the case of the Moroccan administration and leads to a methodological shift: from the semantics of the message towards the pragmatics of the relationship and of evidence.

Keywords: Public communication; systemic approach; epistemological de-objectification; incommunication; bureaucratic mediation; legal-rationality; reflexive modernity; Moroccan administration.

Received Date: December 20, 2025

Accepted Date: January 12, 2026

Published Date: February 01, 2026

Available Online at: https://www.ijsrisjournal.com/index.php/ojsfiles/article/view/893