John Durham
Peters
Speaking into the air. A history of
the idea of communication
Introduction: the problem of communication
Kommunikasjonsbegrepet
Historiesyn
Solipsism and telepathy
Latin communicare
Meanings
Theoretical debates 1920s
In short
4. Martin Heidegger Being
and Time (1927)
The disclosure of otherneess
Problematisk. Myten om den perfekte dialogen og
fullkomne forståelsen mellom sinn.
“in every act of historical narration a constructivist
principle” (3).
Words typical of the late nineteenth century. Reflect
an individualist culture. The walls of the mind as
impermeable or blissfully thin.
Impart, share, make common
> how the concept has come to connote idealised
conceptions of mutuality, good, sharing.
 Imparting – to give, to make known
 Transfer or transmission
 Exchange. Leading the way to the high-stake
definition of communication as contact
between interiorities.
 Term for various modes of symbolic
interaction
 The mechanism through which human
relations develop – “all the symbols of the
mind, togheter with the means of conveying
them through space and preserving the in
time” (Cooley in Peters: 9).
Visible in philosophy and in social thought.
1. Communication as the dispersion of
persuasive symbols in order ot manage mass
opinion (Lippmann, Lasswell). Mass
communication. Future of democracy.
Communication as the management of mass
opinion
2. Communication as the means to eliminate
semantic dissonance. Ogden and Richards.
Sharing of consciousness. Fear of solipsism.
3. Communication as an insurmountable barrier.
Always failing to connect. T.S. Eliot, Kafka,
Virginia Wolf. Fearing that communication in
reality is impossible. Useless sallies from the
citadel of the self.
“communication as bridge always means an abyss is
somewhere near” (16).
Not adhering to the notion of communication as
mental sharing. Communication is about the
constitution of relationshuip, the revelation of
otherness. “His notion of communicaiton was neither
1
5. John Dewey (1927)
The orchestration of action
Technical and therapeutic
discourses after WWII
Information theory
(communication theory)
Communication as
therapeutic self-expression
Peters’ message
semantic (meanings exchanged) nor pragmatic
(actions coordniated) but world disclosing (otherness
opened).
Communucation as pragmatic making-do. Eschews a
semantic understanding of communication. The
universe as more than matter and mind – also about
experience/culture: the world that open up between
people. Communication as partaking and participating
in the creation of a collective world.
The development of contrast between mass
communication and interpersonal communication in
the 1930s.
Of the 1940s. Shannon. A theory of signals (not of
significance). The discourse of information infiltrates
all areas (from neurons to marriages and good
managing). Weaver. Schramm. Imperfections of
human interchange can be readressed by improved
technology.
Authentic disclosure. Both in interpersonal and
international levels (UN in 1945). Julian Huxley,
Gregory Bateson. Carl R. Rogers. Communication as
cure and disease.
The expansion of means does not necessarily lead to
the expansion of minds. Orchestrating collective
being.
ONE: Dialogue and dissemination
The mistake of blaming the
media
Dialogue and Eros in the
Phaedrus
Knowing the audience
Critique of writing
Resembles later critique of
media
for distorting dialogue. Rather media critique should
be about matters of power (concentration). Second,
the need to avoid technological/media determinism.
Media technologies are applied. Their social
applications are not inherent in technology.Third,
dialogue can be tyrannical, and dissemination can be
just.
Socrates’ critique of writing – part of a larger critique.
Coupling between person and person, soul and soul.
Eros, not transmission. Writing allows strange
couplings > worries about erotic perversion.
The connection between the refusal to write and the
refusion to penetrate. Both are asymmetrical relations.
The rhetorician must fit the tropes and topoi to the
listenere. Foolish to scatter words uncritically to the
masses. Reciprocal coupling of speaker and hearer.
Writing creates this kind of scatter. No fit with the
audience. Destroys memory.
Phaedrus spells out clearly the normative basis of the
critique of media (which perhaps is why Peters does
not bother to deal with all media?).
2
A critique of promiscuity
Pretended live presence
Dissemination in the
Synoptic gospels
The wasteful act
One-way communication not
necessarily bad
Peters’ conclusion?’
rather than of writing per se.
but in fact embalmed intelligence.
Dissemination as desirable.
The parabel of the sower – about the diversity of
audience interpretations. Sort of an encoding –
decoding model. The audience have the interpretative
burden.
Godlike love/agape is always wasteful and figured
like broadcasting.
And reciprocity may be violent: war and vengeance.
What would social life be if nothing but reciprocity
governed.
Gift-giving as an illuminating parallel.
Nothing ethically deficient about broadcasting.
Chasms between sender and receiver not always to be
bridged – “they are sometimes vistas to be
appreciated or distances to be respected.”
Reciprocity is a moral ideal, but it’s insufficient.
TWO: History of an error: the spiritualist tradition
The vision of soul-to-soul
converse
e.g. Augustine and Locke
Spiritualist tradition
Peters’ the undesirability of
soul-to-soul communication
CHRISTIAN SOURCES
The ontological dative
1. Augustine: the spirit of
the letter
A sign
1. early Christianity
2. British empiricism (Locke)
3. spiritualism
> important for our understanding of communication
The interiority of the self
Sign as a vessel to be filled with content/meaning.
The self as an eternal, self-identical soul. The soul as
self-existent and detachable.
Etheral modes of thought transference. The
immediate purity of meaning-minds.
The dream of perfect communication – i.e. shared
interiorities/the hassle of imperfect media.
First this model/dream is dangerous – despair at the
impossibility of communication (co-operations is
available and possible in any case). Un-necessary fair
of communication break-down. Respecting disdain
for communication/interactions.
The Gospel of John: the characteristically double
mixture of breakdown and soulful unity. Dialogue as
motivated by misunderstanding in the first place.
> possible to think of how persons can share spiritual
substance.
Helped build the idea of the interior self and the
dream of overcoming it in communication.
A marker of interior and exterior realities. Words are
pointers to things mental and material – their value
lies outside them. The sign is only an interpretive
help.
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The word is split into a body (sound) and spirit
(meaning). The word points to external and internal
realities. Important for revealing interiors – thought
and spirit.
Yet writing ranked below
speech?
2. Angels: the principle of
bodily indifference
BRITISH EMPIRICISM
Latin communicare
Psycho-physical speculations
John Locke: private
properties of meaning
Signs
The idea “idea”
Two sorts of discourse
Language as conveys
“(…) letters have been invended that we might be
able to converse also with the absent; but these are
signs of words, as words themselves are signs in our
conversations of those things which we think.”
Presence as prioritised.
Difficult pages (73-74).
Angels present a model of communication as it should
be. An ideal speech situation. Pure bodies of meaning.
Thomas Aquinas.
Angeology gives the intellectual basis for the dream
of shared interiors in communication.
From matter to mind: “communication in the
seventeenth century
with no special reference to sharing thoughts.
Francis Bacon – “some light effluxions from spirit to
spirit.”
Joseph Glanvill on aether vibrations from mind to
mind. The fusion of mental and material processes.
John Wilkins: ambitions of speed in long-distance
communication.
Newtonian physics and Newton’s description of
gravity, and gravity as travelling in medium.
Communication to describe the sharing of ideas
between people. Locke’s conceptualisation of
communication mingles old senses of the term with
innovative ones. Communication not as speech,
rhetoric, discourse, but as their ideal end result.
as property. The meanings of words as a sort of
private property in the individual’s interior. The
subjectification of the world.
(Descartes). Human understanding based on senses.
No direct access to the real world. Ideas as raw
materials of all knowledge.
The impossibility to communicate from soul to soul?
The internal stream of ideas deriving form sensation
and reflection; the public or external use of language.
The inner word is authorative for Locke.
Language is means of transporting ideas. Word as a
receptable of meaning, as the body is the receptable of
the soul. Communication as a problem of transporting
mental cargo.
4
Communication breakdown
looms.
Communication paradoxical concept: freedom to
combine words and ideas/ hopes for exact
correspondence (which is impossible?).
From private experiences to
(the inverse problem of property). How can common
common world?
meaning come to exist?
Communication
Combining an Augustinian semiotic of innter and
outer, a political program of individual liberty, and a
scientific imagination of clean processes of
transmission.
NINETEENTH-CENTURY Agony of solitude and yearning for unity.
Romanticism.
SPIRITUALISM
Franz Anton Mesmer (1743-1815).
Dr. Mesmer and his fluids
Animal magnetism (latin animus – spirit). Gravitation
holds planets in orbit – animal magnetism holds souls
in love and health and communication. Magnetized
fluids through bodies.
> creating the image of the total fusion of two or more
souls. En repport.
Mesmeric control >
i.e. appears in visions of mass communication.
hypnotism
Mesmerism helped shape the understanding of mass
media as agents of mass control and persuasion.
Mesmerism and telegraphy < electrical connection
Spiritualist mediums and
between individuals.
media
Spiritualism explicitely modelled itself on the
telegraph’s ability to receive remote messages.
Spirit photography.
Ectoplasm
Society for Psychical research
Ether frolics: psychical
> twofold aim of ending the anarchy of popular
research
spiritualism while preserving a properly scientific
hold on the supersensual universe.
Ether
The universe held together by a transcendent invisible
principle of order.
James Clerk Maxwell
Anticipates wireless telegraphy. The ether medium.
Ether
Survives as a figure of speech although demolished
by Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1905,
Radio/telepathy
> contact between people via an invisible material
linkage – radio waves travelling through “the ether”.
The electromagnetic spectrum.
“Brain waves”
The propagation of wireless signals and the sharing of
thoughts as allied processes.
A long string of notions, dispensing with meidation
THE POINT
and interpretation, invest the modern notion of
communication.
Communication – represent a state of shared
understanding and sympathy between people.
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THREE: Toward a more robust vision of spirit: Hegel, Marx, and
Kierkegaard
Main principles
Hegel on recognition
Communication
Spirit
Subjectivity and self
Meaning
Marx (versus Locke) on
money
Locke
Dispute between Locke and
Marx
Money as mass
1. the irreducibility of embodiment
2. the doubleness of self
3. the publicness of meaning
Phenomenology.
1. There is no content separate from form. No
message apart from a channel. Spirit does not
exist without a body.
2. Communication is a problem of the object as
much as the subject. An sich (ontologically
possible) vs. für sich (explicitely).
Not about moving mind stuff, but about establishing
the conditions for subjects to exist für sich –
recognition of self-conscious individuals. There is no
self without an other. “Self-consciousness achieves its
satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” – Is
this something I can use also when discussing
relations of self-identity and others?
Geist. The experience of the simultaneous diversity
and unity of self-consciousnesses. I = We. “human
nature only really exists in an achieved community
[Gemeinsamkeit] of consciousness,”
One’s subjectivity is in sich when it has not yet been
recognized by an other. Recognition > subjectivity für
sich. The self has thus no priviliged access to itself.
The conception of Geist locates meaning as public
rather than private. Geist consists in the material
inscriptions of culture and in the embodied
community of interpreters.
The objectivity of meaning > meanings are in things
independent of people interpreting them > an account
of communication apt for the modern media age.
Typically expressions of the human spirit separated in
time and space from the bodies of the producers of
meaning.
> the basis for much of the deep structure of modern
media analysis. Marx criticizes disseminative media.
Money as a medium of exchange and a medium of
representation.
Nature as an idyll of reciprocity. Welcomes
dissemination. Money collected without any harm to
one’s neighbourgs.
Whether the original dyad of subject and object
remains the normative model or replaced by
something more extended and plural?
Money turns dialogue into dissemination.
Marx prefers dialogue, just communication between
6
communication
Dialogic relations
Peters however
Kierkegaard’s incognitos
Communication
Medium and message
Misunderstandings
equal subjects. Money distorts the normative human
relationship of person to person. Reciprocality – just
exchange.
Dissemination – broadcasting is wasteful.
The substance of our communication practices as the
orchestration of our social worlds and as a criterion of
the good society.
Failures of communication owe less to semantic
mismatches than to unjust allocations of symbolic and
material resources.
“The Marxist tradition risks writing off dissemination
based on its one-way transmission alone, instead of
acknowledging the varying relations of justice that
might inform it.” (127).
The individual is incommensurable with reality.
Meddelelse as a per se philosophical problem.
Communication is less a matter of better
understanding than of strategic misunderstanding. As
revealing and conceiling, not as information
exchange. Never transmission of pure thought.
The utterance is tied to the ethos of its speaker.
“A sign is something different from what it
immediately is.”
The impossibility of direct communication.
Inevitable in several situations. “In a world of
paradoxes, easy communication is necessary false.”
Communication does not necessarily improve
relations or clarify the underlying reasons of things.
FOUR: Phantasms of the living, dialogues with the dead
RECORDING AND
TRANSMISSION
Telegraph fits into the
lineage of Augustine
Parallel universe
“Phantasms of the living”
Media technologies conquer the obstacles of distance
and death. Tele- and –graphy. Space-binding media
and time-binding media (Innis).
and the angels and Mesmer: communication without
embodiement, contact achieved by the sharing of
spiritual (eletrical) fluids.
The separation of transportation from communication
> conjuring of a parallel universe, universe of
replicas.
Frederic Myers. “for the apparitions
[ghosts/phantoms] proliferating in the spiritualist
culture”.
Today: Loads of phantasms of the living appearing in
media. Duplicating and distributing indicia of human
presence.
7
Paralleling discussions
concerning athenticity
Continuing the dream of
angelic contact
New archives of
consciousness
Hawtorne’s haunted house
HERMENEUTICS AS
COMMUNICATION
WITH THE DEAD
Existential facts about
modern media
Communication with the
dead
Two streams of hermeneutics
Paul Ricoeur
Interpretation, not dialogue
Letter writing
Emerson: the porcupine
impossibility of contact
Paradigmatic for all
Nineteenth century worries about the ability to
“appear” apart from the flesh. Created a dialectical
crisis of representation. Interaction could with the
development of media technologies mean interaction
with traces.
By claiming to break the bonds of distance and death.
Not only as hearing and seeing aids. Media of
transmission > crosscuts through space. Recording
media > crosscuts through time.
Nathaniel Hawtorne’s House of the seven gables
(1851). The almost spriritual nature of the telegraph
and the photography.
Nineteenth century Victorians’ search for
communication with the distant and dead.
Romanticism with death.
1. the abundance of traces of the dead. Living
mingling with the dead.
2. th difficulty of distinguishing communication
at a distance from communication with the
dead.
The paradigm case of hermeneutics: the art of
interpretation where no dialogue is possible.
1. Scleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer:
interpretation > open up something more than
text > contact between the living and the dead.
2. More heretical tradition (Hegel, Marx,
Kierkegaard): awareness of the
impossibilities, relations with even the living
as in some way hermeneutic, as in the
interpretation of traces.
Hermeneutics is about the distortion of dialogue. Text
transcends it’s author’s intent, original audience, and
situation of enunciation.
Mediation of modern media > interpretation more
typical than dialogue. “(…) as it were, into the void,
or at least to those who have ears to hear. They await
completion of the loop” (151).
Rhetorics: how to get the message across the gap
Hermeneutics: how to read texts not adressed to them.
(The heart of Brazil as wonderful example). No
necessary correscpondence.
Especially about letters to the dead.
Cemetary from Greek koimeterion meaning
dormitory. Communion between the living and the
dead. Emerson does not believe in any soul-to-soul
connection between the living and the dead – but an
interpretation of the traces of the dead.
Immediate contact is never possible. Not with the
8
communication
Philosophical scepticism
Three horrors given to the
20th century
“Bartleby”: scrivening as
dissemination
moral tyranny of dialogism
The phonograph and
distorted dialogue
Door to the spirit world
Modern media
DEAD LETTERS
> Private letters
Dead letters
dead, and not between the living. The impossibility of
dialogue > the universe as a constant transmission to
those who have ears to hear. Messages do not even be
intended as messages (which makes a lot of sense if
you think of archeological methods). “Whatever
meaning we find is left to our power of “creative
reading.”
Proof of reality outside of our own perceptions?
Forerunner of later scepticism about the reality of the
images and reports of the media.
But does it matter whether it is authentic or not?
Emerson sees communication as a matter of giving
and receiving without any kind of co-ordination of the
two.
1. a God-forsaken universe
2. a self lost in its own labyrinth
3. people depleted of substantive being
Herman Meville’s “Barthely the Scrivener” (1853).
Bartleby as the ultimate impersonality in
communication.
The link from the agonies of communication of mid19th century to fin-de-siecle idealism and to 20th
century existensialism. All examine the media that
puts us iin circuits of communication with the absent.
Not in itself an adequate communicative vehicle for
bearing the varieties of moral experience.
Modern media preserve otherwise evanescent ghosts.
But the phongraph is more typical symbol of
modernity than photography. First time to copy sound
– to capture time.
See for instance Friedlander’s Goethe-story in Kittler
(page 59).
> “the externalization of the fragile and flickering
stuff of subjectivity and memory into a permanent
form that can be played back at will. The supposed
ease of transfer was paid for with ghosliness” (164).
Division of genres between personal and public
correspondence developed in 19th century. Letters
were more like postcards – both privately adressed
and publicly accessible.
1. Post stamp (1840)
2. Envelopes (1849)
3. Street drop boxes (1858)
Made the individual sender sovereign over the letter.
Transformed letters from creatures of dissemination
into creatures of apparent dialogue.
Dead Letter Office (1825) for sorting and collecting
mail with adress problems. The problem with dead
letters is that mortal beings miss getting in touch (not
9
Suggesting the pathos of
communication break-down
Comstock and the dangers
of postal dissemination
The invasion of privacy as
dissemination
Common thread
that minds fail to share the meaning of signs). Dead
Letter Office deals with the materiality of
communication.
The letter that never arrives.
“(…) but what is the meaning of the letter burned in
the Dead Letter Office whose writer does not know it
is lost and whose recipient does not know it was ever
sent” (171)?
Fought against what he perceived to be the dangerous
dissemination of erotic letters. Or at least the
possibility/the potential. Wrath against the privacy of
the letters, and was essentially worried about children
and young people. Linking distant bodies.
Benjamin: “the age of mechanical reproduction”
Both sex and media reproduce likeness.
Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis trying to
contain dissemination – criticising the press for
invading the private, and overstepping any borders of
propriety and decency. Privacy in danger.
The ways that person-to-person communication, once
recorded and transmitted, can break free of its senders
and receivers.
FIVE: the quest for authentic connection, or bridging the chasm
“Wir sind sehr einsam”
Bifurcated vision of
communication
The quest for remote contact
across media
THE INTERPERSONAL
WALLS OF IDEALISM
Late nineteenth century
Anglo-American idealism
Josiah Royce
Maxwell’s two options regarding action at a distance:
1. Action at a distance can never occur: there is
always some “line of communication”/”ether”
connecting the two interacting bodies.
2. Space always intervenes between bodies:
action at a distance is the only kind of action
which ever occurs.
The dream of spirit-to-spirit contact vs. the prospect
that even touch is an illusion stemming from our
sense organ’s insensitivity to the infinite distances
between bodies and chasms between souls.
> modern eros emerge. Eros as the attraction and
repulsion between bodies. “The intellectual history of
“communication” is a record of the erotic
complications of modern life” (180).
The desire for the presence of the absent other.
Royce and Bradley: the example of inmates of
separate rooms.
Homo clausus
Plato’s cave meets the problem of intersubjective
knowledge.
10
F.H. Bradley
Absolute idealism.
The insulation of subjective experience. No direct
connexion between souls. The only way to
communicate is via our bodies.Opaque and peculiar
individual worlds. Communication is always a matter
of interference and interpretation. We are not trapped
– communication is possible.
William Ernest Hocking
Not quite an idealist, but dealt with the problem of
communication. Explored alienation from self and
others. Communication breakdown – souls cannot
touch each other. Takes the idealist trope of the wall –
installs it in the body. But Hocking do believe in
couplings in the common world. Embodiment crucial
for thinking. Minds connected to bodies.
Mediation is productive Descent into physical expression is a progress into
valid and active existence.
Charles Horton Cooley
A clear idealist.
Theoretical disembodiment together with an early
account of communication in 20th century social
thought.
In the wake of modern media > new conceptions of communication.
Communication as independent of physical
transportation. The problem of communication in the
absence of the communicant.
Two senses of
1. Communication as transfer.
communication
2. Transportation and as the communion of
psyches.
Means both fellowship in though and the destruction
of distance. Bypassing the flesh.
Communication makes geography irrelevant. Media
as the movers of social change. Clear parallels to
Innis and McLuhan.
“Since communication is the precise measure of the
possibility of social organization, of good
understanding among men, relations that are beyond
its range are not truly social, but mechanical” (Cooley
in Peters p. 185). Signs mediate our relations.
No importance to the body
The body has no privilege as a carrier of personality.
per se
Embodiment does not matter (which Peters criticises).
FRAUD AND CONTACT? Willam James explores psychical communication,
but discusses aspects of communication relevant for
JAMES ON PSYCHICAL
the whole history of the concept of communication.
RESEARCH
Reserching the medium Piper But not comprehended as a live contact with a remote
spirit. “Piper is less a Marconi station than a
phonograph playing a record cut years ago” (192).
Again Friedlander’s Goethe story (Kittler page 59)
comes to mind.
Hermeneutics, not spirit
Dialogue with the dead concerns interpretation as in
travel
hermeneutics: authenticating, eavesdropping, and
11
Similiarities to the Turing
test
REACH OUT AND
TOUCH SOMEONE: THE
TELEPHONIC
UNCANNY
From public to private
Negotiations of identity
Kafka and the telephone
Allencompassing signs
Modern media
RADIO:
BROADCASTING AS
DISSEMINATION (AND
DIALOGUE)
source criticism (> James was a friend of Dilthey).
Structural similarities: the struggle to distinguish a
real human being from a simulated one when access
to the other’s presence is cloaked by an intervening
medium.
Explores very central issues in communication theory:
What happens when images of persons travel apart
from the body? When is a message a message?
Both telephone and wireless technologies can be
either a central exchange for many voices or a means
fof point-to-point contact. Not so much about the
characteristics of the medium as what constellation of
speakers and hearers has become normative. Peters
seems to have a very instrumental perspective on
technology.
But an idea that was slow in coming.
The telephone operator as cyborg – inhabit a
profoundly liminal space.
as a result of the lacking access to bodily presence.
One did not know whom one was adressing. Being
presence by voice alone.
Evident parallels to claims regarding the anonymity
of online interactions. The problem of knowing
whether one has made contact at all.
All hermeneutics – reading texts by an unintented
audience, like eavesdropping. Audiences bear the
whole interpretation burden.
“The Neighbor”: a story of dobbelgänger and a
telephone > involve mysterious splittings of identity
and conversation.
“The casle”: again, the burden of interpretations
necessary for modern life.
All around us, but refuse to tell us how to read them.
“The inability to make certain whether a sign is a
projection of the self or an utterance of the other, an
interpretive artifact or an objective pattern in the
world” (…) (203).
Who owns meaning?
A limbo of lost connections in all modern media.
Public communication as dead letters on display at all
times.
The inherent publicity of the radio signal, but
broadcasting not self-evident. The radio first
conceived as a means of point-to-point
communication. It’s public reach perceived as a
problem.
12
Instrumentalism, not
determinism
Deformed communication
circuit
“They will never make a
junction”
DX-ing/CQ
> new communicative
settings
The fears of solipsism and
communication breakdown
replicated
Compensatory dialogism
Intimacy tools
Mass communication
Hoc est corpus, hocuspocus
Freud on communication
Body/liveness
Adorno’s false consciousness
Merton: sense of community
“An exhibit of the principle that cultural preconcetion
shapes the uses of technology as much as its internal
properties do, radio “broadcasting” was not embraced
until wireless technology had been in use for a quarter
of a century” (207).
The “transmission of intelligence” was left to chance.
Privately controlled transmission but public reception
(oposite of common carriage).
Common carrriage – like Sokrates in Phaedrus:
guarantee the delivery of the seed.
Broadcasting – like Jesus in the parable of the sower:
scattering the message to all.
The troubling distance between sender and audience.
Communication without bodies. > Idealism’s
speratate rooms; telephony’s severing of a
conversation into two disconnected halves.
Search for signals from remote stations. Erotic in
nature: yearning for contact. DX-ing as an allegory of
faith.
Invisibility and domestic setting. What is
communication without bodies or presence?
Loosened norms of attentiveness
The unknown listeners, the lack of interaction, the
speaking into the air.
In art, literature and philosophy in the interwar years.
The search for new forms of authenticity, intimacy
and touch not based on immediate physical presence.
Compensations for lost presences.
Intimate sound spaces, domestic genres, cozy speech
styles, radio personalities. The fostering of we-ness,
dialogical inclusion, intimate adress remained at the
core. Clear parallel to Ellis’s sense of intimacy.
Providing the listeneres with a sense of participation
or membership.
Does thus not capture the tactics of interpersonal
appeal.
Despite an interpersonal appeal, the relationship of
body to body could not be entirely restored.
What happens when dyadic form (communication) is
technologically stretched to a giant degree (mass).
Each medium as an attempt to cover a human lack, to
fill the gap between ourselves and the gods.
Body/pain – flesh – ethos – authenticity.
The listner tucked into a cocoon of unreflective
security. Similarities to the critique proposed by
Socrates in Phaedrus: the waste of seeds. Authentic
interaction can only occur when one subject
encountered another in its objectivity.
Mass rituals as vicarious interactions for which
13
In Maxwell’s terms
“direct” personal involvement was irrelevant.
The possibility of the media-made community. To
Merton, symbols working at a distance can afford
authentic sociability.
Merton: action at a distance
Adorno: all immediacy is laced with infinitesimal
gaps.
SIX: Machines, animals, and aliens: Horizons of incommunicability
Abysses of communication
threatens
Dialogue as the answer, but often also the virus.
Communication is not distinct to humans, speech is.
Communication reveals our mechanical, bestial and
ethereal resemblances.
Disembodiment
“To talk on the telephone is to identify an acoustic
effigy of the person with an embodied presence”
(228). Communication in fact as a symptom of the
disembodiement of interaction (see Luhmann or
Thompson).
Communicants
Not necessarily only humans: animal, cyborg,
machines, divinity
> the human being at stake.
Hegel Recognition of the other – involves the founding of
the human order.
Peters “deliberations about communication are exercises not
only in self-knowledge, but in living with the other”
(230). How wide and deep can our emphaty reach.
Aim of chapter
Sketch some extremeties of communication theory in
twentieth century: machines, animals, extraterrestials.
Background: Descartes
Humans are alll together distinct from animals and
machines:
- responsiveness in speech
- versatility of action
th
By the 19 century
The membranes separating humans, animals and
machines become permeable again.
Question remains
How can you tell a human from fake?
THE TURING TEST AND The relation between humans and machines.
Alan Turing’s 1950 article “Computing machinery
THE INSUPERABILITY
and intelligence”. To discern a body when its not
OF EROS
present. The original form: separating a female and
male (> Butler: gender trouble).
Can the distinctness of bodies be evident in discourse
alone?
Dethroning of man
Continuity and not break between humans and the
mechanical.
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Interaction matters
The discernibility of
identicals
Recording and transmitting
media
Benjamin
Jorge Luis Borges
Copy
Eros and bodies matter
ANIMALS AND
EMPATHY WITH THE
INHUMAN
Communication with animals
Fend of antropomorphism
Wittgenstein
COMMUNICATION
WITH ALIENS
SETI
Communication out of the
past
Galactic conversations
“In a pragmatist vein, Turing argues that if shared
consciousness is the criterion of success in
communication, then communication is impossible,
and we get stuck in the impasse of solipsism” (236).
Kafka (telephone), Benjamin (photographs), Borges
(literature).
> a principle of duplication entered into what counts
as human.
“The work of art in the age of mechanical
reproduction”.
Artworks have an aura which is irreplacable, cannot
be copyied. A copy would be a spectacle of ingenuity;
a simulation, not an expression.
“Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”
Never idenitical to its origin. The copy needs to have
its aura supplied.
Communication has become a problem of arranging
the ties between distant bodies. “The dream of
communication is the dream of identical minds in
concert” (241).
Between the originals and their doubles there is
always a infinite gulf. “Difference is so pervasive that
it appears even – or especially – between exact
replicas”.
Animals as mirrors of self-definition.
Greeks, Schiller, Marx, Arendt: animals have
societies (co-operation) but not politics (collective
determination of action).
Allegories of human otherness.
The dangers of projecting ourselves into animal
subjects.
Communication as a concept that allows for contact
without presence, indifferent to the bodily form of the
communicators or even to biology.
Recognize an otherness that does not know it is other.
Understanding < lived or embodied world of common
practices + symbol-manipulating capacities.
The dream of empirical contact with extraterrestrials
as a scientific endeavour.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
“If we couldn’t understand a lion who spoke, why
would we understand an alien?” (247)
Communication at a distance always comes out of the
past – but especially with extraterrestrial
communication.
> The unity of communication at a distance and
communication with the dead.
Illustrates the gaps (that always exist?) of which
communication is made. Galactic conversations will
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Borges: “The library of
Babel”
The earth alone in the
universe
Plato and Hegel
Surrounded by alien
intelligence
Pragmatist approach?
Peirce
Interiority as other
necessarily be alternating broadcasts. “Dialogue”
An allegory of inability to connect, the minimal odds
of our own existence (and still we exist).
analogous to the idealist’s human caged in a room:
the longing of not being alone, to find a sing of
something that is not a projection of the self.
(…) if the other has not body whose presence we
could desire, then what makes us think minds can
make contact?” (256)
Yet lonely and unable to communicate. The
strangeness that we never see: our faces. “We haunt
ourselves like aliens.”
There is no other kind of communication than via
signs, those creatures of outer and inner space.
- Pragmatist revolt agains Cartesian hierarchies
- A semiotic animism that ascribes objective
reality to meaning
- An effort to invite us into a beloved
community
Minds as sings mixed with mortal life. His theory of
signs is indebted ti an age when intelligence can be
stored in media.
“(…) interiority appears as an other; that its form is
polymorphous; that we find our inner life dispersed
pluralistically across the fields of our experience”
(259).
We care about ourselves and our surroundings
because they share our world and our shape.
CONCLUSION: a squeeze of the hand
THE GAPS OF WHICH
COMMUNICATION IS
MADE
Interaction
Facts of any communication
THE PRIVILEGE OF
THE RECEIVER
Failed synapses, broken conversations, crosscutting
between distinct lines of plot.
Face-to-face talk is as laced with gaps as distant
communication.
Dialouge as two people taking turns broadcasting at
each other.
has become a reading of textual traces.
 all discourse must bridge the gap between one
turn and the next
 the intended adressee may never be identical
with the actual one
“The other” as the centre of whatever communication
means. Communication is not about the sharing of
truths. Representing interiority is not possible in a
direct way. Rather manipulation of effects to evoke
the truest image of them for the other.
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Mercy on others
THE DARK SIDE OF
COMMUNICATION
Meaning is an uncomplete
project
Peter’s argument
Understanding common
THE IRREDUCIBILITY
OF TOUCH AND TIME
The body matters
“The challenge of communication is not to be true to
our own interiority, but to have mercy on others for
never seeing ourselves as we do.” (267)
Latin communicare
but also from Greek koinoo: make common,
communicate, share, but also pollute, make unclean.
open-ended and subject to radical revision.
A sign surrenders to the interpreter the right of
completing the determination.
We misspend hope in seeking spiritual fullness in
communication. Not about representing the self
autentically, but that the other is caringly served.
Most of the time we understand.
Situation and syntax make the sense of words clear.
Communication is basically a political and ethical
problem (rather than a semantic).
Touch: the most resistant sense to being made into a
medium of recording or transmission.
Seeing communication as the meeting of minds,
underestimates the holiness of the body. Being there
still counts.
People who care for each other will seek each other’s
presence > better access to their body.
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