Communication: A House Seen from Everywhere 9781800735255

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Communication

Studies in Linguistic Anthropology Series Editors: Jamin Pelkey, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada Theresia Hofer, University of Bristol, United Kingdom The Studies of Linguistic Anthropology series opens fresh inquiry into the untold ways human beings shape languages and language shapes humanity. Through innovative monographs and collections, scholars explore the intertwining relationships shared between culture and language, asking how such relations might help us better understand what it means to be human. Studies in the series are empirically grounded, conceptually critical, and theoretically aware. Language and culture are approached as embodied semiotic modeling processes inclusive of speech, sign, and social performance but not limited to observable behavior—thus encompassing social and cognitive dimensions of human experience. To promote the analysis and interpretation of language in cultural contexts and culture in linguistic constructs, the series welcomes a nonrestrictive range of linguistic approaches, using mixed methodologies to treat topics ranging from the embodied human person and evolutionary dimensions of human existence to the vast array of human sociocultural/rhetorical dynamics and speech variation practices. Semiotic, cognitive, and multimodal approaches to linguistic anthropology are particularly welcome, as are diachronic, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic comparisons. Volume 2 Communication: A House Seen from Everywhere Igor E. Klyukanov Volume 1 Rhetorical Minds: Meditations on the Cognitive Science of Persuasion Todd Oakley

Communication A House Seen from Everywhere

‰Í Igor E. Klyukanov

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Igor E. Klyukanov All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Klyukanov, Igor, author. Title: Communication : a house seen from everywhere / Igor E. Klyukanov. Description: [New York] : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Studies in linguistic anthropology ; volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022016027 (print) | LCCN 2022016028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800735248 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800735255 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Communication—Social aspects. Classification: LCC HM1206 .K578 2022 (print) | LCC HM1206 (ebook) | DDC 302.23—dc23/eng/20220406 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016027 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022016028 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-524-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-525-5 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800735248

To Galya

Contents ‰Í

List of Illustrations

vi

Foreword John Durham Peters

vii

Acknowledgments

x

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom

5

Chapter 2. The Nature of Communication

19

Chapter 3. The Conduct of Human Affairs

41

Chapter 4. Communication as Correspondence

62

Chapter 5. ...To Be at Home Everywhere

81

Chapter 6. Squaring the Circle

103

Chapter 7. Being Is Said in Many Ways

128

Chapter 8. Communication/Study as Such

157

Conclusion

169

References

174

Index

211

Illustrations ‰Í

Figures 6.1. Primary Causes. © Igor E. Klyukanov

106

6.2. Intellectual Virtues. © Igor E. Klyukanov

108

6.3. Kinds of Reasoning. © Igor E. Klyukanov

109

6.4. Forms of Communication Activity. © Igor E. Klyukanov

112

6.5. Grammatical Moods. © Igor E. Klyukanov

115

6.6. Scientific Perspectives. © Igor E. Klyukanov

118

6.7. Chiastic Logic. © Igor E. Klyukanov

119

Table 6.1. Un/Markedness Relationships. © Igor E. Klyukanov

125

Foreword ‰Í John Durham Peters

Igor E. Klyukanov’s Communication: A House Seen from Everywhere is one of a kind. It is a book that only one person in the history of the universe could have written. If it were less unique, it would be less full of truth. His house may be seen from everywhere, but it is built upon four cornerstones, spelled out in the climactic chapter 6, revealing the implicit intellectual infrastructure that is alluded to throughout. The universe, knowledge of it, and communication about and within it are all fourfold: rational, natural, social, and cultural. If ever there were to be foundations for the study of communication, this would be it, drawing at once from philosophy, natural science, social science, and the humanities. This is at once a foundational vision of communication studies as interdisciplinary inquiry and a vision—of full Aristotelian grandeur—of both knowledge and the cosmos. Martin Heidegger liked to complain that modern thought only took efficient causation from Aristotle’s fourfold understanding, neglecting the much fuller architectonic structure. That is certainly not the case in this book! Look at those fourfold quadrants in chapter 6 and get lost in what Charles Sanders Peirce called “the play of musement.” Look at the table on virtue and see if you will ever think about anything the same way! Wisdom, episteme, phronesis, and techne: the four cornerstones of our condition, and of this book. Reading Communication will make you wiser, more knowledgeable, savvier, and more artful. Every page bristles with the evidence of Professor Klyukanov’s wide reading. Many of his sentences abound with profuse references to the names of other authors. It is citationally dense, a forest with both old-growth trees and a lot of brush. Or maybe it is better compared to a field whose abundant flowers have been widely sampled by busy bees to make the honey. The book

x

Foreword

is thus not only a theory of being a communicative animal embedded in community; it is a performance and demonstration of how to do it. Every claim is anchored in a history of conversation with colleagues, philosophers, and even poets. Hegel once said of his friend and rival Schelling, perhaps intending a mild insult, that he had conducted his philosophical education in public. In this case, I would take that as praise. Klyukanov opens up his mind and library and shows us the unfolding revelatory process. This book is Platonic in its ambition for cosmic wholeness, Aristotelian in its understanding of human beings as political, logos-possessing animals and of human understanding as fourfold, and Romantic in its insistence that analogy can be poetic in the most robust and ancient meaning of that term as making. But it keeps returning to the happy philosophical homeland of phenomenology and pragmatism. If communication is to build a house, these have always been exceedingly fertile fields. This is an author who loves language, the sine qua non of communication (though this book is characteristically nondogmatic in thinking about many forms, including what we still call nonverbal communication). You sense in both the frequent etymologies and the Nabokovian relish of writing in English (a second tongue for the author) a poet’s voice breaking through. Look at the treatment of the Russian word obshchezhitie, which lies at the heart of the book’s vision and is indeed hard to translate. I’d tinker with symbiosis, shared living, or even communicobiology, but in Soviet times this word could also mean a communal apartment, a hostel, or even a dorm. Here you have all the messiness of joint living, all the inconvenience and pleasure of hospitality, all the collisions and affections that pop up when different souls and bodies come into the same space and time. This term obshchezhitie captures for me the many resonances and layers of this book and even something of its form. In a term like this, you see a poet and translator at work in full wisdom, episteme, phronesis, and techne. Indeed, Professor Klyukanov recently published a Russian translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, another act of obshchezhitie between languages. I like to think of this book and that translation as secret partners, realignments in cosmic orientation in different ways, as distinct acts of hospitality and harboring. Each work asks us to reach out to life forms we might consider alien. Or even monstrous. This is perhaps the most provocative claim of the book. Philosophy can dare to be monstrous. But monstrous here does not only mean aberrant, horrifying, or beyond the pale. This is not the Kraken, Moby-Dick, or Godzilla. Look at Figure 6.6 in chapter 6, the universe as a fourfold: Nature, Society, Humanity, and Monstrosity. One of these things is clearly not like the other! But notice the boldness of what Professor Kly-

Foreword

xi

ukanov is up to: what is called monstrosity here is what philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant would have called God. “That than which nothing greater can be conceived” is the famous definition of God by Anselm, the medieval philosopher. That is indeed shatteringly monstrous in the most dire and exhilarating sense! Hegel, shying away from theological language though still thinking theologically, would call it “the absolute.” Nature, Society, Humanity, and God: that’s a pretty fine fourfold. Each corner, like those of the house of communication, is monstrous (i.e., beautiful, sublime, and fracturing our lazy habits of thought). Communication is above all the effort to think freely, boldly, even monstrously. Let’s see if its readers can rise to its invitation. John Durham Peters is the Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He teaches and writes on media history and theory. He taught at the University of Iowa between 1986–2016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999), Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005), The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), and most recently, Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image, and Other Truth Games in History (2020) with the late Kenneth Cmiel (all published by the University of Chicago Press).

Acknowledgments ‰Í

I’m very grateful to: •

Andrew R. Smith, who read the entire manuscript in draft form and provided constructive criticism on each chapter: his knowledge, support, generosity, and good humor have been invaluable.

•

Richard L. Lanigan, for his helpful and encouraging feedback on the first several chapters.

•

Olivia Dugenet, for her insightful comments and editing suggestions on most of the chapters.

•

Chad Hansen, for a thoughtful response to my question about the four primary causes.

•

John Peters, for his foreword that captures so succinctly and beautifully the key ideas and spirit of my book.

•

Jamin Pelkley, who suggested Berghahn Books as an outlet for my book and introduced me to the publisher.

•

Marion Berghahn, for her enthusiastic response to my project.

•

Tom Bonnington, the entire production team at Berghahn Books, for their efficiency and support; a special “thank you” to Keara Hagerty for her attentive and thorough copyediting.

•

Robert Craig and Andrew Smith, for their endorsements.

Thank you!

Introduction ‰Í

During my formative years as a scholar in Russia, I was interested in how different verbal and nonverbal signs play a role in interactions between people(s). That subject, labeled obchenie and derived from the word obchii (“common”), was explored by philology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, culturology, translation studies, and so on—not by something that would be called “communication study” or “communication studies.” Later, when I became a faculty member in the Department of Communication Studies in the United States, I discovered that I had been studying communication most of my academic life—like Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, who had been speaking prose all his life and didn’t even know it. Today, kommunikatsiya—another word meaning “common”—is a widespread label in Russian academia, found in the names of departments, curricula offerings, problematics of scientific conferences, areas of research, and ever-growing publications. Influenced to a large degree by how communication is theorized, researched, and taught in western, especially English-speaking countries, the area of “communication study” or “communication studies” in Russia—often, but not always, called kommunikativistika—has also inherited the debates about its place among other disciplines, such as philology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, semiotics, rhetoric, and so on. Thus, I try to draw on both cultural traditions of my academic background to address the question what defines communication scholarship. While I am not one of those “communication scholars” who may “spend sleepless nights pondering ontological matters” (Waisbord 2019: 122), I have given this question much thought, the results of which are presented in this book. The present book continues my previous research into the nature of communication and its study (Klyukanov 2010b, 2013a, 2013b, 2017, 2019;

Communication

Klyukanov and Holba 2015; Klyukanov and Leontovich 2017; Klyukanov and Sinekopova 2019) and especially the ideas expressed in my book A Communication Universe: Manifestations of Meaning, Stagings of Significance (2010a). Although the two books go hand-in-hand, that book focused on the former; this one, in its turn, focuses on the latter. The present book addresses both ontological and epistemological views on communication, beginning with the notorious identity and legitimacy crises of communication study. I argue that this is the main reason the study of communication is usually presented in metaphoric terms—Schramm’s metaphor of “a great crossroads” (1959) being, perhaps, the most famous. I try to go beyond metaphoric views in order to understand what communication is, not what it is like. To that end, the focus of this book is on the scientific study of communication (i.e., its systematic examination). Looking at how communication scholarship is presented, we notice that when it is viewed as a field of study or studies, the bounds of communication scholarship are not clearly defined; when it is viewed as a discipline, it is found “undisciplined”; and when it is as a science, it is found “insecure.” Thus, the first chapter gives an overview of the study of communication as a hundred flowers blossoming, setting out to explore both the nature of communication and how it is scientifically investigated. To determine the status of communication study in this light may seem an exercise in utter futility, and yet . . . The second chapter looks at the nature of communication in the literal sense (i.e., conceptualized from the perspectives of natural science in terms of processes and interactions of matter and energy). Special attention is paid to the body and the brain as its most complex organ. Both spatial and temporal aspects of communication as a natural object are discussed. It is argued that any research into the physiological, physical, chemical, biological, and neurological aspects of communication, regardless of its publication outlet and “ownership,” should be considered legitimate if it is focused on the empirical study of communication as connection growing out of the factuality of sensorium bringing together humans and nonhumans—everyone and everything not just in the world but of the world. Further, the chapter shows how such entanglements of different kinds of beings result in the emergence of organized structures. It is shown how such naturally occurring communication can be explained best through Conversation Analysis. While this view of communication may appear simple and devoid of depth, its importance is emphasized, for it deals with the most direct and immediate forms of establishing connection. Chapter 3 covers more familiar ground: communication as a social phenomenon. A quick overview of its conceptualization is given, from Plato and Aristotle to Compte and Mead, who put communication in the socialscientific spotlight. It is shown how the study of communication can be considered a social science due to a number of unifying themes, such as the fo-

Introduction

cus on the links between individual action and social relations, importance of rules and norms, and action that lies at the basis of communication as a social process. It is noted that while modeling their approach on natural science, social scientists still seek to develop their own methodology; in this light, “the problem of the method” is specially addressed. In a similar vein, tensions between self and society, inherent in social communication, are viewed as parallel to tensions between the micro-level and macro-level manifestations of social communication. It is emphasized that such tensions cannot be resolved once and for all since they keep social communication going. Finally, it is noted that although the social study of communication is often treated as a “human science” (Geisteswissenschaften), there is more to what it means to be human. In chapter 4, the study of communication is discussed from the perspective of humanities, focusing on the manifestations of the human spirit. To distinguish it from the social science perspective that studies social actions and institutions, the humanities study of communication is treated as cultural science that is aimed at understanding what makes us human by investigating all products created by humans through various stages of history. In other words, the study of communication as cultural science investigates the process and result of cultivation—of the human, by the human. It is shown how the search for the meaning of the human spirit is carried out by investigating various expressive means of keeping it alive (rhetoric), sign processes involved in the creation of meaning (semiotics), and the overall nature of interpretation and understanding (hermeneutics). Finally, communication is presented as a process of correspondence through significant expressions; in this light, humanity remains one integral whole as long as people correspond with/to themselves as being human. Chapter 5 deals with philosophy of communication. Here, philosophy is conceptualized as a science focused on the whole encounter with the world. It is shown how communication, as a synthetic process of connecting parts into a whole, lends itself to philosophizing, which is viewed as different from communication theorizing. Several possible designations for this science are considered, and “rational science” is chosen as the most appropriate, while keeping in mind its elements of monstrosity, also addressed in the chapter. Although philosophy may appear to be divorced from life, it is argued that this is not the case, and the main “job duties” of the philosopher of communication are presented, such as critical reflection, formulating postulates that determine possible action, special attention to language, and so on. It is emphasized that, overall, the philosopher keeps vigil for experience to be unfolding in such a way that the unity of the subject (oneself) and the object (everyone/everything else) is established.

Communication

In chapter 6, the natural, social, cultural, and rational scientific perspectives on communication are brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square, which is a well-known means of mapping out various semantic categories and relationships between them. The chapter looks at a number of important categories addressed to this point, such as intellectual virtues, kinds of reasoning, and forms of communication activity. Each category is presented in the form of the semiotic square and discussed in more detail. It is also shown that the semiotic square is grounded in kinesthetic relationships and should not be viewed as an abstract framework detached from everyday experience. It is emphasized that the semiotic square can be seen in terms of anatomic body planes only up to a point because the fourth dimension is not a place but a realm of consciousness. The importance of this fourth position is specially noted. It is also shown how, conceptualized dynamically, every operation in the semiotic square results in markedness, which is briefly discussed. Chapter 7 takes as its premise Aristotle’s statement about Being “said in many ways.” In this light, each of the four sciences is presented as a way of saying something about communication; it is argued that each view exists only insofar as the other three are concealed in the background and can be brought to light. For instance, any study conducted by natural science is a case of social communication, including discursively formed judgments, decisions, and actions; cultural expressions and their interpretation; and philosophical reflection. Thus, it is shown how all four scientific views are interconnected; how easy or difficult it is to establish a connection between the four scientific perspectives on communication depends on the distance between them. Chapter 8 brings back the question, raised in the first chapter, about what defines communication scholarship. Several key works on that subject over the past five decades are discussed. It is shown that the question whether the study of communication is a science sui generis remains open. Hence, it is necessary to see if communication can be viewed as an object in itself (i.e., if communication scholars perceive the same object). Based on the framework of phenomenology of perception, it is discussed how the identity of any object is created by its surrounding objects; as they recede into the periphery, the main object of perception is disclosed. In that sense, it is argued that speaking of communication study as such would be possible only if it could overcome the perspectivism of experience. It is stated that, in reality, we cannot look at communication as separate from other objects and that we always deal with its manifestations, captured in the four scientific perspectives discussed in the book.

CHAPTER

Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom ‰Í

Communication Studies: It’s Something Else! Almost half a century ago, George Gerbner wrote that “if Marx were alive today, his principal work would be entitled Communications rather than Capital” (Gerbner 1983: 358). Of course, we can only speculate on what Marx would do or write—especially today: maybe he would work for the World Bank and write analytical reviews on macroeconomics for its Boards of Directors. Or, perhaps, he would study philosophy and the history of science, developing the ideas from his third manuscript, where he wrote: “The whole of history is a preparation, a development, for ‘man’ to become the object of sensuous consciousness and for the needs of ‘man as man’ to become [sensuous] needs. History itself is a real part of natural history and of nature’s becoming man. Natural science will, in time, subsume the science of man, just as the science of man will subsume natural science: there will be one science” (Marx 1988: 111). Again, we can only speculate on what Marx meant by “one science” and what his new work would be called; that it would focus on communications (or communication), though, is more than likely. Today, alongside “homo sapiens,” “homo faber,” “homo ludens,” and so on, “the man” is seen as “homo communicans,” “homo communicates,” or “homo communicativus”—these terms share the same root and show very clearly how the human is viewed in the twenty-first century. There is no lack of scientific attention to communication as the defining characteristic of humans. More and more scholarly journals are devoted to the study of various aspects of communication. More and more academic conferences are held to discuss various issues related to communication.

Communication

New and newer interest groups are formed within regional, national, and communication associations. Few colleges and universities can be found without a department of communication offering the whole gamut of courses—a gamut that keeps expanding. Communication is clearly an important area of study—or studies, referring to a detailed investigation or an activity of gaining knowledge. It is in this sense that Wilbur Schramm talked about the beginnings of communication study in America (1997), or the international history of communication study was presented (Simonson and Park 2016). Today, departments of communication studies are ubiquitous (even though hardly any departments of physics studies or departments of history studies exist). The broad area in academics of communication study or studies is usually presented as a field “in ferment” (Fuchs and Qiu 2018). In this light, several questions may be posed. First, can a field be in ferment, or it is more accurate to speak about “the field, fermented’” (Pooley 2016a), or, perhaps, going “from field to ferment”—the way beer-makers do? Second, can the fermentation of a field occur by itself, or does it need a specific starter set of cultures; and if so, what might be those cultures? And third, is there any fermentation timeline for the field of communication studies? In 1983, Journal of Communication published a special issue, “Ferment in the Field,” followed by two similar issues in 1993 and 2008. In a manner of speaking, these three issues can be viewed as equivalent to three stages of fermentation—primary, secondary, and tertiary—used in beer brewing. Thirty-five years after the original “Ferment” issue, yet another issue of Journal of Communication was published (Fuchs and Qiu 2018) to reflect on the past, present, and future of communication studies: this time, similar to the change from “communication study” to “communication studies,” “ferment” was replaced by “ferments”—probably to emphasize a diversity of activities in the field. This, though, takes the process of fermentation beyond its tertiary stage, and one cannot but wonder when we can see the final product. “Fermentation” in this case does not refer to the literal phenomenon of the chemical breakdown of a substance by bacteria, yeasts, or other microorganisms; rather, it is used as a metaphor for a slow and steady force for transformation (Katz 2020). A metaphor says that something is something else; there are a number of metaphorical attempts to address the status of communication study—this “muddle of a field” (Waisbord 2019: 121)—and to give it some kind of shape, if only by saying what it is like. One of the most well-known metaphors for communication research is that of “a great crossroads,” proposed by Schramm (1959). It should be noted that Schramm viewed communication research as a crossroads (cf. the discussion of communication studies at the crossroads [Timcke 2016]).

Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom

In other words, it is not the field of communication studies facing a crossroads; rather, the field itself is a crossroads where “many pass but few tarry” (Schramm 1959: 8). Another spatial metaphor, albeit of a constricting nature, is proposed by Jefferson D. Pooley, who laments that communication scholars toil away in obscurity exiled to the margins of the university; as a result, our scholarship is not read because “ideas flow in, but—like the Hotel California—they can never leave” (2016a: 622). Though you can check out any time you like, you remain trapped in what at first appears inviting and tempting. Often, a more dynamic nature of the field of communication studies is highlighted. For instance, Kaarle Nordenstreng likens it to surfing (2007). While this metaphor emphasizes the ease with which researchers glide along the waves of various topics and theories, Nordenstreng sounds a concern about this “surf syndrome” because such an approach to the study of communication runs the risk of becoming superficial and devoid of depth. Once its dynamic nature is highlighted, the question becomes how far one can surf in the field, as it were. Some believe that “communication has been far too bashful and timid in its ambitions” and must boldly go “where others dare not” (Wilson 2013). Others, however, think communication scholars are like a “motley assortment of guerrilla bands that raid other disciplines for tools and texts” (Simonson 2001: 20). The field is even discussed in terms of “academic imperialism” (Waisbord 2016: 872). In the same vein, the International Communication Association (ICA) is sometimes “perceived as a colonizing academic organization that tries to shape communication scholarship around the world” (Wiedemann and Meyen 2016: 1,504). Many more metaphors of the field of communication study exist, and still many more could be created: our metaphorical vision is limited only by our imagination, and the field could be called many other things. It should be noted, however, that by viewing the field metaphorically, we inevitably acknowledge—explicitly or implicitly—its so-called status: hence we hear about “the so-called communication theories” (Deetz 2010: 41). Without denying its heuristic potential, we should go beyond viewing the field metaphorically and saying what it is like to a less figurative approach and conceptualizing what it is. To that end, the study of communication is often presented not like a crossroads or the Hotel California, but as a discipline.

An Undisciplined Discipline? It seems that to recognize it as a discipline or branch of knowledge, it is enough to simply state that “communication as a discipline has the . . . responsibility of understanding communication in its entirety” (Hornsey, Gallois, and Duck 2008: 752). Such tautological statements may be true by virtue

Communication

of their logical form but shed no light on why communication is a discipline or what kind of discipline it is. Those who try to conceptualize communication along those lines cannot seem to agree on its place as a discipline, seeing it as a part of the humanities (Apel 1972; Emauel 2007), social sciences (Vroons 2005), or “as a practical discipline insofar as it effectively marshals its available institutional and intellectual resources to address ‘problems of communication’ in society” (Craig 2008: 8). It is no surprise that numerous dissenters have emerged, given the lack of agreement on the place of communication study among those who view it as a discipline. Where for some “undisciplined knowledge and hospitality to multiple disciplines sound fine” (Waisbord 2019: 150), for others this is not the case. It is noted that “if communication studies is a discipline, it should periodically discipline itself ” (Simonson 2001: 20; Kane 2016). In the same vein, “the undisciplinary nature of the field of communication” (Shepherd 1993: 84) is emphasized. Stuart Hall believes constituting communication as a self-sustaining, disciplinary specialty is an “altogether misguided attempt” (Hall 1989: 43). Davis Swanson echoes this view, stating that “it is not a discipline, at least not in any traditional sense, and it will be helpful to discard the contrary view once and for all” (Swanson 1993: 169). Overall, the case of communication studies is considered particularly remarkable, “even amid the chaos of the disciplines” (Waisbord 2019: 122). Moreover, “as an undisciplined discipline, communication generates disorder in the ‘disciplinary system’ and contributes to the phenomenon of ‘chaos of disciplines’” (Vlăduțescu 2013: 493). In addition to those who view it as a discipline yet cannot agree on its specific nature, as well as those who do not consider it a discipline in any traditional sense, attempts are made to ensure its legitimacy by simply declaring—in one broad stroke—the disciplinary centrality of communication studies (Morreale et al. 2000; Waisbord 2019; Wang 2011). Over the years, scholars have asserted the interdisciplinary nature of communication studies. Today, we often hear of “the almost systematic advocacy for interdisciplinarity and the consideration of communication studies as a [sic] interdiscipline” (Kane 2016: 89). Some believe the field of communication studies can be viewed as transdisciplinary, while others argue that it should be considered a “post-discipline” (Waisbord 2019). Sometimes, being recognized as a discipline does not seem to be a matter of first importance: “More important is whether it continues to provide a center of scholarly excitement, a gathering place for scholars to talk and work and publish and debate with each other and to piece together their ideas on understanding the nature of communication (Schramm 1983: 17). In this respect, as noted earlier, communication departments, journals, and associations keep proliferating, and numerous conferences provide gathering places for scholars to

Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom

talk and share excitement over their understanding of communication. And yet, how tenable are such opinions and beliefs about the (“inter-,” “trans-,” “post-”) disciplinary centrality of communication studies? John Peters’ admission from over thirty years ago that “communication has come to be administratively, not conceptually, defined” (1986: 528) is echoed by James Anderson and Geoffrey Baym, who note that this fractured discipline is “held together not by paradigmatic coherence, but by tenuous administrative arrangements” (2004: 603). Will the tenuous administrative arrangements, propped up by various prefixes, continue to prove a center for communication studies? Or should we be concerned that a time may come in communication studies when, as vividly described by William Butler Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”? While we are hopefully not anywhere close to such a rapture, it can hardly be unequivocally stated that nothing is rotten in the state of communication studies; whether as a field or a discipline, we must admit that it is in a state of crisis, which cannot be disguised by simply asserting its centrality or somewhat modifying its designation by adding various prefixes.

A Crisis That Is Always with You As Umberto Eco has remarked, in some situations “the crisis sells well” (Eco 1986: 126). Indeed, those who cry “crisis” may do so for reasons that promise them personal benefit. They are usually seen as the “detractors—scholars who champion theory-driven studies” (Waisbord 2019: 129). Such scholars can hardly be blamed for self-serving interests; it can be recalled that in the ancient Greece, theoria meant transcending one’s particularity and abandoning oneself to something greater (Peters 2005). In this light, those saying that the study of communication is in crisis do not try to cash in on such pronouncements; rather, they call our attention to its condition. To understand the nature of this crisis, let’s consider several cases in which scholars address crises in other sciences. One of the most well-known is Edmund Husserl’s attempt to highlight “the crisis of European sciences” (1989) by showing how their empiricism, manifest in the form of facts of natural science and mathematical formulas, fell short at providing an adequate epistemology because it was divorced from life. As a way to overcome this crisis, he developed his method of transcendental phenomenology, aimed at returning to the real ground of human experience and penetrating into the essence of the nature of knowledge.

Communication

Another case is that of Michele Foucault, who also addressed the crisis in knowledge in modernity, which he set out to resolve in his archeology of the human sciences. From that perspective, the process of humanistic inquiry is based on various discursive formations operating as social technologies in different historical periods. Such technologies are set in motion when individuals question the knowledge previously held unquestionable. An example is Foucault’s analysis of the origins, history, and problems of the medical institutions and practice, presented in his lecture “The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Antimedicine?” (2004). One more scholar who develops his theory as a response to a crisis of modern society is Jürgen Habermas. For him, money and power in advanced capitalist societies colonize the lifeworld and displaced communicative forms of solidarity. He proposes overcoming this crisis by applying evolutionary views to the study of forms of social communication. By establishing a connection between knowledge, language, and action, Habermas aims to recover the capacity of social theory to provide normative foundations for undistorted intersubjective communication. These three cases represent different attempts to address a crisis that is a result of an anomaly that has not been identified and cannot receive an adequate explanation within the existing theoretical framework. Each of these attempts correlates with the nature of knowledge: in the natural science (Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology), in the humanities (Foucault’s archeology of knowledge), and in the social science (Habermas’ theory of communicative action). These three cases, therefore, are examples of epistemological crises arising when anomalies are encountered that cannot be explained by the accepted paradigm of normal science: once such a crisis has been adequately addressed, a paradigm shift occurs (Kuhn 1962). In other words, “the shift is epistemological because the fundamental change is about what we consider to be the core knowledge of the system” (Stobbs 2011: 104). It is important to emphasize that when normal science is unable to solve a problem, a crisis occurs that results in a revolutionary paradigm shift and “a new normal.” It involves a change in how knowledge is structured and developed, but still within a certain scientific field that has a clear designation, such as “natural science” or “social science.” The situation with the so-called communication science is different. For example, it is sometimes characterized as “healthy eclecticism,” and yet the concept of eclecticism presupposes choice and gathering, implying not just diversity (for example, various roots of communication study), but also a unification of those roots in some new coherent framework. It is noted “that paradigmatic analysis is pervasive in the field of communication research” (Jensen and Neuman 2013: 232). Indeed, numerous paradigms coexist and continuously evolve. What may appear as a healthy situation, though, can be seen quite differently if we admit that a development of a discipline

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takes the form of permanent revolution or a series of constant revolutions; that way, all syntagms are proclaimed innovations while the paradigmatic structures themselves become unstable or never materialize. In this light, “the crisis cannot be disguised by calling the discipline poly-paradigmatic” (Leydesdorff 2002: 129). With that in mind, it is not surprising that some communication scholars get “a distinct impression that the discipline is experiencing a high degree of ‘methodological schizophrenia’” (Hanna 1982: 43), while others acknowledge that “the field increasingly suffers from epistemological erosion” (Donsbach 2006: 444). Many communication scholars would share the sentiment that, “to establish the centrality of a discipline, we need a dominant paradigm that can effectively guide and frame research” (Wang 2011: 1,463). Read another way, this statement means no such paradigm exists. In the same vein, when speaking on whether, as sociology or political science do, US communication research has one main journal, Jefferson Pooley states, “We have no flagship to sink” (2015: 1,253). It is not clear why we would want to sink it if we had one, or why “we are better off without a flagship” (2015: 1,248); that flagship (if it existed) would, perhaps, be better off without us. In light of the situation with the so-called “communication science,” briefly outlined above, it is quite understandable that we hear the calls “to face paradigmatic issues” and “to consider a paradigm shift” (Wang 2011: 1463). While it is easy to feel sympathetic toward such calls, it is impossible to simply will a new paradigm into existence. With its so-called “poly-paradigmatic” character, the study of communication, whether labeled a discipline or a science, may appear highly dynamic to some and shifty to others; yet it is difficult to identify an anomaly that requires a paradigm shift. Additionally, according to Kuhn, a scientific community needs to be present that accepts a certain set of knowledge and methods for solving problems—without it, one cannot speak of any paradigms. In this case, it is difficult to identify the boundaries of such a community since it is difficult to think of a topic that would not relate to communication in one way or another. It is easy to create yet another interest group within a communication association, and the number of presenters at communication conventions is limited, it seems, only by the size of meeting rooms. All this can hardly be considered normal. The crisis of communication study, thus, is not a result of an anomaly that could not be adequately addressed by normal science; rather, it is a result of a lack of what can be considered normal science, in the first place. We may have always been “inter-” or “trans-” or “post-disciplinary,” but we have never been normal. The disciplinary crisis of communication studies is sometimes explained by the fact that it has “too much geography and too little history” (Peters 2012: 500). Here, the term “geography” is meant to indicate the discipline’s conceptual territory (i.e., trying to cover too much ground). Today, by add-

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ing communication theories from various places around the globe, geography takes on its literal—spatial—meaning. While certainly a welcome trend, academic globalization does not make the task of theorizing communication any easier: conceptualizing communication in terms of so much geography—in fact, the entire globe—requires time. And, although contemplating communication has a long history, going back at least to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, it has a short past as a field trying to specify its unique perspective (Schramm 1983) and to establish its disciplinary status (Pooley 2016b). In light of “the perennial fragmentation and hyper-specialization of communication studies” (Waisbord 2019: 8), we hear appeals not only for a diversity of views, but also for their unity. One such appeal, for instance, has an eloquent title: Finding Birds of a Feather: Multiple Memberships and Diversity without Divisiveness in Communication Research (Stanfill 2012). Just as birds look for similar ones by their plumage, the author encourages communication scholars to strive for diversity that brings them together. Interestingly, the Russian equivalent of this English proverb—“Rybak rybaka vidit izdaleka” (“A fisherman always spots another fisherman from afar”)—captures this idea even better as it emphasizes not the joint activity (“flight”) but the recognition of similar interests by those who nonetheless remain at a distance from one another. The English expression, in its turn, arose to refer to situations where there is some danger, and it is necessary to “flock together.’” The field of communication studies, though, does not seem to face any danger from other disciplines, even of a broad nature, such as cybernetics or semiotics; its main problem is internal and consists in the necessity and inability to cope with its own legacy (Shepherd 1993). The roots of the communication studies crisis can be understood more deeply if we recall the meaning of “separation” found in the ancient Greek word krísis (“crisis”). For instance, it is noted that a crisis in philosophy manifests itself in three forms: separation of philosophers with their metareasoning from the general culture, separation of philosophers from one another, and separation of philosophers from philosophy itself (McCumber 2013). We get a rather gloomy picture of complete disunity (i.e., separation of philosophers from everything and all, including themselves). “Separation,” however, can be understood not only in the sense of alienation; “to be separate” means also “to be different from others,” and in English, these two meanings are expressed by the words “to divide,” “to disconnect,” “to set apart,” and “to distinguish.” With this in mind, the crisis of communication studies consists in their inability to distinguish themselves—as a field, a discipline, or a science—from the rest. In this light, the field of communication study can be viewed as a patient unable to understand one’s own boundaries. A series of constant revolutions, mentioned earlier, takes the form of different turns: “a turn toward social epistemology,” “a postmodern turn,” “an interpretative turn,” “a critical turn,” “a cultural turn,” “a reflex-

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ive turn,” “a linguistic turn,” “a discursive turn,” “a naturalistic turn,” and so on. If we recall that the word “crisis” goes back through the Latin language to the ancient Greek kríno,—which means not only “separation,” but also “a turning point in the course of the disease”—we can view communication study as a patient who is constantly tossing and turning, unable to find a normal state of health and calm down. All this “brings up old questions about what defines communication scholarship” (Waisbord 2019: 89). Such questions are old because the study of communication is characterized by “long-standing identity issues” (Swanson 1993: 163). Moreover, it is stated that “this identity crisis has been with us for as long as we have existed in academia” (Donsbach 2006: 439). Almost thirty years ago, John Peters stated that “the field has been in a perpetual identity crisis—or rather legitimation crisis” (1994: 133), which is still true today. However, since the latter is caused by the former, this could be rephrased as “the field has been in a perpetual legitimation crisis—or rather identity crisis”; all this in spite of “various attempts to solve the identity problem in communication sciences by providing typologies for this still rather chaotic field” (Kirtiklis 2011: 43). When we face the question of what defines communication scholarship, we should remember that “to define” means “to specify distinctly,” “to set a limit to something.” In other words, unlike the examples of epistemological crises briefly discussed earlier, the crisis of communication studies is ontological in nature (i.e., the very object of its inquiry needs to be specified and its limits established). Communication scholars may not “spend sleepless nights pondering ontological matters” (Waisbord 2019: 122), but if we acknowledge “the lack of ontological center of communication studies” (Waisbord 2019: 8), we must admit that pondering ontological matters is crucial. In this regard, “one possible starting point is to pose the question if, by ‘communication,’ theoreticians understand the same thing” (Kane 2016: 96). After all, ontology is “the scaffolding upon which structures of scholarship are crafted” (Anderson and Baym 2004: 603), and many would agree that it is “a unique foundational ontology that grants fields of study their disciplinary status” (Shepherd 1993: 91). If that is lacking, communication studies will continue to experience “methodological schizophrenia” and suffer from “epistemological erosion.”

What’s in a Name? One can see how the identity crisis of communication studies, due to a lack of ontological center, is manifested in the problem of their designation. It is noted, for instance, that the area of communication theory “had been touched . . . in a thousand different ways long before that label appeared”

Communication

(Pooley 2016b: 12). The study of communication has been conducted in many “fellow subject areas” (Cobley 1996: 31), most contributions made by philologists, linguists, psychologists, literary critics, semioticians, culturologists, and philosophers of language. When communication scholarship is compared to “a large collection of Russian dolls of nested fields and subfields” (Waisbord 2019: 121), it is difficult to see what makes communication scholarship different from other “dolls” (i.e., other fields or disciplines), testifying to the difficulty and importance of ontologizing and naming it as a distinct subject of study. Indeed, this “long-standing area of academic inquiry” (Waisbord 2019: 88) still “does not have a fully accepted title” (Vlăduţescu 2013: 493). To qualify for a specific designation, certain features or characteristics of an object need to be identified, making it possible to refer to that object. As mentioned earlier, the study of communication is characterized as an “inter-,” “trans-,” or “post-discipline.” Similarly, it is defined as “an integrative science” or “a synoptic science” (Donsbach 2006). Such broad designations, however, are deemed ontologically problematic (Kane 2016). Academic departments focusing on communication also exhibit a variety of names. An NCA analysis of 790 communication departments found a total of 116 individual department names, including Communication, Communications, Communication Studies, Communication Arts, Communication Arts and Sciences, Communicology, and more (NCA C-Briefs 2011). This list will become even longer if cognate names are added from other cultural traditions, such as the German Zeitungswissenschaft (Pooley 2016) or the Russian “kommunikativistika.” Of course, one can find in such a variety of names a “remarkable intellectual diversity” (Waisbord 2019: 11). As a result, it becomes tempting to dismiss the necessity of having one clear and accepted designation. For instance, a Russian scholar notes that while naming the field of communication inquiry is worth discussing, the debate about its title should not obscure the key issue: that the Higher Attestation Commission (a national government agency that oversees awarding of advanced academic degrees) must recognize the existence of this science and provide the opportunity to defend dissertations in this area (Dzyaloshinsky 2017). This way, a call is made to solve the legitimacy crisis by officially recognizing this area of inquiry first, and letting it figure out its name and thus solve its identity crisis second. Meanwhile, the relationship between cause and effect should be reverse: this area will be recognized and legitimized (including by the Higher Attestation Commission) only after it identifies the essential features of its object and has a distinct and fully accepted designation. The problem with naming the field cannot be disregarded: the erosion of a designation links directly to the epistemological erosion noted earlier. In-

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stead, a designation is needed, and it needs “to provide rigor, flexibility and robustness” (Vladutsescu 2013: 498). The importance of this cannot be overstated because if something is designated a certain way, the eidetic moment of the name appears (i.e., an outline of its meaning drawn) (Losev 1993: 93). Once something is denoted in such a meaningful way, we can find the object of this designation; for example, knowing what “a tour guide” means, we can find such a person in a crowd (Stepanov 2004). Unfortunately, the area of communication inquiry cannot be found as easily as we find a tour guide in a crowd, and the more names that are used to denote “communication inquiry,” the more difficult it becomes to recognize it “in a crowded field of disciplines, fields, and post-disciplines” (Waisbord 2019: 132). At the same time, calling this area of inquiry simply “communication (studies)” does not solve the problem either, as the essential characteristics of its object still need to be specified. Stating that the study of communication focuses on the inquiry into processes of human communication does not reveal the essence of either. Any designation is a balance between how an object is signified and how it is designated; this way, one can see not only what the object is, but also its indication by the scholar as a subject. Thus, the object of physics is not physics but rather matter and general forms of its motion; the object of biology is not biology but instead living things and their interaction with the environment, and so on. In the case of communication study, the line between designation and signification is blurred, and so limiting this area (defining it) becomes problematic. On the one hand, the name for this area of inquiry is not a proper name, and so this area cannot be easily referred to without any signification. On the other hand, too many names for this area do not make it easy to signify it by limiting the class of included objects; when Schramm says, “the doors from communication open on almost every corner of human life” (1983: 16), one wonders what the corners devoid of communication might be. Thus, the name for the study of communication is not something desirable but essential: it is a sine qua non for this area, be it a field, a discipline, or a science.

“An Insecure Science” So, the field of communication study is “sometimes qualified as a discipline, sometimes as an interdiscipline, sometimes as studies, sometimes as a science” (Kane 2016: 95). Qualified as a field, the study of communication enjoys a lot of freedom; after all, a “field” by definition is a broad and open expanse of land. In this light, the edges marking communication (study, studies, theory, etc.) as a field are usually difficult to determine. Once it is conceptualized as a discipline, the study of communication is expected to meet more

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specific criteria, such as forming a branch of knowledge with a set of certain methods and patterns of inquiry into a defined object of study. When attempts are made to conceptualize the study of communication as a science, the stakes are higher because the classification presupposes a systematically organized body of knowledge in a given area with a distinct identity. Hence, the critical question: “What is communication science?” (Berger, Roloff, and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2010). Although numerous attempts have been made to provide answers to this question, it is admitted that “communication research . . . is the quintessential ‘insecure science’” (Pooley 2016a: 623). For the study of communication to be conceptualized as a science, rather than a field or a discipline, communication research needs to secure its place among all other sciences. When Schramm writes about the doors from communication opening on almost every corner of human life, he notes that “communication researchers can go through any of these doors” and “can make themselves at home with scientists and social scientists from a dozen other fields and disciplines” (Schramm 1983: 16)—something, undoubtedly, to be lauded. In the first place, though, communication researchers should make themselves at home with themselves. And for that to happen, the (identity and legitimization) crisis of communication studies needs to be adequately addressed. No one can deny that “it is challenging to think about communication as a science” (Hartley and Potts 2016: 632). This challenge is usually met by drawing on the traditionally accepted distinction between science and art. In this sense, for example, the study of communication is viewed as drifting “away from science and into the humanities” (Hartley and Potts 2016: 629). For example, it is discussed alongside rhetoric and cultural studies—the areas implicitly deemed outside of its scope. The study of communication is often labeled “social scientific study of communication” (Berger, Roloff, and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2010: 7). That it is modeled on natural science is clear: “For communication scientists, the problem to be solved is one of identifying and then explaining regularities by constructing and testing theories” (Berger, Roloff, and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2010: 7). At the same time, the scope of communication study is very broad; for instance, it is noted that “communication theory has most typically drawn upon the humanities and the social sciences, with occasional forays into the natural sciences” (Peters 2003: 398). When the question is posed where one turns “for the resources with which to get a fresh perspective on communication” (Carey 1989: 23), the answer should be to itself. “Scientific” is usually understood as something “empirically based, experimentally testable, and theoretically formalizable” and “assumed to be . . . exact” (Witzany 2018: 91). It is in this light that “communication science” is usually understood. However, such understanding is restrictive: for exam-

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ple, “there is nothing in its etymology to compel us to restrict . . . ‘science’ to the fields where the greatest exactitude is attainable” (Andreski 1984: 24). The term “science” goes back to both Latin and Greek words for “science,” derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *skei, meaning “to cut, split.” The essence of science, therefore, is in the idea of separating, and while it is usually distinguished from art or philosophy, science needs to be viewed first as something “cut” (different) from life. Any close inspection requires discipline, stepping away from just going about one’s life, as it were, and taking the time to examine it scientifically. One can examine something thoroughly and grasp it intellectually only if one is apart from it—the etymology of “discipline” going back to dis (“apart”) and capere (“take hold of ”). This is articulated most famously by Plato in Apology: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Science searches for true ideas so that life is illuminated by the light of that knowledge. Plato, of course, focused on the importance of philosophical examination in one’s own life, caring about—and even craving for—virtue; hence, his phrase is sometimes translated as “The unchallenged life is the one that’s not worthy of us.” However, the old Greek verb in the statement is etazo, meaning “to inspect closely, to test,” and this applies not only to examining one’s motivation in order to live authentically, but also any scrutiny. Anything examined, be it oneself, the natural world, and so on, sheds light on life and makes it worth living. Plato’s name perhaps is not the first one that comes to mind when thinking “science”; yet he carried out a number of fundamental “splits” (see also his “Divided Line”) that underlie science as “examination of life”: the world of the world of ideas from the world of physical objects, knowledge from opinion, dialectics from rhetoric, oral speech from writing, the subject from the object. Although his sympathies are clear (the first part of each pair is unmarked), “all metaphysics, including its opponent, positivism, speaks in the language of Plato” (Heidegger 1972: 67). Thus, when speaking of “communication science,” it should be kept in mind that “what is peculiarly and technically termed Sciences, will by no means be confined . . . to the domain of such Sciences as deal with the material world, nor even to the whole range of Sciences now existing . . . . On the subject of human speculation, . . . all the cases whether inert matter or living bodies, whether permanent relations or successive occurrences, be the subject of our attention” (Whewell 1967: 3). Often, when communication scholars argue over various problems, “their very arguments over communication rely upon communication used unproblematically” (Tuckett 2014: 481). Hence, to get a fresh perspective, we need to look more critically at communication and its scientific examination, problematizing both. More specifically, just as, for example, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology addressed the crisis by going “back to things themselves” (i.e., the life-world of subjective experiences of people

Communication

from which scientific knowledge grows), the study of communication needs to identify what constitutes the true scientific foundation of conceptualizing communication. In other words, “finding common intellectual ground is . . . necessary to remind ourselves and tell others why communication studies matters” (Waisbord 2019: 153). Earlier, the importance of ontology as the scaffolding for communication scholarship was noted; however, the concept of scaffolding is somewhat mechanistic, and so such common intellectual ground can be better conceptualized in more organic terms as soil—something favorable to growth. Finally, it should be remembered that “crisis” is an alarming time rather than a fortunate combination of circumstances, which presents a certain opportunity that should be welcomed. “Crisis,” as noted earlier, is a critical moment in the course of the disease, and its outcome may be unfavorable; that is why such moments call for careful judgment. The identity crisis that has been with the study of communication for as long as we have existed in academia is quite a lingering moment, and a judgment may be past due. A hundred flowers can blossom year after year only if their soil does not lose its quality as a breeding ground. Otherwise, they become faded and wither away.

CHAPTER

The Nature of Communication ‰Í

The Matter of the Fact The study of communication can be conceptualized from the perspective of natural science because “the sheer phenomenon of communication is, of course, natural and universal in the sense that all biological species of a certain complexity do it in some way, and every human culture has ways of doing it” (Craig 2005: 660). Communication is often studied as a biological event through communibiology. Although, as the name suggests, its focus is on communication as a biological process, communibiology draws from other natural sciences, such as chemistry, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology, among others. The nature of communication is also explored from the perspectives of physiology, neuroscience, earth science, and so on—the sciences focused on the material universe. In fact, the natural sciences are full of consideration of the substances, processes, and interactions of matter and energy that are “central concerns and topics of communication theory” (Peters 2003: 399). Let’s look at some of these concerns and topics. All communication processes are rooted in natural elements; this applies even to the so-called “new media” (Peters 2015). It is impossible, though, to approach the nature of communication without considering “the mother of all media, the body” (Peters 2015: 187). The body draws much scholarly attention; even a special interdisciplinary field of the so-called body studies exists. The body can be thematized as a material frame (of a human or an animal) that is a stable object—“skin-bounded, . . . biomechanical entity” (Lock and Farquhar 2007: 2)—an observable and analyzable datum. Here, we encounter “a non-personal body, systems of anonymous functions, blind

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adherences to beings that I am not the cause of and for which I am not responsible” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 216). So thematized, everybody—every body—can be examined and discussed in the same way so that universal principles at work can be discovered. Both humans and animals come to know the world by sensing it and drawing distinctions: here, “sensations are forced upon us . . . . Over their nature . . . we have . . . no control” (James 1907: 593). Sensations provide us with rich information about the world; that we cannot conceptualize every sensation only testifies to the richness of the stimuli we receive. It is important to emphasize that the world we come to know this way is real for everybody (i.e., there is no individual reality). This kind of knowledge, sometimes labeled “knowledge by acquaintance” (James 1890: 217), can also be called “knowledge from reality,” which is crucial for the survival of every organism—both human and nonhuman. The body is often discussed in the context of nonverbal communication, including the study of gestures, facial expression, posture and gait (kinesics), body movement through space (haptics), vocal characteristics that are not a part of the verbal language system (paralinguistics), tastes (gustorics), and smell (olfatics). These forms of nonverbal communication are based on the five main senses—what is known as “the fivefold sense classification.” All the senses at the basis of the fivefold classification of the body language are external—whether “remote” (vision and hearing) or “contact” (touch, taste, and smell). However, there is more to communication than meets the naked eye, unaided ear, or bare hand; the body as an object can be examined more deeply with the help of scientific instruments. For instance, “among the communibiological paradigm’s biggest advantages is that researchers in the field have access to the most powerful and accurate tools ever available for studying human biological systems” (Yegiyan 2017: 172). This way, the role of the body’s internal senses, such as thermoregulation and balance, comes to light. One’s temperament, for instance, depends on the density and temperature of blood flow. As warm-blooded animals, people always maintain approximately the same body temperature (36.6 degrees Celsius—98.6 degrees Farenheit). While the ability to maintain stable temperature allows humans to exploit colder climates and rise to a higher level of evolution, this requires more energy to be directed toward the vital activity of thermoregulation. That is why a person needs heat—solar heat, maternal heat, and any other heat resulting from interaction with others (read: with other bodies). Coldblooded animals do not need as strong a connection to others because if their body temperature drops below a certain level, they simply enter a state of anabiosis—temporary suspended animation or greatly reduced metabolism. It is no coincidence that “isolation calls” or “isolation behavior” are

The Nature of Communication

found primarily among warm-blooded animals, which indicates their stronger attachment to others. Cold-blooded animals that require less amounts of energy compared to warm-blooded animals can survive the absence of connection to others more easily, existing on their own, unlike humans who suffer in isolation—for example, in times of epidemics and pandemics that require social distancing. For instance, cow hugging is now considered therapeutic because a cow’s warmer body temperature (along with a slower heartbeat) can make hugging them a soothing experience (El-Beih 2020). In this light, conceptual metaphors, such as “affection is warmth,” are based on the primary physiological characteristics of the body temperature. Also, parallels can be drawn between cold-blooded and warm-blooded creatures and Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of “cool media” and “hot media,” which are also metaphoric expressions. One’s temperament is dependent not only on the body’s temperature, but also the types of liquids in the body. According to the humoral theory of temperament, commonly associated with the ideas put forward by Hippocrates and expanded on by Galen, there exist four types of liquids or humors in the body—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—giving rise to four temperaments—sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. These ideas are said to be even older, dating back to the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian physicians. According to Avicenna, for instance, the humors are not the liquid components in the body, but rather the chemical mixture(s) derived from various digested foods; in today’s scientific terms, yellow bile, for example, is homologous to fat (Abu-Asab, Amri, and Micozzi 2013). Whether seen as liquid components or digested foods in the body, temperament is conceptualized as a “proper mixture” or an internal balance crucial for survival and evolution. These ideas may appear simple and naïve, but they contributed to laying a foundation for the scientific method: first, human behavior came to be viewed in terms of causes and effects, and second, countless differences between people were grouped together into a typology. As a result, these ideas have been employed through the centuries; for instance, the Jesuits of the so-called Old Company (1540–1767) applied them to organizational and performance aspects of the colleges and various government positions—for example, “the ‘blood humor’ was classified as unsuitable for religious and ascetic life” (Barea 2011: 2,336). The body, therefore, is not simply an anatomical entity, but also a biochemical organism that needs food as a source of energy. The most complex organ in the body is the brain, which consumes a large amount of energy relative to the rest of the body; in this sense, “brain food” is not a metaphor since one’s brain literally runs on nutrients. The brain is often personalized; for instance, it is said to “recognize faces,” “decide when to work and when to rest,” and so on. However, as Thomas Fuchs hu-

Communication

morously notes, this is simply not the case, “for my brain is certainly not married, not a psychiatrist, and it has no children” (2018: 44). In reality, the brain’s most important function is not thinking: the brain is a control center responsible for the regulation of all body systems so they can work efficiently and remain in balance. Unlike homeostatic regulation that reflects reactive responses, the brain functions according to the principle of allostasis, serving as the integrative center for anticipatory and longer-term regulation (Schulkin 2011). The concept of allostasis is studied, for example, in relation to communication and stress (Storlie 2015), while the concept of allostatic load is found to be “particularly relevant with the research on conflict, aggression, and violence” (Knapp and Daly 2011: 108). It is noted that some hormones promote allostasis; for instance, according to preliminary research, intranasally administered oxytocin is said to improve the ability of anticipating the actions of others and facilitating cooperative behavior (Quintana and Guastella 2020). The body, while a spatially extended object with distinctive characteristics, exists in relation to other natural entities, including the Earth: the word “human” goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *(dh)ghomon-, literally meaning “earthling, earthly being.” As geo-beings, humans cannot help but be connected to our planet itself, as well as the sun, the moon, and the stars. This connection highlights the temporal nature of the body, as demonstrated by chronobiology that reveals how the body is connected to physical (rather than cultural) geography. One such factor is found in circadian rhythms—the natural processes that regulate the body by oscillating in predictable patterns of approximately twenty-four-hour light/dark cycles coinciding with the Earth’s rotation. The circadian rhythms of the human body are determined by a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors: on the one hand, by geological processes in the bowels of the Earth’s crust, and, on the other hand, the gravitational field and solar radiation (i.e., by the rotation of the Earth around its axis, and, therefore, by a change in illumination). The circadian rhythms of living organisms do not exactly correspond to one such revolution and fluctuate within twenty– twenty-four hours (in humans they are ten–twenty minutes longer than the twenty-four-hour period); that is why such rhythms are called “circadian” (i.e., near-daily or approaching daily). In English, two special words were created to denote such a rhythm—“diurnal” and “nocturnal”—to convey the main parts of the twenty-four-hour day. Any verbal label, however, can only be an approximate designation of the natural processes themselves—in this case, the rotation of the Earth around its axis and thus the nature of light. Our body in this respect is better at communication, analogously connected to those entities with which it is naturally in sync (and can be—because of culture—out of sync).

The Nature of Communication

It should also be remembered that the body exists in the magnetic field of the Earth; we may not be able to see, hear, or taste it, but we cannot escape it. In this regard, magnetic resonance imaging could be carried out without expensive equipment—(almost) naturally—if not for the numerous noises (many of artificial—human—origin: magnetic fields created by power lines, transport systems, or electrical appliances) that distort the connection between the human and other natural bodies. As a result, special medical instruments must be used to produce a clear image of the processes and structures inside the body. Studies carried out with the help of MRI demonstrate the natural (physiobiological) basis of human communicative activity. Communication, thus, can be viewed as our synchronization with the natural rhythms of the Earth as bodies resonate with its magnetic field. It is of such synchronization that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote concerning the harmony of things in the beats or vibrations of sounding bodies at specific intervals (Leibniz 1890), anticipating future research into the effects of nonverbal synchronization on the processing and acceptance of messages. Today, such issues are also studied within the framework of biotremology (Hill et al. 2019). Studied this way, synchronization goes deeper than, for example, synchronized head nods in a conversation. By the same token, “resonance” in the Resonance Theory, used in different ways by two well-known communication scholars—George Gerbner and Tony Schwartz—to refer to a process by which a mass media message is received and interpreted based on a person’s real-world experiences, is but a metaphor, unlike the notion of resonance in neuroscience, for example, in the theory of Communication Through Coherence proposed by Pascal Fries (2015). Even described in such broad strokes, it is clear that we can learn much about communication by conceptualizing it as a natural process.

Back to the Thing Itself Scholars have been actively exploring communication as a natural object. Admittedly, the field of communication studies “did not accept this view of communication with open arms” (Hickson and Stacks 2010: 267). Many scholars studying communication from the human science perspectives were critical of such research, their reactions ranging from skepticism to fear. The physicalist orientation of this approach was seen as possibly opening the door to “improving” communication by using various pharmacological drugs, especially in the area of the activity of the limbic system responsible for our emotional behavior and easily affected by psychotropic substances (Earp and Savulescu 2020). Also, many scholars feared that their conceptual territory was being invaded and colonized; if communication is

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an activity that can be explained in terms of natural entities and processes, then there is little, if anything, for them to research and teach. However, rather than making dismissive comments about humanists and social scientists in the field of communication, most communibiologists do their best to address critical reactions to their approach. They point out that the field of communication studies as a whole would be threatened only if all the communication process were conceptualized as biological, which is not the case (Hickson and Stacks 2010). They emphasize the fact that “communibiologically oriented scholars work toward the broader understanding of the linkages among imperatives, neurobiological processes, and behavior in a communication context” (McCroskey, Valencic, and Beatty 2001: 26). As a result, while it may not be embraced by every communication scholar, today the communibiological perspective finds its place in the field of communication studies (Infante, Rancer, and Womack 2003; Beatty, McCroskey, and Floyd 2009). Most recently, communibiology is presented, along with biopsychology, in the twelfth edition of Theories of Human Communication, by Stephen W. Littlejohn, Karen A. Foss, and John G. Oetzel (2021). While these perspectives are discussed in that textbook in chapter 3 (“The Communicator”), they could also be discussed in other chapters, for example, those dealing with the message (chapter 4) or the medium (chapter 5). At the same time, it is noted that the links between communicative behavior and biology “are actively studied outside of the communication discipline” and “most of the research remains entirely unknown to communication scholars” (Floyd 2014: 5, 15). Communication scholars resent the fact that such research is conducted and published “in journals housed in academic disciplines outside of our own” (Boren and Veksler 2011: 24), calling on everyone to make a concerted effort to publish more research in their own journals; the issue here, then, is “a focus on ownership of research that is, by definition, of and about communication” (Boren and Veksler 2011: 24). But who owns communication, and, by extension, its research? Those who publish in journals such as Brain Communications, Science and Environmental Communication, Nature Communications, or Communications Biology clearly focus on communication and have something to say about it. To quote Robert Craig, “communication is undoubtedly an important fact of nature that can be studied empirically” (Craig 2005: 660). We see traditional communication scholars studying it empirically that way, as well: two recent examples are The Handbook of Communication Science and Biology (Floyd and Weber 2020)—a volume in the ICA series (with Craig as the series editor)—and the research conducted at the Institute of Communication Science at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany. Also, traditional communication scholars publish research in “their own” communication journals, such as Communication Research, or Communication Research Reports, where most of the articles are

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empirical. Surely any research into the literal nature of communication, whether or not it is published in a journal deemed “our own,” has the capacity to explain communication in deeper and broader ways. If it is published in a journal deemed “not our own,” should we disregard it? And what about the entire field of communication sciences and disorders? It can hardly be a field “outside of our own” because it, too, deals with communication in a scientific way. Through the study of disorders, not only do we become aware of the norm, but we also can take steps toward making interactions more successful between those who suffer from such disorders and those who do not, for example, in situations involving stuttering (Fogle 2019) or dementia (Rone-Adams et al 2013). Any research into the physiological, physical, chemical, biological, and neurological aspects of communication, regardless of its publication outlet and “ownership,” “reconfigures the relations between humans and animals, humans and matter, and humans and their milieu” and “helps us understand about our vital existence” (Rose 2013: 17). So, rather than looking at who publishes research and in what journals, we should focus on the ontological and epistemological foundations of the research. Ontology, which is “the scaffolding upon which structures of scholarship are crafted” (Anderson and Baym 2004: 603), within the study of communication is often implied by default, assuming we all know what is being discussed. It is noted that “ontology, whatever else it is, is usually just forgotten infrastructure” (Peters 2015: 38). We forget that communication is part of nature (i.e., the world with an intrinsic way of growth, what the earliest Greeks called “physis”). Since they considered everything as living, nature for the ancient Greeks was found in “mountain and sea, plant and animal, houses and human beings, gods and heaven” (Heidegger 2018: 67). The ancient Greek thinkers who tried to comprehend nature as “physis” were called physiologists or natural philosophers, the former focusing on the substantial properties of things, while the latter’s approach to nature was more speculative. Gradually, “gods and heaven” came to be seen as part of the metaphysical realm—something to be considered by theology and philosophy. When general natural entities and processes are identified, they are often viewed in terms of durable meaningful “sediments”; human language is an extreme case of sedimentation (Merleau-Ponty 1962; see also: Jaroš and Pudil 2020). However, it is important to conceptualize communication not simply as sedimentation (i.e., information that “settled down”) but as a matter of energy dispersion; the former is found in the mathematical theory of communication, where probabilities denote relative frequencies, while the latter exclusively focuses on the physical characteristics of communication. The latter, then, treats information as nothing but physical; in this sense, it

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is “the thermodynamic theory of communication” that is “self-consistent by relating all information generation, transmission and interpretation to the principle of increasing entropy” (Karnani, Pääkkönen, and Annila 2009). Human beings are part of nature—primates of the family Hominidae, the Genus Homo. It is common to acknowledge “the animal in the human”; in the words of Merleau-Ponty, for people “there is no word or behavior that does not break free from animal life” (2012: 195). This view goes back to Aristotle, who famously stated that “man is by nature a political animal.” According to this animalistic view, humans and animals share crucial functions, such as the capacity to breathe; the word “animal” goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ane-, meaning “to breathe.” We can understand why this function was taken as a basis for conceptualizing the animal and the human in the same way: the process of breathing can be seen with the naked eye and is ubiquitous, oxygen taken for granted. Breathing, however, as a biological process of bringing air into the lungs (inhalation) and releasing it to the atmosphere (exhalation) differs from respiration, which is a chemical process of exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide between the cells and blood vessels; that is why breathing is also known as “external respiration.” In this regard, trees and plants technically do not breathe, although respiration does occur in them, as well as in other natural organisms. One can literally see this with the help of a dendrometer; when, for instance, Zach St. George, the author of The Journeys of Tree, saw the pumping heart of a balsam fir, he came to see it in a way unexpectedly similar to the way he was alive (see McAlpin 2020). By the same token, while not exactly light on their feet, trees move, albeit at an infinitesimal, glacial pace, and plants are also adept at traveling (Mancuso 2020). We see that in many cases, talk of plant learning and memory is not just metaphorical, but also matter of fact (Ruggles 2017). Hence “man” is by nature not only an animal, but also a tree and a plant. So, it is not that “we have never been human” (Haraway 2008)—we have never been just human. The fact that “for man, everything is constructed and everything is natural” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 189; emphasis added) highlights the continuous nature of our involvement in the natural world. In specific situations, one or the other comes to the foreground: “sometimes, it is restricted to the action necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly posits around us a biological world . . . . Sometimes . . . the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body’s natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 169; emphasis added). Even though the distinction between these two planes is abstract, it still must be drawn for scientific purposes; as mentioned earlier, the essence of science lies in the idea of separating (making a “cut”). For instance, Merleau-Ponty himself, while interested in nature and the body,

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focused mostly on human animality and was primarily concerned with how corporeality relates to consciousness; this puts his project “in a distinctly and indelibly humanistic framework” as his “transcendental claims . . . lack any direct ontological import” (see Smyth 2007: 179). He even stated that “man [humanity] is a historical idea and not a natural species” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 170); compare this with Foucault’s view of “man” as an “invention” (Foucault 1973: xxiii)—a statement that may find a sympathetic ear, for example, in the studies of gender and ethics, but would receive little support from natural scientists. Natural science, because of its focus on the empirical study of real objects, is “prejudiced in favour of the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 53)—a bias that, according to phenomenology, needs to be corrected. In MerleauPonty’s words, “the ultimate task of phenomenology as a philosophy of consciousness is to understand its relationship to non-phenomenology. What resists phenomenology within us—natural being . . . —cannot remain outside of phenomenology and should have its place within it” (1964: 178). That task was to be accomplished by bracketing out the world and overcoming the natural attitude. In essence, phenomenology aimed “to rethink ‘nature’—and thus also naturalism, the traditional nemesis of phenomenology” (Smyth 2007: 177). However, nature is “the excess of being over the consciousness of being” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 38) and so will always remain partly outside; the only way to completely overcome nature/natural is by throwing it out with the “ism” of “naturalism.” We cannot access an “unfiltered” nature since “all corporeality is already symbolism” (Merleau-Ponty 1988: 166). But we can move away, as far as possible, from reflecting on our subjective experience, focusing instead on the significance (ontological import) of our direct contact with the natural world. This way, an explicitly nonphenomenological position can be taken, choosing its “starting point to be the objective, materialistic, third-person world of the physical sciences” (Dennett 1989: 5). This position does not aim to reveal transcendent essences of intentional experience; rather, its stance belongs to the realm of explanation and prediction of behavior and connection of all objects. This theoretical position is sometimes applied to all entities viewed on one continuum. For instance, the Intentional Systems Theory (Dennett 1989) aims to chart the continuities between all kinds of things—persons, animala, plants, clams, and even “the lowly thermostat.” According to this theory, the demand for a bright line between literal and metaphorical meaning is deemed ill-motivated—for example, deciding if an entity is seeking or “seeking”—as long as “what is going on” can be explained. Overall, in Charles S. Peirce’s words, “meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it produces” (Peirce 1923: 43). In this light, when we read

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that “meaningful interspecies relations, whether grounded in philia, eudaimonism, or politics, instead require an attentiveness both to a given animal’s needs as well as desires” (Sharpless 2016: 15), it is clear that animals here are perceived closer to humans, associated with the intentionality of the mind rather than something simply made known; were “needs and desires” placed in quotes, they would be viewed as “natural” creatures and so further away from humans. The fewer the quotes, then, the more literal (original, natural) something is perceived. The nonphenomenological position, choosing as its starting point the material world, “is perhaps not the philosophically most sophisticated one” (Reuter 1999: 82), but this is exactly the point; in fact, the less philosophically sophisticated it is (i.e., the further away from reflection) the better: the more direct its ontological import and the closer it is to the primordial ground of being. This way, we get as close as we can to the first nature, understood as “the totality of objects that can be given as primally present and that make up a domain of common primal presence for all communicating subjects . . . in the first and original sense. It is spatial-temporal-material nature: The one space, the one time, the one world of things for all” (Husserl 1989: 171). Such a position is shared by many scholars who study communication, and it does not really matter in which departments they work and in which journals their research is published. They are clearly “prejudiced in favour of the world” in the spirit of Gadamer’s understanding of prejudice as something positive, trying to pierce into “the anonymous darkness of our pre-personal natural origins” (McMahon 2015: 282). In this sense, nature can be seen as “a sort of time of sleep” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 267). Whereas phenomenology calls on everyone to be awake in every single experience of one’s life, the natural scientific objectivity can be best achieved in a state of sleep, as it were, facing the task of going back to the unarticulated. Since the goal of phenomenology is to study phenomena—appearances of things in a conscious intentional act—its main slogan should be rephrased as “going forward to the appearances themselves.” It is when we examine communication as a natural object that we try to unbracket the natural attitude and go back to the thing itself (i.e., “the pre-subjective ground of the thinghood” [Dalton 2018: 31]—the first nature). The notion of the first nature (erste Natur) was conceptualized by Friedrich Schelling to refer to the primordial character of “the originary unity from which consciousness emerges” (Bech 2013: 172). Merleau-Ponty develops these ideas and, similar to Schelling’s view of nature as “Over-being” (Ubersein), describes it as “an abyss of the past,” which “always remains present in us and in all things” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 38). Schelling sees nature as a universal drive to express “the pure form of our Spirit,” found not only in “the noble Form [Gestalt] which seems to have shed the chains of matter” but

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also “moss, in which the trace of organization is hardly visible” (see Gorodeisky 2019. Merleau-Ponty, as noted earlier, may not have searched for the pure forms of consciousness in the manner of Husserl, yet his approach to nature is still mostly philosophical and the thrust of his work is phenomenological: it is indicative, for instance, that nature often appears in his phenomenological engagement with paintings (i.e., artifacts). The first nature calls on us to pay attention to any traces of organization, even hardly visible, such as moss, and those visible only with the help of scientific instruments. To study communication as part of the first nature, we should take a lead from Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, focusing on Natur rather than Philosophie. This approach should be removed as far as possible from the Romantic conception of nature: just as physis is not about “gods and heaven,” the natural scientific view is not about the pure forms of Spirit. Every natural object seeks to preserve its essence, remaining itself in the process of any transformation; that is why “Nature is thrifty in all its actions,” in the words commonly assigned to Pierre Louis Maupertuis—hence the task of conceptualizing communication as something that remains constant through changes of perspective as it is observed and manipulated from any angle. It is such an invariable essence that natural-scientific thought aims to capture in the form of episteme as a comprehensive account derived from indisputable principles—“that what we know through epistêmê cannot be otherwise than it is” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: 1139b). Since the Greek term physis was replaced by the Latin natura, and nature became investigated by natural science, episteme has been considered an ideal of scientific knowledge. Such knowledge explains everything and everybody “as a prepersonal adhesion to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence” that “plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 86). Such knowledge is achieved by progressing from particulars to universals (i.e., by induction). Although this way of inquiry starts with particulars, each of them is not treated individually but anonymously used for the sake of general principles. The effect of all individual dimensions (situations, persons, etc.) on communicative behavior is deemed negligible—not worth considering (Beatty, McCroskey, and Floyd 2009). In this respect, when studying communication as a natural object, general statements need to be formulated that directly reflect its regular properties that exist independently of the researcher. This goal can be best reached through observation, experimentation, and measurement; such regularities are generalized into laws, the way the “biological bases” of communication are “best explained by recourse to, some kind of covering law” (Berger 1977: 16). When induction is viewed as “the natural process by which generalities or concepts arise in our mind” (Jaroszyński 2007: 34), different opinions are

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found as to who or what is responsible for this process of arising. A human researcher is usually taken as the agent behind this process, for example, “the theorist is attempting to identify (to induce) a set of generalities” (Sharrock and Anderson 1991: 157). However, the situation can be seen as reverse, for example, “the things induce us to look for the universal principles” (Marias 1967: 76). The Latin induction is derived from the Greek epagoge, translated as “to bring or lead in, or on”; here, “the leader” is not humans or things, but nature (revealing) itself.

“One Same Something” How, and how far, can we pierce into communication as the natural “abyss of the past” that is “present in us”? The primordial ground prior to reflection can be found in the body. It is important to note that one can speak not only of human or animal bodies, but also bodies of plants or bodies of water, and even rocks are bodies of undifferentiated mineral matter or solid organic matter. As far as humans are concerned, the natural beginnings of communication are often found in the first parent-child interactions when “in response to the unsuccessful grasping movement of the child, there arises a reaction not on the part of the object, but on the part of another person” (Vygotsky 1997: 105). This way, the proprioceptive system develops, providing the child with information of the position of his/her body relative to the environment, which is fundamental not only for the child’s motor planning, but also his/her language development, and can be linked to later autistic-like communicative behaviors or other problems in social interaction, such as inappropriate openings (Echeverría-Palacio, Uscátegui-Daccarett, and Talero-Gutiérrez 2018). “Proprioceptive” and “in/appropriate” share the same root for a reason. Even before that starting point of interaction that can be observed with the naked eye, though, prenatal connection of the mother and the fetus is formed. In the words of Martin Buber, “the pre-natal life of a child is a pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity” (1970: 76). To put it less poetically in terms of natural science, “molecular interactions and cellular exchanges between mother and fetus or embryo in pregnancy generate an intimate symbiosis of two different lives” (López Moratalla 2009: 303). Also, to cite Buber again, “the womb in which it [the child] dwells is not solely that of the human mother” (1999: 76), since all humans are children of the Earth. In scientific terms, this refers to, among other things, the maternal-fetal circadian communication during pregnancy as key maternal hormones synchronize daily rhythms in the fetus

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to regulate gestation duration (Bates and Herzog 2020). Most natural scientists will probably agree with Buber when he says that “the longing for relation is primary” (1999: 76). This way, consciousness is developed as (being) “with knowledge” that comes from the originary unity of the thinghood—“reality’s concrete pulses” (James 2018: 39). Such direct knowledge from reality—the “knowledge by acquaintance” of which, for example, James and Merleau-Ponty spoke—is the knowledge of what kind of connection is needed for one’s existence and how far one can bear its weight so that a connection can endure. In this light, communication is the bearable weightiness of being. Thus, communication emerges out of the factuality of sensorium, “the factum brutum [i.e., brute fact] of something present-at-hand” (Heidegger 1962: 174). More specifically, it is driven by the need of orienting moving bodies in their interactions with one another so that opportunities for action, or affordances (Gibson 1986), can be established. Communication as connection, therefore, stems from a general basis of expressive movements and takes the form of gestures, bringing together humans and nonhumans. As Hannah Arendt writes, all creatures “are not just in the world, they are of the world, and this precisely because they are subjects and objects—perceiving and being perceived—at the same time” (Arendt 1978: 20). Such corporeal interconnectedness “creates meanings which are transcendent in relation to the anatomical apparatus, and yet immanent to the behaviour as such, since it communicates itself and is understood” (MerleauPonty 2003 220). This way, meaning is conceptualized as a basic capacity of differentiating a value of one’s connection to another. In this light, meaning (M) can be seen as “the relation between an organism (O) and its . . . environment (E), determined by the value (V) of E for O” (Kravchenko 2008: 80). In this light, communication is not equated with “intention” as a mental effort but encompasses any gesture of turning one’s attention to the outside. As Gregory Bateson writes, “it can be argued that all perception and all response, all behavior and all classes of behavior, all learning and all genetics, all neurophysiology and endocrinology, all organization and all evolution— one entire subject matter—must be regarded as communicational in nature” (1972: 287). For example, “ants communicate by their antennae; dogs by the pricking of their ears; and so on” (Bateson 1972: 297). In other words, meaning that is communicated through behavior can be different, a certain hierarchy of levels, which depends on the value of connection between an organism and its environment. For instance, four levels in the semiotic hierarchy can be isolated (see Zlatev 2009): the level of Umwelt with biological value; the value of natural Lebenswelt with phenomenal value; the level of cultural Lebenswelt with significational value; and the level of discourse with normative value. The last level is where norms of

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communication appear that involve conventional signs, not just habits. As noted earlier, meaning can be simply viewed in terms of habits produced (i.e., something held by dealing with the outside; the Proto-Indo-European root of the word “habit,” *ghebh-, meaning “to give or receive”). Convention, in its turn, presupposes a formal agreement, a covenant. In this regard, human communication, based on conventional signs and symbolic language, can clearly express more complex meanings. For instance, while “animals communicate and are aware of their surroundings,” people can grasp the objective world as a whole in relation to itself—in other words, be aware “of their surroundings as surroundings” (Bains 2001: 159). Humans have the capacity to envision the world in terms of alternative ways of connecting the past with the future, known as chromesthesia. At the same time, since communication overall is making oneself known, human speech is still viewed as its “merely one particular case” (Merleau-Ponty: 2003 220). Similarly, it is not shown that, contra Aristotle, the capacity for distinguishing between good and bad “has roots or correlates. . . in species with similar patterns of social organization” (Bekoff and Pierce 2009: 115), although “nonhuman justice might differ in degree from the human sense of justice” (Abbate 2018: 164). Thus, whereas meanings can clearly be of various values and occupy different levels, their hierarchy presupposes a certain continuity: all meanings are somehow connected if only because they grow out of the shared factuality. Thus, once different semiotic thresholds and transitions between them are taken into account, communication is everything “from intercellular signaling processes to animal display behavior to human semiotic artifacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought” (Favareau 2007: 10). It includes connections “between cells and bacteria, which are endowed with a rudimentary level of awareness,” between “different animal and plant species” (Moser 2018; see also Brier 2008), between humans and humans, as well as between humans and nonhumans. Consider this story told by Anthony Wilden: “An earnest young student of academic psychology told me the other day, for example, that light-seeking organisms do not communicate. What she meant, of course, is that they don’t ‘talk’ to each other, they don’t ‘understand’ each other. I pointed out that the behavior of tropismic organisms is indeed communication: there is a sender and a receiver, a message, a code, and a goal. It is rudimentary communication and at a very low level of organization, of course, but it is communication nevertheless” (Wilden 1980: 430). This is echoed by Lotman, who notes that the semiosphere is “steadily expanding into space over the centuries . . . and includes within itself the call signs of satellites, the verse of poets and the cry of animals. The interdependence of these elements of the semiosphere is not metaphorical, but a reality” (Lotman 2005: 219). It should be noted that meaningful con-

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nections develop not only by expansion through space but also by enduring through time; everything exists in a time-space continuum. If we expand our thinking to include the planetary structures within cosmic-scale communicative potential, then, counterintuitively, we come to appreciate its smallest actors—bacteria and viruses. Their communicative potential has a truly cosmic-scale reach: bacteria and viruses existing on the Earth and those from a different galaxy can form a connection very easily. In this respect, they are much better at communication than humans still trying to establish contact with extraterrestrials. Importantly, “at the heart of this communication capacity is biological tropism which does not require consciousness of the human type, and yet it is based on the principles of cognition/semiosis” (Slijepcevic 2020). Humans may use symbolic language and be aware of their surroundings as surroundings, but it is bacteria that are potentially an indestructible form of life. When, in the opening pages of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes, “I am open to the world, I unquestionably communicate with it” (1962: lxxx–lxxxi), the opposite is true, as well: the world communicates with me, and we should recognize the longing for connection in the nature of diverse nonhuman species “instead of rashly denying it any kind of interiority” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 74). Vertebrate, marine vertebrate, insect, plant, and even mineral species, representing various natural empires and kingdoms (no quotes here since the terms are not metaphors), form connections in the shared world as “a pell-mell ensemble of bodies and minds . . . that cohesion which cannot be denied them since they are all differences, extreme divergencies of one same something” (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 84). Such a shared world “of one same something” is a natural community formed by various species in their involvement with one another and should “include ‘all that participates in being,’ organic and inorganic, past, present, and future” (Rasmussen 2013: 44). Communication, in the broadest sense, is something shared by all. “Community” is most often understood as “human community”; this way, we search to answer “the question how individuals . . . come to be connected in just those ways which give human communities traits so different from those which mark assemblies of electrons, unions of trees in forests, swarms of insects, herds of sheep, and constellations of stars” (Dewey 1984: 250). In a broad sense, though, what “so-called human living beings and socalled animal living beings . . . have in common is the fact of being living beings . . . supposing one has the right to exclude from it vegetables, plants and flowers” (Derrida 2011: 10). And so we find the concepts of “a biological community” (an interacting group of various species in a common location), “an ecological community” (a group of various organisms in an area with an emphasis on its tropical structure), and “an ecosystem” (a complete

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community of interdependent organisms that includes humans and inorganic components). The communities emphasizing the impact humans have had, deliberately or inadvertently, on their ongoing connections to plants, and animals, are sometimes labeled “recombinant ecosystems” (Vanni and Crosby 2020). “Ecommunity” can be suggested as an overall designation for any community of a hybrid nature, characterized by intercorporeality—“the mananimality intertwining” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 274), not equating “animal/ ity” only with actual animals. This intertwining is what Merleau-Ponty calls “the flesh of the world”—“a pregnancy of possibilities.” It is this flesh that “expresses and allows association with both the sensible and bodily commonality of beings and also the generative capacity of being as becoming” (Küpers 2016: 26). In flesh, everything is intertwined and reversible: “man” and “animal,” subject and object, sensing and sensible. And, because it is reversible, “flesh makes communication possible” (Oliver 2008: 134). The concept of community, therefore, should not be limited to the human but concerned with the effects of our entanglements with other kinds of beings. We can recall Buber’s famous line “I consider a tree.” Buber says he can feel the tree as movement; moreover, “if will and grace are joined,” he will be “drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It” (1970: 98–99). This can be conceptualized as a case of quantum entanglement when it cannot be determined whether the human first observes a tree or whether the tree first catches our attention. The new ontological status of the quantum world has been mentioned by several phenomenologists, including Merleau-Ponty. In such cases of entanglement, what matters is “one same something.” As Buber so eloquently puts it: “Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible?” (1970: 58–59). Ecommunity is a self-organizing system producing its own order through “the man-animality intertwining.” Incidentally, the Romantic conception of the world, briefly mentioned earlier, not only viewed nature poetically as pure Spirit, but also conceptualized it in scientific terms as a self-organizing and self-generating organism (Wirth and Burke 2013). The roots of such thinking are sometimes traced back to Aristotle’s notion of teleology with its “purposive finality of nature.” Later, though, the teleological underpinnings of self-organization were dropped. Indeed, rather than identifying nature with Aristotle’s final cause, it makes more sense to see it operating through the material cause—“that out of which.” Self-organization in a system is a result of internal processes; that is why it is so ubiquitous and often taken for granted. Through such processes, a system most often, but not always, makes its own structure more complex.

The Nature of Communication

Also, it should be noted that this productive activity of nature involves both organic and inorganic matter. Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, an English neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate, stated that various types of organization of matter, including rocks, exhibit different behaviors: “A grey rock, said Ruskin, is a good sitter. That is one type of behaviour. A darting dragon-fly is another type of behaviour. We call the one alive, the other not. But both are fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround. To make ‘life’ a distinction between them is at root to treat them both artificially” (Sherrington 1940: 78). In that light, although it is a piece of inorganic matter seemingly completely inert and governed only by something entirely external, to consider a rock “in isolation is to ignore that it is a part of a self-governing whole . . . . A part of that thing—nature” (Fisher 2020: 57). Self-organization is characterized not only by the absence of external factors guiding its behavior, but also by the absence of an explicitly defined center in charge of its internal dynamics; a self-organized system has no “leader.” In this light, “physis is, indeed poiēsis in the highest sense” (Heidegger 1977: 10–11): this process of self-making is a process “of reversibility, wherein no ultimate or final position . . . is completely and absolutely reached” (Berman 2014: 57). It is impossible to decisively resolve this process into subject and object—to say who is making what. In this process, there is no “winner,” or rather, the “winner” is the system itself as it keeps reverting to itself—coming back to itself again and again.

An Organizing Principle of Nature Thus, nature as one whole is “a collective process of communication . . . resulting in the emergence of organized structures” (Nederhand, Bekkers, and Voorberg 2014: 2). The natural world can be seen as that which matters to all those involved in it because they respond to one another in meaningful ways. This world is “that of structure, the joining [junction] of an idea and an existence which are indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by which materials begin to have meaning in our presence, intelligibility in the nascent state” (Merleau-Ponty 1998: 206–7). Here, meaning and matter are so close together they form one (“are indiscernible”), and this is as close as we can get to scientifically viewing the natural world. Here, too, although structuralism and functionalism are usually presented as diametrically opposed, structure reveals its deepest function—that of joining or producing a connection. Such joining can be conceptualized as conversation in which a certain order emerges, if only in the nascent state. Inherent parallels of human and animal conversations can be noted and so while it is traditionally applied to

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human communication, Conversation Analysis has been extended to other species (Holler et al. 2016; Pika et al. 2018)—from intraspecies, for example, squawk in interaction to interspecies communication, for example, bonobo– human interaction (Pedersen and Fields 2009). To that end, “work in this area is done by Communication Studies scholars, canine trainers, biologists, and researchers working with Conversation Analysis” (Kulick 2017: 359). It should not be surprising that all these scholars are working side-by-side because Conversation Analysis focuses on naturally occurring communication, and what can be more natural than communication as a natural process? The ethnomethodological foundations of Conversation Analysis are natural in their orientation since ethnomethodology empirically studies “how human beings living in groups, like other animals, act in repetitive, organized, and to some extent predictable ways” (Hollander and Turowetz 2017: 462). “Ethnos” comes from the ancient Greek éthnos where it designated any large undifferentiated group of people or animals. For instance, in the earliest recorded uses, including Homer, the term was used to describe not only groups of warriors, but also animal multitudes, such as bees, birds, or flies (Chapman, McDonald, and Tonkin 1989). That it came to be applied only to groups of people provides an interesting commentary on how far culture came to be separated from nature, which only emphasizes the importance of unforgetting the original meaning of the term and showing how the world is contingent on the interconnections of all groups—human and animal. It should also be noted that “ethnos” shares the same root with the word “idiom”—the Proto-Indo-European root *s(w)e-, meaning “a form of speech particular to oneself.” So, when the nature of communication is viewed as conversation, attention is focused on how various species speak with one another (i.e., how the natural world speaks with itself). That, unlike “saying,” “‘speaking’ indicates the mundane aspect which lapses into the empirical” (Ricœur 2007: 68) only proves its ubiquitous nature. Just as the unphenomenological position is perhaps not the most sophisticated one, the approach to communication as a natural process of conversation may be seen as not a very sophisticated one, either. This approach is manifested in “a strict and parsimonious structuralism and a theoretical asceticism—the emphasis is on the data and the patterns recurrently displayed therein” (Levinson 1983: 295). Yet, “parsimony” should not be taken negatively since it implies economy and frugality, while “asceticism” is associated with a practice that is “rigorously self-disciplined, laborious.” In other words, while it may be seen as not too profound or exhilarating, this approach is certainly scientific. It is found, for instance, in ethological research; rooted in observations of naturally occurring situations, it matters today more than ever (Goymann and Küblbeck 2020). That Conversation Analysis plays a special role in ethological research is not surprising: the use

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of recording technologies in the collection and analysis of human communication material was pioneered in the 1940s and 1950s by human ethologists and anthropologists, for example, by Birdwhistell, Bateson, and Mead (Bull 2002). Anthropomorphic reasoning is sometimes used by cognitive ethologists who may ascribe to animals what exists in our own mind and make assumptions on their behalf. This way, animal communication is discussed in terms of ethics, politics, and so on. Obviously, we are unable to cease using our minds; however, Conversation Analysis is an inductive approach and works well in the study of the natural structure of interaction by looking for observable regularities in intra- and inter-species communication. It has an unphenomenological orientation: its goal is not ascribing (our thoughts to animals) or describing (our subjective conscious experiences) but, rather, simply scribing (noting) any regularities observed. The regular structure most often analyzed is that of turn-taking; a new field of comparative turn-taking is now emerging, aimed at studying human and nonhuman communication and taking into consideration the systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation proposed by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (Pika et al. 2018). It is noted, for instance, that “there are at least 4 types of turn-taking systems easily identifiable across the animal kingdom” (Rossano 2018: 155), and that, through understanding turn-taking across different sensory modalities in animals, we can move toward bridging the gap between human and nonhuman communication research (Fröhlich 2017). Turn-taking is discussed so often because it is an exemplar of reversibility as an inherently relational process of interaction with no ultimate or final position ever achieved—just nature turning. Different interactants exchange turns through adjacency pairs, such as “question-answer.” In this sense, communication between the natural scientist and nature can be viewed as a conversation that consists of adjacency pairs; Charles S. Peirce, for instance, with a reference to Julius Adolph Stockhardt, writes: “An experiment . . . is a question put to nature. . . . The question is, Will this be the result? If Nature replies ‘No!’ the experimenter has gained an important piece of knowledge. If Nature says ‘Yes,’ the experimenter’s ideas remain just as they were, only somewhat more deeply ingrained” (1982: 215). Adjacency pairs are also identified in animal communication (Fröhlich 2017), leading to the alignment of conversation sequences. If we take into consideration that both humans and animals follow the stars in navigating the world, then one can wonder if “perhaps our bodies are themselves aligned along celestial lines” (Peters 2015: 210). Overall, the study of alignment can contribute to the empirical study of interspecies communication (Ribó 2019). Conversation is aligned if systematic preference organization patterns are observed. The concept of preference

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in Conversation Analysis, which is also used in the analysis of animal communication (Fröhlich 2017), refers to a structural arrangement rather than psychological factors of interactants: this way, choices among alternatives are regulated, preferred structures being direct, simple, and immediate. According to the neurobiological Theory of Preference (Dolan and Sharot 2012; Glimcher 2002), choices depend on primary rewards in the form of pleasant stimuli, such as tastes (Knutson and Karmarkar 2014). When conversation sequences exhibit misalignment, repair is in order. The study of the recognition and repair of breakdowns is seen as a key goal of the cross-species ethology of communication (Rossano 2018). Such studies of conversational breakdown repairs are now conducted in the area of intraspecies communication, for example, between nonhuman primates (Voinov et al. 2020). Breakdowns in intraspecies communication are more difficult to study because, if you leave them in the wild (and observe them unobtrusively), animals can figure it all out by themselves; when humans are involved, though, this is true only to an extent. Of course, the so-called Harvard Law of Animal Behaviour states that “under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, the animal behaves as it damned well pleases” (see Renart and Machens 2014: 211). And yet, when humans are involved, animals exhibit patterns shaped by their previous interactions with humans, which should be taken into consideration when it comes to repair of breakdowns. This highlights an inherent problem of human–nonhuman communication, as well as studying it: we cannot leave nature alone. Humans can be considered “natural aliens” (Evernden 1993); they are part of nature and, as cultural beings, outside of it at the same time. When Merleau-Ponty says “we are the parents of a nature of which we are also the children” (Kaushik 2019: 52), it is easier to agree with the second part of the phrase because we are hardly nature’s “parents”; rather, we are its “in-laws.” For this reason, problems in any interspecies contact in which humans are involved can never be completely repaired because there is always a cultural component—something that humans cannot help; “there is, in other words, no sublation or synthetic moment between nature and consciousness” (Kaushik 2019: 52). Here, perhaps, “integral” would be a better word since every moment of contact between nature and consciousness is exactly that—“synthetic” (i.e., artificial). Humans can be seen as a glitch, conceptualized not as a technological flaw but a key ontological condition (Reid 2012). In this sense, we can only have a kind of glitchy access to the natural world, rendering visible the limits of perception and agency in communication. Hence, if nature can repair itself, breakdowns in our interactions with nature cannot be fixed but must be constantly dealt with. Each such interaction is a dilemma because it presents a difficult choice to be made between two or more alternatives,

The Nature of Communication

especially equally undesirable ones. Since, because of humans, interaction between nature and consciousness can never be perfect (perfectly natural), it is said that there can be “only a constant mirroring between the two” (Kaushik 2019: 52). Here, it seems more appropriate to speak about a constant “back-and-forth” (a sort of turn-taking), “mirroring” being its optimal outcome, exemplified by the “tit-for-tat” strategy in Game Theory. Game Theory provides a useful framework for analyzing animal communication (Breed and Moore 2012) and can be applied to the analysis of human– nonhuman interactions. There is, however, a difference in how breakdowns are handled in these two cases. Animals in the wild, as mentioned earlier, can figure it out by themselves. How long their normal conversations will last is another matter; for instance, when multiple interactions were studied, it was found out that rats reciprocated help mainly based on their most recent encounters instead of over longer timespans (Schweinfurth and Taborsky 2020). Sometimes, breakdowns result in serious injury or even death when the stakes are high, as in the case of two males competing for breeding rights with a harem of females (Breed and Moore 2016). In all such situations, however, nature selects the best outcome, not for this or that individual interactant but for itself overall, and so continues to evolve through natural selection. In their turn, humans as “natural aliens” can never integrate into nature (i.e., render the result of their interactions whole); they can only cooperate with nature (i.e., operate jointly to the same end). In this sense, the so-called protection of the environment in reality means that since we can protect something only if it is outside of us, and we are both part of nature and alien to it, we are protecting nature from ourselves (and also, incidentally, trying to protect ourselves from ourselves). The best we can do is to do only that which we can help; the further we move from that optimal strategy, the further our overshoot (i.e., the closer we get to the limits of communication). If, until recently, nature could be viewed as the “residue that we cannot eliminate” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 35), today this is no longer the case. Whereas there are no negatives in nature, not only do humans use symbols, but “man” becomes human “by saying no to himself ” (Burke 1968: 89). Life itself, though, grows out of the natural sensorium; as Karl Marx (who never forgot the source of all means of production) reminds us, “man lives from nature . . . and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die” (2002: 122). So, in the conversation between nature and humans, nature is a more reliable partner since it cannot say no to itself. Humans, in their turn, can eliminate not only themselves but nature as well: so powerful are now, to cite Burke, the “ambitions that symbolism so readily encourages” (1958: 60) and that find concrete manifestation in the weapon of total, not simply mass, destruction. We can only share Burke’s hope that

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humans can overcome such ambitions, and “we might yet contrive to keep from wholly ruining this handsome planet and its plentitude” (1958: 63). Thus, there is no other conversation; just this one. From at least the fourteenth century, “conversation” meant “a place where one lives or dwells” and “a general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world”—both senses now obsolete, which is another revealing commentary on our civilization. We should keep reminding ourselves that our conversation with nature is where we live and remember that it is “unending” (to use Kenneth Burke’s metaphor for human communication) only as long as it continues: everything is forever, until it is no more.

CHAPTER

The Conduct of Human Affairs ‰Í

Social Communication: Setting the Stage The study of communication is regarded as “a relatively late addition to the social sciences” (Dresner 2012: 192); similarly, communication is considered “arguably the newest discipline in the social sciences” (Krcmar, Ewoldsen, and Koerner 2016: 37). The first academic studies of communication as a social phenomenon can be dated back at least to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, in his 1909 book Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind, Charles Cooley defined communication as “the mechanism through which human relations exist and develop” (1998: 100). The term “communication” as a designation for an area of social inquiry is said to have been first used in 1931 by Edward Sapir, who wrote in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences: “every single act of social behavior involves communication in either an explicit or an implicit sense” (Sapir 1931: 104). The concept of the social, however, has been a topic of inquiry at least since the ancient Greeks, who raised such questions as the nature of society, the links between individual and society, the relation between custom, law, and obligation, and more (Kizler 1945). Those questions found their conceptualization in the works of Plato and Aristotle as the two most significant original sources where the role of social communication is emphasized. Aristotle famously proclaimed in his Politics that “man is . . . a political animal” because of a human natural impulse toward various types of associations, the highest type being that of the polis—a form of social organization that allows all citizens to fully realize their potential. The polis is a single entity and so, when translated as “city-state,” “the state” should not

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be regarded in the modern sense as something different from society. Plato in The Republic also described the ideal city, called “Kallipolis” (the Greek word meaning “a beautiful city”), consistent with his view of beauty as the most ideal form. Plato refused to admit “poetical individuals . . . into a wellordered State” because they “are only imitators” who impair the reason, implant “an evil constitution,” and thus are “very far removed from the truth” (The Republic: Book X). In the same vein, while he considered women indispensable to the polis, Aristotle did not think they have the same deliberative capacity as men and so cannot be its active members. The polis is conceptualized by Plato as a form of social organization that provides the best life possible for its members. In that respect, the overall social entity is more important than any individual. When talking about people exchanging their products within the polis, Plato says it was “to secure such an exchange” that “we . . . formed . . . a society” (The Republic: Book II). Aristotle is even more explicit in that regard, saying the polis “is prior . . . to the household and to each of us” (Politics: 1,253a19). He also notes that its citizens “belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state” (Politics: Book VIII). Both thinkers emphasize that the common good of the polis is organized and maintained through communication. Plato underscores the importance of interpersonal interactions as people are drawn into the polis “by a necessity of their natures to have intercourse with each other” (The Republic: Book V), including psychological factors such as “evil communications” that can affect a leader of a state “from without, or . . . within” (The Republic: Book IX). He also understands the significance of what in modern terms would be called “organizational communication” as he proposes “to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people” (The Republic: Book II). Aristotle takes it further toward what in modern terms could be labeled “communications” when he says, “cities thus situated manifestly reap the benefit of intercourse with their ports” (Politics: Book VII). He also emphasizes the necessity of “the laws, which will pronounce and determine who may hold communication with one another, and who may not” (Politics: Book VII). For both Plato and Aristotle, an orderly change that exists in the polis is set in motion by something outside of it. For Plato, the polis is governed by ideas, such as justice or beauty, and can only approximate those pure forms. The polis performs “per forms” (i.e., its social order is modeled according to the harmony of such forms). For Aristotle, the polis is harmoniously ordered by the “Unmoved Mover”—a divine principle that sets everything in motion but which itself remains unmoved. The commonalities of Plato’s and Aristotle’s views outweigh their differences. They may have differed in who can be accepted in the polis, but

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they both saw it as a form of social organization necessary for its members to realize their potential. They may have disagreed on how the polis can be created—for Plato, the polis cannot exist without dialectics as a way of reasoning to demonstrate the truth of things, while Aristotle insists on the primacy of political rhetoric to pave the way for the best course of action to pursue—but both emphasized the crucial role of communication in its creation. They may have found different “engines” behind the social order of the polis, but they both were certain it is set in motion by some immanent force that allows people to live in accordance with universal truths and laws; in their works, the state (the polis) appears as an entity contrary to nature. Both Plato and Aristotle were aware of the difference between an individual and collective bodies. In discussing such forms of organization as “the jury,” “the council,” or “the assembly,” they noted their social character and treated them as if they were individual agents (Frede 2016). As time went on, though, sociopolitical thought moved beyond the boundaries of the city-state, and the modern times saw the idea of the individual personality given more prominence. Michel Foucault famously stated that “man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge” (1973: xxiii). Possible contradictions not only between a civil society as an association of individuals and the state as social institutions but also between the individual and the state were recognized. Individuals started to make their own decisions in various situations that could be different from everyone else’s: one now not so much belonged to the state as had the freedom to think otherwise. The freedom of making one’s own decisions (and the burden that comes with it) was stimulated by a different concept of time. Whereas for the ancient Greeks the ideal was a fixed order of cyclical motion, the time now was straightened in a line, as it were, each point on this line (read: each individual) having a capacity to develop in different ways, along new lines of thought. As mobility increased and people began to move from place to place more freely, space opened up and brought individuals out from the circle of timelessness (Čapek 1961; Derrida 1973). One became increasingly aware of oneself as a member of society that could change in time, and so social nature came to be conceptualized more in terms of development and change. Such was, for example, the social physics of August Compte who, influenced by the ideas of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, saw social development progressing toward the stage of positive science. Compte considered the creative power of individuals limited, for it was not individuals creating the social world, but rather the social world creating individuals; he wrote, for example, about the common social interconnection (1896) governed by law. There were other theories that highlighted the role the individual plays in

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the creation of social order (Fuchs 2003), emphasizing intersubjective interactions and symbols used in these interactions. One of the most well-known such theories is Symbolic Interactionism, which sees every individual action as a symbolic interaction and a joint transaction. George H. Mead, considered a founder of this theory, recognized Compte’s showing the individual’s dependence on society, but disagreed with him “for worshipping ‘the Supreme Being’ in the form of society” (Karier 1986: 169), holding the average person in higher esteem. By the middle of the twentieth century, many social problems became more acute as a result of two terrible world wars and the spread of various types of mass media, taking on a more systemic character. As a result, the social order (and disorder) began to be theorized in more systemic terms as well. Compte’s social physics, with its linear view of social progression, gave way to a more complex treatment of society as an organism that can exist only through interaction with its environment. By the time communication studies came to be regarded as an addition to the social sciences and communication came to be considered a new discipline in the social sciences, the stage had been set.

Communication in the Social-Scientific Spotlight When communication is studied from the social-scientific perspectives, it is sometimes noted that, as with most other social science disciplines, “searching for the unifying principle is likely to be misleading or counterproductive” (Calhoun 2011: 1,484). Yet it is hard to see how the study of communication can be considered a social science or a discipline unless it is based on some kind of unifying framework. Indeed, a number of such unifying themes can be identified, as must already be clear from a short overview presented above. The first unifying theme is found in the object of study, which most scholars take to be “social systems and the links between individual action and social relations” (Bunge 1998: 60) (i.e., how interactions of individuals are organized into social groups). It should be noted that the focus here is on social systems (plural), unlike the focus of the natural sciences that study “nature” (singular). Sometimes social communication is equated with any intersubjective interaction. In this light, family—“a self-defined group of intimates who create and maintain themselves through their own interactions and their interactions with others” (West and Turner 2002: 8)—is considered a primary social group. It is more accurate, though, to conceptualize family as a social group if it consists of parents and at least one child, for “society sensu

The Conduct of Human Affairs

stricto begins with the Third” (Bauman 1993: 112). This distinction between interpersonal and group (social) relations is not always clearly drawn; for example, in the volume Social Approaches to Communication (Leeds-Hurwitz 1995), mostly interpersonal communication topics are discussed, which is reflected in the titles of the chapters. In interpersonal situations, “by definition, the message is unavailable for public examination” (Aitken and Shedletsky 1997: 6). In such cases, one has only one other person in front of oneself, which cannot be conceptualized as examination or observation—rather, two persons simply see each other. Observation is a careful examination of something that requires detachment from what is observed, as well as more time to think about what is observed: “You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes tells Dr. Watson. Two persons in a conversation are too involved in their interaction; for them, to switch from “seeing” to “observing” would require stepping back and trying to decide what each of them has just observed—something that goes against the very nature of interpersonal communication. In situations of social communication, however, not only is the message available for public examination, but its public consideration is necessary. This way, “social actors are seen as supervising their own and others’ action in order to bring into being some larger, collective line of activity” (Anderson 1996: 91). The second unifying theme is found in the importance of rules in social communication. In Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), Wilhelm Dilthey notes that the human sciences (which he clearly identifies with social sciences rather than the humanities) contain three classes of assertions: acts (reality given in perception), theorems (explicating the uniform behavior of partial contents of this reality), and value judgments and prescribed rules. In this regard, the supervision of social actions consists in making sure prescribed rules are followed by everyone. The word “society” goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *sekw, meaning “to follow”; society thus implies not only fellowship but also followship. Rules, which both constitute and regulate meaning, are developed in the process of social interaction and vary from society to society. They are the subject matter of the so-called rule-based communication theories; an example is the theory of Coordinated Management of Meaning (Pearce 1976) that focuses on how meaning is created and social reality managed. The third unifying theme is found in action that lies at the basis of communication as a social process. When Dilthey writes about the human sciences, he notes the relation between the historical, the abstract-theoretical, and the practical as their common fundamental trait (Dilthey 1989). The practical is especially important because society does not arise naturally but is created through action. In this light, communication is conceptualized as a practical discipline, with the concept of praxis at its basis (Craig 1989;

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2018). Every form of praxis is an expression of phronesis, defined by Aristotle as a reasoned capacity to act with regard to things that are good or bad for people (Nicomachean Ethics: VI.6). Every action starts with a wish that determines its end—the wish for some good or the avoidance of some evil. Such a wish is not for producing something outside of the activity, but that which coincides with one’s internal goal; in Aristotle’s words, “life is action and not production” (Politics: 1,254a7). In this sense, communication is a purposeful process, implying a free choice coinciding with the internal goal(s) of those involved in it. This way, people themselves choose what to be and thus create a society of which everyone is a part. It is important to emphasize that one does not aim at producing a specific product outside of oneself through communicative praxis; rather, one’s action is directed toward realizing a certain worthwhile goal and so acting well is an end in itself. In other words, the goal and its mode of expression (communication) are inseparable. By acting, “man” gives “form to his life” (Burke 1968: 89). Thus, the goal of a practical action can be identified with Aristotle’s formal cause. Phronesis does not aim to achieve a social order based on some ultimate foundations: people’s goals may be different, and their praxis can take the form of different social orders. Each social order is based on an overall goal shared by all its members and expressed in praxis (i.e., specific communicative actions that are right in various situations). Knowing which general principles to apply to a particular situation requires deliberation. As Aristotle says, “nobody deliberates about things that are invariable,” adding “or about things that he cannot do himself ” (Nichomachean Ethics: 1,140a24–b12c). Deliberation, therefore, is not only about variable cases, but also actions within one’s own agency. Decisions made through deliberation are based on certain value judgments. The result of praxis is a joint acceptance of something wished for; thus, wish, deliberation, decision, and the subsequent action are all interconnected. It is important to note that action is “what happens in and as praxis, it is praxis in its very accomplishment” (McNeill 1999: 40). Such action is not the “right” action because it has been proven correct; rather, “it is ‘right’ action because it is reasoned action that can be defended discursively in argument and justified as morally appropriate to the particular circumstances in which it was taken” (Carr 1995: 71). The fourth unifying theme is found in the importance of speech for social communication; humans are often viewed as social animals that can talk. As Aristotle writes, “man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals” because “man is the only animal” whom nature “has endowed with the gift of speech” (The Politics: 1,253a). Unlike other political animals, such as social insects, humans divide roles in pursuit of the same

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end by using rational speech to constitute what uniquely binds them together, for instance, a perception of the “good/bad” and “the just/unjust” (The Politics: 1,253a). Today, the concept of nonhuman justice in complex animals is being redefined, and the question whether animals are able to communicate a perception of justice to others is being debated (Abbate 2016; 2018; Bekoff and Pierce 2009). At the level of interpersonal communication, speech is viewed in terms of various verbal and nonverbal utterances; an exemplar of such interaction is conversation. In this sense, speech can be identified with Ferdinand de Saussure’s parole; however, “parole, our everyday conversation . . . is just the tip of the linguistic iceberg” (Jasper 1989: 86). This is not meant to diminish the importance of conversation as a form of communication; interactions not only between people can be viewed as conversation, but also various nonhuman species, as well as between people and nonhuman species. Speech at the level of social communication takes a different form—that of discourse, when people in a group setting go over a certain subject at length to make a decision that affects everyone involved. Ricœur highlights the essence of discourse well: discourse is realized “temporally and in the present” and it is always an event, for “discourse not only has a world, but it has an other, another person, an interlocutor to whom it is addressed” (1981: 133). Thus, society is constituted through deliberative discourse, carried out as a “back and forth mutual questioning and responding” (Cammack 2020: 28).

“The Problem of the Method” Social sciences were modeled on the biological realm, with society viewed as an organism. Compte, who considered his doctrine “social physics,” took one of the basic concepts of his theory—“consensus”—from biology (Levine 1995); like a sequence of nucleotides or amino acids that form molecular chains, a population of individuals forming the structure of a collective being (society) is nothing other than “consensus.” Since their origin, social sciences have also tried to use the methods of the natural sciences to achieve the same success; recall the “plea to consider human social organization as a natural phenomenon investigable through methods of the natural sciences” (Levine 1995: 16). Although social scientists have been criticized for not making sufficient use of the scientific method of induction (Chapin 1924), many scholars studying social communication state that their method is scientific, in other words, the one used in natural science (the implication being that all other methods are not scientific); for example: “we confess . . . we are social scientists (i.e., our methods of examining the social world are systematic and

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scientific)” (Scharp and Thomas 2019: 147). This kind of reasoning is found in social scientific theorizing from its beginnings, for example, in Émile Durkheim’s work. His method is considered to be primarily inductive in its orientation (Meštrović 1992) because he focused on social facts as ways of acting in social interactions that can be observed and investigated empirically. At the same time, he sought “decisive or crucial facts” (Durkheim 1982: 110) rather than an exhaustive generalization of society from enumeration of observed instances; an explanation of collective social representations could only be achieved with the help of suppositions that filled in the blanks between events, so to speak (Schmaus 2017). Using the scientific method of induction in studying social interactions is more difficult than studying natural phenomena. In addition to the overall “problem of induction,” the very object of social sciences makes it difficult to pinpoint social facts and “make stability of meaning prevail over the instability of events” (Dewey 1981: 49). While seeking to identify “decisive or crucial facts,” Durkheim defines a social fact as “every way of acting, fixed or not” (1982: 42) and so, perhaps inadvertently, shows how reaching that task is problematic if such ways are not fixed. Also, society is a dynamic and constantly changing system, and the social scientist is part of the system; hence, every situation of studying social interactions involves the observer’s paradox. Applied to social phenomena, induction results in their explanation (just as objects and processes of the natural world are explained); such knowledge is thus flattened—“ex-planed.” To go beyond the empirical search for regularities in social interaction, it is necessary to get closer to the (social) action itself, so to speak, which requires moving from explanation to understanding; the latter literally means “standing in the midst of ” and “grasping ideas.” In this sense, rather than assuming one’s complete objectivity, efforts are made to understand those observed from their own perspective; an example is Max Weber’s method of Verstehen or empathic understanding of human behavior. To this end, Weber puts forward the concept of “ideal types”: mental constructs formed by synthesizing “diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena” (1949: 90). As can be seen, this approach uses the constructive power of thought, thus going beyond the formulation of regularities based on the empirical observations. While he was critical of the nomological model as used in the natural sciences, Weber deemed the ideal types objectively possible because they “appear as adequate from the nomological standpoint” (Weber 1949: 92). His approach, therefore, can be seen as based on the deductive– nomological model, often called the covering law model. It should be noted that, although he is said to focus on “hypothetical entities” (Silvers 1964: 223) or “(hypothesised) socially patterned regularities

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of meaning” (Miller and Brewer 2003: 148), in the strict sense Weber’s idealtypes are not hypotheses since they cannot be disproved by the empirical case(s) outside of the type because “an ideal-type corresponds to an idea—not reality” (Carlton 1977: 6; emphasis in original). When ideal types are labeled “hypothetical” or “hypothesized,” they are rather taken to refer to abstractions from empirical reality and mean “ideal,” “speculative,” “notional,” and so on. By the same token, Weber’s conceptualizations cannot be equated with normative theorizing; devoid of any ethical prescriptions, ideal types simply serve as a heuristic tool for investigating and comparing particular cases. Although such cases are viewed from the nomological standpoint by using the constructive power of thought, they are based on instrumental rationality and so ideal types will exist as long the instrumental rationality that guided their construction remains of general significance. Moreover, the social sciences are characterized not only by “the transiency of all ideal types but also at the same time the inevitability of new ones” (Weber 1949: 104). Thus, the covering law model as applied in social science does not presuppose an exhaustive system of all types used in social interactions; rather, it “presupposes idealizations” and a “distinction between universal laws and more context-based boundary-conditions” (Gregersen 2008: 85). In this light, the covering law model in communication inquiry does not look for deductive operations using syllogistic reasoning, but emphasizes the development of lawlike generalizations, that is, theories that “have both explicit and implicit boundary conditions” (Berger 1977: 9). It would be too much to ask of communication theorizing grounded in the social-scientific perspectives to formulate universal laws because even “laws of nature are always ceteris paribus laws, that is, statements of law eventually presuppose the hidden clause, ‘all other things are equal’” (Gregersen 2008: 85). Among the social science thinkers who opposed positivism yet tried to move toward understanding human behavior, Max Weber stands out (as an ideal type, as it were). He was unable to completely escape the grip of the nomological model of the natural sciences grounded in explanation. As a result, “Weber’s position . . . should be construed as a self-conscious and deliberate attempt to have it both ways. . . . he acknowledges the peculiarities of human social behavior as a subject of science, but believes it possible to allow for them without compromising scientific method” (Runciman 1972: 16). This approach, with an internal conflict that could not be resolved, might have contributed to physical and psychological sufferings in his personal life, including recurring episodes of depression. Overall, Weber was “a tormented thinker . . . whose work . . . resists any neat theoretical categorization” (Clohesy, Stuart, and Sparks 2009: 20)—just like social science itself. Just as Weber went beyond Durkheim’s empiricism, Weber’s ideas were supplemented by Alfred Schutz, who aimed to get behind the meanings of

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social actors constituted in their interaction and whose main goal was to develop a better understanding of social experience. By focusing on the temporal aspects of their consciousness, he tried to examine the nature of intersubjective understanding and its limits. Approaching the social world from the perspectives of phenomenology, he was developing a phenomenological psychology; hence, “his position is ambiguous because for Schutz psychology is also social psychology, and as such an appendix of sociology as an empirical science” (Seebohm 2015: 86). While he extended Weber’s ideas by investigating the consciousness and motivation of social actors, Schutz still focused more on the structure of the social world “rather than on the potentially unique meanings of real individuals in real settings” (Miller and Brewer 2003: 148). As we can see, while modeling their approach on the natural sciences, social scientists at the same time seek “a radical separation of the methodology of the social sciences from that of the natural sciences” (Huff 1984: 41). In so doing, they face the so-called “is-ought problem,” known as “Hume’s Guillotine” because it was articulated by David Hume who revealed the difficulty of deriving an “ought” from an “is,” that is, moving from factual statements (of what “is”) to moral and value judgments (of what “ought to” be); in Hume’s words, for any “ought” statement, “a reason should be given” ([1739] 1978: Section 1, § 1). Only if we reason can we elucidate how people bond into society (i.e., focus on what makes their actions obligatory, not probable [induction] or obligatory [deduction]). In other words, although “Hume’s Guillotine” is supposed to sever ties between “is” and “ought” statements (read: between the natural sciences and the social sciences), social scientists must somehow survive the “execution” and live to tell the tale. This tale can be told based on the hypothetico-deductive model of science that combines both inductive and deductive reasoning, which is relatively objective and still “has no tinge of necessity” (Lee 1973: 147). This model is considered the most influential or popular method of inquiry in social science (Gorski 2004; Haig and Evers 2015). Despite their differences, this model is brought up in association with the works of Durkheim (Carr 1995), Weber (Kruger 1987), and Schutz (Miller and Brewer 2003). It should be noted that this model, while also deductive in its basis, cannot be equated with the deductive-nomological model, mentioned earlier. The idea behind the deductive-nomological approach is to show the logical relation between the explanatory facts and conclusion obtained from such premises, not to support the conclusion. The idea behind the hypothetico-deductive model is to show how support is provided for a hypothesis being questioned (Salmon and Humphreys 2006). Sometimes the hypothetico-deductive method is viewed as an overall method that can be applied to any meaningful material, including literature,

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works of art, and so on (Føllesdal 1979). Such a view appears too broad, cutting into the realms of the natural sciences, focused on explanation, and the humanities, focused on interpretation (as will be discussed in the next chapter). Significantly, when communication theories based on this model are discussed, they are distinguished from interpretive approaches (Barge and Craig 2009). Sometimes, on the contrary, the limitation of the hypotheticodeductive method is noted because while generalizations are possible in the social sciences, they cannot take the form of universal or statistical laws. Indeed, compared to the natural sciences, inquiry requirements in the social sciences are more relaxed. More attention is paid to the linguistic representations of claims and how they hold up against the existing evidence in light of their justification (i.e., the action of showing something to be right or reasonable) (Gorski 2004). This approach is less radical than a complete separation of the social sciences from that of the natural sciences, but it allows the theorist not to die under “Hume’s Guillotine.” Thus the ideas of the hypothetico-deductive method can be accepted and used in the social sciences if taken not as rigid yes-or-no outcomes “but as ideals which may guide us even though we cannot attain them fully” (Andreski 1984: 24). Hence the emphasis for many human scientists in formulating the working hypotheses that are, by definition, subject to change, which grounded the pragmatistic approach of Charles S. Peirce—bringing us to the fifth unifying theme of social communication theories that is found in their normative character. In Science and Vocation, Max Weber writes: “If Tolstoi’s question recurs to you: as science does not, who is to answer the question: ‘What shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?’ . . . then one can say that only a prophet or a saviour can give the answers” (1949: 152–53). Social scientists, though, do give answers to that question. Compte, for example, whose theory was supposed to explain how society is organized, in later years founded the Religion of Humanity for which he proclaimed himself the High Priest: he abandoned his earlier commitment to science and positivism and preached universal love. Most thinkers, though, without claiming to be prophets, put forward ideas about how people ought to behave in society, defining the expectations for the conduct of human affairs and proposing how conditions for such behavior can be created; it is such ideas that form a normative basis for critical theory (White 1983). According to Ricœur, “the task of the critical social sciences is to discern, beneath the regularities observed by the empirical social sciences, those ideologically determined relations of dependence that can be transformed only through critique.” Hence, “the critical approach is governed by the interest in emancipation. . . .” which “frees the subject from dependence on hypostasied powers” (Ricœur 1981: 82). Normative theory deals with the question of what makes a social action obligatory in human interaction where variables are loosely associated. Its

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evaluation cannot be determined by an appeal to an external authority such as natural law, God, or all-knowing scientists; rather, it depends on the public scrutiny coming from within the society itself. In this regard, normative theory that follows the hypothetico-deductive model relies not so much on the controlled experiment as it does on argumentation over ordinary life experiences (Bolan 2017). In this light, normative theory is not so much proven valid as it is justified. By the same token, normative theory does not offer prediction, which would be more in line with the covering law model, but rather justifications that are based on judgments. Normative theories, therefore, “do not truly ‘explain’ but only point to directions, tendencies, trends, and potentialities” (Bolan 2017: 120). One of the most well-known examples of such theory is the Theory of Communicative Action developed by Jürgen Habermas (1988), which is noted to rely heavily on the hypothetico-deductive model (Føllesdal 1979). According to Habermas, if individuals communicate on the basis of common understanding, they can recognize themselves as a social group and act in accordance with the norms developed through discourse. In the public sphere—one of the key concepts proposed by Habermas—all claims made by anyone are open for discursive examination and, if challenged, must be defended. Habermas specifies that “a moral norm (social practice, policy, rule) is valid (justified and binding) only if the foreseeable consequences and side-effects of its general observance for the interests and valueorientations of each individual could be jointly accepted by all those affected without coercion” (Habermas 1998: 42). Recall that action as a joint acceptance of something wished for lies at the heart of praxis. Recall also that such action does not automatically follow from the main premise in the form of a general principle; it is not “right” in the sense of proven correct but because it can be defended discursively and found to be appropriate to a particular situation. We can also recall Immanuel Kant’s distinction between technical and pragmatic action (subject to hypothetical imperative) and ethical action (subject to the categorical imperative). Whereas hypothetical imperatives require the highest efficiency and best effectivity with respect to given goals, the categorical imperative deals with the goals themselves (Jackson, Keys, and Cropper 1989). Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative, which can be seen as the limit of the hypothetico-deductive model, is translated in (at least) eight different ways (see Seifert 2004: 221). The two most-often cited versions are these: (1) “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law,” and (2) “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law.” The difference between these versions is significant. No one can will his or her goals into a universal law; everyone can act only as if

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his or her action were to become a general law. This difference is captured well by Habermas, who clearly states that “for every possible communication, the anticipation of the ideal speech situation has the significance of a constitutive illusion that is at the same time the prefiguration [Vorschein] of a form of life” (2001: 103). That normative theory has an illusionary character may be taken as the grounds to see it immune from falsification. And yet there is a sense in which normative theories could be rendered practically falsified, leaving one theory as a basis for our actions simply because our actions must be guided by something. After all, “claims to sincerity can be redeemed only through actions” (Habermas 2001: 93), and so it all comes down to not only “discoursing the discourse,” but also walking the walk.

“Humans Living Together” Social communication implies the simultaneous existence of both an association of people sharing a goal and their actions directed toward its realization. To capture this dual idea in one designation, it should both name something and express action of creating it, that is, function both in the nominal and verbal senses. Both of these senses seem to be present in the Russian word obchezhitie—literally “general” (obche) “living” (zhitie). It is interesting to note that zhitie is never used as a separate word with an emphasis on the first syllable. The emphasis falls on the last syllable; zhitie thus means a description of the life and deeds of the saints—hagiography, which was one of the central genres of Old Russian literature. So, when, for example, Zhitiye prepodobnogo otsa nashego Feodosiya, written by the monk Nestor, is translated as “Life of Our Holy Father Theodosius,” the archaic and solemn connotations of the Church Slavonic zhitie are diluted. Only in the compound word obchezhitie does the emphasis in zhitie shift to the first syllable and so the word becomes closer in meaning to “life” in a general sense (i.e., everyday experiences and practical actions that constitute everyone’s existence). Obchezhitie is variously translated as “communal lodging,” “communal housing,” or “residence hall”—all conveying its nominal sense—or “communal living”—conveying (as a gerund) its verbal sense. The English word “accommodation” seems to capture both of these senses since it means something suitable and fitting, as well as taking appropriate measures to that end. It can thus refer to a place of lodging and also the acts of adjusting differences (reconciliation) or mutual adaptation between social groups. And yet “accommodation” does not completely render the idea of obchezhitie as “general living”; for instance, people also live in homes, which can

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hardly be equated with “accommodation” (in fact, those who leave their home are usually said to be living in various types of accommodation). “Co-living” seems to be another word that could be used as an equivalent of obchezhitie. The term suggests a general reference to the practice of living with other people in a shared home. However, this modern form of social life presupposes sharing not only living space, but also interests, values, and intentions; co-living is a group of like-minded people living together. As wonderful as the concept of co-living may be, it still seems narrower in meaning than obchezhitie, in general. Moreover, any group that privileges unity runs the risk of becoming homogenized and represents dangerous ethics, limiting the spirit of hospitality; and, in Jacques Derrida’s words, “What would an ‘ethics’ be without hospitality?” (2000b: 129). Derrida does not mean here hospitality that is institutionalized and turned into a social service such as “tourism industry”—an object of “hospitality studies” (Lashley 2017). He develops Kant’s idea of a perpetual peace that is based on the conditions of general or universal hospitality, taking it further and speaking of unconditional hospitality—the absolute obligation to accept the Other, when one is inherently open to social interactions. While he calls such unconditional hospitality “impossible,” Derrida notes that the very thought of such pure hospitality is essential for creating and maintaining society; without it, “we would not even have the idea of love or of ‘living together’” (see Borradori 2003: 129). Derrida also makes use of the etymological investigation by Émile Benveniste (2016), who showed that “hospitality” comes from the IndoEuropean root with a dual meaning of “guest-host.” To capture such a reciprocal power relationship with an essential ambivalence of the host toward the guest and vice versa, Derrida coined the term “hostipitality” (2000a). Every social encounter involves hostipitality, with both hospitality and hostility as viable options. Such tensions are constantly at play and reveal the nature of pushing the boundaries of social interactions that cannot avoid risk-taking and vulnerability. Benveniste also reminds us of the connection between the notions of hospitality and that of the gift (Benveniste 2016). Ritualized gift-giving is an inherent part of the “guest-host” relationship, creating a bond of trust so that neither guest nor host would turn into enemies. In this light, society is never a static totalized whole, but always a tenuous and temporary togetherness (re)created in the process of communication. What Bill Moyers (2016) says about civilization fully applies to society: it is a “thin veneer of civility stretched across the passions of the human heart” and “because it can snap at any moment, or slowly weaken from abuse and neglect until it fades away,” it “requires a commitment to the notion . . . that we are all in this together.” It is crucial to emphasize that we must be committed to a notion: just as the thought of pure hospitality motivates concrete acts that

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create society, the idea of the pure gift is passed down the generations. The best gift we can give to others or receive from others is the idea of living together. The gift is always given and received willingly, freely, and in peace. In hostipitality, Derrida notes that peace brings “a promise of indefinite, and therefore eternal, renewal” (2000a: 6). Only this way can society exist in perpetuity. It is of such “Eternal Society” as the “primeval contract” among the dead, living, and unborn that Edmund Burke wrote this: “A people is constituted by the living who recognize, respect, and identify with their dead in the things and imprints of places that they left behind. The living love their dead by training their young into the social affections that keep their dead alive to them” (1992: 193).

Self and Society: Looking for Common Ground In Charles Cooley’s words, “self and society are twin-born, we know one as immediately as we know the other” (1998: 19). Hence, “individual” (self) and “society” are traditionally taken as the two extremes of social order (which, of course, is really one system, one continuum of praxis). These two extremes form the basis for dividing all communication theories into “micro-level” and “macro-level.” The former focus on small-scale interactions between individuals, such as group dynamics, and not on broad societal forces that impact such processes, while the latter focus on large-scale social processes, institutions, and hierarchies that shape a society as if by themselves, regardless of the role of an individual—for example, processes of social change, such as the transition from a traditional society to a modern society, as well as most mass communication and mass media theories are considered “macro-level.” Since society is one system, these levels can be isolated only for the sake of analysis; in real life, constant tensions exist between these two manifestations of social communication. On the one hand, everyone feels the desire to be a part of something bigger than oneself. The following words by the famous Russian poet Osip Mandel’shtam will resonate with everyone: “Time cuts me like a coin, / And there is not enough of myself left for myself ” (The Horseshow Finder, trans. Ian Probstein). On the other hand, everyone wants to remain oneself—a unique individual. The coin—Moneta (from the Greek word moneres)—means “alone, unique” and so is associated not only with the goddess’s name, but also with individuality. These tensions are inherent in social communication and can be illustrated by the following polemics between the two well-known thinkers. Let’s first look at the debate between Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas that was launched by their joint seminar at the Max Planck Institut

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in the early 1970s and later their joint publication of the volume entitled Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? (1971). The book not only sold more than thirty-five thousand copies, it also brought forth three volumes of essays of scholarly comments on that debate (Holub 1994). For both Luhmann and Habermas, there is no society without communication; however, they understand its nature (and, consequently, the nature of sociality) differently. Luhmann’s point of departure is the idea of making a distinction by indicating something as an area of interest or relevance, the unmarked state being everything that is not selected; this way, information becomes meaningful. For Luhmann, one’s fall into communication is the same as the original “fall of man”: “Once embroiled in communication, one can never return to the paradise of innocent souls” (Luhmann 1995: 150). It is distinction that lies at the basis of communication, for example, between the system and its environment, or between the observer and the observed. The latter distinction is continuously brought back, so it becomes possible for the observer to observe oneself observing, hence the self‐referential nature of communication. In this light, society is an autopoietic system that maintains itself through internal and recursive operations of distinction-making, not producing the elements but, rather, operationalizing relations needed for the system to function. Society, therefore, is a complex system that is not predictable and so cannot be steered through communication because only communication can communicate (Luhmann 1992). Habermas does not share Luhmann’s view of social systems as self-referential communications that can only make distinctions. He does not accept Luhmann’s “transformation” of the concept of autopoiesis from biology to social science (Habermas 1987: 372), finding it technocratic since the experience of human rational subjects creating meaning gives way to an operational system. For Habermas, communication also forms the basis of sociality, but he understands it as a life-world geared toward mutual understanding and emerging through everyday communicative practices. This view of communication is based on the notion of intersubjectivity—human subjects making, questioning, and legitimating claims in various speech acts. In this respect, communication is viewed not so much in syntacticsemantic terms (an operation of distinction-making) as in pragmatic terms (a form of praxis). While this speech situation is ideal and can only be anticipated, it is also critical as a normative basis of sociality and a standard for reaching consensus. As mentioned earlier, speech here should be conceptualized as discourse. So, while for Luhmann communication consists in continuous operations of distinction-making, for Habermas communication is a process of human subjects engaging in discourse to achieve agreement. Thus, Habermas focuses on the pragmatic factors of communicative actions

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and interactions in the lifeworld, while Luhman focuses on the macro structures of society as their constraints and possibilities (Lanigan 1987). Overall, we can clearly see “the foundational differences between Habermas’s normative-humanist approach and Luhmann’s descriptive functional one” (Moeller 2012: 369). In this respect, “Habermas’ discourse theory can be regarded as a normative superstructure to Luhmann’s descriptive theory of society” (Kjaer 2006: 75). Now, let’s look at the debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault that took place in 1971 at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, as part of the International Philosophers’ Project. The topic of the debate was “Human Nature: Power vs. Justice,” and the role of communication from a sociopolitical point of view was brought up by both thinkers. Foucault’s central concept is power, which arises in the form of discursive formations and constitutes a system of possible relations that operate beyond the thought of individual subjects. For Foucault, power is produced and legitimated in discourse, pervading society. For him, “power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Foucault 1998: 93). According to him, “such relations are specific, that is, they have nothing to do with exchange, production, communication, even though they combine with them” (Chomsky and Foucault 2006: 208). It is as if such relations have a power of their own. For instance, Foucault states that the proletariat taking power into its own hands has nothing to do with the administration of justice; rather, in his words, “one makes war to win, not because it is just!” (Chomsky and Foucault 2006: 51). Thus, within discourse, power is exercised, and subjects are constituted; in a way, just as for Luhmann “communication communicates,” for Foucault, “discourse discourses.” Chomsky focuses not on impersonal regimes of truth that every society has, but on the domains of human intelligence, cognition, and behavior. In a way, he aims to show from where, or, rather, from whom, power comes. Chomsky believes that it is the actions of the subjects (i.e., their communicative interactions) that create society. He does not view human beings as mere “mechanical elements in the productive process” (Chomsky and Foucault 2006: 46); instead, he considers the creative urge intrinsic to human nature and argues that only maximizing its potential can lead to a society of truly free association. Chomsky also emphasizes the role that language plays in expression of thought and interaction between persons. Language here should be understood as discourse since Chomsky believes social progress can be achieved through argumentation in the form of practical reasoning, each argument to be justified on the basis of the claim and its assessment. There can be no perfect society since people are guided by various motives and can make mistakes; however, the concept of justice is necessary as a standard that would guide people in their actions.

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One can see clear parallels between the ideas of Luhmann and Foucault, on the one hand, and Habermas and Chomsky, on the other: the former underscore the operational power of social systems; while the latter, the capacity of interacting human subjects. Both polemics took place at about the same time—when the war in Vietnam was still going on. It is in such times that fundamental questions are often (re)considered; in this case, the question of how a social order is formed. We find two very different answers to this question given in the debates just briefly discussed. One would hope for some kind of reconciliation between them. And yet, the first debate was followed by Habermas publishing his Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981) and Luhmann publishing his Soziale Systeme (1984). Subsequently, the two thinkers had moved very far away from each other and no longer had anything to discuss (Kjaer 2006). As far as the debate between Chomsky and Foucault, “after some polite attempts to find common ground, a divergence broke out . . . and was ultimately left unresolved” (Rajchman 2006: viii).

“The Lonely Skeleton of Truth” The two polemics briefly discussed above highlight the tensions existing between the “micro-level” and “macro-level” manifestations of social communication. Sometimes the meso-level is added as a “field where the structural mechanisms and the interactions between macro and micro levels can be observed” (Haanpaa 2005: 6). Since it is a field of interaction, it can be better conceptualized as an area of “middle-range theory” that attempts to bring together the concrete and the abstract, the empirical and the rational. Robert Merton who introduced this term (1994) saw the theories developed within this range as “only temporary stopping points” (Broadbent and Laughlin 2013: 56); such theories are supposed to mature and turn into universal laws like those in the natural sciences (Dorsey and Collier 2018). However, nothing is more permanent than the temporary, and so attempts are continually made to reconcile the tensions between the two manifestations of social communication—just as phronesis “continually mediates between the abstract, theoretical universal and the practical and particular” (Parsons 2013). It is tempting yet impossible to find the perfect position—in the very middle of the middle range—from which both the society and the individual come into an equally sharp relief. Social order is one system continually subdivided into infinitesimal elements, and so there can be no resting place in its middle. Even if we could imagine such a place from which one watches the conduct of human affairs on the stage, they would be constantly moving—to or away from our “unmoving spectator,” who would

The Conduct of Human Affairs

then see either the faces of the individual actors (micro-level) or the social play itself (macro-level). When noting the largest promise of the middle-range theories, Robert Merton adds: “even so we must adopt the provisional outlook of our big brothers and of Tennyson: ‘Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be’” (1968: 52–53). The next two lines in Tennyson’s poem read: “They are but broken lights of thee, / And thou, O Lord, art more than they” (“In Memoriam A. H. H.”). The middle-range theorizing, therefore, cannot bring the abstract and the concrete into one happy union; although “self and society are twin-born” and thus equal, one of them is more equal than the other (and it is not “self ”). It is not surprising, therefore, that “the study of communication on balance remains committed to a foundationalist ontology” (Anderson and Baym 2004: 603). Here, the social-scientific perspective on communication most clearly reveals its ties to natural science; hence, communication is “always reducible to psychology, biology, or physics, explainable in the final instance by the tools, techniques, and focus of other disciplines” (Anderson and Baym 2004: 603). A foundationalist epistemology also “functions as the default assumption” and “sees the real perhaps not as obvious, but as inherently deducible” (Anderson and Baym 2004: 603–4). That, by balancing all factors involved, the study of communication leans toward (or defaults to) a foundationalist view, both ontologically and epistemologically, should not be surprising; the stage was already set by the ancient Greek thinkers for whom the polis “is prior . . . to each of us” (Aristotle, Politics: 1,253a19); since then, the stage has been tilted, as it were, toward society. When the theoretical import of agency if emphasized, it is usually done at the background of social structural constraints. For instance, in his effort to go beyond the structuralist and agency-based theory, Michael Huspek talks about the dueling structures of meaning (rather the dueling agents) in the light of understanding the conditions of resistance in discourse (1993). But then, can one expect anything else from what is called “social (and not ‘individual’) science”? “Social,” by definition, applies to a collective and is used in the plural; for it to be used with reference to an individual, it needs a subject (e.g., “a social security number”); when people simply say “a social,” the subject (security number) is still presupposed. Compare this to “the/a human,” which can refer to both collective and individual, that is, used in both plural and singular; herein lies a difference between social science and the humanities, of which more will be said later in the book. The foundationalist view, which privileges the social, cannot completely disregard the individual. It is sometimes noted that the individual, grounded in the empirical, provides mere experience (i.e., practice without knowl-

Communication

edge) for the macro-level theorizing (Broadbent and Laughlin 2013). However, “mere experience” is crucial, for experience is associated with risk (the word “experience” goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *per— “to try, risk”), which is contained in everything one does. The nominalist can appreciate this more than the realist; in this sense, as agued by Karl Popper, societies do not exist, since “even ‘the war’ or ‘the army’ are abstract concepts, strange as this may sound to some. What is concrete is the many who are killed; or the men and women in uniform, etc.” (Popper 1957: 135). Societies do not get killed; they disappear because individuals are killed or die from other unnatural or natural causes. It is individual agents who reflect on the social structures they inherited and act in ways that may transform their society. In other words, society is a product of individuals’ actions just as individuals are a product of social forces: their relationship is one of mutual dependence (Bevir 1996). These tensions cannot be resolved once and for all for they keep social communication going. In a way, the social sciences set for themselves an impossible task of explaining how we can immediately know self and society, only to be constantly pulled in two directions and having to choose one over the other (usually, by default, the stability of meaning over the instability of events). Not surprisingly, some critics find the very idea of social science to be an oxymoron since it is modeled on the natural sciences yet emphasizes its phronetic character (Schram 2012). Since society is (made up of) individuals, whose actions are variable and can be unpredictable (even to the individuals themselves), someone will always throw a phronetic wrench into the process of theorizing. That is why, perhaps (among other reasons) Bruno Latour wryly notes: “I forgot who the famous philosopher was who used to quip that all was well with the social sciences except for two tiny words: ‘social’ and ‘sciences’” (2000: 107). One can compare the social sciences to Schrödinger’s cat as they exist in a superposition of dead and alive states, and it is only upon observation that one can see how that position plays out in reality, that is, how they are resolved into one possibility or the other. Another metaphoric way—more charitable albeit grimly so—to view social-scientific theories is by likening “them to skeletons; like any skeleton, they require ‘flesh’ to make them ‘whole beings’” (Broadbent and Laughlin 2013: 56). One can quote here from Gregory Bateson’s poem entitled Manuscript: “You will find nothing there / For that is the discipline I ask / Not more, not less / Not the world as it is / Nor ought to be—/ Only the precision / The lonely skeleton of truth.” The further the social-scientific theorizing moves away from its attempts to achieve the precision of the natural sciences, the more “the lonely skeleton of truth” is fleshed out with cultural texture and animated by the human spirit.

The Conduct of Human Affairs

When Wilhelm Dilthey’s well-known Naturwissenschaften–Geisteswissenschaften distinction is discussed, it is often noted that these two German words denote “the human, or social, sciences and the natural sciences, respectively” (Calhoun 2002). Geisteswissenschaften can indeed be viewed as a social science, but only insofar as it deals with the organizational structures of society, focusing on human interactions that mediate between individual initiative and communal tradition (Makkreel 2016). It is more common to translate Geisteswissenschaften as “the human sciences,” encompassing both the social sciences and the humanities. Thus, when the study of communication is conceptualized as a social science, it should be viewed as only one part of the human sciences, for they also deal with “the elusive human Geist . . . — Geist being a cognate of the English ‘ghost,’ and alternately translatable as ‘ghost,’ ‘mind,’ or ‘spirit’” (Slingerland 2008: 3). Those “‘human sciences’ are close to what Gadamer calls ‘humaniora,’ the humanities; they are essentially sciences of culture, concerned with the renewal of cultural heritage in the historical present” (Ricœur 1981: 82). In John Locke’s words, “spirits . . . are beings that have perfecter knowledge and greater happiness than we, must needs have also a perfecter way of communicating their thoughts than we have, who are fain to make use of corporeal signs and particular sounds” (1823: 33). People, of course, are no angels; their knowledge is not perfect, let alone perfecter than that of spirits. Human communication is not immediate, since we need a medium, and not only an oral one; “life and history make sense like the letters of a word” (Dilthey 1982: 168). Only this way can we express ourselves and strive toward “a special intimacy of understanding” (Bulhof 1980: 35). Whereas inquiry into social communication is aimed at examining the organizational structures of society and thus explaining “the human state,” the sciences of the spirit are aimed at examining what is expressed in “particular sounds” and the “letters of the word,” that is, what makes social beings human and thus understanding “the human condition” (Arendt 1998). To understand what it means to be human, we should not abandon the concept of the human subject; instead, we should problematize this concept further, looking at ourselves from the outside, as it were, and focusing on “particular sounds” and “letters of the word,” imperfect as they may be.

CHAPTER

Communication as Correspondence ‰Í

Toward Conceptualizing the Human/ities The status of communication study is often presented as either under the humanities umbrella or as a social science (Gronbeck 2005). In the binary logic of such reasoning the two kinds of science are mutually exclusive (i.e., if communication study is a humanities science, then it is not a social science, and vice versa). Today, though, the study of communication is rarely questioned that way, its double genesis—both from the social sciences and the humanities—widely accepted (Beck et al. 2013; Kirtiklis 2011). The humanities have shaped the study of communication in numerous ways—from the touchstone of rhetorical theory to literary studies to the tradition of historiographical reflection on the entanglements of the past with the future to cultural studies, and so on (Pooley 2016). In its turn, communication scholarship is said to have something to give back to the humanities, as well. For instance, a special issue of Review of Communication presents several essays demonstrating how the study of communication offers the humanities a plural, reflexive, and inventive enterprise for examining what it means to be human. Specifically, the essays address various aspects of rhetorical theory, ethics, history, pedagogy, criticism, and the new media (Mifsud 2019). It is even argued that communication should be considered the humanities’ core discipline (Emanuel 2007; Apel 1972). Although communication is usually recognized as a humanities discipline, the struggles for the academic identity of communication study

Communication as Correspondence

continue. Social sciences are often seen as encroaching on the traditional sphere of the humanities, claiming that they could interrogate the same subjects and issues more successfully (Russo 1998); hence, tensions persist between those who advocate social scientific approaches to communication and those whose studies are grounded in the humanities (Gunn and Dance 2014). Sometimes calls are made for disrupting the humanities versus social science binary and framing communication studies as a “transformative” discipline (Scharp and Thomas 2019). Disruption, though, is not enough; besides, any truly scholarly study, whether from the social sciences or humanities perspectives, is supposed to be transformative, that is, cause a marked change in our view of communication. That such studies leave “us with some divided loyalties” (Livingstone 2011: 1,472) is perfectly fine, as long as we are aware of how and why our loyalties are different, and our studies can peacefully coexist based on some shared loyalty to communication, as such. With that in mind, what is special about studying communication from the humanities perspectives? It is argued, for instance, that its unique focus is human interaction: “This intense focus on what, when, where, how, and why humans interact is what is so special about the Communication discipline” (Emanuel 2007). Phrased this way, the net is cast too widely; after all, the social sciences also deal with humans and their interaction. And yet, while the social sciences belong to the human sciences, they are not the same as the humanities. The idea of the humanities in the Western hemisphere can be traced back to the concept of paideia in ancient Greece and later the concept of humanitas in ancient Rome. Both concepts referred to a process of educating people into their true form (i.e., becoming human). The (ancient) “human Greeks” were distinguished from the primitive and uncivilized “barbaroi”; similarly, in ancient Rome, “homo humanus,” whose life was regulated by the civil law (the “jus civile”), was opposed to “homo barbarous,” whose life was viewed in the natural—uncivilized and animalistic—mode. To become truly human, “homo humanus should overcome homo barbarous” (Svendsen 2010: 233). Later, Christian theology developed its own view of the human being: to be human is to be a “child of God” and so the true human nature is not of this world. This view was undermined in the eighteenth century and deemed unable to address all complexity of the real human experience; as a result, human studies came to be contrasted with divinity studies. It was thus no surprise, for example, that when in 1809 Wilhelm von Humboldt was given the task of creating the new University of Berlin, one of his first steps was to liberate learning from scholastic theology, which for him, just like natural science, was not conducive to the new spirit of Wissenschaft as systematic pursuit of knowledge and real scholarship (Prickett 1986).

Communication

All the studies of the human outside of natural science and theology were brought together in the Middle Ages under the name studia humanitatis, which had been first used by Cicero in 62 BC. By late Mediaeval–early Renaissance times, stimulated by a growing interest in the ideas of Greco-Roman antiquity and based on the trivium and the quadrivium, studia humanitatis had been codified as the seven liberal arts. In a book written by Marcianne Capella in the early fifth century AD, we read about “the Marriage of Philology and Mercury”—the former considered one of the forgotten origins of the modern humanities (Turner 2014), and the latter, the swift messenger of Roman Gods in mythology and a counterpart of Hermes in Greek mythology, highlighting the importance of interpreting messages for successful family communication. It should be remembered that liberal arts is a concept in its own right and cannot be equated with the humanities. At the same time, the humanities preserve their main meaning—that of liberalis or freedom. This meaning is not to be understood as opposed to conservative, since the modern notion of liberalism entails both the “liberal” and the “conservative”; rather, it refers to free as the opposite of subjugated and constrained. In this meaning, the humanities deal with the human as not subjugated by our animality or by God—anything that constrains the mind and soul, standing in the way of our being truly free, that is, being ourselves. This way, the human being is conceptualized in terms of negative freedom (i.e., freedom from the barbaric nature or God). The human being appears in this light as someone seeking to liberate oneself from everything inherited from below that is considered base, on the one hand, and everything bestowed from above that undermines human agency. The human being, as it were, seeks to find its own place on Earth; the meaning of homo goes back to the Latin humus (“earthly being” or “born of earth”); in the same vein, the Hebrew word Adam comes from Adamah (“land”). The human being, thus, needs to be conceptualized in terms of positive freedom as the realization of potential and attainment of goals. This way, we can understand what the human being is with feet firmly planted on the ground. Natural science is said to pay no attention to the human being. It is more accurate to say the human being does matter to natural science, but only as a representative of the Homo sapiens species. In other words, the human being matters to natural science only as a natural object (i.e., something not free from nature)—a view that cannot allow us to fully understand what the human being is. Social science, as a human science, takes a step toward understanding the human being in terms of positive freedom. Social science, however, is modeled after natural science. People are positioned in front of the social scientist as natural objects are to the natural scientist, in a manner allowing them to be observed, manipulated, and studied in or-

Communication as Correspondence

der to achieve positive knowledge. Social science explains interactions of individuals as they are organized into a social world, rather than help us to understand what makes social worlds meaningful for humans. In addition to seeing how humans are connected to the natural world and how they relate to one another in various social ways, it is necessary to identify the kinship of the human being with all other human beings and with oneself. So, the task of the humanities is to understand what makes humankind. As noted earlier, the social sciences show how human life is organized through phronesis—the activity that is an end in itself, that is, in which action coincides with a person’s internal goal. A social order is primarily viewed in terms of the external world made up of interactions, behaviors, associations, structures, and so on, while the internal world of an individual is not really problematized. The humanities’ task is to focus on the internal world: to understand what it is, why it is created, and how it is passed from individual to individual, from generation to generation, from age to age. Only this way, by getting as far as possible into the internal world of every human being, can we understand all of humanity; the humanities, therefore, go “where every man has gone before.” This task can never be fully accomplished because the internal world of the human being (in essence, one’s own world) can never be positioned as a thing in front of the researcher. It becomes an object of study only insofar as one can look at the manifestations of the human being (i.e., examine oneself from a distance). Following Wilhelm Dilthey, the German term Geisteswissenschaften has been traditionally used to refer to the disciplines known as the humanities, the word Geist taken as a positive label for the historical manifestations of the human internal world, or “spirit” (not to be equated with Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit”). What Dilthey called Geisteswissenschaften, though, he summarized as the “sciences of man, of society, and the state” (1989: 10), focusing on how the human mind exists in social actions and institutions. It is no surprise that there are other terms in German for “social sciences,” such as Sozialwissenschaften and Gesellschaftswissenschaften. In its turn, the term Kulturwissenschaften (“cultural sciences”) is used for those disciplines that focus on understanding the human mind as manifest in other forms. As “close to what Gadamer calls ‘humaniora,’ the humanities; they are essentially sciences of culture, concerned with the renewal of cultural heritage in the historical present” (Ricœur 1981: 82). This captures the essence of the humanities as investigations of the process and result of cultivation—of the human, by the human. Natural and even social scientists usually believe that only their inquiry produces truly scientific and worthwhile results, looking at the humanities with a condescending air. The humanities are sometimes considered useless because they do not produce anything “practical.” The humanities, however,

Communication

also have a very important goal of producing something: understanding ourselves and others, or what it means to be human; in the words of Johann Gustav Droysen, “understanding is the human being’s most human act, and any truly human act rests on understanding, aspires to understanding, and arrives at understanding” (see Gens 2018: 27). To understand what understanding is, the humanities focus on what the ancient Greeks called poiesis— production, making. Poiesis can be viewed vis-à-vis physis—an intrinsic productive principle (natura naturans) and a produced result (natura naturata). Poiesis is different from physis because it is not something that moves out of and toward itself (i.e., it is not origination but moved making). Poiesis thus belongs to techne— the ability to bring something into existence from without. Following Aristotle, techne is conceptualized as what “in some cases completes what nature is unable to complete, and in other cases imitates it” (Physics II 8: 199a15– 18). Techne cannot be reduced to high art, on the one hand, nor material “know-how,” on the other hand. Aleksei Losev, a famous Russian philologist and scholar of ancient Greek thought and culture, reminds us that “techne is first of all—handicraft, second of all—art, and third of all—it is science. . . . the Greek . . . understands science practically” (2003: 67). Poiesis can also be viewed vis-à-vis phronesis, which belongs to praxis as communicative action and is studied by social science. Communicative praxis is directed toward realizing specific worthwhile goals in various situations and is not aimed at producing a concrete product outside of oneself, the latter accomplished through techne. Phronesis and praxis, therefore, lie at the basis of society; society is what we do and why we do it. Poiesis and techne lie at the basis of culture; culture is what we make and how we make it. This is one of the distinctions drawn between the study of communication as a humanities science and a social science (Gronbeck 2005). The human being is not a pregiven object that can be studied like any natural object, nor can humanity know itself through introspection. Rather, the human subject is a product of poiesis cultivated by its own techne. Communication study as a humanities science is aimed at understanding what makes us human by investigating human culture (i.e., all products created by humans through various stages of its history). As emphasized by Michel Foucault, the humanities that focus on the products of the human mind study the “man” “as one . . . who can be known to the extent that he lives, speaks and works” (1996: 16)—in other words, as one who expresses oneself, that is, presses oneself out and forward in order to come into being and know oneself. Whereas René Descartes found only thinking beyond any doubt, it should be noted that indubitability itself is what is expressed. One can only experience be(com)ing human and only by expressing oneself. Exprimo, ergo sum.

Communication as Correspondence

In Search of the Human Spirit The humanities deal with the human spirit—something that cannot be observed with any scientific instrument, no matter how advanced, because it is not given as an object but only in signifying expression (Bakhtin 1984). In other words, the spirit that lives in the human can only be known through expression—by being pressed out from inside, as it were. In this sense, “self-expression” is somewhat of a misnomer since one can express only oneself; if one could “express others,” communication would be much different. Today, the studies of connections between spirituality and communication form a growing subdiscipline of communication. For instance, the goal of the NCA Spiritual Communication Division is to promote an understanding of spirituality from a communication perspective in such realms as energetic communication, after-life communication, contemplative communication, and more. However, all communication is spiritual insofar as it relates to the human spirit present in any significant expression. Every product of techne, in which the human spirit lives, has texture; it is for a reason that the words techne and “texture” are related. Because texture is a surface, one might think of it as a superficial manifestation of human life. In fact, the opposite is the case: the surface is meaningful since this is the world in which we all live; without such outermost boundary, we would have nothing innermost. Texture is what makes any human creation hold together, including the human itself. “Texture” thus applies to cultural configurations in various modalities. Every medium operates by means of primary qualities and allows the area of humanness to grow; following Marshall McLuhan (1964), it is common to view media as “the extensions of man.” Of course, when we read that “reflexive self can probe deeply into the textures of its life to see the everyday, ongoing repetitions in communication that produce cultural configurations” (Warren 2009: 68–69), the verb “to see” should be understood not only in the literal sense, but also figuratively as “to know, to understand.” To bring something into existence, the early humans used what comes to everyone most naturally—the body, which makes it possible for people to feel “the quiet joy of breathing and living” (A body is given to me . . . , by Osip Mandel’shtam, trans. Robert Tracy). It was a world of oral speech, and people intimately felt the spiritual nature of communication; the Latin “spiritus” means “a breathing, breath.” To help communication flow, oral mnemonics were used, such as rhythm, rhyme, and repetitions. Oral poetry was not so much recited as sung; for instance, Homer sings the wrath of Achilles (Strate 1986). Everything significant was passed down from generation to

Communication

generation viva voce—“in the living voice.” The voice was not disembodied (i.e., separated from the elements of kinesics), and so every communicative event was “a continuous viva-voce performance” (Wheeler 1999: 87). Today, although much rarer, viva voce as a form of techne still exists, for example, in the defense of a dissertation or as a part of the final examination in medical education. In such cases, we deal with the significant expressions that are recited, not sung (i.e., repeated from memory). This also applies to oral poetry that is learned by heart and then recited. It is interesting that in Russian, “knowing or reading something by heart” literally means “knowing or reading something so well that it goes out easily from one’s lips.” The tradition of memorizing and reciting poetry did not survive so long in the west as it did in the Soviet Union (Gronas 2011) where, in a way, the spirit of antiquity was still present in stadiums, concert halls, and kitchens. Oral communication is “speaking into the air” (Peters 1999). “Oral literature” in this light is “an absurdity” (Niles 2013: 11); by definition, “literature” must be written, documented, recorded. And yet, this is how every society is maintained in time as a living tradition. Oral communication, ephemeral as it may be, is characterized by a simple yet lasting message: everything is alive and sacred. This message is as “close to the human life world” (Ong 1982: 42) as any message can be.” Oral speech has an important advantage: it does not interfere with other activities based on motor or visual skills, all of them creating together one whole communicative event. Such communicative events, however, can take you only so far. For instance, according to the Tübingen School, Plato conducted his esoteric teachings orally; of course, only those who were there in real time, listening to what Plato had to say, could know whether this is really the case. That Plato’s “unwritten doctrines” have reached us is possible only thanks to writing; this way, certain events in time that happened almost two thousand years ago have been brought to us, albeit indirectly and incompletely, through space-biased media, to use the well-known distinction proposed by Harold Innis. The human lifeworld kept expanding as materials other than one’s body were used in its creation. While simple and crude, such materials as sand, wood, stone, or natural fiber had a crucial advantage over the human body: they could last longer and reach further. For example, weaving as a textile art of interlacing threads into cloth is one of the earliest forms of techne. Due to its nature, weaving was associated with fate, the three Moirae in ancient Greek mythology weaving the threads of human destiny. By using an always-expanding array of various materials—anything from paper to the flow of electrons—people kept increasing control of their environment and their fate (for better or for worse).

Communication as Correspondence

All this explains why the human is known as “Homo faber,” “Man the Maker”—often used in opposition to “Deus faber,” “God the Creator.” The human lifeworld is anything made and cultivated by the human. In the words of Clifford Geertz, “culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action” (1973: 145). Cultural fabric is textured in various ways—from air waves to pressure on the skin to marks on paper to flows of electrons. In fact, “textured fabric” is an oxymoron: fabric cannot be “untextured” no matter how “completely smooth” (read: “immediate”) it may appear. Techne, thus, brings about a transition from nature to culture. Whereas the object of natural science is nature (i.e., what is not created by others and arises by itself), the humanities’ object is culture as human self-expression or, rather, various self-expressions—a living fabric of meaning, constantly cultivated. The more significant an experience, the more mindful is the care put into its expression and preservation. While “virtually anything shared (or assumed to be shared) among members of a historically recognizable group can rightfully be called culture” (Hall 2014: 60), the human world is inconceivable without signifying expressions; hence, “in every culture ‘a unit’ . . . is simply anything that is . . . defined and distinguished as an entity” (Eco 1976: 67), that is, recognized and set aside as one and the same. Cultural units are found in texts as distinct significant expressions that are concrete, cohesive, and coherent: “culturally our communication . . . is organized through texts” (Brier 2015: 570). The relationship between text and techne is hard to miss. While all three words—“texture,” “fabric,” “text”—can be used as both uncountable and countable nouns, the first two are easier to perceive as the former, while the third one, as the latter; hence, “text” is something that is easier to recognize and count as one and the same expression, which can be (re)examined (Frim 2018). Today, of course, written words (let alone signs in other mediums) can be set in motion digitally, turning into fluid “textoids”—creations that can be modified by anyone with access to a computer, Wikipedia being one such example (Epstein 2012). “Text” is usually identified with any expression above the level of sentence (utterance), even though it may consist of just one sentence (utterance), for example, in the form of one-sentence poems. Texts, however, should be conceptualized as any human creations and not equated with just verbal expressions. Any human creation in any medium is a significant expression; semiotically speaking, poems, symphonies, advertisements, entire cities, and so on are all texts. It is only oral expressions, perhaps, that can hardly be called “texts”; it is even noted that “the term ‘oral text’ is just as much of an absurdity as is ‘oral’ literature’” (Kenner 1992: 145). Indeed,

Communication

Verba volant, scripta manent—“spoken words fly away, written words remain.” An oral expression is a speech event and an utterance—something sent forth as a sound; something textured, like every expression, but not textualized. As pointed out by Marshal McLuhan, though, electronic technologies have a retribalizing effect on human culture that returns to an oral/aural awareness of the tribe, albeit on the global scale. Thus, the human Geist is not given as an object and can only be (re)examined based on “mediation by the text, that is, by expressions fixed in writing but also by all the documents and monuments which have a fundamental feature in common with writing” (Ricœur 1981: 108). Because “human beings are text-producing animals, . . . those disciplines called ‘humanities’ are primarily engaged in the analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and production of texts” (Scholes 1982: 1). In other words, while both are considered “the human sciences,” the humanities focus on artifacts (texts), whereas social sciences focus on acts of praxis (i.e., various collective practices and social facts, such as institutions, roles, laws, and norms). Social phenomena are a result of communicative praxis wherein one does not aim at producing a specific product outside of oneself; rather, a goal and its mode of communication are inseparable. Or, in Aristotle’s words, “life is action and not production” (Aristotle, Politics: 1,254a7). In this sense, texts as artificial products can be viewed as something more mediated and not as close to life, as it were. It is sometimes stated that natural and social sciences are called upon to meet big challenges, such as finding new energy sources or fighting poverty, while the humanities turn to the consideration of small and smaller objects (Presner 2014). The humanities’ problems are as important, though, and it is not so much a matter of size as their specific nature: for the humanities, every text is individual and unique, and therein lies its significance. It is only by interpreting every text and seeing how they—unit by unit—are joined into one unity that we can truly understand what it means to be human.

Bind the Gap The innermost human meaning is often equated with the oral/aural immediate awareness, when/where no gap seems to exist between oneself and others, not to mention between oneself and oneself. And yet, gaps are such stuff as human communication is made of: we always try to get our message or get (in more than one sense of the word) others’ message across the gap and bridge it. As John Peters notes, gaps “are most visible at the margins of social life, in interactions with the mad and the aged, with children and strangers” (Peters 1994: 131). At such social gaps, though, we can still inter-

Communication as Correspondence

act with others and engage in a live back-and-forth, asking and answering questions, debating issues, and (hopefully) reaching consensus. As margins are stretched out and discourse gives way to texts, gaps become more visible—and more difficult to bridge. In such “acts of semiotic communication,” we still talk about interaction “of a person with another autonomous personality” (Lotman 1992: 132) or consider texts—“objectified manifestations” of meaning—to be “in the last analysis, . . . communication between human beings” (Apel 1972: 30). And yet, we deal here with texts, so there is wishful thinking in such statements and even an element of madness, since people “worry about how to get their ‘message’ across the gap (rhetoric)” and “worry about how to read texts not addressed to them (hermeneutics)” (Peters 1994: 131). It is one thing to interact with the aged or strangers, and it is another thing to communicate with those you have never met and can never meet, carrying “a dialogue with the dead” (Valauri 2010: 726). And yet, communication gaps “are not its ruin, but its distinctive feature” (Peters 1994: 130). In other words, though this be madness, yet there is method in it, life is short, but art is long, and so life goes on through techne by space- and time-binding. That the innermost meaning of humanness cannot be captured immediately becomes clear by turning to the origins of semiotics. Some may be surprised to find the book titled Osnovy Semiotiki Zabolevaniy Vnutrennikh Organov [Basics of Semiotics of Diseases of Internal Organs] (Gaponenkov et al. 2009), in which semiotics is presented as a science of the mechanisms of the occurrence of symptoms and syndromes of diseases of internal organs. Meanwhile, already Hippocrates believed that diseases should be treated scientifically based on their symptoms as kinds of bodily sensation noticed or felt, for example, skin rash or nausea. Symptoms, though, need to be considered as signs to understand and identify an illness; it is no accident that of special significance are “vital signs” (not “vital symptoms”). If diseases could be treated based on their direct symptoms, people would be able to do it themselves and so no doctors would be needed. As it is, “existence reflected in sign is not just reflected, but refracted in it” (Voloshinov 1973: 23); that is why diseases are treated based on how well symptoms are described by patients and interpreted by doctors. In human communication, it is more difficult to “diagnose” a meaning because it is refracted by (artificial) signs rather than presented by (natural) symptoms. It is important to remember that “the self does not know itself immediately, but only indirectly by the detour of the cultural signs of all sorts which are articulated on the symbolic mediations” (Ricœur 1991: 81). It should also be kept in mind that a text, as a manifestation of the human spirit, is not simply a message, but “a complex device that stores diverse codes that can transform received messages and generate new ones” (Lot-

Communication

man 1992: 132). In this sense, the margins of what is considered “human life” are not set and emerge in the process of signification, often called “unlimited semiosis” (Eco 1990). Perhaps, treating semiosis as limitless or infinite captures the irreducible nature of communication better because humans can only “partake in the ecstasy (ek-stasis) of discovery” (Macke 2010: 45); one does not find out what one is, but “partakes” in the activity of being simultaneously oneself and outside of oneself, momentarily binding this gap. The humanities’ search for meaning comes into sharp relief when compared to how inquiry is conducted by natural science. For the latter, its object of study (nature) is external and separate from the researcher, that is, it operates on the assumption of a radical difference between the object and the subject. This allows natural science to explain its object in terms of objective and general characteristics; all effects of individual dimensions (including the individual researcher) on the process of explanation and objects explained are deemed negligible (i.e., insignificant). The goal of natural science is to explain, that is, literally “to place or plan in flat land, sacrificing other dimensions for the sake of appearance. . . . to expound or put out at the cost of ignoring the reality or richness of what is so put out” (Wilden 1980: 155). When limitations of a scientific study are noted, such as constraints on generalizability, or internal and external validity, they all come down to one limitation inherent to the nature of inquiry: the human. For the humanities, the object of study is the human itself (the subject); thus, there is a radical similarity between the object and the subject. In other words, here “the subject and object are mutually implicated” (Ricœur 1981: 57). This makes understanding as the goal of the humanities both easier and more difficult; “understanding” literally means “standing in the midst of,” and so it is easier to understand oneself as a human because of “standing in the midst of ” other humans—and it is more difficult for the same reason. That is why, perhaps, Wilhelm Dilthey famously said, “We explain nature; man we must understand” (1990: 144; emphasis added). We can understand what it means to be human because we can focus on ourselves, as subjects, insofar as we can relate our (internal) life to how it is present in significant expressions. As Dilthey puts it, “we understand ourselves and others only if we project our experienced life into every sort of expression of our own and others’ lives” (2002: 109). Understanding is based on projection, that is, stretching out beyond ourselves into the external world, but not to the point of breaking with our inner world. For the humanities, every sort of expression is important, and those manifestations of the human spirit that are least susceptible to positive observation and measurement are of most interest. For the humanities, no expression of the human spirit is insignificant.

Communication as Correspondence

A Never-Ending Journey Expressions of the human spirit are comprehensively addressed by hermeneutics, which, in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s classic formulation, is “the practical art, that is, a techne, . . . the art of understanding” (2006: 29). The origins of hermeneutics go back to the need of interpreting texts in other languages, especially Scripture. Whenever a text is not clear, it calls for hermeneutical exegesis (i.e., seeking out its meaning). Just like doctors would be unnecessary if illness could be cured directly by those ill, based on symptoms, techne hermeneutiké would be unnecessary if all meanings were literal and manifest. Obviously, the further away from us a text is (temporally and spatially), the less transparent its meaning and the more necessary its interpretation. Hermeneutics in this sense can be conceptualized as “the discipline of bridging gaps and of theorizing about what is involved in this process” (Palmer 1977: 386). Techne hermeneutiké takes the form of operations on a text in order “to reveal the living existential dimensions beneath” (Moran 2018: 81), that is, to bring its spirit to effective presence (i.e., to ourselves). Understanding as a result of interpretation consists of two interconnected processes—explication and expression. What is implicitly present in a text needs explication. The unweaving process of explication is more organic than explanation, which involves spreading something out flat. Explication alone, however, is insufficient; the implicit material within a text also needs expression. These two processes take place simultaneously; hence, understanding is explaining by expressing. Interpretation is not a simple process of moving from point A to point B; rather, it is a circular and continuous movement between two points (the interpreter and the text)—a journey that never ends. The hermeneutic circle should not be identified with the circular argument—a type of reasoning where the conclusion is assumed in one of the premises; a common form of such logical fallacy is “begging the question.” The hermeneutic circle differs from circular reasoning because it is a process of producing new understanding. It is not a preargued circle, so to speak, but an open one in which it is impossible to reach the “closure of meaning.” If techne hermeneutiké is conceptualized as a journey that takes the form of a circle, the question of where to start may arise. The answer is—anywhere, simply because one must start somewhere. In other words, a “journey may imaginatively originate at any point on the hermeneutical circle” (Paparella 2012: 11). What is crucial, though, is eventually coming back to where the journey started—full circle back to Self. Interpretation is not simply going in circles but making full circles through space and time. When one goes in circles, nothing changes; when one makes a full circle, one returns with a

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new understanding of a cultural unit (including oneself). Or, putting it more poetically, “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” 1942). Every act of communication is an encounter of two forces—the interpreter and the text—through which each is taken beyond what is close at hand toward a new understanding. As Paul Ricœur reminds us: “we owe to Gadamer this very fruitful idea that communication at a distance between two differently situated consciousnesses occurs by means of the fusion of their horizons, that is, the intersection of their views on the distant and the open. Once again, an element of distanciation within the near, the far and the open is presupposed. The concept signifies that we live neither within closed horizons, nor within one unique horizon” (1981: 62). It is in such “fusion of horizons” that the human spirit is brought to a living presence. We are not moving to this point in a straight line, though, but in a circle, trying to achieve perfect understanding and exclaim “Beautiful moment, do not pass away!” With an increasing significance of a text, the importance of its perfect understanding is felt more sharply. More meaningful mass requires more energy to interpret it, but we cannot move faster than the speed of thought. All we can do is continue on our journey—the way a butterfly flutters its wings: the faster it does so, the more it seems that its wings form a perfect living circle. In a way, humanity is Psyche, a butterfly fluttering its wings. Every “fusion of horizons” is an act of penetration: not only does the interpreter penetrate into (the meaning of) the text, but the text penetrates into the interpreter’s mind and soul. Human communication is thus interpenetration—a love act, as it were, affecting the interpreter and the text (i.e., the overall human spirit). Humanity can continue only through communication and only through loving interpenetration. It is more accurate to conceptualize communication in terms of interpenetration rather than conversation or dialogue, which is usually done within the hermeneutics framework because interpenetration is an act of mixing together or mutual affection. Every act of communication is a fusion of different and concrete horizons, which requires more effort; it is easier to love humanity as a whole than one specific person. As Alain Badiou observes, if politics neutralizes individuals, then true love is based on the experience of difference and is always concrete; that is why “love begins where politics ends” (2005: 160). That is why (among other things) political science is a social science, whereas hermeneutics belongs to the humanities. The humanities face a difficult task of studying how the human spirit is cultivated and kept alive. If its object could be observed as an entity sepa-

Communication as Correspondence

rate from the human, it would lend itself to the inductive logic of the natural sciences. Yet, as Gadamer shows in his Truth and Method, this logic can hardly apply to the human sciences, tempting as such possibilities may be. It is also tempting to see the humanities approaching their object of study deductively; Gadamer states, for instance, that “understanding . . . is a special case of applying something universal to a particular situation” (1989: 310). Communication, of course, cannot exist without norms and rules, especially when it comes to social interaction; it is no accident that Gadamer talks here about specific situations in which individuals must “find the right course of action” (2019: 4). However, the human spirit can hardly be restricted to lawlike manifestations with logically predictable consequences. As Gadamer himself reminds us, the aim of the human sciences is not to confirm our universalized experiences but to understand something in its historical and unique concreteness: “how it happened that it is so” (1989: 4). Neither induction nor deduction will be of much help in achieving this aim: a search for the innermost meaning of humanity is contingent, complex, and continuous. As can be seen, “for hermeneutics, textual understanding (and human knowledge in general) is possible neither by induction . . . nor by deduction” (Nöth 1990: 336). The hermeneutic search for understanding is conducted on the basis of suppositions and can be identified with abduction (Nöth 1990: 336). On the one hand, abduction is different from induction; while both are ampliative, the latter appeals to frequencies of observations, whereas the former is based on some kind of leap to understanding and bypassing an empirical demonstration of all empirical steps (Douven 2017). For such leaps to be made, “one must imagine relations and linkages where previously there were none” (Smith 2012: 24). It is interesting to note that Gadamer labels an element found in the human sciences “artistic induction” (1989: 7), which seems similar to abduction. On the other hand, abduction is different from deduction: the latter is a logic of formal causality with conclusions determined by the premise, whereas the former is a logic of creating new meaning; in this respect, it is noted that “Abduction is the Logic of Efficient Causality” (Hansen 2017: 181). While it is more difficult to confuse with induction and deduction, abduction is easier to be conflated with the inference to the best explanation (IBE) because it, too, deals more directly with understanding (Park 2017). However, although closely related, abduction focuses on generating theories, whereas IBE concentrates on evaluating them and providing a stronger form of inference rather than merely a possible one (Mcauliffe 2015; Yu and Zenker 2018). It is sometimes noted that there is no progress in the humanities where, instead, calls are made to go backward—a pattern “hard to imagine . . . occurring in any field labeled ‘science’” (Gay 2009: 16). However, while every

Communication

creation of the human spirit can be understood only in its historical concreteness, understanding is always projected into the future; the present moment can be meaningful insofar as it effectively aligns with the past while “bringing people back to the future” (Montreuil, Fréchette, and Sofronas 2020). It should be remembered that abduction is stretching out, that is, expressing oneself by going beyond oneself; hence, every conjecture about the human spirit is “out there.” While the essence of abduction is better captured in terms of abducing rather than (more forceful) abducting, both words share the same meaning of “drawing or leading away.” Thus, “the human consciousness understands by means of the logic of abduction” (Lanigan 2013: 76), and “the abductive result is agency, the distinctive human capacity to illuminate meaning” (Catt 2017: 114). It can be said not only that is it human to abduce, but that “the breakthrough of the human capacity to abduce” (Brouwer 2004: 280) allows people to deal with communication as a process of ever-shifting meaning and gaining insight. An interesting case of the human capacity to illuminate meaning is found in rhetoric, which, since Aristotle’s classical work, has remained a core humanities discipline and the oldest tradition of communication study. At the same time, the classical rhetoric has been criticized for being regulative and simply modulating a meaning that is already there, as well as for its linear, cause-and-effect approach to communication (Sonesson 1997; Vivian 2004). In that light, communication is viewed as a mechanical process of skillfully reaching goals according to prespecified ends. The mechanisms at work here are based on inductive reasoning (in the form of example) and deductive reasoning (in the form of syllogism or enthymeme)—both fitting into Aristotle’s famous definition of “rhetoric” as “the faculty of observing in any given case available means of persuasion” (W. Rhys Roberts’ translation). However, other translations exist where rhetoric is rendered as “a faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject” (Hobbes’ translation); “the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever” (Freese’s translation); “an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion” (Kennedy’s translation); and “the power of investigating all that may be urged persuasively on any given subject” (Gillies’ translation). Even if we take W. Rhys Roberts’ translation, as the translator notes himself, “we must ‘observe,’ but not necessarily employ, the possible means of producing” (1924: 358). Considered a process of discovering or investigating and given that “Aristotle aligns rhetoric with inventional (creative) rather than practical (oratorical) considerations” (Herrick 2013: 72), rhetoric then should be viewed as a more active and open-ended search for meaning. Rhetoric is a techne of investigating and inventing rather than observing and seeing (what to employ). In other words, rhetoric is not a simple skill

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that can be mastered and used as a series of mechanical steps; rather, it is a techne “with a spirit of invention, . . . a noble act unique to humans,” reflecting “their genius” (Kelly 2004). It should be noted that, in translating Aristotle’s famous definition of “rhetoric,” not only is the faculty rendered differently, but also its scope. While “in any given case” and “on any given subject” are the most common variants, they do not fully capture the meaning of “peri hekaston,” which translates more adequately as “about each and every” and so should be read as “an assertion of rhetoric’s indefinite genitive source” (Foley 2013: 244). In this light, rhetoric can hardly be limited to only the inductive and deductive forms of reasoning, ignoring the role of abduction as a truly generative process. It can be recalled that Charles S. Peirce considered abduction as speculative rhetoric (see Smith 2012). Thus, “abduction . . . is . . . a rhetorical pattern on a par with but distinct from the enthymeme and the paradigm” (Bybee 1991: 296), making a weaker claim about what is possible. So, treating it simply as a technique for making persuasive speeches does not do rhetoric justice, for rhetoric is also the investigation of the ways for the human spirit to be alive in constantly changing situations of communication. It is for that reason that classical rhetoric has been followed by other conceptualizations, such as neo-rhetorical investigations and the works of Groupe μ where the operations on a text are conceptualized in terms of different kinds of metaboly (Oda 2007).

The Ghost in the Human As we can see, the humanities’ search for the meaning of the human spirit is carried out by investigating various language-based means of keeping it alive (rhetoric), sign processes involved in the creation of meaning (semiotics), and the overall nature of interpretation and understanding (hermeneutics). Human communication is meaningful insofar as people produce texts in which their experience is expressed. This way, people make their feelings and thoughts known to others—and to themselves; meaning can be produced only if one views oneself as the Other and the Other as oneself and so, in this sense, “we ourselves are what the other is” (Ricœur 1981: 55). Texts continue to be meaningful in/through interpretation; although it may be an exaggeration to say that “a text is even ‘outside’ only” (Vandevelde 1994: 283), a text is certainly partly outside, partly beside itself (with meaning). All texts as the products created by humans through various stages of its history form culture. In this sense, culture can be conceptualized as one text constantly (re)produced by everyone and all: even though most concrete texts have individual authors, culture is a collective creation,

Communication

keeping in mind that “culture must be institutionalized, which is to say, socially processed and made usable” (Luhmann 2013: 23). It is through the creative activity of producing texts that the human itself appears—the main product of poiesis cultivated by techne. We are communicated into humanity, or, rather, we communicate ourselves into becoming human. Although they focus on text, culture, and the human, the humanities ultimately search for the spirit without which nothing is meaningful; thus, the term “science of the spirit”—Geisteswissenschaften—is the most accurate designation for the humanities. Given its elusive nature, the humanities’ search for the human spirit is sometimes seen as “mere description, which would be nearer to poetry than to exact science” (Hjelmslev 1961: 8–9). Description, for instance, is considered the main method of traditional ethnography of communication (e.g., Geertz’s concept of “thick description”). Geertz’s vision, though, is more of “a revamped social science,” taking its “cues . . . from the humanities” (Hoffman 2009: 417); in other words, he focuses on social behaviors, albeit informed by culture. While he treats culture as ensembles of texts, Geertz still identifies more with the anthropologist close to the people who produced those ensembles, straying “to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (1973: 452). Here, the emphasis is on reading (trying to understand) social behaviors (e.g., Geertz’s analysis of two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes). As is clear from its name, though, ethnography calls for description or writing something down; in a way, the ethnographer always writes over someone’s shoulders and not necessarily while standing nearby. In his later works, Geertz paid more attention to the anthropologist as author and focused on writing and interpreting texts (1988). It should be recalled that poiesis is moved making rather than origination, the latter being a characteristic of physis. Hence, the “original” meaning in human communication is a moving target. In some spheres of life, such as law, it is more tempting to adopt the originalist approach. For instance, when US Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was asked by one of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in her confirmation hearing how she understands being an “originalist,” she said: “The text is text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it” (Zimmer 2020). Such a position, which implies that one can get into the heads of the framers of the Constitution, striving to “understand a writer better than he understands himself [sic]” (Gadamer 1989: 359), is open to criticism from the hermeneutic perspective that sees meaning as a constant process of interpretation (see Valauri 2011). That the term “originalism” itself causes different interpretations only proves it. Only by keeping in step with the times can a text remain meaningful.

Communication as Correspondence

Thus, it is not “mere description” that keeps the human spirit alive; rather, this process should be conceptualized as correspondence—a communication of exchanging significant expressions as littera missive (letters sent). In this process, gaps between surface and depth are bridged, and humanity remains one integral whole. Human communication is successful as long as there is a connection between all people (i.e., as long as they all correspond with/to themselves as being human). Every text as a significant expression is a letter sent to everyone; in a way, it is a “Note to Selves”—a kind of memo telling everyone (including oneself) what it means to be human. As long as everyone understands this memo (“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”—“I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me”) the way Publius Terentius Afer did, communication is successful, one expression succeeding another. In this regard, it becomes clear why memory is crucial for communication: techne is always a memory of making something, and so when “a loss of culture” is lamented, both something made and the memory of how to make it disappear. For example, by obsessing with new digital technologies, we are losing the art of handwriting and thus a part of humanness. Therefore, memory is “the sine qua non of communication, dependent on the TRACE” (Wilden 1980: 374). Culture is memorable communication: to be human is “to think memorable thoughts” (Ong 1982: 94)—and to express them. The humanities search for the innermost meaning of the human spirit and how it is made. At the same time, as Jean-Paul Sartre said, “it is by the lack that human reality comes into the world” (2001: 158). Nature is a continuous, real world with no gaps: Natura non facit saltum. The only thing it lacks is “the simple negative, i.e., an expression for ‘not’” (Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson 1967: 65). The presence of culture is “NEGATED PRESENCE, which must be digital, which distinguishes human communication” (Wilden 1980: 431). Hence, the human spirit can be defined with ever-increasing precision, but never as something that is really present. In other words, it can never be presented in terms of positive freedom only; the human spirit is always what it is and what it is not. No matter how many expressions we feel need to be produced, the human spirit can never be captured once and for all; “need can be fulfilled, desire cannot” (Wilden 1980: 431) because needs are part of the message, whereas desire is part of the code (which in our case is, also, that of digital symbols). The humanities deal with the human spirit that is elusive (Slingerland 2008). There is also always something playful about the human spirit; “poiesis, in fact, is a play-function” (Huizinga 1955: 119), and so “Homo Ludens” is an apt designation for people. This play-function is especially appreciated by postmodern thinkers interested in floating signifiers, simulacrum, erasure, and so on. In the words of Derrida, such “freeplay is always an inter-

Communication

play of absence and presence” (1978: 294). With their corporeal origins of showing on fingers (Latin digitus), the more they highlight the playfulness of the human spirit, the more digital technologies make it clear that the human spirit cannot be completely shown. Calling the human spirit “elusive,” therefore, may be somewhat wishful thinking, for it means “difficult to catch or achieve.” Unlike, for example, small birds that can prove surprisingly elusive, the human spirit is impossible to capture—but possible to lose. Since techne is above all the human ability to make something, humanity can exist as long as people are able to continue making significant expressions in which their spirit lives, that is, correspond with/to themselves as human beings. More and more often, we hear of the “posthuman” referring “to the destabilization and unsettling of boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, and mind and body” (Blackman 2008: 117). The main goal of the posthuman enterprise is developing the technologies powerful enough to conquer the human body. In the posthuman world, if communication is reduced to informational circuits, “the body ceases to exist as living being and becomes dead living matter” (Giblett 2008: 34). It is no longer the body that lives and breathes in the human sense (and so it is “dead”), but it is still “living matter”—or whatever it ends up being labeled as. If it comes to that, “then . . . man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1973: 387). All humans can do about it is continue their communication as correspondence so that “human” can remain a significant expression. It is only the humans who can give up the ghost in the human—and cease to be.

CHAPTER

. . . To Be at Home Everywhere ‰Í

Here Is a Twist As discussed in the previous chapters, communication as an object of scientific study has been identified with natural entities and processes, social institutions and facts, and manifestations of human spirit. There is one view, found in philosophical contemplation, the aim of which is to see “how all this hangs together” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 206). As stated by Wilfrid Sellars, “it is . . . the ‘eye on the whole’ which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise” (2007: 371). Thus, “the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Under “things in the broadest possible sense” are included “such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings,’ but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death” (Sellars 2007: 369). Communication “hanging together” as one whole should be conceptualized not only in the broadest possible sense, but also in the deepest possible sense (i.e., in terms of the distance from side to side of something as well as the distance from top to bottom). Overall, it is not so much breadth or depth as the distance from the observer (the subject) to the (horizon of the) object observed. Scientific examination is conducted through distanciation of the observer (the subject) from the object observed, including “a distanciation of the self from itself ” (Ricœur 1991b: 268). Distanciation is always a matter of the subject’s goal and the object’s complexity. The more particular an object, the more “practical” the goal, for instance, an understanding of a specific text (it is no accident that distanci-

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ation is most often viewed as a hermeneutical function and a condition of understanding). The more universal an object, such as “all things hanging together,” the more “impractical” the goal, such as contemplation. In this respect, although both techne and sophia (two of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues) require the ability to distance oneself from one’s immediate situation, they differ in terms of their objects and ends, the former tied to the efficient cause, and the latter to the final cause. To put it another way, philosophy is capable of the farthest distance from the object, while making “distanciation itself a moment of belonging” (Ricœur 1991: 268), that is, allowing one to continuously hold the object before one’s mind. Thus, in its own— broadest and deepest, most “distanciated”—way, it can help us deal with the “slippery hold” of communication as a unified object, neither holding it too firmly to the extreme point of stifling it by dogmatism, not too loosely to the extreme point of losing it to skepticism. Philosophy is sometimes viewed vis-à-vis science, the implication being that philosophy is not (a) science. However, philosophy can be, and is, conceptualized as science, “understood . . . to include the whole human encounter with the world” (Moran and Cohen, 2012: 63). In this sense, “philosophy is the science of being” (Heidegger 1988: 13) and “nothing other than the ultimate radicalisation of rigorous science” (Husserl 1975: 30). Kant’s lament that philosophy lost its meaning as “a scientific wisdom of life” (2002: 431) is refuted by many philosophical scientific investigations, including those by Kant himself. As a science, philosophy is sometimes considered “a guest among the humanities, and a dubious one” (Turner 2014: 382). Viewing philosophy as part of the humanities is understandable (although its intertwining with the history of natural science cannot be overlooked). And yet, the place of philosophy among the humanities is rightly doubted, for it has its own focus: problematizing one’s encounter with the world and reflecting on the conditions of the possibility of this experience. For an object to be in such focus, our reflection needs to hold it by avoiding the two extremes noted earlier, while at the same time having it both ways, so to speak (i.e., contemplating an object in its dynamic unity). Hence, going in just one direction along the same line (of thought), whatever it may be, is only partially productive since one covers more (conceptual) ground yet remains on the same plane. As noted earlier, in communication theory, for instance, we find numerous “turns,” such as “interpretive,” “cultural,” “discursive,” “postmodern,” and so on. A philosophical view requires that, at some point, one go in the opposite direction, making a complete rotation and producing an unexpected change, with both directions still forming one single movement. Only this way can one know both the inside and the outside, Self and the Other—different yet united into one unbroken whole. We find such a turn in the twist

. . . To Be at Home Everywhere

of the Möbius strip that preserves its two ends connected; one traverses the entire length of the strip without ever crossing an edge and returns to where one started, albeit on the other side. Once communication is philosophized as such a unified and topological object, we can focus on our living relationship not only with nature, others, and texts, but with everything— from cabbages and kings to any aesthetic experience. It is no accident that many philosophers of communication go through two phases in the development of their thought. For instance, two phases are usually distinguished in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work; the “early” Wittgenstein is associated with a more formal and structural analysis of language in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while the “later” Wittgenstein, with more social and cultural rules of “language games” in the Philosophical Investigations. Importantly, both phases offer insights into the nature of language, and so only by avoiding the danger of treating the two phases as “independent time-slices” can we appreciate “the unity of his philosophy” (Stern 1991: 203). Similarly, two phases are usually distinguished in Edmund Husserl’s thought, identified with the Halle years, marked by his focus on the objectivity of logic and expressed in Logical Investigations, and the Göttingen years, marked by his focus on the subjectivity of consciousness and expressed in Ideas I. Here, too, it should be remembered that Husserl’s thought “after the so-called ‘transcendental turn’ is largely in keeping with that of the Logical Investigations, despite whatever other differences there may be between the two periods” (Bachyrycz 2009: iv). In other words, the two phases cannot be completely separated; rather, they should be viewed as supplementing each other and contributing to a fuller appreciation of Husserl’s philosophical position. Perhaps most famously, two phases are identified in Kant’s thought, usually labeled “precritical” and “critical.” The thrust of his thought during the first phase can be seen in the title of his 1755 work—Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Whole Universe according to Newtonian Principles. His focus here is on the natural elements of the observable universe and the basic structure holding everything together, accepted unproblematically and viewed within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. At the same time, the theological ideas and philosophical speculation of the first phase anticipate important aspects of the second phase and are thus part of Kant’s overall philosophy. The thrust of his thought during the second phase can be seen in the titles of his three Critiques. It is in one of them—The Critique of Practical Reason—that Kant famously talks about “the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Only this part of the phrase is usually quoted; however, the first part is equally important: “two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them”

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(Kant 2004: 170). It highlights Kant’s revolutionary turn from the structure of the natural world to the structure of consciousness, transcendental apperception being the source of the unity of all experience and the foundation of knowledge. In traversing the entire length of the Möbius strip (i.e., contemplating the entire universe before coming back to self-consciousness), Kant was “weary . . . as well of dogmatism, which teaches us nothing, as of scepticism [sic], which does not even promise us anything” (2004: 25). While he was critical of both, though, he did not reject either: refusing to choose either one or the other extreme, Kant retained both positions, showing that there were constructive elements in both, conceptualizing consciousness of oneself as a unity of the empirical and the transcendental, sensibility and intellect. In other words, he carried out their synthesis, keeping in it one’s relation to the world as an object of contemplation. Philosophy is interested in what Kant called “synthetic a priori” judgments; unlike analytic a priori judgments that are self-contained and do not require any reference to anything external, synthetic a priori are exemplified by sensory impressions, while not wholly reduced to them. There is always an element of intuition in synthetic a priori, such as space and time as a priori forms of sensible intuition. Synthetic a priori represent the ideal of all knowledge since they possess the character of necessity and universality. It is in synthetic a priori judgments that our experience (of being connected to the world) is unified, our consciousness constantly searching for the “last foundations” and drawn to the absolute—that which is “behind the horizon.” One may wonder what philosophers actually do since philosophy appears divorced from life. Let us take a closer look at the philosopher’s “job description.”

The Philosopher’s “Job Description” To Critically Reflect First of all, the philosopher is engaged in contemplation and critical reflection, making synthetic judgments that embrace one’s encounter with the world and represent sensus communis. Kant writes about this critical faculty (when discussing taste as a kind of sensus communis) as a reflective act, which “takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind, and thereby avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could readily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence upon its judgment” (1951: §40). Such reflection, in other words, is universal in that it aims at casting critical light

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on experience; “critical” here is equated with “synthesis” (i.e., bringing everything into a unified whole). Critical philosophy is not quite the same as critical theory. Although a common ground between them can be seen in their pursuit of freedom, the former is aimed at clarifying and purifying concepts (setting them free, as it were), while the latter is aimed at emancipating those social groups whose ideologies are silenced and setting them free from dependence on monopolized power structures. Critical theories are grounded in social science and find their object in distortions of communication, suggesting ways for remedying the situation. For critical philosophy, its object is perfect: everything is always everything, equal to itself. There is nothing to “improve” here, but everything to critique, that is, reflect on it in relation to ourselves while reestablishing its unity as an object of our contemplation. Such contemplation may seem too abstract and unnatural; however, as emphasized by Kant, while “it may seem that this operation of reflection is too artificial . . . . In itself nothing is more natural than to abstract from charm and emotion where one is looking for a judgment intended to serve as a universal rule” (1951: §40). Moreover, the more naturally this unity seems to appear, the more perfect (universal) it is; as Kant puts it, “we are . . . delighted (strictly speaking, relieved of a need) when we encounter such a systematic unity among merely empirical laws, just as if it were a happy accident which happened to favor our aim, even though we necessarily had to assume that there is such a unity, yet without having been able to gain insight into it and prove it” (2000: 71; emphasis added). In this (de)light, everything is as if it were meant to be that way, seemingly seamless—necessary and universal. It should be noted that Kant speaks of a need relieved; desire, as noted earlier, can never be fulfilled. Philosophy brings in an element of purity (absoluteness) into every science; although Kant talks about “pure reason” only in one of his Critiques, we can speak of “theoretic pure reason,” “practical pure reason,” and “aesthetic pure reason” (Marias 1967). Thus, without philosophy there would be no natural science (see The critique of Pure Reason), no social science (see The Critique of Practical Reason), and no humanities (see The Critique of Aesthetic Judgment). In a way, philosophy brings a “perpetual peace” to all sciences. Communication lends itself to philosophizing as a synthetic process of connecting parts into a whole (Lanigan 2019). Communication as an object of philosophical science, though, can hardly be equated with the so-called theory of communication; as John Peters puts it, “almost everyone in the field of communication would claim to be a theorist at some level, but philosophers are relatively few” (2012: 508). Bearing in mind that theorists are not concerned “with metaphysics or the ultimate order of the universe” (Peters 2012: 508), it is not surprising that we find certain thinkers, such as

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Martin Heidegger or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, featured in books on philosophy of communication rather than theory of communication (Chang and Butchart 2012; Mangion 2011). As can be seen, philosophy, often associated with “just ideas” and not “doing anything,” actually creates a new type of practice—critical reflection on what forms a basis for any science (including philosophy itself). And so, a first duty of the philosopher is to critically reflect on everything.

To Postulate Philosophers do not just contemplate and reflect, but also formulate the results of their contemplation and reflection. It is often believed that these results take the form of axioms as self-evident truths. According to Descartes, such “primary notions which are presupposed for the demonstration of geometrical truths are readily accepted by anyone, since they accord with the use of our senses. Hence there is no difficulty there, except in the proper deduction of the consequences, which can be done even by the less attentive, provided they remember what has gone before” (1984: 111). Since “geometry” comes from the Ancient Greek geo-, meaning “earth,” and metron, meaning “measurement,” such truths are literally grounded and can be arrived at by taking a series of steps (perhaps originally literal steps on the ground). In the study of communication (mostly as social interaction), such well-known axioms exist as “Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a meta-communication” (Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson 1967) and “As nonverbal expressive communication increases, uncertainty levels decrease, and vice versa” (Berger and Calabrese 1975). The importance of axioms cannot be doubted for they allow us to predict the results of our actions. However, axioms can hardly be seen as a foundational philosophical notion; for instance, “Descartes was searching for a philosophical Archimedean point from which the whole world could be ‘heaved,’ as it were, into the light of reason, . . . but his ‘axiom’ could not fulfill this role” (Pivčević 1970: 20). Important as proceeding deductively may be, one can carry out such reasoning only this far, so to speak; we still need the (more fundamental) knowledge of how concepts (such as “axiom” and “deduction”) are generated in the first place, without being obscured by the prejudices of the senses particular to this or that situation (i.e., by any subjectivity). As Descartes says, “all the mistakes made in the sciences happen . . . simply because at the beginning we make judgements too hastily, and accept as our first principles matters which are obscure and of which we do not have a clear and distinct notion” (1984: 419). One can hear in these words the anticipation of the “natural attitude” that Husserl was critical of and

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called to overcome, rendering those “obscure” concepts more and more pure through a series of reductions (the influence of Descartes’ philosophy on Husserl’s ideas is well-known). Descartes also speaks about the mistake of making judgements “too hastily,” which brings up an important aspect of being a philosopher. In ancient Greece, legal proceedings were limited by the amount of time allotted for the presentation of cases, time measured with a water clock—clepsydra (meaning “that which steals time”—kleptes means a “stealer” [literally or figuratively]). In that regard, Socrates makes a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer: the former has time, whereas the latter “is always in a hurry; there is the clepsydra limiting his time, and the brief limiting his topics, and his adversary is standing over him and exacting his rights” (Plato, Theaetetus). From Plato’s Apology, we learn that Socrates had to stop defending himself in court because the water in the water clock ran out. He did not “beat the clock,” but he did “beat the time,” so to speak. A true philosopher, therefore, takes time and never does anything “too hastily” (Critchley 2010). The mistake of making judgments “too hastily” must be avoided, and time must be taken “in order to lay the first foundations of philosophy” (Descartes 1984: 221). This way, one’s encounter with the whole world becomes possible as an object of contemplation. The results of philosophical reflection, as noted earlier, cannot be equated with axioms as self-evident truths; rather, they take the form of postulates. The nature of postulate is addressed in-depth by Kant, who speaks of it as “the practical proposition that contains nothing except the synthesis through which we first give ourselves an object and generate its concept . . . ; and a proposition of this sort cannot be proved, since the procedure that it demands is precisely that through which we first generate the concept” (1998: 333). Drawing a parallel with mathematics, Kant (not surprisingly) also addresses a postulate in his Logic, where it is defined as “a practical, immediately certain proposition or a fundamental proposition which determines a possible action of which it is presupposed that the manner of executing it is immediately certain” (1992: §38). With all that in mind, Kant emphasizes that (focusing here on practical reason) “since there are practical laws that are absolutely necessary (the moral laws), then if these necessarily presuppose any existence as the condition of the possibility of their binding force, this existence has to be postulated” (1998: A 633–4/B 661). Also, Kant notes that a postulate is “a theoretical proposition although not one demonstrable as such” (Kant 1996: 122). Let us unpack these formulations by highlighting their most important points. First, a postulate brings everything into a unified whole, or, as Kant puts it, “contains nothing except the synthesis.” Second, a postulate is “immediately certain,” although a lot of time may be spent in reflec-

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tion leading to it; as Sellars puts it, “one can ‘have one’s eye on the whole’ without staring at it all the time” (1963: 35). Here, the distance between the subject (oneself) and the object (everything else) is the shortest, their unity formed instantaneously, as a happy accident. Third, because such synthesis is immediate, a postulate is not demonstrable. Fourth, although immediate and not demonstrable, a postulate is practical: it generates a concept, gives us an object, and determines a possible action. Fifth, a postulate is necessary: through such a procedure with binding force, an object comes into existence, or, as Kant puts it, “this existence has to be postulated.” And sixth, a postulate is fundamental, for it provides the foundation for universality. One may still find such philosophical reflection to be remote from everyday experiences, focusing less on the “objective reality” itself and more on how our knowledge of it is formed. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that since Kant’s critical phase, philosophy has privileged epistemology over ontology, placing less value on “the being of objects in favor of how these objects appear to us humans, who interact with or reflect upon them” (Strathausen 2019: 108). The French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has even referred to Kant’s critical ideas as “the Kantian catastrophe” (Morgan 2017) instead of “the Kantian revolution.” Yet Kant’s philosophy deals with objects as they are constituted and regulated by the human mind; in other words, “Kant’s critique . . . is not just an epistemology, but also includes an ontological dimension beyond the things-in-themselves” (Strathausen 2019: 113). That is why his philosophy has not lost its significance to this day. As Richard Rorty notes, “on both sides of the Channel . . . most philosophers have remained Kantian. Or, as a saying popular among philosophers goes, ‘You can philosophize with Kant or against Kant, but you cannot philosophize without him’” (see Beck 1965: 3). As Rorty notes, “even when they claim to have ‘gone beyond’ epistemology, they have agreed that philosophy is a discipline that takes as its study the ‘formal” or “structural’ aspects of our beliefs, and that by examining these the philosopher serves the cultural function of keeping the other disciplines honest, limiting their claims to what can be properly ‘grounded’” (1979: 162). Thus, a second duty in the philosopher’s “job description” is to formulate postulates. In that regard, according to an old joke, mathematicians need just a pencil, paper, and a bin, while philosophers are even more frugal because they do not even need an eraser. Easy as it may sound, this duty is extremely important because “all knowledge is sustained by a ground of postulates and finally by our communication with the world as primary embodiment of rationality” (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 42).

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To Let It Be Philosophy seems to be “serenely passive” and “completely unworldly” (Peters 2012: 507–8). Philosophical reflection, though, manifested in a postulate, is practical in that it determines a possible action. Philosophical contemplation, therefore, is not in the least passive, for its action consists in “weighing the judgment, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate. This, in turn, is effected by so far as possible letting go the element of matter, i.e., sensation, in our general state of representative activity” (Kant 1951: §40). It is important to note again that an action of weighing the judgment takes time. Also, it is crucial to emphasize that this action is taken as far as possible by holding the experience of this action in one’s mind neither too firmly nor too loosely, letting a unified object come into existence and a concept for it be generated; as Heidegger puts it, “to let be is to engage oneself with beings” (Heidegger 1993: 125). Merleau-Ponty writes very eloquently about such objects that “offer themselves . . . only to someone who wishes not to have them but to see them, not to hold them as with forceps, or to immobilize them as under the objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to witness their continued being” (1968: 101). Thus, philosophical reflection is neither passive nor active, neither interrogative nor imperative; it is serene contemplation “before which the things form and undo themselves in a sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the no” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 102). Such philosophical reflection is exemplified by phenomenology, called by Husserl prima philosophia. Phenomenology is aimed at providing absolute and indubitable foundations for all possible knowledge. The relationships between phenomenology and communication have received an in-depth treatment in the works of Richard Lanigan (1987; 1988), and the phenomenological tradition is considered one of the main traditions in communication theory (Allen 2017). Phenomenology, as the name suggests, studies phenomena, that is, any lived experiences that present themselves reflexively to our consciousness. Although it conceives of itself as a rigorous science, phenomenology does not use any instruments or calculations: it approaches its object (anything that appears to our consciousness) by way of reflection and arrives at a pure structure of this experience. The overall goal of phenomenology is “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself ” (Heidegger 1972: 34). Let us take a closer look at the nature of that “that” as a phenomenon. A phenomenon is what we let appear to our consciousness as a unified object. Just like a postulate, a phenomenon cannot be demonstrated. Deduc-

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tion can be considered the ultimate method of gaining true knowledge only if we fail to hear “monstrum” in “de-monstration”; hence, a phenomenon should be conceptualized in terms of monstration, or showing (of) itself. In the words of Jacques Derrida, “it shows itself [elle se montre]—that is what the word monster means” (1995: 386). The word “monstrosity” in Ancient Greek is téras, meaning “wonder,” “marvel”: it is a wondrous sign through which the sublime shows itself in some manner. “Monster” is related not only to monstrare (“to show”), but also to monere (to warn). Monstration, therefore, is also an omen, foreboding and warning. (It is no surprise, then, that we find it in phenomenology as the study of anything that appears.) Monstrosity is not a result of degenerative development or illness, but that which underlies life itself (see Shildrick 2002). Such treatment of monstrosity goes back to Aristotle, who admitted that “even that which is contrary to Nature is in a certain sense according to Nature” (1912: 770b). In this sense, a phenomenon contains the characteristics of monstrosity, appearing as something (sublime) in something else (human) to which it does not naturally belong; “so understood, a monster is precisely the belonging together of a divine excess and the mundane thing through which such an excess shows itself ” (Ewegen 2014: 106). It is such “belonging together,” such connection, that we feel—or fail to feel. All phenomena exceed nature within nature and cannot be completely demonstrated as physically present in their entirety; they just monstrate themselves. Monstrosity is the most difficult thing to direct our consciousness to as a stationary object; a (monstrous) phenomenon seems to appear to our consciousness instantly as a synthesis of the divine and the human. We can understand why “starting from antiquity, the monster’s figure was identified with a providential indication of the physical presence of something unknown, beyond and beyond” (Golynko-Wolfson 2016). Every time we let the world appear to our consciousness, we experience the sublime— something beyond the limit; it is at this point that “the imagination attaints to its maximum, and in the effort to go beyond this limit it sinks back to itself ” (Kant 2007: 83). Thus, “that” which we let show itself is monstrosity—“natural manifestation of unnaturalness” (Foucault 2003 81) or “unnatural manifestation of naturalness”; “formless form” (Derrida 2000a: 420) or “formed formlessness”; “immediate mediation” (Mittman and Dendle 2009) or “mediated immediateness.” Here, we deal with something wonderfully monstrous or monstrously wonderful—the absolute reversibility. Here, the distance between oneself and everything else but disappears; there is only one whole experience of relatedness. The experience of communication cannot be equated only with being connected to what is considered nature, other members of society with

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whom one interacts, or cultural artifacts; “the crucial point is that human subjectivity both underlies and emerges from experience, and that the world neither predates nor postdates the subject, but co-emerges alongside and together with it” (Strathausen 2019: 123). By “it” here, we should understand everything monstrous that appears to our consciousness. In this light, Kant’s categorical imperative can be reformulated thus: “Give up futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate” (Strathausen 2019: 118). In a way, we are no longer just “naturally” human or nonhuman, social or cultural beings; we are just “things themselves,” reflexively presenting themselves to themselves; “we are . . . the way that the universe comes to self-consciousness” (Peters 1999: 256), and so “we should act as if our choices shape the universe” (Peters 1999: 156). The nature of monstrosity presents a special challenge to our reasoning. This challenge cannot be adequately met by resorting to deductive proofs, which “were probably disseminated in the live interaction of small groups of compass-literate people . . . chatting around a writing surface (sand, wax tablet, or papyrus) on which diagrams could be drawn” (Alexander 2012: 330). Such proofs are literally very much down-to-earth; that is why, according to Descartes, the de-monstration of geometrical truths can be done even by those who just pay some attention to what has gone before. We cannot, however, fully account in a demonstrative fashion for the meaning of monstrosity because it simply shows itself. All meaningful phenomena are imbued with monstrosity, its excess keeping communication elusive and wondrous—if we let it show itself. As Daniel Otto Jack Petersen puts it, “there is a sense here of things . . . so overflowing with disclosure that they foreclose closure in a plenum of permanent monstrosity. Let us call this unclosure” (2020: 119). The nature of monstrosity calls for a different kind of reasoning, grounded in everyday experience and transcending every capacity of human reason at the same time. Such a response to monstrosity is found in adduction: “the nonlogical operation of leaping from the chaos that is the real world to a hunch or tentative conjecture” (Blaug 1992: 17), which is different from deduction, induction, and abduction (or hypothetic inference, or retroduction). It is known that Peirce in a letter of 1911 used “adduction” as a possible replacement for “induction.” However, as Mark Blaug reminds us, “enormous confusion might be avoided if we could only enforce the linguistic usage of ‘adduction’ for nondemonstrative styles of reasoning vulgarly labeled ‘induction’” (1992: 17). While induction is often viewed as the opposite of deduction, it is in fact adduction that “contrasts neatly with ‘deduction’” (Black 1970: 137). Because it is conceptualized as a tentative con-

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jecture, adduction may sound like Peirce’s abduction; yet the two claims are different. Peirce never seemed to clearly differentiate between hypothesis (read: abduction) and abduction (read: adduction) (Lanigan, pers. comm.). A distinction between abduction and adduction can be drawn as follows: “the abductive logic means that in the same context (Rule), an internal comparison (Result) establishes the identity of two phenomena (Case); while the adductive logic means that in different contexts (Rule), an external comparison (Result) establishes the identity of two phenomena (Case)” (Lanigan 1992: 217). Also, Lanigan emphasizes that “the adductive claim is a sign relation by being universal and a priori” (Lanigan 1995: 63) and explicitly identifies it with the realm of the critical: “CRITICAL = use of adductive logic” (Lanigan 1992: 217). Although Peirce speaks of abduction as “the only kind of reasoning which supplies new ideas,” which is “in this sense, synthetic” (1932: 777), new objects are postulated and concepts are generated through adduction, wherein one lets the unified experience of one’s encounter with the world be renewed. It should be noted here that, similar to Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Kant, Peirce’s thought can be seen falling into two periods. In the early period, he focused in a pragmatic fashion on reasoning as an evidencing process, and in the later period, he reinterpreted those ideas in a more metaphysical fashion, postulating the universal connectedness of all things (Burks 1946; Parker 1998). The nature of monstrosity lends itself to adduction as a nondemonstrative kind of reasoning because it cannot be observed, conclusively inferred, or hypothesized: it can only be experienced, that is, “the monster is known through its effect, its impact” (Mittman 2012: 6). Adduction does not demonstrate anything but makes the monstration of something possible. It calls on us so we can feel its effect, and this is as close as one can get to the (limit of) phenomenology of experience. We cannot turn away from the monstrosity adduced through experience because we cannot escape ourselves; that is why monsters “stir recognition within, a sense of our openness and vulnerability (Shildrick 2002: 81)—and oneness with the world. That is why “a monster is always alive” (Derrida 1995: 386). The wisdom of philosophical reflection calls for everything that is human, all-too-human—care, faith, hope, and love, and for something that is all-too-more-than-human (Petersen 2020). Thus, a third duty of the philosopher, therefore, is to let it be, that is, one’s encounter with the world appearing as a unified experience, always familiar and new. This duty is carried out with the help of adduction. Denis Diderot writes that it is impossible “to set a limit to the ideas that are aroused and linked in a philosopher who meditates or who listens to himself in silence and darkness” (2002). In other words, the philosopher lets every stimulus show itself and become part of his/her consciousness; according to

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the famous definition by Novalis, “philosophy is really . . . the desire to be at home everywhere” (2007: 155). On the one hand, it is appropriate to identify philosophical reflection with “desire,” for desire cannot be fulfilled; it is no accident that philosophy is the “love of wisdom,” not its consummation. On the other hand, “desire” puts too much emphasis on one’s agency, for it expresses a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen (the same applies to “urge” that is sometimes used in place of “desire” in translations of Novalis’s phrase). The strength of an action should somehow be counterbalanced by a weakness, some passivity. To that end, instead of “desire,” such English words as “inclination,” “instinct,” and even “shoot, newly grown plant stem” could work well to express this sense of passivity: all are the equivalents of German der Trieb used in the original text of Novalis’s Das Allgemeine Brouillon. They highlight the meaning of natural tendency or acquired propensity, offsetting an intense wish to attain or possess something. In the Russian translation of Novalis’s phrase, der Trieb is rendered as tyaga, related to tyagotenie and parallel to the Latin gravitare. In the literal sense, this word means a tendency to move (under an earthly weight) toward a center of gravity or other attractive force (see the law of universal gravitation). In the figurative sense, it means being attracted to a place, person, or thing; in this sense, we feel the tyaga to escape the force of gravitation, attracted to stars, planets, and other objects in the universe. Thus, we are drawn to be at home anywhere that draws us.

To Listen Given its nature, it is understandable why monstrosity is usually identified with liminal, threshold zones. As part of one’s lived experience, it is barely perceptible and can be known only by its effect; most naturally, it appears to the stream of one’s consciousness through listening. With the help of visual mediums, objects are literally limited against a spatial horizon, “but in the case of the auditory field that horizon appears most strikingly as temporal. Sound reveals time” (Ihde 1976: 102). Thus, listening, as attunement, is best suited to capture the immediacy of letting the world monstrate itself in one’s consciousness. Out of the four traditionally identified forms of communication—speaking, reading, writing, and listening—the latter has been given less scholarly attention than the other three, only now beginning to receive comprehensive conceptualization (Worthington and Bodie 2020). Just like monstrosity, listening is elusive and does not lend itself easily to sustained conceptualizing; yet that is exactly why it “is a philosophical challenge that invites communication theorists to rethink communication through the lens of listening” (Lipari 2010: 348). This challenge can be met, however, only if the

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nature of listening itself is understood more fully in a philosophical light. To that end, let us briefly discuss its main characteristics. First, although listening is an active process—“we hear, not the ear” (Heidegger 1996: 47)—it is still less active than the other forms of communication (more natural and more immediate): all one needs to do is just be still without making any visible movements. Also, it is the earliest (primary) form of communication. In utero, the developing embryo and fetus cannot read, write, or speak but can perceive sound vibrations; the hearing thresholds in fetal development have been experimentally identified (Fletcher and O’Toole 2016). The fetus itself is an auditory organ and even looks like an ear on a sonogram. This way, one’s first contact with the world is established, and there is nothing one can do to exercise control over it. Even later, as one becomes more self-aware, there is not much one can actively do with/ against listening, short of closing one’s ears. Second, listening has no fixed boundaries or directionality: it “favors sound from any direction. We hear equally well from right or left, front or back, above or below. . . . There is nothing in auditory space corresponding to the vanishing point in visual perspective” (Carpenter and McLuhan 1960: 67–68). It could be argued that sound, as such, is nothing but a vanishing point, nothing but immediacy, unless recorded and “saved” from disappearing. What is beyond doubt is that while the eye pinpoints objects in physical space against a certain background, the ear is open to the entire world and it does not matter from where the sound comes. For that reason, it is the “phenomenology of listening” that is best suited to “study the experience (engagement) of the mind (and body) interacting with (responding to) phenomena (whether objects or other subjects)” (Lipari 2020: 37). Also, for that same reason (among other things), listening is directly connected to thought, unlike the other forms of communication: you can say “I hear you,” meaning “I understand you,” but not—in that sense—“*I speak you,” “*I read you,” or “*I write you.” Also, listening—again unlike the other forms of communication—is connected to the meaning of connectedness: as such, “I hear you” also means “I’m with you,” “I follow you.” And third, listening highlights the ethical underpinnings of communication. It is easier to see why listening is conceptualized as “an encounter with radical alterity” (Lipari 2010: 350) because we listen to the Other; see the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom to communicate is to recognize the Other, to give and be accountable to the Other. It is more difficult yet equally important to see “the role of listening . . . in the constitution of the self ” (Beard 2009: 9). And yet, it is only by listening to the Other that we become ourselves; this is clearly seen in the Russian equivalent of the verb “to obey,” slushat’sya, which literally means “to listen to oneself.” Listening, therefore,

. . . To Be at Home Everywhere

contains a double movement—toward the Other and toward oneself; “thus, in listening is born the possibility of a relation to the other and a relation to a community of others” (Johnson 2016: 228). A close link between obedience and listening is found in many cultural traditions and reflected in such languages as Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. What is crucial to recognize here is that the ethics of communication can be conceptualized only in terms of listening to the Other and the Self at the same time; it is insofar as the subject (the Self) and the object (the Other) are united into one whole that communication is constituted and regulated. In this regard, one can recall Bacon’s famous aphorism—Natura non nisi parendo vvincitur—translated either as “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed” or “Nature is conquered only by obedience” (i.e., by being listened to). Thus, a fourth duty of the philosopher is to listen. This was understood well by Wittgenstein—a true philosopher who appreciated the importance of listening to/obeying the Universe—see the seventh proposition of his Tractatus: “That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.”

To Express the Inexpressible The philosopher is one who also expresses self. One can remain silent only so long: paraphrasing Wittgenstein’s proposition, we can say: “That whereof a philosopher cannot remain silent, thereof a philosopher must speak.” In this light, not all interpretive approaches to communication can be considered equally philosophical. For instance, although hermeneutics and phenomenology are often conceptualized as philosophical traditions, the former’s focus is on interpretation of texts, posing questions and giving possible answers about their meaning, while the latter’s focus is on phenomena that do not have clearly understood or widely accepted significations and call for the very possibility of their meaning to be expressed. And, as Louis Hjelmslev states, it is “in a language, and only in a language” that we can “work over the inexpressible until it is expressed” (1961: 109). Language is the most universal and absolute phenomenon used in communication. Anthony Wilden notes “that a discourse has a subject—a relation between a sender and a receiver—whereas a language does not” (1980: 237). What he says of discourse, though, applies to speech and text as well. All our subject-object power relations, expressed in speech, discourse, and text, pale before the power of language: we feel that language as such speaks (to/ through) us. Merleau-Ponty captures this essence of language well when, with a reference to Paul Valéry, he writes that “language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical

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reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth” (1968: 155). Language is most suited to deal with the monstrosity of phenomena, of which Wittgenstein in the Tractatus speaks thus: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical” (1922: 6.522). Even though he meant to draw the limit of language in the propositions of the natural sciences, viewing everything that lies on the other side of the limit as nonsense (in terms of the logical clarification of thoughts), Wittgenstein exhibited a paradox, which, as Bertrand Russell confessed in his introduction to the Tractatus, left him “with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort” because “Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said” (1922: 22). In his later writings, Wittgenstein came to see language differently (i.e., as language-games and forms of life). Thus, although the mystical does not lend itself to empirical verification, investigating it is a noble goal of philosophical reflection. While he considered running against the walls of the language cage to be hopeless, Wittgenstein admitted that he could not help deeply respecting this tendency in the human mind (Wittgenstein 1965). The philosopher, therefore, is one who hears the possibility of the emergence of a new concept that can bring an object into existence and finds language for such synthesis. In this sense, the philosopher deals with something for which no ready-made words exist, something which cannot be, yet must be, expressed. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, “what would be the worth of a philosopher of whom one could say: he did not create the concept?” (1994: 6). When they say, however, that philosophy does “find any final refuge in communication, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create ‘consensus’ and not concepts” (1994: 6), they clearly refer to discourse rather than communication overall. For instance, in the same book (What Is Philosophy?), they note that “every philosopher runs away when he or she hears someone say, ‘Let’s discuss this,’” specifically referring to such discussions “as ‘communicative rationality,’ or ‘universal democratic conversation’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 28). Thus, they clearly have in mind the likes of Aristotle and Plato, rather than Habermas, when viewing philosophy as “the discipline that involves creating concepts” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 5). Indeed, they see as truly philosophical “Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’s cogito, Leibnitz’s monad, Kant’s condition, Schelling’s potency, Bergson’s duration [durée]” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 5). Their ideas are echoed by other thinkers. For example, Mikhail Epstein notes that philosophers create “a new language of intellectual wonderment and estrangement, a language that is orthogonal to common sense and critically cleansed of all clichés and meanings corrupted by everyday use, . . . e.g., idea (Plato), thing-in-itself (Kant), Aufhebung (Hegel), Ubermensch (Nietzsche),

. . . To Be at Home Everywhere

and Zeitigung (Heidegger)” (2012: 109). To these, we can add Lacan’s extimité, Bakhtin’s chronotope, Derrida’s différance, and Lyotard’s differend, to mention some of the most well-known concepts. In such cases, “some concepts must be indicated by an extraordinary and sometimes even barbarous or shocking word” (Parnet and Deleuze 2002: 7). Such language formations are to some extent “monsters”; one can even say that a philosopher, in the process of expressing the inexpressible, becomes partially a monster as well. At the same time, only this way can we appreciate how, while running away from discussions, a philosopher is drawn to/by language, for, as noted by von Humboldt, “languages are not only the proper means of presenting truth already known, but also help reveal truths yet unknown” (see Innis, 1982: 37). A fifth duty of the philosopher, therefore, is to do something impossible and necessary—to express the inexpressible. The philosopher is one who listens to the universe and creates a language that may sound—especially at the beginning—barbaric and shocking. In a recent book entitled Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger (2020) brings together Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, and Heidegger in their search for the one language, pure and perfect, underlying all being. Trying to create such a language is what all philosophers do, and this includes not only a vocabulary but a syntax as well (Deleuze and Guattari 1994).

To Keep Vigil Philosophy’s attraction lies in its monstrous language (among other things). As eloquently argued by Vladimir Bibikhin, a Russian scholar who translated works of Wittgenstein, Arendt, Gadamer, and Derrida, philosophy’s strange language is a reminder that the illusion of habituality enveloping the world is just that—an illusion—and that our language is not supposed to be easy in order to be truly natural (2002). When we read philosophers’ works, we begin to learn a new language and see the world, and ourselves in the world, in a new light. Just like we learn to speak Spanish or English, we learn to speak Aristotle and Kant, Wittgenstein and Cassirer. Philosophy plunges us through the familiarity of the “natural” attitude, so to speak, reminding us that communication is authentic insofar as we relate to someone or something, and that a lived experience of such relationship must be constantly renewed. Philosophy itself, of course, cannot plunge into the familiarity of accepting everything for granted, but should reflect on its own experience of connecting to the world. In this regard, “a philosopher could scarcely be said to have his eye on the whole in the relevant sense, unless he has reflected on the nature of philosophical thinking. It is this reflection on the place of philosophy itself, in the scheme of things which is the distinctive trait of the philosopher” (Sellars 1963: 37). It can be understood

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why, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “philosophy is not a particular body of knowledge; it is the vigilance which does not let us forget the source of all knowledge” (1964: 110). The philosopher is one who stays—and keeps us—awake by drawing the limits of experience and making sure it sinks back to itself. In so doing, the philosopher keeps vigil for understanding the foundations of being, that is, how it is possible for things and “things” to hang together. Such devotional care cannot be equated with the spreading of understanding after the fact—the way “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk,” in Hegel’s famous phrase. For him, knowledge is suspended until the Absolute Spirit goes through a number of historical stages and comes to be aware of itself. This view holds for a philosophy of history; however, “the same is not true for the beautiful or for any deed in itself ” (Arendt 1992: 77) (i.e., for philosophy in general). Since nothing can be judged until it has entered its closing stage, a nocturnal if not moribund nature of Hegel’s phrase gives a new meaning to the idea of philosophy as “caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death” (Derrida 2008: 17). This idea, most famously expressed by Plato, who says that “those who practice philosophy correctly practice dying” (Phaedo: 67e), is found in the works of other thinkers, such as Cicero (“Philosophizing is nothing else than getting ready to die”) and Michel de Montaigne (“To philosophize is to learn how to die”).Yet, the devotional care of philosophic vigil cannot be equated with just “practicing dying”: wisdom is not only rehearsing for one’s death or arising only when the object to be understood (life) has played itself out. The philosopher keeps vigil for experience to be unfolding in such a way that every deed in itself could feel “immediately certain,” the unity of the subject (oneself) and the object (everyone/everything else) formed instantaneously, as if by a happy accident. These are the “accidents” of absolute reversibility, when it is impossible to say whether the subject inhabits the object or vice versa. The philosopher comes as close as can be (“awakes”) to the immediacy of experience, which is enlivened—note the etymology of “vigil”: “to be strong,” “to be lively.” Perhaps philosophy should be seen not (only) as Minerva, but, for instance, the raven, believed to be a harbinger of cosmic secrets and a divine messenger that reveals omens and foretells the future. Also, in ancient cultures the raven was believed to be a solar animal, associated with the sun, light, and wisdom. It is interesting that Susan Archer Talley Weiss, a friend of Edgar Allan Poe, writes that he had originally intended to write his famous poem based on the incident of an Owl—a nightbird with its ghostly presence and inscrutable gaze. Choosing the Raven for the sake of “Nevermore,” he had never been satisfied with the poem and on many occasions attempted to destroy it (Weiss 1907). Perhaps Poe would have been happier if he had stayed with the owl, the refrain of the poem being something like “Hoots the Owl: hoo-hoo-hooooo!”

. . . To Be at Home Everywhere

To philosophize is (to learn) to live, and a sixth duty of the philosopher is to remind everyone to be alive. Ultimately, as Nietzsche writes, “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves anything, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities; all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words” (1997: 187). Philosophers are usually judged by the focus of their subject-matter—in this respect, Heidegger is considered the quintessential philosopher of being; Levinas, the quintessential philosopher of ethics; and Wittgenstein, the quintessential philosopher of language (Wolcher 2005). The truly quintessential philosopher overall, though, is one for whom philosophizing and living are one; in this sense, “Socrates is the quintessential philosopher; Socrates is pure philosophy personified” (Kreeft 2002: 25). It is hard to live one’s (particular) life so that it can come to possess the character of necessity and universality unless one’s deeds are not only immediately witnessed, but also universally mediated (consider Plato’s Dialogues where Socrates is the main character). In such cases of “immediate mediation” or “mediated immediateness,” we do not doubt the authenticity of an action. The action of Socrates’ execution is universally presupposed since “the manner of executing it [tragic pun intended—Igor E. Klyukanov] is immediately certain” (Kant 1992: §38). Here, then, is a summary of all the duties in the philosopher’s “job description”: first, to critically reflect; second, to formulate postulates; third, to let everything be; fourth, to listen; fifth, to express the inexpressible; and, sixth, to be vigilant. These duties cannot be separated into “required” and “desired”: this being philosophy, they are all essential. Also, these are the tasks that cannot be fulfilled but can only be continuously problematized: that is why Merleau-Ponty writes, in referring to Husserl’s unpublished works: “The philosopher is a perpetual beginner” (2012: xxviii). It is not easy to say which thinkers are best qualified for the philosopher’s job. As Nicolas Bencherki and François Cooren admit, writing an article on the topic of the philosophy of communication for Oxford Bibliographies Online was not an easy task because “many sociologists, anthropologists, semioticians, and linguists, as well as communication theorists, have been philosophers at some point in their career” (2013). Among the thinkers usually included in books on philosophy of communication (Arneson 2007; Chang and Butchart 2012; Hannan 2012; Mangion 2011), some can be seen as leaning more toward philosophizing communication within the social sciences (for example, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas), while others are found within the humanities (for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ernst Cassirer, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roman Jakobson). Still other thinkers are more “pure” philosophers of communication (for example Socrates, Plato, Immanuel Kant, Jean Gebser, Martin Buber, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Of these,

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as noted earlier, Socrates is “pure philosophy personified”; that is why today he (sadly) would hardly stand a chance of getting a tenured position in any academic department (Frodeman and Briggle 2016). It is obviously impossible to neatly carve the nature of philosophy of communication at its joints. Speaking of “nature,” most books in which communication is discussed do not include sections on natural philosophy or profiles of natural philosophers. Yet in this respect, many thinkers—from Aristotle to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz to Alfred North Whitehead to Edward O. Wilson to Francisco Javier Varela—have much to contribute to our understanding of communication. Rumors of natural philosophy’s demise are greatly exaggerated; today, we witness a growing interest in integrating physical, chemical, biological, and cognitive studies with metaphysics in order to look at the Universe in a holistic, systemic light (Schroeder and Dodig-Crnkovic 2020). It is by bringing together such seemingly incompatible perspectives that a new synthesis can be achieved, and the more monstrous it appears, the more complex an object it can bring into existence. This way, for instance, Norbert Wiener meets Jacques Lacan on the grounds of third-wave cybernetics, showing “that one cannot purge human communication of the ‘imagining’ of the object of desire” (Nusselder 2009). Also, this is how Nicklas Luhmann meets Kant via Husserl; Luhmann (2013) finds phenomenology with its focus on the transcendental structures of consciousness to be a precise theory, while Kant writes: “[Hume] deposited his ship on the beach (of skepticism) for safekeeping, where it could then lie and rot, whereas it is important to me to give it a pilot, who, provided with complete sea-charts and a compass, might safely navigate the ship wherever seems good to him, following sound principles of the helmsman’s art drawn from a knowledge of the globe” (1997: 12). As can be seen, Luhmann sounds like an advocate of phenomenology, while Kant an advocate of cybernetics; “using today’s parlance, we might say that the human mind, according to Kant, is an autopoietic system—which explains why Kant’s transcendental philosophy remains as relevant today as it was some 250 years ago” (Strathausen 2019: 115). With all this in mind (and the body), we can view communication as a never-ending yet noble process of rattling against the cages of our language as an operationally closed system, impinging on the infinite.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving What would be the most appropriate designation for philosophy, as a science? Here, a number of possible names may be considered. One obvious candidate is “theoretical,” since philosophizing can be viewed as a quest for knowledge driven by a sense of wonder. It is noted

. . . To Be at Home Everywhere

“that philosophy has become a theoretical discipline over time and as a result of many complex historical developments” (Ambury, Irani, and Wallace 2020: 203). However, “theoretical philosophy” is only one part in the common division of philosophy that goes back to Aristotle, the other part being “practical philosophy”: the latter deals with people’s actions based on morals and ethics in social and political situations, while the former deals with issues of metaphysics, epistemology, and cognition. This division has been upheld, albeit under different names, in modern philosophy as a result of Aristotle’s impact. For instance, Jacopo Zabarella, an Italian Aristotelian scholar of the sixteenth century, considered divine philosophy (metaphysics) and natural philosophy to be “contemplative disciplines”; at the same time, he spoke of active philosophy directed to contemplative philosophy as to its end (see Mikkeli 2018). Similarly, one can speak of “speculative philosophy” only insofar as “practical philosophy” is presupposed (Maritain 2005). To transcend this distinction, “henological” could be a possible modifier for philosophy; going back to the ideas of Plato and Plotinus, “henology” derives from the ancient Greek hén, meaning “one.” Henology, however, stands in contradistinction to ontology; as John Deely reminds us, “‘hen+logos’ gives ‘discourse about the one’ or ‘henology,’” while “‘on+logos” gives ‘discourse about being’ or ‘ontology’” (2001: 119). Thus, philosophy could be considered a “theoretical,” “contemplative,” “speculative,” or “henological” science. Given the nature of philosophical language, a somewhat monstrous characterization for philosophy can be suggested: “ostensory.” “Ostensory,” also called “monstrance” (both words go back to Latin ostendere and monstrare, respectively, meaning “to show”), refers to the vessel used in the Roman Catholic Church and some other churches carried as the consecrated Eucharistic host during Eucharistic adoration or Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Monstrance shares the same Indo-European root not only with “monster,” which can be readily seen, but also other words, such as “monument” (hence, the meaning of memory), and Minerva, goddess of wisdom (Shipley 2001). Ostensory signifies the monstration of the sacred— the elements transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ, its real presence. Grammatically, “ostensory” is used as a noun, referring to an object, but could be interpreted to have elements of a verb, expressing, similar to “therapy,” an action (of the sacred monstrated). It can also be adjectivized, such as philosophy as an ostensory science. Taking into consideration all these meanings of ostensory/monstrance, it can be postulated that communication best reveals its nature in the philosophical light: it is the element (the first principle) consecrated in every act of communion. It is interesting to note that a ciborium—a chalice-like vessel used to contain the Blessed Sacrament—in Russian literally means “that in

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which the gift is carried” (daronositsa). So, when—in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy—monstrances are mentioned as a kind of media and the question is posed what sort of visibility they provide (Dayan 2016), the answer should clearly go beyond the visual realm, for here communication shows its most sacred nature (i.e., that of the gift that is treasured—monstrated—and thus keeps on giving). All these designations may be suitable, but none is completely adequate or equal to what is required (for philosophy to be what it truly is); in this book, philosophy is taken to be “rational science” (see Marcuse 2018), also keeping in mind its ostensory character.

CHAPTER

Squaring the Circle ‰Í

We have seen from the previous chapters that the study of communication can be conducted in terms of natural science, social science, cultural science, and rational science. In this chapter, these four scientific perspectives on communication are brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square, which is a well-known means of mapping out various semantic categories and relationships between them (Greimas and Courtés 1982). Throughout the chapters, several important semantic categories have been addressed; below, each is presented in the form of the semiotic square and discussed in more detail.

Primary Causes These refer to the four causes proposed by Aristotle as the ways of explaining being in general, hence an argument for translating the term as “because” and speaking of “Aristotle’s four becauses” (Hocutt 1974). Whether called “causes” or “because,” these categories are “universal in the most eminent and strict acceptation of that term” (M’Mahon 1857: xv). The material cause, as that out of which something comes to be, clearly falls under the subject matter of natural science. In fact, it is argued that “the only ‘causes’ with which the natural sciences can ‘explain’ are what Aristotle called ‘material causes’” (Ritchie 1905: 104). This way, communication is viewed as a natural entity or process, explicitly focusing on its physiobiological aspects, for example, by thematizing the body as a material frame. The formal cause is that which patterns matter into a particular type of thing. The formal cause is the exemplar (paradeigma) for something that is to be. Unlike eidos, this kind of force defines a thing by being extrinsic (Gardeil

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1956). It is the study of communication conceptualized as a social process that focuses on the manifestations of the formal cause, such as structural arrangements and types. When Frederick Engels identifies the modes of production and exchange with “the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions” (2008: 54), the term “final cause” is not used in Aristotle’s sense (and is more of Engels’ wishful thinking). Rather, any social model, including the one viewed in terms of the modes of production and exchange, “constitutes the formal cause of the social whole” as “a dynamic order in which and through which men communicate with one another” (Niemeyer 1951: 66). This is concisely stated by Althusius, who says: “The formal cause is indeed the association brought about by contributing and communicating one with the other, in which political men institute, maintain and conserve the fellowship of human life through decisions about those things useful and necessary to this social life” (2005: 24). The formal cause can be identified with a prefiguration of a form of life (Habermas 2001); the polis, discussed earlier in the book, is one such example. The efficient cause is that from which change originates. Given its nature as an art of bringing something into being, the efficient cause can identified with viewed the techne. It is easy to see how any craftsman can be considered an agent of change, for instance, the writer as “the efficient cause of the text’s production” (Irwin 1999: 23), or humans as the efficient cause of their culture (Massey and Prabhakar 2005). We should remember, though, that it is ultimately the “human faculties” that “are the efficient cause of the symbolic expressions” (Pre/Text 1981: 30). In other words, the efficient cause goes beyond a concrete agent of change, such as a writer; rather, it is the motivating force from which change originates: “ultimately efficiency is caused by some spirit” (Menn and Smith 2020: 139). It is the humanities that ultimately focus on the spirit that gives human communication its meaning. The final cause is that for the sake of which something is. When we read about “the role of the human as the efficient and the final cause of communication” (Poole 2007: 359), we can understand the importance of emphasizing human action; however, the human cannot be identified with the final cause. In fact, “if efficient cause is the most evident, final cause is often the most veiled and inscrutable. Not that its existence eludes the mind, but its precise working is most difficult to conceive” (Gardeil 2009: 66). One of the main difficulties lies in the question of how the final cause can exert itself if it does not yet exist (Gardeil 2009: 66). Here, parallels can be drawn with Kant’s guiding question: “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?”—which found the answer in his concept of pure reason. The final cause, then, characterized by necessity and universality, must be postulated the same way as synthetic a priori. The final cause, therefore, is an important concept of the philosophy of communication. As mentioned earlier, techne and sophia, which both require the ability to distance oneself

Squaring the Circle

from one’s immediate situation, differ in terms of their primary causes, production of significant expressions identified with the efficient cause, and philosophical contemplation with the final cause. By the same token, the final cause is distinguished from the formal cause, which is found in various social structural arrangements or types. In the words of Althusius, “the final cause . . . is the enjoyment of a comfortable, useful and happy life, and the common welfare—that we may live with piety and honour a peaceful and quite life” (2005: 24). Therefore, the final cause cannot be equated with that out of which something comes, that which patterns matter into a particular type of thing, or that from which change originates. At the same time, once the final cause is in place, the material, efficient, and formal causes follow it by necessity as an overarching movement. The final cause can be more succinctly expressed in the optative mood: the phrase “that we may live,” that is, that communication may continue—and “no amount of absurdity or extravagance . . . can make anything but the optative proper in expressing it” (Goodwin 1882: 296). The four causes are ends not in the sense of ceasing to be, and that applies to the final cause the most. In fact, it can be viewed as the beginning for the sake of which something is and that is why it can be best represented by the philosopher who is a perpetual beginner. The four primary causes should be viewed “not as a medley” (Gardeil 2009: 70) but interconnected within one framework. Below, the relationships between these four causes are mapped out in the form of the semiotic square (Fig. 6.1). Material :: Formal. These two causes are contrary opposites. Both of these causes deal with perceptible reality (Byrne 2018); however, the material cause has a determinate nature of its own, while the formal cause is an extrinsic force that defines a thing. In a way, the two causes have opposing views on the nature of reality—seen as material by natural science and as formal by social science—but do not exhaust its entire meaning: it is possible to speak of the “third nature” and the “fourth nature,” as well. Material :: Efficient. These two causes are contradictory opposites. In Metaphysics, Aristotle invites the reader to follow those philosophers who progressed beyond the material cause, adding: “Now to seek this is to seek another principle, namely, as we might say, the source which begins motion” (1891: 984a17). He clearly refers here to the efficient cause; while out of the material cause something comes to be naturally—(as if) by itself, the efficient cause contradicts this view by seeing an agent of change as “not natural”; for instance, according to the last verse of Dante’s Divine Comedy, it is love which moves the sun and other stars. Final :: Formal. These two causes are also contradictory opposites. The formal cause is always a certain exemplar, while the final cause does not prefigure a particular form of life and simply exerts itself, which is why it is difficult for the mind to grasp.

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Figure 6.1. Primary Causes. © Igor E. Klyukanov

Final :: Efficient. These two causes are subcontrary opposites. The subcontrary opposition is not as strong as the contrary opposition because, as Aristotle puts it, subcontraries are “only verbally opposed” (Prior Analytics: 63b21–30). The efficient cause is evident, unlike the final cause that is not tied to the immediate situation, but both deal with bringing something into the world. Thus, “material and formal causes on the one hand, and efficient and final causes on the other are associated pairs” (Gardeil 2009: 70). Material :: Final and Formal :: Efficient. These causes are in the relation of complementarity, the truth of the superaltern statement implying truth of the subaltern one: that out of which something comes to be implies that for the sake of which something is, while that which patterns matter into a particular type of thing implies that from which change originates.

Intellectual Virtues These refer to the rational qualities identified by Aristotle that are required for humans to acquire knowledge and engage in various activities. Knowledge that explains why a thing is the way it is and not otherwise is found in episteme, which can be presented in the form of general propositions. Knowledge is sometimes viewed as a natural phenomenon (Kornblith

Squaring the Circle

2002), and so it is no surprise that episteme is considered the scientific ideal and associated with natural science. The study of communication aimed at episteme, as noted earlier, is prejudiced in favor of the world and focused on its empirical investigations. The virtue of prudence, or practical wisdom (i.e., a reasoned capacity to act in different situations), is represented by phronesis and found in social science; in this light, communication is usually conceptualized as a practical discipline, with the concept of praxis at its basis. Episteme does not work in the social study of communication the way it does in natural science because, in Bent Flyvbjerg’s words, “no predictive theories have been arrived at in social science” and so “this approach is a wasteful dead-end” (20052006: 38). Similarly, based on the role of communication in the evolution of society, as conceptualized by Jürgen Habermas, it is noted that the study of the political sphere of human action “could not assume the form of a rigorous science, of episteme” (McCarthy 1979: viii). The virtue of poesis is represented by techne and found in the humanities. One might think techne should be studied in relation to technology as part of natural science; however, natural science and technology need to be delimited (Rapp 1974), and techne understood as a virtue required for the human production of any significant expressions. It is through techne that humans create and cultivate their culture. In this sense, the humanities not so much borrow the concept of techne from natural science as return it to their roots of investigating art creativity expressed through various signs (see Epstein 2012). The virtue of wisdom is defined by Aristotle as “scientific knowledge, combined with intuitive reason, of the things that are highest by nature” (Nicomachean Ethics VI: 1,141b). This virtue is found in philosophical contemplation and reflection, exemplified by synthetic a priori that combine intuition with sensory impressions. The philosopher of communication both cares for wisdom and can communicate it, “making the love of wisdom truly worthwhile” (Chang 1996: 3; Tietien 2013). Below, the relationships between these intellectual virtues are mapped out in the form of the semiotic square (Fig. 6.2). Episteme :: Phronesis. These two virtues are contrary opposites. For natural science, the virtue is in formulating universal laws not affected by any variability; for social science, the virtue is in being able to reason how to act in different situations. While the two virtues are opposites, they do not exhaust the entire meaning of what can be considered “virtue.” Episteme :: Techne. These two virtues are contradictory opposites. For natural science, knowledge is natural and exists in the form of predictable laws; for the humanities, knowledge is “not natural” as it is produced by people and so can only be (re)interpreted. Wisdom :: Phronesis. These two virtues are also contradictory opposites. For philosophy, the virtue is pure contemplation; for social science, the vir-

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Figure 6.2. Intellectual Virtues. © Igor E. Klyukanov

tue lies in appropriate practical action, not philosophical reflection, which for social science is “impractical” “inaction.” Wisdom:: Techne. These two virtues are subcontrary opposites. Unlike contrary opposites that both cannot be true, but both can be false, subcontrary opposites both cannot be false, but both can be true; hence, the subcontrary opposition is not as strong and so a connection between the two opposites can be established more easily (i.e., wisdom viewed as a kind of poesis, albeit much more veiled and inscrutable). Episteme :: Wisdom and Phronesis :: Techne. These virtues are in the relation of complementarity, the truth of the superaltern statement implying truth of the subaltern one: searching for general knowledge implies contemplation, and a reasoned capacity to act implies the existence of significant expressions.

Kinds of Reasoning As discussed earlier, any natural object is best explained by observing empirical reality and formulating general conclusions. In a way, nature induces humans to reason from particular observations toward generalizations; that way, induction is seen as a natural process by which generalities arise in the

Squaring the Circle

Figure 6.3. Kinds of Reasoning. © Igor E. Klyukanov

human mind. Using induction in studying social interactions is difficult because of their dynamic variability and the reflexivity of human action; that is why the use of the (hypothetico-)deductive reasoning fits well into the normative approach to social communication. The humanities do not have the normative character and are aimed at understanding individual products of the human spirit, which is done by using abduction. Finally, philosophical approach to communication takes the form of adduction—the least logical, as it were, kind of reasoning that embraces the unified experience of one’s encounter with the world and postulates new objects. Below, the relationships between these kinds of reasoning are mapped out in the form of the semiotic square (Fig. 6.3). Induction :: Deduction. These two kinds of reasoning are contrary opposites. For instance, “the Organon of Aristotle and the Organon of Bacon (i.e., deduction and induction) stand in . . . the relation of contrariety. The one, considers the laws under which the subject thinks; the other, the laws under which the object is known” (Reid 1849: 72). In a similar way, Wilhelm Windelband talks about “the relation of contrariety between deduction and [inductive] inquiry” (1893: 137). Induction is opposed to deduction in that it focuses on the empirical observations of reality (of “the object”), while deduction on the law-like reasoning (of “the subject”). Still, as contraries, “we see, then, that Induction and Deduction are after all not so very unlike”

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(Peirce 1992: 169). Parallels can be drawn between these two kinds of reasoning and what Francis Bacon says in The New Organon in his Aphorism 95: “The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance” (1905: 288). The ant clearly operates inductively, while the spider deductively. Induction :: Abduction. These two kinds of reasoning are contradictory opposites. Although usually opposed to deduction, induction is in a deeper (contradictory, i.e., mutually exclusive) relation with abduction: the former simply explains and, in Peirce’s words, “can never originate any idea whatever” (1931–66: 145), while, as far as abduction, “if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way” (1931–66: 777). It should also be remembered that Peirce put forward abduction as a kind of reasoning radically different from that of positive science (Reilly 1970). Deduction :: Adduction. These two kinds of reasoning are also contradictory opposites. Again, although induction is most commonly opposed to deduction, “the relevant contrast is never between deduction and induction but between demonstrative inferences that are certain and nondemonstrative inferences that are precarious” (Blaug 1992: 17). In other words, the demonstrative certainty of deduction is radically opposed to the monstrosity of adduction, which is “a totally different type of mental operation” (Blaug 1992: 17). In his Aphorism 95, Francis Bacon also speaks of the bee that “gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms . . . it by a power of its own.” According to Bacon, this is not unlike “the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments” (1905: 288). One could imagine Kant having this metaphor in mind when developing his concept of synthetic a priori. (It could also be argued that the bee may not be the best symbolic representation of philosophy because bees are too visibly busy and rely too much on the flowers of the garden and of the field; this image would be more appropriate for the humanities scholars who gather their material from texts. The owl or the raven would symbolize philosophy better since they just sit motionless, contemplating the world). Adduction :: Abduction. These two kinds of reasoning are subcontrary opposites. Unlike induction and deduction that are more like-law kinds of reasoning grounded in reality, either as objectively known or subjectively thought, adduction and abduction are the logics of insight and so have a more abstract character. Like the contrary relation between induction and deduction, abduction and adduction are not mutually exclusive, the former being a posteriori and empirically based (albeit of a kind produced by humans), while the latter being a priori and critically based (Smith 2012).

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Induction :: Adduction and Deduction :: Abduction. These kinds of reasoning are in the relation of complementarity, the truth of the superaltern statement implying truth of the subaltern one: formulating the laws under which the object is known implies reflection and intuition, while considering the laws under which the subject thinks implies originating and understanding ideas. Parallels can be drawn between the primary causes and the kinds of reasoning, for example, the way it is done in the Four-Causes Diagram proposed by Chad Hansen: “Abduction is the Logic of Efficient Causality and Adduction is the Logic of Final Causality, so Deduction is the Logic of Formal Causality, while Induction is the Logic of Material Causality” (2017: 182).

Forms of Communication Activity These refer to four modes of communication activity: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Below, the relationships between these forms of communication activity are mapped out in the form of the semiotic square (Fig. 6.4). Reading :: Speaking. These two forms of communication activity are contrary opposites. Reading can be understood, in the words of Walter Benjamin, not only in its profane semiotic sense, for example, a person reading a newspaper, but also in its magical mimetic sense: “such reading is the most ancient: reading prior to all languages” (1999: 722). In this sense, we can talk about “the hunter reading the spoor of an animal in the forest, the farmer reading the weather in the sky or the fisherman reading the ocean currents by plunging a hand into the water” (Alloa 2015: 199). Benjamin, though, was primarily a cultural critic; in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” we find the following note: “The historical method is a philological method based on the book of life. ‘Read what was never written,’ runs a line in Hofmannsthal” (2003: 405). As a result, when he talks about “the most ancient reading,” he brings together reading “from entrails, the stars, or dances” (1999: 722), that is, the natural (the first two) and the cultural (the third one) phenomena. In the same vein, for instance, Georgio Agamben focuses on the role of potentiality and imagination inherent in thought when reading what has never been written (Colill 2015). This view can be traced back to Plato’s famous metaphor in Phaedrus in which Socrates speaks about “dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver” (265d–266a). A good carver is a practitioner of diairesis, that is, uses “the method of Division and Collection, by which ‘episteme’ is achieved” (Negrepontis 2014: 16). A quintessential philosopher (not a cultural critic), Plato (like Benjamin)

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Figure 6.4. Forms of Communication Activity. © Igor E. Klyukanov

applies his metaphor to (reading and carving) the world of ideas (Forms), not the natural world. However, this is also how the natural world is studied by the natural scientist, who looks for observable regularities in the (relations between) animal entrails, the ocean currents, the stars, and the human body (i.e., anything that can be read with the naked eye or with the help of scientific instruments). The approach of the natural scientist is unphenomenological, uncultural—“a kind of hermeneutics without text” (Alloa 2015: 199–200). Reading here is meant in its truly ancient sense of “explaining, putting in order, reasoning, counting.” The goal of the natural scientist, therefore, is to read what has always been written. Speaking, in its turn, is not a natural process (like that of “arche-reading”) but a social activity. Whereas in the study of nature, to use Plato’s metaphor, “the number of joints or cuts [are] being determined, it seems, by the object itself ” (Naas 2018: 29), speaking exists as a phenomenon created by the subject(s). Reality, thus, is “cut up” into “objective reality” (natural science) and “social reality” (social science). Reading :: Writing. These two forms of communication activity are contradictory. They present radically different views of communication, identified with natural traces (reading) and human inscriptions (writing). We can find the latter view in writing as it is traditionally understood, or what

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Derrida calls “the vulgar” concept of writing, proposing a new concept of “arche-writing” to refer to the general state of mediation and any system of signification. Still, he admits that this new concept “essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing” (Derrida 1976: 56). In other words, he conducts a deeper analysis of writing “in the same kind of way that, for Freudian psychoanalysis, unconscious desire communicates with its visible, manifest form” (Bradely 2008: 68). It is no surprise that Derrida’s Of Grammatology “put writing at the heart of humanistic study” (Epstein 2012: 117); it is from the perspectives of the humanities that communication is studied in terms of mediation by texts as significant expressions. Reading, understood in the sense of explaining, is at the heart of the natural study of communication; in contradistinction to “arche-writing,” it can be called “archereading.” That reading and writing are contradictory opposites can be seen in everyday behavior: just try to read and write at the same time! Speaking :: Listening. These two forms of communication activity are also contradictory. Speaking is clearly a social activity—discourse that “not only has a world, but it has another person, an interlocutor to whom it is addressed” (Ricœur 1981: 133). It is by speaking that people deliberate and develop social norms. Listening, in its turn, is a solitary and “inactive” activity: one can simply be, motionless, obediently attending to the radical alterity of the world. That speaking and listening are contradictory opposites can also be seen in everyday behavior: just try to speak and listen at the same time! Listening :: Writing. These two forms of communication activity are subcontrary opposites. Similar to the outside reality divided into the opposites of objective reality and social reality, here the inside reality is divided into the opposites of the realm accessed through mediation by significant expressions and the realm accessed through letting it appear in our consciousness through listening. Reading :: Listening and Speaking :: Writing. These forms of communication activity are in the relation of complementarity, the truth of the superaltern statement implying truth of the subaltern one: listening complements reading as both activities appear natural and are determined by the (real) object, while writing complements speaking as both activities appear created (artificial) and are determined by the (human) subject.

Grammatical Moods These refer to the ways in which modality is expressed. Three such ways are traditionally identified: indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods. The indicative mood is used to make factual statements; the imperative mood is used to require or urge doing or not doing an action; and the subjunc-

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tive mood is used to express various states that are not real. To these three, the optative mood is added, which expresses an irrealis modality conveying desire, hope, aspiration, and so on. The optative is listed as one of four fundamental moods in earlier Indo-European grammar (Baldi 2002; Southard 1916). While less common in language use now (which is a comment not so much on the mood itself, but, rather, on the modern civilization), by taking it into consideration, a more comprehensive view of the relationships between these four kinds of moods can be developed. Below, the relationships between these kinds of moods are mapped out in the form of the semiotic square (Fig. 6.5): Indicative :: Imperative. These two kinds of mood are contrary opposites. The indicative mood refers to the real world (i.e., what is known as “objective reality”). In this sense, the indicative mood can be called “the objective mood.” It is easy to see that this mood is used by natural science: “law in the physical world is expressed in the indicative mood” (Denny 1894: 218). The imperative mood is the opposite of the indicative mood in that it refers not to what is the case but what should be the case in terms of actions required or urged. It is easy to see that the imperative mood refers to interaction according to social norms: “the imperative has no place in any context outside of the social” (Forsström 2016: 12). Contrary to the epistemic modality of natural science, social science focuses on deontic modality; thus, law “in the moral world [is expressed], in the imperative mood” (Denny 1894: 218). From its inception, social science has tried to separate itself from natural science as a science in its own (true) right; contrary opposites, however, cannot both be true, and so social science cannot help suffering from “physics envy” (Flyvbierg 2001: 1). That is why, perhaps, as Albion Woodbury Small puts it in the chapter entitled “Disunity of Social Science,” “some of our leading social theorists are trying to conjugate biology in the imperative mood” (1910: 47). Such (wishful) thinking reveals attempts by social science to have it both ways, studying human social behavior as if it were objective reality that can be stated as facts. Indicative :: Subjunctive. These two kinds of mood are contradictory opposites. Whereas the indicative and imperative moods are opposites but not mutually exclusive, the indicative and subjunctive moods contradict each other: the former deals with objective reality, while the latter expresses a state of something that is not real. If the indicative mood can be called “objective,” then the subjunctive mood is “the subjective mood.” And, if the natural world is expressed in the indicative mood, then the “unnatural” world of human creations is expressed in the subjunctive mood by always imagining new relations and linkages. Imperative :: Optative. These two kinds of mood are also contradictory opposites. It has been noticed that the optative mood is related to the im-

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Figure 6.5. Grammatical Moods. © Igor E. Klyukanov

perative mood, especially its cohortative form (Ketevan 2007). At the same time, it should be emphasized that, despite some similarity (Southard 1916), their relation is one of contradiction. Although both moods have to do with the expression of a wish of the speaker about a future state of affairs, the imperative conveys an appeal to the addressee(s), while optatives “are uttered by a speaker who is not in a position to influence the truth of the expressed proposition (distinguishing optatives from imperatives)” (Grosz 2014: 90). Besides, whereas the imperative is tied to a specific situation of social interaction, the optative expresses something as desirable in every instance, that is, in general (Bates 1901). Also, although the optative mood is sometimes conceptualized in terms of volition (Ketevan 2007), the latter rather falls under the imperative mood, which expresses a decision on (in)action. In its turn, the optative mood does not focus on action; instead, “the Optative is the Mood of Thought” (Hale 1906: 196). This mood is clearly the mood of philosophical contemplation when one does not exercise one’s free will, but is, so to speak, willed by Being—the same way one is spoken by language. In this regard, it is interesting to note that Paul Ricœur relates the fragile moments of happiness to the lyric states of language wherein the very possibility of happiness can be thought. Instead of focusing on what happiness is (indicative) or how one should obtain happiness (imperative), Ricœur sees

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true happiness expressed in the optative mood, transcending the borders of theology and philosophy (Verhoef 2018). Optative :: Subjunctive. These two kinds of mood are subcontrary opposites; rather than contradicting each other; “the subjunctive and the optative have a kindred meaning” (Henry 1894: 321). Although it is not easy, especially today, to draw a line between them, and it is noted that the optative is overtaken by the subjunctive (Forsström 2016), these two moods still should be viewed as “separate eminences” (Southard 1916: 441), albeit “as mental reactions, not as verb-forms necessarily” (Southard 1916: 441). Also, although historically both moods referred to future tenses (Leach 2016), the optative mood was associated with a general indication of desirability and represents “a more remote or less vivid future” (Householder 1954: 396). Additionally, the optative mood denoted “a thing imaginary, unconditional, utopian, and purely ideal, and independent of all reality” (Wylie 1838: 53). Overall, “the original distinction between the subjunctive and optative appears to have been between what is willed or expected (subjunctive) and what is desired or considered possible” (Betts 2012: 18). Thus, “the optative is a milder mood than the subjunctive in meaning,” in which we find “merely an admission of possibility” (Cookson and King 1890: 196). In this sense, it is possible to speak of “the optative of concession” (Hale 1906: 198), that is, allowing for something to appear. In some languages, it is expressed by corresponding auxiliary words, for instance, wa in Ossetic, meaning “to leave; to permit, allow, let; to give opportunity; to release,” or pust’ in Russian where it has similar meanings of letting or releasing (Ketevan 2007). The optative mood, therefore, does not simply refer to something that expresses various states that are not real, but unconditionally lets the world appear in one’s consciousness. Indicative :: Optative and Imperative :: Subjunctive. These kinds of mood are in the relation of complementarity, the truth of the superaltern statement implying truth of the subaltern one. The indicative mood not only implies the optative; sometimes, factuality is even said to have “respect over hope and prayer” and “relegated them . . . to a group of ‘modal auxiliaries’” (Leach 2016). Be that as it may, the relationship between these two moods is similar to that between natural philosophy and metaphysics, or first philosophy, the latter growing out of the former; the optative mood expresses “a thought, an idea, something abstracted from reality” (Hale 1906: 198) and what appears as natural likelihood (Bates 1901). By the same token, it is noted that “the closest relatives of the imperative are ‘subjunctive’ or ‘irrealis’ forms” (Jary and Kissine 2014: 48). These grammatical moods, while in the technical sense being expressions of modality, can be viewed, following Priscian (see Luhtala 2005), as the inclinations of the mind showing various dispositions. In Russian, the words

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for “mood” (naklonenie) and “inclination” (sklonnost’) sound very similar as they share the same root: klon (“leaning toward something”). In this light, the inclination of the natural scientist is to explain an object of reality; the inclination of the social scientist is to understand how people should organize their interactions; the inclination of the cultural scientist is to interpret what it means to be human; and the inclination of the philosopher is to postulate how everything unfolds in one’s consciousness by letting it be. It is interesting to draw parallels between the moods and the kinds of human comportment representing different temperaments: the “fourfold division of moods (imperative, indicative, subjunctive, optative) fairly well corresponds with human character groups. . . thus, choleric, imperative; phlegmatic, indicative; melancholic, subjunctive; sanguine, optative” (Southard 1916: 442). Thus, the social study of communication can be considered “choleric”—active, impulsive, and histrionic; the natural study of communication “phlegmatic”—principled, controlled, and persistent; the humanities study of communication “melancholic”—serious, patient, and empathetic; and the philosophic study of communication “sanguine”—contented, hopeful, and inspiring. Finally, let us briefly discuss the object(s) of the four scientific perspectives on communication. Below, the relationships between these scientific perspectives are mapped out in the form of the semiotic square (Fig. 6.6). Nature :: Society. These two objects are contrary opposites. Natural science focuses on communication as intrinsic, being that it remains itself in the process of transformation. For social science, communication is not an objective reality; its focus is society, that is, reality created through intersubjective interactions and symbols used in these interactions. Nature :: Humanity. These two objects are contradictory opposites. Whereas for natural science communication exists as a natural object, communication as an object of the humanities is not natural in that it is made by humans themselves; it is in such significant expressions that the humanities search for what it means to be human. Society :: Monstrosity. These two objects are also contradictory opposites. Whereas society is a certain order created and shared by a group of people through various behaviors, monstrosity is something that is not social, something that only emerges with the subject (i.e., monstrates itself). Monstrosity :: Humanity. These two objects are subcontrary opposites. Here, just like natural science and social science have opposing view on what counts as reality, philosophy and the humanities have opposing views on what counts as meaningful experience, the latter searching for it in texts, while the former in the “things themselves.” When, for instance, at their famous debate at Davos, Cassirer saw creativity as the essence of “the spiritual world created from [man] himself ” while Heidegger found that to be

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Figure 6.6. Scientific Perspectives. © Igor E. Klyukanov

“the lazy outlook of a man who merely uses the works of the spirit” instead of “throwing man back into the hardness of his fate” (Kirsch 2021), the two thinkers clearly addressed the subtle substances of life, albeit as a cultural theorist (Cassirer) and as a philosopher (Heidegger). Monstrosity :: Nature and Humanity :: Society. These objects are in the relation of complementarity, the truth of the superaltern statement implying truth of the subaltern one: although they cannot be completely demonstrated as physically present in their entirety, all phenomena still exist within nature; and all human significant expressions underlie social practices. Overall, the semiotic square can be presented in terms of chiastic logic, or “the well known aphoristic chiasm phrase : Le Même et L’Autre” (Lanigan 2021: 89) (Fig. 6.7).

“One, Two, Three, and Where Is the Fourth?” The semiotic square is not an abstract framework detached from everyday experience; rather, it is grounded in kinesthetic relationships; let us see how this can be done by using the human body image (Pelkey 2017).

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Figure 6.7. Chiastic Logic. © Igor E. Klyukanov

The sagittal plane divides the body into a left section and a right section. It is a vertical line that creates one-dimensional space made up of two points. These two meaningful positions are in the relation of contrariety and form what Kant calls “real opposition,” which occurs when two things are predicated of one and the same subject. Such a subject can be given to us in various realms; “for example, when a single body is pulled in different directions by two forces . . . . One direction in which the body is pulled may be called ‘negative’ and the other ‘positive’” (Shell 1993: 133). Hence, the opposition of the left arm and the right arm is a real opposition. In the same way, we can view social reality; for instance, the opposition between the left party and the right party is a real opposition. In this light, it can be understood why contrariety relationships are formed by terms, not propositions: terms express meanings that are limited, bounded, or fixed, that is, easier to be perceived (as real). The oblique plane divides the body at an angle; we now have two different lines (two-dimensional space) creating more complex meaningful positions that are in the relation of contradiction—what Kant calls “logical opposition”—formed by two mutually exclusive predicates ascribed to the same thing. In such oppositions, one predicate cancels the other; for

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instance, “Kant gives the example of the predicate ‘mortal’ being cancelled by the predicate ‘infinite,’ which is one of the constituent marks of the concept of God” (Proops 2005: 590). It should be noted that the terms of a real opposition are not negatives in themselves, but only the negatives of each other (e.g., Self as the negative of the Other). In this sense, although opposites, they should in fact be seen as both positive; for instance, “falling is not distinguished from rising in the same way that not-a is distinguished from a” (Colletti 1975). In other words, negation, as such, lies at the heart of contradiction (e.g., Different as not Self). So, in a way, “the essence of negation is to invest the contrary with the character of the contradictory” (Bosanquet 1888: 306). Because of the positive nature of real opposition, contraries may at first sight appear to be stronger than all other kinds of opposition; however, they simply can be formed more easily (more naturally, if you will), while “of the several forms of opposition contradictory opposition is logically the strongest” (Stock 1888: 141). Logical opposition is grounded in the abstraction from real objects; and, as Kant puts it, “anything one likes can serve as a logical predicate, even the subject can be predicated of itself; for logic abstracts from every content” (1998: A 598/B 626). In other words, a new meaningful position can be formed by changing the direction of meaning at any acute angle, so to speak. Significantly, contradictory relationships are formed by propositions and so require statements, for instance, logos— logic, reason, speech (e.g., “diction” in “contradictory”). Forming and articulating the positions of contradictory relationships is more difficult than simply presenting the right leg as the opposite of the left arm; often, “the oblique perspective involves hard labour” (Zwart 2017: 13). It is this way, though, that researchers articulate their objects: “the oblique perspective exposes the philosophemes of science” (Zwart 2017: 15). Overall, “oblique explorations bring the broader landscape into view” (Zwart 2017: 17). The transversal plane divides the body into upper and lower parts. “Transversality” has become a popular concept in the study of social and cultural phenomena, especially following the works of Gilles Deleuze who sees its nature as the “transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point” (1987: 109). It is in this sense that transversal communication is conceptualized as different from both horizontal and vertical communication, and an example of transversal unity (Ramsey and Miller 2003; Schrag 1997): “transversality integrates our experience of both right and left limbs, both above and below the waistline” (Pelkey 2017: 287). In a similar vein, it seems, Merleau-Ponty talked about the nervous excitation, which “instead of being a longitudinal and punctual phenomenon, becomes a transverse and global phenomenon” (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 89), noting that of such “‘transverse

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phenomena’ . . . there is neither a physical nor a physiological definition” (Merleau-Ponty 1967: 205). In anatomy, though, as noted above, transversality is traditionally identified with a horizontal plane passing through the standing body so that the transverse plane is parallel to the floor. So, if we want to stay within the realm of anatomical planes (i.e., plane geometry), then we should not read too much into the concept of transversality. The lower part also presents a relationship predicated of one and the same subject; unlike the upper part, though, where the subject is materiality, the subject in the lower part can be labeled “information” (Hayles 1999: 250), or something along those “immaterial” lines. Thus, we have here two realms: one is made up of “the material world, where things and people exist,” and the other of “processes through which representation, meaning and language operate” (Hall 1997: 25). Finally, the coronal plane divides the body into the front and the back parts. Here, we enter three-dimensional space; whereas we can see the entire body (and divide it with sagittal, oblique, and transversal lines) on a two-dimensional plane, we cannot see both the front and the back of the body at the same time. For the body to reveal this new dimension, either the body or the observer must turn, which takes meaning beyond the logic of contradiction; thus, “when a fourth experience . . . is discovered and added to the others, . . . that . . . has the potential of becoming thought” (Sieden 1989: 297; emphasis added). Having started with a contrary binary opposition, we now have four positions and six relationships between them, and “those six relationships are the human mind’s quarry in its pursuit of a thought” (Sieden 1989: 298; emphasis added). The fourth position in the semiotic square, described as its most engaging and enigmatic, is said to be “a productive leap to the elaboration of a new system of meaning” (Lenoir 1994). The other three positions, once established, open up new meanings as well. This one, though, is different in that it is “the most critical position and the one that remains open or empty for the longest time, for its identification completes the process and in that sense constitutes the most creative act of the construction” (Jameson 1987: xvi). One can recognize in this position philosophical contemplation, which is in the relationship of complementarity with its explanation as a natural object; in other words, this turn of thought is a re-turn that establishes a connection between monstrosity and nature (i.e., “same” and “self ”). This step, while still visible, brings forth something invisible: time; just like complement in music means a simple interval that completes an octave from another simple interval, here a significant pause finally frees the time that remained hidden up to this point. It can be said that “the square’s logic . . . generates the fourth term but has all along suppressed the very possibility the fourth term represents” (Schleifer 1992: 210); or, it could be said that the

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square’s logic has not “suppressed” what the fourth term represents, but rather has taken the time to prepare it for what lies ahead. The semiotic square, therefore, can be viewed in terms of anatomic body planes only up to a (three-dimensional) point; once the fourth dimension is added, which is not a place but a realm of consciousness, the semiotic square is set in motion and comes alive. It is important to emphasize that “things cannot be reducible to correlates of the body or perception; they retain a depth and resistance that provides their existential index”; in other words, “the world is the ultimate horizon or background style against which any particular thing can appear” (Toadvine 2019). If the semiotic square could speak, it would repeat after Merleau-Ponty: “Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them” (1962: 325). It is in Merleau-Ponty’s works that depth is given its due as “the most ‘existential’ of all dimensions” because “depth forces us to reject the preconceived notion of the world and rediscover the primordial experience from which it springs” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 298). When he articulates how the unity of self, the world, and others is revealed in the dimension of depth, Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes depth as experience “from which height, width, and depth [the classical dimensions] are abstracted” (1964: 180). In other words, “in realizing depth, we do not move away from classical experience but move back into its ground where we can gain a sense of the primordial process that first gives rise to it” (Rosen 2015: 265). For Merleau-Ponty, at the depth of experience lies the ever-changing time, and so depth can be articulated only as re-membered (Mazis 1988). Memory, time, depth, and experience go hand in hand; memory here is not the same as storage, such as computer memory, but a communicative act that requires awareness and mindfulness. Everything that may appear as juxtaposed or mutually exclusive experiences finds its place—and time—in the embodied articulation of depth: “this contraction in one perceptual act of a whole possible process, constitute the originality of depth” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 264). Being, therefore, is not so much about oppositions but, rather, intertwining and unfolding. The semiotic square can be seen in terms (and propositions) of static relationships between positions, or in terms of dynamic operations (presupposition, negation, implication) that bring these positions into relationships. Through such operations, meaning is marked, that is, identified as more or less favored. Conceptualized dynamically, every operation in the semiotic square results in markedness, which “is rooted in our lived experience” (Pelkey 2017: 286). As a result of sagittal operation, the upper-left corner is vested with more authority; for instance, in the opposition “nature—society,”

Squaring the Circle

“‘physics’ comes first and is unmarked, while ‘nomos’ comes second and is marked” (Candel 2020: 279). As a result of transversal operation, the body is divided into two sections often called “superior” and “inferior”; these labels for the “upper” and “lower” parts have both literal and figurative meanings, making it clear which one is considered more important. Here, the natural sciences and the social sciences are in the same (“upper”) section, while philosophy and the humanities are in the “lower” section; their relationship (contrariety vs. subcontrariety) is parallel to the relationship between “hard” and “soft” sciences, although social science tries to have it both ways by considering this “a false opposition” (Graham and Kantor 2007). As a result of oblique operation, the contradictory relation is formed between two mutually exclusive realms that would appear to be perfectly balanced; however, one realm cannot cancel out the other one unless it is vested with more power; which one it is becomes clear by taking into consideration the result of transversal operation. In this light, (looking from inside the semiotic square, as it were) the upper-left corner is unmarked, while the lower-right corner is marked; think the right arm vs. the left leg or the natural sciences vs. the humanities. The names of two kinds of acute angles are very telling in this regard: the angle from the horizontal upward to an object is called “angle of elevation,” while the angle from the horizontal downward to an object is called “angle of depression.” Finally, as a result of coronal operation, the relationship of complementary is established between the superaltern and the subaltern realms; for instance, the supernatural is seen as subordinate to nature, while individuality is subordinate to society (Candel 2020). This can be read as relationships between philosophy and natural science, on the one hand, and the humanities and social science, on the other. Thus, two parts of each opposition can be called “halves” only in quotes; in reality, one “half ” is always “more equal” than the other, which applies to the “half ” of the “half.” If the semiotic square is divided into four equal (without quotes) quadrants, each occupying 25 percent of the overall meaning, there would be no tension between them. For the semiotic square to exist as a dynamic unfolding of meaning, these realms need to be at least in the relationship of 51 percent to 49 percent—for example, one square as one “half,” occupying 51 percent, and the other three together making up the other “half,” occupying 49 percent of the overall meaning, each of the three given its own weight, for example, 25 percent, 15 percent and 9 percent. This way, the first square is hogging the blanket, so to speak, that is, claims to be more important (unmarked) than the other three (marked) squares put together. Each of the four perspectives discussed earlier can claim monopoly over the status of the study of communication (i.e., to explain, to understand, to interpret, or to postulate all 100 percent of its meaning). As it is, though, communication is a complex object that calls for (at least) four

Communication

scientific perspectives and their dynamic relationships. The most productive relationship is established by any two squares being “on the same side” and together occupying 51 percent, the other two squares also being on the other same side and together occupying 49 percent, wherein 51 percent is broken into 32 percent (one square) and 19 percent (the other square), while 49 percent is broken into 31 percent (one square) and 18 percent (the other square). Thus, the semiotic square takes on the following form/s (the two bolded squares form the unmarked “half,” and the line between the two “halves” visually indicates the nature of the operation) (Table 6.1). This is the most productive (balanced) relationship because the ratio between the unmarked and marked “halves” tends to the golden number Phi = 1.618 . . . : 32 ÷ 19 = 1.6842 . . . ., and 31 ÷ 18 = 1.7222 . . . In this sense, whatever meaning is mapped out in the semiotic square is truly dynamic—never the same and never-ending. Earlier, the critical importance of the fourth position in the semiotic square was emphasized. And yet, the very first decision that must be made is equally important, albeit for different reasons, since we must decide which term in the contrary opposition is positive (unmarked), thus setting the stage for the unfolding and further hierarchies of meaning (see Beetz 2013). If, for example, the first line in the Bible were translated the way Faust does in Goethe’s famous play—“In the beginning was the Deed . . . ”—the Western world might be different today. Thus, it is important not only to identify the four positions (the positive first, its contrary second, its negative third, and the doubly negative fourth) and the operations establishing their relationships (presupposition, negation, implication), but also to keep in mind that these operations are oriented and “the orienting operations can begin with any one of the four terms. In other words, there is no fixed ‘fourth term” (Hendricks 1989: 98). The fourth term, while always deepening meaning, always depends on where we start. In our discussion, we have started with communication as a natural object and ended with communication as an object of philosophic contemplation. However, we could begin with any square, for example, by making the humanities perspective the first positive term and going from there; then, the fourth position would be represented by the social scientific perspective on communication. And so on. Overall, “the truth is the whole”—not in the Hegelian sense of something reaching its completeness but in the sense of unending unfolding. The dynamic view of the relationships between different meaningful positions shows that they are reversible; this includes not only the relationships of (sub)contrariety and contradiction, as indicated by the arrows in the semiotic square, but the complementarity relation as well. Traditionally, the direction of implication is understood as going from the superaltern (top) position to the subaltern (bottom) one. However, conceptualized

Squaring the Circle

Table 6.1. Un/Markedness Relationships. © Igor E. Klyukanov

Sagittal: 51 | 49 Oblique: 51 / 49 Transversal: 51 – 49 Coronal: 51 \ 49

32

31

19

18

32

18

31

19

32

19

31

18

32

19

31

18

in terms of markedness, this direction can be reversed, as Greimas says when speaking about the relation of implication: “although the existence of this type of relation seems undeniable, the problem of its orientation (s1 → –s2 or –s2 → s1) has not yet been settled” (1987: 228). It is easier to speak about reversibility when focusing on material objects, such as Merleau-Ponty’s famous example of the handshake being reversible. This applies to other realms as well: “thus between sound and meaning, speech and what it means to say, there is still the relation of reversibility, and no question of priority” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 145). It is only when time comes into play more and more that we are reminded of its irreversibility and entropy; hence, even every handshake is irreversible. The relation between science and life, in general, is one of reversibility. Although science is opposed to life (“cut” from it, as mentioned earlier), science tries to encompass all life, so to speak, by coming closer and closer to it through systematic study, usually designated as “investigation” or “inquiry.” In so doing, science sets to fully explain, understand, interpret, or postulate life—from pure things to “pure things.” In this sense, science faces the problem of squaring the circle of life, trying to become life, only orderly and complete. Squaring the circle is one of three classical problems of Ancient Greece (the other two being doubling the cube and trisecting the angle), wherein one tries to determine whether it is possible to construct, in a finite number of steps, a square precisely equal in area to that of a circle by using the straightedge and compass. As Meton says in Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds, “With the straight ruler I set to work to inscribe a square within this circle.”

Communication

For him to succeed, though, a square must be constructed with the sidelength of the square root of π (which is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter). That, however, cannot be done in the (Euclidian) geometry of ordinary spatial experience. In the eighteenth century, π was proven to be an irrational number, that is, it cannot be expressed by a simple fraction and so is an “infinite decimal” because after the decimal point, the digits go on forever. Several years ago, π was successfully computed to 31.4 trillion decimal places, or π * 1013; although a breath-taking number, π still remains a “Pi in the sky” (Iwao 2019). In the nineteenth century, π was proven to be also a transcendental number, that is, it cannot be found by a finite number of applications of the algebraic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and taking nth roots of rational numbers. It is impossible, therefore, for Meton (or anyone else) to inscribe a square within the circle so that their area is one and the same. By the same token, science cannot solve the problem of squaring the circle of life once and for all, putting a full stop, as it were, at the end of its inquiry—it can only be a dot of the decimal point, indefinitely followed by never-ending numbers. It is as if life, with all its irrationality and transcendence, has a way of going around the orderly precision of science and making it bend into a curve. So, just like life cannot do without science, science cannot do without life: there is no fixed line between the two, which is especially clear in the case of communication study as science, and communication as life. Science and life exist in constant tension—the experience so eloquently described by Merleau-Ponty, a true phenomenologist: I cannot conceive myself as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere object of biological, psychological or sociological investigation. I cannot shut myself up within the realm of science. All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge is gained from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. . . . Science has not and never will have, by its very nature the same significance qua form of being as the world we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of the world. . . . To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is. (1962: ix–x)

These words, though, should not be taken as a call for science to capitulate before life; that a circle cannot be squared with exact precision by certain tools does not mean that such attempts must stop. It is no surprise, then, that even after π had been found irrational and transcendental, and the

Squaring the Circle

Paris Academy of Sciences had announced that it would not examine any more attempted solutions to the problem of squaring the circle, the interest in the problem and attempts to solve it did not end. One of the most recent proposals, for instance, argues that the circle can be squared not in Euclidean space alone, but in space-time by adding the tool of Einstein’s synchronized clocks. The author notes that this can be done at least hypothetically and admits that he has slightly bent the rules of squaring the circle (Haug 2021). We can see one of the most famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci—the Vitruvian Man—as a metaphor for the relationship between life, represented by the circle, and science, represented by the square (the semiotic square being one example). Just like Leonardo worked the problem of squaring the circle to a close approximation, science can only hope to come closer and closer to life. “Approximation,” which is derived from the Latin propinquitatem, with the meanings not only of “nearness and vicinity,” but also “relationship and affinity,” goes back to the Indo-European root *propro, meaning “on and on.” For science and life to go on and on; though, we must begin somewhere—and in Derrida’s words, “Let us begin by the impossible” (1997: 248). Only this way can we keep returning to things themselves, “to things themselves.”

CHAPTER

Being Is Said in Many Ways ‰Í

As Aristotle puts it in Metaphysics, “being . . . is said in many ways” (E.2 1,026a33–34). One can perceive these ways of saying only by losing “in background what one gains in focal figure” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 78). In this light, “NO COMMUNICATION CAN BE PROPERLY DEFINED OR EXAMINED AT THE LEVEL AT WHICH THE COMMUNICATION OCCURS” (Wilden 1980: 113). Let us examine how communication being is said by different sciences and how each of these four ways of saying it exists only with the other three concealed in the background, which are each “unconcealed” below.

Natural as . . . Social Although the study of communication is usually presented in terms of social science or the humanities, it is argued that natural sciences “are leading an epistemic change in our relationship to the human” (Rose 2013: 17) and “are becoming better . . . at explaining human cognitive and linguistic abilities in terms of the brain’s physical-chemical features and seeing these skills as a result of man’s biological ancestry” (Faye 2012: 23). The reason for such arguments is the objective character of natural science. From this perspective, in Alfred North Whitehead’s words, “in a sense nature is independent of thought” and so “we can think about nature without thinking about thought” (1920: 3). And yet, the thinker is more than just the thought thought, but also a sensuous being—an observer who, of course, uses not only the sense of sight; that is why “nature is independent of thought” only “in a sense.” As Heinz von Foerster eloquently put it, “objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer” (see von Glasers-

Being Is Said in Many Ways

feld 1995: 149). Thus, while the natural science view is presented as neutral (objective) and opposed to the views of social science and the humanities, “in actual fact, of course, no matter what it is ‘about’ ‘in itself,’ any [natural science] theory—or any statement or message whatsoever, as it happens—is also a communication about the context in which it arose and from which it cannot in fact be isolated, except in the imagination of ‘science,’ or through the delusions of the theorist” (Wilden 1980: 303). In other words, “a theory occurs only in a specific historical and social context” and, “like any adaptive system, must have survival value” (Wilden 1980: 303). Even though natural science deals with the material cause, natural scientists are social beings acting in historical circumstances; for instance, even Francis Bacon—one of the founders of modern natural science—was driven by the vision of “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit” (1909: 152). That is why the “survival value” of Bacon’s ideas has been high. Any study conducted by natural science is a case of communication as social activity and depends on discursively formed judgments, decisions, and actions. As Donna Haraway puts it, “nature is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the earth” (1992: 67). For instance, it seems we can objectively measure something—for example, the quantity of substances secreted by sweat glands, which determines one’s behavior, such as experiential arousal—the way it is done in communibiology (Allen 2017). The very nature of physical measurement, though, is one of the variables that must be considered in conducting natural science experiments because “our choice of measurement apparatus decides which . . . quantities can become reality in the experiment” (Zeilinger 2005: 743). For example, even investigating a seemingly purely physical phenomenon, such as pain, cannot be limited to simply measuring the level of tissue damage because it bears the imprint of social concepts, such as empathy and altruism. The role of social (f)actors in natural science has been noted by many thinkers, from Aristotle, who defined “man” as “a political animal,” to Merleau-Ponty, who emphasized that “for man, everything is [socially] constructed and everything is natural” (1962: 189), to Greimas, who pointed out that in science “a communicative dimension and thereby a communicative doing . . . is far from negligible” (1990: 31), to Schrag, who reminds us that “natural science . . . is as much a venture of communicative praxis as is any special humanistic endeavor” (1986: 73) and that “communicative praxis is infected with forgotten speech acts and forgotten social practices” (1986: 174). There are studies in which such social practices are unforgotten and brought to light. One example is Steven Shapin’s analysis (1984) of Robert Boyle’s experiments in pneumatics in the late 1650s and early 1660s. Shapin shows how Boyle’s scientific work was a practical matter that involved new

Communication

forms of social communication, such as conducting experiments in a public setting of the laboratory, explicitly contrasted to the alchemist’s closet. The reliability of knowledge-claims, therefore, depended on multiple witnesses; thus, science came to be viewed as a collective enterprise, publicly constituted and validated. In a way, the setting of the scientific laboratory could be seen as a precursor, along with coffee houses, of the public sphere as an important social space. A similar example—of a more recent scientific case—is the history of the conceptual development of elementary-particle physics, discussed by Andrew Pickering in his book Constructing Quarks (1984), where he shows how the construction of natural scientific knowledge was influenced by many sociological and historical factors (see Skibba 2020). More examples along the same lines can be found in such academic journals as Science, Technology, & Human Values; Social Studies of Science; Science & Society; and Science Communication, in which the social nature of science is explicitly acknowledged and studied in terms of social network of scholars, institutional structures, public discourse, shared social practices, and so on (Nielsen 2013; Sarukkai 2016). The role of social interaction in natural science is most consistently demonstrated in the field of science and technology studies (STS), launched by Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour’s famous book Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979). Forty years after its publication, their conceptual framework was reassessed, including the ideas of ethnography, reflexivity, daily activity, the observer’s story, microprocessing, and statement types. It was found out that not only were those ideas still valid, but also they could be replicated, as demonstrated by many scholars who had followed in Woolgar and Latour’s footsteps (Havstad 2020). That these ideas are still generating interest and new research is understandable; after all, they are based on a premise that cannot be denied: natural scientists are people too, or, in Latour’s words, “No matter how far out they send their thoughts, researchers always have their feet firmly anchored in clay” (2018: 68). For that reason, social norms and biases cannot not be embedded into the scientific knowledge that only seems completely objective. It should be noted that STS is not aimed at doing away with science; on the contrary, it wants a stronger science by showing its social underpinnings, which is especially important today when trust in science is being undermined by “alternative facts” and electronic communications (de Vrieze 2017; Swift 2019). Bruno Latour’s recent attempts focus on the study of the current climate crisis and environmental “cosmocolossus” (de Freitas 2020). In this light, natural science as a form of communicative praxis cannot avoid the questions of responsibility and ethics, which become even more important

Being Is Said in Many Ways

today with advances in computational neuroscience and human–machine interactions, including the brain-computer interface. As we can see, matters of fact are always matters of social concern.

Natural as . . . Cultural When we speak of the totality of scientific knowledge, we should not forget about the “man-made fabric which impinges on experience . . . along the edges” (Quine 1951: 42). This fabric consists of various human expressions in which meaning is cultivated. In that regard, “the legitimacy of . . . the academic division of science from humanities, is sustained only by denying this arbitrariness” (Sangren 1992: 293). It is easy, thus, to lose sight of this cultural fabric when thinking of science, focusing only on natural entities and processes; and yet, its role is noted by natural scientists themselves. For instance, Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize-winner in Physics, emphasizes the importance of what he calls “cultural background.” In his discussion of quantum jumps, he writes that “there is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general, and that scientific findings . . . are meaningless outside their cultural context” (1952: 109). He emphasizes the importance of the “historical connectedness . . . of production and of action” (1952: 110), which brings up unmistakable parallels with the (social) praxis, or “action,” and the (cultural) techne. Although natural science identifies true knowledge with episteme, “modern natural science as a whole . . . is itself already merely an application of ‘technology,’ where ‘technology’ means here something other than only what engineers bring about” (Heidegger 2018: 67–68). All scientific knowledge exists only insofar as it is expressed. When asked about the nature of the quantum world, Niels Bohr, another Nobel Prize-winning physicist, famously answered: “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (see Petersen 1963: 12). It should be noted that “what we can say about nature” is not the same as “what we can say to nature”: the latter is more immediate and identified with speech, while the former is more mediated and identified with texts. Thus, the “concept of techne offers a constructive basis for theorizing scientific inquiry as a productive art” (Wickman 2012: 28). In this connection, one can recall the famous motto of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in the seventeenth century: the Latin expression Nullius in verba, meaning “Take nobody’s word for

Communication

it.” This way, it was made unequivocally clear that true scientific knowledge can be based only on the results obtained experimentally, not on words and someone’s authority. There is no place for rhetoric in natural science—only the knowledge of things as they are in objective reality. The motto, though, is itself expressed in words, and natural science is also a rhetorical production; “in fact, crucial aspects of the process of scientific inquiry (not the data) are rhetorical” (Graves 1995: 107). Often, physics is viewed as the “hardest” science since it is ostensibly free from rhetoric; hence, if rhetorical forces can be identified in this area of inquiry, then they must be at work in other natural sciences as well (Bazerman 1994). If we go back to the experiments in pneumatics in the late 1650s and early 1660s conducted by Robert Boyle, a physicist and an inventor, we can see how rhetoric, or “literary technology,” played a role in the process of his scientific inquiry. Boyle was careful to construct texts, including visual representations, to provide a source of virtual witnessing, which “supplemented the public space of the laboratory by extending a valid witnessing experience to all readers of the text” (Shapin 1984: 509). It is important to emphasize that Boyle viewed texts not simply as a mere report but an important means for validating the results of his experiments; “therefore, attention to the writing of experimental reports was of equal importance to doing the experiments themselves” (Shapin 1984: 493). Over the years, the use of literary technologies in physics, as well as their rhetorical analysis, has become more complex, and so it is even more clear that “crucial aspects of the process of scientific inquiry (not the data) are rhetorical” (Graves 1995: 107; see also Wickman 2012). Rhetorical technologies have also been found at work in other natural sciences, such as biology, where the use of metaphoric language and strategic ambiguity helps to move scientific knowledge in new directions, as demonstrated, for example, by Kenneth Burke in his analysis of Charles Darwin’s use of identification and transcendence in On the Origin of Species (Burke 1969), or Debra Journet’s discussion of Richard Dawkins’ use of ambiguity and the metaphor of the selfish gene (Journet 2010). Most recently, steps have been taken toward a neurorhetoric, showing how a rhetorical framework can generate new approaches to studying the brain (Jack 2019). All scientific knowledge exists not only insofar as it is expressed, but also as it is interpreted. That natural science can be seen as “a hermeneutic of instrumentation” (Heelan 1983) is not readily obvious; in fact, as an aspect of natural science, hermeneutics exists “where one would have least expected it” (Kockelmans 1993: 107). And yet, to cite Karl Popper, we should not forget “that observations, and even more so observation statements and statements of experimental results, are always interpretations of the facts observed” (1959: 107). In other words, important as the understanding of

Being Is Said in Many Ways

scientific observations may be, the “observation statements and statements of experimental results” (read: texts) are even more important. Just like any human, “the natural scientist is thrown into the world and any act of understanding begins from the fore-structures of understanding, which Gadamer collectively terms Vorurteile, prejudices” (Schmidt 2018: 156), and, it must be added, come from texts. For example, Charles Darwin’s formulation of natural selection was influenced by the works of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus (Gould 1992); more similar examples can be given by conducting the archeology of knowledge, that is, “digging” into (read: interpreting) texts. In this sense, indeed, “there is nothing outside the text.” All such examples make it clear that if one can see further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants by using the ideas expressed in their texts (understood as the manifestation of the human spirit in any modality). It is not always easy, though, to see that this is the case; as Jesper Hoffmeyer, who was a professor at the University of Copenhagen Institute of Biology, confessed, “the separation between natural science and the humanities was so ingrained in our minds that it had not occurred to us, as biologists, to search the semiotic literature for precedents of reflections on . . . nature” (2011: 195). Overall, natural science is always a result of techne (among other things), a semiotic craft. Natural science cannot not be a human (cultural) science as well, if only because “science can give no answer to the question of its own meaning” (Jaspers 1971: 10). While it focuses on the material cause, the existence of natural science “rests upon impulses for which there is no scientific proof ” (Jaspers 1938: 10), that is, it calls for identifying the efficient cause that moves it; in this sense, natural science is an “enterprise of the human spirit” (Schrödinger 1952: 110).

Natural as . . . Rational Natural science investigates reality through observation, testing, and measurement, presenting an objective view of determinate things. Experimentation is a key tool used by natural scientists; that is, for example, how Ivan Pavlov developed his theory of classical conditioning for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and which became a basis for a behavioristic approach to communication (Hartman 1963). In his lectures (1928), Pavlov talks about the physiologist who sometimes begins to make suppositions based on his own subjective state, leaping from the measurable world to the immeasurable and thus abandoning the objective scientific attitude. To talk about science only in terms of stimulus-reaction, though, is not very helpful because scientists do not “simply dig facts out of nature, like a farmer harvesting turnips” (Fine 2020). As was shown earlier,

Communication

natural science is also social activity, in which various human and nonhuman actors create what Latour calls “factishes”—something that is neither reality that can be discovered through experimentation, nor just a human imprint onto an object. Also, natural scientific knowledge exists only insofar as it is textually expressed and interpreted by humans. And yet, “we find in texts only what we put into them” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: viii), that is, ourselves as others or others as ourselves. Thus, important as the social and cultural underpinnings of natural science may be, they cannot provide something that only philosophy can: “without philosophy, science does not understand itself, and even scientific investigators, though for a time capable of extending specialized knowledge . . . , abandon science completely as soon as they are without the counsel of philosophy” (Jaspers 1971: 11). Whereas natural science deals with experiments, philosophy deals with experience; while the former is simply observing or testing, the latter is an event that has affected one. It is only by turning to our experience that we can understand the world and our “living communication with the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 53). Husserl’s “principle of all principles” postulates that everything presented to us in intuition as being within the limits of an experience is a legitimate source of knowledge (1983). The originary faith in the world as it directly appears to us, though, tends to be obscured, and the phenomenal field is naturally reduced to an objective world of determinate things. This natural attitude is most common, not surprisingly, in natural science, and efforts to address it are often viewed as irrelevant or subversive. A good example of that is a story about Lawrence Kubie, a Freudian psychoanalyst, who at the famous Macy Conferences on Cybernetics “introduced a reflexive perspective when he argued that every utterance is doubly encoded”; as a result, his colleagues preferred “to shift the conversation onto more comfortable ground” (Hayles 1999: 9–10). It is easy to forget the phenomenal life-world as a foundation of natural science, and, as Albert Eisntein put it, “the more primitive the state of science, the easier it is for the scientist to live in the illusion that he is a pure empiricist” (see Kuznetsov 1987: 86). It is the mission of phenomenology to unforget this by going to the “things themselves.” To cite Merleau-Ponty, “we shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology” (1962: viii), that is, the unity of ourselves and the world. It can be said, therefore, that “all of science is, in essence, philosophy, regardless of whether science acknowledges this historical fact” (Heidegger 1991: 30–31). Indeed, the attitude of natural scientists toward philosophy varies. In his book The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the 21st Century, Jerome Kagan notes that “most scientists feel no embarrassment over their lack of interest in . . . philosophy” (Kagan 2009:

Being Is Said in Many Ways

260). At the same time, some scientists are not only interested in philosophy but embrace its ideas. For example, a case is made for why “regrounding natural science in a phenomenological approach is indispensable for solving science’s own problems” and why “it is physics—considered the most advanced and refined of sciences—in which the necessity for a phenomenological approach becomes most obvious” (Rosen 2015). Natural science requires direct experience and our reflection on that experience. As Einstein wryly notes, “those factors may have escaped the attention of previous generations to whom it seemed that theoretical creations developed out of experience by induction, without the creative effect of the free formation of concepts” (1932: 363); in a similar sense, Karl Popper speaks of “the inductivist prejudice” (1959: 59). As was shown in a previous chapter, concepts are creatively formed through adduction, and the role of language in this process is crucial, eloquently argued by Ernst Cassirer in his work “The Influence of Language upon the Development of Scientific Thought” (1942). He shows that it is philosophy that transmutes the incessant change into steadfast concepts, the way it was done by Aristotle in the field of physics, beginning with the concept of nature itself. In this light, the concept of life “is not a discovery of biology, but rather something that biology—to the extent that life is its subject matter—must always presuppose” (Toadvine 2015: 243). Cassirer also shows how language later came to be superseded by the symbols of mathematics, the systems of Lobatschevsky, of Bolyai, of Riemann speaking in their unique language. It should be noted that it is “not the description of a thing; it is a system of symbols, a symbolic language” (Cassirer 1942: 319); hence, such symbolic systems must be distinguished from texts as specific expressions using those languages. Cassirer emphasizes this point over and over again; he says that for each new language, such as spoken by quantum-mechanics, “we have, so to speak, to find a general grammar and a general semantics” (1942: 320–21); he speaks of the “general structural laws of language . . . as a means of communication” and “language-taken in its most general sense” (1942: 322, 326). Cassirer shows how passing the threshold of a new world introduces a new language (1942: 314). Cassirer also reminds us that “intuition cannot be separated from expression” (1942: 326)—a point especially important in light of some misconceptions about the role of philosophical language. For example, Zhores Alferov, a Nobel Prize-winner in Physics and (at that time) vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, shared with the Vesti Nedeli program on 30 March 2013 his view of the process of scientific inquiry: “First, the physicist makes a discovery, then the theoretical physicist describes it, then the engineer designs a device, and then comes the philosopher who knows neither physics, nor mathematics, nor engineering, but loves to talk about

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everything.” Scientific inquiry, however, is an experience in which thought, intuition, and expression go hand in hand in a complementary fashion, the world revealing itself in the process of monstrating. As Cassirer reminds us, “science arrives at its own form only by expelling every mythical and metaphysical component from itself,” but “the battle, which theoretical cognition believes it has won for good, will continually break out anew” (2021: xxxiii). So, natural science is not only experimentation, but also experience; hence, its philosophical underpinnings, including philosophical language. When Ivan Pavlov says, “science . . . should not abandon its objective attitude” (1928), his sentiment is understandable. For scientific inquiry to become more objective, though, this natural attitude needs to be addressed by pushing it beyond its limits and finding the language for that experience, since “the wounds that language inflicts upon human thought cannot be healed except by language itself ” (Cassirer 1942: 327). Natural science, therefore, should not abandon its objective attitude; at the same time, it cannot exist and progress without the counsel of philosophy. As Peirce noted, even “physics itself . . . could not progress further without philosophical guidance” (see Putnam 1992: 86). This becomes especially noticeable at the most critical moments in the development of scientific thought, when doubts arise about the reliability of those general laws that had previously explained the observed natural phenomena, and when it seems as if matter had disappeared. At such moments, physics takes on an increasingly pronounced philosophical character and may seem not human, turning to monstrous ideas. The objective attitude of natural science then may seem to be completely abandoned; for instance, ideas about the multiverse and string theory in theoretical physics lack empirical evidence and are viewed as philosophical speculations (see Seife, 2000), raising the question: “Is it science?” (Baggott 2019). This question, though, has already been answered by none other than Albert Einstein, who wrote “that the recognition of the speculative character of science has become a universal property” (1932: 363). Philosophy, of course, cannot investigate the world the way natural science does; “the humble role of the philosopher in the hubristic age of science is to call to mind the most important lesson that science teaches: human finitude and the corresponding limitations on knowledge” (Mootz 2010: 143). This is not the only role of the philosopher, though; as noted above, while reminding us of the limitations of knowledge, philosophy also inspires us to confront and overcome those limitations; awe in science is as necessary as are measuring instruments. This is how we experience the attraction of the microscopic world, as well as an outer space with the possibility of extraterrestrial communication; each such case is “a beguiling chal-

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lenge, like trying to imagine a color we’ve never seen” (Johnson 2020). And yet, that is the way to make sure our living communication with the world continues.

Social as . . . Natural John Dewey’s phrase, “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful,” is well-known—better certainly than its continuation where Dewey explains why communication is wonderful: it “is a wonder . . . that things should be able to pass from the plane of external pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves” (1981: 138). He thus makes a connection between human affairs and those of natural things—a process in which both are revealed. It is not that surprising that “social scientists find some aspects of physical and especially biological phenomena closely related to their own fields” (Bain 1947: 11). The interest of social scientists studying communication in biological phenomena has a long history, going back to Aristotle, who viewed the social forms of human association as natural: “every man, by nature, has an impulse toward a partnership with others” (The Politics: 1,253a29). Aristotle’s ideas go beyond the naturalistic view that explains everything in terms of mechanistic causal materialism. Rather, his view is that “second nature, an elaboration of purely biological nature, grows out of human biology to fit us for that distinctly human level of adaptation, and it is a joint product of natural causality and discourse” (Gillett 2018: 8). That it is a joint product can be seen in the hybrid designations for many modern areas of inquiry, such as “communibiology,” “communigenetic,” “sociobiology,” and “neurocommunication.” There are many studies discussing the role of biology in socially interacting groups. For instance, it is known that women on average contribute more time and energy to childcare than men do, usually explained by feminist theories in light of patriarchy and a long history of men’s political subjugation of women. At the same time, we should not overlook the research showing that the sex difference in childcare effort is not unique to humans since in many other species, including spiders, hummingbirds, rhinoceros, and armadillos, females also contribute more time and energy to childcare than males (Floyd 2014). The recently published The Handbook of Communication Science and Biology (Floyd and Weber 2020) brings together research into the evolutionary principles of communication, including human mate choice and the evolution of human societies (d’Ettorre and Hughes 2008). The volume presents research on the connections between the brain, bi-

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ology, and social behavior, covering not only evolutionary perspectives on communication, but also communication and media neuroscience, as well as emotional and affective aspects of social interaction, for example, the topics of persuasion and information propagation, a cognitive neuroscience of political knowledge and misinformation, biological perspectives of media violence and aggression, and neuromarketing, among others. Some studies deal with the overall biological foundations of social organization (Buck and Powers 2006), and some with more specific relationships between genes and social communication, showing the links between genes and social awareness, genes and empathy, and also neurodevelopmental problems that create impairments in social communication, such as impoverished narrative skills, particularly in unstructured and emotionally salient situations (Bishop 2009; Buck and Ginsburg 1997; Changeux 2017; Lee et al. 2020). Genetic research can be used by social scientists to predict group behaviors in the areas of hereditary and communicable diseases; for instance, a map was created in Russia showing the potential immunity and susceptibility to such diseases of various ethnic groups based on the genome of their ancestors (Kovalchuk, Naraikin, and Yatsishina 2013). Today this research can be of special relevance; for instance, the Covid-19 pandemic is now discussed in the light of communibiology (Fajar 2020). Besides physical and biological, chemical underpinnings of social communication cannot be avoided; as an adage goes, “chemistry is everywhere” (Schiphorst 2019). A communication theory approach can be applied not only to the chemical bond focusing on molecular systems (Nalewajski 2004), but also to the social bonds as a result of such molecular systems (i.e., the area of so-called “relationship chemistry”). Usually, romantic chemistry is discussed in terms of similar interests, reciprocal candor, personableness, and so on (Campbell et al. 2018), and social chemistry, in terms of productive relationships, psychology, and network analytics (King 2021). At the same time, however, social relations and especially instant connections with other people can be viewed as literally chemical communication, for example, attributed to the influence of hormones and pheromones. In this respect, the expression “There was chemistry between us” is only partly metaphoric because “physical, chemical, and biological considerations . . . enter human relationships” although “they are not as determinate . . . as is molecular bonding” (Krippendorff 2005: 156). In this light, we have less control over romantic and other relationships than we like to think. As such, the role of chemical communication in our choice of mates (and other choices) cannot be ignored; the area of chemosensory communication has been receiving more scholarly attention, aimed at finding out what evolutionary advantages it may offer (Pause 2019). This especially applies to

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social situations involving emotional states; for instance, it has been experimentally proven that fear and anxiety in humans is conveyed chemically and can be contagious, spreading through in a crowd (Notman 2020; Pause 2012). While not the same as olfactory, chemical communication is usually below the level of consciousness; and yet, its role in social behavior cannot be underestimated due to its analog nature, compared to the mostly digital character of verbal language, because “what is called, rather diminishingly, nonverbal communication is clearly older than language” (Peters 2015: 271). So, even in such areas as mental disorders, when calls are made to “avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’” because “it’s people in distress” (Davisis 2020), this can hardly be done. Chemistry here does play a role, although it is always a joint result of natural causality and social discourse. In other words, it is always a case of people in distress, but also of chemical imbalance. By turning to its physiological underpinnings, further insights can be gained into such aspects of social interaction as affectionate communication, pain, conflict, aggression, violence, and even forgiveness (Crowley and Allred 2020). It is also possible to present communication as “social physics”—bringing August Comte’s dream closer to becoming a reality. Today, social physics is a field of research that uses social experiments, network science, and game theory, among others, to investigate political conflicts, organized crime, human migration, daily and seasonal rhythms, and the organizational productivity at various scales. The role of circadian rhythms in various situations of communication cannot be ignored in both creation and perception of messages. For example, in order for us to perceive sensory stimuli as significant (i.e., not as noise or not to perceive them at all), they must last at least 25 milliseconds and be separated from one another by an interval of at least 40–50 milliseconds; such features of physiological time as, for example, the length of daylight hours, can affect the effectiveness of our public speaking, the success of interpersonal interactions, or the perception of advertisements. The dynamics of social networks also depend on circadian rhythms (Zhao et al. 2013). This approach is positioned to widen our scope of understanding human sociality and predicting the behavior of the social system (Bhattacharya and Kaski 2018). Overall, what is usually labeled “the natural environment” is tied to the way social affairs are conducted. In this sense, media are not just the social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram; media are above all “elemental,” made up of the four natural elements, from the oceans to the sky (Peters 2015; see also Parikka 2015). How far such natural phenomena are accepted in the study of social communication can be seen in the designations for these areas of inquiry: hyphenated or spelled as one word, they reflect closer ties (e.g., “communibiology” or “neurobiology”); as prepositional phrases,

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they show a larger distance (e.g., “physiology of communication” or “physics of communication”). This can be explained by the internal character of biological or neurological phenomena, which are literally in our blood or nerves, and the external character of physical matter.

Social as . . . Cultural It may be tempting to identify the constituent character of human communication with sociopolitical factors (Shepherd 1999); however, it should not be forgotten that the concept of human” includes cultural components, as well: “there can be no such thing as pure ‘interpersonal’ communication because of the involvement of artifacts in all person-person interactions” (Jordan 2002: 379). Social science and cultural science in a complementary relationship, the latter focusing on techne and text, rather than phronesis and discourse, shows how they play a role in understanding social communication more fully. First, the social analysis of communication uses the framework of semiotics, which, it can be recalled, Ferdinand de Saussure saw as “a science that studies the life of signs within society” (1983: 16). Social semiotics is concerned with the “analysis of records . . . , such as ‘artifacts,’ ‘texts,’ and ‘transcripts’” . . . in various “contexts within which meaning is made” (Bezemer and Jewitt 2009: 1). Usually associated with such seminal publications as Language as Social Semiotic by Michael Halliday (1978) and Social Semiotics by Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress (1988), social semiotics explores the role of signs in the social dynamics of power and ideology, including their abuse and distorted communication; in that respect, social semiotics and critical discourse analysis work toward the same normative goal of improving society (Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwen 2003). Second, the social analysis of communication uses the framework of rhetoric. The “constitutive role of rhetoric . . . used (un)consciously in social praxis” (Abbink and LaTosky 2021) ranges from the construction of medical frames of reference, including mental disorders (Harley 1999), to organizational rhetoric and communication (Ihlen and Heath 2018) to the rhetoric of social intervention (Opt and Gring 2009) to social movement rhetoric, including the relations between strategy, symbolic action, and social change (Crick 2021). And third, social analysis of communication uses the framework of hermeneutics. Here, the special sociological significance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics should be noted (McGowan 1988). It was Gadamer who emphasized that “in the logic of the social sciences as a field of study the hermeneutical problem acquires a new importance” (2007: 67). While phronesis, as prac-

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tical wisdom in action, is concerned with the deliberation about what is understood and needs a decision, the techne of hermeneutics deals with the process of interpretation of cultural products. In this sense, texts are not simply “vehicles for social communication” (Nebreda 2011) but “as artifacts are sites where the habitus can be discerned” (Rowsell and Pahl 2007: 394); also, it should be remembered that “social identities” are “durable projections from texts” (Silverstein and Urban 1996: 6). Social identities cannot be formed, and habitus cannot be established, without relying on the interpretation of cultural texts; as Stanley Deetz puts it in Hermeneutics, Textuality and Communication Study, “we live on the thickness of interpretation” (1980: 7). Thus, here we deal with a movement “from text to action” (Ricœur 1991b).

Social as . . . Rational The relationship between social science and philosophy, as rational science, is complicated, which is reflected well in the following title: Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences (Kaldis 2013). It is argued that social science should not be left to philosophers who have little knowledge of such social issues as conflict, power, and intersubjectivity, and so cannot solve social problems. To that end, the ideas of such thinkers as Marx, Weber, and Habermas are found more helpful (see Bunge 1996). In the volume Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought (Benton and Craib 2001), for instance, we find two references to Aristotle, four to Kant, and none to Plato. Thus, philosophy of the social sciences is, in effect, social philosophy. And yet, the role of philosophy in social science goes beyond the ideas of instrumental or communicative rationality with their normative orientation. In should be remembered that, in general, “knowingly or not, social scientists utilize philosophical concepts and principles” (Branaman 1997: 783), speaking the language(s) of metaphysics. In this regard, a communication ontology can hardly be proposed that “does not lapse into some form of Platonism” (Cooren 2012: 6), for conceptualizations of communication “lapse” not only into some form of Platonism, but also Aristotelianism, Kantianism, Wittgensteinianism, and so on. “Philosophy of the social sciences,” therefore, cannot be identified with “philosophy and the social sciences,” illustrated by the comparison of the two thinkers below. One is August Compte, who aimed to overcome the “unscientific” theological and metaphysical views that, in his opinion, by their nature could only display critical or destructive activity; he wanted to replace them with a positive science that would be able to explain social development. Compte

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considered his views to be a revolution in human thinking, as did the other thinker—Immanuel Kant, albeit for different reasons. Whereas Compte posits, Kant postulates; the former aims to set ideas fixedly in place, the latter “merely” to present a synthesis that gives us an object and generates its concept. While both are practical, the former actively seeks normative foundations and focuses on discourse, whereas the latter focuses on language and passively makes an action possible. Also, for Kant, critical philosophy is not destructive; rather, it synthesizes all experiences in transcendental apperception of the subject as the unity of one’s self-consciousness: philosophy, therefore, “is designed to determine the boundaries of the conceivable and thereby unthinkable” (Wittgenstein 1922: 4.114). It is perhaps no accident that Compte toward the end of his life saw himself as a social prophet and preacher, while Kant avoided the temptation of identifying the nature of Being only with social processes, living an ordinary and happy life of contemplation. As we can see, social science is in the contradictory relationship with philosophy, trying to position itself as “not philosophy.” In a way, overcoming the “unscientific” metaphysical ideas means canceling philosophy out. Compte called this new science “social physics,” as if trying, perhaps subconsciously, to erase all traces of philosophy. Social thought, therefore, may not have been driven only by “physics envy”; maybe it suffers from something like the Oedipus/Electra complex, its deep desires being repressed or unconscious. Be that as it may, “the central problem of sociology, which gives an explanation of the nature of social phenomena in general, itself belongs to philosophy” (Winch 1958: 33), and we see this not only in the attempts, conscious or not, to forget it, but also in such approaches as social philosophy, phenomenological sociology, or phenomenologically informed sociology (Allen-Collinson and Evans 2019), which emphasizes the fact that social communication is not only about institutions or structures of power, but also experiences of individuals in their relations to others.

Cultural as . . . Natural In the words attributed to Ernest Rutherford, another Nobel Prize-winner, “physics is the only real science, everything else is stamp collecting.” It is not surprising, therefore, that, when the hierarchy among the scientific disciplines is likened to a universe in which the gravitational pull on each discipline-planet is proportional to its distance from the sun, the sun is represented by physics, followed by biology and chemistry as the near planets, and then, in increasingly distant orbits, such disciplines as psychology, anthropology, and political science; finally, “at the far end of this hypothetical

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universe are the arts and literature” (Kagan 2009: 246). We can also recall that in Compte’s hierarchy of sciences there was no place for the humanities at all. It is no wonder that natural science and the humanities, as cultural science, are in the relationship of contradiction. Whenever natural science attempts to enter the human realm, such efforts seem misplaced; hence, “the humanities are the domain in which the intrusion of science has produced the strongest recoil” (Pinker 2013). At the same time, although a gap seems to exist between natural science and cultural science, there is still a connection between them, tentative as it may be. Indeed, the study of communication makes “occasional forays into the natural sciences (mostly in the hunt for metaphors)” (Peters 2003: 399). The humanities borrow and creatively adapt from natural science terms and complex ideas; for example, in his book The Transformative Humanities, Mikhail Epstein uses Einstein’s famous formula as a heuristic device to describe the transformation of the mass of knowledge into the energy of thinking (2012). The heuristic value of the concepts and ideas from natural science cannot be denied, yet they are still used (metaphorically, as noted above) by the humanities as cultural science; for cultural science to (also) be conceptualized as natural science, the “intrusion” of the latter into the former needs to be more direct—literal, not metaphoric. In this light, it should be remembered that all expressions of the human spirit (including metaphors) are realized by the circuitry of the human brain, and that includes metaphors. As noted by George Lakoff (2009), the theory of conceptual metaphors he developed with Mark Johnson was vague in a number of ways, and so the neural theory of metaphor provides a better explanation for metaphorical inferences since it uses neural computational modeling. By showing how a node in a neural circuit can activate a meaningful mental simulation (i.e., by seeing what conceptual metaphors physically are), the neural theory makes it possible for us to understand better why some human expressions are more powerful than others, and why certain metaphors are more widespread around the world. Lakoff also mentions the book Where Mathematics Comes From that he wrote together with Rafael Núñez (2000), which shows how even mathematics is built up, through layers of metaphor, from embodied concepts. Indeed, the origins of mathematics go back to real-life “trial and error,” that is, practical experience and observation; for instance, “we find that the pre-Hellenic mathematics was empirical. Nowhere do we find in ancient oriental mathematics a single instance of what we today call a logical demonstration” (Eves 1990: 5). Meanwhile, the humanities often view mathematics as a “planet” out of their orbit. As John Peters notes in his assessment of Friedrich Kittler’s work, the German scholar complained that the humanities forgot how to count, while “the humanities—and humans—are nothing without mathe-

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matics. The arts of song, poetry and dance all rest on measure, meter and number” (2015: 29). All expressions of the human spirit that are studied by cultural science require some kind of natural materiality, meaning, “any form of matter or energy” (Schiffer 1999: 12). In the words of Hildegard of Bingen, “the spirit without the bloody matter of the body is not the living person” (see Harrison 1998: 35). Human culture can be discussed as “purification” and “grooming” not only in terms of rituals or verbal gossip, but also in the literal sense. Hence, such fields as media ecology and ecology of communication can be developed only if it is remembered that “the media of communication are not mere catalysts but have their own physics and chemistry” (McLuhan 1967: Item 14). In this respect, “a material theory of communication includes not only verbal exchanges, but virtually all others, including those at the molecular level, where the odor of freshly baked foods communicates in much the same way as speech” (Jordan 2002: 380). The “material turn” as one of the characteristic features of the humanities in the early twenty-first century can hardly be considered a paradigm shift because the materiality of human expressions has been explored for centuries. In that sense, for instance, all expressions of various ideologies, important as they may be, are grounded in reality; hence, “communication and the forms of communication may not be divorced from the material basis” (Voloshinov 1973: 21). Today, more attention is paid to the physicality of cultural artifacts, including the “disembodied” forms of electronic communication. “Disembodied” as they might appear, communication should be viewed in terms thermodynamic characteristics. In this sense, such purely characteristics are involved in accounting for today’s increasingly more integrated global communication processes (Karnani, Pääkkönen, and Annila 2009). It is noted that the focus on verbal text is predominantly a phenomenon of the Western humanities, whereas, for instance, the material dimension in Asian cultures has a much longer history of scholarly interest (Bod et al., 2016). Even in the West, though, as Ivan Illich notes, reading was perceived as a physical activity “not unlike a search for firewood”; however, “with the detachment of the text from the physical object, . . . nature itself ceased to be an object to be read and became the object to be described. Exegesis and hermeneutics became operations on the text, rather than on the world,” and so “the page lost the quality of soil in which words are rooted” (1993: 58, 117, 119). Still, operations on the text sometimes include making use of the material traces, for example, radiocarbon dating techniques applied to the Bible (Levy and Higham 2005), or a spectral and chromatic analysis of paintings, examining the composition of pigments and the impact caused by environmental factors as part of its authentication (Turcanu-Carutiu, Rau, and

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Meghea 2008). Such findings are meant to add to, not replace, those from the areas of inquiry that deal with the cultural “archeology of knowledge.” Texts can also be viewed in the light of natural patterns of organization, such as the fractality, symmetry, and rhythm that form their physical macrostructures, measurable and reproducible with a certain degree of probability (Moskalchuk and Manakov 2014). Culture overall can be seen as a human creation cultivated in the natural soil. What Roland Barthes calls “writing aloud,” for instance, is conceptualized in terms of “the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning” (1975: 66). He sees the cinema materiality captured well by cinema, which, with its “sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle,” succeeds “in shifting the signified a great distance” (1975: 67). It should be noted that there is a difference between seeing the articulation of the body as “not that of meaning” and “shifting the signified a great distance,” that is, still being meaningful, albeit far removed from the (cultural) meaning of the signs. By the same token, while focusing on the poetics and erotics of writing and reading, Barthes says that “the pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need” (1975: 17) and also that it is “like the exercise of a different physiology” (1975: 30). In other words, although nature cannot replace culture, culture cannot do without nature. Finally, the most distinctly human experience is often found is the aesthetic realm. According to Kant, we have a cultural taste if we are able to take a stance toward an object devoid of all interest, such as our scientific interests and our practical concerns; then, the object can be judged “beautiful.” In contrast to the merely agreeable experience confined to our private subjectivity, the beautiful is grounded in conditions presupposed for everyone and so is communicable; only then can humans “engage . . . in very intimate communication” (Kant 1987: 231). One of the questions that remain, though, is whether the richness of the reality in which the beautiful is grounded includes taste as a natural object; that is one reason why the “difficulty of defining this third faculty [of taste], much less determining its existence, continues to vex both philosophers and communication theorists” (Hove 2009: 104). In light of the Theory of Preference that views communication as a neurobiological process (Dolan and Sharot 2012; Glimcher 2002), choices depend on primary rewards in the form of pleasant stimuli, such as tastes (Knutson and Karmarkar 2014). Perhaps in the end (and in the beginning), cultural differences exist not in literal and metaphoric meanings but come down to the realm where the signified is shifted at such great distance that one simply cannot help it, being affected by an object rather than judging

Communication

it, the way a smell of freshly baked bread becomes part of your cultural self. This explains perhaps why, despite its universal communicability, there is no accounting for taste.

Cultural as . . . Social The humanities gain an access to the human spirit through texts as significant expressions. At the same time, it should be remembered that “texts, as so-called ‘objects’ of interpretation, are, in the last analysis, only objectified manifestations of the meaning-intentions of their authors and thus of a communication between human beings which surmounts, so to speak, space and time as the very realm of objectification” (Apel 1972: 30). Interpretation, therefore, is always a kind of practice of working with text, and there is a certain value associated with it; it is no accident that in Ancient Greek the word “interpretation” is derived from per-n-e, meaning “I sell” (Morris 1982). The process of interpretation assumes a reflexive attitude of the researcher to the text and to oneself: in this sense, true hermeneutics is (or should be) double hermeneutics. Hence, “communication is, at once, a productive or technical skill and a social practice” (Jensen 2018: 179). Today, this is especially emphasized by those who research electronic texts and can see how changes to social life are made quickly just by pressing a key on a computer keyboard; in a way, our life can be seen as one big Wikipedia. It is important to remember that “the conversion of a chain of facts into a text is invariably accompanied by . . . fixing certain events which are translatable into elements of the text and forgetting others . . . . In this sense every text furthers not only the remembering process, but forgetting as well” (Lotman and Uspensky 1978: 215–16). Selecting and fixing certain events into a text is a social activity that includes judgment, identity, categorization, and similarity (McClain 2014). Judgment expresses the interpreter’s attitude to the text in terms of its value and significance that can range from utilitarian to deifying. Identity refers to those forms of activity that result in the individuality of both a person and a separate group being strengthened or weakened. Categorization is the establishment of links between different texts (i.e., intertextuality) and similarity implies communicative acts based on a spiritual closeness of the interpreter to the text—in other words, any interpretative practice is motivated by personal meaning and is not only a form of techne, but also an ethical act and a phronetic decision based on judgments, identity, categorization, and similarity. So, just as communication is both a technical skill and a social practice, the humanities can understand the human spirit more fully by considering the practical ends of

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its manifestation, for “much of what we do represents praxis and poesis in varying degrees and proportions” (Skirbekk and Gilje 2001: 82). In this light, Aristotle’s rhetorical teaching is not only a guide to effective persuasion. Aristotle was convinced of the need for rhetoric and wrote his famous work not simply as a practical guide but as an analytical response to the sophists and Plato. While his Rhetoric is a case of techne—a product generated outside of oneself—Aristotle’s creation of Rhetoric is a case of the activity that is an end in itself, that is, in which social action coincides with his internal goal. Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic theory can be seen in the same vein. Where Aristotle’s ideas and actions grew on the basis of the polis, Bakhtin’s situation was quite different: his were the times of monologism and a single ideology. Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination grew out of his distrust of such monologic forces; for him, language is inherently multivoiced and ethics begins not with preconstructed rules, norms, and laws but always from a unique moment of active engagement with others in nonrecurrent circumstances of time and space. Bakhtin understood that we are responsible for every act we perform and affirmed it with all his life (Klyukanov and Sinekopova 2019).

Cultural as . . . Rational It was mentioned in a previous chapter that philosophy is sometimes considered “a guest among the humanities, and a dubious one” (Turner 2014: 382). In fact, philosophy is conceptualized as the opposite of such humanities disciplines as philology or rhetoric (Heunemann 2017). Whereas humanities scholars turn to texts for the ideas about what constitutes the human spirit, philosophers look for their ideas elsewhere (or, rather, everywhere). When it is said (Heunemann 2017) that at academic cocktail parties philosophers are more likely to hang out with physicists than with literary critics, this is not just a funny observation, but also an insightful one (it should be added, though, that those physicists are most likely theoretical physicists). It is not that philosophy is too far from the humanities, but rather that they are too close, their relationship being one of (sub)contrariety. In other words, philosophers feel they are more likely to find new ideas in an area further away where the limits of knowledge are also being pushed, albeit from a different perspective. This does not mean, of course, that philosophy is not relevant for the humanities, or vice versa (Derrida 2000b; Olafson 1968; Zeidler 1996). If that relevancy is not obvious to some and questions arise—such as “Why do we need Kant and Derrida?”—two main responses can be given. The first response is that “we need concepts to understand and deal with the world”

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(George 2019: 7). In this regard, analytic philosophy, often perceived as too dry and abstract because of its focus on the conceptual clarification of language, made “contributions of real value to our understanding of that common language on which the humanities are so heavily dependent” (Olafson 1968: 44). Also, the importance of logic, as a backbone of every science, should not be overlooked in the humanities, where arguments also are offered based on some premises, and conclusions are reached (Heunemann 2017). And “the second response pertains to the clarification of assumptions that underlie the way we think” because of our “subservience to habit”; in other words, the humanities need philosophy “to clarify and contest the unconscious assumptions” (George 2019: 7). In this regard, humanities studies can be carried out more successfully “under phenomenological auspices” (Olafson 1968: 44). Focusing on the interpretation of texts in their specific cultural circumstances, “the humanists . . . can learn from the philosophers that, while context is important, it isn’t everything” because philosophy does something crucial for cultural science, and that is “illuminating the problem spaces of problems” (Heunemann 2017). In fact, if all the professional duties of the philosopher, discussed earlier, were brought down to just one main duty, it would be “problematizing” or “philosophizing.” “To philosophize” is different from the verbs that appear grammatically similar yet are transitive, such as “to biologize” or “to humanize,” meaning “to make biological” and “to make human” (i.e., “to attribute certain qualities to an object”). “To philosophize” as an intransitive verb means “to speculate,” “to reason as a philosopher.” When it is treated (very rarely) as a transitive verb, for example “to philosophize about or on something,” it still means “to talk about something in a serious way,” or “to reason as a philosopher.” Only occasionally is “to philosophize” viewed as a transitive verb with the meaning of “bringing into conformity with a philosophical point of view.” In Russian, these two meanings of “philosophizing” are reflected in the existence of two verbs: filosovstvovat’ (in the first, common, meaning of “speculating”), and filosovizirovat’ (in the second meaning of “conforming an object to philosophy”). It is sometimes noted that “contemporary philosophy bogged down in its own mire—it took ‘to philosophize’ as an intransitive verb” and that, since “philosophy, as it now operates, takes ‘to philosophize’ as an intransitive verb, it tends to be a closed, self-analytical enterprise” (Laszlo 1973: 82). And yet, to be a philosopher is to philosophize; as Jean-François Lyotard puts it: “In truth, how can we not philosophize?” (2013: 123). This case is made most explicitly by Heidegger who writes: This comportment is expressed in a special manner when we say that “studying philosophy” must be a real “philosophizing.” That means: what we relate to . . .

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is such that it determines, from its own character, the comportment toward it. The object gives the comportment a name, i.e., the comportment to—namely, to philosophy—is properly expressed as an intransitive. . . . The object of the comportment lends this to the expression, such that the latter precisely expresses the independence of the comportment and such that what is decisive in this case is not the comportment to . . . but . . . the being-in-this-comportment. (2001: 39)

Philosophizing as a comportment so understood fits well into the distinction between two kinds of consciousness: transitive as being aware of something or that something is so-and-so, and intransitive as consciousness without an object (Armstrong 1984). Philosophizing clearly being a case of the latter, it is tempting to treat it as “bogged down in its own mire” or “a closed, selfanalytical enterprise.” However, “one must be intransitively conscious, in the sense of being ‘awake, in order to be transitively conscious,’” that is, “intransitive consciousness (of whatever sort) is a necessary condition of transitive consciousness” (Neufeld 1997: 47). In this sense, philosophy’s intransitive comportment is necessary for any kind of transitive activity, including creation and interpretation of significant expressions by humans. Sometimes “philosophizing” is used interchangeably with “theorizing.” Indeed, “to philosophize” and “to theorize” can both function as transitive and intransitive verbs. When communication is theorized, however, the focus is on a particular system of ideas about some of its aspects (Gudykunst 2005) or a tradition uniting several theories, for example, “socio-cultural tradition” (Craig and Muller 2007). This comportment is expressed as a transitive because of a shorter distance between its object and the subject (the theorist). The more independent of a specific object, that is, the more it functions as a general background, the more comportment becomes intransitive (i.e., philosophical). Thus, “philosophizing” can hardly be equated with “theorizing”: overall, the more intransitive the nature of one’s comportment to communication, the closer it is to philosophizing. In this light, for instance, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Levinas, Derrida, and Heidegger are philosophers of communication rather than its theorists. It is no accident that their philosophizing has a lasting value. Sic intransit gloria mundi.

Rational as . . . Natural According to the oft-quoted pronouncement by Leonard Mlodinow and Stephen Hawking, “philosophy is dead” because “philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics” (2010: 5). This

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clearly is not a statement of fact; rather, it is provocative, meant to note that philosophy has perhaps been neglecting the natural sciences. Rational science and natural science, however, exist in the relationship of complementarity, and so “if science needs philosophy, scientific results should also be the starting point of philosophical reflection about nature” (De Haro 2013: 310). Natural science, as briefly discussed earlier, cannot not be in some ways philosophical since it contains a dimension of subjective experience in its “objective” approach and also depends on the philosophical limiting of the unlimited; for instance, though he was certainly doing physics, Einstein was also “doing the philosophy that physics required at that point in time—and it was philosophy because he was reflecting on, and critically and constructively engaging with, the conceptual foundations of quantum theory” (De Haro 2013: 307–8). Since their relationship is one of complementarity, natural science returns the favor; as Jaspers notes, looking back at the history of their relationship, “at the same time as the limits of science became clear, the positive significance and indispensability of science for philosophy also became clear” (1971: 10). Jaspers goes on to specify why philosophy needs science. First, he notes the importance of “recognizing and overcoming the muddy confusion of philosophy and science” (1971: 10). In this respect, it is important not to confuse not only philosophy and natural science, but also natural science and natural philosophy, for the latter aims to explain everything as a manifestation of physis (Gare 2018). And second, the natural sciences “bring us face to face with the factual content of appearances” (Jaspers 1971: 11). Historically, many philosophers, including Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and Kant (who cannot, however, be pigeonholed into the category of “natural philosophers”), have found such factual matters very stimulating. Today, philosophy continues this tradition “by remaining in living touch with the sciences” (Jaspers 1971: 11). “Touch,” of course, stands for contact in any modality. For example, the phenomenon of “neuronal entrainment”—a process of spontaneous synchronization observed in various oscillating physical and biological systems—is attracting increasing attention. It is noted that this phenomenon “complements the theories of communication through coherence and communication through resonance by proposing that communication from the multitude of external rhythmic (and quasi-rhythmic) sources of information is engaged by entrainment” (Lakatos, Gross, and Thut 2019: R895). Philosophy is thus nudged to philosophize this phenomenon, as well as “A World without Entrainment” (Lakatos, Gross, and Thut 2019: R899). In the same vein, natural science has made great strides in explaining the visceral experience of perceiving music as a process encompassing motion and change and so “the lived reality of mu-

Being Is Said in Many Ways

sic puts pressure on philosophers to broaden their conception of what the mind is” (Judge 2018). Philosophy is also drawn to contemplate the findings of such natural sciences as biology, zoology, geography, geology, and ethology, which are comprehensively addressed by Deleuze and Guattari, who bring philosophy down to earth within the framework of geophilosophy (Bonta and Protevi 2004; Gasché 2014); in doing so, they follow the ideas of Nietzsche who proclaimed “Be true to the earth” and whom they view as the founder of geophilosophy (Gunzel 2003). Thus, while philosophy may appear as self-contained and existing within its own realm separate from life and natural sciences, this is not the case. In fact, “philosophy must find paths of inquiry and verification that lie within reality as it is conceived today in all its manifestations. This reality, however, can in no instance be genuine and wholly present without [natural] science” (Jaspers 1971: 13).

Rational as . . . Social In Vladimir Lenin’s often-cited words, “One cannot live in society and be free from society” (2008: 25). This dictum finds its manifestation in social philosophy; for instance, Dewey called to “avoid large general isms” because “what is needed is to see that every philosophy since it has a practical aim is relative to the specific situation which requires rectification. We must think within limits set by special ills and special resources at hand for correcting them” (2015: 11). Here, the approach is clearly pragmatic, aimed at providing normative standards for social transformation, for example, correcting such ills as the writer, artist, or actress dependent on money-bag and corruption masked by bourgeois ideology, of which Lenin wrote in highlighting the relationship between individuals and society. This approach is adopted by critical theories of communication, such as a recent book entitled Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory (Fuchs 2020). Such an approach focuses on concrete social conditions and, in spite of all its importance, is found not radical enough; a radical philosophy explores the phenomenology of human perception and communication (Kolesnikov 2010). Striving toward pure forms of consciousness, though, could lead phenomenologists to the opposite extreme: “focusing on consciousness, they forget praxis” (Melançon 2014). Thus, to be truly radical, philosophy must not lose sight of social reality, while interrogating its own assumptions of how lived experience emerges and is structured. These ideas form the basis of critical phenomenology laid out in the works of such thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Pierre Bourdieu. Merleau-Ponty makes it clear

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that “philosophy . . . does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part” (1962: xxiii). The connection between rational science and social science may be difficult to establish due to their contradictory relationship between theoria and praxis, yet, although they appear mutually exclusive, one cannot be free from the other. Philosophizing, as a quest for knowledge driven by a sense of wonder, is grounded in the sociohistorical conditions of the world, even though it is tempting to allege that philosophizing is an autonomous enterprise, such as can be seen in Wittgenstein’s dictum: “What is history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world” (1969: 82). One can also note a skeptical attitude of some philosophers, especially of the analytical tradition, to nonphilosophical histories of philosophy, such as those conducted within social science. However, the alleged autonomy of philosophy “must be questioned as to how it is achieved, what forms of knowledge it is thought to exclude, and why it is accorded any special value in the first place” (Kusch 1995: 23). Hence, the relationship between philosophy and society cannot be limited only to criticizing and correcting social problems, but must also problematize the foundations of philosophy itself, thus making it “an eminently philosophical project” (Kusch 1995: 23). This project can be carried out from different perspectives, for instance, in terms of controversies over knowledge claims or in terms of interests represented by network models. A comprehensive example of the latter is Randall Collins’ article “The Sociology of Philosophies,” which covers the origins and changes of philosophical thought in ancient Greece, ancient China, Japan, India, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, and modern Europe (Collins 2000). Collins makes his main premise very clear: philosophical “ideas are not rooted in individuals but in communications among individuals” (2000: 158). He does not deny the existence of the genius or intellectual hero; still, “there is a social causation of creativity, even at its intimate core” (2000: 161). More specifically, he shows how philosophical ideas emerge and take shape through interaction rituals in social networks of communication. All such social encounters are discussed in terms of ritual intensity that depends on physical, intellectual, and emotional distance between those sharing a social identity. Thus, philosophical ideas appear as a result of intergenerational chains and are shaped by contemporary rivalries, politics and opposition to innovation, secularization, and a proliferation of organized schools, to name but a few of the social factors discussed. We find attempts to present a history of communication studies (Löblich and Scheu 2011) or historically theorize communication (Schiller 1996) from similar perspectives. When philosophy of communication is discussed, it is often presented in terms of individual thinkers or according to the types of works “rather than attempting to find coherence” (Bencherki and Cooren 2020).

Being Is Said in Many Ways

Writing an intellectual history along the lines briefly outlined above could provide it with such coherence. In a similar fashion, the “philosophical project” can be informed not only by sociological insights, but also other areas of social science; for instance, anthropology (Carroll 2017) or psychology that is indispensable to such areas of philosophy as logic, epistemology, and metaphysics: “not one of them can neglect psychology with impunity” (Thilly 1906: 141). And yet, while the importance of philosophy for psychology is widely recognized (see all the work in the “philosophy of psychology” field), the opposite is a different matter. In addressing the question “what psychological factors drive philosophers toward certain views and away from others?” (Schwitzgebel 2007), social psychology takes center stage. However, if “philosophic systems are presented to us as if growing out of one another spontaneously,” then “their authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts” (de Unamuno 1921: 2). In other words, not only social psychology deserves attention, but personality psychology does as well (Starks 2019), “for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we accept or reject as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it” (Fichte 1970: 16). Or, as Carl Gustav Jung eloquently puts it, “there is no thinking qua thinking . . . . Often what is thought is less important than who thinks it. But this is assiduously overlooked” (1973: 331–32). One of the exceptions is Alexander Herzberg’s book The Psychology of Philosophers in which he shows that “all great philosophers” are individuals “of great intensity of impulse” (1929: 114) and argues that in most cases it is inaptitude in practical affairs of the social world that results in their preponderance of philosophic thought, such as the contradictory relationship between praxis and theoria. Thus, philosophizing as reflection on our experience of longing to be at home everywhere (i.e., “our communication with the world” [Merleau-Ponty 1969: 42]) cannot be free from the society in which we live. Philosophizing cannot be equated with “content”; it is always an embodied activity out of which ideas emerge and should be viewed “in relation to different discourses and practices” (Cull and Lagaay 2020: 14). Philosophy exists as long as it keeps this relation in mind and does not forget to problematize its own existence.

Rational as . . . Cultural As Hegel concisely put it, “Parmenides began Philosophy proper” for which “necessity alone, Being, is the truth” (1892: 254). Since then, though, philosophy has been seen in many relationships. Whether to call these relationships “improper” is beside the point; the point is that “philosophy confronts

Communication

otherness as having an essential relation to whatever constitutes its own and proper task” (Bambach and George 2019: 1)—consider the contradictory relationship between theoria and praxis just noted (i.e., philosophical reflection as not practical activity). By the same token, there is a relationship between philosophy, as rational science, and the humanities, as cultural science; after all, philosophy “itself is a human construction, and the philosopher knows very well that, whatever be his effort, in the best of cases it will take its place among the artefacts and products of culture, as an instance of them” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 102). In this sense, “poetizing confronts thinking as its other” (Bambach and George 2019: 2); “poetizing” here should not be equated only with composing poetry or presenting something in verse but understood in terms of poesis as making. Thus, “philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xxiii). The relationship between philosophy and art is different from the relationship between philosophy and social activity. When Gadamer writes of “an eternal dispute about the priority of philosophy over art or vice versa” (Gadamer 1980: 41), one may see this as a struggle to the bitter end, that is, as a contradictory (mutually exclusive) relationship. Their relationship is more peaceful, though, called by Friedrich Hölderlin “harmonious contrariety” (Bambach and George 2019: 4); or, using the semiotic square framework developed earlier, “subcontrariety.” It is no accident that “we cannot help but encounter a certain affinity between thinking and poeticizing” (Bambach and George 2019: 2). This affinity finds its manifestation in that both philosophers and those in the humanities create and interpret significant expressions. Perhaps not as tempting as it is for natural science to follow the Nullius in verba motto, rational science also may see itself as dealing not “with philosophy’s rhetoric, but with philosophy neat, clean, and simple, where issues of logical consistency and truth trump those that pertain to the expressive dimension of writing” (Danto 1996: 102). Still, for philosophical ideas to last, they need to be expressed and recorded; as mentioned in a previous chapter, even Plato’s “neatest and cleanest” doctrines have reached us thanks to writing. Also, just like any writing, philosophical works can be divided into different genres; in this respect, for example, “lyrical philosophy fully deserves consideration as a distinctive yet insufficiently explored mode of philosophical literature” (Epstein 2014). The crucial role of interpretation is addressed in-depth by philosophical hermeneutics. It should be emphasized that only through interpretation can understanding take place, including self-understanding. In his book Philosophy of Existence, Jaspers shows very well how philosophy speaks through the texts of its “great representatives,” such as “Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Nico-

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las of Cusa, Anselm, Plotinus, Plato.” He notes that “one may know texts, and be able to trace their thought constructions with precision—and yet not understand them” (1971: 12)—only by interpreting and understanding them can philosophy remain relevant. Thus, although for philosophy Being is the truth, its contact with Being is an act of creation because “Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 197). At the same time, we should view “philosophy as supreme art” since “it wishes to surpass itself as pure Gebilde, to find again its origin. It is hence a creation in a radical sense” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 197). In this light, an analysis of literature and all cultural artifacts can be seen “as inscription of Being” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 197); textual inscriptions, thus, become the objects of hermeneutical interpretation (see Luzar 2016). Philosophy, though, is radical in that it does not commit itself to any specific commentary on textual meanings, “neither seeking nor positing to interpret, to signify” (Nancy 1991: 60). Following Jean-Luc Nancy, we can talk about “free philosophical composition as an autonomous form of writing, as ‘literature,’ in terms of exscription of existence” (Hutchens 2005: 15). In this regard, philosophy is not focused on text but on language, in general, that makes it possible for all beings to exist in unceasing contact with Being—to be more exact, on the limit of language where the world comes into presence as the gravity of thought. Philosophy is the art of feeling such weight, no matter how infinitesimally small, and letting it come into existence so naturally as if it were meant to be that way. In a manner of speaking, philosophy is an art of light touches. Nancy reminds us that “one must always let the limit present itself anew” (1997: 67), and so, just like new relations open in excess of the inscribed meaning, philosophy must forever begin again, neither able to capture the sense of existence nor to leave it be; hence “exscription” is a “twofold failure” (2008: 57). However, this double negative translates into a positive, just like the (neither-nor) fourth position of the semiotic square opens up to new meaning. This is the most “unartful art,” dealing with the double bind of the twofold failure by “reading what cannot be read, and saying what cannot be said” (Larssen 2017: 29). The art of philosophical comportment “is a writing that touches but does not grasp, and that is attentive to the fact that it cannot appropriate bodies totally, but that they are exscribed at the moment of inscription, this being the condition of possibility of writing in general” (Larssen 2017: 44). Thus, this is not the “heavy” comportment of positing but the “light” comportment of postulating; in Nancy’s words, “let there be writing, not about the body, but body itself ” (2008: 9). How easy or difficult it is to establish a connection between the four scientific perspectives on communication depends on the distance between them. Those in the relationship of complementarity are closer to each other

Communication

and often viewed as one, which is literally reflected in the distance between characters of their designations—“fused” in a solid spelling, such as the Russian term naturfilosofiya (“natural philosophy”), or hyphenated, such as the “socio-cultural tradition of communication.” It is more difficult to see a connection between those perspectives that are in the (sub)contrariety relationships. Still, scholars who study social communication view themselves as scientists (i.e., follow in the footsteps of natural science), while “both the poetical and philosophical types of speech share a common feature: they cannot be ‘false’” (Gadamer 1986: 139), and so philosophers may see themselves (and often are seen) as poets, and poets as philosophers. It is even more difficult to see a connection between those perspectives that are in the contradictory relationship and can appear to be completely separate rather than separated; hence, for example, a larger distance that can be perceived as a gap between the humanities and natural science.

CHAPTER

Communication/Study as Such ‰Í

We have seen that communication can be studied from several scientific perspectives. To try and conceptualize the study of communication overall, we need to see if communication can be viewed as an object in itself. To that end, it seems only appropriate to pose “the question if, by ‘communication,’ theoreticians understand the same thing” (Kane 2016: 96), in other words, if they perceive the same object. As Merleau-Ponty shows in Phenomenology of Perception, the identity of any object is guaranteed by its horizon (i.e., its surrounding objects): insofar as these “objects recede into the periphery and become dormant,” the main object of perception “comes to life and is disclosed” (1962: 78). Every object can be viewed as made up of two realms: the “visible” (external, substantial), on the one hand, and the “invisible” (internal, ideational), on the other. For example, a person can look at a lamp on the table where he or she sits and see it not only with his or her eyes, but can see it how the chimney, the walls, and the table “see” it, as well (1962: 79). Also, one can detach oneself from the experience of perceiving an object in space, such as a house, and pass to the idea, and “like the object, the idea purports to be the same for everybody” (1962: 79). Every object, therefore, is viewed not only as something existing in space, but also in time, or, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “what we have just said about the spatial perspective could equally be said about the temporal” (1962: 79), hence the role of memory. Every object, then, exists only as long as it is being recognized (visibly and invisibly) by all the other objects that form its horizon and impose a structure on the object, making it appear; “the horizon, then, is what guarantees the identity of the object throughout the exploration” (1962: 80). This is how “consciousness . . . takes hold of itself and draws itself together in an identifiable object” (1962: 82);

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this way, thought becomes objective and an object becomes thought. It is important to emphasize that, although an object is always partly “out there” and so never complete, we are “in inner communion . . . with them” (1962: 82); otherwise, an object would not be identifiable. Communication is different from a mere object like a lamp because, like Proteus, it constantly changes. It can appear as a natural entity or process, as a social fact or process, as a significant expression, or as a conscious experience. In this light, for natural science communication is a connection between beings and beings; for social science, a bond between people and people; for cultural science, a correspondence between people and people; and for rational science, a relation between beings and Being. Just as one treats the body as an object by being “obsessed with being, and forgetful of the perspectivism of [one’s] experience” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 81), one treats communication in one of its manifestations; while the other perspectives are forgotten. They still exist as dormant, though, and can be unforgotten. When various perspectives on communication are offered, they all lean one of the four ways, as discussed earlier. For instance, the volume Communication as . . . : Perspectives on Theory (Shepherd, St. John, and Striphas 2006) brings together twenty-seven chapters by leading scholars who share their views of communication, which fit into those four sciences: social (e.g., ritual, social influence, political participation, complex organizing), cultural (e.g, techne, a practice, storytelling, articulation, collective memory), rational (e.g, relationality, transcendence, failure), and natural (dissemination). Not surprisingly, the majority of the views are from the social science perspective, followed by the cultural science perspective, then the rational science perspective, and, finally, the natural science perspective (which in the book has a somewhat metaphoric thrust). If we look at those who have studied communication throughout the ages, we can see that they, just as the perspectives on theory above, lean toward one of the four sciences: social (e.g., Aristotle, Plato, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, George Herbert Mead, George Gerbner, Harold Dwight Lasswell, Stanley Deetz), cultural (e.g., Ernst Cassirer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes, James Carey, Walter Fisher, Dell Hymes, Stuart Hall), rational (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Husserl, Buber, Gilles Deleuze, Charles S. Peirce, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein), and natural (e.g., Aristotle, Robert Boyle, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin, E. O. Wilson). Obviously, no classification is clear-cut, and so we find several thinkers in more than one area, Aristotle being a prime example. What is also important here is that these thinkers are usually designated as philosophers (e.g., Aristotle and Plato), philosophers and social theorists (e.g.,

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Mead and Habermas), economists and political theorists (e.g., Marx), linguists (e.g., Jakobson), literary theorists (e.g., Burke), cultural theorists (e.g., Hall), political scientists (e.g., Lasswell), linguists and anthropologists (e.g., Dell Hymes), psychologists (e.g., Paul Watzlawick), biologists (e.g., Wilson), and so on. “Communication scholars” are usually so called or self-identified by way of “administrative arrangements” (Anderson and Baym, 2004: 603) or “an institutional architecture of professional organizations, academic units, and journals” (Waisbord 2019: 124). In reality, “communication departments” are made up of “some variety of quantitative scholars, psychologists, sociologists, cultural theorists, historians, legal and policy experts, political economists, and so on” (McChesney 2007: 21). As humans, we tend to focus on “human communication”; this designation, however, implies that communication can also be “not human” or “nonhuman,” as well as “human-not/nonhuman”; even communications in inorganic synthesis is a legitimate area of research, for instance, the international academic journal of the same title. Thus, all human RELATIONS are relative to the long-range survival of the (social) system one is in; and this at another level is relative to the constraints of the organic environment (which includes humans-as-organisms). This at another level is relative to the constraints of the inorganic environment; which in turn is relative to the constraints of local or “planetary (positive) entropy . . .”; and so on. Each time we approach a boundary in this hierarchy of relations—e.g., the boundary between “life” and “non-life” defined by the DNA-RNA communication system, or that between “nature” and “society” defined by the historical emergence of kinship-constrained production and reproduction (including the reproduction of society itself)—we are at the same time approaching the locus of what a given relationship will be relative T0. (Wilden 1980: xxxiii–xxxiv)

“Communication” is clearly understood in different ways; “this may include interorganismic or intraorganismic communication, communication in biological systems, communication between animals or between human beings, psychosocial or socioeconomic communication” (Wilden 1980: 111). We must admit, therefore, that theoreticians do not understand by “communication” the same thing; in each case, we should ask “which concept of ‘communication’ are we using here?” (Luhmann 2013: 54). “Communication” cannot be defined as an object if we keep in mind that “definition” is a translation of the Latin word “definition” (from the word finis—“end,” “border”), which, in turn, is a translation of the ancient Greek horismós—“limit,” “border”; hence, “to define a thing is to set limits to it” (Marias 1967: 39). If “communication” cannot be really circumscribed as a specific object, then it should be viewed in terms of “infinitions,” releasing it from any restricting demarcations (Epstein 2012), or “transfinitions” (compare to transfinite

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numbers—a monstrous concept, combining infinity and limit). Georg Cantor, who coined the term “transfinite,” advanced the Continuum Hypothesis, maintaining that “the transfinite numbers followed directly from Nature” (Dauben 1979: 238). In this regard, communication “is always, firstly and lastly, a one, the continuity of experience, a simple ongoing that” (Friedl 2019: 302). All four scientific perspectives on communication are interconnected and should be treated as equal (as seen with the four quadrants of the semiotic square); one of them, though, is usually considered “more equal” because “if you take any problem—a problem of the natural sciences, of the social sciences, of aesthetic experience . . .—and push it far enough, it is a philosophic problem” (McKeon 1994: 2). If you take any problem and push it far enough, though, you could make it a problem of the natural, social, or cultural science. So, “philosophers should recognise that the particular problems they are concerned with . . . do not drop into their laps from Plato’s heaven” (Heunemann 2017). Philosophy enjoys “preferential treatment” because it is usually said that “philosophy can act as a language connecting disciplines that are far away from each other” (De Haro 2013: 311). However, while emphasizing its special role, such treatment in a way does philosophy disservice by placing it in a realm separate from all other disciplines; if that is the case, how does philosophy come to understand itself and create its language? It should be admitted “that philosophy is too important to leave to the philosophers” (Lester 1982: 943); the same can be said about the other sciences as well. Each science aims to provide an independent and selfsufficient view of its object, that is, it strives for the position of “proper science.” Yet no science can completely appropriate its object; left to its own devices, something will be left out. All sciences, therefore, should be viewed as having something in common, including philosophy (which should be seen not just connecting, but also connected). What they have in common is communication: it can be said that any problem pushed far enough is a communication problem. Communication is one whole that is being conceptualized (“cut”) in different ways. Thus, “by . . . removing communication as an activity from any privileged anchor in the human body or soul,” “communication” is “a concept able to unify the natural sciences (DNA as the great code), the liberal arts (language as communication), and the social sciences (communication as the basic social process)” (Peters 1999: 25). All sciences, therefore, can be seen as the same, only different: the same in that they deal with communication, different in that each focuses on one of its manifestations. So, all scientists, be their study natural, social, cultural, or rational, are the scientists of communication—made of communication and conducting studies of communication.

Communication/Study as Such

This brings us back to the question raised in the first chapter: What is the identity of communication study? In other words, what is communication/ study, as such? Not only is this a legitimate question but a crucial one if “as a branch of scientific and academic knowledge, communication is a sui generis object of study, i.e., it is different from the traditional parameters of the other sciences’ objects of study, which are also circumscribed and specific” (Barroso 2020: 11). If the study of communication is, indeed, sui generis, then what is it that makes it a science of its own kind, a class by itself? What can the communication scholar say about communication that is not said by the natural, social, cultural, and rational scientists? In his article entitled “Communication as Social Science (and More),” Craig Calhoun shares his findings on what knit the whole field of communication together: “Let me sum up my electronic research. Communications is an academic discipline that: 1. Covers everything. 2. Focuses especially on the distinctions between words and not-words, people and not-people. 3. Produces textbooks, electronic publications, and journals. 4. Is a field utterly unable to generate a good account of itself on Wikipedia” (2011: 1,479). While facetious, his summary draws our attention to the key issue of communication study. This issue, of course, has been addressed over the years in a more serious way. Over half a century ago, Lee O. Thayer outlined a number of obstacles to comprehensive theory-building, which, mutatis mutandis, could be viewed as the obstacles to conceptualizing the study of communication in general. He starts by noting “an almost infinite variety of . . . topics dealt with under the rubric of ‘communication,’” from “marks on paper” to “what goes on between the ‘black boxes’ in a computer” to “what the female partridge does during a mating season . . . and so on” (1963: 219). Seeing this as an overall problem, Lee goes on to discuss some conceptual problems. The very first, and basic, problem that he identifies is “the assumption that communication is a thing sui generis” (1963: 220) and that “attempts to treat communication as a thing (process) sui generis may stand in the way of the development of a substantial, useful theory of communication” (1963: 222). Another major obstacle that he notes is “a kind of disinclination to keep conceptually distinct the levels and units of analysis to be employed” (1963: 222). He speaks of four levels in human communication—the physiological, the psychological, the sociological, and the technological—stating that “to refer to cells as ‘communicating,’ persons as ‘communicating,’ and groups as ‘communicating’ must surely be to refer to different orders of events with the same concept” (1963: 223). Parallels can be drawn between these four levels of analysis and the four sciences, as discussed in this book. Thayer writes that “there may be no theory of communication. There may be theories of communication—one for each level of analysis” (1963: 224). He notes

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a similar conceptual confusion regarding the unit of analysis, posing the question of what is to be taken as the unit—“the cell or the cellular event . . . , the person or the person-event or the person-event-person . . ., the group or the group structure or the institutionalized artifact . . . , a technique of listening, a ‘communication’ network or the nature of the hardware” (1963: 224–25). Thayer identifies several additional problems, such as the imprecise assumptions about causation (1963: 225) and forgetting something deemed unimportant or unrelated to communication; an example “is our tendency to emphasize some aspect of the phenomenon we are studying—such as the linguistic aspects of it—and simultaneously to neglect or ignore other, perhaps equally or more, important aspects of that phenomenon” (1963: 230). He also questions “the assumption that communication is something that one does . . . rather than something that occurs” (1963: 232); as an example of such “communication” he mentions a chair that “does not transmit information to me, but I know when I am seated in it” (1963: 232). In other words, communication is simply some contact that takes place and time. Thayer goes to great lengths to emphasize that every problem he identifies “is not ‘simply’ a semantic one. It is conceptual, and hence prototheoretical” (1963: 223). Toward the end of the article, his views—and emotions—come through as clearly as can be: “We seem almost to speak in tongues when it comes to the subject of our interest. What, exactly, is the phenomenon we want to study? Is it a letter, a phoneme, a speech, a snatch of conversation, a picture, an electrical hookup, a physiological system, a technique, a person-person interaction—what?” (1963: 231–32). It is hard for any “communication scholar” not to relate to these thoughts and feelings. Lee clearly wants the “communication scholar” to start speaking in a language rather than in tongues and be able to answer the question posed above. He is also clear about the purpose of his article, which is to discuss the main assumptions that “lie behind our present conceptual perspectives of our area of study, and to suggest the problems that these assumptions may present for further theory-building in communication” (1963: 235). Three decades later, “our area of study” was still, as Gregory Shepherd put it, “in a precarious position of illegitimacy” (1993: 89) due to its inability to articulate a unique foundational ontology. Shepherd raises somewhat similar questions to those posed by Thayer (although never citing him directly). He imagines what representatives of different scientific disciplines would say of a chair in his room: for instance, “the physicist, the biologist, the artist, and the economist” would say, in turn, “‘How sturdy!’ ‘How natural!’ ‘How handsome!’ ‘How much?’” (1993: 84). Only the “communication scholar” has nothing to say. Shepherd proposes “a communication-based view of Being . . . where the essential character of sticks, stones, bones, and the chair in my room is ‘communicationally’ constructed; where commu-

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nication rather than cellular structure, energy or mass, aesthetic quality of commodiousness, is the foundation for Being. This is the view of Being that communication disciplines would offer as alternative to the views of other disciplines” (1993: 90). As has been shown, though, natural entities and processes, social actions and structures, cultural technologies and products, and consciousness of experiences cannot be separated from communication. Shepherd is aware of this; while proposing the general grounding of Being in communication, he notes that “communication is both the builder of Being’s foundation and the foundation itself ” (1993: 91). In this view, communication cannot be just the grounding of Being, separate from all other alternatives; rather, it is Being overall—that is why Shepherd admits that “the amorphous nature of this ontology poses a serious challenge to would-be disciples of communication” (1993: 91). A few years before Shepherd published his essay, Robert Craig published an article (1989) in which communication is conceptualized as a practical discipline, recursively cultivating the social practices that constitute its subject matter. Later, he shows how this subject matter can be theorized by proposing his constitutive meta-model of the field (1999). Although he does not cite his article, Craig engages with some of the questions posed by Thayer. The first line of engagement is the explicit focus on theory-building in the study of communication. He notes that “communication” is already a richly meaningful term” and that “communication theory is enormously rich in the range of ideas that fall within its nominal scope” (1999: 119)., Although “communication theory has not yet emerged as a coherent field of study,” Craig still says that his “essay reconstructs communication theory as a dialogical-dialectical field” (1999: 120). Also, as if echoing Thayer’s statement that “there may be no theory of communication,” Craig says that there can be no “chimerical, unified theory of communication just over the rainbow” (1999: 123). Instead, he writes that “the potential of communication theory as a field can best be realized . . . not in a unified theory of communication but in a dialogical-dialectical disciplinary matrix” (1999: 120). This way, communication theory in the form of a matrix (i.e., still as one whole) brings together diverse traditions in productive argumentation. Speaking of the field of communication theory (in the singular), Craig emphasizes that it “is not a repository of absolute truth. It claims no more than to be useful” (1999: 154). Again, it is as if Craig were responding to Thayer’s discussion of the obstacles in the way of the development of a useful theory of communication. Craig sees the usefulness of his metamodel in identifying something that all different traditions can “argue about—the social practice of communication” (1999: 152–53); in this view, “communication theory . . . is . . . a field of discourse about discourse with implications for the practice of communication” (1999: 120). Conceptualized this way, communication

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theory is focused on what Thayer identifies as the sociological level and not, for example, the physiological level. So, on the one hand, Craig says, “we should stop ignoring each other and start addressing our work to the field of communication theory” (1999: 152–53), and, on the other, even though he mentions the communibiological view in one of his talks, he admits that he is “unaware of any unique biological conceptualization of communicative practice itself ” and “a tradition that does not meet this rigorous standard is logically outside the field of communication theory” (1999: 151). Not surprisingly, this view is challenged by those who approach communication from natural science perspectives. As stated by Joseph Cappella, “without putting too fine a point on it, the explicit omission of biologically oriented theories of communication is not equivalent to disallowing predictions and explanations for communicative behavior using biologically based concepts and operational techniques” (2020: 11). Cappella goes on to say that there is certainly a place for biological approaches to communication research and theory about communication. This place is not located in communicative practice itself but in the kinds of causal antecedents to communicative expression, and to explanations and predictions about communicative influence. These might be assimilated in some senses into the social psychological traditions of the field as Craig identifies them, but they are certainly beyond the typical psychological and social antecedents and consequences that reside centrally in the social psychological traditions of communication research and theory. (2020: 11)

Discourse about “cells communication” also has implications for the practice of communication since it is part of the “productive argumentation across the diverse traditions of communication theory” (Craig 1999: 120); that such argumentation finds its manifestation on the pages of scholarly publications in different scientific areas proves it well. Craig ends his article by making a call to explore the complementarities and tensions among the traditions presented and emphasizing that the field is open to new traditions of communication. He suggests several traditions that might potentially provide new ways of theorizing communication. A feminist tradition, in his view, might be theorized as connectedness to others; at the same time, he wonders how this tradition would differ from the phenomenological tradition. By the same token, proposing a spiritual tradition in which communication might be theorized as communion on a nonmaterial or mystical plane of existence, he wonders how this tradition would be different from other kinds of transcendence conceptualized by phenomenology, sociocultural theory, and critical theory. He clearly realizes that there are still questions left to answer and concepts to problematize. Almost ten years later, Craig writes an article in which he develops a framework about a disciplinary authority that is determined by intellectual,

Communication/Study as Such

institutional, and sociocultural factors. He notes that “communication has acquired many of the institutional-professional trappings of an academic discipline but as an intellectual tradition it remains radically heterogeneous and largely derivative” (2008: 9). Most recently, Silvio Waisbord makes an “attempt to make sense of communication studies” (2019: 2) and brings up “old questions about what defines communication scholarship” (2019: 89) (he does not cite Thayer’s article in his book, either). He presents an overview of the fragmentation and hyperspecialization of communication studies, revealing its multidisciplinary roots. To move forward along this complex conceptual terrain, Waisbord suggests, as a road map, a taxonomy of six conceptualizations of communication: connection, dialogue, expression, information, persuasion, and symbolic interaction (2019: 25). One could see parallels between these conceptualizations and the traditions identified by Craig: information= cybernetic; persuasion=sociopsychological; connection and dialogue=phenomenological; expression and symbolic interaction=sociocultural. Speaking of communication studies as a “muddle of a field” (Waisbord 2019: 121), its case being particularly remarkable “even amid the chaos of the disciplines” (Waisbord 2019: 122), Waisbord is not bothered by this situation; on the contrary, he considers communication studies to be a post-discipline and calls on it to embrace this status. In his opinion, while the social sciences and humanities engaged in continuous debates over disciplines and their prefixes, communication studies was already post-disciplinary (2019: 131). Yet, “post-discipline” itself, as a designation for communication studies, is formed with the help of a prefix. If we want to legitimize the centrality of the discipline, we should go the root (both conceptually and morphologically). As he develops his view, Waisbord writes, “Communication studies is versatile, vibrant, and messy. These conditions make communication a post-discipline” (2019: 9). He gives examples of other post-disciplines, such as “sustainability, criminology, women, race, environment, health, food, development, and LGBTQ studies” (2019: 127). It is not clear what makes communication studies a post-discipline in its own right; for instance, how is “health” as a post-discipline different from “health communication,” or how is “environment” different from “environmental communication”? Also, along with “post-disciplinary,” Waisbord sometimes speaks about “transdisciplinarity” “as a badge of honor for communication studies” (2019: 132) and their “non-disciplinary mindset unburdened by disciplinary constraints” (2019: 134), leaving the differences between “-post,” “-trans,” and “-non” without clear definitions. What then holds communication studies together as a post-discipline, other than its “versatile, vibrant, and messy character”? In Waisbord’s opinion, it is not the shared epistemologies, theories, objects of study, or

Communication

methodologies found in other disciplines and fields; “rather, communication studies is held together by an institutional architecture of professional organizations, academic units, and journals” (2019: 123–24). He quotes John Peters’ conclusion from thirty years prior that still applies today: “Communication has come to be administratively, not conceptually, defined” (2019: 124). Such a conclusion, however, should be read not as an acceptance of this status quo, let alone embracing it; rather, it should be viewed as a call on communication scholars to increase their effort toward conceptualizing the nature of their object. Waisbord’s stance is different; for him, “whatever piece of scholarship finds room in communication associations, journals, departments, and schools is communication research” (2019: 124). Waisbord argues that we find a lack of analytical consensus in communication studies “precisely because post-disciplines do not need intellectual integration to move forward” (2019: 133). He understands that this view may not be shared by all scholars, noting that this push to post-disciplinarity will have “detractors—scholars who champion theory-driven studies” (2019: 129). Indeed, this view will not sit well with “those scholars interested in subjects such as communication theory writ large” (2019: 126). At the very beginning of his book, Waisbord admits that interpretations and analytical foci of communication studies “are anchored in classic philosophical understandings” (2019: 10). Later in the book, however, he claims that “we cannot and we shouldn’t try to settle ontological questions” and “nor is it obvious that communication scholars spend sleepless nights pondering ontological matters” (2019: 41, 122). In the title of his book Waisbord calls communication “a post-discipline”; throughout the book, though, he sometimes speaks of “the field of communication studies” (2019: 4) while stating elsewhere that “the fact that communication is not a field should not be construed as a matter of concern” (2019: 126). He also calls it “a distinctive field of inquiry” (2019: 11) and “a long-standing area of academic inquiry” (2019: 88). At the end of the book, he compares communication scholarship to “a large collection of Russian dolls of nested fields and sub-fields” (2019: 121). That it is difficult to see what makes communication scholarship different from other “dolls” (i.e., other disciplines, or fields, or sciences) only testifies to the difficulty and importance of ontologizing and naming it as a distinct object of study. However, this difficulty is no longer perceived as an existential problem; rather, it is a pragmatic question that can be answered away. And so, we’re back to square one; and two; and three; and four. Is the study of communication a science sui generis? What is the identity of communication/study as an object? Communication is different from a lamp or any other object not simply because it constantly changes, but because for communication there are no

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“other objects”; whatever “other object” is identified, it becomes part of communication. The horizon of communication is more communication. And there is always something out there that “exceeds perceptual experience, . . . as the notion of a universe, . . . exceeds that of a world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 82). We can ask with Lotman: “Is the whole universe not a form of communication, falling within an ever more general semiosphere?” (2005: 220). We deal with the manifestations of communication as its objects; communication as such, however, never recedes into the periphery and never becomes dormant. We cannot separate ourselves from communication (i.e., plunge ourselves into communication); we can only exist in it and look at it in terms of its manifestations revealed to us, such as the four scientific perspectives discussed earlier. The “visible” plane of communication is represented by the external (substantial) reality, addressed by natural science (“objective reality”) and social science (“social reality”), while its “invisible” plane is represented by the internal (ideational) reality, addressed by cultural science (the human spirit) and rational science (pure forms of consciousness). Communication is always “such and such”; there can be no “communication as such” if we understand by it something separate from “other objects.” We can only speak of “communication as such” if we conceptualize it as everything that we have, do, make, and think. Such conceptualization should not be identified with “the absolute positing of a single object” (Merleu-Ponty 1962: 82)—an object of “perfect density” constituting “of an infinite number of different perspectives compressed into a strict coexistence, and to be presented as it were to a host of eyes all engaged in one concerted act of seeing,” for that would be “the death of consciousness” (Merleu-Ponty 1962: 79–80, 82). Instead, communication should be seen as an ultimate object; when Merleau-Ponty says, “one’s own body evades, even within science itself, the treatment to which it is intended to subject it” (1962: 82), these words apply to communication best of all, because not only does it include the body as an object, but also because no one owns communication. We can only speak of the communication study as such if we understand by it a desire to overcome the perspectivism of experience and unforget everything. The communication scholar, then, would be someone who will say of a chair “How common!” showing how the four different scientific conceptualizations discussed earlier interconnect and converge in this (or any other) object. In other words, the communication scholar would be someone who would show that everything is communication; how feasible, substantial, and useful that would be is an open question. Beyond that, one can certainly call oneself a “communication scholar” and one’s research “com-

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munication research,” but “for instance, research on psychological deformations as an effect of violent media content is still psychology and research on the causes of media concentration is still economics . . . not communication” (Donsbach 2006: 439). A communication scholar leans one way or another and turns into a psychologist, an economist, a biologist, a literary critic, and so on. It is only Lord Ronald, a character in a story by Stephen Leacock, who “flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” It is usually philosophy that is viewed as a unifying framework. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “philosophy is everywhere, even in the ‘facts,’ and it nowhere has a private realm which shelters it from life’s contagion” (1964: 130). Communication, however, is even more “everywhere” because communication includes philosophy, among other things. Communication constitutes the ultimate unity of everything as the “transition-synthesis, the action of a life which unfolds, and there is no way of bringing it about other than by living that life” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 491). Whereas philosophy can still be viewed as separate from life, communication cannot be sheltered from its contagion because communication is the very action of life, or, since the concept of life is a moving target, the action of Being itself—“everything exists because of the same basic occurrence, the same type of event: namely, communication” (Luhmann 2013: 54); “To be means to communicate” (Bakhtin 1984: 287). Communication, thus, is “the house seen from everywhere. . . . translucent, being shot through from all sides by an infinite number of present scrutinies which intersect in its depths leaving nothing hidden” (Merleu-Ponty 1962: 79). “To see this house” is not only to literally see it with “eyes as bits of matter” (Merleu-Ponty 1962: 81), but also to contemplate it, to apprehend it, to remember it, and to inhabit it (all these verbs are used by Merleau-Ponty). Thus, “to see the house from everywhere” is to be in communication, to be communication, to be. Communication is the House of Being—Being that is said in many ways, the House that is seen from everywhere.

Conclusion ‰Í

At the very beginning of the book, it was noted that there is no lack of scientific attention to communication, with an ever-increasing number of studies, theories, scholarly journals, associations and conferences—“a thousand flowers blooming,” according to the metaphor in the title of the first chapter. Yet, it is often metaphorically that both communication and its study are presented (e.g., “a great crossroads,” “the Hotel California,” or “guerrilla bands raiding other disciplines for tools and texts”). While the heuristic potential of metaphors cannot be doubted, the book aimed to adopt a less figurative approach, conceptualizing what the study of communication is. Hence, the main question posed was what defines communication scholarship. To that end, we first looked at how communication scholarship is presented. When it is viewed as a field of study or studies, the bounds of communication scholarship are not clearly defined; when it is viewed as a discipline, it is found “undisciplined”; and when it is as a science, it is found “insecure.” Overall, whether as a field, a discipline, or a science, it is often admitted that the study of communication is in a state of a crisis, both in terms of its identity and legitimacy; the book could not avoid addressing this crisis. We can see now that the reason for this crisis is the desire to capture the essence of communication in one definition. However, communication evades such attempts, for, like Proteus, communication constantly changes; as a result, we can only focus on one of its manifestations at a time. The book showed how these aspects of communication can be scientifically investigated. In the second chapter, the study of communication was discussed from the perspective of natural science; here, the focus was on communication

Communication

in terms of the substances, processes, and interactions of matter and energy. Special attention was paid to the body and the brain as its most complex organ. It was shown how communication can be conceptualized in the spatial light; also, its temporal nature was also highlighted—demonstrated, for instance, by chronobiology. Tensions between communication scholars and those who study it outside of the communication discipline were addressed. It was argued that any research into the physiological, physical, chemical, biological, and neurological aspects of communication, regardless of its publication outlet and “ownership,” should be considered legitimate as long as it focuses on the empirical study of communication as connection that brings together humans and nonhumans. In this sense, communication can be viewed as connectivity. Also, communication was treated as a natural process resulting in the emergence of organized structures. In that light, it was shown how communication can be studied in terms of Conversation Analysis; usually applied to human communication, it can be extended to intraspecies and interspecies communication. Finally, it was noted that while it emerges out of the factuality of natural sensorium, there is much more to communication. In the third chapter, the study of communication was discussed from the perspective of social science. Although the study of communication is often regarded as a relatively new addition to the social sciences, the concept of the social has been a topic of inquiry at least since the ancient Greeks. Hence, a short overview of such inquiry was given, showing how the stage was set for further theorizing. Next, the main unifying themes for the study of communication as a social phenomenon were discussed: the focus on the links between individuals and social relations, the importance of rules, communication as praxis, and speech conceptualized as discourse. Also, it was noted that while modeling their approach on the natural sciences, social scientists seek to develop their own methodology, with mixed success. In that light, “the problem of the method” was specially addressed. Additionally, the tensions inherent in the social study of communication were presented in terms of its “micro-level” and “macro-level” manifestations. To that end, two debates were discussed between well-known thinkers—Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas, on the one hand, and Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, on the other, highlighting the tensions between the power of social systems and actions of interacting subjects. Such tensions, though, cannot be resolved once and for all, keeping social communication going. In the fourth chapter, the study of communication was discussed from the perspective of humanities, or cultural science. It was shown how communication study as a humanities science is aimed at understanding what makes us human by investigating human culture (i.e., all products created by humans through various stages of its history); hence, it is conceptualized

Conclusion

as cultural science. It was emphasized that the human subject, as the object of study of “cultural science,” is a product of poiesis cultivated by its own techne; human communication is thus meaningful only insofar as people produce texts in which their experience is expressed. The search for meaning was discussed in terms of various language means of keeping the human spirit alive (rhetoric), sign processes involved in the creation of meaning (semiotics), and the overall nature of interpretation and understanding (hermeneutics). Finally, communication was presented as a process of correspondence through significant expressions, that is, humanity remains one integral whole as long as people correspond with/to themselves as being human. In the fifth chapter, the study of communication was discussed from the perspective of philosophy, or rational science. Here, the focus was on the whole human encounter with the world. It was noted that communication, as a synthetic process of connecting parts into a whole, lends itself well to philosophizing. The main “job duties” of the philosopher of communication were discussed: contemplation and critical reflection, formulating postulates that determine possible actions, letting everything appear to our consciousness, listening to what does not yet have a name, and expressing the inexpressible. It was emphasized that, overall, the philosopher keeps vigil for experience to be unfolding in such a way that the unity of the subject (oneself) and the object (everyone/everything else) is established. In the sixth chapter, all four scientific perspectives on communication— natural, social, cultural, and rational—were brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square: a well-known means of mapping out various semantic categories and relationships between them. The following semantic categories addressed throughout the previous chapters were each presented in the form of the semiotic square and discussed in more detail: the primary causes as the ways of explaining being, intellectual virtues required for humans to acquire knowledge and engage in various activities, kinds of reasoning, forms of communication activity, and grammatical moods. Also, the objects of the four scientific perspectives on communication were mapped out in the form of the semiotic square as follows: nature (natural science), society (social science), humanity (cultural science), and monstrosity (rational science). Additionally, it was shown how the semiotic square can be grounded in kinesthetic relationships by using the human body image. It was emphasized that the semiotic square can be viewed in terms of anatomic body planes only up to a (three-dimensional) point because the fourth dimension is not a place but a realm of consciousness; the importance of the fourth position was specially noted. The semiotic square formed by the four sciences of communication was also discussed in terms of static relationships between positions and in terms of dynamic opera-

Communication

tions that bring these positions into relationships. It was shown how, conceptualized dynamically, every operation in the semiotic square results in markedness. Finally, it was noted that science tries to solve the problem of squaring the circle of life. In the seventh chapter, Aristotle’s statement about being that is “said in many ways” is taken as the premise. In this light, each of the four sciences was presented as a way of saying something about communication. It was argued that each view exists only insofar as the other three are concealed in the background. It was shown how for each view, the other three are unconcealed and brought to light. For instance, the study of communication conducted by natural science was presented as also a case of social communication, including discursively formed judgments, decisions, and actions; cultural expressions and their interpretation; and philosophical reflection. The same was done for all four scientific perspectives. Thus, it was shown how all four scientific views are interconnected. What makes it easier or more difficult to establish a connection between the four scientific perspectives on communication was discussed. The main point made in the chapter was that there is no “proper science,” that is, no one science owns its object because any object is a communication object. Overall, communication was shown to be (conceptualized as) a natural entity or process; a social fact or process; a significant expression; a conscious experience. In this light, for natural science, communication is a connection between beings and beings; for social science, a bond between people and people; for cultural science, a correspondence between people and people; and for rational science, a relation between beings and Being. In the eighth chapter, the same question raised at the beginning of the book (i.e., what defines communication scholarship) was addressed again. Several key works on that subject over the past five decades were examined. In 1963, Lee O. Thayer outlined a number of conceptual and hence prototheoretical obstacles to conceptualizing the study of communication, in general; each of these obstacles was briefly discussed. In 1993, Gregory Shepherd found our area of study still in a precarious position of illegitimacy and proposed a view of Being that communication scholars would offer as alternative to the views of other disciplines. His view was briefly discussed in the chapter, including its possible limitations. In 1999, Robert Craig presented his view of communication theory as a field in the form of a matrix that brings together diverse traditions in productive argumentation. In his article entitled “The Constitutive Metamodel: A 16-Year Review,” Craig notes that the metamodel “can claim to have demonstrated some usefulness” and “also been criticized for its imperfections” (2015: 370), some of which he addresses in his review. Finally, in 2019, Silvio Waisbord presented his view of communication studies as a post-discipline. It was argued

Conclusion

in the chapter that it is not clear quite what makes communication studies a post-discipline in its own right, besides an institutional architecture of professional organizations, academic units, and journals. Thus, the question whether the study of communication is a science sui generis remains open. With that in mind, it was argued that it is necessary to see if communication can be viewed as an object in itself (i.e., if communication scholars perceive the same object). Based on the framework of phenomenology of perception, the identity of any object is created by its surrounding objects; as they recede into the periphery, the main object of perception is disclosed. In that sense, it was argued that speaking of communication study as such would be possible only if it could overcome the perspectivism of experience. It was concluded that, in reality, we cannot look at communication as separate from other objects and that we always deal with its manifestations as captured in the four scientific perspectives discussed in the book. In other words, one studies certain aspects of communication, such as social, cultural, and so on, and the more aspects one studies, the closer one gets to becoming “a communication scholar.” This, though, is an ideal that cannot be reached; so, when Stewart Hall says, “Communication research is constantly breaking apart and coming to the end of the road, arriving at terminal points beyond which it cannot survive, and so on. Yet, it does not disappear” (1989: 46), we can understand why this is the case. We all live in communication—the House of Being that is seen from everywhere. Let us hope we all continue to live in it.

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Index ‰Í

abduction and adduction, 111 and hermeneutics, 75 and induction, 110 and Peirce, Charles, 92 as speculative rhetoric, 77 adduction, and abduction, 92, 110 and deduction, 110 and induction, 111 and language, 135 and monstrosity, 91–92 and Peirce, Charles, 92 Althusius, Johannes on the final cause, 105 on the formal cause, 104–5 Apel, Karl, 8, 62, 71, 146 approximation, 127 Arendt, Hannah, 31, 61, 98 Aristotle on being, 129 on episteme, 29 the formal cause, 45 the four causes, 103–5 intellectual virtues, 106–7 on man as a political animal, 26, 41, 45 on phronesis, 46 on polis, 42, 59 rhetoric, 76–77 on subcontraries, 106 on techne, 66

on “Unmoved Mover,” 42 on wisdom, 107 autopoiesis, 56 axiom, 86 Bacon, Francis, 95, 109, 110, 129 Badiou, Alain, 74 Bakhtin, Mikhail and chronotope, 97 and dialogic theory, 147 on the humanities, 67 Barthes, Roland on the pleasure of the text, 145 on “writing aloud,” 145 Bateson, Gregory on Bateson, 31 poem Manuscript, 60 Bauman, Zygmunt, 45 Benveniste, Émile on hospitality, 54 Bibikhin, Vladimir on philosophy’s language, 97 Blaug, Mark, 91, 110 Bohr, Niels, 131 Boyle, Robert and experiments in pneumatics, 129, 132 Brier, Søren, 32, 69 Buber, Martin on the pre-natal life, 30 on relation, 31, 34

Index

Burke, Edmund, 55 Burke, Kenneth on the nature of “man,” 39, 46 on “unending conversation,” 40 Calhoun, Craig on communications as an academic discipline, 161 Cantor, Georg and the term ‘transfinite,’160 Carey, James, 16, 158, Cassirer, Ernst on creativity, 117 as a cultural theorist, 118 on intuition, 135 on language, 135 on science, 136 Chomsky, Noam debate with Michel Foucault, 57 Cicero, 64 circadian rhythms, 22, 139 communibiology, 19, 24, 129, 137, 138, 139, 164 communication the body temperature, 21 the brain, 21, 22 breathing, 26 as corporeal interconnectedness, 31 chronobiology, 22 and ethics, 27, 37, 54, 62, 95, 99, 101, 130, 147 identity crisis, 13, 18 legitimacy crisis, 14 and listening, 93–94 and mnemonics, 67 as post-discipline, 8 as poly-paradigmatic, 11 resonance, 23 and social systems, 44 and spirituality, 67 communications, 5, 14, 24, 42, 56, 130, 159, 161 Compte, August and consensus, 46 and positive science, 43, 142 and the Religion of Humanity, 51 and “social physics,” 44, 47, 139

comportment, 117, 149, 155 Conversation Analysis, 36–38, 170 Cooley, Charles on communication, 41 on self and society, 55 Coordinated Management of Meaning, the theory of, 45 Cooren, François, 141 Craig, Robert on communication as a fact of nature, 24 and metamodel, 163–64, 172 on praxis, 46 critical philosophy, 85, 142 deduction, 50, 86 and abduction, 75 and adduction, 110 and hermeneutics, 75 and induction, 75, 92, 109, 110 and the logic of formal causality, 111 Deely, John, 101 Deetz, Stanley, 7, 141 Deleuze, Gilles, on nature, 120 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari on creativity, 96–97 and geophilosophy, 151 Dennet, Daniel Intentional Systems Theory, the, 27 Derrida, Jacques and arche-writing, 113 on the concept ‘monster,’ 90, 92 on “hostipitality,” 54–55 on human and animal living beings, 33 and philosophy, 98 Descartes, René, 66, 86–87, 91 Dewey, John, 33, 48 on communication, 137 on philosophy, 151 Diderot, Denis, 92 digital technologies, 79, 80 Dilthey, Wilhelm and the human sciences, 45, 65 and the NaturwissenschaftenGeisteswissenschaften distinction, 61 on understanding, 72

Index

discourse, 47, 96 and henology, 101 and natural causality, 137, 139 and normative value, 31, 52, 142 and phronesis, 140 and power, 57 and speech, 56, 170 and text, 71 Droysen, Johann, 66 Durkheim, Émile on a social fact, 48 Eco, Umberto on crisis, 9 and ‘unlimited semiosis,’ 72 “ecommunity,” 34 Einstein, Albert, 135, 136, 150 Epstein, Mikhail on “infinitions,” 159 on language, 96 on philosophical literature, 154 on “textoid,” 69 Flyvbjerg, Bent, 107 Foerster, Heinz von on objectivity, 128 Foucault, Michele concept of power, 57 debate with Noam Chomsky, 57 on humanistic inquiry, 10, 66 on “man as a recent invention,” 27, 43 philosophy, 152 Gadamer, Hans-Georg and “artistic induction,” 75 and hermeneutics, 73, 141 and “humaniora,” 61 and “the fusion of horizons,” 74 on philosophy and art, 154 and prejudice, 28, 133 Game Theory, 39, 139 geophilosophy, 151 Geertz, Clifford on culture, 69 and ethnography of communication, 78 Gerbner, George, 5, 23, 158 Greimas, Algirdas, 103, 125, 129

Groupe μ, 77 Habermas, Jürgen on colonization of the lifeworld,10 and debate with Niklas Luhmann, 55–57 and the ideal speech situation, 53 and the public sphere, 52 and Theory of Communicative Action, 10, 52 Hall, Stuart, 8, 173 Hansen, Chad, 75, 111 Haraway, Donna, 26, 129 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 65, 96, 98, 124, 153 Heidegger, Martin on “the factum brutum,” 31 on “the goal of phenomenology,” 89 and listening, 94 on poesis, 35 on “technology,” 131 henology, 101 hermeneutics, 71, 73, 74, 75, 95, 112, 132, 140, 141, 144, 146, 154 hermeneutic circle, the, 73 Hjelmslev, Louis, 78, 95, Hoffmeyer, Jesper, 133 hospitality studies, 54 “hostipitality,” 54–55 humanitas, the concept of, 63 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 63, 97 Hume, David, 50, 51, 100 Husserl, Edmund on “the crisis of European sciences,” 9 on “the first nature,” 28 and “the natural attitude,” 86 on “prima philosophia,” 89 the “principle of all principles,” 134 and transcendental phenomenology, 10, 17 hypothetico-deductive model of science, the 50–52 Ihde, Don, 93 Illich, Ivan, 144 induction, 30, 135 and abduction, 91,110 and adduction, 111

Index

and deduction, 75 as a natural process, 29, 108 the scientific method, 29–30, 48 interpersonal communication, 45, 47, 140 intraspecies communication, 38 “is-ought problem,” the so-called, 50 Jameson, Fredric, 121 Jung, Carl Gustav, 153 Kant, Immanuel the categorical imperative, 52, 91 and critical philosophy, 142 a “happy accident,” 85 the idea of a perpetual peace, 54, 85 postulate, 87–88 on “real opposition,” 119 synthetic a priori, 84 transcendental apperception, 84 and transcendental philosophy, 100 Kantian catastrophe, the, 88 Kuhn, Thomas, 10, 11 Lanigan, Richard, 57, on adduction, 92 and chiastic logic, 118 on the logic of abduction, 76, 92 phenomenology and communication, 89 Latour, Bruno 130 on “factishes,” 134 on the social sciences, 60 science and technology studies (STS), 130 Lebenswelt, 31 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 23 Levinas, Emmanuel, 94, 99 liberal arts, 64, 160 listening, 93–95, 111, 113, 162, 171 Losev, Aleksei on the eidetic moment of the name, 15 on techne, 66 Lotman, Yuri, 32, 71, 167 Luhmann, Niklas, 159, 168 on culture, 78 debate with Jürgen Habermas, 55–57 and phenomenology, 100

Lyotard, Jean-François, 97, 148 Macy conferences on cybernetic, the, 134 markedness, the concept of, 122, 125, 172 Marx, Karl, 5, 39 McLuhan, Marshall and auditory space, 94 and “cool” and “hot” media, 21 and electronic technologies, 70 media as “the extensions of man,” 67 Mead, George and Symbolic Interactionism, 44 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice and depth, 122 on the humanities 66 on human animality, 26–27, 34 and human speech, 32 and nonhuman species, 33 on language, 95–96 on “a non-personal body,” 19–20 perspectivism of experience, 157–58 on philosophical reflection, 89 on philosophy, 98, 99, 154, 168 and postulates, 89 and the quantum world, 34 and reversibility, 125 and sedimentation, 25 and texts, 134 and transversality, 120–21 metaphors for communication, the, 2, 6, 7 middle-range theory, the, 58–59 Merton, Robert, 58–59 modality, 113–37, 133, 150 monstrance, 101–2 monstrosity, 3, 90–92, 117–18, 121, 171 and adduction, 92, 110 and language, 96 and liminality, 93 Möbius strip, the, 83–84 Nancy, Jean-Luc on exscription, 155 negative freedom, 64 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 96, 99, 151 nonverbal communication, 20, 139, Nordenstreng, Kaarle, 7 normative theory, 51, 52, 53

Index

Novalis on the nature of philosophy, 93 Ong, Walter, 68, 79 ontology, 13, 18, 25, 59, 88, 101, 141, 162, 163 paideia, the concept of, 63 Pavlov, Ivan and classical conditioning, 133 on science, 136 Peirce, Charles Sanders and abduction, 77, 92, 110 and adduction, 91 on experiment, 37 on meaning as production of habits, 27 the pragmatistic approach, 51 on physics and philosophy, 136 Pelkey, Jamin, 118–20, 121 Peters, John on communication theory, 16, 18, 85 on disciplinary status of communication studies, 9, 11, 166 and Friedrich Kittler, 143 on the identity crisis of communication studies, 13 and “new media,” 19 on nonverbal communication, 139 and oral communication, 68 on theoria in ancient Greece, 9 phenomenology, 10, 27, 28, 33, 50, 89, 90, 100, 134, 164, 173 Plato, on “Kallipolis,” 42 philosophical examination of life, 17 and Plotinus, 101 and Platonism, 141 and the polis, 43 and the Tübingen School, 68 and writing, 154 poiesis, 35, 66, 78, 79, 171 posthuman, 80 power, 57, 58, 85, 95, 140, 141, 142, 170 polis, 41–43, 59, 104, 147 Popper, Karl, 60, 135 postulate, 86–89, 117, 171

praxis, 45, 46, 52, 55, 56, 66, 70, 107, 129, 130, 131, 140, 147, 151, 151 phronesis, 46, 58, 65, 66, 107, 108, 140 Ricoeur, Paul the critical approach, 51 and discourse, 47, 113 and distanciation, 81–82 and “the fusion of horizons,” 74 and sciences of culture, 61 on “speaking,” 36 and writing, 70 Rorty, Richard, 88 Rutherford, Ernest on physics, 142 Sapir, Edward on social behavior, 41 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 79 Saussure, Ferdinand de and semiotics, 140 and speech, 47 Schrag, Calvin, on natural science, 129 and transversality, 120 Schramm, Wilbur, 6, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16 Schrödinger, Erwin on cultural background, 131 science, the term, 17 sedimentation, 25 semiotic square, the, 4, 103, 105, 107, 109, 114, 117–8, 121–4, 127, 155, 160, 171–2 semiosphere, 32, 167 Sellars, Wilfrid, 88, 97 on the aim of philosophy, 81 sensations, 20 Schelling, Friedrich First nature (erste Natur), 28 Schutz, Alfred, 49–50 Shepherd, Gregory, 8, 12, 13, 140, 162–3 speech, 32, 46–47, 95, 120, 125, 131, 144, 156 Socrates, 87, 99–100, 111 Sonesson, Göran, 76 sophia, 82, 104 studia humanitatis, 64

Index

techne, 66–69, 71, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 107, 108, 131, 133, 140, 146, 147 techne hermeneutiké, 73 text, 69–71, 73–74, 77–79, 95, 104, 110, 112, 113, 117, 131–34, 141, 144–46, 155 texture, 66–69, 77 Thayer, Lee, 161–64 thermodynamic theory of communication, the, 26 transversality, 120–21 Umwelt, 31 Valéry, Paul on the nature of language, 95

viva voce, 68 Waisbord, Silvio, 6, 7–8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 159, 165–66, 172–73 Weber, Max and the method of Verstehen, 48 and “The Religion of Humanity,” 51 Whitehead, Alfred North on nature and thought, 128 Wilden, Anthony, 32, 72, 79, 95, 128, 159 Wittgenstein, Ludwig and Bertrand Russell, 96 and “language games,” 83, 96 and listening, 95