John Durham Peters

Speaking into the air. A history of the idea of communication

Introduction: the problem of communicationKommunikasjonsbegrepet Problematisk. Myten om den perfekte dialogen og

fullkomne forståelsen mellom sinn.Historiesyn “in every act of historical narration a constructivist

principle” (3).Solipsism and telepathy Words typical of the late nineteenth century. Reflect

an individualist culture. The walls of the mind as impermeable or blissfully thin.

Latin communicare Impart, share, make common> how the concept has come to connote idealised conceptions of mutuality, good, sharing.

Meanings Imparting – to give, to make known Transfer or transmission Exchange. Leading the way to the high-stake

definition of communication as contact between interiorities.

Term for various modes of symbolic interaction

The mechanism through which human relations develop – “all the symbols of the mind, togheter with the means of conveying them through space and preserving the in time” (Cooley in Peters: 9).

Theoretical debates 1920s Visible in philosophy and in social thought.1. Communication as the dispersion of

persuasive symbols in order ot manage mass opinion (Lippmann, Lasswell). Mass communication. Future of democracy. Communication as the management of mass opinion

2. Communication as the means to eliminate semantic dissonance. Ogden and Richards. Sharing of consciousness. Fear of solipsism.

3. Communication as an insurmountable barrier. Always failing to connect. T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Virginia Wolf. Fearing that communication in reality is impossible. Useless sallies from the citadel of the self.

In short “communication as bridge always means an abyss is somewhere near” (16).

4. Martin Heidegger Being and Time (1927)

The disclosure of otherneess

Not adhering to the notion of communication as mental sharing. Communication is about the constitution of relationshuip, the revelation of otherness. “His notion of communicaiton was neither

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semantic (meanings exchanged) nor pragmatic (actions coordniated) but world disclosing (otherness opened).

5. John Dewey (1927)

The orchestration of action

Communucation as pragmatic making-do. Eschews a semantic understanding of communication. The universe as more than matter and mind – also about experience/culture: the world that open up between people. Communication as partaking and participating in the creation of a collective world.

Technical and therapeutic discourses after WWII

The development of contrast between mass communication and interpersonal communication in the 1930s.

Information theory (communication theory)

Of the 1940s. Shannon. A theory of signals (not of significance). The discourse of information infiltrates all areas (from neurons to marriages and good managing). Weaver. Schramm. Imperfections of human interchange can be readressed by improved technology.

Communication as therapeutic self-expression

Authentic disclosure. Both in interpersonal and international levels (UN in 1945). Julian Huxley, Gregory Bateson. Carl R. Rogers. Communication as cure and disease.

Peters’ message The expansion of means does not necessarily lead to the expansion of minds. Orchestrating collective being.

ONE: Dialogue and disseminationThe mistake of blaming the media

for distorting dialogue. Rather media critique should be about matters of power (concentration). Second, the need to avoid technological/media determinism. Media technologies are applied. Their social applications are not inherent in technology.Third, dialogue can be tyrannical, and dissemination can be just.

Dialogue and Eros in the Phaedrus

Socrates’ critique of writing – part of a larger critique. Coupling between person and person, soul and soul. Eros, not transmission. Writing allows strange couplings > worries about erotic perversion.The connection between the refusal to write and the refusion to penetrate. Both are asymmetrical relations.

Knowing the audience The rhetorician must fit the tropes and topoi to the listenere. Foolish to scatter words uncritically to the masses. Reciprocal coupling of speaker and hearer.

Critique of writing Writing creates this kind of scatter. No fit with the audience. Destroys memory.

Resembles later critique of media

Phaedrus spells out clearly the normative basis of the critique of media (which perhaps is why Peters does not bother to deal with all media?).

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A critique of promiscuity rather than of writing per se.Pretended live presence but in fact embalmed intelligence.

Dissemination in the Synoptic gospels

Dissemination as desirable.The parabel of the sower – about the diversity of audience interpretations. Sort of an encoding – decoding model. The audience have the interpretative burden.

The wasteful act Godlike love/agape is always wasteful and figured like broadcasting.

One-way communication not necessarily bad

And reciprocity may be violent: war and vengeance. What would social life be if nothing but reciprocity governed.Gift-giving as an illuminating parallel.

Peters’ conclusion?’ Nothing ethically deficient about broadcasting. Chasms between sender and receiver not always to be bridged – “they are sometimes vistas to be appreciated or distances to be respected.”Reciprocity is a moral ideal, but it’s insufficient.

TWO: History of an error: the spiritualist tradition The vision of soul-to-soul converse

1. early Christianity2. British empiricism (Locke)3. spiritualism

> important for our understanding of communicatione.g. Augustine and Locke The interiority of the self

Sign as a vessel to be filled with content/meaning.The self as an eternal, self-identical soul. The soul as self-existent and detachable.

Spiritualist tradition Etheral modes of thought transference. The immediate purity of meaning-minds.The dream of perfect communication – i.e. shared interiorities/the hassle of imperfect media.

Peters’ the undesirability of soul-to-soul communication

First this model/dream is dangerous – despair at the impossibility of communication (co-operations is available and possible in any case). Un-necessary fair of communication break-down. Respecting disdain for communication/interactions.

CHRISTIAN SOURCES The Gospel of John: the characteristically double mixture of breakdown and soulful unity. Dialogue as motivated by misunderstanding in the first place.

The ontological dative > possible to think of how persons can share spiritual substance.

1. Augustine: the spirit of the letter

Helped build the idea of the interior self and the dream of overcoming it in communication.

A sign A marker of interior and exterior realities. Words are pointers to things mental and material – their value lies outside them. The sign is only an interpretive help.

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The word is split into a body (sound) and spirit (meaning). The word points to external and internal realities. Important for revealing interiors – thought and spirit.

Yet writing ranked below speech?

“(…) letters have been invended that we might be able to converse also with the absent; but these are signs of words, as words themselves are signs in our conversations of those things which we think.” Presence as prioritised. Difficult pages (73-74).

2. Angels: the principle of bodily indifference

Angels present a model of communication as it should be. An ideal speech situation. Pure bodies of meaning. Thomas Aquinas.Angeology gives the intellectual basis for the dream of shared interiors in communication.

BRITISH EMPIRICISM From matter to mind: “communication in the seventeenth century

Latin communicare with no special reference to sharing thoughts.Psycho-physical speculations Francis Bacon – “some light effluxions from spirit to

spirit.”Joseph Glanvill on aether vibrations from mind to mind. The fusion of mental and material processes.John Wilkins: ambitions of speed in long-distance communication. Newtonian physics and Newton’s description of gravity, and gravity as travelling in medium.

John Locke: private properties of meaning

Communication to describe the sharing of ideas between people. Locke’s conceptualisation of communication mingles old senses of the term with innovative ones. Communication not as speech, rhetoric, discourse, but as their ideal end result.

Signs as property. The meanings of words as a sort of private property in the individual’s interior. The subjectification of the world.

The idea “idea” (Descartes). Human understanding based on senses. No direct access to the real world. Ideas as raw materials of all knowledge. The impossibility to communicate from soul to soul?

Two sorts of discourse The internal stream of ideas deriving form sensation and reflection; the public or external use of language. The inner word is authorative for Locke.

Language as conveys Language is means of transporting ideas. Word as a receptable of meaning, as the body is the receptable of the soul. Communication as a problem of transporting mental cargo.

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Communication breakdown looms. Communication paradoxical concept: freedom to combine words and ideas/ hopes for exact correspondence (which is impossible?).

From private experiences to common world?

(the inverse problem of property). How can common meaning come to exist?

Communication Combining an Augustinian semiotic of innter and outer, a political program of individual liberty, and a scientific imagination of clean processes of transmission.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY SPIRITUALISM

Agony of solitude and yearning for unity. Romanticism.

Dr. Mesmer and his fluids Franz Anton Mesmer (1743-1815).Animal magnetism (latin animus – spirit). Gravitation holds planets in orbit – animal magnetism holds souls in love and health and communication. Magnetized fluids through bodies. > creating the image of the total fusion of two or more souls. En repport.

Mesmeric control > hypnotism

i.e. appears in visions of mass communication. Mesmerism helped shape the understanding of mass media as agents of mass control and persuasion.

Spiritualist mediums and media

Mesmerism and telegraphy < electrical connection between individuals.Spiritualism explicitely modelled itself on the telegraph’s ability to receive remote messages.Spirit photography.Ectoplasm

Ether frolics: psychical research

Society for Psychical research> twofold aim of ending the anarchy of popular spiritualism while preserving a properly scientific hold on the supersensual universe.

Ether The universe held together by a transcendent invisible principle of order.

James Clerk Maxwell Anticipates wireless telegraphy. The ether medium.Ether Survives as a figure of speech although demolished

by Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1905,Radio/telepathy > contact between people via an invisible material

linkage – radio waves travelling through “the ether”. The electromagnetic spectrum.

“Brain waves” The propagation of wireless signals and the sharing of thoughts as allied processes.

THE POINT A long string of notions, dispensing with meidation and interpretation, invest the modern notion of communication. Communication – represent a state of shared understanding and sympathy between people.

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THREE: Toward a more robust vision of spirit: Hegel, Marx, and KierkegaardMain principles 1. the irreducibility of embodiment

2. the doubleness of self3. the publicness of meaning

Hegel on recognition Phenomenology. 1. There is no content separate from form. No

message apart from a channel. Spirit does not exist without a body.

2. Communication is a problem of the object as much as the subject. An sich (ontologically possible) vs. für sich (explicitely).

Communication Not about moving mind stuff, but about establishing the conditions for subjects to exist für sich – recognition of self-conscious individuals. There is no self without an other. “Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.” – Is this something I can use also when discussing relations of self-identity and others?

Spirit Geist. The experience of the simultaneous diversity and unity of self-consciousnesses. I = We. “human nature only really exists in an achieved community [Gemeinsamkeit] of consciousness,”

Subjectivity and self One’s subjectivity is in sich when it has not yet been recognized by an other. Recognition > subjectivity für sich. The self has thus no priviliged access to itself.

Meaning The conception of Geist locates meaning as public rather than private. Geist consists in the material inscriptions of culture and in the embodied community of interpreters.The objectivity of meaning > meanings are in things independent of people interpreting them > an account of communication apt for the modern media age. Typically expressions of the human spirit separated in time and space from the bodies of the producers of meaning.

Marx (versus Locke) on money

> the basis for much of the deep structure of modern media analysis. Marx criticizes disseminative media. Money as a medium of exchange and a medium of representation.

Locke Nature as an idyll of reciprocity. Welcomes dissemination. Money collected without any harm to one’s neighbourgs.

Dispute between Locke and Marx

Whether the original dyad of subject and object remains the normative model or replaced by something more extended and plural?Money turns dialogue into dissemination.

Money as mass Marx prefers dialogue, just communication between

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communication equal subjects. Money distorts the normative human relationship of person to person. Reciprocality – just exchange.Dissemination – broadcasting is wasteful.

Dialogic relations The substance of our communication practices as the orchestration of our social worlds and as a criterion of the good society.Failures of communication owe less to semantic mismatches than to unjust allocations of symbolic and material resources.

Peters however “The Marxist tradition risks writing off dissemination based on its one-way transmission alone, instead of acknowledging the varying relations of justice that might inform it.” (127).

Kierkegaard’s incognitos The individual is incommensurable with reality.Communication Meddelelse as a per se philosophical problem.

Communication is less a matter of better understanding than of strategic misunderstanding. As revealing and conceiling, not as information exchange. Never transmission of pure thought.

Medium and message The utterance is tied to the ethos of its speaker. “A sign is something different from what it immediately is.”The impossibility of direct communication.

Misunderstandings Inevitable in several situations. “In a world of paradoxes, easy communication is necessary false.” Communication does not necessarily improve relations or clarify the underlying reasons of things.

FOUR: Phantasms of the living, dialogues with the deadRECORDING AND TRANSMISSION

Media technologies conquer the obstacles of distance and death. Tele- and –graphy. Space-binding media and time-binding media (Innis).

Telegraph fits into the lineage of Augustine

and the angels and Mesmer: communication without embodiement, contact achieved by the sharing of spiritual (eletrical) fluids.

Parallel universe The separation of transportation from communication > conjuring of a parallel universe, universe of replicas.

“Phantasms of the living” Frederic Myers. “for the apparitions [ghosts/phantoms] proliferating in the spiritualist culture”. Today: Loads of phantasms of the living appearing in media. Duplicating and distributing indicia of human presence.

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Paralleling discussions concerning athenticity

Nineteenth century worries about the ability to “appear” apart from the flesh. Created a dialectical crisis of representation. Interaction could with the development of media technologies mean interaction with traces.

Continuing the dream of angelic contact

By claiming to break the bonds of distance and death.

New archives of consciousness

Not only as hearing and seeing aids. Media of transmission > crosscuts through space. Recording media > crosscuts through time.

Hawtorne’s haunted house Nathaniel Hawtorne’s House of the seven gables (1851). The almost spriritual nature of the telegraph and the photography.

HERMENEUTICS AS COMMUNICATION WITH THE DEAD

Nineteenth century Victorians’ search for communication with the distant and dead. Romanticism with death.

Existential facts about modern media

1. the abundance of traces of the dead. Living mingling with the dead.

2. th difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead.

Communication with the dead

The paradigm case of hermeneutics: the art of interpretation where no dialogue is possible.

Two streams of hermeneutics 1. Scleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer: interpretation > open up something more than text > contact between the living and the dead.

2. More heretical tradition (Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard): awareness of the impossibilities, relations with even the living as in some way hermeneutic, as in the interpretation of traces.

Paul Ricoeur Hermeneutics is about the distortion of dialogue. Text transcends it’s author’s intent, original audience, and situation of enunciation.

Interpretation, not dialogue Mediation of modern media > interpretation more typical than dialogue. “(…) as it were, into the void, or at least to those who have ears to hear. They await completion of the loop” (151).Rhetorics: how to get the message across the gapHermeneutics: how to read texts not adressed to them.

Letter writing (The heart of Brazil as wonderful example). No necessary correscpondence. Especially about letters to the dead.

Emerson: the porcupine impossibility of contact

Cemetary from Greek koimeterion meaning dormitory. Communion between the living and the dead. Emerson does not believe in any soul-to-soul connection between the living and the dead – but an interpretation of the traces of the dead.

Paradigmatic for all Immediate contact is never possible. Not with the

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communication dead, and not between the living. The impossibility of dialogue > the universe as a constant transmission to those who have ears to hear. Messages do not even be intended as messages (which makes a lot of sense if you think of archeological methods). “Whatever meaning we find is left to our power of “creative reading.”

Philosophical scepticism Proof of reality outside of our own perceptions? Forerunner of later scepticism about the reality of the images and reports of the media. But does it matter whether it is authentic or not?Emerson sees communication as a matter of giving and receiving without any kind of co-ordination of the two.

Three horrors given to the 20th century

1. a God-forsaken universe2. a self lost in its own labyrinth3. people depleted of substantive being

“Bartleby”: scrivening as dissemination

Herman Meville’s “Barthely the Scrivener” (1853). Bartleby as the ultimate impersonality in communication.The link from the agonies of communication of mid-19th century to fin-de-siecle idealism and to 20th century existensialism. All examine the media that puts us iin circuits of communication with the absent.

moral tyranny of dialogism Not in itself an adequate communicative vehicle for bearing the varieties of moral experience.

The phonograph and distorted dialogue

Modern media preserve otherwise evanescent ghosts. But the phongraph is more typical symbol of modernity than photography. First time to copy sound – to capture time.

Door to the spirit world See for instance Friedlander’s Goethe-story in Kittler (page 59).

Modern media > “the externalization of the fragile and flickering stuff of subjectivity and memory into a permanent form that can be played back at will. The supposed ease of transfer was paid for with ghosliness” (164).

DEAD LETTERS Division of genres between personal and public correspondence developed in 19th century. Letters were more like postcards – both privately adressed and publicly accessible.

> Private letters 1. Post stamp (1840)2. Envelopes (1849)3. Street drop boxes (1858)

Made the individual sender sovereign over the letter. Transformed letters from creatures of dissemination into creatures of apparent dialogue.

Dead letters Dead Letter Office (1825) for sorting and collecting mail with adress problems. The problem with dead letters is that mortal beings miss getting in touch (not

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that minds fail to share the meaning of signs). Dead Letter Office deals with the materiality of communication.

Suggesting the pathos of communication break-down

The letter that never arrives. “(…) but what is the meaning of the letter burned in the Dead Letter Office whose writer does not know it is lost and whose recipient does not know it was ever sent” (171)?

Comstock and the dangers of postal dissemination

Fought against what he perceived to be the dangerous dissemination of erotic letters. Or at least the possibility/the potential. Wrath against the privacy of the letters, and was essentially worried about children and young people. Linking distant bodies. Benjamin: “the age of mechanical reproduction”Both sex and media reproduce likeness.

The invasion of privacy as dissemination

Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis trying to contain dissemination – criticising the press for invading the private, and overstepping any borders of propriety and decency. Privacy in danger.

Common thread The ways that person-to-person communication, once recorded and transmitted, can break free of its senders and receivers.

FIVE: the quest for authentic connection, or bridging the chasm“Wir sind sehr einsam” Maxwell’s two options regarding action at a distance:

1. Action at a distance can never occur: there is always some “line of communication”/”ether” connecting the two interacting bodies.

2. Space always intervenes between bodies: action at a distance is the only kind of action which ever occurs.

Bifurcated vision of communication

The dream of spirit-to-spirit contact vs. the prospect that even touch is an illusion stemming from our sense organ’s insensitivity to the infinite distances between bodies and chasms between souls.

The quest for remote contact across media

> modern eros emerge. Eros as the attraction and repulsion between bodies. “The intellectual history of “communication” is a record of the erotic complications of modern life” (180). The desire for the presence of the absent other.

THE INTERPERSONAL WALLS OF IDEALISMLate nineteenth century Anglo-American idealism

Royce and Bradley: the example of inmates of separate rooms.Homo clausus

Josiah Royce Plato’s cave meets the problem of intersubjective knowledge.

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F.H. Bradley Absolute idealism. The insulation of subjective experience. No direct connexion between souls. The only way to communicate is via our bodies.Opaque and peculiar individual worlds. Communication is always a matter of interference and interpretation. We are not trapped – communication is possible.

William Ernest Hocking Not quite an idealist, but dealt with the problem of communication. Explored alienation from self and others. Communication breakdown – souls cannot touch each other. Takes the idealist trope of the wall – installs it in the body. But Hocking do believe in couplings in the common world. Embodiment crucial for thinking. Minds connected to bodies.

Mediation is productive Descent into physical expression is a progress into valid and active existence.

Charles Horton Cooley A clear idealist.Theoretical disembodiment together with an early account of communication in 20th century social thought.

In the wake of modern media > new conceptions of communication. Communication as independent of physical transportation. The problem of communication in the absence of the communicant.

Two senses of communication

1. Communication as transfer.2. Transportation and as the communion of

psyches. Means both fellowship in though and the destruction of distance. Bypassing the flesh.Communication makes geography irrelevant. Media as the movers of social change. Clear parallels to Innis and McLuhan. “Since communication is the precise measure of the possibility of social organization, of good understanding among men, relations that are beyond its range are not truly social, but mechanical” (Cooley in Peters p. 185). Signs mediate our relations.

No importance to the body per se

The body has no privilege as a carrier of personality. Embodiment does not matter (which Peters criticises).

FRAUD AND CONTACT? JAMES ON PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

Willam James explores psychical communication, but discusses aspects of communication relevant for the whole history of the concept of communication.

Reserching the medium Piper But not comprehended as a live contact with a remote spirit. “Piper is less a Marconi station than a phonograph playing a record cut years ago” (192). Again Friedlander’s Goethe story (Kittler page 59) comes to mind.

Hermeneutics, not spirit travel

Dialogue with the dead concerns interpretation as in hermeneutics: authenticating, eavesdropping, and

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source criticism (> James was a friend of Dilthey). Similiarities to the Turing test

Structural similarities: the struggle to distinguish a real human being from a simulated one when access to the other’s presence is cloaked by an intervening medium. Explores very central issues in communication theory: What happens when images of persons travel apart from the body? When is a message a message?

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE: THE TELEPHONIC UNCANNY

Both telephone and wireless technologies can be either a central exchange for many voices or a means fof point-to-point contact. Not so much about the characteristics of the medium as what constellation of speakers and hearers has become normative. Peters seems to have a very instrumental perspective on technology.

From public to private But an idea that was slow in coming. The telephone operator as cyborg – inhabit a profoundly liminal space.

Negotiations of identity as a result of the lacking access to bodily presence. One did not know whom one was adressing. Being presence by voice alone. Evident parallels to claims regarding the anonymity of online interactions. The problem of knowing whether one has made contact at all.

Kafka and the telephone All hermeneutics – reading texts by an unintented audience, like eavesdropping. Audiences bear the whole interpretation burden.“The Neighbor”: a story of dobbelgänger and a telephone > involve mysterious splittings of identity and conversation.“The casle”: again, the burden of interpretations necessary for modern life.

Allencompassing signs All around us, but refuse to tell us how to read them. “The inability to make certain whether a sign is a projection of the self or an utterance of the other, an interpretive artifact or an objective pattern in the world” (…) (203).Who owns meaning?

Modern media A limbo of lost connections in all modern media. Public communication as dead letters on display at all times.

RADIO: BROADCASTING AS DISSEMINATION (AND DIALOGUE)

The inherent publicity of the radio signal, but broadcasting not self-evident. The radio first conceived as a means of point-to-point communication. It’s public reach perceived as a problem.

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Instrumentalism, not determinism

“An exhibit of the principle that cultural preconcetion shapes the uses of technology as much as its internal properties do, radio “broadcasting” was not embraced until wireless technology had been in use for a quarter of a century” (207).

Deformed communication circuit

The “transmission of intelligence” was left to chance. Privately controlled transmission but public reception (oposite of common carriage). Common carrriage – like Sokrates in Phaedrus: guarantee the delivery of the seed.Broadcasting – like Jesus in the parable of the sower: scattering the message to all.

“They will never make a junction”

The troubling distance between sender and audience. Communication without bodies. > Idealism’s speratate rooms; telephony’s severing of a conversation into two disconnected halves.

DX-ing/CQ Search for signals from remote stations. Erotic in nature: yearning for contact. DX-ing as an allegory of faith.

> new communicative settings

Invisibility and domestic setting. What is communication without bodies or presence? Loosened norms of attentiveness

The fears of solipsism and communication breakdown replicated

The unknown listeners, the lack of interaction, the speaking into the air.In art, literature and philosophy in the interwar years.

Compensatory dialogism The search for new forms of authenticity, intimacy and touch not based on immediate physical presence. Compensations for lost presences.

Intimacy tools Intimate sound spaces, domestic genres, cozy speech styles, radio personalities. The fostering of we-ness, dialogical inclusion, intimate adress remained at the core. Clear parallel to Ellis’s sense of intimacy.Providing the listeneres with a sense of participation or membership.

Mass communication Does thus not capture the tactics of interpersonal appeal.

Hoc est corpus, hocus-pocus

Despite an interpersonal appeal, the relationship of body to body could not be entirely restored.

Freud on communication What happens when dyadic form (communication) is technologically stretched to a giant degree (mass). Each medium as an attempt to cover a human lack, to fill the gap between ourselves and the gods.

Body/liveness Body/pain – flesh – ethos – authenticity.Adorno’s false consciousness The listner tucked into a cocoon of unreflective

security. Similarities to the critique proposed by Socrates in Phaedrus: the waste of seeds. Authentic interaction can only occur when one subject encountered another in its objectivity.

Merton: sense of community Mass rituals as vicarious interactions for which

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“direct” personal involvement was irrelevant.The possibility of the media-made community. To Merton, symbols working at a distance can afford authentic sociability.

In Maxwell’s terms Merton: action at a distanceAdorno: all immediacy is laced with infinitesimal gaps.

SIX: Machines, animals, and aliens: Horizons of incommunicabilityAbysses of communication threatens

Dialogue as the answer, but often also the virus.Communication is not distinct to humans, speech is. Communication reveals our mechanical, bestial and ethereal resemblances.

Disembodiment “To talk on the telephone is to identify an acoustic effigy of the person with an embodied presence” (228). Communication in fact as a symptom of the disembodiement of interaction (see Luhmann or Thompson).

Communicants Not necessarily only humans: animal, cyborg, machines, divinity> the human being at stake.

Hegel

Peters

Recognition of the other – involves the founding of the human order.“deliberations about communication are exercises not only in self-knowledge, but in living with the other” (230). How wide and deep can our emphaty reach.

Aim of chapter Sketch some extremeties of communication theory in twentieth century: machines, animals, extraterrestials.

Background: Descartes Humans are alll together distinct from animals and machines:

- responsiveness in speech- versatility of action

By the 19th century The membranes separating humans, animals and machines become permeable again.

Question remains How can you tell a human from fake?THE TURING TEST AND THE INSUPERABILITY OF EROS

The relation between humans and machines. Alan Turing’s 1950 article “Computing machinery and intelligence”. To discern a body when its not present. The original form: separating a female and male (> Butler: gender trouble). Can the distinctness of bodies be evident in discourse alone?

Dethroning of man Continuity and not break between humans and the mechanical.

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Interaction matters “In a pragmatist vein, Turing argues that if shared consciousness is the criterion of success in communication, then communication is impossible, and we get stuck in the impasse of solipsism” (236).

The discernibility of identicals

Kafka (telephone), Benjamin (photographs), Borges (literature).

Recording and transmitting media

> a principle of duplication entered into what counts as human.

Benjamin “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”.Artworks have an aura which is irreplacable, cannot be copyied. A copy would be a spectacle of ingenuity; a simulation, not an expression.

Jorge Luis Borges “Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote”Copy Never idenitical to its origin. The copy needs to have

its aura supplied.Eros and bodies matter Communication has become a problem of arranging

the ties between distant bodies. “The dream of communication is the dream of identical minds in concert” (241).Between the originals and their doubles there is always a infinite gulf. “Difference is so pervasive that it appears even – or especially – between exact replicas”.

ANIMALS AND EMPATHY WITH THE INHUMAN

Animals as mirrors of self-definition.Greeks, Schiller, Marx, Arendt: animals have societies (co-operation) but not politics (collective determination of action). Allegories of human otherness.

Communication with animals The dangers of projecting ourselves into animal subjects. Communication as a concept that allows for contact without presence, indifferent to the bodily form of the communicators or even to biology.

Fend of antropomorphism Recognize an otherness that does not know it is other.Wittgenstein Understanding < lived or embodied world of common

practices + symbol-manipulating capacities. COMMUNICATION WITH ALIENS

The dream of empirical contact with extraterrestrials as a scientific endeavour.

SETI The search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “If we couldn’t understand a lion who spoke, why would we understand an alien?” (247)

Communication out of the past

Communication at a distance always comes out of the past – but especially with extraterrestrial communication. > The unity of communication at a distance and communication with the dead.

Galactic conversations Illustrates the gaps (that always exist?) of which communication is made. Galactic conversations will

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necessarily be alternating broadcasts. “Dialogue”Borges: “The library of Babel”

An allegory of inability to connect, the minimal odds of our own existence (and still we exist).

The earth alone in the universe

analogous to the idealist’s human caged in a room: the longing of not being alone, to find a sing of something that is not a projection of the self.

Plato and Hegel (…) if the other has not body whose presence we could desire, then what makes us think minds can make contact?” (256)

Surrounded by alien intelligence

Yet lonely and unable to communicate. The strangeness that we never see: our faces. “We haunt ourselves like aliens.”

Pragmatist approach? There is no other kind of communication than via signs, those creatures of outer and inner space.

Peirce - Pragmatist revolt agains Cartesian hierarchies- A semiotic animism that ascribes objective

reality to meaning- An effort to invite us into a beloved

communityMinds as sings mixed with mortal life. His theory of signs is indebted ti an age when intelligence can be stored in media.

Interiority as other “(…) interiority appears as an other; that its form is polymorphous; that we find our inner life dispersed pluralistically across the fields of our experience” (259).We care about ourselves and our surroundings because they share our world and our shape.

CONCLUSION: a squeeze of the handTHE GAPS OF WHICH COMMUNICATION IS MADE

Failed synapses, broken conversations, crosscutting between distinct lines of plot. Face-to-face talk is as laced with gaps as distant communication.Dialouge as two people taking turns broadcasting at each other.

Interaction has become a reading of textual traces.Facts of any communication all discourse must bridge the gap between one

turn and the next the intended adressee may never be identical

with the actual oneTHE PRIVILEGE OF THE RECEIVER

“The other” as the centre of whatever communication means. Communication is not about the sharing of truths. Representing interiority is not possible in a direct way. Rather manipulation of effects to evoke the truest image of them for the other.

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Mercy on others “The challenge of communication is not to be true to our own interiority, but to have mercy on others for never seeing ourselves as we do.” (267)

THE DARK SIDE OF COMMUNICATION

Latin communicarebut also from Greek koinoo: make common, communicate, share, but also pollute, make unclean.

Meaning is an uncomplete project

open-ended and subject to radical revision. A sign surrenders to the interpreter the right of completing the determination.

Peter’s argument We misspend hope in seeking spiritual fullness in communication. Not about representing the self autentically, but that the other is caringly served.

Understanding common Most of the time we understand.Situation and syntax make the sense of words clear.Communication is basically a political and ethical problem (rather than a semantic).

THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF TOUCH AND TIME

Touch: the most resistant sense to being made into a medium of recording or transmission.

The body matters Seeing communication as the meeting of minds, underestimates the holiness of the body. Being there still counts. People who care for each other will seek each other’s presence > better access to their body.

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