Love and Communication

Paddy Scannell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509547548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Love and Communication is an intriguing philosophical and religious inquiry into the meaning of "talk" – and ultimately the meaning of "being human."

Taking an historical approach, Paddy Scannell argues that the fundamental media of communication are (and always have been) talk and writing. Far from being made redundant by twentieth-century new media (radio and television), these old media laid the foundation for today's technologies (AI and algorithms, for instance). Emphasizing these linkages, Scannell makes the case for recognizing what a religious sensibility might reveal about these technologies and the fundamental differences between a humanmade world and a world that is beyond our grasp. Drawing on the pioneering work of John Durham Peters, the book proposes that communication and love go together, which can be understood in two ways: as a human accomplishment, or a divine gift. Ultimately, the essential conundrum of today is highlighted: do we wish to remain in a human>

This book draws on a lifetime of academic work and the author's personal experience. It will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication, who will welcome this highly original and searching examination of love as communication.

Part I
Talk and Communication, Writing and Language

1
The Still Face Experiment

I will start in a roundabout way, with the question of language, whose bewitchments make it hard to get at the truth. And what truth is that? What it is to be human, Heidegger’s question in Being and Time. It is by now a long-established truth that what distinguishes us from the animals is language. But what does that mean? As I see it, there are two languages: one we all learn, and the other that only some of us learn on top of that. And to make this point is to separate language from something else, that something being communication. What every child learns is their Muttersprache, their mother tongue, the spoken language of their parents, of the speech community into which they are born. If a little child is not caught up in the pleasurable game of Muttersprache, it will not become human, and must remain a feral little animal, like poor Genie Wiley. The game in which the infant is caught up is not learning a language so much as how to talk. And learning how to talk includes the Muttersprache of her parents as part of the larger process of learning how to interact (or communicate) with an adult human being. This is the universal thing that every usual little child learns, ab ovo. Learning to talk is part of learning to communicate, as other nonhuman species do. Communication is not a language thing. It is not unique to human beings, and becomes species-specific for some but by no means all human beings when it becomes apparent through writing. All usual human children learn to talk-as-communication. Writing developed as human beings learned how to live in larger and more complex communities, and it became in the course of time a useful if not necessary device in the various complexities of economic and political life in large-scale societies. Writing-as-communication came much later in the form of letters to stay in touch with distant others, and later still as entertainment in the form of the novel.

I

The little girl and her mother in the Still Face Experiment (SFE) on YouTube (it has had nearly 10 million views) is introduced by its experimenter, Dr. Edward Tronick.¹ He leads us through the little experiment and comments on it as we watch and listen. In the crucial second phase – the “still face” moment – the mother turns away momentarily from her child and returns, at Tronick’s behest, with an expressionless, motionless face that she will maintain however her daughter responds. And the response of the baby is the point. How will she handle the sudden (and inexplicable) situation she now finds herself in? Part of the fame of the SFE is that it is reliable, always producing the same overall result. The little child notices immediately the change in her mother, tries to reengage her, and, after failing to do so, bursts into tears. At which point the mother reaches toward her and reengages with her and all is well.

What is going on here is not learning her native language, but learning how to communicate. The child has already learned the preliminary skills of interaction with another as the necessary prelude to learning her Muttersprache. These essential social skills only partly involve acquiring language skills. They are all interlocking and equally important aspects of the multimodal skill of interaction: reaching out, ostensive gestures with hands and arms, face work, gladness of countenance, and blandishments. These were the things that were missing in the egregious experiment of Frederick II, the holy roman emperor who, in the thirteenth century, was convinced that the origins of language began with our first parents. And they, he supposed, naturally spoke Hebrew as they conversed with God in paradise. To prove this he conducted what is now sometimes known as “the forbidden experiment” (Shattuck 1980). Because he had absolute power, and there were no ethics committees back then, the emperor had newly born children removed from their parents and brought up by his court menials with strict instructions that they should be looked after in all respects but no one should ever speak to them. The experiment went ahead, but failed because, in the words of Salimbene di Adam, a monk in the imperial court, the children “could not live without the clapping of hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments” (Language deprivation experiments: Wikipedia).

It is very well established in the academic literature (not to mention our own personal experience) that parents and others (adults and older children) talk to babies in a special kind of way. This distinctive baby talk is variously referred to as caretaker speech, motherese, or (child) infant-directed speech (IDS) – the preferred term in the scientific community. IDS has its own special vocabulary and a distinctive prosody. Its utterance and intonation are usually more gentle, in a higher pitch, with a cooing sound and “glissando variations that are more pronounced than in normal speech production” (Baby talk: Wikipedia). These prosodic features may be considered as the vocalized blandishments of Muttersprache (“motherese”). “Bland,” adjective (L. blandus, soft, smooth): gentle or suave in manner; mild, soothing, not irritating. “Blandish,” verb: flatter gently, coax, cajole; use blandishments. Note that blandishments/motherese are terms that say nothing about linguistic content but presuppose the expressive character of voice – a communicative, not a linguistic phenomenon. Adults will often talk to their pets in the same way, or to each other as a form of intimacy, or to other adults or children as bullying or condescension. But in all positive instances, the blandishments of IDS are a display of indulgent fondness, expressively registered through voice modulation and other proxemic devices. The parental voice of Muttersprache ties together everything that Salimbene di Adam saw as necessary for infants to speak their mother tongue: clapping of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments. All contribute to the primary effect of shared, mutual, and focused attention on each other, as shown by the SFE.

Professor Colwyn Trevarthen has argued for “communicative musicality” as the basis of human companionship (Malloch and Trevarthen 2009). Trevarthen, like Tronick, is a pioneer in the study of child development and “language acquisition” going back to the 1970s. Over the course of many years, and across a range of related disciplines (pediatricians, child psychiatrists, ethologists, anthropologists, and social linguists), what gradually has emerged is a quite new view of the infant human child (in any culture) as endowed with, from birth, a sympathetic communicative competence (Malloch and Trevarthen 2009: 2) that is activated in interaction between an infant and a sympathetic first carer or mother. In his own work, Trevarthen has focused on the musicality of the voices of infants and adults “and how the pitch and duration of these sounds change as the infant attends to the habits of sympathetic older persons and becomes aware of the common sense in the talk around them” (Powers and Trevarthen 2009: 210). This work attends to the vocalization of vowel sounds by both parties. The word “vowel” is synonymous with “voice.” Vowels are pure sounds; the breath of life; the utterance (expression) of “liveness,” being-alive, life. Vowels are “key elements in the communication of emotion and meaning by sound” (Powers and Trevarthen 2009: 210–13). Babies are born with a powerful and delicate range of coos, calls, and cries, while the prosodic features of adult IDS tutor them in how sounds in the vocal stream may be shaped and interrupted by movements of the tongue, jaws, and lips. The upshot of this body of research is “that normal happy infants and their mothers use their voice tones cooperatively with ‘communicative musicality’ to sustain harmony and synchronicity in their interactions with each other” (Powers and Trevarthen 2009: 232).

A component part of learning to talk is the gladness of countenance of both parties to the interaction, confirmed by mutual blandishments. The necessary face and body work involved in this are both learned behaviors, but how have they been learned by the child (we assume, naturally, that the mother already has these communicative skills)? Not in any formal way. No mother says, “Now here is how to smile. And here is how to laugh.” And she certainly never says, “Now here is how to cry.” Her smiles and laughter as communicative phenomena are simply picked up by the baby on, as we might say, the way to talk. The encouragement she receives from adults when she responds with smiles and laughs at first are simply mimicry (they have no intentionality, no meaning content, but she is still learning how to respond to another) and at some point are subsequently transformed into communicative phenomena. There are things that are learned but not formally taught. But note how easy it is to say this, or that the baby just “picks up” communicative skills along the way to talk as if by some magical transformation.

II

The baby has not yet learned her native language, although she appears to be at what linguists call the canonical moment in language development, producing distinct consonant/vowel sounds (she twice says “da,” while clearly pointing with her finger). What the experiment shows is that she has already learned how to communicate. Let us look more closely at how she tries to reconnect with her mother. She first leans forward and looks at her mother quizzically. Then, leaning back and looking upward (for inspiration?), she returns to her mother and begins her efforts at setting things right. She smiles. She points at something and says “da.” In the pre-still face moment a little earlier, she had pointed at something and got an immediate, enthusiastic response from her mother. It worked then, but not now. She leans forward with arms outstretched. She claps her hands. Nothing works. Finally, she turns away from her mother’s still face, wriggles in her seat and bursts into tears.

These are my interpretations of the baby’s actions (for a more detailed analysis, see Scannell 2019). I say this, in the first place, because I cannot ask the little girl to justify her actions. She is not an adult. She cannot talk. I must infer her actions from her behavior, which I take to be meant and meaningful. As does Dr. Tronick, along with 10 million viewers of the YouTube video. We are all, quite naturally, able without any hesitation to figure out what the baby is thinking and doing. Dr. Tronick, as he walks us through the experiment, comments on both. At one point, he says that the baby “puts up both her hands and says ‘What’s happening here?’” She says no such thing, because she cannot talk. But in saying this, Dr. Tronick is behaving not as a man of science, but as a usual human being, who is “adultsplaining” infant behavior. It is not so much that the baby’s actions are intelligible (i.e., meaningful, understandable, reasonable) in the first place, but rather they are treated as such by all usual adults. What the child is learning are the first steps in the arduous process of becoming a usual adult like the rest of us.

I would not wish to imply that the little girl’s responses to her stone-faced mother are meaningless, and that we superimpose adult meanings onto her behavior. Her actions are meaningful, separately and together. But although they are meaningful, they do not translate into linguistic phenomena. There is a logic to her actions that we can infer from them. They are relevant, individually and in sequence, to the weird situation. What she does is not a jumble of stuff, one thing after another, in an arbitrary, random fashion. Separately and together, the component parts of her efforts to reignite the interaction make sense to us, adults. There is a logic to their overall strategy – getting her mother back on track. This logic is the logic of human communication, that distinguishes it from machine><machine communication. It is the nonlinguistic logic of human><human interaction, that she is learning from her adult parent.

III

How would you explain – to try a little thought experiment – to the child what is going on in the SFE? Could you? I do not think so. The mother’s weird behavior makes sense only to us, as usual adults, who endure without demur all sorts of crazy things that scientists (psychologists in particular) inflict on us and our offspring (Stanley Milgram comes to mind). To the little girl, the situation is simply baffling, and she does her best to get out of it. I do not think (and this is pure speculation) that she would be persuaded by being told that it all made sense as an adult experiment. She would think such an explanation was silly, or stupid. And yet it is the only possible “rational” explanation that could explain otherwise inexplicable adult behavior. The communicative, reasonable logic that the child employs could not supply the adult rational justification for it.

The experiment works successfully on infant (speechless) children. What if it were tried on, say, college students? Would they behave in the same way as the baby? I think not. The famous sociological experiments of Harold Garfinkel – the so-called “breaching experiments” – were designed to display the taken-for-granted character of the moral basis of everyday life. Garfinkel – the...