Unless one intends to develop a science with no name, we believe it necessary to pause and reflect on the word communication, as it pertains to a nominal synthesis of a variety of contemporary practices which range from intersubjective exchanges of words to the technologically advanced transmission of signals and messages. Embodied in industries, this synthesis continues to unfold in technical terms with enormous social and academic consequences, without having a name which truly configures a unit or, to attend to the spirit of the electronic times, a cognitive network focused on the constitution of a positive knowledge.
Originally, to communicate—“to act in common” or “to allow to act in common”—means to bind, relate, concatenate, organize, or allow to organize by the constitutive, intensive, or pre-subjective dimension or the symbolic order of the world. Just as biology describes communicating vessels and architecture envisions communicative spaces, human beings are communicative, not because they speak (an attribute resulting from the linguistic system), but because they relate or organize symbolic mediations—by conscious and unconscious means—according to a common which is to be shared. In the radical sphere of communication, these mediations are not reduced to a syntactic or semantic logic of signs, because they are trans-verbal, oscillating between unconscious mechanisms, words, images, and bodily affectations.
This is not socially or theoretically evident. First, this is because reflectivity—traced by a determined line of thought in the very foundations of the ideological reproduction of modern social systems—admits that certain terms are capable of producing the reality in which they are discursively inserted. This is a position which traverses from the American pragmatists to the British and French sociologists, but is also found harbored in the thought of Walter Benjamin, for whom ideas are given in a movement of original perception, in which words, designated, generate knowledge: “It is to some extent doubtful whether Plato’s theory of ‘Ideas’ would have been possible if the very meaning of the word had not suggested to the philosopher, familiar only with his mother tongue, a deification of the verbal concept, a deification of words: Plato’s ‘Ideas’ are - if, for once, they might be considered from this one-sided viewpoint - nothing but deified words and verbal concepts.”
Thus, the term communication—deriving from the Latin communicatio/communicare with the principal meaning of “share,” “participate in something” or “to put in common”—can end up creating, in the twentieth century, its own reality from the ancient metonymic expansion of the meaning “thing communicated” with the competition of information and publicity transmission techniques. The focus on interaction, which is an occurrence inherent to communicational exchange, ended up overtaking the meaning of message transmission.
Contemporary dictionaries and especially North American scholars from the beginning of the last century tended to understand communication as the transmission of messages or information, but from an ethical and psychological viewpoint, subsumed by the word communion. This understanding, socially underscored by the development of communication and information technologies in the USA, was strengthened in Europe, including from competition within the academic community which, under the influence of linguistics and the philosophy of language, attempted to find an object common to both, imagining the ability to found a general science of man. The idea of communication was thus annexed to the models of signal transmission.
It’s true that the meaning of “transmission” dates back to the sixteenth century (“to communicate a piece of news”), but its contemporary stability most likely stems from the energy of the word information, which implies the codified organization of variation—thus, the endowment in the form of a material or any relation—and the flux of signals from one hub to another. Today, the term media condenses the diversity of information devices. Although communicating is not truly the same as informing, the ideological aspiration of the media system is to reach, by means of information, the human horizon of dialogic exchange supposedly contained in communication.
In fact, although the original root (communis + actio = communicatio) truly says nothing about the transmission of information or messages, this dictionary definition in Western languages imposed itself onto the primordial meaning of “common action” or something like “action in common.” Appropriated by sociology, it served as a basis for the study of social relations generated by modern information technologies and framed in the vague, theoretical body of the pair “communication/information ,” which is simply another name for modern communication, also called “mediatization.”
The judgment implicit in these definitions receives, logically, the label tautology. Something like “communication is communication,” or rather, what is intended by the “science” of communication coincides tautologically with its own, experienced reality. From the perspective of logic—more precisely, epistemology —of social thought, all this is a source of ambiguity and problems for those who aspire to clarify the theoretical field pertaining to the nebulous entity denominated “communication/information .” All the more nebulous when one considers that the current complexity of social systems, in contexts which are nearly impermeable to the establishment of linear relations of cause and effect, is accompanied by the structural uncertainty related to the predictability of facts.
The term information requires greater clarification before shedding some light on its semantic and theoretical indeterminacy. In fact, this word, constant in biology (neurology, physiology), was incorporated into journalistic activity, was frequently used in cybernetics, has gained space as a metric (or quantitative) concept in the mathematical theory of signal transmission circuits, and ended up reflectively sustaining notions regarding civilization, such as “information society ” or “the Information Age.”
The problem is that, despite the socio-discursive effects of reflectivity, conceptual gaps can appear—that is, in terms of cognitive systematization—when one says “information.” One could write a grand work on the “Information Age” without the requisite conceptual categorization. In other words, this is not to affirm that the communications field of research lacks a frame, but that its conceptual framework is indeed weak.
In the scope of these socially valued effects, a pragmatic approach to the question could, however, be conducted with the following rationale: it does not truly matter to know what is communication/information , rather what matters is knowing socio-technical uses in contemporary life.
This is an acceptable understanding for the common sense of a public which is immersed in what is called “media culture” or in the consumption of technical devices continually dumped on the market by the electronics industry, from which exudes an aura of irrepressible optimism, analogous to the emotional atmosphere of the great transformations of capital. Marx had already observed, however, that “the bourgeois revolutions, like those of the 18th century, precipitate rapidly from success to success, their dramatic effects overtaking each other, men and things seem shrouded in the splendor of diamonds, the enthusiasm which reaches ecstasy is the permanent state of society - but it does not last long” (18 Brumaire, Luis Napoleon).
Maybe for this reason, even in the sphere of academic knowledge, it is admissible to release works about the uses which the State and the Market make of an enormous variety of processes—financial transactions, consumption, business management, cultural dissemination, media culture, documented records, digital convergence, etc.—with the general title of communication/information, without conceptually elucidating the described or analyzed object. It seems that the pure and simple description of processes or practices is enough to assure the continual management of an interdisciplinary field at the university level or in external, technical circuits without appealing to “strong” explicative devices, that is, to scientific systematization. In political or macro-social terms, it would be enough to evaluate the degree of democratization of these processes to legitimate them cognitively.
Traditionally, however, even the pragmatic endeavor of the valorization of democracy as a postulate of open, modern societies adheres to the imperative of redefining or renovating democratic mechanisms. This implies not only the use, but the continual education of citizens and perspectives on that which sits beyond the economic, juridical, and social parameters established by a determined human formation. This “beyond” the limits of the forms of power, which has been translated in practice as refined creativity since Ancient Greece, with the perspectives of man’s happiness, may receive the name ethics.
In this case, the question about what it is cannot be relegated to the sphere of the remaining conceptualists of Greek metaphysics, because it is the necessary point of departure for an existential orientation toward the hypertrophy of power of so-called communication/information , and for an eventual line of ethical-political action within the democratic order. It is not secondary, therefore, to ask what communication truly means, all the more when one accompanies Wittgenstein in the supposition that all philosophical questioning addresses the meaning of words. Beyond this, with an epistemological view, this questioning contributes, along with the requisite ontological clarification of the phenomenon, toward deliberating a positive knowledge, that is, a specific science, albeit one that is not destined to be confined within objective parameters established by a “normal” episteme.
Something analogous is registered in the history Marxian thought (in the Grundrisse, for example) when it, in the dialectical formation of capital, distinguishes capital in general from categories such as value, labor, money, prices, and circulation. Or rather, it distinguishes the presumptions from the synthesis of determination, with the caveat that it is necessary “to fix the determined form in which capital is placed in a certain point.”
It is this “certain point” which seems to supervene now in the communicational field, where signs, discourse, instruments, and technical devices are presumptions of the formative process of a new way of socializing, of a new existential ecosystem in which communication is equivalent to a general mode of organization. Installed as a world of interconnected systems of production, circulation, and consumption, the new socio-technical order is fixed at a historical point of the here and now, not as an index of a new mode of economic production, but as the continuity, with financial and technological domination, of a commercialization begun by capitalism in the beginning of Western modernity. In the necessary rearrangement of persons and things, communication was revealed as the principal organizing form.
We accentuate the “was revealed” because communication means, in fact, in its radicalism, the organizing action of unpredictable mediations of the human common, the approximate resolution of the differences pertinent to symbolic forms. Things, differences approach each other as communicative entities because they fit into the primordial binding (a mark of limits, comparable to meaning) established by the symbol.
Symbol is not understood here as a secondary figure of language or a linguistic epiphenomenon, but as the work of relating, concatenating, or placing in common (syn-ballein) separate forms, in the form of a general equivalency, energetically invested as a value and circulating as currency, speech, father, monarch, sign, or rather, as primordial, symbolic mediations which develop into the economy, psyche, kinship, politics, and language.
Language, for example: the word or sign only materializes on the social record of vital exchanges as a representation with the value of linguistic use because it is symbolically constituted of a condition of possibility, an a priori, which is not a reciprocal convention, but a generative emptiness (like the number zero), an abstract principle of organization—the common. This principle is inherent to the human condition and becomes visible when the man, in any cultural or civilizational latitude, make an emptiness appear in the totality which is presented as absolute, simply by thinking.
This revealing reflection does not necessarily stem from a brilliant individual, but often from a historical constellation. Today, it is the very occurrence of technological production, its historical veneer as the apex of Western rationality, urged on by the energy of information as the efficient operator of the financial economy, which reveals the organizing nature of communication. It is, thus, of a transcendent nature, hidden from or unconscious of the origin of the organizing principle of the human common, now reinterpreted by systems powered by electronic technology.
The living forces of this common can be apprehended as words, gestures, signs, or collected as information and susceptible to quantitative evaluations (the technical information being a species of circulating currency), but communication is not defined by these: the actio communis is an a priori, it is the symbolic dimension, the condition of the possibility of vital exchange, within which, naturally, lies the system of differences and substitutions of the linguistic signs.
One may use the “plates” metaphor to present the concept: communication w...