The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common

Alphonso Lingis

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780253334381
• eBook ISBN: 9780253114112
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"... thought-provoking and meditative, Lingis's work is above all touching, and offers a refreshingly idiosyncratic antidote to the idle talk that so often passes for philosophical writing." —Radical Philosophy

"... striking for the clarity and singularity of its styles and voices as well as for the compelling measure of genuine philosophic originality which it contributes to questions of community and (its) communication." —Research in Phenomenology

Articulating the author's journeys and personal experiences in the idiom of contemporary continental thought, Alphonso Lingis launches a devastating critique, pointing up the myopia of Western rationalism. Here Lingis raises issues of undeniable urgency.

the murmur of the world

INFORMATION AND NOISE

we communicate information with spoken utterances, by telephone, with tape recordings, in writing, and with printing. With these methods we communicate in the linguistic code. We also communicate information with body kinesics—with gestures, postures, facial expressions, ways of breathing, sighing, and touching one another. The communication here too uses abbreviations, signs, and conventions.

To make drawn lines into writing, we have to conform with the convention that dictates that certain strokes correspond to a certain word and notion. Even those among us with excellent manual dexterity, good training, good health, and alertness make slips in our penmanship and our typing. There are always typos in the many-times copyedited critical editions of classic authors. There is no speaking without stammerings, mispronunciations, regional accents, or dysphonias. Typing and printing are designed to eliminate the cacography, yet in every book we have seen some letters and words that are so faintly impressed that they are inferred rather than seen. Recording, and radio and television transmission, are designed to eliminate the cacophony, but there can be static, cut-offs, and jamming; there is always hysteresis, the lagging of transmission due to shifting in the electromagnetic field; and there is always background noise.

Entering into communication means extracting the message from its background noise and from the noise that is internal to the message. Communication is a struggle against interference and confusion. It is a struggle against the irrelevant and ambiguous signals which must be pushed back into the background and against the cacophony in the signals the interlocutors address to one another—the regional accents, mispronunciations, inaudible pronunciations, stammerings, coughs, ejaculations, words started and then canceled, and ungrammatical formulations—and the cacography in the graphics.

COMMUNICATION AND CONTENTION

It is striking that the development of knowledge is conceived in military terms, such as hunt, raid, strategy, battle, and conquest. Yet is not knowledge developed in and for communication? When individuals shielded and armed encounter one another and make a move to communicate—extending bared hands and speaking—their violence comes to a stop. Discourse interrupts violence and words silence the clash of arms. Communication finds and establishes something in common beneath all contention.

But communication itself has been classically conceived as an agon, a contention between interlocutors. Communication takes place in discourse, that is, a dialectics of demand and response, statement and contestation, in which interlocutors oppose one another.

One sees communication as a continuation of violence, but with other means. One sees in the dialectical cadence of communication, proceeding by affirmation and contestation, an interval in which each makes himself other than the other, when one sees each one speaking in order to establish the rightness of what he says. To speak in order to establish one’s own rightness is to speak in order to silence the other. Yet Socrates from the beginning excluded the possibility of establishing one’s own rightness. Communication is an effort to silence, not the other, the interlocutor, but the outsider: the barbarian, the prosopopoeia of noise.

Michel Serres argues¹ that there is indeed force being exercised to resist and silence another in all communication, but it is not in the dialectic of demand and response, statement and contestation, in which interlocutors position themselves and differ the one from the other. What the one says may oppose—question, deny, or contradict—what the other says, but in formulating opposing statements that respond to one another, interlocutors do not entrench themselves in reciprocal exclusion. For speaker and auditor exchange their roles in dialogue with a certain rhythm; the source becomes reception and the reception, the source; the other becomes but a variant of the same.² Discussion is not strife; it turns confrontation into interchange.

However, when two individuals renounce violence and set out to communicate, they enter into a relation of non-communication and violence with outsiders. There could well be, and in fact always is, an outsider or outsiders who have an interest in preventing communication. Every conversation between individuals is subversive—subversive of some established order, some established set of values, or some vested interests. There is always an enemy, a big brother listening in on all our conversations, and that is why we talk quietly behind closed doors. There is nothing you or I say to one another in conversation that we would say if the television cameras were focused on us for direct broadcast.

There are outsiders who have an interest in preventing this rather than that from being communicated; they do so by arguing for that, by presenting it in seductive and captivating ways, or by filling the time and the space with it. There are outsiders who have an interest in preventing us from communicating at all. They do so by filling the time and the space with irrelevant and conflicting messages, with noise.

Formerly the street walls of buildings were blind, without windows; anyone who came to speak had to ring a bell and tell his name. Today the street walls of buildings are screens upon which messages are written in neon flashes—irrelevant and conflicting messages which are not received and responded to but which agitate and merge into images that dazzle, inveigle, and excite the consumer frenzy of contemporary life. The roads and the paths to the furthest retreats in the country are lined with wires tense with stock-exchange pandemonium; beams bounced off satellites in outer space penetrate all the walls.

The walls we have to erect about ourselves are immaterial walls, the walls of an idiolect whose terms and turns of phrase are not in the dictionary and the manuals of rhetoric. Not only the talk of lovers, but every conversation that is resumed again and again becomes, over time, incomprehensible to outsiders. There is secrecy in every conversation. In the measure that this wall of secrecy gets thinner, we more and more utter but current opinions, conventional formulas, and inconsequential judgments. Heidegger quite missed that; it is the big and little Hitlers lurking in every hallway, every classroom, and every bar where we went to relax and get our minds off things, that produce das Gerede—“talk.”

There are also allies—outsiders who have an interest in promoting the communication between us. The company wants the section members to communicate with one another; in disputes the police want us to try to communicate with our neighbors before calling them. Even authoritarian governments want the citizens to communicate at least their fears and resignation to one another.

When we cannot communicate, we appeal to outsiders to help. We enroll in classes, to learn from professors mastery of the established forms of discourse and the state of the current debate, so as to be able to communicate our insights effectively. We appeal to the scientific community, its established vocabulary and rhetorical forms, in trying to communicate with fellow-scientists from Japan or agricultural workers in Africa. Descartes, having established the existence of his own mind and his own thoughts, then appeals to the great outsider, God, before he moves on to consider the existence of other minds and the possibility of communicating with them.

In making philosophy not the imparting of a doctrine but the clarification of terms, Socrates, like analytic philosophers, like recent pragmatic philosophers, makes philosophy a facilitator of communication. Socrates, who evolved from soldier to philosopher in the service of the community, struggled against the babble and the barbarian who is the real enemy of truth.

But Michel Serres interprets the Socratic effort in such a way as to make the elimination of noise, in the rational community, a struggle against the rumble of the world and to make the struggle against the outsider a struggle against the empiricist.

THE SIGNIFIED, THE SIGNIFIER, THE REFERENT

To communicate is to take an emitted signal to mean the same to the speaker and to the auditor. And it is to take an emitted signal to mean the same as a signal emitted before. The meaning designated by conventional signifiers at different times and in different places is recognized to be the same; Husserl characterizes the meaning of expressions as ideal. Meanings exist, not intemporally and aspatially, but by the indefinite possibility of recurring and by the indefinite possibility of being designated by signifiers issued anywhere, anytime.

There is, in language, no first or last occurrence of a word. A word can have meaning only if it can be repeated. The words that have suffered obsolescence can still be referred to, by linguists and students of literature, and can be returned to the language; their demise is never definitive. The first time a word is constructed, if it is to be able to enter into the usages of language, it must appear as already latent in the structures and paradigms and rules of formulation of the language.

It is not only the signification but the signifier, too, that is ideal. What signals in a sound is not its particular sonorous quality as really heard, but the formed sound that is taken to be ideally the same as that of other sounds uttered before and yet to be uttered. To hear sounds as words, to hear signals in the noise, is to abstract from the soprano or bass, thinness or resonance, softness or loudness, or tempo of their particular realizations and to attend only to the distinctive feature that conventionally makes the sounds distinct phonemes in the phonetic system of a particular language. The word as a signifier is already an abstraction and the product of an idealization.

Recognizing what is written involves epigraphy, a skill in separating out the ill-written features of the letters and words. The geometry class abstracts from the fact that the drawing the teacher has put on the board is only approximately a right triangle or a circle. When she draws a circle with a compass, one ignores the fact that the pencil angle shifts as she draws and the line is thicker on one side than on another. The reader systematically neglects not only the erroneous lines but also the particularities with which the letters have to be materialized. He disregards the fact that they are written in blue or black ink, or set in a Courier 10 or Courier 12 typeface. Reading is a peculiar kind of seeing that vaporizes the substrate, the hue and grain of the paper or of the computer screen and sees the writing as will-o’-the-wisp patterns in a space disconnected from the material layout of things.

To communicate is to have practiced that dematerializing seeing that is seeing patterns as writing and that dematerializing hearing that is hearing streams of sounds as words and phrases. It is to push into the background, as noise, the particular timber, pitch, volume, and tonal length of the words being uttered and to push into the background, as white noise, the particular color, penmanship, and typeface, of the visible patterns. Communication—by words and also by conventionalized kinesic signals—depends on the common development of these skills in eliminating the inner noise in signals and in dematerializing vision and audition.

To communicate with another, one first has to have terms with which one communicates with the successive moments of one’s experience. Already to have a term which, when one pronounces it now, one takes to be the same as when one pronounced it a moment ago, is to have dematerialized the sound pattern, de-materialized a vocalization into a signifier, a word. Memory works this dematerialization. When one conveys something in words to another, how does one know that the communication is successful? Because one hears the other speaking about that experience, responding to it, and relating it to other experiences, in terms one would have used. To recognize the words of another as the words one used or would use, one departicularizes those words of their empirical particularities: their pitch, timbre, rhythm, density, and volume—their resonance. One disengages the word from its background noise and from the inner noise of its utterance. The maximal elimination of noise would produce successful communication among interlocutors themselves maximally interchangeable.

The meanings we communicate—the ways we refer to objects and situations—are abstract entities: recurrent forms. The signifiers with which we communicate are abstract, universal: ideal. But the referents, too, are abstract and idealized entities.

If we speak to another of a mountain vista, it is because that mountain landscape spoke to us; if we speak of a red, not brown, door, it is because that door emitted signals in the vibrations that made contact with our eyes. If our words, signals addressed to one another, have referents, it is because things address signals to us—or at least broadcast signals at large.

The medium teems with signals continually being broadcast from all the configurations and all the surfaces of things. To see that color of red, to pick up the signals from that door or that vista, is to constitute an enormous quantity of irrelevant and conflicting signals as background noise.

But to refer to that color of red with a word that one has used to refer to red things before and that will be used by one’s interlocutor who does not see it or who sees it from his own angle of vision, is to filter out a multiplicity of signals given out by this particular door in the sun and shadows of this late afternoon and received by one who happens to be standing just here. What we communicate with the word and concept “red” is what, in this red door, can recur in other things designated by this word. The reception of signals from referents in view of communicating them is not a palpation that discerns the grain and pulp and tension with which each thing fills out the spot it so stubbornly and so exclusively occupies. It is seeing the red of the door, and the gloom of the forest and the shapes of the leaves, as modular patterns stamped on the unpenetrated density of things. Only this kind of leveling and undiscerning perception, Serres argues, could be communicated. “The object perceived,” he complains, “is indefinitely discernible: there would have to be a different word for every circle, for every symbol, for every tree, and for every pigeon; a different word for yesterday, today, and tomorrow; and a different word according to whether he who perceives it is you or I, according to whether one of the two of us is angry, is jaundiced, and so on ad infinitum.”³ To communicate is to consign to noise the teeming flood of signals emitted by what is particular, perspectival, and distinctive in each thing.

To abstract from the noise of the world is to be a rationalist. The first effort at communication already begins the dematerialization that thought will pursue. The effort to render a form independent of its empirical realizations issues in the constitution of the universal, the scientific, the mathematical.

THE CITY MAXIMALLY PURGED OF NOISE

We face one another to emit signals that can be received, recognized, and reiterated, while about us extends the humming, buzzing, murmuring, crackling, and roaring world. Our interlocutor receives the information by not harkening to the pitch, volume, accent, and buzz of our sounds, and attending only to the recognizable, repeatable form, consigning the singular sonority of our voice and sentence to noise internal to the message. And he turns to the thing, situation, or event referred to by our message as a recurrent and abstract entity, not as the singular vibrant density sunk in the morass of the world and emitting its particular signals, static, and noise. The practice of abstraction from the empirical implantation of things is what brings about communication. To eliminate the noise is to have successfully received the message. To communicate it is to reissue the abstract form. The abstract is maintained and subsists in the medium of communication.

The community that forms in communicating is an alliance of interlocutors who are on the same side, who are not each Other for each other but all variants of the Same, tied t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Other Community
• The Intruder
• Faces, Idols, Fetishes
• The Murmur of The World
• The Elemental that Faces
• Carrion Body Carrion Utterance
• Community in Death