On Communication Studies
What can communication studies tell us about human communication while retaining the critical edge and pluralism of the term “studies”? This question becomes more pertinent now when fake news, hate speech and fanaticism have found global driving power in algorithmic rationality. Crowd sourcing has rendered learning of language unnecessary. Media as technologically enabled and networked memory opens up the future through distraction and panic. That ‘pure communicability’ is available to usexternalized in machines should be a fortunate moment for anyone who wishes to study communication. An attempt to reflectively inhabit communication could benefit from counting on the following salient features of the latter: affective investment in truth; a radical opening to addressing; and the diversification of media as memory-technics by reinventing the cognitive power of myth that renegotiates the divide between nature and culture.
In India, from the camera to the mobile phone, the advent of every new media is welcomed as opportunity to give voice to the hitherto silenced sections of the society. The graded inequality between castes is often cited as an impediment to unleashing the potential of communicative reason. However, the social theories of caste society, despite the strident calls of a phatic politics, have not shown much excitement in proceeding within the ambit of a theory of communicative action. Such a theory would count on our ability to redeem the implicit validity claims of truth, rightness and truthfulness. However, the experiences of humiliation drag some to linguistic dispossession that no dialectics between the self and other could possibly redeem. Ambedkar had ignited the spark of theoretical unrest by inverting the relation between caste and communication by locating the origin of caste hatred in an original stifling of communication that transcendental reflection cannot penetrate. He poses the problem in terms of a society’s relationship with truth and how truth inflects human existence.
Ambedkar proposed a diagnosis of the lack of life in the intellectual systems of India that had made remarkable achievements in ancient times. In the Philosophy of Hinduism, he asked why did the profound truth discovered by the Upanishads turn out to be ineffective in creating the sciences of the future? How could such profound thoughts allow the society to sustain the inhumanity of caste? Here Ambedkar distinguishes between cognition of truth and love for truth.
“The philosophers of Upanishads did not realise that to know truth was not enough. One must learn to love truth. The difference between philosophy and religion may be put in two ways. Philosophy is concerned with knowing truth. Religion is concerned with the love of truth. Philosophy is static. Religion is dynamic. These differences are merely two aspects of one and the same thing. Philosophy is static because it is concerned only with knowing truth.”[1]
For Ambedkar, philosophy in India pursued the cognitive access to truth without caring for the love of truth. This passion is irreducible to a validity claim implicit in acts of communication. Also, the love for truth is a very potent one. If it is not cared for and kept at a distance from the life and love of simple human beings, it turns into hatred. Such a truth-seeking enterprise could do nothing against the hate and infamy spread by the laws of Manu. As Ambedkar’s European contemporary Husserl observed, the pursuit of ruthless cognition in Indian systems of thought remain entrapped in the mindless repetition in closed communities. Truth without love failed to affect the human existence as such. We did not become us by relation to one-self and others in relation to truth. With colonialism this truth-indifferent and caste hating society will encounter the West that had imposed sanctions against lying. According to Benjamin, ban on lying and fraud killed the non-violent potential of communication[2]. Hopefully, a communication studies that takes the passion for truth seriously will write the history of the violent encounter between caste and colonialism.
Ramachandra Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and a student of the British philosopher Peter Strawson, argued as early as in the 1970s that addressing is the decisive presupposition of human communication. He affirmed the primacy of communication over the transport of meaning or information. It is not a matter of convention or intention.
The address relates saying to the happening of saying. For Gandhi, reported speech is the paradigm of communication. While Austin claims that all saying is doing, Gandhi found saying in all doing. Addressing is the disavowal of the causal efficacy of communication. Telling someone something is a matter of ‘not really’ trying to get someone to believe something, or trying to get him to believe that the speaker believes something. Communicative competence is an ability to grasp and perform acts of “not really” trying do anything causally efficacious. Addressing is the nonviolence that opens up every act to communication. The addressing cannot be accounted in any dialectic between the self and the other. It is a gesture that opens up the saying to its own ‘circum-ambient’ silence, noise and nothingness. It offers a vulnerable spot in our communicative networks where hate speech can be tempted to take the risk of transforming itself into slogans of solidarity.
The priority of technicity over ethnicity has fostered the hope that technological media can open up the potential for overcoming racial and ethnic stereotyping and segregation. In India, the digital media, despite the digital divide, is celebrated for its potential to cut across the caste class and gender divide. However, the suicide of Devika, a fourteen-year-old lower caste girl in Kerala (the most literate state of India), for not being able to join virtual classes during the pandemic, belies this hope [3]. It may be seen as a sad and hasty response to the lack of technological resources that, had she waited a few days, the family, community or state would have provided for. The premature closure of the future horizon of a child when faced with a technological challenge demands us to rethink the conception of techno-media as a common fund of the tertiary retentions[4] of humanity. The technical is haunted by differences prior to culture and ethnicity. The advent of colonial technology was met with fear and suspicion, on the one hand and hope and excitement on the other. The colonial destruction of indigenous technical practices and the post-colonial adventures with the digital demand a historicity that overwhelms memory and meaning. This history runs through jugaad (makeshift), entertainment, hacking and endless migrations of impoverished craftsmen. Can the communication studies give voice to the ghosts Devika might have encountered in the digital?
In civilizations such as India, media, memory and technique need elaboration as myth. Myth was neither ideology as a mistaken science nor a failed technology. As scholars from Giorgio de Santillana to Michel Serres teach us, myth was directedly involved in the generation and perpetuation of data about cosmic events like the precession of the equinoxes. “Myths can be used as a vehicle for handing down solid knowledge independent of the degree of insight of the people who do the actual telling of stories, fables, etc”. This knowledge is generated and transmitted without involving the subjective conditions of the knower. The gnomon, tracked the cosmos by letting the sun cast a shadow on earth and not through the telescope that presupposes a transcendental subject – the man – behind the eye-piece. Media is myth before message and myth is measurement before meaning. Myth places media at once in nature and culture also in metaphysics and ethics forcing us to be alert about rape in the MUD game of LambdaMOO[5] – incidentally brought to light by the avatar Dr Bombay! – and Devika’s suicidal encounter with the real of digital learning.
-Sanil.V
IIT Delhi
[1] Ambedkar.B.R (1987), Philosophy of Hinduism in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar : Writings and Speeches, Vol 3, ed. Hari Narake (New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation), p 86
[2] Benjamin Walter (1996), Critique of Violence in Selected Writings vol 1913-26 ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press) P 244
[3] https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/kerala/malappuram-student-commits-suicide-allegedly-over-missing-online-class-1.4800626
[4] Stiegler, Bernard (1998), Technics and Time vol 1. Tran by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, P 246
[5] Dibbell, Julian (1998). “A Rape in Cyberspace”. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. (
New York: Owl). p. 11–30. http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/