Undoing/Rethinking

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/

 

 

I consider here the dual erasure now under way in media studies: one has to do with the non-Atlantic world, non-English productions, and non-cosmopolitan worlds, which were strangely relevant in a bi-polar world but have become oddly marginal in a fragmented, multi-polar world. The other erasure is of those subjects once thought to be central to media and communication studies: propaganda, advertising, news, and such fundamental problems as “communication” itself. I suggest that these two erasures are
connected.

“Miscommunication” is one of these zombie topics which has been buried under such phenomena as fake news, opinion bots, social media personae, and the like. The lack of interest in miscommunication is tied to the decreasing interest in communication, especially among media theorists. This is a symptom of the growing gap between media studies and communication studies.
Communication studies was a field born in the crucible of the Cold War, when scholars based in the United States agreed that the war against communism had to have a significant “soft” component, consisting of the international cultural export of American cultural forms and messages through such vehicles as The Voice of America and the United States Information Service, and by building the institutions of journalism, opinion-building and press freedom in the new nations of the global South. Thus, the lines between propaganda and communication were significantly blurred in the sixties and seventies of the last century, though in the United States it was a central article of faith that “we” practiced communication and “they” practiced propaganda, both internally and externally. A topic such as advertising was regarded as a benign form of propaganda, since it served the interests of both democracy and capitalism.

Communication studies also had significant links in the United States to linguistics and to the general interest in language as the prime human means of communication. Thus, for example, the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania had a strong group of scholars, including Dell Hymes, Steven Feld, Ray Birdwhistell, and Erving Goffman, who worked on linguistic forms and practices during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Media studies was not a really well-established form in this period, when it
was confined to such Canadian scholars as Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, and their acolytes in the United States.

Miscommunication was a crucial topic in these decades, of interest to students of electoral campaigns, of truth in advertising, and of the relationship between generations, genders and ethnic groups. It was seen as the dark and revealing side of communication, and as  a problem to be overcome by clarity, sincerity and conviction. Starting in the 1990’s, media studies emerged as the Trojan in the communications horse, and a whole field began to emerge around such topics as codes, systems, interfaces, screens, grids, networks and algorithms. There is an obvious genealogy for this development in the cybernetic interests of the 1950’s and the renewed interest in science, technology and infrastructure among humanists, especially in the United States, since the 1990’s. Since this time, English literature scholars, tired of studying cinema, fashion, and colonialism, have turned their attention to media, through such
inventions as the digital humanities. Philosophy was soon to follow, with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Badiou recruited to the study of video-games, sonic archives and photography. All of a sudden media studies became a high-end humanities field, in direct dialogue with the hard sciences, and with no further need of the fogeys of an older social science, abandoned to studies of propaganda, advertising and yes, communication.

This is the short story of what happened to miscommunication as a topic of interest after the 1980’s. But for it to become a dead topic, one other shoe had to drop and that too is a result of the digital revolution. This second shoe is the birth of the fake as the main currency of news, social media and politics. The victory of fakeness in the public sphere is enabled by the anonymity of digital media as well as its prolixity, but it also thrives in the atmosphere of post-truth as an epistemic regime. In this new world, fakes operate simultaneously with their others, the stage props of which the real is built. In this sense the documentary fiction and the fictional fact support and propagate one another synchronically. In the pre-digital world there was necessarily a temporal gap between original and fake, thing and image, event and report. In the digital era, that gap has vanished in a world of simultaneity. Communication and
miscommunication require this temporal gap, and with its disappearance, these topics have themselves vanished, leaving behind the favored objects of media studies, since the algorithmic world is about patterns, networks and signals which come vanishingly close to eliminating duration altogether. The world of post-truth is thus not relativistic, cynical or opportunistic. It is a world which has lost interest in both communication and miscommunication, since both these phenomena rely on the temporality of impression, digestion, reaction and response. When this sequencing is lost to digital simultaneity, what remains are an endless network of impressions, opinions, postures and framings, that are no longer susceptible to the diachrony of natural communication. Post-truth regimes are built on the logic of pure synchrony.

For this reason, in the dominant spaces of media theory, history has become the history of devices, society has become mere connectivity, tools have become apps, and the person has become the profile. This state of affairs is a disciplinary illusion, which does not reflect or engage the lives of ninety per cent of mankind, which lives in a world of bodily risk, morbidity, suffering by exclusion, and ruthless stigmatization on the grounds of race, caste, citizenship and gender. Theirs is a world in which communication and miscommunication still count, but the discipline media studies remains libidinally attached to high technology, theory-induced vertigo, and disciplinary myopia. Its world thrives in the zones north of injustice and west of communication.

August 11, 2020