Quotes
"The self-evident quality of the boundary that divides organism and
environment becomes less and less obvious the closer we approach it.
Bateson, in his classic example of the man-axe-tree circuit, suggests that
only the total system of tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree has the
quality of immanent mind. What occurs in this system is a series of
transforms and what happens in the environment is as essential to the
circuit as the sensory-muscular processes in the human participant. There
is danger in separating meaning and context, or participant and setting,
of falling into the trap of viewing one as independent variable and the
other as dependent variable.
"My own view agrees with his emphasis upon the idea that communication
systems, particularly human ones, never exist out of context, that any
analysis of behavior that disregards the matrix in which it occurs
distorts its character in some respects. As he stresses, 'in no system
which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control
over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system
are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole' (Bateson,
1972). The issue here is whether to base the study of communication on the
assumption of a hierarchy of systems in which each serves as context of
the others, each having some unique features and some autonomy, or that
the only communicative system is the universe as a whole and analytic
units become 'arcs of larger circuits.'" "Toward an Ecology of
Communication," Richard Barnlund, Rigor & Imagination, 1980, p.95.
"It seems clearer and clearer to me that we cannot understand language
except through direct experience, using it or having it used to us. Unless
our words make a difference in the outcome, we cannot make valid
judgments. Too often the sociolinguist or pragmaticist still attempts to
play the games of the ivory tower, to study some aspect of real language
use 'objectively.' If it's a form of language with which we are all
familiar anyway, like conversation, there is probably no harm done. But
when the researcher ventures into foreign territory, like the courtroom,
it is essential to be engaged, to get a whiff of the adversariality in the
air by joining the game, not standing on the surface decorously jotting
notes. Lakoff, Robin. Talking Power; The Politics of Language in Our
Lives. Basic Books. 1990. p. x.
"During the second year of the
infant's life language emerges, and in the process the senses of self and
other acquire new attributes. Now the self and the other have different
and distinct personal world knowledge as well as a new medium of exchange
with which to create shared meanings. A new organizing subjective
perspective emerges and opens a new domain of relatedness. The possible
ways of 'being with' another increase enormously. At first glance,
language appears to be a straightforward advantage for the augmentation of
interpersonal experience. It makes parts of our known experience more
shareable with others. In addition, it permits two people to create mutual
experiences of meaning that had been unknown before and could never have
existed until fashioned by words. It also finally permits the child to
begin to construct a narrative of his own life. But in fact language is a
double-edged sword. It also makes some parts of our experience less
shareable with ourselves and with others. It drives a wedge between two
simultaneous forms of interpersonal experience: as it is lived and as it
is verbally represented." The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Daniel
Stern, Basic Books, New York, 1985, p. 162.
"Now the dilemma: On one hand, arguing from and accepting claims on
authority are the twentieth Century’s definitive epistemic methods. On the
other hand, the medieval logicians’ chief reason for seeing the argument
from authority as a fallacy still holds: To invoke authority is to abort
debate.” Willard, Charles Arthur. Liberalism and the Problem of Knowledge:
A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago Press. 1996. p.
140.
"This moment presupposes that the interpreter and poem are in communion
and that the communion is large enough to fill the space in which the
audience is present, thus to encircle the audience, take it up into its
life, and so transform it, just as poem and interpreter are transformed.
For Bacon this process begins with 'the tensive life of literature,'
expands into a relationship with the interpreter, and finally culminates
in 'the relationship between these two lives and the life of the
audience....' This complexity of relationship creates growth in all of its
parts: poem, interpreter, and audience each grows and becomes more itself
through the others." Bozrath-Campbell, Alla. The Word's
Body. The University of Alabama Press. 1979. p. 16.
"To decode a message fully, one
would have to reconstruct the entire semantic structure which underlay its
creation--and thus to understand the sender in every deep way." Goedel,
Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstader, Penguin, 1979, p. 166.
“If communication is genuine only
insofar as it expresses one’s beliefs, or realistically connects nouns
with objects, then most communication is counterfeit, most leadership is
deceitful, and mass media simulations will seem to have replaced the
authentic links between language and reality. Behind this thinking is a
naive realism: Communication is a process of making known one’s thoughts
and feelings; its purpose is to convey one’s thoughts and feelings to
others; it either conveys one’s internal reality or conceals it–it is
either true or false. Honest communication is authentic, accurate, a
mirror of inner reality. In a word, it is expressive.
“One who sees communication this way will see conventional rules,
etiquettes, and norms as inauthentic and rhetorical achievements–the
creation of new situations and selves to get around conventional
obstructions–as deceitful. This primitive view of communication is an
interpersonal handicap, and it is angst-inspiring when it fosters the
expectation that states and organizations be as authentic as people. The
expectation that ITT or IBM be surrogate humans, embracing the individual
in the warm arms of common ground is both a mistake and predisposition to
anomie. Mimicking kinship and friendship is not what the conventions of
organizations and societies do best–so they inevitably seem counterfeit
and inhuman.” Willard, Charles Arthur. Liberalism and the Problem of
Knowledge: A New Rhetoric for Modern Democracy. University of Chicago
Press. 1996. p. 16.
Examples
Statement of Point
Interlocking both primary societies offers an expanded paradigm of communication that is not just the
basically assaultive shoving of messages but is also the larger frame of
actually evolving contexts (local portions of the lifescape), the movement
and growth of various societies. We can huff and puff with words/signs and
information in the conceptscape’s pipelines of messages but actual
relations will evolve as they will. The two “societies” are in interplay;
to forget actual, rich contexts is to court ideological bashing and
withdrawal while to forget words/signs and message content of the
conceptscape is to remain babbling. If we meet and depart in communicative
encounters that presume diverse and incompletely knowable personal
societies, then there cannot be the “miscommunication” of the conceptscape
alone’s missed equivalences; there will always be personal societies’
partially melded successes. In this view communication is the same as
action where a rupture from the complex moves into the singulars of the
conceptscape’s constructions. The difference to action is that
communication’s action is on the semantic web itself.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations