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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Love and Communication is an intriguing philosophical and religious inquiry into the meaning of "talk" - and ultimately the meaning of "being human." Taking an historical approach, Paddy Scannell argues that the fundamental media of communication are (and always have been) talk and writing. Far from being made redundant by twentieth-century new media (radio and television), these old media laid the foundation for today's technologies (AI and algorithms, for instance). Emphasizing these linkages, Scannell makes the case for recognizing what a religious sensibility might reveal about these technologies and the fundamental differences between a humanmade world and a world that is beyond our grasp. Drawing on the pioneering work of John Durham Peters, the book proposes that communication and love go together, which can be understood in two ways: as a human accomplishment, or a divine gift. Ultimately, the essential conundrum of today is highlighted: do we wish to remain in a human> This book draws on a lifetime of academic work and the author's personal experience. It will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication, who will welcome this highly original and searching examination of love as communication.
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Seitenzahl: 171
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Part I Talk and Communication, Writing and Language
1 The Still Face Experiment
2 Talk and Writing
3 The Wonder of the World
Part II Miracles
4 Heidegger’s Teacup
5 Miracles
6 Love and Communication
Coda
References
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Coda
References
End User License Agreement
Pages
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Love and Communication
Paddy Scannell
polity
Copyright © Paddy Scannell 2021
The right of Paddy Scannell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4754-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scannell, Paddy, author.Title: Love and communication / Paddy Scannell.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “An intriguing philosophical inquiry into the connection between communication, religion and love”--Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020055611 (print) | LCCN 2020055612 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509547524 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509547531 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509547548 (epub) | ISBN 9781509549207 (pdf)Subjects: LCSH: Communication--Philosophy. | Communication--Social aspects. | Communication--Religious aspects. | Love.Classification: LCC P91 .S296 2021 (print) | LCC P91 (ebook) | DDC 302.201--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055611LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055612
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Introduction
This is the final volume in a trilogy that I planned years ago, as I worked out the books I wanted to write. And I should say (it seemed obvious then, and I did not need to mention it) that I meant academic books about the field I worked in: communication or media studies. The first, Media and Communication (Scannell 2020 [2007]) was a textbook pitched at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, in which I laid out the academic development of the field itself in the last century, in North America, the United Kingdom and (partially) Europe. I followed it with Television and the Meaning of “Live” (2014), written for colleagues as an historically informed theoretical account of live television. Subsequently, as time and I were getting on a bit, I retired from academic life and began to think about the final book I proposed, back in 2007, in the preface to the first book. Each stands on its own legs, and is independent of the others. But if you were to read them all (I’m not saying you should), you would see there is a continuum to them. Love and Communication was the title I came up with for this final volume long before I ever got round to writing it. I knew that I wanted to write about this at least twenty years ago, but when I eventually started work on it, both the world and I had changed, and I found myself writing something rather different from what I first intended. There is a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes and others – Karl Ove Knausgaard (2004) for instance, point out – and I instinctively felt that love and communication were matters best left until my academic career was over.
I
Being an academic was something that, at the time, I took entirely for granted, but as I got older, I felt an increasing tension between my academic self (me the professor) and my human self (the me-that-I-am, the nonacademic self, a usual person like everyone else). And this tension between my institutional and noninstitutional self runs right through this book. I took the title from a longish review essay, “Love and communication,” that I wrote in 2005 about Speaking into the Air by John Durham Peters (1999). This was and is a book I deeply admire, and especially because it unashamedly brought religious thought into the usual thinking of the academic field I worked in. At that time, it was preoccupied with the politics of communication, the media as cultures of power, and so on. Peters’s book was different. It was focused on religious and philosophical thought in relation to communication, and particularly communication as love, and divine and human versions of it: the difference, as he puts it, between agape and eros. He takes Jesus and Socrates as two paradigm figures who express this difference – Jesus and divine love, Socrates and human love. Their distinctive forms of communication capture the difference between agape and eros.
Socrates to this day is known as a talker, whose mode of philosophizing was dialogue. He famously preferred speech over writing, as Plato (who wrote his dialogue) made clear in what is known as the Phaedrus. As a communicative method it is quite distinct from that of Jesus, whose manner of speaking was exemplified in the parable of the sower. It was a parable about parables, Jesus’s own justification of his method as a communicator. In this story (as written down by his followers), Jesus speaks to a multitude (a mass of people) by the lake of Galilee. Two different approaches to communication. Socrates goes for talk between two people in each other’s presence (the young Phaedrus, and himself) – talk as dialogue. Jesus speaks as one to many – talk as teaching – and it is a one-way, not a two-way process. These two modes of communication are distinguished as insemination (Socrates) and dissemination (Jesus). We, I supposed, naturally prefer two-way over one-way communication. It seems more personal, more genuine, and authentic than one-to-many discourse. But Peters prefers the latter: dissemination over insemination. I had never thought of it this way, but it is surely right. One-way communication is, by definition, nonreciprocal. And in this sense, it is like agape, the love of God, who “gives” without any expectation of thanks and recognition. This for me was a trope for public service broadcasting. The BBC, whose beginnings I had studied in detail, was exemplary (Scannell and Cardiff 1991). In Britain, radio and television were and remain broadcasting institutions. It is a one-to-many communicative system, in which the apparatus “speaks” and multitudes listen and watch. They do not engage in argument. They are not obliged to take heed. The indiscriminate scatter of broadcasting, as in the sowing of seed in the parable, goes everywhere. It is for anyone and everyone, not just some. Insemination (the planting of seed in another) is for the chosen ones, but not radio or television, who began the process of full, democratic, communicative inclusion.
Broadcast radio and television defined (communicatively speaking) the twentieth century and, not by coincidence, their development ran in parallel with the full emergence of a certain version of politics (liberal democracy). This inclusiveness (all in, no one left outside the tent) is the basis of broadcasting. And like the love of God, it is one-way or one-to-many, and nonreciprocal. In what follows, I hold to Peters’s line that there are two kinds of love, divine and human, agape and eros. And each is a different kind of communication. They come together in the end, but the start of the journey lies elsewhere. It reminds me of the old joke about the Englishman lost in the back of beyond in Ireland, trying to find his way to Dublin. He asks a local for help. There is a pause, while the local thinks it over before saying, finally, “Well I wouldn’t start from here.” The local was right, but you have to start from somewhere, and I must clear up some motifs that run through what follows before finally reaching my Dublin. I kick off with human and nonhuman interaction, followed by speech and writing. My goal is the love of God, and everything that follows is working toward this.
II
God, whoever or whatever that may be, is not some kind of Übermensch or super human. The everlasting virtue of this placeholder word is that it prevents me from falling into human hubris. Man is just not (even allowing for its sexist implications) the measure of all things. “God” is the placeholder for a power that far surpasses my limited, fallible, human, understanding. For purely human reasons, I will think of Him as some kind of “almighty father,” because I cannot imagine any other way of thinking about Him and His world. But put this way, it draws attention to two quite distinct worlds: the divine and the human. With this in mind, I follow the Genesis narrative in which our first parents were cast out of the Edenic garden where they were naked and unashamed, and lived directly in the presence of God, and spoke with Him. Their expulsion from God’s presence was, as the story goes, because Eve and Adam “were tempted” by the fruit of the tree of knowledge. For the sake of knowledge, they were willing to lose paradise, or heavenly bliss. I don’t mean this literally, but neither do I mean it metaphorically. I simply take it as expressing essential human truth. Whether it is fact or fiction is, for me, neither here nor there. Leaving Eden was a deliberate choice by our “first parents” to live in a human world, rather than in God’s. It was the original sin, in which human beings began to take responsibility for the world, rather than leaving it to God. What followed from this, over many, many centuries, was the evolution into history of the totally human world in which we live today. And this is the point of the distinction. Today’s world (and we take it utterly for granted) was made by human beings, for exclusive human use. God was thought of once as the Creator of all life, of the living world in all its parts, including us. But now, we who live in our human world have no time for the rest of the living world and its Creator. We no longer share it with other nonhuman living creatures. We think of this “external” world as Nature, and it belongs to the natural sciences, if it belongs to us at all. We talk of the external world as external to inner mental life, but really the external world belongs to God and His creation. Leaving that world for our own was the original sin.
III
These two worlds, the human and the divine, are quite simply separate, and the Genesis story is an ancient tale of how this separation began. And this original sin (the human desire for knowledge) was realized in the original technology of writing. Again, I’m not saying it was the original technology. (Perhaps that was Adam and Eve’s fig leaf girdles.) But the truth is that our world is wholly underpinned by writing, a very old technology whose origins are lost in time, like other ancient, yet still living, technologies – the production of bread, beer, and wine for instance. By writing, I mean the alphabetic system, but not just that. There are two written “languages”: that of literacy and that of numeracy. Writing, with letters or numerals, has a long history to it. But it is clearly a human invention in all its stages, from the emergence of written inscription long ago, to the invention of the printing press, and the breakthrough into modern times and today’s world. I do not mean to privilege alphabetic script (there are a number of them; this is Roman) over other systems of inscription, Chinese for instance.
These two systems of inscription (letter and number) developed separately, but together. We think of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as giants of philosophy because their works are still alive and well today, thanks to having been somehow salvaged, down through the centuries, by writing. And we tend to forget about Archimedes, Euclid, and Pythagoras whose work was also saved. Literacy has until today been the dominant system of inscription. Now, as the internet is taking over our world, numeracy is becoming dominant. Binary digitalization underpins the computer whose analogue interface I use. Writing divided the world into literates and illiterates, minorities and majorities. To be “unable” to read and write became a social stigma, and literacy became the highway out of this state; men of humble origin, like Thomas Cromwell, became powerful because they had literate skills. But today this has changed, and numeracy rather than literacy is the greasy pole to power and wealth. To be a functioning member of today’s world, you need to be numerate because binary language underpins the internet, the horizon of the online world, and its various mediated forms of connectivity. Algorithms rule, ok.
I have had to rethink the relationship between speech and writing (Scannell 2019), and this for a number of reasons, but basically because writing comes before speech, and only with writing does language appear as such. I am not saying that writing comes before language. It comes before speech, which depends on language (but not completely or necessarily, and certainly not in the first place). If learning to talk is the humanway of learning to communicate, we should remember that species other than our own communicate with each other perfectly well, to the best of our knowledge, and some even communicate with us, and we respond to their communicative implicatures. (When the cat rubs itself against my legs and makes purring noises, I put some cat food out.) But without writing, language is not apparent. Writing made it visible, available, analyzable. We all know that writing came after speech. Can you imagine language without writing? I can’t, and I have tried. The very ideas of “oral culture” or “oral poetry,” for instance, are literate back-projections (McLuhan’s rear-view mirror) that came retrospectively with writing-as-printing.
Jacques Derrida argued, in Grammatology (1976), that writing came before language. As he put it (at some considerable length) it appeared paradoxical. But it isn’t really. It is, for me at least, the expression of a fundamental truth. My dictionary defines grammatology thus: “The worship of letters; spec[ifically] rigid adherence to the letter of Scripture.” Religions of the book are grammatologies, and Marshall McLuhan is a grammatologist, whose Gutenberg Galaxy (2011 [1962]) is a grammatology of the Roman alphabet. Instead of writing before language, try writing before speech. The origins of language are connected with child development, ab ovo. A child must learn its language, otherwise it will remain dumb. At present, language acquisition is mainly studied in the hinterlands of medicine (psychology, psychiatry, child development), where it is taken as read that language acquisition is passed down from mother to child. Unless a baby is taught by an adult, it will not learn to speak the language of its parents, Muttersprache, the language of the speech community into which any child is born. Without this, the usual child will remain speechless, or what some call feral (see the truly tragic story of Genie Wiley on Wikipedia). Linguists are prone to believe that every baby has an inbuilt LAD, or language acquisition device. I’m not sure I’d go along with this. I’d rather say we all have an inbuilt CAD, or communication acquisition device, and LAD is part of CAD. The point I’m struggling toward is the claim that speech, or preferably talk, is a universal thing that any child, anywhere, anytime must learn if it is to become human. And this is not primarily a linguistic process, although as the usual child acquires its Muttersprache, language (as talk) becomes increasingly important.
Any neonate, or proto-human, is inhuman. It is a tiny bundle of immediate needs that must be met (at least usual adults think so) by those who are its carers. It is learning stuff from day one. But what is it learning, if not how eventually to become a usual adult,1 like everyone else? Learning this is not just learning a Muttersprache, their native language. We do not usually talk about learning to speak, though a child’s first words are a great event. We say she or he is learning to talk. Talk is a term that I am overfamiliar with. I have been working on it for years, but you can work on something for a long time and still not understand what in fact you’re doing. I have only recently come to see that what really got me going all the while was not media and communication in the first place, but talk. By now I have something of a bee in my bonnet about it. Talk is not an academic thing, and for a long time it was for me simply a taken-for-granted aspect of other things – radio, television, etc. (I edited a book called Broadcast Talk back in 1991). I now see talk as an interesting thing in itself, and I want to say that learning to talk is learning to be human, and acquiring a Muttersprache in the process is merely one aspect of it. Learning to be human is not a “language thing.” Learning to talk > learning one’s Muttersprache > learning to communicate > learning to be human. And the key point is that communication and language (both being innate and learned) are not the same. As we will see in the next chapter, the Still Face Experiment shows how a little child becomes a fluent communicator before she becomes a fluent speaker of Muttersprache.
IV
History and writing go together. One of the reviewers of the manuscript of this book wrote that “writing is a technological achievement, while talk is a human achievement.” This is quite beautifully put, and I wish I had thought of it myself. I live in the exclusively human world, and hence I think of myself as a member of historical humanity, and God is not part of it. History began with writing, and this technology was invented by human beings. It made language available. It made it historical. In learning to talk, a child is not learning to write. That is what school is for; a later thing, where we learn our ABC. The skills of literacy have, for quite a while, been the basic infrastructure of the lengthy formal process of education. Mothers, or first carers, are mostly not professional teachers, and learning to talk is an informal process. Why would we let someone without any special training teach the speechless infant to talk? Because, as I see it, the mother is an expert in one crucial way: she is a usual adult and, as such, a usual human being. She is teaching her child not language, but how to communicate with adult others like herself. Learning to talk is a quite extraordinary skill, and it is ultimately about learning to connect with others.
