Dwa aspekty komunikacji/Summary
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| Autor | |
| Tytuł | Dwa aspekty komunikacji |
| Rozdział | Two aspects of communication. Foundations of Communication history |
| Wydawca | Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM |
| Data wyd. | 2015 |
| Miejsce wyd. | Poznań |
| Źródło | E-book na Commons |
| Inne | Cały tekst |
| Indeks stron | |
In this book, I demonstrate the conditions under which we can examine the past communication phenomena. Therefore, it consists of considerations within the scope of the methodology of humanities and philosophy of communication. This means that the subject of my research is both communication itself as well as how it is analysed. I wrote about two aspects of “the same” communication, i.e., about the media and about our collective representations. So, I describe how it is possible to write the history of ways of thinking about communication. My analysis results in a catalogue of assumptions, i.e. philosophical conditions for communication history.
Every author must answer the question who the recipient of his works is, and who the potential Reader is. In my opinion, this book will be of interest not only to philosophers but also to all communication and culture theorists and historians who acknowledge that the philosopher might have something interesting to say about how to study past social phenomena.
I would also like to emphasize that although this work is on the history of communication, it is not on the history of the media. Therefore, I do not discuss how we can examine the communication technologies, from smoke signals, through radio, television, to the Internet. I am interested in something else. Namely, how we can examine our ways of “communicating about communication” and what the reason for the changes in these ways of thinking is.
The premise underlying my considerations is the historicity of communication itself. When writing this book, I have been referring to the current ongoing debate on the reflexive historicising of communication. So, in this work I demonstrate which assumptions must be accepted in order to claim that the communicative activities and practices have a historical dimension.
The communication and the media give rise to a multitude of scientific papers, guides, essays and press releases. Many universities conduct programmes in communication, journalism, media studies. It would seem, therefore, that reflection on the phenomena of communication has already reached full bloom. However, when we analyse these publications and curricula, it may be concluded that many authors have forgotten (or even fail to see) that the main means of communication is a conversation between two people, not the activities of big media industries (basically not even present before the twentieth century). It is we who, by communicating, create the foundation of our cultural communicative society. Of course, we use a variety of tools for this purpose (which we do call the media), but our communication is not restricted to them. In everyday conversation, we usually do not think about what we actually do when we utter the successive words, answering questions. Our conversations in this regard are simply carried out in a habitual manner. However, these habits, rituals (e.g. extending the right hand when greeting), we have learned and we apply them in our activities. Furthermore, each of us has an idea of what communication is, what we are allowed to do in a conversation with a colleague, a supervisor, or a friend. We also know whether our negotiations have been successful or have failed. How do we know that? It appears that we do not always share a common definition of “effective communication”. It might even be said that not everyone believes that communication must be effective in order to be regarded as communication at all. Such differences in the beliefs and values we associate with communication shape our ways of communicating.
We think of communication only when something starts to go wrong. If our daily conversations with colleagues at work fulfil their function (e.g. fill a coffee break time), then we do not speculate why something as “natural” to us as conversation can fill this free moments. However, if one day we cannot convince our friends to our arguments, we begin to ask ourselves: “Maybe I said something wrong? Maybe my tone was inappropriate? Maybe she did not hear me?”.
The object of the considerations undertaken in the book is communication understood as a cultural activity. I attempt a twofold task. I want to demonstrate how communication can be reflected upon in the philosophical perspective. Simultaneously, I will indicate what assumptions can be used as the basis of a methodological tool for research on the history of communication. It pertains to the philosophical perspective, within which the history of communication and its subject matter may be analysed. The structure of the tool derives its inspiration from the philosophy of communication, philosophy of culture and communicology, whereas the historical communicology itself can be understood here as the philosophically perceived communication history – a communicology or communication science sub-discipline.
The first objective of my analysis is to present the culturalist understanding of the concept of communication which recognizes communication as activity and practice in the sphere of culture. It is crucial for me to emphasize the historical nature of these social processes. The culturalist definition of communication that is presented in this work is a consequence of my creating the philosophical research perspective. In this regard, I wish to emphasize that the way how contemporary communication practices are performed and what communication is, does not imply that these practices have always been performed the same way and that communication has always been such. I assume that the way we communicate today is the result of many transformations affecting social practices. I am primarily interested in communication practices transformations which take place under the influence of the changes in the means and forms of communication and in the collective representations on communication.
Therefore, the main objective of this work is to present a tool for such a description of communication practices which allows the description of the historical dimension of the practices. That is, to emphasize that the contemporary rules and norms shaping the practices are a result of historical transformations. Thus, this book is an attempt to show the philosophical validity of the assumptions adopted here, and is intended as a justification for the possibility of constructing a culturalist research tool. The tool is used to analyse the research object of of historical communicology. The project of the culturalist approach to historical communicology is not so much meant to deliver specific research methods for media or communication studies as to rely on the delimitation of communicological knowledge.
The research perspective I accept emphasizes that communication practices in the historical approach (past communication phenomena) are a research object of the history of communication. It is a young subdiscipline, which is not just a mutation of the press or media studies, because it emerges from the primacy of communication over its means and forms (for media studies the starting point – and often its finish – is the medium itself). As a philosopher I am interested in the research object which the subdiscipline constructs with its research.
The book is divided into three parts, which are focused on considerations sequentially related to: (1) work assumptions and the culturalist definition of communication, (2) the presentation of research in the field of historical communicology and (3) the conceptual analysis of two communication aspects – in particular the metaphorical conceptualization within the aspect of the collective representations.
In the first part, entitled the Culturalist approach to communication, I demonstrate what initial assumptions are required for communication analyses on the grounds of communication philosophy. Therefore, I characterize the ideational understanding of culture, which I accepted, and the utilitarian description of the media. I also demonstrate how the collective representations on communication may be understood. Moreover, I accept the assumption about the reflexive historicising of communication, which allows me to go beyond the transmission metaphor in communication studies. In subsequent chapters of the first part, I present the definition of communication action and communication practices I believe that communication is an action, therefore, it is rational and thus requires and is subject to interpretation. At least two entities which use characters participate in it (or more accurately: two communicators’ functions are carried out). The main (but not the only one) function of communication is to allow and maintain the functioning of these entities in culture. The remaining chapters are used to present an outline of the historicised approach to communication, i.e., to demonstrate that communication does have a historical dimension.
The analyses presented in the first part concern mainly the subject matter, that is, “what” is examined in the context of historical communicology. Therefore, in the second part entitled Historical Communicology, I describe the emergence of research in the field of history of communication in the modern study of communication. The key issue in this part is the separation of the two periods of historical communicology: the implicit and the explicit one. Thus, I demonstrate that in the study of the past communication phenomena, we must face the problem of presentism, i.e., evaluating the past with the tools of contemporary theories. In the last chapter, I define two spheres of the historical communicology subject matter: (1) the media aspect, and (2) the collective representations aspect of the communication phenomena.
The last part, Collective representations and the Media, is devoted to characterising the two aspects of communication. In this section, I present the comprehensive understanding of the concept of meta-communication and analyse the basic historical metaphorical conceptualizations: the transmission metaphor and the food metaphor. Subsequently, I demonstrate that the historical philosophical treatises may be used in the analysis of the collective representations aspect of communication phenomena. By referring to John Locke’s works, I demonstrate how his “legacy” can be found in modern communication theories. The last chapter of the book consists of a collection of philosophical conditions for research within the framework of communication history. At this point – on the basis of the justification previously developed – I present the seven assumptions:
1. The assumption about the representational nature of communication.
2. The assumption about the integration of the means and the form of communication.
3. The assumption about the socio-individual dimension of communication.
4. The assumption about the regulatory role of cultural knowledge.
5. The assumption about the self-reference of research.
6. The assumption about the reflexive historicising of communication.
7. The assumption about accepting the weak version of presentism.
The indicated conditions are meta-theoretical assumptions of practising communication history. It means that these philosophical conditions designate the boundaries of communication knowledge. This way they present the research perspective with foundations for functioning, legitimize certain positions, but also indicate the limitations. The catalogue of these conditions is in fact the key research result achieved in this book. Below, a synthetic presentation of each of the conditions is provided.
Communication can be perceived as a communication action and as a communication practice. Thus, I assume that communication is primarily theorized or described by the researcher. Therefore, I emphasize that communication is “perceived to be” not that communication “is” this or that. Of course, this assumption results mainly from the constructivist attitude to humanities research, although it is connected with another key issue; namely, the assumption about the representational nature of communication deals with how the concept of communication is understood in a given community. In other words, what do the individuals participating in a given culture imagine communication to be, and what do they imagine an effective or successful practice of communication is like. In other words, with this assumption I emphasize that communication has a very important represantational dimension which I call the collective representations aspect of communication. It is shaped by cultural knowledge, rules, standards and values shaping our communication actions. At the same time, the collective representations aspect, i.e., such ways of conceptualizing communication about communication, which determine the formation of communication theory, can be indicated. To specify this meta-level, in the culturalist position I use the term meta-communication.
The collective representations aspect of communication is one of two aspects; although – as I have stated numerously – for the culturalist perspective it is the key aspect. The second aspect I call the media aspect of a given communication, although the medium is understood here as an integration of the means and the form of communication. This means that the medium is the carrier of the sign, i.e., it is a tool used by communicators during the operation of the communication. A typical example of the medium is, therefore, a voice, a telephone, a radio channel or a volume of a journal. What is important is that the means of communication is used to implement some form of communication. The form may be oral, literate, video or audiovisual. This way the form of communication can be understood as a kind of symbolization. Therefore, when I write about the medium as an integration of the means and the form I refer to the two dimensions of the medium: its materiality (means of communication) and the type of symbolization (form of communication) which also results from the materiality of the medium itself.
Each communication action gains validity, i.e., it is realized through communicators’ cultural knowledge, for it is a rational action that needs to be interpreted so that it could “occur as communication”. In other words, any communication takes place in a specific place and time, in a specific context. However, the conditions of how this action is performed are not at the individual level, but on the social one (e.g., included in the collective representations on communication). This means that we, as communicators, can perform communication actions – i.e., to recognize that someone wants to communicate with us and on this basis, for example, decide to continue this relation – due to our cultural knowledge. We use it mostly in a habitual, learned, ritual manner. This knowledge is a part of a given social practice, therefore communication is seen as an individual realization (through action) of social practice. Any such practices and actions find their intersubjective applicability in culture – which is the foundation of all cultural actions.
The role of cultural knowledge stems from, e.g. the socio-individual nature of communication phenomena. This way, our cultural knowledge – which consists of views (representations) on communication – shapes, regulates and determines the communication practices and their particular realizations. However, the cultural knowledge is always created in specific socio-historical circumstances and, therefore, the knowledge itself is subject to the them. Thus, it follows that the way of understanding and recognizing what communication “is” (or rather how it is “perceived”) undergoes historical transformations. In other words, a way of describing and defining communication is not universal. The assumption about the regulatory role of cultural knowledge with respect to communication actions and practices has also other essential consequences. It is essential that the cultural knowledge can be (re)constructed from descriptions of past communication events or formations, artefacts of communication itself. In fact, researchers analysing past communication phenomena have only enough access to do just that: naturally, we can not access past communication actions, and most often do not have any recording or descriptions of these actions (such as audio or video). Therefore, we can talk about past communication phenomena only from the perspective of the ways to perform communication actions, the ways to use the media. We can access the mental states of neither the past nor the present communicators. In the media (such as a written piece of paper) no “immanent knowledge of communication” is contained. We can only reconstruct it or construct on the basis of the established cultural knowledge. Whether it will be a reconstruction, or – stronger – a construction of historical knowledge, obviously depends on additional assumptions.
This assumption can be understood both as the foundation for a theoretical study as well as the establishment of other assumptions. It is simply a metacondition, as it determines not only the research framework of practice itself, but also sets the boundaries for the remaining assumptions and conditions. For I assume that the culturalist definition of communication is only a starting point, merely a heuristic tool serving as a guidepost. It is therefore not a real definition, although sometimes it can claim to be so. This means that I accept that during the subsequent analyses I may encounter situations which are difficult to interpret, which may put the entire theoretical construct and many of the assumptions into question. I may encounter such social actions which will destroy the logic of the above arguments. I do not want to assume that the only correct answer is: “so much the worse for the facts”. On the contrary, I assume that our (i.e., the researchers’) views on communication, as well as the reflection on communication are relative to the socio-historical conditions and, therefore, are not universal or universally applicable. Thus, when claiming that the communicators and communication theorists have a view on communication it should also be assumed that the proposed solutions are presented “only” one of many (historically variable) concepts. Therefore, the measures of “truth and falsehood”, a better suitability or adequacy, cannot be applied to such theoretical ideas. However, one can talk about the usefulness of a given approach on the basis of the humanities discourse.
The assumption about the self-reference is directly related to the assumption about the reflexive historicising of communication. It stems from the fact that such a methodological step can be understood as a self-referring historicising of the object of study. The researchers accepting this assumption assume that their communication is subject to historical changes. This in turn implies that history becomes a context for the understanding of both past and contemporary phenomena of communication. The assumptions that the self-reference and the reflexive historicising of communication imply that the researcher scrutinizes the matter as a research object submerged and growing out of a historical context, while assuming that the same applies to his research method.
The last condition is the assumption about accepting the weak version of presentism. It means that I accept the need to acquiesce to the fact that a pure historical interpretation is impossible. In other words, historical research necessarily involves applying the procedures from the scope of adaptive interpretation. The understanding of communication presented in this work is not essentialist. It means that it is impossible to indicate an “entity” which “has always been” communication but (possibly) was called otherwise. I assume, therefore, that it is not possible to escape from presentism understood as describing the past in today’s terms – it needs to be done, although it must be done carefully in order not to allow our research to drift away and become separated from the key assumptions.
I developed the catalogue of philosophical conditions for the history of communication in order to develop a foundation for further philosophical and communication studies. I assume that first, the assumptions, the accepted perspective, and the understanding of the basic concepts must be clearly presented. I can, therefore, claim that virtually all of the arguments in this book are my methodological credo. This is how I see the actions and practices of communication and I believe that they can be analysed on theoretical grounds defined this way.
