Briankle G. Chang: Deconstructing Communication. Representation, Subject, and Economics

Briankle G. Chang: Deconstructing communication. Representation, subject, and economics of exchange

Introduction

The impossibility of communication / Clearly with parallels to Peters’ book. Doubts the possibility of communication.
Communication / Communicare. Communality. Focus on sharing, social intercourse, mutual exchange.
> A romantic view on communication. Symptomatic for communication theory.
”Ideology of the communicative” / Conceptualization of communication as transcendence of difference is naïve. Reflects an implicit subjectivist thesis.
> Advocates an inverted image of communication as the occurrence of Babel-like.
DECONSTRUCTION / Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction must execute two related operations: mimesis and castration.
Always an asymmetry between explicit statement and its implicit ”gesture”
Presupposes two things /

The host text mut be (or thought to be) coherent, unified and meaningful.
The text, despite its own claim, is not coherent and unified.

This non-correspondece opens the text to deconstruction.
Desire for reason, logos /

For presence and the consequent constructions of philosophical hierarchies based on transparency, identity and totality. Desire for primitive meaning
Contrary desire coming from the far side of reason. Desire for deconstruction. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida. Antimetaphysical desire.
> An economy of nonfinality and undecidability.

First part of book / Traces the formation of the transcentental economy.
This modern theorizing of communication bears on Husserlian phenomenology: ”radical Cartesianism” that articulates this desire. Traces the formation of the transcendental-hermeneutic foundation of modern communication theories.
The second part of the book / Seeks to undermine the transcendental-hermeneutic communication theories. Show how and why communication theories fail.
Solution? / A vision of the future enabled by post-phenomenological thinking, especially deconstructivism.

Part 1: The transcendental economy

1. Phenomenology and after

Beginning anew / Symptomatic for Plato, for Descartes and finally for philosophy generally: turning away from tradition in order to inagurate a new beginning.
Descartes’s Meditations / The discovery of the one indubitable fact: cogito. An achoring point for all future knowledge. The essence of human being as dependent of that person. The absolute certainty of the ego, the distinctive subjecctum.
Cogito > new metaphysics / A new relation between thinking and being. A rationalized philosophy. The age of reason.
Crisis / Recurring because of the philosophical need to do everything all over again.
CRISIS AND BEYOND: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL WAY
Husserl’s phenomenology
- the objective of transcendental phenomenology / Wishes to reconstruct philosophy as a rigorous, precise science in a time of crises-ridden European philosophical scene. Rearticulating a First Philosophy (as the beginning of all sciences).
Being for consciousness / Unfolds in the form of a science of transcendental subjectivity. “Transcendental phenomenology is concerned with the “region” of absolute beings, “since everything we can in general speak of as ‘being’ (Seiendem) is being (Sein) for sconsciousness and must permit the justification for its beings posited as being to the exhibited consciousness.” (7)
Move beyond positivism / Transcendental phenomenology as a truly universal ontology with a comprehensive analysis of beings and things.
Where does phenomenology begin? / From naïve cognition of reality to the reality of congnition.
Phenomenology begins by performing reduction: by abstracting whatever is reducible in experience. I.e. whatever is transcendent to consciousness.
The intentionality of consciousness / Understood in strict relation to consciousness.
Intentionality: The intentionality of consciousness. Consciousness as invariably a consciousness of… Consciousness inescapably transcends itself toward the world, something other than itself.
Transcendence and consciousness / Not every instance of being is mind-dependent. Phenomena that are outwardly beyond conscious processes. Instances of in-itself that hold their opacity in opposition to any intending act. Instances of being that are transcendent to the immanent stream of consciousness. Resist any arbitrary appropriation by the reductive consciousness.
Immanence / The intending consciousness – by its nature bipolar and reflexive. Immanence as the totality of reflexive mental processes: constructing the intellectual constellation of recursively intended objects of consciousness in and by consciousness itself.
Don’t get it yet? / “’Immanence’ refers to consciousness’s own interior plenitude, while ‘transcendence’ indicates the possibility of exteriority as the very ‘irreducibility of what is meant to the particular act or acts in which it is meant’” (9).
PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION: FROM PHENOMENON TO EIDOS
Reduction in two steps / First step is to let objects the chance to show themselves as they truly are. Descriptive phase, a means to an end.
“Critical” as in moving beyond mere assumptions.
Approaching objects as nomeas / f.ex. approaching a tree as a noema (what is meant by object, phenomena). From a tree in nature to an object in consciousness. “reduction purifies the perceptual object by neutralizing the prejudgments that under normal practical circumstances would consume it” (10). Brings us closer to the reality of the object.
Step two: Eidetic reduction / Uncovering the essence of the object. An eidetic analyses of what the descriptive step discovers.
> into a kind of essentialism.
Essence as the structure that governs a range of actual and possible objects. What makes objects objects of the same type.
Imagination necessary / Free variation in fantasy through three steps: exemplary intuition, imaginative repetition, synthesis.
Towards an overreaching act of identification, an act of synthetic abstraction. Identifying the core, the indisputable identitical.
A radical phenomenology / Beyond its Cartesian point of departure. Evolves into a theory of essence (in relation to essentialism?). “I think” tells only half the story.
Exceeds Descartes’s doubt, and revives the Platonic illumination of the true being of things.
PHENOMENOLOGY AS TRANSCENDENTAL EGOLOGY
The primacy of the ego / As a consequence of the reduction process. A self-identical ego as a functinoal center of the transcendent. World perceived as dependent on ego. Being for me. The ego becomes a singular constitutive agent of the world.
The pure ego / Once the reduction has been performed thoroughly. The reductive process must be continued up to the transcendental ego – the only irreducible foundation.
> transcendental ego
Solipsism? / insofar as it constitutes itself while motivating objective or transcendent beings through its own intentional life.
Functions as the kern central from which the world stems.
From radical empirism to an idealism of the ego. A subjectivist idealist position.
I AND OTHERS: THE PROBLEM OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Phenomenonology egologized / The total triumph of interiority over exteriority and of the immanent over the transcendent.
Two Husserlian phenomenologies / -A philosophy of “constitution”, of the productoin of meaning and the constituted objects.
-A philosophy of givenness, of intuitive contact, the in-person presence of the things themselves
This dual incompatible demand / > phenomenological reduction forced to play two different inconcruent roles:

As a descriptive endeavor, phenomenology is empirical
A post-Cartesian theory of subject that modernizes the moment of certainty.

Towards transcendental solipsism / How can the otherness of other be justified? The problem other egos and other subjects, of the plurality of subjects and the reality of the social.
The problem of intersubjectivity / Other egos are intentional subjects too.
An intrinsic difficulty of the transcendental problematic betrayed in an asymmetry or nonreciprocity between the I and others.
Asymmetry and lack of reciprocity / How to account for what is other than I.
“Sphere of my ownness” / The initial reduction: the reduction to sphere of ownness. A transference from me to others > Recognized as something “alien”, an alter ego. Enables the other ego to take shape in a mirro image of me. First constitute a sense ego, the transport the sense “alter ego” to the other.
* But how move from the sense “alter ego” to the other as a genuine and legitimate ego-subject.
Analogical apprehension / The other has to be apprehended through the experience ego has of itself.
We perceive the other by the appearance of the other’s body. Inferential movement, but we do not disclose its interiority.
Pairing / > passive genesis (origin): one understands something new by analogy with something familiar. Pairing association.
From paired body to another ego-subject / The other body must be verified.
Two-fold verification:
-bodily expressions as indicative signs. (Dis) confirmation of what the other body expresses
-These indicative signs must exhibit “a [continuous] unitary transcending experience”. The anthropological principle of concordant behaviour.
Alters the status of the paired being, elevating it into an intentional being, an ego-monad.
Overcoming solipsism? / Chang means not.
Egology + intersubjective phenomenology: intermonadic community and forms of social communalization, each possessing the character of personalities of a higher order. Chang however does not mean the transfer from egological phenomenology to intersubjective phenomenology is that smooth.
Two problems /

The plausibility of analogizing apprehension: can one attribute equal validity to presentation and appresentation, “so that (…) one can move from what is given originally and immediately (presented) to what originally lies outside the sphere of ownness (appresented)” (26).
analogizing apprehension depend on a minimal level of similarity between the two bodies being paired. However, I do not find Chang’s argument very convincing at this point.

Perception defined by a relation of visibility in the living presence; apperception claims knowledge beyond perceptual visibility.
Husserl’s failure / The other ego has to be more than a sense, more than a being-for-me. Still in the final analysis the other is no more than a moment in the constitutive productivity of the ego. It is still the I who gives sense to the that other ego. Essentially an asymmetrical I-other relationship.
The problem of solipsism has not been dissolved.
PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHICAL MODERNISM
The sovereignity of the subject / The ego constitutes the world and the truth, it constitutes everything but itself.
No remaining reality / No residual reality. The transcendental subject reigns without challenge.
Philosophical modernism / The sovereign subject representes the break with the classic tradition.

2 / Communication before deconstruction

Husserl’s impact / Husserl’s vission of a First Philosophy has been prominent within the twentieth-century theoretical thinking.
Phenomenological elements into the humanities and the social sciences.
Phenomenologically inspired ideas and concepts / Describe, the everyday life-world, insider’s point of view, reduction, presence, transcendence, the subject, life-world, temporality, transcendental consciousness, deconstruction.
Communication studies / Emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s? Influences from phenomenology are visible.
Chapter outline /

How this phenomenological consciousness makes possible the clear articulation of a subject-based problematic.
How and why these theories necessarily fail to answer the question of mediation <-- idealist vision of the subject

A NOTE ON THE PROBLEMATIC
Althusser: the problematic / Looking beneath theories to uncover their foundation. Performing a “symptomatic reading” the available theories --> reconstruct the system behind the words.
Epistemological field / Constitutes “a problematic”. Functions as the latent thought-structure enabling the production of theories.
The prolematic gives order to the pretheoretical chaos and determines what counts as a legitimate scientific object.
THE QUESTION THEN…: COMMUNICATION AND THE COMMUNICATIVE SUBJECT
The central challenge / How is individuality transcended? How is sharing meaning/understanding achieved? Concerns questioning what is usually taken for granted.
Ricoeur: (…) Because [it]… appears as a way of transcending or overcoming the fundamental solitude of each human being.” (39).
Central mystery / Communication seems to be a necessary fact. Yet communication appears to be enigmatic, a person’s individuality as a difference that sets a person apart from all others. Can both be possible? The possibility of transcending individuality.
Presuppes a conception of subjectivity as essentially solitary / In short noncommunication. Overcoming the dilemma of understanding the individual, the egocentric subject as bot monadlike and coexisting.
Modernized transcendentalism / Inagurated by Husserl’s transcendental subject. This constitutes the background for thematizing the solitary subject of communication. Both existing with and necessarily distanced from other subject and the social world.
COMMUNICATION AS MEDIATION: THE POSTAL PRINCIPLE
The solitary subject / The primitive of the problematic of communication.
Because:

It is a necessary constituent of the problematic.
The nature of the solitary subject is determined before its participation in the problematic. Before the theory.

Problem of mediation / The challenge of communication translated into a challenge of privacy. The problem of communication rewritten as a problem of mediaton. How can solitary subjects share understandings. Closing the gap between the islandlike monads.
Communication represents the embodiment of an interplay between self and other.
From individual to commonality / The telos of communication as a dialectical becoming. The I becomes a member of the We.
Communication as transmission / The delivery of messages. The specific adressing according to receiver. Communicatio as delivery.
The postal principle / - the more general principle governing the dialectic of mediation. The postal principle as the medium of communication rather than the reverse. The presupposed identity of both the addresser and the addressee, and the identity of the message.
Why postal principle / Unifies the concepts of communication, exchange, and mediation under one rule – its own rationality as universal mediation. This postal ideology explains why the concept of communication so easily translates into the concept of mediation. Really?
Potential problems with Chang / It seems to me that Chang works with at least two somewhat dubious premisses: that communication effortlessly translates into mediation; and that in creating and sending messages, receiving is already inscribed in the sending, that the addressee must be known prior to the sending.
METAPHORS AT LARGE IN COMMUNICATION
Metaphors to explain communication / Metaphors easily step over their function and stand in place of the concept they are supposed to illustrate. A trespassing of the abstrac by the concrete, a reversal of the signifier and the signified.
The danger of overreliance of metaphors / Raises questions regarding the validity of explanatory discourses in which the usurpation takes place. Are communication theories nothing but postal constructs?
Derrida on metaphors in philosophy / The founding concepts of philosophy are metaphorical and philosophy is as such not rational altough appearing to be. A heliotropic system of metaphors. Philosophy is necessarily a culture-specific tropology. Has become powerlessto control the tropology that has empowered it.
Towards “hermeneutics of suspicion” towards the origin of communication theory / Sceptisism toward the foundatio of communication theory inspired by Derrida’ scepticism.
Theories of communication, relying on metaphors, as not different from fictional artifacts?
REREADING THE PROBLEMATIC OF COMMUNICATION
Resisit parrotry when rereading / Staying within the problematic of communication, yet remaining indifferent to its suggestions.
How? / How is the problematic of communication as an active structure of determination itself determined?
How does the postal government of communication itself display the same kind of metaphorical displacement that is displayed in the postal construction of communication?
Dialogical nature / “I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view” (56). Verbal (only?) communication requires a minimal level of reciprocity. Perspective taking. Parallels to G. H. Mead (and hence symbolic interactionism).
Language/code / Communication, communality, co-operation. Language makes this possible in the first place. More precisly the code. Establishes the possibility of commonality in a world of differences and the basis for co-ordination.
Code/intersubjectivity / The code is essentially intersubjective. Intersubjectivity as the key term in explaining how individuality is transcended.
Codes translates what is subjective into something objective or accessible.
Intersubjectivity thus the mediating term / Answers the question of communication: how individuality is transcended. The conflict between the natural certainty (we communicate) and the reflective puzzle (solipsism).
IGNOTUM PER IGNOTIUS; OR, THEORETICAL VENTRILOQUISM
First: definition / Explaining the unknown by means of the more unknown.
The problematic of communication / Fundamentally at triadic structure of subject, mediation, intersubjectivity. Chained together by the postal principle.
The problem of the concept of intersubjectivity / Generated from within the problematic in response to the problematic’s initial move of postulating a solitary subject. This way the concept and meaning of intersubjectivity blocks any further exploration of the relation between privacy and mediation without really explaining anything.
“The logic of “deferral” (suspension) / Parallel to the concepts of “social role” and “interaction” in sociology. Tautologically defined: one is defined or clarified in relation to the other. Radically compromises the explanatory utility of the concepts.
The same can be said about the postal play taking place between mediation and intersubjectivity in communication theories.
Trades away the explanatory integrity /

Intersubjectivity functions as a transcendental signifier. It accounts for mediation but is itself unaccounted for.
As a signifier immune to reflexive critique, intersubjectivity designates the problematic’s own blind spot.

The theoretical challenge of solipsism is silenced.
Tautologically understood / Communication and intersubjectivity can only be tautologically understood. The lack of a terminal referent whose meaning does not presuppose prior understanding of the terms within the problematic.

3 / The inaugural relation: toward an ontology of communication

DeMan: no natural unrhetorical language / Reality constituted as such by linguistic signs according to their own reason. Establishes the world as present.
Rhetorical turn / Rhetoric as epistemic and ontological.
Communication theories / Captives of their metaphors, their rhetoric.
How then can theorizing about communication find a way out of the metaphorical mess and still respond to the initial existential eigma that brings that theorizing into being (the fact of communication taking place + solipsism).
READING THE CIRCLE AND THE HERMENEUTIC RETURN
Chang’s aim / Conduct a Heideggerian critique of the “textual prehistory” of communication theories. An archeological reading of the movement between the two signifiers communication and intersubjectivity to uncover the staging of elements that supports the double play of the metaphorical couple of mediation and intersubjectivity.
--> a nontranscendental regrounding of communication theories.
YOU MUST TAKE FOR GRANTED THE TAKEN-FOR-GRANTED
Husserl’s post-Cartesian self / Not a simple or innocent point of departure although Husserl seems to believe so. Identity “actualizes itself as a grasping of itself by the unity that I am in myself” (Nancy in Chang: 74). “Cogito” presupposes a self-constituted ego.