Networks and the Philosophy of Noise (original) (raw)
Related papers
The transmission of information: an “awful deformation” of what communication really is
It is easy to think of communication as being primarily to do with the transmission of information, with the communication of facts, of intelligence, of things people want to know about – a view given scientific expression long ago by Shannon and Weaver (1949). The taken-for-granted background to this view, being the Cartesian assumptions of a mechanical world of separate, identifiable, inter-acting entities in motion according to discoverable laws. Everything changes, however, once we switch to a view of communication as occurring within a ceaseless, indivisible flow of entwined strands of spontaneously responsive, expressive, living, bodily activity – a view adopted by all those who see communication as a dialogic activity (e.g. Bakhtin, 1981, 1986; Gadamer, 1975, 2000; Wittgenstein, 1953, 1980; along with many others). Straightaway we find, instead of facing simply one kind of difficulty in life – that of solving problems – we face a second, much more basic difficulty – that of gaining orientation, of arriving at a sense of what the situation is that we find ourselves in, prior to our attempts to act well within it. While the facts of the matter are still of importance to us, what is of even greater importance is our sensing of the relations between the possibilities for action it makes available to us and what, ethically, we feel we must do within it if we are to be the kind of person we feel we want to be. What is special about our living activities in these situations, is that they work in terms of the ways in which our past experiences give rise, within us, to an anticipatory sense of our possible next steps – ethical and political issues then enter into this process as we try to resolve on a line of action, on an expression of our feelings/sensings that “does justice” to the uniquely detailed situation we currently occupy. While some communications can change us simply in our knowledge, others can change us in our very ways of being in the world, in who we are – it is the nature of these latter which will be central to my presentation at the conference.
The organizing property of communication
What is an organization? What are the building blocks that ultimately constitute this social form, so pervasive in our daily life? Like Augustine facing the problem of time, we all know what an organization is, but we seem unable to explain it. This book brings an original answer by mobilizing concepts traditionally reserved to linguistics, analytical philosophy, and semiotics. Based on Algirdas Julien Greimas’ semio-narrative model of action and Jacques Derrida’s concept of écriture, a reconceptualization of speech act theory is proposed in which communication is treated as an act of delegation where human and nonhuman agents are mobilized (texts, machines, employees, architectural elements, managers, etc.). Perfectly congruent with the last development of the sociology of translation developed by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, this perspective illustrates the organizing property of communication through a process called ‘interactoriality’. Jacques Lacan used to say that the unconscious is structured like a language. This book shows that a social organization is structured like a narrative.
Politiques de communication, 2022
For its tenth anniversary, the French academic journal Politiques de communication is organizing an international colloquium whose ambition is to propose an overall reflection on "the grip of communication" in the structuring of contemporary social spaces. The "grip of communication" is not a new question for social science research. Its ideological, political, economic, technical and organizational dimensions have been explored. In a cumulative perspective, the first ambition of this colloquium is to propose an assessment of the works on the evolution of social practices and representations of communication and their organizational implications. It also proposes to question the social relations of domination - of gender, class, "race", generation - of which communication is a tool and sometimes a revealer. In what proportions and according to what variable modalities is this "grip" of communication exercised (or felt), according to the specific logics of a given social space? Is the professionalization of communication a form of rationalization of the work of legitimization or of symbolic domination? Does the extension of the practices of communication take part of a growing subordination to economic and political interests? Is it a resource monopolized by a few institutions or people with better resources? On the contrary, is it also observed - and with what ambivalences - in the militant, scientific or artistic practices of contestation of the social order? The need to capitalize on the numerous contributions of the social sciences is in line with the desire of the journal Politiques de communication to open up new avenues for research. These new ways are established by the exploration of objects having escaped until now the investigations of the research, but they can also be drawn in the course of a renewed work of problematization and distancing that highlight the induced effects of communication in social universes already well studied. Researchers from different social science disciplines are invited to participate in this collective critical enterprise. The expected proposals should, on the one hand, present an explicit construction of the object around this "grip of communication", and on the other hand, mobilize and rely on rigorously constructed empirical data in order to avoid the risk of speculative denunciation. Proposals for papers should be sent before June 15, 2022 to the following address: colloque.emprise.communication@gmail.com Short (about 450 words), they should present their object of study, the theoretical framework, the problematic and the empirical elements. They will be careful to explain the critical dimension of the approach and indicate what they wish to show/demonstrate. Papers can be submitted in French and English The authors whose proposals are selected will participate in the colloquium and, at the same time, will submit a written version of their paper, which will be reviewed for publication in the anniversary issue of the journal. The proposals will be selected by the editorial board of the journal Politiques de communication. The committee will make its decision by July 15, 2022. For the publication of a special anniversary issue of the journal, papers should be written in a format that corresponds to the journal's format and sent to the conference organizing team by November 15, 2022.
By claiming a general graphematic structure of every communication, Derrida builds a critique to traditional notions of unified or stable meaning attacking the paradigm that sees in communication a phonocentric and self-sufficient attempt to seize and transfer meaning in an adequately, clear and understandable way from one point to the other. Anything functioning as means of communication must possess, in its iterability, the structure of writing. Indeed, communication is a kind of writing. In consequence, it may be examined according to the central notions of Différance, Supplement or Dissemination. The graphematic turn, in effect, opens the path to exam communication according to a de-centered paradigm. This chapter explores this assumption having in mind the relations between communication and metacommunication. We argue communication is always escaping us. It is permanently traveling along different paths of meaning happening between the lines. So, there is not beginning and no end. Anything more than communication would just be more communication. Metacommunication is, thus, the endless cycle of communication’s self-differentiation. It supplements communication and is also supplemented by it.
Communication, Non-communication, and their Integration
LiBRI. Linguistic and Literary Broad Research and Innovation , 2017
The term 'communication' becomes meaningless if we cannot distinguish communication from what is not communication or if the notion of 'information transfer' is undifferentiated. The situation is complicated by the fact that some phenomena can be viewed as 'communicational' in some respects but not in others. A further complication is the range of phenomena which are similar to communication. Some suggestions are made for the distinction and for the range of intermediate cases. Apart from real-world events, our reasoning processes and mental models of reality, while communicable and exploiting information transfer are not communication. However, there is a danger that a dichotomy between communication and non-communication will divert attention from the integration of communication and non-communication in our understanding of reality. Résumé La 'communication' est dépourvue de sens si l'on ne saurait distinguer la communication de la 'non-communication' et si le 'transfert de l'information' n'est pas différencié. Le problème est en partie une question définitionnelle. Il existe des processus qui sont similaires à la communication mais qui ne répondent pas aux critères de la définition. La distinction est compliquée par de divers facteurs. À part les états et les évènements du monde physique, les signaux de tous sortes sont objectifiés et entrent dans les processus de raisonnement pour former nos conceptions de la réalité. Ni les formes du raisonnement ni les 'modèles mentaux' font part de la communication, bien qu'ils soient communicables. Pourtant, en séparant la communication de la non-communication on risque de divorcer la communication de son rôle dans la construction de la réalité.
Towards an epistemology of social noise
Polis - Revista de Stiinte Politice, 2016
This paper intends to present some considerations on a possible epistemology of noise as a response to theory of recognition and its bases on theory of communicative action. The principal movement will be to recover some aspects of Marcuse's and Foucault's perspective on the disturbances narratives in social sphere. The interest for them becomes stronger from Habermas' perspective on their " performative contradicions ". Both of them would appeal to social aspects that escapes from critical normativities. Foucault's structures of power as well as Marcuse's psychoanalytical drives would represent aspects of the same Habermasian problem: the absence of auto-critical rationality. However, we can question: what would offer to the two authors the limits of communicative action?