Critical Studies in Mass Communication
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Sharing of thoughts or recognizing otherness?
Reply to Logue and miller
John Durham Peters
To cite this article: John Durham Peters (1996) Sharing of thoughts or recognizing otherness?
Reply to Logue and miller, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 13:4, 373-380, DOI:
10.1080/15295039609366988
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Published online: 18 May 2009.
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that the term communication names things univocally, i.e., the qualities required of the primary
instance must be found in all instances, or a single definition must fit every case. Thus he criticizes
Anderson and Meyer's more prescriptive definition, which brings out what completeness of
communicative interaction would require, for disqualifying "most of the things we talking animals
do with words. Communication ends up being our impossible essence" (1994, p. 134).
3
Our hypothetical communion of disembodied spirits was suggested by the old problem of how
angels might communicate, but Peters elsewhere calls attention to a striking modern formulationthe sociological theory of C. H. Cooley: "Cooley managed successfully to eliminate the ultimate
human place, the body, as an important part of interaction.... His sociology was a high point in
Victorian social thought; it provided a way to conceive of human society without bodies" (1989, p.
256).
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References
Logue, C. M. & and Miller, E. F. (1995). Rhetorical status: A study of its origins, functions, and
consequences. QuarterlyJournal of Speech, 81,20-47.
Peters, J. D. (1989). Satan and savior: Mass communication in Progressive thought. Critical Studies
in Mass Communication, 6,247-63.
Peters,J. D. (1994). The gaps of which communication is made. Critical Studies inMass Communication, 77(2), 117-40.
Sharing of Thoughts or Recognizing
Otherness? Reply to Logue and Miller
John Durham Peters
I
T is a rare treat in intellectual life to
receive so generous and astute a
reading as that from Cal M. Logue and
Eugene F. Miller. With admirable clarity and constructiveness, they probe
the weaknesses of my original argument, focus debate on fundamentals,
and take a refreshingly ecumenical
stance toward the kingdom of communication. They articulately defend what
is surely the dominant view of commu-
nication, the sharing of thoughts and
intentions. I take their critique to be, in
part, an invitation to clarify whether I
was just playing gadfly to a host of conventional wisdoms or offering the rudiments of a novel understanding. Perhaps
somewhat counter-intuitively, I in fact
hold both that communication as mental
sharing is impossible and that successful
interaction is quite ordinary. I share the
high value Logue and Miller place upon
sharing, but believe their conception of
John Durham Peters is associate professor of sharing fails to confront adequately the
communication studies at the University of abysses and chasms in the self, the other,
Iowa.
and modern life.
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DECEMBER 1996
Logue and Miller fault my claim that ultimately to Plato, though their thinkcommunication is made of gaps as be- ing also shows a strong Aristotelian
ing, essentially, one-sided-seeing a strain and (2) a history of common
glass half empty (the loose coupling sense interpretation. Their argument is
mat lurks in every interaction) instead structured by the central dualities of
of half full (the potentials for gap- western thought: mind-body, insidebridging). Fair enough. My title made outside, meaning-medium, intellecta highly unconventional use of commu- sense, denotation-connotation, and nanication in order to reconceive that con- ture-artifice. Making communication
cept quite against the grain of its re- the bridge of these antinomies, howceived usage. Taken as a name for the ever, also makes it their slave. For
sharing of thoughts, whether in a direct Logue and Miller communication beor indirect way, I find the notion of comes a problem of spiritual transporcommunication unintelligible. Despite tation: "infusing" mental meanings into
the apparent common sense of the no- material "vehicles" at one end, "extion, I can find no such thing in ordi- tracting" them at the other. Logue and
nary interaction as thought-transfer- Miller explicitly argue that mediation
ence. Though we daily exchange and embodiment are necessary, but
words, we never exchange thoughts or they also write as if perfect communicaintentions. I do not mean that thoughts tion would involve the disappearance
and intentions are eternally bottled up of all media. The real work of commuinside each one of us, but rather that nication thus occurs largely on a nonthey are signs on the inside as well as material plane, wherever mutual parthe outside. Some things can be shared; taking of intentions and thoughts opens
our existence cannot be. Communica- up. Each sign is a seance in miniature,
tion would then be the name for the as it were, calling forth a spiritual bestrategies we use to make common ing: "When I perceive a sign as a sign,
cause with the ineluctable otherness something more comes to presence."
that we find around us-in ourselves, The sign's own body is at best incidenothers, and the world. Communication tal. In a lovely phrase Augustine could
is what arises from the fact that we have written, Logue and Miller write,
cannot be other people. There are a "the sign-vehicle's own thingness remultitude of culturally-diverse prac- cedes into the background and sacritices by which people coordinate ac- fices itself, as it were, for the meaning
tion and share lives, but no means of that it bears." The motto of the venerfully fathoming a person's existential able tradition which Logue and Miller
solitude. At best, communication is a represent might be, "The letter killeth,
name for all the ways humans manage but the spirit giveth life."
to cope with the impossibility of expeThe vanishing sign is an excellent
riencing another person's experience.
description of much of our experience
Logue and Miller, in contrast, think of speech and language. But I do not
that communication, despite the formi- think it provides the best descriptive or
dable obstacles, ought to be conceived explanatory framework. Everyday conof as the bridging of interiorities. In cepts do offer us useful clues, but they
this, they are heirs to (1) a long and can also mislead. The history of commuinfluential tradition that runs via Locke nication as a word testifies to a longand Descartes to St. Augustine and standing evasion of the "letter," that is,
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the material density of signification. about communication breakdown. The
Early in English, communication re- hope of telepathy (a term coined in
ferred to physical processes of transmis- 1882) was a cultural twin with the horsion and metaphysical ones of consub- ror of solipsism (coined in 1874). The
stantiation. In seventeenth-century oscillation between the dream of transusage, for example, tangibles such as parency and the nightmare of obstrucrobes, fortunes, plants, and commodi- tion is characteristic of traditional thinkties, and intangibles such as light, heat, ing about communication. Logue and
blessings, praise, secrets, vices, Miller succumb to some degree by
thoughts, and ideas could all be "com- contrasting the hypothetical contact
municated" (Oxford English Dictionary, among spirits with the blockages of
s.v. "communicate," "communica- embodiment. Media become either
tion"). John Locke, I have argued (Pe- bridges or obstacles. If communication
ters, 1989), is especially crucial in involves intermental contact via matefounding the modern concept. For rial signs, almost all of our social life
Locke "communication" is die sharing will fall short of that lofty-but quite
of a substance that neither tips a scale impossible-ideal. We will see ournor casts a shadow: "ideas." From selves as trapped amid signs instead of
there, a word which had formerly liberated as animals possessing speech.
meant sharing of any sort, material or We will risk seeing double—looking beimmaterial, came to mean mental shar- yond the gift of language to a superluing, often aggressively indifferent to nary world of "meanings."
mediation. Thanks the telegraph, teleLike many others in the western traphone, and "wireless," each of which dition, Logue and Miller locate the
seemed to spirit thought away via elec- gaps in the wrong place: "Communicatricity or the ether, the spiritualization tion gaps have their origin in the cirof human intercourse in "communica- cumstances of our individuality as emtion" continued into our century.
bodied beings in a spatio-temporal
The dream of instantaneous and im- world." Embodiment is not the chief
mediate communication has many pre- source of misunderstanding between
decessors in discourses such as angelol- people but the only possible ground of
ogy, mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical signification or cooperation. Communiresearch, and idealist philosophy, but cation itself, with its doubling of self
it reached its current form in the late and other, is the locale of the gaps. In
nineteenth century. It was in part a saying that "the media on which we
response to the historically unprec- rely to bridge these gaps are imperfect
edented and massive mediation of hu- vehicles that impose on us the highly
man relations. The cinema, phono- uncertain task of infusing and extractgraph, telephone, and radio put people ing meanings, or encoding and decodin contact without their physical pres- ing messages," Logue and Miller not
ence. That new media can disembody only suggest that meanings are full but
communicators was an effect Plato saw expression is flawed, but that meaning
from writing in the Phaedrus. Modern is fully present to the self. Logue and
forms of communicative disembodi- Miller's implied notion of selfhood
ment both fed the older notion that seems a model of individuality, like
communication consists of direct men- Locke, that locates uncertainty and dital contact and created new anxieties vision in sign-junctions with others, not
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DECEMBER 1996
in the very structure of subjectivity. Greeting the stranger in the self may
For Logue and Miller, the self seems a help us greet the self in the stranger.
sovereign lord of the signifier. Its mean- Communication will always be an
ings are self-consistent and self-evi- asymmetrical enterprise of co-constitudent. Communication, then, is a largely tion, not a delivery of mental cargo.
symmetrical aifair in which two such Signs are not only the means by which
egos share their thoughts and inten- we transmit notions, but by which we
tions.
come to ourselves.
I hold, in contrast, that the self is a
The notion of communication as
relation. Our individuality is less an sharing clear inner ideas via blurry
obstacle to communication than a prod- , outer media fails to confront this Moeuct of it. Pragmatists such as Peirce, bius strip, the uncanny and wonderful
Royce, James, Cooley, Dewey, and otherness we find in our own heart and
Mead all believed that the self can only in our neighbor. Communication in
know itself belatedly. We act first and any meaningful sense must negotiate
know later. Self-knowledge is not radi- the tension of oneness and otherness.
cally different from knowledge of other The notion of sharing thoughts evades
people. Both occur through a process the ways selves elliptically constitute
of interpretation. As Royce put it, "One each other in interaction.
discovers one's own mind through a
There is no access to interiority, exprocess of inference analogous to the cept as it takes form in a sign-process.
very modes of inference which guide Introspection, as Peirce almost said, is
us in a social effort to interpret our a social task. We never sound the
neighbor's minds" (Royce, 1913, vol. depths of another human being. In this
2, p. 138). The self is an other to itself. sense gaps are more basic than bridges.
The self, essentially, has no more imme- Yet humans also usually manage to
diate access to its own experience than choreograph interactions smoothly and
it has to another's experience, unlike even productively. We can share lives,
the fully present cogitos Logue and projects, and histories, but not interioriMiller more or less presuppose. Our ties. Communication is how we deal
political culture proclaims the sover- with the impossibility of thinking anotheignty of the individual at every turn er's thoughts and feeling another's feeland has led us to mistake the real ings. No metempsychosis occurs
difficulty of communication. In commu- among mortals. Stated baldly, distantianication, my own thoughts not only tion is the fundamental fact, and bridgremain with me, but they become radi- ing—between souls, thoughts, meancally transformed as well. The chal- ings, intentions or other inwardly
lenge of communication is not a matter ghostly beings—is ultimately illusory.
of encoding and decoding but rather, The best we can aspire to is a just and
as Hegel argued, the moral, and politi- loving dance of signs in which we all
cal task of constituting a world in which take part without ever touching each
human beings can recognize each other in full. We can share many things,
other. The fundamental gap lies not but not our existence (Levinas, 1989,
between inner thought and outer word, chs. 2-3).
intelligible idea and sensible sign; it
"Communicative sharing," write
lies in the otherness of the self and the Logue and Miller, "is undoubtedly a
selfhood of the other (Arendt, 1971). good thing." I am not so sure. Much
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kindness and civility rests on precisely arguing for fundamental distances, I
not expressing what is inside. Logue am decidedly not saying that each of us
and Miller, like many others, invoke walks around in our own private unithe Latin communicare as evidence for verse such that communication is at
the long tradition of sharing-talk. The best an accident. The view that meanmore rarely cited Greek term, KOIVOCO ing lies in the individual self stems
[koinoo] offers a harsher lesson. Like from the tradition I oppose. The threat
communicare, it means to make com- of solipsism follows naturally from the
mon, communicate, impart, or share; interiorization of signification. We live,
it also means to pollute or make un- I would argue instead, in front of ourclean. Communication thus can be selves, in public worlds. All significacommon, just as meaning can be mean. tion is fundamentally public. I do not
The brutal rigor of this insight is found find it hard to explain how "persons in
in a logion of Jesus concerning the pu- communication are able so often to
rity of foods: "whatever goes into a understand each other." The problem
man from outside cannot defile is not the incommensurability of every[Koivwom] him, since it enters not his one's unique experiences (which never
heart but his stomach . . . What comes enter into communication save via
out of a man is what defiles [KOLVOI] a signs) but the reliability, even tyranny
man. For from within, out of the heart of signs. I see four main positions on
of a man, come evil thoughts, fornica- the fundamental question of semiotics:
tion, theft," etc. (Mark 7:18-21). "What meaning lies (1) in the word (semancomes out of the heart" is not a bad tic), (2) in the sentence (syntactic), (3)
definition of communication as shar- in the webs of sentences that constitute
ing, but here such making common is a discourse or even langue or system of
figured as the release of iniquity. What- language (semiotic), or (4) in webs of
ever one makes of this profound pun, sentences as interwoven with forms of
communication as pollution, it at least life (pragmatic). I hold the last. To
complicates our notions about the ben- some degree these accounts are cumuefit of sharing and provides a more lative, the latter explaining and clarifycomplex genealogy than does communi- ing the previous.
care.
I take signs to be wonderfully reliThe self is a sign; there is no hidden able and flexible ways of coordinating
content to be poured into signs that is social action and directing experience;
not already a sign of some sort. I do not what we call "understanding" is really
mean that the self is "merely" a sign. a fluent coordination of action. We
Rather, following Charles Sanders need no supplements ("meanings") to
Peirce, I take the self as a sign in all its account for the social life of words.
splendor and glory. Telepathy, if it What we take as meanings are semiowere even possible, would be cata- pragmatic networks. "Meaning" and
strophic. Instant utterance would deny "intending" are themselves rich acts
our thoughts the gestation of struggling having diverse traditions. Though John
with public expression. I rarely know Dewey sometimes had his flights into
what I think until I say it. In the begin- the noosphere on this topic, his basic
ning was the word; the thought came conception of communication as the
later.
establishment of a "community of parHere again it is crucial to be clear. In taking" (1988/1925, p. 146) is one I
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endorse. He saw this partaking as always lived, behavioral, and out in public. Barring the widespread corruption
of speech and language in ideology or
neurosis, I'd wager that we fail words
more often than words fail us. Dewey
sought to explain sharing without entering the fly-bottle of private meaning
and without depreciating the rich soliloquy of the self with itself. The best
pragmatists did not use a behavioral
vision of communication to deny the
richness of individual experience. The
point was rather the publicity of all
signification, the socialness of all interpretation, and the interpretiveness of
all sociability. In endorsing this project,
I think I share much with Logue and
Miller.
People both speak from different
places and usually manage to mesh
words quite seamlessly together. But
nothing ever like full mental disclosure
ever takes place, neither to the self nor
to the other. This should be nothing
shocking or paradoxical, only an ordinary observation about how people in
fact conduct their lives together. Getting rid of the dichotomies of innerouter, thought-word, content-vehicle
(into which I have surely slipped as
well) would help us see more clearly
the stakes of our communicative practices. We would complain less that no
words can match our feelings and work
harder to see ourselves as others whose
understanding can only come via the
public stuff of signs. That would be the
best way to pursue an ideal of sharing
involving a fairer and more compassionate partaking in the goods of social
life.
What Logue and Miller call "interpretive distance" occurs less when
meanings are mismatched than when
practices break down. It is not that
signs are brittle but that our worlds and
commitments collide. Being-as Marx,
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Emerson, and Dewey all said in their
different ways-precedes consciousness.
Distorted understandings arise from
distorted conditions. Communication
as sharing thoughts can only come after the creation of a common world of
practices (including signifying practices). The problem is not just epistemological misfires, but lives that do not
connect. Communication is more basically a political and ethical problem
than a semantic one. We ought to be
less worried about how signs may rouse
divergent meanings than the conditions that make it hard to attend to
beings radically other to us.
Am I making an invidious dichotomy of my own in separating communication and community? Perhaps, but
I hope not. The point is a question of
priority, and I privilege ontology over
epistemology, social ties over individual cognition. Communication in the
richest sense has to do precisely with
all the arts of creating worlds in which
to be with other beings. Trying to speak
the tongues of angels is not a more
excellent way than the more plodding
virtues of love and justice. This debate
recapitulates one of the fundamental
issues in social theory: Is communication primarily the constitution of relationships or the sharing of content? Is
social order or consciousness primary?
Most of the characteristically modern kinds of communication gaps owe
much more to the difficulties of building relationships than to semantic
naughtiness. The past century has taken
up the fraught project of establishing
communication with "primitives," the
mad, the dead, extraterrestrials, animals, or machines in such fields as
anthropology, psychoanalysis, history,
exosociology, zoosemiotics, and cybernetics. In each case, it is hard to know
even where to begin. The fundamental
issue is not the lack of shared mean-
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ings, but the lack of shared lives and
practices. The lesson of our century is
that coordinating meanings is less crucial to communication than recognizing otherness. It is when bodies are
foreign or not recognizable as human
that we face communication gaps, not
just when our semantics differ. The
issue is less a failure to coordinate
meanings than a failure to enter into
community.
As to interaction, I very much appreciate the clarity with which Logue and
Miller pose the question. In the "Gaps"
article I treated conversation as a form
of broadcasting; in a more recent piece
(Peters, 1996) I examined how radio
broadcasting can be conversational,
thanks to such techniques as audiences
that are internal to the text, dialogical
formats, and intimate styles of address.
Texts—ranging from radio comedies to
the Phaedrus-can stage dialogues that
invite the reader into its world. The
difficult question for me is still what
counts as interaction. Is interaction defined by a participant or an observer?
Is any kind of active involvement in a
text a form of participation?
I take the fundamental question of
mass communication theory to be the
possibility of interaction without personal or physical contact. Theodor
Adorno and Robert Merton debated
this question (Peters, 1996), and it has
been the implicit axis of mass communication theory since. Adorno finds the
idea of audience participation in the
radio world the worst kind of idolatry
or projection; Merton finds it to be a
ritual act of solidarity that has real
social consequences. I am, quite
frankly, torn on the question whether
we should call "interaction" those distended relationships in which one party
to the dialogue is absent in some way:
mourning, prayer, spectatorship, reading, audition, communion with nature,
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or even the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. Is the key criterion immediacy of interchange, personalization
of address, or alternation of who has
the floor? Most attempts to define interaction I find unsatisfying. Often in mass
communication theory, at least, loops
and spirals replace arrows and boxes
in the diagrams, but exactly what
counts as reciprocity and mutuality is
left insufficently considered. The strong
honorific quality of reciprocity as an
ethical ideal often obscures the problems of that concept (Peters, 1995).
Even the interaction model offered by
Logue and Miller does not quite cast
out the demon of thought-transportation. It is still thoughts that are being
packaged and delivered, even if the
process is two-way.
Logue and Miller argue that interaction can occur for a reader of the Phaedrus but do not seem willing to extend
the same privilege to the radio listener.
They astutely credit Plato with inventing a form of writing capable of fitting
readers according to their distinct interests, but do not want to call this broadcasting. The combination of openended address plus individualization
of interpretation is, for me, the exact
definition of broadcasting. This is the
point of the parable of the sower, that
archetype of broadcasting. Identical
seed is scattered on all kinds of grounds
with wildly diverse results. The distinctness of the fit depends on the receiver:
They who have ears to hear, let them
hear! A general mode of address-one
size fits all-is the essence of broadcasting. Thus the Phaedrus is broadcast because it is invariant in form (as a text)
but infinitely adaptive in the interactions it invites with a variety of readers.
The question of a reader's interaction
with the Phaedrus is no different from a
radio listener or a person who "inter-
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DECEMBER 1996
acts" with a pet, an infant, or a correspondent. In each case, control over
turn-taking is restricted to one end of
the transaction. Perhaps interaction at
base entails some rough equality of
access to the word.
Finally, I fully agree that my original
conception of justice, like that of love,
was too simple. Justice is not only indifferent dissemination (treating all people
the same), but also a profound sensitivity to the individual case (giving each
his or her due). Love, likewise, is not
only individuated care. It is also constancy and invariance, "an ever fixed
mark," as Shakespeare said. There is
an aspect of both justice and love that
is invariant and uniform, and an aspect
that is personal and particular. Justice
that is not loving is not just; love that is
not just is not loving,
If I have emphasized where I differ
from Logue and Miller rather than what
we share, it is partly in order to clarify
the stakes-and partly to be consistent
with my view of communication!
References
Arendt, H. (1971). Thinking and moral considerations: A lecture. Social Research, 38, 417-46.
Dewey, J. (1988). Experience and nature. Ed. J o Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press. (Original work 1925).
Levinas, E. (1989). The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Peters, J. D. (1989). 'John Locke, the individual, and the origin of communication." Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 75, 4, 387-99.
Peters, J. D. (1995). "Beyond reciprocity: Public communication as a moral ideal." In E.
Hollander, C. van der Linden, and P. Rutten (Eds.), Communication, culture, and community: Liber
amicorumJamesStappers (pp. 41-50). Houten, Netherlands: Bohn, Stafleu, van Loghum.
Peters, J. D. (1996). "The uncanniness of mass communication in interwar social thought." Journal
of Communication, 46, 3, 108-123.
Royce, J. (1913). The problem of Christianity. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan.
Communication as Mediated Sharing:
A Rejoinder to Peters
Cal M. Logue and Eugene F. Miller
Three principal questions were raised
in our critique of Professor Peters' essay: (1) Is communication made of gaps
and, if so, what is their source? (2) If
the "broadcast" is the constituent unit
of all communication, what does it
mean to say that in broadcasts, "the
moments of encoding and decoding
are relatively autonomous"? (3) What
evidence refutes the claim that mass