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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2012
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Quietude and identity – The silent core of language
More LessAbstractDespite the Heideggerian advice to remain silent about silence, this article explores the idea of a fundamental silence at the core of language, an idea that is present in the phenomenological tradition from Husserl to Derrida, but also in other thinkers. The relation between silence, speech, the face and identity is charted, and related to the question what it means to speak a language, and to speak this language rather than that language. The considerations establish the need for a philosophy of communication (in addition to a science of communication) and for an ethics of cautious anticipation regarding language change and linguistic diversity, an ethics which avoids the complicit dangers of (cultural and linguistic) fetishization and instrumentalization; a multiverse of languages emerges as the only state in which language can exist.
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Communication – that which befalls us
More LessAbstractThe nature of communication can be theorized in many different ways, e.g. as ritual, storytelling, deliberation, rational argument, dissemination, articulation, translation, and even failure. In the present article communication is conceptualized as a (dialogic) process of conversation between the subject and the object as the Other; however, this conceptualization goes beyond its treatment as a simple reciprocal exchange of messages. First, a more nuanced and layered understanding of the role of the Other in communication is given; it is described what it means to be existentially bound with the object and engaged with the Other in a conversation as a process of interpretation and signification. Secondly, the importance of time in this process is highlighted; it is argued that communication can be understood more adequately when treated as a process of temporalizing of meaning. And, thirdly, the aporia of communication as conversation is discussed; it is shown how intersubjectivity and reciprocity can be reified and abused. Overall, it is concluded that the nature of communication as a complex process of common human experience calls for other theoretical perspectives.
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Who’s in the Place of Power? A de Certeauan Account of User Practice on the Web
More LessAbstractIs the World Wide Web (WWW) the true Citizens’ Medium? This issue has been ardently debated in recent years: some herald the WWW as an emancipating technological tool, others claim it to be just another ploy of capitalism. As empirical proof corroborating both sides proliferates, the correct answer must probably be situated somewhere at the intersection. Of this heterogenic ‘middle’ field the work of Michel de Certeau helps us to make sense. We take three de Certeauan concepts, sketched out as binary pairs, and elaborate on them in relation to ‘Web 2.0’: strategy/tactics, passive/active, and writing/speech. Exactly the tension between the terms of these distinctions is played out on the Web. Yet boundaries do blur, and right there the contours of some hybrid ‘strategic tactics,’ performed by everyday users, are becoming visible.
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The Conflation of Communications in Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders: Violence and (Mis)Remembrances
By Seth BerkAbstractThis article analyzes the influence that violence holds over a subject’s ability to remember and recall, specifically within the confines of Uwe Timm’s Am Beispiel meines Bruders. Timm attempts to understand the silence and erroneous remembrances of the perpetrator generation and their aversion to the acknowledgement of collective guilt. The discrepancies between intergenerational conceptions of the past are marked through the intertextual nature of Timm’s text; the sharp contrasts between the self-censored narratives of the narrator’s parents and the unexpurgated accounts of the holocaust found in survivor testimonials force a reevaluation of the family’s private history. The war journal of the narrator’s deceased brother provides the crux for Timm’s conflation of private and public communications, and it underscores the text’s programmatic acknowledgement of violence and the institutionalization of this recognition as the fundamental basis for remembrance. The intertextual composition of Timm’s text is read as an affirmation of Habermas’s theory of communicative reason.
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Bergson’s aesthetics: Art as a unique form of communication
By Elena FellAbstractFor Bergson, creating a masterpiece and perceiving it amounts to an act of intuitive communication between the artist and the spectator. Both the artist and the viewer intuit the work of art, which is something other than their own personal history, something that belongs to both of them and at the same time exists independently from them. The Bergsonian concept of heterogeneous duration, which primarily refers to consciousness and living processes, is extended in this instance to artistic communication as a process that unites creation and contemplation. Artistic creation and communication constitute an intimate ontological bonding wherein human beings actualize their ability to intuit and where an artist shares with the audience his or her deep emotions without revealing personal data.
This process of creation and perception of art could be named artistic duration or artistic communication. This duration is created by a joint participation of more than one individual and represents duration that escapes the boundaries of one mind because it is created by more than one mind. The artist initiates a continuity of emotion, by expressing it in art and making us feel it when we admire the masterpiece. By perceiving it, we do not return to the artist’s time and re-live his or her artistic creation vicariously, but pick up where the artist left this creation and let it live further on in our soul.
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Some foundational conceptions of communication: Revising and expanding the traditions of thought
Authors: Peter Simonson, Leonarda García-Jiménez, Johan Siebers and Robert T. CraigAbstractThis work presents and defines three meanings of communication taking into account some of the traditions of thought that founded our field of study. These three conceptions are: communication as an architectonic art; communication as a social force; and communication as the encounter with truth. These three conceptions are considered with regard to several traditions of thought conceptualized in Craig’s (1999) constitutive metamodel of communication theory (rhetorical, sociopsychological, critical and phenomenological). Furthermore, the discussion expands the traditions of thought, adding American pragmatism (Craig’s proposal would be included in it), and a new tradition that highlights the element of undecidability in communication, partly as an extension of phenomenology and partly with its own historical roots in Badiou’s philosophy of the event.
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Review
By Elena FellAbstractPhilosophical Profiles in the Theory of Communication, Jason Hannan (ed.) (2012) New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 519 pp., ISBN 9781433116469, Hardback, £66.00
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