Mutually Assured Heteronomy: On the Ethics and Politics of Dialogue and Dissemination

AMIT PINCHEVSKI

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ISRAEL

 

Abstract

Setting dialogue in opposition to dissemination is one of the main themes of Speaking into the Air. This however does not entail regarding them as dichotomous or mutually exclusive. This article proposes that dialogue and dissemination are in fact interconnected, forming what I call “mutually assured heteronomy”: each finds its justification and limitation in the other. Neither autonomous nor combining to create a greater whole, dialogue and dissemination are caught in an interruptive bond. This reading allows reconsidering the ways ethics and politics are conceptualized in Speaking, revealing them as similarly linked in a non-dialectical, mutually implicating bond. 

Keywords

dialogue, dissemination, ethics, politics, Levinas, Arendt

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/155 

Twenty odd years ago, I was contemplating writing a dissertation about the ethics of communication as inspired by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. I was looking for a way to go about it that would be different from the properly philosophical work that had been previously done mainly in phenomenology and rhetoric. One strategy involved going to the McGill library and pulling out books from select shelves, pretty much randomly, seeking inspiration, or at least an ally in making the Levinas case for communication. I remember the day I pulled out a black hardback by an author I had not known about back then. While browsing, I found this line: “Today the most influential thinkers about communication are probably Jürgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas” (Peters, 1999: 20). I had to read it twice. No one had put it so boldly before. Placing Levinas side by side with Habermas not only signaled an unmistaken priority to ethics, but introduced a competition to mainstream thinking about communication ethics. Years later, I told the author, who has since become a dear friend, that this line is more of a wishful thinking than an accurate account of your typical Intro to Comm. syllabus. While Habermas is a household name in communication studies, Levinas was and still is somewhat esoteric. So, for me, as a doctoral candidate just starting to putting together ideas for a dissertation, this was a resounding affirmation: I found shoulders to stand on. And in the book as a whole, I found much more: an entirely new way of thinking and writing—indeed of going about this whole business of academic research. Rather than philosophize about communication, it did something far more ingenious: it communicationalized philosophy. There is much more to say about the intellectual pathways it has opened for many of us, but for now let me just say that my debt to this book and its author cannot be conveyed dialogically; it takes a long, extended, and still ongoing dissemination.

In the following, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the ethics and politics of communication as arising from Speaking into the Air. Ethics and politics: this conjunction appears front and center on the first page of the book, and continues to accompany the discussion throughout. By the end, the point is put most plainly: “The question should not be Can we communicate with each other? but Can we love one another or treat each other with justice and mercy?” Therefore communication “is more basically a political and ethical problem than a semantic or psychological one,” and so we ought “to be less worried about how signs arouse divergent meanings than the conditions that keep us from attending to our neighbors and other beings different from us” (Peters, 1999: 268-9). The argument repeats a number of times not only in content but also in form: a negative claim stating what communication is not, or should not be about (technical problem, message transfer, understanding), and a positive claim, which as above, takes a conjunctional structure: justice and mercy, politics and ethics, neighbors and other beings. The conjunction is not simply stylistic but reflects a tension at the core of the positive argument concerning communication. That tension, as I propose in the following, corresponds with the basic division accompanying the book: that of dialogue and dissemination. Yet unlike earlier readings that deem dialogue and dissemination as mutually exclusive, I suggest that the two are inseparable and, moreover, that their relation is indicative of the relation between ethics and politics as arising from Speaking into the Air. Dialogue and dissemination, like ethics and politics, form what I call here “mutually assured heteronomy”: each finds its justification in the other, which makes them interdependent. This reading invites new insights into the continuing import of Speaking.

In her book, Medium, Message, Transmission, Sybille Krämer calls Peters “the Levinas of communication theory” (Krämer, 2015: 68). I concur, even if Peters would probably disagree. This is not so much because of his direct employment of Levinas’s thought, but more because of affirming the idea of communication as an experience with otherness. In doing so, Speaking grants legitimacy to incompletion, failure, and even refusal of communication, which I think is one of its greatest achievements. Difference and distance are therefore inherent to communication; indeed, are its conditions of possibility. Thus “the gaps of which communication is made” do not bode the end of communication, rather its beginning. The concept of dissemination, which Jacques Derrida introduced in the early 1970s, is extended here toward pragmatism while still retaining much of its critical bite. It is through dissemination that the fundamental openness of communication is sustained, and that openness is key to conceiving the relation with the other precisely as a disseminative relation, which, in line with Derrida and Levinas, is asymmetric, nonreciprocal and nonequal. It is the other, rather than the self, that has privilege; it is the other, not the self, that “should be at the center of whatever ‘communication’ might mean” (Peters, 1999: 265).

Importantly, this is neither a factual description nor an ontological account of communication; it is not about what communication “is.” Rather, it is about the way communication ought to be. It is from the start an ethical evaluation. It bears wondering whether the distinction between “is” and “ought” is at all tenable when it comes to communication. For if we think of communication in terms of message transfer or exerting influence, this view already determines the privilege of the self and the source while relegating the other and the receiver to a subservient role. Alternatively, if we think of communication as transpiring with the aim of reaching an understanding or cooperation, whereby communicators are to achieve something together, this view already deems communicators as equal and equally predisposed to pursuing a collective goal. If instead we consider communication in terms of constitutive gaps, openness and dissemination, a very different view emerges whereby the other and the receiver are privileged. Here incompletion and divergence are welcomed rather than reckoned as problems to be overcome. To describe communication is already to take a stand as to how it should take place. Statements of “communication is” are preconfigured by notions of “communication ought,” even if implicitly. The ethics of communication is intrinsic to however we imagine it to be. The ontology of communication is already an ethics.

Adopting a disseminative view of communication also reveals it as a necessarily mediated relation. This is because for communication to transpire, the difference and distance that give rise to it call for mediation. If communication takes place because of, rather than despite, the gap between self and other, between here and there, there must be a medium mediating across the divides. Mediation sustains the paradox of communication: connecting differences while maintaining separateness—connecting because maintaining separateness. From this follows the rejection of any preexisting or innate communicability from which manifest communication proceeds. Likewise, the rejection of any antecedent commonality by virtue of which communication comes to pass. This is because assuming such fundamental communicability inevitably violates difference and otherness, and hence ultimately exerts violence. As Giorgio Agamben puts it in a more political vein: “What hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are being separated by what unites them” (Agamben, 1993: 81). The message of Speaking can be put as the reverse: what enables communication is incommunicability itself; humans are being united by what separates them.

Setting dissemination in opposition to dialogue is of course one of the main themes of the book. Yet this does not entail regarding dissemination and dialogue as dichotomous or mutually exclusive. While some parts in the book permit such an interpretation, I think it was mostly later commentaries that turned a distinction into a dichotomy. I see them more as two modalities of communication, rather than two ontologies, especially when it comes to questions of ethics and politics. I would further suggest that the difference between dialogue and dissemination does not ultimately amount to material or structural conditions. It would require another discussion to explore the historicity of the dialogue-dissemination distinction, which in Speaking begins with a trans-historical staging of Socrates vs. Jesus, and as the book progresses takes on different instantiations and manifestations. By the time we get to the fifth chapter on animals, machines and aliens, the stakes are at their highest as the tension between empathy and incommunicability is pushed to the extreme. When dialogue is impossible, dissemination remains the only option. Yet it is instructive that at this point embodiment enters the scene and reasserts itself as basis for empathy, despite (or arguably because of) incommunicability. As said, this calls for a separate discussion, one that I attempt to develop elsewhere (Pinchevski, 2011).

Insofar as dialogue and dissemination are concerned, I suggest that what separates them are two distinct logics of relation to the other, two approaches to alterity. In dialogue, the other’s otherness is transcended so as to impart knowledge, share experience, establish a common ground, or reach an understanding. Dialogue reaches to the other in order to achieve something with or through the other. In dissemination, the approach to the other draws on and maintains the distance to and separation from the other. What will be the outcome of communication is not the prime concern in dissemination; it may take place for its own sake without assurance of reception and without necessarily serving greater goals. Seen in this way, dissemination may well happen face-to-face: “dialogue may simply be two people taking turns broadcasting at each other” (Peters, 1999: 264). The opposite may also be true, namely, that broadcasting may attempt a dialogue across distance. Think of the simulation of a conversational mode of address in broadcasting, or of the various forms of telecommunication that are set to close the circuit and confirm receipt. Dialogue may then take on a disseminative form while dissemination may take a dialogic form. Which means that the line separating communication that is hospitable to otherness from communication that is not, does not run between dialogue and dissemination but within each of them. Hence, we can discern between a disseminative and non-disseminative dialogue and between a dialogic and non-dialogic dissemination. The two disseminative modes—namely, disseminative dialogue and non-dialogic dissemination—are other-oriented.

What stood out to me upon a recent rereading of Speaking is the unapologetic embrace of impersonality in communication. This might seem a minor point but I think it holds much. Typically, we associate impersonality with indifference, formality and matter-of-factness. But Speaking openly endorses impersonality, discovering it to be virtuous for moral reasons, and this is owing to the thirdness it introduces into interaction. We read that impersonality protects against the madness of love; provides a model for just treatment of others; it is egalitarian and universal; and reminds us of the fundamental otherness at the base of our contact with others. The one-way flow of dissemination goes hand-in-hand with the equal treatment of impersonality. Impersonality, as performed through the general access system of dissemination, provides a release from the sometimes-harsh demands of particularity and uniqueness. It can expose the indecencies that might hide under the cloak of free and open one-on-one talk.

What better exemplifies this than the figure of Bartleby, Herman Melville’s unresponsive scrivener. Bartleby is the impersonality in communication personified: the antihero of dissemination, as we read in chapter 4. Like writing, he gives no answer, rejects dialogue, is not particular, and most of all, resists interaction. His stance is of “pure dissemination”; he becomes a dead letter (Peters, 1999: 158). The narrator, Bartleby’s employer, appears as an overbearing fatherly figure whose consistent attempts to reach and decipher the scrivener discloses the cold righteousness of dialogism. And yet, I believe this story captures another lesson about dialogue and dissemination. For if Bartleby represents impersonality and non-particularity, the narrator clearly represents the personal and the particular. After all, the story begins with the lawyer stating: “I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener of the strangest I ever saw or heard of” (Melville, 2012: 3). Say what you will of the lawyer, he clearly cares about Bartleby, even as his state of mind vacillates from pity to murder ruminations. The narrator, for better or worse, operates from the realm of dialogue and interpersonality. Indeed, the clash between the interpersonal and the impersonal is what drives the plot, which is ultimately about the discontents of dealing with otherness pointblank. As such, it could never be told from the standpoint of impersonality. Bartleby, unmoved as he is, would make a lousy narrator; there would no ethical dilemmas, no rage, guilt or remorse—no story, really.

Put differently, if there is a moral drama in this story, it is fed by the demands of the interpersonal. For it is in the interpersonal that our basic ethical orientations form. There is nothing in impersonality to instruct us one way or the other; it is by definition indifferent. If we can judge the outcomes of impersonality for good or ill, or even find it virtuous, it is only by measuring it against virtues cultivated in the interpersonal. From whence we acquire our dos and don’ts, which then serve as a yardstick, albeit a constantly revisable and scalable one, for our dealings with the rest of the world. Equality and fairness would be morally void without the animating power of fundamental values such as respect, love, openness, and responsibility—all bred and nurtured within the primary group. That impersonality might be “a protective wall for the private heart” (Peters, 1999: 59) is therefore dependent on a “good” that is cultivated in the face-to-face. Yet, the same goes in the opposite direction: namely, the introduction of thirdness into the moral scene. What dissemination teaches us, is that for the face-to-face to be truly ethical, it cannot be closed unto itself and be content within its intimacy. It cannot remain exclusive of the outside. For the private to be ethical it must invoke the public—and for the public to be ethical it must invoke the private.

Let me develop this point further. The ethical and political message of dissemination has to do with accepting and embracing the gaps that are inherent to communication. This is also the reason that brought Derrida to favor writing, as it has its own time and space, “escaping better than speech from empirical urgencies.” And so, the writer, according to Derrida, is the one who “absents himself better, that is, expresses himself better as other, addresses himself to the other more effectively than the man of speech” (Derrida, 1978: 102). The same holds for dissemination. But what is the measure by which the disseminative approach is deemed “better” and from where does it draw its justification? It does not come from the act itself, from writing or disseminating or broadcasting, but from the values attached to it, values that acquire their significance elsewhere—in the realm of the face-to-face. The face-to-face is the bedrock of ethics. Therefore, impersonality can be ethical only as long as it maintains its tie to values of the interpersonal. As we know, this is not always the case. Impersonality can be the basis of many evils, as modern history starkly demonstrates. Today, perhaps more than when Speaking was first published, we encounter the darker side of dissemination. Some of the greatest disseminators of our time sit in Palo Alto, Mountain View, and until recently in Washington D.C., and their idea of dissemination is clearly very different. And what is our current algorithmic culture if not personalized impersonality? Impersonality does not necessarily make dissemination ethically favorable; but it can be so if it operates without losing touch with the ethical precepts forged in the interpersonal.

To be clear, there is nothing in dialogue to make it necessarily ethical either, even if occurring face-to-face. Proximity does not safeguard against harm; in fact, closeness and familiarity might easily translate into disrespect and even abuse. As Levinas taught, the face of the Other is a powerless force: it cannot prevent the aggression that it calls against. Co-presence can be coercive, and dialogue self-righteous. We can therefore conclude that facelessness may be ethical and faceness may be unethical. What makes them ethical is the extent to which they avail themselves to otherness, the extent to which they are other-oriented, respectful of the other. In the case of dissemination, it is the introduction of grace into distance, and in the case of dialogue, it is the introduction of distance into grace. To put it in Charles Sanders Peirce’s terms, what makes thirdness ethical is secondness, and what makes secondness ethical is thirdness (cf. Peirce, 1992: 270–271). Love suffers without justice, and justice suffers without love.

The entangled relation between the particular and the general, the second and the third, also figures in Levinas’s philosophy. As a formative relation of the self—indeed formative of the self—the responsibility toward the Other is unidirectional and unlimited. It reaches out without qualification and without seeking reciprocation. But the social is never one-on-one. It is multiple from the start. Once there is an Other, the is another Other, who is also the Other’s Other. In the face of the Other, there is already the call of all others, who demand equal concern. “The other is from the first the brother of all the other men,” writes Levinas, “The neighbor that obsesses me is already a face, both comparable and incomparable, a unique face and in relationship with faces, which are visible in the concern for justice” (Levinas, 1998: 158). The incomparable and incalculable relation to the face must then undergo comparison and calculation. The indivisible must be divided, responsibility must transform into justice. But this does not mean that justice operates irrespective of the face and responsibility—to the contrary: justice can be just only insofar as it makes itself exposed to the call of the particular face. The third and justice are already announced in the relation to the face, and the appeal of the face always implicates social justice. Second and third, responsibility and justice, are simultaneously incompatible and inextricable—and this entangled relation is what lies at the base of ethics that is at once particular and universal.

I suggest that the same entanglement holds for dialogue and dissemination. While constituting two distinct modes of communication, dialogue and dissemination are in fact necessarily linked and inter-implicating. Recall that we begin Speaking with a strong argument in favor of distance and end up with the irreducibility of touch. This journey from the general to the particular, from impersonality to personality, and from space to the face, might seem as ultimately expressing ambivalence regarding the question of dialogue vis-à-vis dissemination. Another reading might be dialectical where thesis and antithesis complement and transcend each other. I believe that neither is the case. If anything, the two modalities produce something like negative dialectics, a kind of elective nonaffinity, for when rubbed one against the other they each reveal their respective limitations. Precisely for this reason they are inseparable. Each needs the other to lay bare its own deficiencies while pointing to the other for a corrective. To use a notion that I’ve been trafficking for a while, they interrupt each other, which means they are deeply interconnected yet at the same time incommensurable (Pinchevski, 2005). Such is an ethical interruption—an ethics of interruption.

Dialogue and dissemination should then be regarded not as two autonomous modalities but as an intertwined couple. Their entanglement is of a mutually assured heteronomy: each has its normative compass pointing to the other; each is lacking in justification without recourse to the other. The reciprocal interruption of dialogue and dissemination bears out their interdependency. This has important implications to the understanding of communication. First, it affirms the impossibility of complete grasp by means of communication; that is, that neither dialogue nor dissemination has monopoly on what communication is. Nor does their combination, which if anything constitutes an incompletion rather than totality. Second, and consequently, the impossibility of a complete grasp of the very idea of communication: that whatever falls under “communication,” what communication “is,” should always remain lacking. If dialogue and communication are bounded up in a state of mutually assured heteronomy, then not only neither encompasses a comprehensive account of communication, they each mirror their distinctive deficiencies through the other. Far from forming a whole greater than its parts, they constitute an oscillating dyad, never resting in a steady state.

So how might we imagine the conjunction of the ethics and politics of communication as arising from the mutually assured heteronomy of dialogue and dissemination? What kind of public sphere can bring forth both love and justice into play? I think it comes close to what Hannah Arendt identified in The Human Condition as the condition of plurality, but with an important amendment. To Arendt, plurality is the highest achievement of the vita activa, above and beyond the realms of labor (physical survival) and work (social and economic activity). Plurality is the basis of the realm of action and can only be realized collectively, as a political achievement. Plurality is revealed in the space of appearance where people appear to one another through speech and action—indeed through communication—coming together as different beings. Arendt makes a point in distinguishing between otherness and distinctness: the former is a general category inclusive of human and nonhuman, whereas the latter is distinctively human. And it is precisely that distinctness, the uniqueness of each and every human life, that animates plurality: “human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings” (Arendt, 1998: 176).

Speech and action are united in the effort to create and maintain this plurality. The public realm is never given but always to be achieved; it is the result of a common political effort, but such that is based on the fundamental multiplicity of human life. Indeed, it is the multiplicity of human life, the distinctness of each and every one, that brings people to collaborate and act politically. Importantly, human distinctness comes to pass through speech whereby the speaker appears as a unique being, answering an implicit question “Who are you?” (Arendt, 1998: 178). What Arendt has in mind is not simply physical appearance but a form of individual address, something akin to what Levinas designates as the address of the other as a face. Thus, for Arendt, as for Levinas, social life can never be divorced from human singularity, from the unique signature of the particular, the face and the address. This and more: human uniqueness can only be appreciated and maintained under conditions of plurality and publicness. There is no paradox, therefore, between individual and public insofar as the actualization of the condition of plurality is concerned.

Arendt considers speech as more than mere means of communication for passing information, which could be achieved in other, more technical ways, and arguably outside public speech altogether. The kind of speech she envisions is not subordinated to other agendas but is an accomplishment in its own right, and one that is necessarily public and performative. Yet because necessarily public, and because critical to contemporary political life, such speech, broadly understood, cannot be thought of without recourse to media. Arendt has practically nothing to say about media, insisting as she does that speech is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” (Arendt, 1998: 7). This is presumably because Arendt associates things and matter with the material realms of labor and work, thus rather problematically disassociating communication from materiality and mediation. It is here that dissemination offers a corrective to Arendt’s notion of the public realm, allowing to reconceptualize it as an essentially mediated realm that, precisely because mediated, supports collective plurality. The space of appearance is profoundly mediated, symbolically and technologically, and therefore a space of disseminated speech (Silverstone, 2007).

If Peters adds to Arendt mediation, Arendt adds to Peters action. Arendt’s philosophy of action might help infuse political urgency into the idea of communication as dissemination. It invites us to rethink the conditions for actualizing dissemination, to rethink dissemination as action-based, that is, as something to be achieved rather than given. Moreover, it invites rethinking dissemination as a collective public activity that can be achieved only collectively, and is therefore deeply political. In the space of disseminative appearance, the conjunction of face and distance is not antithetical but forms the conditions for genuine plurality which draws equally from love and justice. To be sure, plurality is not a state of reconciliation between dialogue and dissemination, rather the result of their perpetual reciprocal interruption. If plurality is the highest human political achievement, as Ardent argues, it is because it stretches from the particular to the universal and back, having its ethical primal scene in intersubjectivity and its ultimate horizon in the collective public domain.

Seen in this way, dissemination should be conceived as more than open-ended address, its effects going beyond the releasing of hermeneutical possibilities. Dissemination as a form of action should extend to the nonhermeneutical, the inarticulate and the voiceless—a politically motivated commitment to a profound plurality of modes of address and addressers. Constituted on spatiotemporal hiatus, dissemination is inherently disposed to accommodating a variety of forms of expressions, including those that defy immediate explication. Dissemination is more tolerant than dialogue to non-sense and idiosyncrasy, which may be embryonic of what is yet to be expressed. Here we can perhaps find an anticipatory note to be taken up later in The Marvelous Clouds insofar as nonhuman communication is concerned. Adopting a disseminative view of public discourse thus entails not only openness to whatever may come, but further entails fostering the conditions for an ever-broader range of expressions. It demands not only liberality but hospitality. It is then that dissemination takes on its full ethical and political dimensions.

 

References

Agamben, G. (1993) The Coming Community. Translated by M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Krämer, S. (2015) Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy. Translated by A. Enns. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press (Recursions : theories of media, materiality, and cultural techniques).

Levinas, E. (1998) Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pa: Duquesne University Press.

Melville, H. (2012) Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.

Peirce, C.S. (1992) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by N. Houser and C.J.W. Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Peters, J.D. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Pinchevski, A. (2005) By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication. Duquesne University Press.

Pinchevski, A. (2011) ‘Bartleby’s Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability’, Cultural Critique, 78(1), pp. 27–59. doi:10.1353/cul.2011.0019.

Silverstone, R. (2007) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

 

Amit Pinchevski is an Association Professor and Director of the Smart Institute for Communications in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Email: amitpi@mail.huji.ac.il