On Communicating: Otherness, Meaning, and Information

On Communicating

Klaus Krippendorff is an influential scholar in communication studies widely known for his award-winning book Content Analysis. Over the years, Krippendorff has made important contributions to the ongoing debates on fundamental issues concerning communication theory, epistemology, methods of research, critical scholarship, second-order cybernetics, the social construction of reality through language, design, and meaning. On Communicating assembles Krippendorff’s most significant writings – many of which are virtually unavailable today, appearing in less accessible publications, conference proceedings, out-of-print book chapters, and articles in journals outside the communication field. In their totality, they provide a goldmine for communication students and scholars. Edited and with an introduction by Fernando Bermejo, this book provides readers with access to Krippendorff’s key works. Klaus Krippendorff is Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His landmark book Content Analysis, now in its second edition, has been translated into Hungarian, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish. Fernando Bermejo teaches Communication at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. He holds a Ph.D. from the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona and an MA from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

On Communicating

Otherness, Meaning, and Information

Klaus Krippendorff Edited by Fernando Bermejo

First published 2009 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2009 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Catalog Record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 0-203-89480-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–97859–9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–97860–2 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–89480–4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–97859–0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–97860–6 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–89480–4 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction by Fernando Bermejo

vii 1

PART 1

Communicating Introduction

9

1 An Alternative Paradigm

11

2 Epistemological Grounding

37

3 Major Communication Metaphors

48

4 A Recursive Framework for Communication Theories

72

5 Conversation or Intellectual Imperialism

86

PART 2

Otherness Introduction

99

6 The Otherness that Theory Creates

101

7 A Cybernetics of I–Other Relations

112

8 Pathology, Power, and Emancipation

131

9 Writing Ecologically

156

vi Contents PART 3

Meaning Introduction

171

10 A Constructivist Critique of Semiotics

173

11 The Dialogical Meaning of Cultural Artifacts

191

12 The Methodo-logic of Content Analysis

205

13 Discourse as Systematically Constrained Conversation

217

PART 4

Information Introduction

235

14 An Introduction to Information Theory

237

15 Research In-Formation

265

16 Paradox and Information

278

17 Cyberspace and Its Artifacts

299

18 Social Memory

322

References Permissions Index

343 358 360

Acknowledgments

This book, as every other book, would not have been possible without the contributions of many different people. It would, of course, not have been possible without Klaus Krippendorff’s work, nor without his commitment to seeing this project through and his involvement above and beyond the norm. Neither would this book have come into being without the trust, support, and patience of its editor at Routledge, Matthew Byrnie, nor without the excellent job of the editorial team that worked on it—Maggie Lindsey-Jones, Stan Spring, Belinda Wakefield, and John Banks. It would never have taken shape without a wonderful network of colleagues and friends—especially, Francisco Javier Gil Martín, Manuel Martínez Nicolás, David W. Park, Daniel Sánchez Salas, and Magdalena Wojcieszak—who served as advisers, consultants, commentators, and guides. It could have never been finished without Susan Haas’ efforts to polish the language used by a German author and a Spanish editor and turn it into proper English.As many other things, it would never have happened without the help, love, and understanding of Smriti Belbase. Finally, if, as Julio Cortázar said, “a bridge is just a person crossing a bridge,” then a book is just a person reading a book. It would not be possible without you. Fernando Bermejo

Introduction Fernando Bermejo

The aim of this book is to provide a distinctive, comprehensive, and suggestive approach to communication by presenting a structured selection of the scholarly work produced by Klaus Krippendorff. It is a distinctive approach because it is the product of a particular scholar, but also because it feeds from an intellectual tradition situated far from the mainstream of communication scholarship. It is comprehensive because it touches upon all the fundamental issues surrounding communication, such as language, meaning, otherness, and information.And it is suggestive because it offers opportunities for engaging in fruitful dialogue with other approaches to communication and for revising some of the basic tenets of the field at a time when this revision seems necessary, and even urgent. Since it would be at odds with the very approach to communication articulated here to present the book as the product of a disembodied voice talking above the head of readers, it seems appropriate, first of all, to contextualize it as the result of the work of a scholar with a unique personal and intellectual biography. Krippendorff’s writings on communication span decades and cover a wide range of topics. In order to make sense of them it is possible – and hopefully not unfair or simplistic – to categorize his major previous publications into three distinct paths of inquiry. The first one has to do with design and, in particular, with issues of meaning in design.After graduating as an engineer in Hanover (Germany) in 1954, Krippendorff attended the Ulm School of Design – an avant-garde institution, existing for only fifteen years, yet key to understanding contemporary design.There he began a career as designer and developed a keen interest in the analysis of the meaning of artifacts, an interest that resurfaced in the mid-1980s – with his proposal of “product semantics” – and has accompanied him ever since. His publications on the issues of meaning and design, which started with his Ulm thesis, culminated recently in his book The Semantic Turn:A New Foundation for Design (2006). The second path of inquiry pursued by Krippendorff over his career is related to cybernetics. In the early 1960s, he moved to the United States to become a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana.There he came into contact with some of the leading figures in the burgeoning field of cybernetics – he worked with, among others, Ross Ashby, one of the founding fathers of the cybernetic movement.

2 Introduction

He was strongly influenced by this contact and by the work of those cyberneticians, especially Gregory Bateson, concerned with social phenomena and culture. Krippendorff’s edited Communication and Control in Society (1979), his Dictionary of Cybernetics (1986), and Information Theory:Structural Models for Qualitative Data (1986) stand out among his contributions to the literature on cybernetics and related issue of information theory. The third path of inquiry, and the one that has contributed the most to his reputation in the field of communication, is his work on content analysis. Krippendorff obtained his Ph.D. in Communications with a dissertation titled An Examination of Content Analysis: A Proposal for a General Framework and an Information Calculus for Message Analytic Situations (1967). Already before completing his doctorate, he began collaboration with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania – which has been his intellectual home ever since and where he serves as Gregory Bateson Professor of Communication. There he became an internationally renowned expert on content analysis thanks to his widely used and translated Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (1980). His interest in this research technique has not diminished over the years, and his two recent books on the subject – a second, updated, and expanded edition of his Content Analysis (2004), and The Content Analysis Reader (2008), jointly edited with Mary Bock – attest to this. In moving through the successive stages of his life and career Krippendorff has managed to preserve and enrich these interests, and has continued to develop them with new contributions. But, besides these three main lines of inquiry, and while feeding from them, he has also been generating a constant flow of texts that address fundamental communication issues and contextualize and supplement his work on the semantics of design, cybernetics, and content analysis.These contributions have been published in key journals in the fields of communication, sociological methodology, cybernetics, systems theory, and semiotics. Some have appeared in less accessible publications, conference proceedings, and book chapters. Until now there was no single source that offered a comprehensive view of this body of work, and of the ways it relates to his previous publications.This book is intended to serve as that source. The texts collected in this volume shed light and put in perspective the rest of Krippendorff’s oeuvre. However, it also seems necessary to contextualize the very approach to communication presented here. And in order to do so it is important to pay attention to its intellectual lineage, in particular to the transformation undergone by cybernetics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a transformation that gave birth to second-order cybernetics – also referred to as cybernetics of cybernetics or new cybernetics. Though Margaret Mead is usually credited as the first proponent – rather in passing – of a cybernetics of cybernetics in her inaugural address at the First Annual Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics (1968), it was Heinz von Foerster (1979, Foerster et al., 1974) who clearly effected this transition and who articulated the distinction between first-order and second-

Introduction 3

order cybernetics as a distinction between the cybernetics of observed systems and the cybernetics of observing systems. Of course, he was not alone in his effort.This change was sought by a group of cyberneticians who realized they could not “pursue any longer the flawless, but sterile path that explores the properties seen to reside within objects” and decided to “turn around to explore their very properties seen now to reside within the observer of these objects” (Foerster, 1979:6). With this shift, cybernetics began to study its own workings, observers tried to explain themselves to themselves, and all knowledge and all knowing became observer (self)-referenced (Scott, 2004). While second-order cybernetics showed lines of continuity with first-order cybernetics, it also introduced a whole new set of concepts, assumptions, and perspectives.A central feature of this new cybernetics was the refusal to accept any kind of ontological presuppositions, with the consequent rejection of objectivity and a new focus on epistemology. The rejection of objectivity became an obvious follow-up of the central role awarded to the observer, since second-order cybernetics “is cybernetics when the observer’s presence is admitted rather than disguised – or even completely denied” (Glanville, 2004:1380) while objectivity is “the illusion that reality could be observed without an observer” (Foerster quoted in Chapter 7, this volume).The shift from studying “observed systems” to studying “observing systems” meant a shift of attention from that what is known, to the process of knowing, to epistemology – which instead of being understood as a process of apprehending a given reality was conceived as a process of drawing distinctions1 and establishing relationships.This insistence on the observer-related nature of knowledge and reality linked second-order cybernetics to the different strands and degrees of constructivism, from the social constructivism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) to the radical constructivism of Ernst von Glasersfeld (1995). It also granted issues of self-reference, recursiveness, and reflexivity a central place in all its intellectual pursuits.2 It is this constellation of topics and ideas that most clearly shapes the approach to communication presented here. When the essential traits of second-order cybernetics are applied to the analysis of communication, they necessarily yield a specific perspective. Language can no longer be seen as a representational tool, but rather as a constitutive phenomenon, as a medium through which people construct realities. In this sense, second-order cybernetics’ approach to language feels at home with the philosophy of the second Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) and of Richard Rorty (1989), with the linguistic anthropology of Edward Sapir (1949) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956), and with the more recent contributions of John Shotter (1993) and John Stewart (1995),

1 The concept of “distinction” is central to the development of second-order cybernetics and derives from Spencer-Brown’s (1969/1979) “calculus of indications.” 2 In this regard, the idea of “autopoiesis,” as developed by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980), can be seen as the culmination of this interest in issues of self-reference.

4 Introduction

with a view of language as a “medium through which we organize our experiences and engage in interaction with each other” (Chapter 3, this volume). In turn, meaning cannot be conceived as something contained in language, but rather as the result of situated and embodied interactions. Communication ceases to be seen as the transmission or sharing of information, but rather as a process of intertwined practices. Indeed, communication cannot be taken as a given, but as an ongoing accomplishment, as an activity, as “communicating.” When communication is analyzed from this point of view, what matters is not what communication “is,” but “how it comes to be.” Of course, taking second-order cybernetics into account is necessary but not sufficient to understand Krippendorff’s approach to communication. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain the differences between his work and that of other authors feeding from the same tradition, for example, Niklas Luhmann. While Luhmann’s approach to society (1995), communication (1992), and media (2000) is clearly inspired by second-order cybernetics, it is far removed from Krippendorff’s.A fundamental difference is the role that human beings play in their respective theoretical constructions. While Luhmann’s work is devoid of human presence,3 Krippendorff’s is full of it – starting with the author himself.This is partly due to the very different ways in which the observer is conceived. For Luhmann, society observes itself, and this allows him to hide his own voice behind an abstract and disembodied language. In contrast, Krippendorff takes human beings to be the observers, and this leads him to constantly acknowledge his own presence in his writing rather than hiding behind an omniscient, god-like view.A clear manifestation of this is the frequent use of the first person singular.This use is far from a narcissistic exercise; rather, it is a way of assuming responsibility for what is written, and for its consequences.4 But the author is not the only human presence in Krippendorff’s work. Human beings and their communicative practices constitute the object of his inquiries and theorizing. And if the researcher and theorist is not representing a given reality, but constructing one in the process of writing, then he has to take responsibility for the place others occupy in his work, for the kind of otherness built into his theory. In this context, otherness becomes “the most important challenge to writers of social phenomena” (Chapter 9, this volume) and ethical concerns become a central element of theorizing. 3 Humberto Maturana recalls in Poerksen (2004:79) a conversation with Niklas Luhmann that can explain this absence: “He [Luhmann] told me once that he excluded human beings from his theoretical framework in order to be able to make universal statements. If you speak about human individuals, he argued, you cannot formulate universal statements.” 4 This concern with the use of “I” as a way of assuming responsibility was clearly stated by Foerster (2003:281): “Objectivity demands that the properties of the observer shall not enter the description of his observations. This proscription becomes manifest when you submit to any scientific journal an article containing a phrase like ‘I observed that …’ The editor will return it with the correction ‘It can be observed that …’ I claim that this shift from ‘I’ to ‘it’ is a strategy to avoid responsibility: ‘it’ cannot be responsible: moreover, ‘it’ cannot observe!”

Introduction 5

His approach to theorizing others is also related with a label Krippendorff has often used to refer to his own work, which is “critical scholarship.” This label might sound somewhat surprising if we think, as is often the case, of critical scholarship that is influenced by Marxism.This assimilation of critical scholarship and Marxism became common currency in the field of communication since the exile of the Frankfurt School, when “the term ‘critical’ did not so much describe a position as a cover under which Marxism might hide during a hostile period in exile” (Carey, 1982:22). What is then the position described by the label “critical”? Herbert Marcuse (1964) points to an answer in his introduction to One Dimensional Man when he says that “critical theory must abstract from the actual organization and utilization of society’s resources” and that such abstraction “refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation,” and analyzes “the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities.” In this light, it is possible to view the critical nature of Krippendorff’s work not as an influence of any branch of Marxism, but as an offspring of the general cybernetic and constructivist inspiration of it. As Bateson stated (1972:399), cybernetic explanation is always negative, and it considers “what alternative possibilities could conceivably have occurred and then ask[s] why many of the alternatives were not followed, so that the particular event was one of those few which could, in fact, occur.” Thus, critical theory shares with cybernetics a keen interest not in what is, but in what could have been and could be. This interest is also shared by constructivism, which always starts by assuming that “in the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to be inevitable” and then proceeds to show that “X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is … it is not inevitable” (Hacking, 1999:6–14).Thus, the position of a critical scholar is one in which alternative paths are explored, in which “what is” is shown to be contingent, in which denied possibilities are examined, in which what is before our eyes is transcended “by imagining, at the very least, a world more desirable” (Carey, 1982:33) or, when theorizing communication, by offering “conceptual spaces in which observed forms of communication can be explored relative to those that do not yet occur in practice” (Chapter 4, this volume). It is in this sense that Krippendorff’s work can be labeled as “critical scholarship.” But scholarship – be it critical or not – can avoid falling into oblivion only if it is accepted by those who come into contact with it and incorporated into their own communicative practices. In particular, academic work needs first to be accepted and incorporated into the community of scholars with a disciplinary affinity to that work before it can take hold in the lives of those theorized. In this regard, the history of first-order cybernetics may offer a useful lesson for the prospects of the ideas presented in this book. It is possible to argue that the same element that fueled the success of classic cybernetics – the interdisciplinary approach, the use of tools and concepts applicable to the most diverse domains of inquiry – contained within it the seeds of its demise. Cybernetics became for many disciplines a kind of outside consultant whose tools were appreciated, learned, and even applied, but who was shown the door once its services were no longer required. The day-to-day

6 Introduction

functioning of the different disciplinary discourses remained basically intact and cybernetics slowly lost its prominence.5 Though it would be pointless to blame anyone in particular for this development, it is possible to argue that it could have been avoided through an open and engaged dialogue between cybernetics and the more established intellectual currents within each discipline. Krippendorff’s approach to communication offers ample opportunity for this kind of dialogue. While not part of the mainstream, it shows clear affinities with certain more established strands of thought in the field of communication with which it can engage in a fruitful process of intellectual cross-fertilization. In spite of their different trajectories and vocabularies, Krippendorff’s approach relates to pragmatism’s not foundational epistemology and concern with viability, to phenomenology’s interest in otherness and dialogue, to ethnomethodology’s focus on the reflexive and local production of a social order, and to critical theory’s attempts to question the given and explore the possible. Besides these opportunities for establishing connections, Krippendorff’s approach to communication can also contribute to enriching our field by illuminating self-understanding endeavors, such as Craig’s (1999) metamodel for the field of communication theory and the subsequent exchange it generated.6 The texts collected in this book provide a fitting scaffolding for understanding Craig’s metamodel as a mapping of the field, as well as the ensuing debate. In any event, the place that the ideas presented in this book will occupy within our discipline will depend on whether they “remain viable in complex networks of communication that potentially include the very others they theorize.Theories that fail to compel people to reproduce them simply fade” (Chapter 9, this volume).The task of reproducing Krippendorff’s perspective on communication might not appear easy. At times, he seems to challenge and disrupt the basic concepts and practices that make science, theory, and scholarship what they are.This may lead to confusion, discomfort, or even outrage, but it is also an opportunity to examine and question the fundamentals of our own work – the same way that Garfinkel’s (1967) disruption of the everyday assumptions of social actors allowed him to reveal the unexamined logic of actions. At times, his ideas seem paradoxical – when theorizing the entailments of theorizing, when trying to escape the limitations of writing in writing. But, as shown later in the book, paradoxes might actually be a precondition of

5 Margaret Mead (1968:2) talked of cybernetics as “a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand.… We were impressed by the potential usefulness of a language sufficiently sophisticated to be used to solve complex human problems, and sufficiently abstract to make it possible to cross disciplinary boundaries. We thought we would go on to real interdisciplinary research, using this language as a medium. Instead, the whole thing fragmented. Norbert Wiener wrote his book Cybernetics. It fascinated intellectuals and it looked for a while as if the ideas that he expressed would become a way of thought. But they didn’t.” 6 See Myers (2001) and Russill (2005), together with Craig’s (2001, 2007) responses.

Introduction 7

growth in cognition, a way of helping the field of communication adapt when it is confronted with new phenomena that seem to require a revision of some of its basic ideas. In the end, the value of this work will depend on its capacity to be incorporated into the embodied communicative practices of its readers.This book is just intended as a spark. References Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Berger, Peter L. & Luckmann, Thomas (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City NY: Doubleday. Carey, James (1982). The mass media and critical theory: An American view. Pages 18–33 in M. Burgoon (Ed.). Communication Yearbook 6. Beverly Hills CA: Sage. Craig, Robert (1999). Communication theory as a field. Communication Theory 9,2:119–161. Craig, Robert (2001). Minding my metamodel, mending Myers’. Communication Theory 11,2:231–240. Craig, Robert (2007). Pragmatism in the field of communication theory. Communication Theory 17,2:125–145. Foerster, Heinz von, et al. (1974). The Cybernetics of Cybernetics. Urbana IL: Biological Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois. Foerster, Heinz von (1979). Cybernetics of cybernetics. Pages 5–8 in K. Krippendorff (Ed.). Communication and Control in Society. New York: Gordon and Breach. Foerster, Heinz von (2003). Understanding Understanding. Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. New York: Springer-Verlag. Garfinkel, Harold (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall. Glanville, Ranulph (2004). The purpose of second-order cybernetics. Kybernetes 33, 9/10:1379–1386. Glasersfeld, Ernst von (1995). Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning. London, Washington DC: Falmer Press. Hacking, Ian (1999). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Krippendorff, Klaus (1967). An Examination of Content Analysis: A Proposal for a General Framework and an Information Calculus for Message Analytic Situations. Ph.D. Dissertation. Urbana IL: University of Illinois. Krippendorff, Klaus (Ed.) (1979). Communication and Control in Society. New York: Gordon and Breach. Krippendorff, Klaus (1980). Content Analysis; An Introduction to Its Methodology. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. Krippendorff, Klaus (1986a). A Dictionary of Cybernetics. Norfolk VA: The American Society for Cybernetics. Krippendorff, Klaus (1986b). Information Theory: Structural Models for Qualitative Data. Beverly Hills CA: Sage. Krippendorff, Klaus (2004). Content Analysis; An Introduction to Its Methodology, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. Krippendorff, Klaus (2006). The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. Boca Raton FL: Taylor & Francis CRC. Krippendorff, Klaus & Bock, Mary (Eds.) (2008). The Content Analysis Reader. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. Luhmann, Niklas (1992). What is Communication? Communication Theory 2,3:251–259.

8 Introduction

Luhmann, Niklas (1995). Social Systems. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, Niklas (2000). The Reality of Mass Media. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1964). One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies. Boston MA: Beacon Press. Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company. Mead, Margaret (1968). Cybernetics of cybernetics. Pages 1–11 in H. von Foerster et al. (Eds.) Purposive Systems. First Annual Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics. New York: Spartan Books. Myers, David (2001). A pox on all compromises: Reply to Craig (1999). Communication Theory 11,2:218–230. Poerksen, Bernhard (2004). The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Rorty, Richard (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Russill, Chriss (2005). The road not taken: William James’s radical empiricism and communication theory. Communication Review 8,3:277–305. Sapir, Edward (1949). Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality. G. Mandelbaum (Ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, Bernard (2004). Second-order cybernetics: An historical introduction. Kybernetes 33,9/10:1365–1378. Shotter, John (1993). Converstional Realities. London: Sage. Spencer-Brown, George (1969/1979). Laws of Form. New York: Dutton. Stewart, John (1995). Language as Articulate Contact: Towards a Post-Semiotic Philosophy of Communication. Albany NY: SUNY Press. Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956). Language Thought and Reality; Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. John B. Carroll (Ed.). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Part 1

Communicating Introduction

The five chapters in Part 1 introduce the central threads of this book, and constitute the fundamentals of Krippendorff’s approach to communication. They provide an alternative paradigm for the study of communication – supported by a specific epistemology – and a perspective on language and metaphor that allows for an enhanced understanding of everyday conceptions of communication, and opens the door to a full reconsideration of communication theory. In contrast with the “positivist” or “naturalistic” paradigm that has shaped science for centuries and still dominates the field of communication, Chapter 1 develops an alternative paradigm for communication theory and research.The limitations of the prevalent paradigm – which is based on two main premises, i.e. “observers shall accept only one reality,” and “observers shall not enter their domain of observation” – are exposed through an examination of Russell’s theory of logical types, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Popper’s falsification criterion as responses to paradigmatic challenges. Krippendorff articulates an alternative around five ultimately ethical imperatives that stress the constructed nature of knowledge, replace representational truth with viability, encourage self-reference, and take otherness to be a central concern for communication studies. These imperatives serve as a guide for the remainder of the book. As the paradigm proposed in the first chapter calls for researchers and theorists to include themselves in what they observe and theorize, it follows that ontological concerns should give way to epistemological ones.Thus, Chapter 2 introduces an epistemological foundation for communication that is derived from the proposed paradigmatic alternative and, drawing from cybernetics, is based on the twin operation of drawing distinctions and creating relations. This epistemology takes knowing and communicating to be processes in which circularity and self-reference play major roles. What the first two chapters develop is then applied in Chapter 3 to an examination of common communication metaphors.The chapter starts with a brief theory of metaphor that goes beyond mere rhetorical formulations and links language to perception of realities. Next, the six most pervasive metaphors of human communication in everyday life are distinguished, and their entailments explored

10 Communicating

in view of the social realities their use creates. Finally, the pervasiveness of these metaphors serves as the basis for several constructivist reflections, touching upon the role of language in the social construction of realities, the cognitive autonomy of individuals, the constraints on and the viability of enacted constructions, and the need to recognize oneself in these constructions in order to move from a first-order to a second-order understanding. The role of the mass media and the state of communication research are woven into these reflections. The three previous chapters crystallize in Chapter 4, in which a recursive framework for communication theories is proposed. It renders self-reference as a central feature of communication, claims humans to be cognitively autonomous, and considers that “human communication constitutes itself in the recursive unfolding of communication constructions held by participants (including of each other) into intertwining practices that participants can recognize and explain in terms of communication.” As a framework, it does not propose a definition or a particular theory of communication, but an approach to coordinate the theories of participants in communication into a fundamentally social, locally managed, embodied, and reflexive process. The framework proposed in the previous chapter is applied in Chapter 5 to issues of theory comparability. This chapter aims at showing how privileging any one theory of communication as the general one, one that subsumes all others without consent by those theorized therein, is likely to lead to intellectual imperialism.The chapter puts forward a series of alternative propositions for constructing communication theories in conversation, and for making comparisons among them communicable. The social implications of theorizing serve as a link to issues of otherness and power addressed in the second part of the book.

Chapter 1

An Alternative Paradigm *

Figure 1.1. Abstract: Draw Others Like Yourself 1

Introduction We are witnessing many cracks in the foundations of the established and largely naturalistic paradigm of scientific inquiry.They show the received view of science to be in trouble and suggest revolutionary changes to be imminent if not timely. I am convinced that our pre-paradigmatic or naive experience in studying * From Krippendorff, K. (1989a). On the ethics of constructing communication. Pages 66–96 in B. Dervin et al. (Eds.). Rethinking Communication: Volume 1. Paradigm Issues. Newbury Park CA: Sage – edited and references updated. 1 Composed from elements of a drawing by Saul Steinberg.

12 Communicating

communication leads to a new paradigm and that communication scholars are or could be the avant-garde of this paradigmatic revolution. According to Thomas Kuhn (1962), a paradigm is a unity of (1) methodology, that is, the formal rules governing scientific practices, and (2) the kind of scientific problems to be solved against the background of (3) consensus on what counts as acceptable explanations. Probably the most important property of a paradigm is that it contains its own justifications. It defines rationality and objectivity; sets conditions of truth by means of rational procedures; and prevents false or otherwise inadmissible elements from entering the knowledge generated under the aegis of this paradigm. Paradigms are self-sealing in the sense that empirical evidence which is considered acceptable within a paradigm cannot challenge its validity. Because paradigms are neither established nor challenged by empirical evidence – see Maruyama’s (1974) paradigmatology – I invite you to participate in an epistemological journey. It entails constructing with me a world, a reality that the existing paradigm might consider unacceptable (unreal, crazy, or outrageous, and in any case not worth pursuing), entering this world by applying its premises to our own experiences, particularly in communicating with others, and then asking whether the explanations it offers are more compelling and useful than those provided by established practices.At the end of this journey, I hope you find that the world that I construct with you is not so crazy after all and that the design principles for this reality are applicable not only to understanding communication as an interactive process but also to the scientific efforts of acquiring knowledge about human communication, social processes, and, if you prefer to treat it as something different, nature. The Existing Paradigm The mind derives its limits not from nature but from its own prescriptions. (Immanuel Kant) To characterize the currently dominant paradigm, from which any new paradigm must depart, let me start our journey with some of the metaphors used in accounts of scientific practices. Philosophers and linguists have suggested that metaphors play a central role in communication, thought, and action (Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Ortony, 1979b; Sacks, 1979; Salmond, 1982) and provide the key to the realities in which their users live and work. Scientific discourse relies heavily on agricultural metaphors.Anne Salmond (1982) termed this the “knowledge is landscape” metaphor. Indeed, we divide knowledge into separate fields in which we work, we define areas of study, draw boundaries, and defend ourselves against intrusions by those that have no business doing work where we have established roots. Some fields are productive and yield fruitful insights; others bear few fruits or are fruitless.A second, related body of metaphors is called “understanding is seeing.” We take positions in the field, have outlooks or points of view, choose between micro- and

An Alternative Paradigm 13

macroscopic perspectives, look at things more closely, employ a narrow focus, survey a wide range of phenomena, or approach a problem with an open mind. Common to these metaphors is the assumption that reality exists separately from the scientific observer.While work is undeniably needed to tend to a field, the nature of the crops we harvest is governed by another metaphor that Salmond calls “facts are natural objects.” We refer to facts as hard, solid, concrete, or tangible. Facts are raw, original, simple, uncontaminated, or pure. Facts are searched for, discovered, found, picked up, collected, gathered, and sampled from where they are or uncovered, unearthed, dug up from below the surface. Once researchers have obtained such tangible facts, they may record, sort, examine, weigh, balance, arrange, tabulate, analyze, and process them in the form of data, preserve them for subsequent explorations, and ultimately describe them as findings. Metaphors like “understanding is seeing” and “facts are natural objects” not only set observers apart from what they observe, they also provide the metaphorical grounding of the notion of “objectivity.” Facts are objective when they are discovered in their natural form and habitat. In everyday talk, the assertion “this is a fact” settles the question of their validity, because facts are considered inherently undeniable,unquestionable and irrefutable; they speak for themselves and therefore cannot be doubted or argued with. In scientific discourse, it is their a priori and independent physical existence that makes facts and everything derived from them “objective.” Re-search, literally “repeated search” or “repeated examination” of scientific facts, brings forth, reveals, unveils, or unwraps uncontaminated truths – much like peeling a fruit or extracting a substance – and shows, displays, or describes its objective core. The consistent use of such metaphorical expressions in scientific discourse as well as in everyday talk characterizes the working of an extremely powerful paradigm that governs the production of knowledge in contemporary society, guides much of social research, controls many inquiries into human communication, and must serve existing institutions well. The key to the dominance of this existing paradigm lies in the metaphorical grounding of objectivity: in the conception of a world composed of tangible objects existing outside and independent of being attended to.Two basic premises seem to characterize the ontological commitments of its users.The first locates the objects of scientific inquiry in a unique and preexisting empirical domain where they can be found, distinguished, and referred to according to what – objectively – they are. This premise commands: Observers shall accept only one reality. The universe implied by this premise affords only one unique explanation.According to the above, researchers may choose their metaphorical fields expecting to find the metaphorical objects of their interests – without questioning, however, the fundamental ontological premise of a unique reality: that no object can be two different things at the same time and no two objects can occupy the same space within their fields. It follows that conflicting explanations are seen as defective and

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evidence of human error, biases of perception, interest, or ideology, or as artifacts of language, which need to be corrected at all costs.2 The issue of bias leads to the second premise of the dominant paradigm. Heinz von Foerster (1979:7) suggested it in these words: The properties of observers shall not enter the descriptions of their observations. This premise amounts to a commitment to construct a universe without observers, effectively denying that the act of observation has anything to do with what is observed. It claims an epistemological impossibility: the ability to observe without being an observer. Although I am trying to avoid big names for various forms of -isms and of famous philosophers of science, it is obvious that the ontological commitment entailed by these two premises describes logical positivism, neopositivism, and the kind of empiricism that conceives all knowledge as built upon elementary sensations through which the world reveals its structure and appears to disembodied scientists as what it “in fact” is.Anthony Giddens (1989) prefers the term naturalistic paradigm to refer to the same. Before our journey takes us to issues of human communication, let me show how the proponents of the established and uncritically adopted paradigm manage to preserve their ontological beliefs in the face of obvious challenges. Two examples may suffice, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Logical Types.A third, Karl Popper’s Falsification Criterion, will be addressed later. Heisenberg’s (1958) Uncertainty Principle recognizes that in quantum physics every measurement requires an exchange of energy and disturbs the natural condition of the measured object. It states the impossibility of accurately measuring the position and velocity of atomic particles simultaneously.The principle is stated for observations in the microcosm of quantum physics. Such a limit may be less problematic in everyday (macro)physics, including astronomy, where the act of observation may not noticeably alter the observed, but it certainly has its analogue in the social sciences where observer influences over phenomena of interest are common, not the exception. A generalization of Heisenberg’s principle could be: the more the act of observation (measurement) affects the variables of an observed (measured) system, the greater is the uncertainty about what the data about these variables mean.There is no way to distinguish the effects of observation on a system from the nature of the unobserved system. In other words, the more scientific observers probe and prompt, the less information their data provide about what the observed was like before its observation.

2 Witness the discomfort felt within the community of theoretical physicists by the coexistence of the particle and waveform theories of light. Although these two theories do not seem to lead to conflicting predictions, one can observe a Herculean effort to unify them.

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Note that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (and its generalization to social phenomena) stays entirely within the existing paradigm. It preserves the ontological commitment to an objective reality by affirming the ideal of representing its objects without observer involvement. It merely recognizes a limit: Objectivity is unachievable when observation (measurement) is not a strictly one-way process. The standard response to this principle is for adherents of the existing paradigm to withdraw to situations in which their observations are unproblematic and about which they can assure their scientific peers that they have not entered their domain of observation. Scientific literature is full of such recommendations.A good deal of measurement theory addresses ways to detect and avoid spurious influences on the measuring process.Textbooks call attention to the dangers of experimenter biases, the frequently demonstrated experience that preconceptions and intentions, even by minor laboratory personnel, may influence the results of scientific experiments. They warn that inappropriate choices of analytical techniques could create artificial findings. Social scientists are taught to avoid at all costs the well-known interview biases, the effects of interviewer characteristics, interviewing situations, and ways of asking questions on the kind of responses obtained and recorded. The widely promoted use of Unobtrusive Measures (Webb et al., 1966) – content analysis (Krippendorff, 2004), for example – in preference to experiments with subjects, opinion surveys, and field research, in which individuals cannot but react to the inquiring scientist’s manipulations, is evidence of that effort. Such measures are undertaken not to increase scientific knowledge but to preserve the dominant paradigm. This is particularly troublesome where the acquisition of knowledge and practical action go hand in hand, for example, in psychiatric work, management, community development, political communication, design, and, of course, dialogical forms of communication. Omitting observers from the picture that traditional scientists are expected to paint also entails declaring observer-dependent knowledges irrelevant to science. This accounts for the customary distinction between two categories of knowledge, propositional and objective, and value-laden and subjective or biased.The idea that it is impossible for observers to escape a position from which they observe, that seeing and knowing requires human bodies practicing their living with others, has no place within the naturalist paradigm.Accordingly, observers qualify as scientific observers only where their claim of being able to assume a disembodied and positionless God’s Eye view of the world is not questioned, that is, within a community of adherents to the existing paradigm. I maintain for the purposes of our journey toward a new paradigm that the privileging of positionless knowledge severely limits our understanding of human communication. Russell’s Theory of Logical Types (Whitehead & Russell, 1910) reveals a second limit of the existing paradigm.The theory was invented literally to end two thousand years of puzzlement over paradoxes in logic, mathematics, and most recently the social sciences. In the scholarly community, paradoxes have been a perennial source of intellectual entertainment but have not been taken too seriously. For example,

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did Epimenedes, the Cretan philosopher lie or tell the truth when he claimed, “all Cretans are liars?” Can the command, “disobey this” be followed? What does it mean to say, “I am not talking to you?” From the perspective of propositional logic, contradictions of this kind rob a language of its descriptive power by introducing unsettling circularities. Logicians have called statements of this kind vicious: When one believes Epimenedes tells the truth, one concludes that he must therefore be a liar, and when one assumes him to lie, one concludes he must be telling the truth. Unless one confines the use of paradoxes to inconsequential conversation, they can raise havoc with descriptions of facts. Russell identified the self-reference in paradoxes as the chief villain. Indeed, Epimenedes made a statement about the invalidity of statements, including his own, invoking the endless cycle of their alternating (in)validity. Russell’s commitment to the ontological premise of a single, non-contradictory, paradox-free, and observerindependent reality led him to believe that contradictions and paradoxes are undesirable artifacts of language; his Theory of Logical Types ruled them illegitimate. Statements on any one logical level, his theory insists, must refer only to things, observations, or statements on a logical level beneath them, thus expelling all circular constructions from the legitimate concerns of scientific inquiry. By ruling paradoxes inadmissible, Russell’s theory declared meaningless all conceptions rooted in self-reference: the idea of observers as active participants, notions such as self-determination, self-organization, autonomy, self-fulfilling prophecies, constitutive processes, and dialectical methods, all of which involve potentially “vicious” circularities.To exclude a great many phenomena, particularly in the social world, from scientific inquiries, simply to preserve the foundations of a preferred paradigm – one which Whitehead and Russell intended to clarify – is a drastic measure and a supreme demonstration of the logical power that the dominant paradigm exercises in our scientific enterprise.3 One consequence of adopting Russell’s Theory is the exclusive privileging of the referential (abstract/objectivist according to Volosˇinov, 1986) conception of language, observation, and measurement. In Russell’s conception, any language must describe an object language and is in turn describable by a metalanguage, which is then describable by a metametalanguage, and so forth.The fact that Gödel (1962) placed limits on this infinite regression is rarely recognized in scientific practice. The more remarkable consequence of the Theory of Logical Types, already alluded to in the notion of metalanguages, is its privileging of logical hierarchies. For example, values, conceived to account for how people decide among alternatives, must occur on a logical type higher than the decisions they govern.To account for

3 In an essay on paradox and information, reproduced here as Chapter 16, I am linking morphogenesis and structural growth in cognition, society, and science to the emergence and successful resolution of paradoxes. Simply declaring paradoxes to be an artifact of language “without reality” would prevent us from understanding a major dynamics of intellectual growth.

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choices among applicable values requires higher order values, and so on.This leads to hierarchical expansions that never reach closure except in the conception of a (disembodied) universal principle. Similarly, social control, which implies the ability of one person to cause another’s behavior, puts the controller on a logical level higher than the controlled and immediately favors the constructions of hierarchical forms of organization – Weberian bureaucracies, for example – in which responsibilities are logically unambiguous for everyone. It also locates power at the top of a hierarchy, ultimately in an unquestionable authority or God. Many systems theorists, working within the existing paradigm, virtually equate systems with hierarchical forms (e.g., Miller, 1978) and find hierarchies in the organization of the universe (galaxies containing solar systems containing planets containing …), in the organization of scientific knowledge (philosophy → theoretical sciences → applied sciences → practices …), in the organization of living things (for example, the Linnaean system of biological classification), and so on – not realizing that it is not nature that is organized that way but how the proponents of the existing paradigm are led to perceive it. The Theory of Logical Types encourages us to naturalize hierarchies and removes circular and autonomous forms from the domain of legitimate scientific concerns. In sum, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states the limit of what can be objectively observed within the dominant paradigm. Russell’s Theory of Logical Types exorcises self-reference from referential conceptions of language, outlawing circular forms of expression to protect the existing paradigm from replacement by another.Why do so many communication theorists still follow a paradigm that so obviously limits inquiry? Communication To give some “substance” to the alternate world we construct on our journey, let me start with a Zen story that narrates, pedagogically simplified, the kind of experiences we encounter in communication with each other, friends or strangers. Reading this story will, I hope, invoke experiences that highlight our dual role as everyday communicators and as communication researchers, for later I will posit no difference between the two, save concerns – observational skills, critical ability, and social responsibility, for example – that trained researchers ought to display in their work.The story is as follows: Trading Dialogue for Lodging Provided he makes and wins an argument about Buddhism with those who live there, any wandering monk can remain in a Zen temple. If he is defeated, he has to move on. In a temple in the northern part of Japan, two brother monks were dwelling together.The elder one was learned, but the younger one was stupid and had but one eye. A wandering monk came and asked for lodging, properly

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challenging them to a debate about the sublime teaching. The elder brother, tired that day from much studying, told the younger one to take his place. “Go and request the dialogue in silence,” he cautioned. So the young monk and the stranger went to the shrine and sat down. Shortly afterward, the traveler rose and went in to the elder brother and said: “Your young brother is a wonderful fellow. He defeated me.” “Relate the dialogue to me,” said the elder one. “Well,” explained the traveler, “first I held up one finger, representing Buddha, the enlightened one. So he held up two fingers, signifying Buddha and his teaching. I held up three fingers, representing Buddha, his teaching, and his followers, living the harmonious life. Then he shook his clenched fist in my face, indicating that all three come from one realization.Thus he won and so I have no right to remain here.”With this, the traveler left. “Where is that fellow?” asked the younger one, running in to his elder brother. “I understand you won the debate.” “Won nothing. I’m going to beat him up.” “Tell me the subject of the debate,” asked the elder one. “Why, the minute he saw me he held up one finger, insulting me by insinuating that I have only one eye. Since he was a stranger I thought I would be polite to him, so I held up two fingers, congratulating him that he has two eyes. Then the impolite wretch held up three fingers, suggesting that between us we only have three eyes. So I got mad and started to punch him, but he ran out and that ended it!” (Reps, n.d.:28–30) What can we learn from this story? One lesson is that each communicator seems to live in an entirely different world, a reality that no video of the silent debaters could record. Another is that, while the two debaters do not share the same understanding, they undoubtedly do understand what was going on in their own terms, without experiencing misunderstanding. A third is that information flow is circular between the two debaters and their interaction or alteraction changes the minds and responses of the debaters, leading to the traveling monk’s departure and the resident monk’s anger. What could communication researchers, working within the naturalist paradigm, learn as participants in a debate like this? They would have to treat the situation not as a dialogic give and take but as a way of obtaining valid information about their opponent’s knowledge and attitudes. This is what the two monks were obliged to do, given the ground rule “to debate in silence.” Each perceives the gestures of the other in his own terms. One relates them to his disability, the other to Buddha’s teachings. Each of their observations makes unambiguous sense, and being prevented from talking, which equals being prevented from entering the domain of the other’s experiences, their own interpretations remain unverifiable. Because influencing the object of observation is not permitted by the existing paradigm, our communication researchers might not investigate how they shape perceptions of each other. Indeed,

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within this paradigm, researchers would not be able to make much sense of the situation. Presumably, traditional communication researchers would prefer the position of the older brother, who, being the medium through which the story comes to us, superficially resembles a detached and superior observer or experimenter. By instructing the two monks to debate in silence, he assures himself the privileged position of listening to their accounts separate from each other.The debaters were deprived of hearing the other’s account of the debate. With these “data,” a typical experimenter could either infer what “really” happened, the objective facts underlying both of these “obviously distorted” accounts, or accept the two accounts as two subjectivities and explain their differences in psychological terms. In fact, when I tell fellow communication scholars this story, most of them say it is about misunderstanding. It is not from either communicator’s perspective. However, the Zen story refrains from judging whose account is more reliable. It is not concerned with representational truths. It does not offer psychological explanations of individual differences or biases. It does not shy away from allowing observers to enter their domain of observation, and it does not privilege one narrator’s account over that of another. Instead, it accepts the debaters’ realities as each saw theirs and offers us an understanding of why the sequence unfolded the way it did. Understanding the dynamics of communication is not facilitated by adjudicating misunderstandings or distortions of perception – unless the latter are identified as such by those involved and enter their interactions Let me suggest that the renaissance conception of a single reality and the injunction against allowing scientific observers to enter their domain of observation should be removed from studies of communication and replaced by other, empirically less restrictive and ethically more acceptable principles. In the next leg of our journey, I propose five imperatives: aesthetic, empirical, self-referential, ethical, and social.They are not meant to be a collection from which to select one and not the other, but an integrated whole, a system that hangs together and defines a paradigm in its own right.To me this paradigm is far more attractive and challenging than the one it is meant to replace. Let me consider these imperatives and elaborate their implications, keeping in mind the tentative nature of my proposal. The Aesthetic Imperative The aesthetic imperative reads quite innocently: Construct your own reality to see. It is intentionally ambiguous, for it can be read in two ways: “in order to see, you must construct a world that affords being seen” and “what is seen is the reality you have constructed.” Construction involves creativity. It is not a mechanical process.The Zen story exemplifies this with clarity. Both monks make perfect sense of the situation

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in which they find themselves, on their own terms. Each lives, observes, and acts in his own reality. It is this constructed reality that gives meaning to unfolding sequences of individual experiences. Through the eyes of the older brother, we witness two universes. If we add the older brother’s construction and those of the readers of this story, we deal with the interactive creation of a multiverse of tenuously connected realities. The objective/subjective distinction, central to the established paradigm, is irrelevant here. A camera could not capture what the two monks are experiencing and any one silent debater’s account could not do justice to the world of the other. Although the two accounts of what happened share some phrases, for example, “one finger,” “two fingers,” and so on, they play entirely different roles in the debaters’ stories.These constructions account for how each gesture is interpreted and responded to.These constructions are also quite real, not only for the debaters, but also for the older brother and the readers of the story who can make sense of what happened only by taking the two accounts seriously.They are interactively true. There are many biological examples where seeing, acting, and constructing go hand in hand.The blind spot in our retina demonstrates that we do not miss what we cannot sense, making up, albeit unconsciously, what should be there (after Foerster, 1981a:288–289). Binocular vision helps explain why the nervous system had to invent a third dimension in order to cope with the conflicting images in our two retinas (after Bateson, 1979:77–79). Color perception experiments revealed no demonstrable correlation between the spectrum of light reflected from objects and the colors we perceive as an intrinsic property of their surfaces, but a remarkable mechanism through which the experience of color is created (after Brou et al., 1986). So-called visual illusions are illusions only relative to a mistaken conception of visions as an optical system for accurately representing what is in front of one’s eyes. Research on the neural organization of perception strongly suggests that whatever we see is largely generated from within the brain – the product of active, iterative, and semiautonomous cognitive processes that determine their own criteria. The circular construction of realities largely evolves from their own history of construction, occasionally perturbed by exterior sensations (after Varela, 1984). I mention these biological insights as they oppose the widespread use of optical metaphors for perception, which suggests that the human brain processes more or less accurate pictorial representations of the outside world. Optical metaphors fail to explain the most important feature of cognition: its autonomy in constructing realities under perturbations from a world that is constitutively unknowable without constructing it. In sociology, the idea of knowledge as socially constructed and governed by processes that result from the collective history of constructing reality is not new. The early proponents of this sociology of knowledge, however – Berger & Luckmann (1966), for example – carefully limit their concern to social reality, which has a history of being seen as defined and superimposed on material reality – Marx’s

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notion of ideological superstructure, for example – thus avoiding the issue of how deep this construction penetrates human existence. Studies in social psychology (Gergen & Davis, 1985; Harré, 1986) go further and suggest that human emotions, which are commonly thought to be biological, instinctive, and hence involuntary in nature, have well documented social origins and histories. Romantic love, for example, its suddenness of onset, its physiological arousal, and its commitment to the other’s wellbeing, is a social construction that may have emerged at most seven hundred years ago (Averill, 1985). Even consciousness, the practice of self-ascription of perception and the ability to take responsibility for one’s actions, commonly considered a defining characteristic of being human, seems not to be biological or natural either. According to Julian Jaynes (1982), it may have been invented in the Mediterranean some time between the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. There seems to be little doubt that we see, feel, act upon, and account for our own constructions of reality, just as the Zen monks did. Should scientists be exempt from this epistemological constraint? I believe the foregoing is generalizable to scientific pursuits as well. In fact, as social scientists, we assume considerable freedom in proposing hypotheses, designing experiments to generate data to test them, creating theories to explain a larger range of data, formulating policy recommendations – all of them are creative of conceptions that enable seeing the world as constructed. The history of communication research is not so much about communication but about creative scholars playing with novel ideas and institutions that benefit from developing these ideas into technologies and methodologies. Communities form around such theoretical/ practical projects until they seem exhausted. In other words, scientific knowledge seems related less to the “area” it claims to depict than to the nature of the community generating it. Even Albert Einstein, who otherwise believed in the existence of a single and consistent universe (“God does not play dice”), frequently acknowledged that the universe we see is constructed to be seen by creative scientists: We now know that science cannot grow out of empiricism alone, that in the constructions of science we need to use free invention, which only a posteriori can be confronted with experience as to its usefulness. This fact could elude earlier generations, to whom theoretical creation seemed to grow indirectly out of empiricism without the creative influence of a free construction of concepts.The more primitive the status of science is the more readily can the scientist live under the illusion that he is a pure empiricist. (Einstein in Pais, 1982:14) The recognition that constructions of reality precede observations also underlies various criticisms of the established paradigm, which makes an external reality the principal ruler of what can be said about it. For example, communication researcher Daniel O’Keefe maintains that all

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observations are inherently “theory-laden,” that “facts” are not facts independent of a conceptual (theoretical) framework, and thus that there is no theoryindependent observation language. As Hanson (1958) puts it, “seeing is a ‘theory-laden’ undertaking” and thus “there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.” (O’Keefe, 1975:174–175) In his review of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), W.V.O. Quine pointed out that physical theory is “ninety-nine parts conceptualization to one part observation,” and concluded that this would make “nature” a poor candidate for the “real” world (cited from Bruner, 1986:100).Apparently, the idea that cognitive and communicative considerations govern theory construction and perception generally, including in physics but probably more so in the social sciences, should not be so strange. The aesthetic imperative liberates us from paradigmatically imposed externalities.Without acknowledging that we construct our realities to be seen and experienced, we reduce ourselves to response mechanisms. The view expressed so far is not entirely my own. It is consistent with Jean Piaget’s (1970), Heinz von Foerster’s (1981a; Segal, 1986), Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (1995), Nelson Goodman’s (1978, 1984), and Jerome Bruner’s (1986) work, and related to various less radical forms of social constructivism, for example, those of Kenneth Gergen and Keith Davis (1985), Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), Luckmann (1983), and including perhaps Jesse Delia (1977). The aesthetic imperative, “construct your own reality to see,” is in fact a rephrasing of Foerster’s (1981a:308), “If you desire to see, learn how to act.” The Empirical Imperative The aesthetic imperative reminds us of the freedom we have in constructing what we see. However, proponents of the existing paradigm, finding no solid ontological ground to stand on, dismiss it as “relativist,” implying that “everything goes.” Everyday experiences teach us otherwise; thus, the empirical imperative recognizes that some constructions of reality are viable in the sense that enacting them supports their beholders being and acting, whereas other constructions may fail them. The empirical imperative acknowledges a “realist” constraint on the aesthetic imperative without invoking references to ontology, constitutively unknowable external causes of seeing, or beliefs in an observerless world: Invent as many alternative constructions as you can and enact them to experience the constraints on their viability. Viability is not representational truth. Going back to our Zen story, while it is obvious that the two debating monks present the older brother with very different

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but perfectly consistent narratives of their reality, it is important to note that neither has experienced misunderstanding. Leaving the monastery does not get the visitor in trouble nor does the younger brother’s anger.The silent interactions are perfectly clear in either monk’s reality construction, they determined the outcome, consensually complied with by both monks..The two rather different constructions of reality remained viable in the sense that the situation in which they were enacted did not get their beholders into difficulties. Had the debate been continued with words, or had the older brother intervened after hearing both accounts, the two monks may have recognized the incompatibility of their narratives and created mutually more fitting reality constructions. Nonviability is the experience of constructions that get their beholder into experiences that do not fit the expectations they entail.Viability or nonviability is a property of constructions in use. Misunderstanding may not be life-threatening, but mistaking a loaded gun for a toy may be; imagining being superman and jumping from a high building certainly is. The notion of viability is connected to the theory of evolution. In biology, evolution does not favor the fittest (a popular misinterpretation of Darwin’s theory) but selectively eliminates organisms that fail to succeed in interactions with their environment. It suggests that surviving organisms have features that have not proved fatal without guaranteeing that possessing these could not become fatal in the future. Mutation constantly creates new biological features non-purposely, randomly, whether they are relevant for survival or not.The constructions of reality that people hold and their creative reconstructions are subject to evolutionary processes as well. Nonviable constructions that lead to the deaths of those who enact them are no longer reproduced. One might argue that the “external world” is always “a poor communicator – for not revealing itself – but a decisive one.” It has only one message to send. It says either “NO” to a construction – when its predictions fail, when the actions it suggests do not yield expected results, or when its enactment kills the actor – or it says nothing at all. From “nothing” or “no comment” one cannot infer anything about what the external world is like or locate what makes one’s construction viable. Ernst von Glasersfeld (1995) equates viability with the ecological concept of “fit.” To highlight the difference between fit and representation, he used the analogy of a key and a lock.There may be many keys that could open a particular lock but there are also some that could not. Keys that open the lock do not describe it, just as constructions that work do not represent the world.They cannot be subject to the criterion of representational truth. Gregory Bateson (1972) anticipated this imperative by linking its negative form of reasoning in evolution to cybernetic explanations.There also is a connection to Karl Popper’s (1959) Falsification Criterion. Concerned with whether scientific predictions could be (perfectly) valid, Popper concludes they cannot. It is impossible to know whether one has all the evidence in favor or against a theory. Instances that could reject it may be forthcoming, even in the distant future. Recognizing that

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verification (empirical support for the truth-value of a theory) is impossible, Popper suggests that falsification lies at the heart of scientific procedures. Positivists have semantically distorted Popper’s insights by calling a “nonfalsified” theory or hypothesis “corroborated” or “implicitly verified,” a meaning that violates Popper’s intentions. Although Popper’s philosophy of science could not overcome the established paradigm, it clearly makes no claim as to what, if anything, nonfalsified theories describe. Falsification is also the key to Donald Campbell’s (1974) “Evolutionary Epistemology,” Peter Skagestad’s (1978) sequel to it, and Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (1995) radical constructivism. The conservative response to experiencing the nonviability of a construction is to limit its use to what worked and shy away from exploring its limits. In stating his Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg ventured to the limits of the existing paradigm. Rather than modify the paradigm to accommodate the effects of observation, its proponents exclude from empirical inquiry situations where it fails, declaring the observer effects on scientific findings a methodologically dangerous territory, thus banishing such situations from the conduct of science. Many constructions of reality are possible, fictional, unethical, irrelevant and nonfalsifiable.Without enacting them, the external world is silent. From an evolutionary perspective, diversity of constructions is advantageous, as one can never know which constructions prove fatal.The empirical imperative suggests that one always go as far as one can. But it also invites us not to take too seriously constructions that have not been enacted and be aware of those that cannot be tested – beliefs in supernatural constructions and foundations.The imperative encourages us to push the application of constructions to where reality begins to assert itself, for only where constructions become nonviable can we learn. It calls on researchers to overcome the conservatism of merely elaborating the constructions currently in vogue and instead generate new ones that expand the horizon of understanding to its realistic limits. It suggests treating viable constructions as what they are: not yet proven nonviable. Among the conceptual consequences of the empirical imperative in communication research is the rejection of cognitive sharing as a criterion for good communication. Cognitive sharing among communicators – having or converging to the same, similar, or overlapping cognitive representations of an external world – is impossible to establish.We cannot open someone’s brain without destroying what we wish to observe; and if we could, we cannot correlate observed neuronal activity with anything other than what we observe. In the Zen story, there indeed was little correlation between what we could have seen from a camera’s record of the silent debate and the realities that the two monks reported. The ideal of cognitive sharing would also make communication superfluous. The anthropologist Anthony Wallace (1961) comes to this conclusion when he shows cognitive sharing to be neither a necessary condition for society nor a desirable feature of culture and human communication. He suggests complementarity as a better criterion for good communication, and indeed the two debaters’ cognitive systems seem to fit like hand in glove, key in lock, or two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle visibly touching at the

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fringes of their constructed worlds.There would be little to say if cognitive sharing existed. It was the differences in the accounts relayed to the older monk (and to us through him) that explained the outcome of the encounter and made an instructive story. The Self-Referential Imperative The self-referential imperative squarely counters the second premise of the established paradigm. It recommends: Include yourself as a constituent of your own constructions. Enlightenment scientists have good reasons to be troubled by this imperative as they would have to give up two privileges that the existing paradigm implies: the ability to hold nature, not themselves, responsible for the theories they “find” and the ability to ignore the “vicious circularities” of self-reference. The former is empirically if not ethically untenable. The latter was resolved in George SpencerBrown’s (1979) Laws of Form, Francisco Varela’s (1975) calculus of self-reference, and Foerster’s (1981a) calculus of infinite regression and theory of eigen-behaviors. This imperative builds on these developments. Let me begin with the obvious. Communication scholars, whether their intellectual roots are in the humanities, the social sciences, or technology, can never escape participation in the culture that produced them, taught them its conceptions, and provided them opportunities to work, observe, theorize, and contribute. Scientific problems emerge from scientific culture. We solve them with the instruments given to us, but what we contribute affects the very context in which the problems arose.To understand our scholarly role is to conceptualize ourselves as co-constituents of the phenomena we address. One may appreciate the difficulties of self-referential theory construction when asked to describe a map that includes its maker, which must therefore include the cognitive map that the mapmaker has of the map he or she is making, which, of course, contains the map of the map of the map, and so on. Self-reference, repeatedly applied, produces an infinite regression in which the distinction between the map and its maker disappears in the process of mapping.This is precisely what the self-referential imperative implies. Observers who, by acting on an object, observe that object as acted upon and who, in response to the construction of what they experience, act upon the object observed, must ultimately see themselves in the object they have been constructing. This self-referential circularity is also evident in the microcosm of our Zen story. It applied a rule: “If the wandering monk wins a debate on Buddhism, he may stay at the temple.” This rule was designed to bring the debate to a decision point. Save for the role of the older brother, it rendered references to the world outside the debate irrelevant.The two debating monks started as strangers, but during the

26 Communicating

debate – that sequence of actions, responses to actions, responses to responses – each debater contributed something to how the other saw him and responded, converging to a point when the decision was clear to both.The two monks did not merely observe one another; they influenced each other’s observations, changed their conceptions of each other and could not help but bring their constructions of each other to the test. There was no sharing. The constructions the debaters developed became complementary: What each communicated (here, gesturally, in silence) had a consistent place in the other’s construction. Only the older brother learned how these constructions ended the way they did. As Heisenberg’s Principle suggests, interaction with one’s environment introduces uncertainty as to what it was before one became interactively engaged with it. Because the debate was to lead to a decision, the debating monks could care less of who the other was before they engaged each other. Their aim was not ontological but ontogenetic, not to describe what the other knows, but to interactively come to complementary reality constructions, to an equilibrium at which each monk had reached a sense of closure. The self-referential imperative encourages us to acknowledge our inevitable role in what we construct. In communication, we cannot deny that responding to the constructions that others enact changes our own. Our self-conception not only causes the self-conception of others but also responds to theirs. Being both cause and response is common to numerous social situations. Scientific experiments, for example, are supposedly designed to generate data that could decide the validity of a theory or hypothesis. But such tests are never only about a hypothesis, but also about the experimenter’s ability to generate relevant data. Without an experimenter’s interventions, experimental data would not exist. Or, when interviewing people for their opinions, one cannot help but influence the interviewees, directing their attention to what the survey researcher wants to know, raising their awareness about a question that may have never crossed their mind, or forcing them to decide among alternatives that mean nothing to them. It is a myth to believe that interview data represent the attitudes and opinions of interviewees. They represent the pollster’s interests as well. Nicholas Bateson (1984) rightly suggests that we do not collect survey data but construct them. Other examples of causing and then responding to observational data include therapeutic interventions, management decisions, policy considerations, and design. Interactive understanding is typical, not the exception, and understanding that understanding requires putting the human actors into the context in which this understanding is achieved. I want to mention one methodological implication and three conceptual opportunities of the self-referential imperative: autonomy, self-realization, and responsibility. Methodologically, moving beyond Heisenberg’s limit, it is important to realize that we cannot help but intervening in the very phenomena we wish to understand. Experiments with subjects, interview schedules, and measuring instruments are designed to bring forth the very conditions we then analyze. Undisturbed nature is

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a myth and cannot serve as the paradigm case for research. Interactive involvement usually sets in motion a process of convergence to an equilibrium or eigen-behavior, which is stable under repeated applications of the very operation that brings this process about. At that point, the operation and the operand, the observer and the observed, the mapmaker and the map, even the psychiatrist and the client (as conceptualized by either in relation to the other) are no longer independent of each other.They form more or less stable relationships, a system of which the inquiring scientists are as much a part as the people allegedly studied. The self-referential imperative suggests that it is such stabilities which we come to know: a unity of data construction, their analysis, and what we say about our experiences with both. Among the circular constructions explainable with the help of the self-referential imperative is autonomy. Conceptually, autonomy means self-government. Operationally, it involves a relatively closed network of communication among parts of a system whose behavior constitutes that very network.To constitute means to define from within; it is the mark of an autonomous system that its organization cannot be designed from its outside nor as the product of external causes or controls. Neither can it be understood by outsiders of the system.The established paradigm, which requires distinctions between cause and consequence, dependent and independent variables, definiens and definiendum, controller and controlled, provides no place for such phenomena, much less can scientists be conceptualized as participants in operationally closed systems. Self-realization is conceptually related to autonomy. It shares its prefix with selfgovernment, self-determination, self-organization, self-production (autopoiesis), self-reflection (introspection), and so on. In human terms, self-realization is the use of one’s ability to distinguish oneself in the context of others. So conceived, selfrealization can emerge only in communication with other people and involves complementary constructions of self and others.As with autonomy, self-realization escapes external observation. Explanations in terms of innate properties of the organism (Chomsky regarding language), responses to stimuli (B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism), modes of production (Marx’s historical determinism), and early acquired drives (Freud’s psychological determinism) contradict the very notion of self-realization. I echo Jürgen Habermas’s (1971) suggestion here that Freud with his very invention of psychological determinisms deserted and destroyed his idea of psychoanalysis as a process in which an individual realizes (invents) herself. The self-referential imperative enables us to assume responsibility for what our constructions realize. One may ask why the naturalist paradigm survived without holding its proponents responsible for their contributions. The answer lies in the above-mentioned use of metaphors to describe scientific practices. Scientists could not possibly be held accountable when one believes they merely discover what someone else, nature or God, has put there. Scientific knowledge cannot possibly be subjective when it is data, not scientists, that decide among competing hypotheses. By creating a suitable metaphorical ground for evading responsibility for scientific findings, enlightenment science has been able to stay out of all kinds

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of political, economic, and military struggles and has survived ideological and religious controversies. I suggest this politically convenient paradigm is no longer sustainable. The need to take responsibility for our theoretical constructions is particularly important in the social sciences, where theories are reified and institutionalized easily. Social theories are about people.They can be understood by people who either actively oppose them or adopt them as providing new insights about themselves. Here, the validity of theories becomes a function of the influence they have over the people studied. Ethnic stereotypes, self-fulfilling hypotheses and certain principles of effective management, for example, the Hawthorne effect,4 are of this kind. I would say that B.F. Skinner is responsible for contributing to the kind of behaviorism in psychology that reduces humans to trivial stimulus-response mechanisms. I suggest that commercial mass communication research is responsible for “improving” the economics of media control over large audiences. Social scientists need to be aware when their theories favor the interests of dominant minorities, controlling industries, or oppressive governments. I suggest that Sigmund Freud should be held responsible for having invented a model of the human psyche with its drives, repressive mechanisms, and childhood determinism that leave little room for human creativity and emancipation.The vocabulary he initiated has created a huge industry of mental illnesses and psychiatric services. Had another theory taken hold in the conceptual vacuum during Freud’s time, we might see ourselves differently today. The imperative to acknowledge ourselves in the realities we construct should also be applied to the paradigms under which we choose to work.That choice has considerable consequences for what we theorize, the research we do, and how we come to know each other and the world.Working under the established paradigm is a choice as well, not the only rational alternative. The Ethical Imperative The three imperatives discussed so far give scientists considerable freedom to construct viable realities, encourage explorations of their empirical limits, and suggest taking responsibility for these constructions.Although responsibilities always imply fellow beings, the above imperatives have not yet addressed them. They do not discourage generating inhumane knowledge, making theories into dogmas, communicating monologically, and creating subjects that have no human agency. The ethical imperative is to prevent communication scholars from privileging their logic over that of others and relying on a mono-logic that portrays scholars as rational and superior to those they observe, describe, and theorize. This is precisely the

4 The Hawthorne effect refers to improvements in people’s performance following an interest in and attention to their work. It was found to interfere with measurements of workplace ergonomics and is recognized as an important motivator in the management of organizations.

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condition of the two monks debating in silence.They could see each other only in their own terms, creating two coherent stories that left no place for the story of the other, for the recognition that the other lived in a different world. The ethical imperative: Grant others that occur in your constructions at least the same capabilities that you employ in constructing them. To appreciate what this simple imperative suggests, one has to realize the long tradition it opposes.The established paradigm was born in the natural sciences where nature is construed to have no mind, no understanding of what it does and no knowledge of how or when it is studied. Given this construction of nature, it makes sense for natural scientists to remove ethical considerations from their inquiries and to assume the freedom to follow any research idea they please, test any theory of interest, and accept any truth to which nature does not object. Imported into the social sciences and mindlessly applied there to people who can think and act intelligently, this paradigm makes subjects of human beings. Subjects, as the word implies, are meant to be subjected to conditions of scientists’ choosing. They are understood as causal stimulus-response mechanisms, as respondents to questions, as followers of instructions, passive television viewers, even as systems of attributes whose variables are to be associated, correlated, explained, or predicted. Delia (1977) aptly criticized the type of research that this tradition favors and labeled it “variable research.” Even more remarkable are the fundamental inequalities between conceptions of scientific observers and observed subjects on which this tradition thrives. Claiming intellectual abilities for ourselves while denying them to our subjects, borders on institutional oppression. On a small scale, Rita Atwood and her students (1984) noticed this methodological injustice while interviewing women on how the image of women in television had changed. Starting with an elaborate set of analytical categories to code what they expected to hear, they soon learned that interviewees had much more elaborate and detailed vocabularies than the researchers anticipated. This inequality exists on a larger scale, for example, in Western social research applied to developing countries. It rarely offers their subjects a voice in how they are studied. For example, when a survey of a Turkish village is designed far away at Harvard University, an army of trained interviewers descends without warning so as to keep the village in a “natural state” and to prevent villagers from discussing the survey among each other.When data are flown back to Boston to be ground through a sophisticated analysis that assigns each villager a point in multidimensional space, the practical wisdom and complex relationships among villagers are lost, excluded from the preconceived survey instrument, irrelevant to the hypotheses of the “naturalist” study, and hence never “found.”Variable research confines its findings to the mono-logic of its method. It is bad enough when researchers deny their role in constructing theories, believing that their data did this for them. But when communication theorists

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exclude themselves from their theories of human communication, interpersonal influence, attitude change, message effects, fear-inducing methods, and mass media effects, their theorizing becomes elitist if not unethical. This kind of scholarship generalizes the ability of human subjects to serve the interests of researchers, to react to stimuli not under their control, to have no opinions other than those pollsters deem survey-worthy, and to succumb to compelling advertisements, while researchers celebrate their own intellectual contributions and declare immunity to the very influences they discover in others. This unacknowledged discrepancy between two kinds of humans – theorists and theorized – is appalling. The methodological denigration of the other is acknowledged and opposed in at least two research traditions, ethnography and participatory research. Ethnography originated in anthropology as an attempt to understand “natives” in their own terms, paying close attention to the concepts informants use in the context of their lifeworlds. Ethnographers are taught to be aware of potentially intrusive roles as interviewers and participant-observers.These precautions, however, describe what ethnographers might find in the field, not what their interactions bring forth.While writing about their field work back home removes them from informants’ everyday lives, ethnography is in part an ethical response to the mono-logic of naturalist inquiries. In Participatory Research, called “Socially Shared Inquiry” by Herminia Alfonso (2001), the recognition of theorist-theorized inequality has stimulated a conscious effort to reformulate methods of research to include the intellectual abilities of stakeholders in the results. Paulo Freire (1970, 1974) too maintains that the role of researchers who care for those they study is not to fabricate liberating ideas and take them into a community but to invite people to participate creatively in a process that involves above all an understanding (conscientization) of the diverse realities in which they live. Adopting the ethical imperative in social inquiry is the key to being able to describe communication as dialogue – enabling others to develop their own understanding while listening to that process. It means theorizing communication with respect and empathy for the social relationships in which one participates – not as an independent variable to be correlated with dependent variables of particular interests, but as a phenomenon within which dialogue can occur. The ethical imperative suggests replacing the unidirectional conception of communication – monologue – where possible by recursive conceptions, by circular reality constructions in which the universe of one is embedded in that of the other, allowing multiverses to be acknowledged and studied. The aforementioned infinite regress that this recursive embedding of different logics entails becomes resolved by dialogue. It encourages a way of being with each other in mutual fascination for each other’s identity and constructions of reality. Figure 1.2 compares the monological observation of others from within the received paradigm with the kind of multiverse that the ethical imperative enables people to realize.

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Figure 1.2. Monological and Dialogical Observations

In the left part of the figure, one can see a naturalist observer (oval face) describing a subject (rectangular face). That observer develops a single representation of the observed, typically using a representational language to describe it. By being fully in charge of one’s logic of description, one can see only one positionless universe. This process can be written as a function: the operation “Observe” yielding a Representation of the observed Object: Representation = Observe(Object) This one-step application of the operation “Observe” is where the existing paradigm would leave us. However, when one grants observed others the same capacities to construct their others, the observer’s universe of the established paradigm collapses into two. On the right side of this Figure, two partners in dialogue engage each other in a circular process through which they understand or construct themselves relative to how the other enacts self-understanding. Expressed as a function, a first approximation of the Self-construct is obtained by observing (or applying the operation “Observe” to) the interactions between one’s Self and one’s Other: Self-construct1 = Observe(Self ← → Other) This is as far as the self-referential imperative would go. However, if this Self and that Other both realize each other’s constructions, which emerge as such from the history of observing one’s interactions with others, a second approximation of the Self-construct involves applying the operation “Observe” twice to one’s Self and one’s Other: 1 Self-construct2 = Observe(Self-construct1 ← → Other-construct ) = Observe(Observe(Self ← → Other) ← → Observe(Other ← → Self))

In continuous communication between such observers, respective selves and others become interactively interwoven, each reconstructing their relationship in response to creative perturbations by the other. As a result of this sequence of embedded operations, the original Self and the original Other disappear in the

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evolving background while bringing the recursively obtained products into view. Hence: Construction = Observe(Observe(… Observe(Self ← → Other) …)) Expressing this construction as a function of the construction that the previous Observe produced: Construction = Observe(Construction) Or for short: Construction is Constructing Constructions. The process and its products direct each other within the constraints asserted by the empirical imperative. The methodological consequences of these imperatives emerge in the kind of participatory research in which members of a community engage each other in dialogues that increase the competence of the community to understand itself (Alfonso, 2001), developing and revising collective realities as appropriate, leaving room for community members to create their own complementary constructions and to realize themselves in them. Researchers who accept the ethical imperative are, as Freire suggests, more facilitators than experts.They know by empathy rather than position. They commit to dialogue without assuming they already know the solutions to the problems of others.They possess the flexibility to switch positions from one reality construction to another, particularly between their own and that of others, and can thus see the world including themselves through the eyes of others.The ethical imperative encourages diverse people to live together, creating recursively intertwined dialogical constructions of reality. The Social Imperative What happens now to objectivity, the unquestionable truthfulness of scientific knowledge on which modern society has built its technology and institutions, presumably to serve its members? What can be relied upon in the proposed paradigm with its grounding in human communication and action? What is still missing in my effort to reconstruct the knowledge that served us well historically? Let me sketch a possible answer as we approach my fifth and last imperative. Under the existing paradigm, for data to count as evidence, they must not only support relevant hypotheses or theories, they must also be reliable. Reliability describes the condition that observers describe the same phenomena in the same terms. It is this requirement that upholds the idea of objectivity as transcending human involvement.The new paradigm, however, moves human beings, their bodily participation, experiences, and communications, into the void that the existing

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paradigm leaves unfilled. From the perspective of the latter, what would the assertion of agreement mean? What act is performed by saying “I agree with you,” during a conversation? It cannot possibly refer to a shared understanding, not even that one sees something the same as the other does. Cognitive phenomena are constitutively inaccessible from the outside and escape comparisons, yet the phrase “I agree with you” is common. I suggest that the assertion of agreement indicates the feeling that further conversation on the subject would no longer add to one’s own understanding and the suggestion to move on. It asserts that understanding is sufficiently coordinated and reality constructions apparently are complementary. Note that such a judgment presupposes the kind of recursive reality constructions that the ethical imperative suggests. It asserts that the history of interactions has led the communicators to a new coordination of understanding and responding to each other. Assertions of agreement are not about mental states but about satisfactory interaction. While convergence to intersubjectively agreeable constructions is common if not inevitable in most communication situations, stable complementarities can lead to entrapment.The movie My Dinner with Andre contains a vivid description of the selfentrapping qualities that social construction can develop, reifying themselves in the form of communicative practices and converging toward stable complementarities from which it becomes difficult to escape: He said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” “Ah, New York yes that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of NewYorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes.”And he said,“Why do you think they don’t leave?”And I gave him different banal theories. And he said “Oh, I don’t think it is that way at all.” “I think that NewYork is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they’ve built – they’ve built their own prison – and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners.And as a result they no longer have – having been lobotomized – the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or even to see it as a prison.”And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a seed for a pine tree.” And he put it in my hand. And he said, “Escape before it’s too late.” (Shawn & Gregory, 1981:92–93) Too often apparently good ideas – once institutionalized, legitimized, and systematically applied – create monstrous social realities that become burdensome to their constituents. The concept of objectivity was the enlightenment’s weapon against religious mysticism. It is now blinding its proponents from the social consequences of their theories.The promise of democracy, of government by and for the people, has eroded into betting on, casting, and counting votes. Marxism, predicting the emergence of a society without classes that exploit each other’s

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economic weaknesses, has led its followers into political-economic bankruptcy. Technologies introduced for the convenience of users, cars for example, have made life increasingly difficult and costly. On a micro level, marriages typically start on noble premises but may end in abuse and divorce. Coming back to communication research, we must realize and respond to the extraordinary reificative power of scientific theories. From self-fulfilling prophesies we know that predictions may affect what was predicted. Communication theories may teach people how to communicate with each other.Theories of the mind may encourage classifications of mental illnesses. Political theories may institute new or erode old governments, and so on. I say “may,” for not all theories are equally convincing and become true by reification. Academics may not be the ones who build cities, program the mass media, run governments, or organize people for collective actions, but they do publish their work – under the existing paradigm, without considering its social consequences. True, like technology, the social consequences of theories are difficult to predict, precisely because they develop in the hands of their users. They can encourage growth or lead to confinements. Interactively evolving constructions can unwittingly become traps in five common steps: (1) Initially, and while aware of alternatives, they provide attractive benefits. (2) They are adopted at the expense of other reality constructions. (3) In due time, their benefits come to be taken for granted, and their enactment becomes habitual, “natural,” and expected. (4) In repeated practices, constructions exhaust their own diversity and blind their users to alternatives. (5) Should life turn out burdensome under these conditions, people find themselves entrapped in their constructions without apparent escape.5 To the extent that objectivity, like authority, can have such entrapping consequences, it needs to be overcome – not by collecting more data, refining the theories that were found deficient, and relying on more prominent social scientists, but by including those who have a stake in the consequences of scientific knowledge. I see problems with the preference of traditional communication scholars for causal explanations that reduce human beings to stimulus response mechanisms, for message effects studies that fail to question the consumer society their findings encourage, and for easily studied individual phenomena without awareness of or concerns for the social and cultural consequences of psychological or cognitive explanations. I suggest, therefore: When communicating, preserve or open new possibilities for others. 5 See Chapter 8 in this volume for the notions of entrapment and pathology.

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By preserving or opening new possibilities for others to enact, my social imperative is intended to challenge objectivity, which has no place for choice and no place for others. I am suggesting that choices be relevant to the lives of others, neither objectively enumerable nor of one’s own preference. It embeds intersubjective agreement as a criterion for academic work in the mutually affirmed options that conversations about social constructions presuppose. Intersubjectivity should be regarded as a choice. Critical scholars have developed many devices to create alternative constructions: recontextualization, inversion, demystification, removing presuppositions, highlighting suppressed voices, questioning assumptions, embedding monologue in dialogue, and more.The social imperative suggests to put these devices to work not for the benefit of one’s own scholarship but of those others we write about and wish to serve. It is not meant to be altruistic, however.The act of creating new possibilities for others returns possibilities to oneself – but manifest in social realities for both. I take Paulo Freire’s (1974) suggestion to heart when I propose that communication researchers consider their theories as suggestions, not to tell people what is right or wrong – this judgment should be left to those theorized or affected – but to communicate possibilities that enable meaningful choices where social reality has failed to provide them. Concluding Remarks While the use of the word positivism, or naturalism, is now in disrepute, its premises still permeate much of social research, are encoded in the language we use to describe our findings and nourish the technology and institutions built on them. Unfortunately, the current paradigmatic limits on theory construction render the social sciences increasingly irrelevant except where they serve institutional interests that almost always trivialize their subjects and narrow their choices. But when one denies these premises, as I have, and turns them into their opposite or upside down, as Marx might have said, one comes to appreciate that there are alternative worlds that this all-pervasive paradigm has prevented us from seeing, worlds we can coconstruct, take responsibility for, and live in, worlds in which we grant others creative capabilities similar to our own, worlds in which we can realize ourselves in relations to others, and worlds that may support liberation from the history of metaphysical determinism – without denying experiential constraints. Communication is central to all of these worlds, not in the sense of control, which positivist ontology naturally favors, but in the sense of dialogue, engaging in ongoing interactions that respect the autonomy of different reality constructions, enabling each participant to interrogate his or her own history and grow beyond it. Dialogue is probably the noblest form of human interaction; communication scholars should be the first to appreciate its outstanding human qualities and enable it by creating liberating constructions. I would like to leave the naming of this new paradigm to those who have accompanied me on this journey. For Ernst von Glasersfeld it is “radical constructivist”

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(1995), but his concerns are not social.As a radical reading of Berger & Luckmann’s (1966) work, one might call it “radical social constructivist.” Because it does away with metaphysical assumptions, one can consider it “grounded.” Gregory Bateson (1972) recognized the evolutionary nature of cybernetic explanations that this new paradigm encourages. He might have characterized it as an “ecological paradigm.” Many ideas for this proposal, especially the self-referential and ethical imperatives, come from contemporary cybernetics, which has always understood itself to be a science of communication and organization, though of a particular kind. Calling it a “cybernetic” paradigm would be fair as well.

Chapter 2

Epistemological Grounding *

Cybernetics Since its inception in the 1940s, cybernetics held the promise of providing a general theory of communication. Norbert Wiener (1948) defined cybernetics as the “science of control and communication,” and, to emphasize the irrelevance of the nature (or materiality) of the communicators involved and to distinguish it from entirely social conceptions,Wiener added “in the animal and the machine” to it. Early successes of cybernetics were technical, for example the design of automatic controllers, computers, telecommunication systems, and information networks. However, theoretical developments surpassed this initial focus; examples with far-reaching implications are theories of information flows in complex systems, theories of selforganization, N-person game theories, theories of equilibria and homeostasis in systems, theories of positive and negative feedback, and theories of morphogenesis, all of which formalized general ideas. Consequently,Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Stafford Beer, Karl Deutsch, Gregory Bateson, George Spencer-Brown, Francisco Varela, and many others derived profound insights from cybernetics, applying them to neurophysiology, cognition, anthropology, religion, industrial organization, government, psychology, logic, and biology. W. Ross Ashby (1956a) captured the power of cybernetics to organize knowledge in these diverse fields with an analogy: cybernetics is to real systems as geometry is to the earth’s surface. In retrospect, cybernetics has been concerned with three basic forms of construction: circularity, process, and variety, to which observation was added later. Observation is my primary concern. Circularity is evident in early interest in feedback, but a more general circular causality is found in recursive computation (the use of DO-loops, for example), in Ashby’s suggestion that cybernetics address informationally closed systems, and in the paradox of self-organization that has evolved into conceptions of self-reference (Spencer-Brown, 1979), autonomy (Varela, 1979), and autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1988). * From Krippendorff, K. (1984a). An epistemological foundation for communication. Journal of Communication 34,3:21–36.

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Process is evident in efforts to explain change in terms of system transformation (rather than producers or products), for example by involving time in its communication constructs (unlike the work of linguists and semioticians), and generally by emphasizing system dynamics, development, epigenesis, and evolution in preference to determining what something or who someone is. A crucial aspect is that cybernetics links and thereby explains the behavior of organizations in terms of networks of interactions among its constituents, not in terms of what these parts are. Variety, the recognition of multitudes, lies at the root of the notion of information, with associated concepts of constraint, uncertainty and chance.Variety is built into the understanding of a system as composed of many (interacting) parts or as describable in terms of variables, and has found material realization in computer architecture, programming and use. Cybernetics has developed several laws, for example Ashby’s law of requisite variety, which links variety to regulation, adaptation, intelligence, and evolution. Observation, as a way to access reality underlies all scientific inquiries. In enlightenment science, observers locate themselves outside of what they observe. Consequently, they try to avoid experimenter biases, obtrusive measurements, unreliable data, and other interventions in their objects of interest in order to preserve accurate representations of the observed. In contrast, inquiring cyberneticians apply such notions as circularity, process, and variety to interact with their world, yielding a conception of observers as participants in what they create (Mead, 1968).This dual role of observers and creators of the observed acknowledges their involvement in a circular process of mutual determination. It recognizes the constructive abilities (cognitive autonomy and agency) of the observer/participant and the responsive nature of the observed and shifts attention from ontology to epistemology. Cybernetic Epistemology Let me clarify the terms that characterize this shift. Ontology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality or what exists independent of observation. Ontological assumptions render observation as a one-way process of communication from disinterested objects of nature to intelligent and interested observers. Ontology takes patterns in nature as givens awaiting discovery and analysis. In the enlightenment philosophy of science, the idea of objectivity encourages scientific methods that are designed to prevent properties of observers from entering valid knowledge, and the value of replicability directs the scientist’s attention to invariancies, to phenomena that endure in time. These ontological commitments force scientists into roles as detached observers intellectually superior to their objects of descriptive interest. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Cybernetic epistemology does not concern itself with knowledge of what exists external to us, ontology, but focuses on processes by which we come to know, on “knowing,” denying “knowledge” to be a thing, and considering “the known” as constructed by

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the knower.Thus, cyberneticians acknowledge observers and observed as interacting and communication between them flowing both ways.This allows the properties of observers to enter their domain of observation which renders the enlightenment standards of objectivity unachievable. A cybernetic epistemology does not thereby open the door to speculation and fuzzy thinking. Rather, it presents a radical application of what we know about communication generally to processes of scientific observation and yields a powerful paradigm within which certain phenomena can be constructed in ways that the established paradigm of detached observation cannot conceive.The choice of one paradigm over another is not subject to empirical proof, for each carries its own criteria of acceptability. I propose here a basic epistemological unity for inquiries in general and communication in particular. An Epistemological Unity Distinctions are drawn by observers in their perceived environments. Whether distinctions are purposeful and reflected or involuntary and determined by convention, they divide a space into parts and thus intervene in an observer’s domain of observation. Distinctions may be drawn along the skin of an organism, separating the inside from the outside, or between the parts of a motorcycle, locating them in mutually exclusive spaces. Distinctions may be drawn within a sample of data, assigning data points to different categories.When we draw a circle on a piece of paper, we distinguish what we write inside it from what is written outside. The drawing of distinctions is arbitrary in principle, although there may be reasons for some to be better than others, as we shall see. In Spencer-Brown’s words,“distinction is perfect continence” (1979:1). Distinctions are the source of variety in an observer’s environment.Without the act of drawing distinctions, everything would appear as an undifferentiated mass lacking a handle. Only after distinctions are drawn can one note differences, obtain information about the world and do something with them. Through distinctions observers create the capacity for understanding. As Spencer-Brown put it (1979:xxix): A universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart.… The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage, the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet. Relations, by contrast, are conceptual inventions designed to reconcile the violence that the drawing of distinctions inflicts on the environment as a whole. To conceive a relation implies embodiment in some medium, whether in a nervous system, computer algorithm or linguistic proposition.This form must be capable of

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operationally describing, reproducing or modeling how one part created by a distinction differs from, links to, correlates with, conditions, causes, follows, or contradicts, etc., the other part created by that distinction. If drawing a distinction is an act of separating two or more parts, formulating a relation is the creative contribution by observers to their own understanding. Although there is no reason to suppose that relations represent anything existing in reality, their adoption is far from arbitrary.They must in some sense be afforded by the observer’s environment. It might resist or object to being taken apart (as in taking a technological artifact apart in unintended ways). It might defend itself against an undesirable distinction (as in response to racial discrimination). It might render a distinction disadvantageous (as when a surgeon mistakenly cuts into an organ). It might also be silent, rendering a distinction inconsequential (as encouraged by the enlightenment philosophy of science which prohibits feedback with an object of analysis which is represented by available data). Relations are an observer’s way to compensate for the empirical consequences of drawing distinctions. The two operations embodied in observers and their environment go hand in hand and form what I would call the basic epistemological unity of observation. It applies not only to objects of observation but also to the very unity of observer and observed, a distinction of convenience, perhaps, which must be bridged by constructing the operation of observation. Once this is understood, the observer/ environment distinction can be abandoned in favor of the unity whose generality should by now be clear.What does knowing mean in this context? Knowing Consider the sequence of numbers: … 64128256512102420484096 … One manifestation of knowing or understanding is the ability to go on, generally in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1953) sense, here to extend the sequence of numbers from the observation of its parts beyond its known boundaries (into the past and/or the future), for example by inventing a rule. A rule that extends the sequence in either direction is more convincing when it applies to its parts as well. Partitions are arbitrary, as I said, except for their usefulness in the reconstructability of the sequence.Taking each individual numeral of the sequence as one part does not yield a pattern.Taking pairs or triples is unsuccessful. However, partitioning the sequence into parts containing unequal numbers of numerals: 64|128|256|512|1024|2048|4096, reveals that each successor is twice the previous number, p′ = 2p, and the sequence might have come from and continue as

Epistemological Grounding 41

12481632

…

819216384 …

Note that there is no justification for distinguishing these numerals as in the above except in the presence of the rule relating the distinguished parts. Neither the distinction alone nor the multiplications alone yield that understanding, but the unity of the two does. In understanding the sequence, it is not clear which comes first, the rule or the distinctions enabling it to be applied. Consider reconstructability analysis (Ashby, 1964; Klir, 1981), which generalizes several statistical techniques, for example information theory, to many variables.1 It starts from a distribution of data points in a multivariate space, generated by a system governed by unknown complexities.The analyst draws distinctions among its variables, taking each subset of variables with its own distribution of the original data points as part of a possible model of the system.The analyst then generates a hypothetical distribution of data satisfying all of the distinguished parts and the relationships between them. If the original distribution from the whole system matches the distribution that the hypothetical model of interacting parts generated, the model would be a simplified representation of the original data. If they do not match, the distinctions that gave rise to the analyst’s model violate whatever governs the system. The latter situation offers a choice: either tolerate the mismatch or redraw the distinctions. In effect, the method provides a way of testing what would be lost if one were to take the system apart, and identifies a relational structure that illustrates the violence such a decomposition would inflict on the ability to know the system as a whole. Consider the biology of cognition.The mammalian retina consists of numerous light-sensitive cones, each of which responds to magnitudes but not to patterns. Immediately behind the retina, a network of neurons computes relations in the form of differences between the impulses originating in neighboring cones. Following the first layer of neurons is another one, which computes differences of differences that are processed by another layer of neurons, etc.Thus, increasingly complex patterns result and information about them ultimately reaches the brain, where further computations of relations ultimately result in actions that in turn change the very retinal images that gave rise to the action. Cognition – the succession of drawing distinctions, computing relations and acting on them – is a circular process, coupling an observer’s nervous system with her environment of unknowable complexity. Maturana and Varela (1980, 1988) conclude cognition to be a function of the biological organization of the observer. Consider a national economy with its innumerable activities and forms of exchange. Economists, serving particular interests, experiment with different distinctions (sectors, regions, industries, etc.), employ statistical regularities in search of meaningful units, and test a variety of quantitative measurements (cash

1 See Chapter 15 in this volume.

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flows, demand-supply characteristics, interest rates, investments, gross national products, etc.), all of which are initially arbitrary and uninformative. But they begin to make sense when they correlate and lead to mathematical models that account for relationships among variables as measured, ideally reconstructing and simulating the economy in terms of the distinctions drawn.Although economists have not been as successful in this endeavor as they would like, and alternative economic theories and models of the same phenomena are eagerly explored, the unity of drawing distinctions and formulating relations is evident not only in the process of economic modeling but also in the circularity of its policy implications: changing economic realities, calling for new models, etc. As mentioned in conjunction with understanding the sequence of numerals, it is not always clear which of the two operations comes first. Sometimes researchers derive distinctions from available theory; sometimes they develop theories after distinctions have been drawn. This option attests to the circularity of our epistemological unity. These examples suggest that knowing is not a one-way communication leading to representations of observable features of the external world. It is more a cooperation between the observer and the observed, a dialogue of albeit unequal contributors.The observer enacts distinctions; the observed affords them or objects. The observer seeks to account for objections by proposing relations between the distinguished parts; if relations fail, the observer revises the distinctions and/or relations between the distinguished parts until the objections seem to cease – a dance that converges to a knowing and acting that are mutually acceptable, to a point at which the observer’s constructions are afforded. The eigen-value of the epistemological unity (the state toward which the process of observation converges) could be called understanding. A thesis in cybernetics – “thesis” in the sense that we have experienced little to the contrary – suggests that “the nervous system is organized or organizes itself such that it computes a stable reality” (Foerster et al., 1974:53). This “reality” is located neither inside nor outside the observing organism but in the ongoing process of drawing distinctions and formulating relations.This describes a process by which “facts” become known. Communication Unfortunately, in the most familiar definitions and theories of communication and methods to gather data in their support, ontological commitments predominate. By relating communication to changes in psychological states, attitudes, or individual reactions, behavioral theories of communication stress the involuntary nature of individual responses to stimuli and, by extension, the involuntary nature of the data analyzed by behavioral scientists.This confirms what I have said above: ontological commitments imply a concept of observation as the discovery of the laws of nature, law that also govern human behavior, as if these laws existed outside of the constructive abilities of observers.

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Ontological commitments of this kind are not abandoned when symbols, messages, or linguistic expressions replace physical stimuli or when they are considered to have mediating roles or indirect influences. Treating physically measurable stimuli and symbolic influences in like ways fails to acknowledge the observers’ cultural ability to interpret symbolic matter, their participation in the very culture that generates their data. Although both symbolic-interactional and transactional theories of communication differ from behavioral ones by stressing the voluntary nature of communication, they fail to offer an alternative epistemology for studying communication. Symbolicinteractionists emphasize feedback, mutuality, and complementarity in human communication and allow individuals to reach agreement on the meaning of symbols.Transactional theorists emphasize individual interpretations and actions in particular social contexts. Both locate the phenomena they describe in a reality that exists independent of their own interpretations and values. The controversy over value-free science versus critical science has this ontological commitment at its root. In cybernetic epistemology, communication researchers who try to understand processes of communication outside themselves have to build into their communication with observed communicators a test for whether communication “occurred” within the system constructed as observable. Formal tests of this kind are available (Krippendorff, 1970) and probably are practiced more widely than apparent. They presuppose, first, that observers draw distinctions within the observed system among who they consider communicators – individuals, groups, audiences, or institutions, even computational devices. Second, that they secure data on both the dynamics of the whole system – its variation over time – and the dynamics of its component communicators – their responsiveness and variability. According to what I developed above, communication is neither part of the observed system (it occupies no physical space) nor an arbitrary construction imagined without ground. Communication is an explanation of the difference between treating communicators as isolated individuals and as part of a larger system whose holistic qualities resist descriptions as the mere sum of its parts. It follows that communication is that observer-created relational construction which explains what makes a system defy its decomposition (without loss of understanding) into independent parts. A test for communication does not answer the question of whether it exists but whether it is necessary to explain how communicators depend on, interact with, enact their expectations and cooperate and understand each other and thereby participate in a non-decomposable whole. Note that the epistemological assumptions underlying such a test emphasize the observers’ contributions in bringing about what adds to a holistic phenomenon (relating parts to form wholes). It is observers who draw distinctions, wait to see whether the distinguished parts can be considered independent without loss of understanding, and finally decide whether there is a compelling reason for postulating a dynamic relationship called communication to account for the difference between the behavior of the whole and of the aggregate of its parts.

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Note also that this notion of communication equally applies to individual communicators in the context of others. If the behavior of one cannot be understood fully without reference to the behavior of another, then describing them separately will reduce the understanding of both.There is no need to attribute communicative qualities to media of communication.The staring of someone at a television screen or a newspaper does not constitute evidence for communication, as it is possible for that person to give the impression of attending to a medium while thinking of or doing something different. Similarly, the noises people make in each other’s presence are insufficient evidence of communication. If there is no demonstrable need for constructing dynamic dependencies between people – between what they say, how they respond and act – they are not communicators.They can be described separately without loss. Communication may be said to recover the understanding lost when people are regarded as individuals, independent of one another or asocial. Shannon’s mathematical theory (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) formalizes this notion of communication by defining the amount of information transmitted as the difference between two kinds of entropies: the entropy in all components measured separately and the joint entropy. Stated for senders and receivers: I = H(sender) + H(receiver) – H(sender & receiver) The classical phrase that communication is “the process by which one mind affects another” states virtually the same as the above, except that it refers to mentalist qualities that are difficult to establish. The epistemological unity applies to distinctions within observations. Lasswell (1948) did not appreciate the constructive involvement of communication researchers in their subject matter when suggesting that they answer a series of questions: “Who says what by which channel to whom and with what effect?” If one lists the “who,” “what,” “whom,” etc., one presupposes communication without the ability to study it, for answering these questions separately renders communication empirically invisible. To ascertain communication, one would have to demonstrate that the answers correlate. Communication is of primarily explanatory value as a construct to understand dynamic wholes in terms of the interactions among its parts. It tests such ontological claims as “everything is related to everything else” – but not without shifting to the epistemology of the observer so that the construct of communication reveals its purpose outside communication. But what if our observer enters ongoing processes of communication as a participant? Communicating and Participating Clearly, observers who participate in what they observe can no longer describe what exists ontologically without experiencing Heisenberg’s (1958) uncertainty. Shifting to epistemology allowed me to characterize communication as the construct by an observer accounting for or explaining how the drawing of distinctions violates what

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works together. But this characterization has not thus far considered the possibility of that constructive observer to be a constitutive part of the observed system. For one, systems of participating observers are social in the sense that they involve human agents with capabilities similar to our observers. Let me explore several levels of participation. In social systems, communication is first of all public. Maturana and Varela (1988) speak of consensual coordination to emphasize that people see each other in a context or in a jointly acknowledged situation, facing an artifact or problem – for example, by not bumping into each other – or their assertions – for example, by saying things appropriate to their common situation. In public – and the size of a public can range from two people to a mass meeting – people observe each other, speak about how they observe each other, and respond to assertions of observations of observations. Observers interested in understanding ongoing communication must participate in coordinating the drawing of their distinctions among participants consensually and presenting their constructions for verification by the constituents of the system of which they have become a part. Knowing a public means participating in changing it. Observers who refuse to become part of a public cannot know whether their distinctions and relational constructions operate beyond their own understanding. Communication is not only public, but also can be conversational. Social organizations are constituted in networks of conversations that hold them together and direct the activities of their members. Here again, observation without participation can yield only shallow understanding. Knowing what is going on can be validated only by successful participation in conversations that establish memberships, negotiate and test commitments, assign and affirm responsibilities, coordinate understanding, and agree on joint actions, but also by telling stories about what is going on. Understanding communication in social organizations means participating in changing such organizations. In organizations, most of what is said about observations of observations and about constructing reality constructions consists of speech acts that assert truths, command behaviors, declare facts, make promises, and express emotions, all of which are performatives that accomplish something. In such contexts, the language in which to understand the social realities of communication cannot rely exclusively on the representational truths of assertions. It must include their effects, how these speech acts are compelling and what they entail. When social theories become available to those theorized or affected by them, their very communication will influence them either by affirming them in actions – thereby strengthening their validity in the manner of self-fulfilling prophesies – or by contradicting them behaviorally – and thereby invalidating them. Even the communication of theories can have effects on the theorized. One historical example of the failure to recognize this self-referential and constitutive process is found in Marxism. Although Karl Marx asserted that philosophy should not merely describe but change society, he placed himself in the position of an outside observer, possibly because of his social position as an émigré

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in England. Whatever the reason, his belief in his own detachment is evident in declaring that he was not a Marxist and providing no classification in which he would fit, being neither capitalist, worker, lumpenproletariat, landlord nor peasant or farmer. As outsider, the social dynamics he observed with clarity had to appear deterministic and proceed toward inescapable homeostasis. Originally, Marxist theories of social development had no competitors. They were adopted eagerly where beliefs in the inevitability of progress were common or could serve political ends. But these theories grew few roots where there was widespread belief that people could shape their own systems of production. Western European and American responses to Marx’s (in his opponents’ conception bleak) forecast included the evolution, if not the conscious creation, of systems of communication that invalidated Marx’s prediction. Marx’s lack of awareness of the (de)constructive consequences of communicating social theory invalidated his predictions, because processes of social communication are fundamentally participatory, self-governing, and ultimately constitutive of their own organizational forms. Consider a micro-level example, family therapy.The therapist begins by facing a family whose members have agreed on why they seek help. However, their agreement was reached without the therapist. To understand what is going on in that family, the therapist must enter the conversations that shape the family, asking questions, eliciting stories, and observing alliances and manners of communication that keep the family entrapped in debilitating reality constructions. The therapist then reframes the stories told by family members into treatable narratives, encourages members’ awareness of how they communicate with one another, organizes role playing and assigns tasks, not only to change established patterns of communication but also to establish herself as a needed expert. In the course of therapy, a family may resist the therapist’s interventions, inviting her to redraw distinctions and reinterpret family structure. This is done not merely to better understand the family but also to make the larger system consisting of the therapist and the family work for both constituents, with the therapist retaining her role as an authority on psychological and communicative matters. Whether psychotherapists are more astute observers than their patients is secondary to the importance of a therapist’s active involvement, maintenance of an understanding of what happens as distinctions are drawn and revised and communication patterns are rearranged to overcome family pathology. Communication not only reflects distinctions and relations envisioned by communicators observing each other’s observations, it constitutes the whole in which it takes place.To constitute means to establish or define itself from within itself. Social communication usually converges to participants developing their own understanding of the very system in which that understanding constitutively participates. Social systems, from families to societies, involve members recursively and are thus inherently circular. Participation is the only path toward understanding this circularity. Finally, I revisit the contrast between the epistemological foundations I have sketched and the ontology of the established philosophy of scientific inquiry. I agree

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with Richard Howe and Heinz von Foerster (1975; Foerster, 1979) that the insistence on objectivity – that the properties of observers must not enter descriptions of their observations – has largely prevented serious inquiry into society. Participation in social systems makes those systems inherently circular in organization, and adequate theories of communication in such systems therefore must be self-referential. In place of objectivity, I suggest that in systems involving their observers, communication theory must be accepted on evidence that it constitutes the system it claims to describe. Such a theory contains its own domain, constitutes theory in action, and is not discoverable from its outside. Circular forms of explanation are fundamental to understanding one’s participation in social phenomena and essential to theories of communication that underlie them. Circular explanations are also incompatible fundamentally with ontological commitments. In their foundations of mathematics and logic,Whitehead & Russell (1910) rigorously exorcised self-reference from scientific accounts and much of the philosophy of science, which is built on these foundations and is consequently incapable of theorizing about the fabric of society. The research methodology that arose within this tradition in science is equally powerless to make self-referential social structures transparent. Cybernetics – first surreptitiously, now more openly – works against these philosophical constraints. In summary, the epistemological unity – the unity of drawing distinctions and creating relations within an observer’s domain of experiences – takes knowing to be a process, offers circular (interactive) concepts of communication and can embrace the self-referential nature of social systems while involving observers as participants. It provides a powerful epistemology for studies of human communication.

Chapter 3

Major Communication Metaphors *

Introduction The following essay is about human communication.Traditionally, one would define the concept, proceed to force a variety of phenomena into its terms and declare the exercise a success when it appears to capture a great deal of territory. While tempting, such constructions of reality also are lonely ones devoid of contributions by other people who populate reality as well. In contrast, this essay seeks first of all to listen to everyday accounts of experiences of human communication. This intent is grounded in the belief that the ordinary nature of such accounts does not disqualify them, even where scientific conceptions are available. Indeed, most social scientific theories can be shown to have grown out of ordinary folk wisdom. Scientific conceptions are more formalized and subjected to tests unlike those practiced in everyday life.To listen to the linguistic expressions of others means trying to understand what they mean to say and respect what they say as their account of the situation in which they find themselves.This essay is about understanding others’ understanding of communication – without ignoring one’s own participation in their understanding. In pursuit of this second-order understanding, I begin with a brief theory of metaphor, one that goes beyond mere rhetorical formulations and links language to the creation of perceived realities. I then discuss what I consider to be the six most pervasive metaphors of human communication in everyday life. Each entails its own logic for human interaction and the use of each creates its own social reality. This descriptive account is intended to provide the “data” or ground on which I then develop several constructivist propositions.These enable reflection on the nature of social realities that evidently can afford the use of numerous metaphors with diverse entailments about how communication works, leading individual participants to different kinds of understanding, different kinds of understanding others’ understanding, and rendering the practice of communication more or less satisfactory. * From Krippendorff, K. (1993b). Major metaphors of communication and some constructivist reflections on their use. Cybernetics & Human Knowing 2,1:3–25.

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Then I sketch some aspects of mass communication in these terms and comment on its research. Analyses of everyday uses of metaphors prove useful not only in understanding ordinary communication but also the metaphorical base of scientific communication theories. The unreflected use of metaphors may drive their users – ordinary and scientific – along paths they might not want to take. Metaphor When English speakers talk about a failure of communication, they might say: Communication broke down. He didn’t come across as well. Her thoughts were locked in cryptic verse. The message got lost in the process. You just don’t understand. It didn’t compute. Talking to him was like talking to a brick wall. There was no chemistry. All of these expressions rely on metaphors; one can hardly think about communication without them. Notions of metaphor have ancient roots. In his Topica,Aristotle urged a distinction between definitions and metaphors, arguing that one should be wary about the latter’s ambiguity (Ortony, 1979a:3). “Metaphor,” he wrote in his Poetics, “consists in giving a thing a name that belongs to something else” (Quoted in Sontag, 1988:5). Aristotle’s suspicion that there is something devious at work in the use of metaphors survives in the contemporary distinction between literal language, preferred in scientific and technical discourse, and metaphorical language whose aesthetic qualities are allegedly of interest mainly to literary connoisseurs and poets. The former implicates a representational notion of language, the latter highlights experiences, cognitive and emotive, especially in social relations such as love. Literal language – illusionary as this category may be – also privileges the construction of observer-independent external realities as the ultimate arbiter of what can be said and how. To me, representational notions of metaphor are utterly unproductive. If one is willing to go through the epistemological shift from the earlier Wittgenstein (1933) to the later one (1953), if one is willing to embrace the anthropological insights of Sapir (1949),Whorf (1956), and Wagner (1981), or recent philosophical explorations from Rorty (1989) to Glasersfeld (1984, 1991), if one is willing to abandon the view of language as a medium of representation in favor of one that sees language as a medium through which we organize our experiences and engage in interaction with each other, then we are led to a vastly more powerful notion of metaphor.

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Let me sketch a theory of metaphor using the expression “there is no chemistry” as an example. Chemistry is a domain of science writing about transformations of chemical compositions.The discourse of chemistry occurs in communication among chemists but can say nothing about language use. Hence, for chemists or readers who take a literal view of language, the phrase in question would not make sense. But as an expression in everyday life it may say a great deal about how what happens between people is conceptualized.A theory of metaphor should address the question of why this might be so: (1) All metaphors carry explanatory structures from a familiar domain of experiences into a present domain in need of understanding or restructuring. The example carries knowledge from chemistry into the domain of human interaction. (2) To do their “work,” metaphors require seeing some structural similarities between these two domains, however far-fetched. Chemistry is concerned with how chemical substances interact and form composites. In the domain of human communication we acknowledge people doing something with and to each other.This similarity resides, of course, as much in the use of words as in the experiences these words embrace.We can speak of “bonding” in both empirical domains yet impart entirely different meanings. Black (1962) speaks of “interaction,” alluding to the creative effort of fitting selected features into a pattern of similarity. (3) But most importantly, metaphors have entailments (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) for the target domain they thereby organize far beyond any initial structural similarity. Our example makes human interaction into a product of instant and involuntary reactions via the nature of the individuals involved. “Good chemistry” attracts, creates synergy, unifies; “bad chemistry” repulses, spells difficulties, and separates. Explaining human relationships in terms of chemistry entails denying choices in what happens between two people and absolves them of responsibility for what takes place – bonding or the lack of it – rendering their relationship involuntary, uncontrollable by either party:“Chemistry makes the decision for us.” While metaphors introduce vocabulary from a source domain into the present situation, a process that is as optional and arbitrary as poetry, it is amazing that we surrender to a metaphor’s entailments, taking it to describe our experiences, without considering alternative metaphors.There is no doubt that everyday users of this vocabulary consider “chemistry” a real experience. (4) Hence, metaphors organize their users’ perceptions and, when acted upon accordingly, create the very realities experienced. “There is no chemistry” is a metaphorical statement, but its very utterance creates or constitutes the fact it states, with the entailment that this is the way it is and nothing can be done about it.The social relationship that existed before the chosen metaphor came into use is replaced by what the new metaphor takes from its source, from chemistry.What was before recedes into the background of non-recognition.

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This example makes clear, I hope, that metaphors are more than hidden comparisons as Aristotle suggested and many contemporary literary analysts continue to maintain. Unlike analogies, metaphors are fundamentally asymmetrical.They are the linguistic vehicles through which something new is constructed. In Lakoff & Johnson’s (1980) definition of “metaphor (as) understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another,” the “another” is rarely noticed. It is the “terms,” mentioned in the definition, the vocabulary, that create present perceptions.Thus, metaphors are not mere poetic embellishments; they invoke their users’ experiences, encourage new experiences, and inform their users’ actions. Metaphors are also far from ambiguous and vague. Their entailments can be traced with considerable certainty and in as much detail as desirable, leading to a reality equally obvious and clear to the user of the metaphor and to its analyst. The eighteenthcentury philosopher Gambatisto Vico recognized metaphors as the most important manifestation of human creativity. Friedrich Nietzsche described truth in language as “a mobile army of metaphors” we no longer recognize. Let me apply this theory to the six most prominent metaphors of communication. Six Major Communication Metaphors The Container Metaphor

The expression “her thoughts were locked in cryptic verse” depicts language as a container of thoughts, to which access seems denied by the absence of a key.This phrase may have been constructed by a skillful writer, but the idea that messages contain something – thoughts, information, instructions, meanings, feelings – permeates many everyday accounts of language (Reddy, 1979), rendering communication, for example, as sending message contents from one place to another. The latter entailment dominates the language of communication research as well; for example, content analysis (Krippendorff, 2004). Some communication scholars jokingly call it “the bucket theory of meaning,” but, to understand everyday processes of communication, I suggest we take this prevailing metaphor more seriously. Consider that we have no qualms asking someone what is in a letter, what someone got out of a lecture, or, we object to someone reading something into a contract that wasn’t there. In communication research, we write about mass media content as if it were fact.We may find ourselves judging a speech meaningful or as having no meaning at all. We might accept the advice: if you don’t put your heart into what you say, you don’t say anything. Someone who hasn’t anything to say uses empty phrases. Even engineers speak of signals carrying information contents.Whether one talks about the content of a novel or of the information content of signals, the content is seen as separate from the vehicles carrying it. All of these everyday expressions depict messages, language, and pictures, even signals as containers for ideas, meanings, information, or things that are preserved during their communication from an origin to a destination.

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One entailment of this metaphor is reflected in our cultural emphasis on the content of communication at the expense of or even blindness to the messages, language, and processes that presumably bring these contents to us. In fact, the language we speak appears to us mostly as transparent, unproblematic, unexamined, and invisible.With this metaphor in mind, vessels are mere “means” for containing what really matters. It follows that journalists are concerned with the truth and accuracy of what is being reported and less with why it is published, how it gets into the newspaper, and what it does to the public. McLuhan’s proposition that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964) sought to shift our attention from the content of the mass media. Bateson (1972) and Watzlawick et al.’s (1967) distinction between the content and the relationship aspects of human communication attempted to put the metaphorical content in perspective. In everyday life, noncontent or relational aspects of communication may be felt but are rarely conceptualized. The container metaphor renders the language we speak nearly invisible. A second entailment of this metaphor is its conceptualizing contents as entities with objective qualities.While it may be difficult to imagine how material containers – paper, electrical impulses, and sound – could hold immaterial substances, nevertheless we put thoughts into verse, get something out of a course of study, receive pieces of information and write news items.We break media content into analyzable units – all attesting to our concept of content as tangible entities that can be broken, cut into chunks, packaged, and sent off. Rendering contents as objects implies our ability to treat them objectively – as in content analysis – and ascribe observer-independent existences to them. A third entailment of this metaphor is to render communication as transportation, as a problem of getting the thoughts, feelings, meanings, information, and other entities from here to there. “Send me that information” exemplifies this conception, but so does “the message got lost in the process” – perhaps uttered after a tumultuous meeting. We also convey messages and deliver speeches. While the problem of communication is to get a message across, to bridge a communication gap, understanding becomes entirely unproblematic.All we seem to need is contact or exposure to what messages contain. Understanding also can mean digesting what someone presents to us.Audiences are often described as consumers.Accordingly, understanding is seemingly effortless, self-evident, direct, instantaneous, natural, and hence entirely unproblematic. A fourth entailment is the equation of communication with sharing. If communication is the transportation of content in containers and understanding is a matter of contact with what messages contain, then it would follow that exposure to the same content causes common knowledge, same views, or thinking alike.This causes the almost universal conception that good communication results in sharing. Sharing is often depicted by Venn diagrams of overlapping circles, which is consistent with the above in circumscribing sets of objects. The complaint “you just don’t understand ” often implies “not as I do” and suggests that the criterion of good communication

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was not met. Reliability of coding in content analysis, for example, is said to assure that the resulting data represent the common denominator of diverse interpretations (Berelson, 1952). The association of communication and sharing is of ancient origin. This can be seen in the etymology of the word “communication.” It has the same root as “common,” “commune,” “community,” even “communism,” all of which construct individuals as being in some respects the same, for example regarding habits, world views, or language competence. In the above mentioned Venn diagram, the areas outside the intersection often are considered sociologically deviant, containing either objects with idiosyncratic – non-shared – meanings, or someone who does not belong. Evidently, sharing serves as a strong social norm. The use of container metaphors profoundly affects the social relations possible among communicators within community and society.Taking message contents to have an objective or observer-independent existence leads one to conclude that it is unreliable perception that can lead the receivers of identical messages astray and produce something other than sharing. Indeed, just as we would not believe one could drink wine out of a bottle filled with milk, the physics invoked by the container metaphor implies that one can remove from a message only what had been put into it and that this would have to be the same for everyone. It offers no logical place for variations or discrepancies in interpretation.1 Such discrepancies can be dismissed as jokes or entertainment – magicians bedazzle us by taking things out of a hat that were not there before, for example. But when we take discrepancies seriously, we tend to blame somebody, consult an authority regarding who is right, or fight them out rather than abandon the container metaphor for an alternative conception. Blaming somebody often focuses on human errors, pathological conditions and devious intentions.Those who explain discrepancies this way consider themselves blameless and free of biases, implying an objective standard applicable to all. Specialized authorities may be consulted to arbitrate discrepancies that cannot be explained causally. Here, the container metaphor unquestionably privileges the authors or producers of messages. The word “authority” derives from the word “author,” someone who, according to the container metaphor, should know what he or she put into a message. Without access to authors or historical figures, for example, the metaphor virtually creates the need for specialized authorities on meanings – dictionaries, linguists, experts in literature, and ultimately the courts – to resolve disputes over correct meanings of messages or texts. It is amazing how scholars of literature speak with certainty about Shakespeare’s intentions or the correct reading of a text.The container metaphor not only calls for such authorities but also grants them privileged access to an imaginary reality unavailable to those

1 An exception is the “natural” decay of content. So, just as cider can become vinegar while being transported, information can become outdated.

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willing to submit to their judgments.2 It is submission that generates authority and grants these amazing powers. Physical violence is the method of last resort when causal explanations and authorities are unable to resolve significant discrepancies in readings of texts. Indeed, much violence arises from differences in interpretation of what all sides consider “facts” – domestic violence within families usually results from discrepancies about “what happened” just as international conflicts often are rooted in different readings of historical texts laying incommensurate claims to truths, land or privileges (Krippendorff, 1988:254–255). It would be easy for communication scholars to discredit the container metaphor for entailing a misleading logic with potentially disastrous consequences, but this would deprive us of the ability to listen and understand everyday communication, including the conflicts this metaphor can breed. Clearly, the container metaphor, alive and widely used in everyday life, provides the conceptual foundation of a great number of social phenomena and has entailments worthy of further exploration. The Hydraulic Metaphor

In the nineteenth century, revolutionary new technologies entered human communication. Experiments with continuous sources of electricity during its first quarter led to commercial telegraph lines during its second.The telephone, invented in 1876, was in use widely by the turn of the twentieth century.The staggering speed of this technical development outpaced everyday understanding of how it worked. Such developments naturally attract metaphors that import suitable explanatory structures from more familiar domains, organize otherwise incomprehensible experiences and give direction to technical developments. Initial questions about how messages could be “squeezed through copper wires” employed vocabulary from fluid mechanics, which in turn provided an important metaphor for the technologies of communication.3 The wire became a tube through which something could flow from a source to its sink, much like familiar plumbing systems. Recognition of media-specific constraints of communication, for example writing and printing on paper (excluding sound, touch, and the expression of emotions) and telephone use (excluding images among other media), were conceptualized as channels. Just as one cannot let different fluids run through the same pipe without creating mixtures or impurities, the hydraulic metaphor encouraged divisions of human communication into different channels, for different kinds of flows, having

2 It should be mentioned that in more recent theories of literature, readers of a text are given far more currency than their authors, although one can hardly deny that authors are the first readers of their writings. 3 Sigmund Freud too, conceptualizing psychoanalysis at about that time, heavily relied on hydraulic metaphors, depression, for example.

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different (fluid mechanical) characteristics, and constituting different dimensions of communication. Besides technical distinctions between such things as bandwidths, circuits, or rail lines, we naturally distinguish between verbal and nonverbal (including gestural) channels or, in another system of classification, between auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory channels. Under the governance of the hydraulic metaphor human communication thus became a multi-channel phenomenon. Experiences with acoustical noise in telephone conversations came to be conceptualized as pollutants surreptitiously entering a channel of communication.We speak without hesitation of sources of noise – acoustical or semantic – as if a foreign substance penetrated a channel from its outside, mixed up different substances and interfered with a desired flow of information. I found it useful to depict Shannon’s (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) conception of a channel as flows.4 In the analysis of mass media organizations, we speak of gatekeepers who determine what reaches the public. In the communication research literature, one-step flow or hypodermic needle models of communication, which depicted content as directly injected into the minds of television viewers, were replaced by two-step flow models. This advancement, however, remained entirely within the hydraulic metaphor. In conceptualizing knowledge acquisition including perception, we talk of filters that let some information through and block others.The expression “Talking to him was like talking to a brick wall” describes a barrier to flow.“Not to get through to someone” assumes an obstacle or break in the conduit. The tendency of the mass media to favor the average viewer, to avoid extremes, is called mainstreaming. In describing communication in organizations, we speak of having to go through proper channels, encountering bottlenecks, branches, etc. In accounting for how governmental decisions are channeled through an administration, we refer to long or short pipelines and inquire about how clogged they are. We complain about information overloads. Even engineers, who ought to be familiar with the physics of communication technology, talk about signals flowing through wires, carrying information and noise. These contemporary conceptions have imported conceptions from hydraulics to depict communication as a flow of certain substances through various channels. The hydraulic metaphor resembles the container metaphor in several respects. Reddy (1979), who limits his concern to language, refers to both as conduit metaphors; for example, the container/content distinction reappears in the channel/flowing substance distinction.While the hydraulic metaphor shifts attention from the transport of discrete units of content to continuous flows, it retains the expectation that tangible entities or substances are or can be preserved in the process. The idea of the internet as an information highway embraces both metaphors. A final entailment of the hydraulic metaphor is that volumes flow from one place to another and that channels are limited in capacity. So conceived, capacity cannot

4 See Figures 14.12, 15.2, and 15.4 in this volume for graphical depictions of flows.

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be exceeded, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Channels may break, develop leaks, get mixed up, or become polluted. But by ordinary folk physics, substances do not get lost.They merely end up where they are not wanted. Save for such imperfections, the hydraulic metaphor does not seem to give rise to the kind of discrepancies that container metaphors invite.5 The Control Metaphor

The equation of communication with control has a long history as well. It goes back at least to the Sophists who valued arguments that were convincing regardless of their truths.The control metaphor describes communication, first of all, as a causal phenomenon which, once it is conceived as such, becomes available to rational decision makers. Second, it considers communication as a means to reach particular objectives or as an instrument for realizing manipulatory intents.Third, the use of this metaphor subordinates all aspects of communication, messages, contents, truths, the individuals involved, and social consequences to rational pursuits governed by desired effects. Linguistic evidence for seeing communication as a causal phenomenon equally abound.We say that “the weather report caused the university to cancel its classes,” that “television watching affects student grades,” that “being accused drove him mad,” that “a statistics forced management to rethink its objectives,” that “an officer coerced his men to shoot,” that “she was unable to resist his plea.” While human communication certainly is not like inserting a CD (Compact Disk) into someone’s brain, control metaphors call for the construction of or appeal to forces presumed capable of causing various effects. So, we speak of persuasive appeals, compelling arguments, potent communications, powerful documentaries, illocutionary forces, all of which associate seemingly objective forces whose sheer presence causes specific effects. Control metaphors in human communication entail, second, fundamental social asymmetries. Causes and consequences are embodied respectively in controllers and 5 Recent developments, especially of the internet, have made prominent another kind of metaphor, encouraging communication to be viewed as networks. The source domain of the network metaphor comes from nets used in fishing, soon migrated to roads, telephone, power, computers, social networking and entered the study of communication in diffusion research and studies of social organizations. Its entailments suggest dense connectivity. Ideally everyone is connected to everyone else, directly or indirectly, and when one link fails, the whole is unlikely to be affected. The network metaphor connects with the hydraulic metaphor: when one link, say, a particular road or computer fails, neighboring links can either absorb the additional flow or break down and affect the network as a whole – just as a fishnet can be stretched until it tears, at which point it becomes useless. With sufficient flexibility (redundancy), networks are metaphors for reliability. We have studied the effects of different kinds of communication nets on the performance of groups, speak of social organizations as networks of conversations, characterize the World Wide Web as a network of web pages through which browsers crawl and we develop software that allows us to participate in a diversity of networks, groups, and virtual communities.

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the controlled and this distinction is carried into nearly all practices of social life. It is implied in the mass media’s calculated effort to target messages to mindlessly receptive mass audiences. It resides in the differences between active and informed senders, producers, or entertainers and passive and uninformed receivers or consumers. In the past it has been built into one-way communication technology, the publishing industry, radio, and television for example, designed for distribution of the senders’ messages to masses of receivers – not the other way around. Control metaphors assign controllers, authors and producers of communications the privileged position of knowledgeable agents who are able to conceptualize what they want to achieve and select among messages to accomplish their objectives. By contrast, the targets of such communication, the listeners, readers, viewers, or audience members are expected to take in what is presented to them and to be ignorant of how they are being manipulated. Since the latter would serve the former’s ends best when predictable, the control metaphor encourages a view of ordinary humans as reactive to stimuli and enlists communication researchers to find mechanisms to explain attitude change, product acceptance, and voter preference as a function of exposure to particular messages. Behavioral research is particularly suited to serve users of the control metaphor as it insists on causal theories without respect for their subjects’ explanations.This reduces ordinary humans to what some writers have called cultural dupes who need to be entertained and told what to do, and who remain powerless in their world. Third, with control metaphors in place, communication becomes limited to successful communication. The volume of textbooks on improving communication skills and techniques and courses on effective public speaking, advertising, or management attests to the popularity of this metaphor in rational social organizations as well as in everyday life.“You just don’t understand” implies not only a lack of sameness but also a lack of conformity to the speaker’s intent.When advertisers say “the ad did not communicate” they invariably mean that “it didn’t have the desired effects.” Communication criteria of truth, eloquence, sharing, and community become subservient to the manipulatory intents of the controller.All assertions of failures of communication derive from the control metaphor and are grounded in empirical deviations from desired causality. Finally and as a corollary of the preceding, the control metaphor defines a particular perspective, legitimizes an empirical domain defined by the controllers’ purposes and suppresses other perspectives on the same communication situation. It is well recognized that from an outsider’s perspective, all efforts to control produce not only intended but also unintended consequences – the unintended cultural side-effects of commercial television, the political repercussions of dirty political campaign advertising, or the unanticipated consequences of lies. Functional sociologists describe unanticipated consequences of actions from the perspective of an agent as latent (as opposed to manifest). Economists talk about externalities. These phenomena acknowledge that there is more to what the control metaphor seeks to explain but they are irrelevant from the perspective of communication as control.

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To avoid confusion, I should note that, in cybernetics, control is seen not as a function of one agent over something else, but as residing within circular causal networks, maintaining stabilities in a system. Circularities have no beginning, no end and no asymmetries. The control metaphor of communication, by contrast, punctuates this circularity unevenly. It privileges the conceptions and actions of a designated controller by distinguishing between messages sent in order to cause desired effects and feedback that informs the controller of successes or failures. Although no government can rule without some listening to citizens’ needs and no mass media can operate for long without researching their mass audiences, the control metaphor blinds its users to circularities within systems and renders communication as control of someone or something. The Transmission Metaphor

The transmission metaphor comes to us from cryptography. Here, the problem is to encipher an understandable message, also called “clear,” into a form, called “cipher,” that unauthorized interceptors cannot interpret but authorized addressees can decipher and read. Cryptography, originated in ancient secret societies and perfected during various wars, has become important in efforts to protect electronic communication, particularly over the internet, from illegitimate access. In his Mathematical Theory of Communication, Shannon, who had an early fascination with cryptography, sees “[t]he fundamental problem of communication [a]s that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.… A transmitter … operates on the message in some way to produce a signal suitable for transmission over the channel.… The receiver ordinarily performs the inverse operation of that done by the transmitter, reconstructing the message from the signal” (Shannon & Weaver, 1949:36). For Shannon, messages are successively translated from one medium to another and this includes media conducive to human understanding as senders or receivers. Signals, one could say, result from intermediate translations. A code describes the process of translation. It retains a correspondence between the messages, images, data, or choices made in one medium and the messages, images, data, or choices made subsequently in another medium. Information measures the extent to which coding processes are reversible and thus preserve patterns during successive applications of codes. Information measures the reproducibility of the pattern in the originals. By not rendering meanings as residing in what is transmitted, the transmission metaphor radically departs from the container and hydraulic metaphors. But it shows some correspondence to the control metaphor by relating patterns in a sender’s messages to those identifiable by a receiver – without, however, implicating intentions and effects. One major entailment of the transmission metaphor lies in the cognitive burden it places on the communicators involved both as senders and as receivers.Whereas the container and hydraulic metaphors naively imply exposure to contents or access

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to flows to be a sufficient condition for understanding, the transmission metaphor expects communicators to be capable of decoding encoded messages or data streams. Reproduction of the original messages is that special case of transmission which provides human access to copies of originals. All intermediate processes are of a technical nature. Another entailment of the transmission metaphor is the required commonality of the complementary operations of encoding and decoding. Reproducibility could not be established if writing and reading, articulation and interpretation, or encoding and decoding would not be complementary in effect. Consider an electronic document, opened with the wrong program, yielding an unreadable distribution of characters. If another program can transform the unreadable file into a readable document, we can assume that the unreadable file preserved all information from the original. Readability presupposes that readers and authors belong to the same speech community, that saying things and listening to what is said are complementary operations. While reliable transmission has become an essential ingredient of contemporary information technology – reproducing original images on a television screen or faxing texts that can be read at both ends – this entailment of the transmission metaphor cannot account for novel interpretations that are meaningful in a culture precisely because they are unconventional, unexpected, or inspiring – poetic interpretations, imaginative inventions, political foresights, and leading ideas. If communication were limited to the transmission of information, to reproducing messages from one place to another, much of what matters to people would have to be excluded. The use of the transmission metaphor is not limited to technical or engineering aspects of communication, as some writers have suggested. We speak of the transmission of genetic information across generations, the transmission of infectious diseases through a population and the transfer of technology from developed to developing countries. The War Metaphor

Another metaphor, presumably grounded in the British tradition of public debating and more associated with talk than with writing or mass communication, makes communication into a kind of war. Lakoff & Johnson (1980:4) suggest it to be evident in a variety of everyday language expressions. Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target. I demolished his argument. I’ve never won an argument with him. You disagree? Okay, shoot! If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out. He shot down all of my arguments.

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The authors continue to describe the entailments of this metaphor: It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments.We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent.We attack his positions and we defend our own.We gain and lose ground.We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of attack. Many of the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war.Though there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle, and the structure of an argument – attack, defense, counterattack, etc. – reflects this. It is in this sense that the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing. Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. It would seem strange even to call what they were doing “arguing.” Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance. (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980:4–5) Obviously, verbal communication and armed conflict are different kinds of human interactions. However, using the war metaphor cannot but set communicators against each other with the implicit aim of establishing who is right, who is stronger, or who is better. Naturally, the metaphor would work best when there is something to win, as in bargaining for a good price or earning an award in a debating competition. But when there are no obvious criteria for gaining or losing something, the use of this metaphor creates grounds for conflicts over territory, pride, identity, and power relations. None of these may have anything to do with the issues under discussion but the use of the war metaphor makes winning the primary objective of human communication, often preventing communicators from solving problems cooperatively. The Dance-Ritual Metaphor

Speaking about communication scholarship, Carey (1989) suggests that the ritual aspect of communication has been relegated largely to a residual category, one that remains after communication’s contents are removed and its purposes explained.

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For him as for McLuhan (1964), the routine of attending to the mass media, the commitment to a daily reading of the newspaper, or the habitual watching of sports on Sunday are ritual uses of communication. The metaphor of the ritual directs attention to what is invariant in communication: endlessly repetitive performances not aimed at a practical purpose that unify those involved into a community. So it is with communication as dance, which stresses, as suggested by Lakoff & Johnson (1980:4–5), the harmonious complementarity of movements: ceremoniously asking how are you and saying goodbye, taking turns at talk, the punctuations that mark the progression of legal procedures, and the public ceremonies of political succession. Ideal conversations are dance-like. Etymologically, conversation comes from the Latin verb conversari which means to live, to keep company, to become occupied or engaged, and to move around, to which Middle English and French have added to speak.The purpose of being in a conversation is to keep it going. The dance-ritual metaphor entails, first of all, continuity and repetitiveness. In a ritual, especially when proliferated throughout a population or passed from one generation to the next, authors are unimportant and performers are replaceable. In dance, it is not the identities of dancers but the grammar of movement that choreography describes. Conversations may drift seamlessly from one topic to another; what remains constant is the taking of turns at talk, respecting each other’s contributions, and conceiving each other as in the same “boat.” Life with this metaphor means maintaining mutual engagement. When dance, ritual and, conversation terminate under mutually agreeable conditions, it is always with the understanding of continuation or repetition elsewhere, perhaps with different people – as long as participants and audiences recognize the sameness of the process. A second entailment of the dance-ritual metaphor is that it makes communication a cooperative,communal,and public activity. Participants see each other, coordinate their movements and actions relative to each other, and are concerned for each other in view of a whole.There are all kinds of devices to keep participants within this cooperation. If someone feels ignored, meta-communicating, for example by saying let me have my turn, may bring her back into the routine. In dance, partners notice each other’s missteps and compensate for them with a minimum of disruption. In conversation, participants may ask one another to elaborate on what they meant to say, justify their behavior, and feel obliged to comply with such requests (Shotter, 1984). A conversation becomes a bad one (or loses the status of a conversation altogether) when it turns into a monologue, when war or control metaphors creep into the process, or when some participants are put down, made to feel incompetent, or ignored. Ackerman discusses two claims that (when entering a dialogue without further grounds) disqualify a conversation as being what he calls (power-) neutral. These are claims by any one participant, (1) that his or her conceptions are inherently better than those of the others, and (2) that, regardless of the merits of the conceptions involved, a participant claims intrinsic superiority over some or all of the other participants (1980:10–11).Thus conversations can easily turn into debates, arguments, or power plays, all of which entail claims to unequal privileges that are

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incompatible with the dance-ritual metaphor. In dance, ritual, and conversation there are only participants, neither winners or losers nor managers. In rituals, even “masters of ceremony” participate in prescribed roles.They are not above them. A third entailment is that the communication as dance-ritual is both individually satisfying to all participants (at no one’s expense) and leaves something recognizable behind. It may change the minds of its participants as in religious ceremonies, or put forth artifacts that affect the surrounding ecology (Rappoport, 1979), or create historical records that can be examined by others – a movie, for instance. Constructivist Reflections on the Use of Metaphors What could we learn from the preceding examples of leading communication metaphors? One traditional response, and the one objectivists tend to prefer, is to generalize, to take all of these “folk-theories of communication” to be mere descriptive variations of a single underlying truth and to regard the elements they share as generalizable to all instances. I submit this to be a rather hopeless effort. Although one always can “find” similarities if one looks for them, most of these metaphors provide evidence for the availability of vastly different if not incommensurate logics of communication that bear at best Wittgensteinian family resemblances: no commonalities other than the use of the word “communication.” Another traditional response, one that seems equally objectionable, would be to dismiss these metaphors as naive accounts or as popular myths about communication that ignorant communicators may well believe and enact, and that this ignorance be replaced by scientific theories of what actually happens in communication. In this vein, one could easily ridicule the container and hydraulic metaphors by confronting them with physical evidence. Indeed, literally, a letter contains nothing. It consists of paper imprinted with diversely light-reflective patterns. Everything else is a matter of recognizing configurations of familiar characters that mean something to a reader. Similarly, there is nothing flowing through copper wires. Electrons merely oscillate or bounce against each other (a common metaphor in physics!) in causally determined ways. By analogy, dropping a stone into a pond causes ripples to propagate to its periphery and back, giving rise to the illusion that something material is traveling while the water, much like the air surrounding any speaker, stays pretty much in place. However, where humans communicate, I see no reason to privilege physical accounts of interactions. Rather than treat metaphors of communication as windows into how users understand communication, let me shift gears to consider the “social reality” of this apparent metaphorical multitude. The following ten mini-essays seek to situate metaphors in ordinary people’s lives, including how researchers do and might handle them in their efforts to construct the very realities into which communication researchers need to inquire – without either generalizing these metaphors or dismissing them out of hand.

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1 Reality

Whatever underlies the various phenomena we call communication, they obviously can afford many metaphors, models, and theories of communication. None of these can be claimed to be a better approximation of what communication “really” is. In fact, it is the diversity of metaphors of communication, not any one generalization, that tells something about the reality of experiencing human communication. Obviously, (1) The apparent multitude of available communication metaphors is indeed afforded by how the phenomena of communication are embodied within the people enacting them, technologies facilitating them, and society legitimizing their use (2) Each metaphor creates a coherent system of concepts, a vocabulary capable of creating plausible but diverse constructions of reality (3) These metaphors are viable in various contexts, that is, they have survived the discursive practices in which they occur. Supporting each other, clashing with, or wronging each other is part of human communication. Elsewhere,6 I suggest that privileging any one metaphor or any one theory of communication or proposing any one standard against which all conceptions of communication are to be evaluated – without consent by those who live by their communication metaphors or are theorized by a particular theory – amounts to an intellectual imperialism or the claiming of superior observer roles. To me, communication is a way of living together. That “way” differs from fighting, enslaving, exploiting, or deceiving, for example, but I would not want to claim a reality for this proposition other than what the users of particular metaphors and conceptions do when considering how they practice communication. 2 Cognitive Autonomy

I take it as axiomatic that individual humans are cognitively autonomous beings. Their understanding of themselves, the environment they occupy, the language they speak, and their communicative involvement with others always is their own. Nobody can be forced to understand something as intended, as it is or as it should be. Since nobody can observe someone else’s understanding, nobody will ever know someone else’s thoughts for certain or be able to determine whether two people share an understanding. Also, understanding is never finished. Even in the absence of pressing physical events, people can reconsider, reconstruct, imagine, or invent new worlds, including themselves therein. Cognitive autonomy should not be confused with individualism or solipsism and it does not conflict with participation in social forms of organization as may be seen below. 6 See Krippendorff (1993a) and Chapter 5 in this volume.

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How do particular metaphors of communication relate to cognitive autonomy? I already suggested that the container and hydraulic metaphors, for example, equate understanding with something like contact with tangible contents or mere access to channels of communication. This rather simplistic notion of reading and listening seems not inconsistent with everyday experiences of being in communication.These experiences seem common, unproblematic, automatic and justify the assumption of sameness for everyone.They also suggest influence to be direct, supporting the authority of authors but no option for audience members to read or listen differently. They encourage no self-reflection and no understanding of understanding. Yet, the possibility of saying things differently is part of our common experience with language and a prerequisite for metaphors to work as described above. Experiencing this possibility, I suggest, is common and becoming aware of metaphors as metaphors encourages choices on the level of language, including choices among metaphors and therefore also choices among ways of communicating. Realizing that choices are not dictated by an authority is one constitutive part of cognitive autonomy.The other is realizing that the possibilities that enable such choices do not reside outside one’s cognition, in nature, but are the results of constructing alternative paths. Focusing attention on the use of metaphors in language (Schön, 1979) – not being duped by notions of content, hydraulics, control, transmission, or war, or by mathematical models of communication – almost always ends in recognizing one’s cognitive autonomy. 3 Understanding and Practice

The circularity of knowing and doing and of perceiving and acting define a unity that tends to converge to a condition in which one becomes increasingly confident about what one knows and can achieve, a condition in which one’s metaphorically informed construction of reality appears increasingly vindicated and certain, and one feels more and more in touch with the reality in which one lives.This condition signals understanding. As a premise for people living together, we expect that all reasonable others enact their own understanding. By reasonable I mean nothing more than the willingness to give reasons, when requested, for why one is doing or saying what one is doing or saying. As a version of Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, I suggest that Nobody can knowingly act contrary to his or her understanding. Together with the above-mentioned circular unity, this principle suggests that one can become entrapped in coherent constructions of reality.7 Yet, there seem to be

7 See Chapter 8 in this volume.

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three points for incoherences to arise and enter this unity, suggesting if not forcing changes, adjustments, or reconstructions.The first, discussed in the previous section, is the experience that language affords alternative expressions, hence enabling the creation of alternative metaphors. However, the adoption of new metaphors is motivated largely by inadequacies of present understanding and changing what works well is not likely. This brings me to the second and more important source of incoherences.The practices that a particular understanding informs can unfold only in a medium (an environment).This medium may not cooperate, may even “object” to how it is being treated, thus troubling one’s understanding and demonstrating the non-viability of the construction of reality responsible for this condition. The third source of incoherencies stems from interacting with others who, each acting according to their own constructions of reality, may well perturb one’s understanding of these others’ understanding. Human communication is as variable as language is creative. It always introduces newness to one’s understanding. However, the use of communication metaphors in communication with others can reify these metaphors, coordinate each other’s conceptions of communication and thereby confine incoherences that do arise to tolerable levels. 4 Viability

Among the many metaphors of communication, some can cooperate with each other, others clash when their entailments are enacted. Two individuals who conceive communication in terms of the war metaphor need to be right, will argue all the time, win and lose debates and aggressively seek to put each other down. For them, life is a struggle and they find this is what communication is all about. Individuals who are comfortable in such interactions are not hard to find. In another situation, if one individual subscribes to the control metaphor and the other to the transmission metaphor, they may not be able to stay together for long. While each may start out presuming to know exactly what communication “is,” the former sees the situation in terms of intentional actions, accordingly pursuing various persuasive strategies, regarding what is said as diverse means to an end and may be disappointed to find the latter neither comprehending nor complying with what is said. The subscriber to the transmission metaphor, in contrast, will try to figure out the code that the former is using so as to be able to decode what she thinks or observes and will be unable to understand why the former does not appear to transmit information and instead comes across as manipulative or lying and serving unarticulated purposes. Thus, metaphors of communication turn out to be either viable or not, but always in interaction, that is, relative to each other. Non-viability is experienced as a breakdown in understanding. In the absence of breakdowns, constructions of communication are complementary, and can be taken as an encouragement to continue. Viability means neither sharing nor being real.

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5 Second-Order Understanding

The foregoing examples pitted two ways of understanding communication against each other and explored their viability. They did not speak to the possibility of understanding others’ understanding, a kind of understanding that I am calling second-order. By merely observing processes of human interactions, one is unable to determine whether people are “hard-wired” to respond to physical stimuli as do smart gadgets, follow a script as do actors on stage, or reflect on what they could say and choose among alternatives to preserve their relationships with each other. It would require asking questions of those observed, probing which alternatives they see, inquiring into why they are doing what they are doing in order to understand how these others understand. A classic example of the poverty of observation or first-order understanding comes from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973:3–30). Observationally, there would be no difference between someone’s eye involuntarily twitching and someone winking to someone else.The physical phenomena are the same, but a wink, he says, is the stuff of culture, whereas a twitch is not. In researching a culture, the ethnographer must record the winks, not the twitches. Geertz calls observational accounts thin descriptions, and accounts that consider the conceptions of those engaged in what is being described thick descriptions. Similarly, observers of two people interacting would have no clue whether they convey information, play a game with words, or parody someone else – unless one asks, which implies speaking their language. While I am interested not in describing phenomena of cultural significance but in understanding how they work in communication, the point is that without languaging one can neither see oneself through the eyes of the other nor realize the other in one’s own constructions. This is why it is so difficult if not impossible to communicate across species, with dolphins for example, and why an exploration of the use of metaphors in communication is so important in reflecting on one’s own understanding and in providing clues for how one can construct someone else’s understanding. It is important to note that the six metaphors reviewed above, while unquestionably occurring in language, have no entailments leading to an understanding of what metaphors do. This is perhaps why the communicational role of metaphors remains largely unrecognized. Second-order understanding is not meta-understanding, which would imply a logical level above one’s understanding. Second-order understanding means providing a space to consider an understanding unlike one’s own but with respect if not excitement about its difference, including the ability to move from one’s own understanding to that of others and see their world from their perspective.Where metaphors of communication are concerned, second-order understanding calls for taking seriously the metaphors used by others and constructing from their entailment a picture of the world as seen by these others. In a way, this is what I did in discussing the six major metaphors and their entailments.

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6 Social Communication

The attribute “social” is often carelessly applied to all kinds of phenomena involving two or more people. I like to limit social phenomena to those that are constituted in the understanding its participants have of them and of each other. To illustrate, there can be no language without speakers speaking in the expectation of being understood – everyone in their own terms, of course. There can also be no family without members feeling part of it. Crimes are “crimes” because people agree on the meaning of this word. While that meaning may well be in dispute, when it is not, real consequences follow. Part of marriage is for a couple to continuously coordinate their understanding of what marriage means to them.Accordingly, social phenomena entail bodily participation (they are not abstractions); expectations of how participants understand (second-order understanding); and some kind of coordination of understanding, actions, and purposes. All of these features are brought forth in language. Sociological theories of social phenomena tend to address social phenomena from their outside without regard to the language used by those theorized. The kind of theories I have in mind would be closer to what ethnomethodologists construct, theories that include or at least do not contradict the understanding that participants in a social phenomenon have of it (Berger & Luckmann, 1966:65; Garfinkel, 1967; Giddens, 1990:38; Krippendorff, 1993a).8 Let me then propose that acts of communication – what people say to each other – become social precisely when actors embed them into their own understanding of how their partners understand communication;when their communication practices are guided by efforts to coordinate their second-order understanding, enabling participants to see their practices through the eyes of others. In social communication, so conceived, the conception of metaphors as drawing experiences from familiar domains of experiences into present communications is a small but important part of accessing the conceptions permeating practices of communication. To not merely describe human communication but conceive of it as participants do requires attention to how metaphors of communication are individually realized and how their meanings are interactively coordinated.To validate such accounts – I am hesitant to call them “theories” – calls for reentering these accounts into the very process of communication they speak of. This leads me to suggest conversation as the prototype for such reflective inquiries. 7 Larger Constructions

Often, communication between two or more people is embedded in and constitutive of larger social forms with their own, ultimately communication-related metaphors. The metaphor “organization” draws on experiences with organisms and entails

8 See Chapter 5 in this volume.

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harmonious communication among its parts, submission to the wellbeing of the whole, and functional differentiation in the service of larger objectives. Larger social forms, so metaphorized, provide no place for conflict or questioning their identity and indeed, consideration of the purposes of an organization is left to its head, the seat of intelligence, and ability to speak. In addition, the control metaphor has given rise to hierarchies, placing the most privileged individuals on top and demanding obedience down the hierarchy. Except for the top, the whole becomes a rational mechanism consisting of procedures, functions, and members who conform – Max Weber’s description of bureaucracy.There is a difference between describing a corporation as an assembly line and as a family. The cultures of larger social constructions, the metaphors circulating within them, entail how their parts communicate with one another. The social construction of social institutions – from the family to the state; of collective phenomena – from culture to hegemony or ideology; of nature – from everyday physics to cosmology; even of individual humans – from individual to positional identities; all rely on the very process of human communication in which metaphors arise and structure perceptions. The three remaining propositions will focus on the mass media of communication. 8 Self-Authorization

As a social institution, the mass media of communication constitute themselves in the very social realities they create to thrive in.This fact may not be unique to them; for example, the institution of law brings forth both law enforcement agents and the criminals it pledges to bring to trial.The institution of education continuously reproduces teachers, school administrators, and the students it seeks to prepare to knowledgeably function in society. The institution of the military creates the very conditions for war it is designed to fight, etc. All institutions rely on communication practices that perpetuate their construction in the understanding of their participants. What makes the mass media different from other institutions is that they define themselves as communicating about publicly relevant social realities including about how other institutions constitute themselves. In the guise of merely representing reality as it is, they actively participate in creating these realities in the public’s eyes, set agendas for public deliberations, provide the frames for seeing the issues, and therefore are far more monological, self-directing, and in control of how society sees itself and other social institutions. More than any other social institution, the mass media authorize themselves. 9 Impoverishing Communication

Accordingly, the mass media maintain themselves as the authorities on “everything that’s fit to print.” While overtly focusing on content, as discussed, leaving their

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language transparent and unreflected, mass media practices promote essentially three social constructions underlying communication more generally: uncritical reception, the authority of content production, and one-way communication as the norm.The control metaphor is clearly evident in their operation: measuring success by desired effects, canceling shows that do not bring sufficient advertising revenues, segmenting audiences into profitable markets, seeking to improve predictability of responses to reception via surveys, etc.This contrasts sharply with the metaphors of communication used for public consumption.The hydraulic metaphor explains news flow and the dance-ritual metaphor its continuity.Whether there is something to report or not, a newspaper always has about the same number of pages and television news consumes a scheduled number of minutes.The container metaphor explains the production and dissemination of messages in different categories along with the mass media’s interest in maximizing exposure to their products. Depicting content as unproblematic, instantaneously understandable, and effortlessly entertaining accounts for its uncritical reception, discourages an understanding of this understanding and cultural critiques. In adopting these conceptions, mass media audiences become more and more addicted, dependent, predictable, and hence easily controllable consumers of mass culture. Whether the multitude of especially minor metaphors of communication that are not practiced by the mass media are actively ignored or merely absent for technical reasons, it is in this selectivity that the mass media encourage their audiences to surrender their cognitive autonomy to media authorities of content production, an authority on which mass media institutions thrive. For example, transmission metaphors, which could encourage their users to be interested in what goes on behind the television screen, might lead audience members to explore the hidden interests and powers governing the operation of the media, or enable them to reflect on their own complicity in the media’s increasing role in their everyday lives. However, widespread and critical examination of media practices would undermine the very authority of the mass media that corporate interests seek to maintain. Indeed, most efforts to create citizen awareness of mass communication have failed largely because of the overwhelming presence of seductively simple metaphors of communication. Unfortunately, critical studies of popular culture often thrive on the very same repertoire of metaphors that the media promote and therefore have difficulties reflecting on their own critiques.The selective promotion of metaphors of communication is also underwritten by the one-way nature of mass media technologies. Conversations, for example, can hardly grow in one-way communication technologies that the mass media have adopted as their most effective means. Audience feedback is minimal and restricted, for example, to voting in popularity contests. One-way communication at the expense of conversation and dialogue has a long history in theatre and classical music, but it increasingly determines many current cultural forms: popular entertainment, music production, reality shows, the system of popular celebrities, even the politics of voting – expensive messages, decisive but

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simple votes. However, recent interactive media, the internet for example, provide users not only spaces to say what is important to them but also more choices to respond, motivated by the pleasure of participation.These developments are bound to undermine mass media’s hegemony. 10 Communication Research

Communication research, at least as practiced and taught by the majority of researchers, seems to be more a product of the mass media’s reality constructions than its scientific practitioners are willing to admit. Indeed, the dominant definitions, models and theories in communication research are derived largely from container and hydraulic metaphors in the public and interpersonal spheres, and from the control metaphor in the spheres of organization and management of the public. In the first instance, this spurns a whole spectrum of cultural interpretations and scientific research focusing attention on the contents, ideas, and information provided in mass-produced containers, rendering how language participates in the process virtually invisible and an open field for the mass media to operate. In the second instance, these metaphors drive communication research to study the flows, dissemination and effects of communication without reflecting on the recipients’ (including on the communication researchers’) understanding of their own involvement in the process. Focusing on effects encourages the use of methodologies that conceptualize data in terms of independent or manipulable causes of dependent or controllable variables. Even critical scholars, seeking to assess media biases in causal terms or attempting to uncover underlying power structures, ideologies, or hegemonies often subscribe to the same causal determinism that institutional control efforts construct, unwittingly supporting the very logic they criticize. In the third instance, one-way communication has become the standard model of communication, not only organizing other public communication situations, but also forcing communication research into a linear process, proceeding from gathering data to conclusions or theories – without involving those theorized. Linear conceptions of communication are also evident in the questions that communication researchers are expected to ask.This is evident in Lasswell’s famous questions:“who, says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect” (1948:37).They suggest analyzing separately the actors, audiences, distribution, contents, and effects. Although “feedback” could be added here, these separately answerable questions effectively hide the complexities of communication and blind the researcher to questions about language. The situation is not quite so hopeless, however. Alternative approaches to mass media derived communication research are surfacing in various areas.There is a shift away from studying effects to research into agenda setting (Shaw & McCombs, 1977) or various forms of language-informed framing (Gitlin, 1979; Rachlin, 1988).There is a shift from explaining audience behavior as mass media or message driven to

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explaining it in these audiences’ own terms, for example in the uses and gratification approach (Katz et al., 1974) or by focusing on information-seeking behaviors (Donohew & Tipton, 1973).There are efforts to link the idea of construction to the operation of the mass media institutions (e.g.,Tuchman, 1974).There is a renewed concern with language (Edelman, 1964, 1977), ethnography (Agar, 1986), naturalistic observations (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) and discourse (Dijk, 1985b). Closer to philosophy, there is the shift from objectivism to experientialism (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), social constructionism (Gergen, 1985), radical constructivism (Glasersfeld, 1984, 1991; Segal, 1986;Watzlawick, 1984b), and ecological systems theory (Luhmann, 1989). There are efforts to radically reorient epistemology (Rorty, 1989; Maturana and Varela, 1988).There is the turn toward postmodernism which, while often eroding into a semiotic enterprise, severely attacks the rational consensus on hierarchical forms of thinking and organization and the hegemony of grand theory in which people found no place to breathe. Much social (and sociological) knowledge remains to be reformulated to achieve an understanding of human communication in human terms – which always entails thick descriptions or second-order understanding.

Chapter 4

A Recursive Framework for Communication Theories *

Introduction This is an essay in human communication. It mentions “communication,” is about communication and most importantly, yet often overlooked in other writings on the subject, it is communication to its readers. No statement, no essay, and no theory can say anything about communication without also being communication to someone. Among all the scientific discourses, this is an unusual fact – fact in the sense of having been made or realized as such. I suggest it is constitutive of communication scholarship that its discourse demonstrate what it is about; it therefore cannot escape the self-reference this entails. As my first premise for communication research, I propose that to be acceptable, Theories of human communication must not contradict how they are created, communicated, and used. Although this premise seems to state the obvious, many writers on the subject do not comply; they theorize communication as if their own use of language and communication of theory are exempt from what they theorize or have nothing to do with communication. The reason for this omission may lie neither in bad intentions nor in an inability to understand this phenomenon, but in unquestioned commitments to certain ontological assumptions and vocabularies that prevent these scholars from confronting themselves in their own constructions. This premise would question general theories of communication that exclude the theorist, include claims about the naive responsiveness of television audiences by a creative theorist of television effects, or propose causal theories of communication that could not explain how their proponents communicate among themselves. For much of the history of science, self-reference and the paradoxes it entails have been treated as an oddity of logic and a source for amusement at dinner-table * First part of Krippendorff, K. (1994). A recursive theory of communication. Pages 78–104 in David Crowley & David Mitchell (Eds.). Communication Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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conversations among intellectuals. Indeed, whether Epimenides the Cretan lied when he claimed that “all Cretans are liars” left much of the world around him unchanged. Bertrand Russell (Whitehead & Russell, 1910) may have been the first to recognize the seriousness of such paradoxes. However, instead of coping with their “vicious circularities,” he invented the theory of logical types in order to ban self-reference – along with its relatives, reflexivity and circularity – from scientific discourse.This ghost haunts scientific theory construction; if self-reference indeed is a defining feature of communication scholarship, excluding it impoverishes our understanding of human communication.1 This essay seeks to resurrect self-reference in understanding human communication.To succeed, it must provide an antidote to the Russellian Ghost. I believe this can be found in recursion, the repeated application of an operation on itself. Here, I propose a recursive conception of human communication and suggest that social scientific inquiries into communication acknowledge taking place in human communication – in conversations, collaborations, or consensual coordination among social scientists.This is a project that Margaret Mead (1968) initiated when she suggested that cyberneticians apply cybernetics to their own work, and that Heinz von Foerster (Foerster et al., 1974) defined as a shift in attention from what is observed to the process of observing; that Lars Lofgren (1984) understood as a search for a type-free logic or autology; that Ernst von Glasersfeld (1984) sought to realize in his radical constructivism; that Malcolm Ashmore (1989) and colleagues pursued in the name of a reflexive sociology; and that Anthony Giddens (1984b, 1991) acknowledged in the reflexivity of socially knowledgeable agents. The reflexivity that needs to be pursued will, I am convinced, usher in radical changes in understanding human communication and attendant social phenomena. In this essay, I can develop only a recursive frame into which all kinds of communication theories can be inserted. In the course of its development, I will add two propositions to the above premise and articulate a few of their corollaries. I do not wish to limit theory to abstract statements of facts and predictions of events outside its embodiment in theorists and proponents and practitioners of a theory. Social theories arise, like all theories, within a social fabric, constitutively involving human beings capable of inventing and articulating them, and, as my first premise acknowledges, communicating them to others. But unlike theories in the natural sciences, social theories may also reenter their social fabric and become embodied in the practices of knowledgeable human agents because they are theorized therein or offer insights about communication with others.Thus, a frame for theories of human communication must accept how practitioners of communication understand it, provide spaces for individuals to participate in the process and inform them about the joint consequences of their mutual involvement.

1 For further elaboration of this issue see Chapter 16 in this volume.

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The Centrality of Understanding A second proposition guides my argument toward a recursive framework for communication theories: Everything said is communicated to someone understanding it as such. The explicit self-reference in this proposition, the “as such” pointing back to something being “said” is important. It locates saying things and communication within someone’s understanding. Substantially, the proposition asserts that anything is what it is because someone understands it that way; that the judgment of whether something is real, true, or sensible always is someone’s judgment; and that communication cannot exist without someone’s conception of communication.Theories may be written on a piece of paper for the convenience of not forgetting or joint attention, but they always reside in a listener or reader’s understanding. This proposition might be depicted as in Figure 4.1.

Communicating

To someone

Saying (things)

Others

Figure 4.1. Someone’s Understanding

By “saying,” I do not intend to restrict communication to spoken communication. One can say things by drawing pictures, or communicate with gestures or touch involving no language at all. Neither do I insist that “saying” originates in speakers other than oneself. Although conversation with others is prototypical of human communication, in that process speakers too must understand what they are saying in order to be able to monitor their participation. Humberto Maturana’s (1970) formula “everything said is said by an observer” focuses attention on humans as being both speakers and observers. My proposition merely adds human understanding as constitutive of what (if anything) is recognized as being said. This could be seen as reformulating Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson’s admirably simple axiom of communication: “One cannot not communicate” (1967:48–51). This suggests that all features of human behavior, sounds, gestures, the absence of a response, even a deliberate effort not to engage in communication reveal

A Recursive Framework 75

themselves as meaningful, to which I would add “to someone.” Their axiom admits the inability of speakers or actors to control the meanings their behaviors hold for those who notice them as listeners or observers, but fails to give listeners or observers credit in determining what the behavior of others means to them. In contrast, my proposition is stated from the position of readers, listeners, or observers who always are in charge of their own understanding. Indeed,Watzlawick and colleagues’ axiom is not applicable when people do not notice each other or have no concept of communication in the broadest sense of being responsive to others’ behavior. This proposition is intended to overcome the Cartesian dualism that manifests itself in the distinction between what something really or materially is, a text for example, and its interpretation or the subjectivity of meaning. It counters the suggestion that one could see a text prior to seeing it as such and then explain it as a cause of one’s perceptions or interpretations, as if the dualism implied in this distinction resided outside an observer’s reality. Whatever gives rise to the awareness of something being said and communicated, the causes of one’s experiences, must be located within one’s horizon of understanding. Inaccessibility of the external causes of one’s perception does not mean that understanding could not be extended to heretofore unknown phenomena. For example, television viewers see sharply contoured and moving images on their screens. Yet a magnifying glass applied to the screen will reveal independently flickering dots. The correlation between the two views reveals the operation of a magnifying glass, relating two kinds of experiences without saying anything about an objective (pre-experiential or observer-independent) reality. There is no escape from one’s understanding. My proposition also opposes generalizing human nature from the observation of subjects – subjects meaning people who consent to suspend their agency, even if only during an interview or psychological experiment, answering questions truthfully, following instructions blindly, and agreeing not to challenge the researchers’ motivation for imposing such conditions.There usually are reasons for why people agree to such conditions – rewards, curiosity, fear of the consequences of noncompliance, and obligations to authorities. Such reasons are part of subjects’ understanding. But ignoring subjects’ reasons for participating in conditions created to observe what can be explained causally says more about the researchers’ ability to get people to do something they might not do otherwise than about how people would behave normally. Nor does the proposition mean that understanding is wholly subjective and free of circumstantial constraints. For example, Giddens (1984b:2–7) describes ‘knowledgeable agents’ as continuously monitoring what they do, turning certain consequences of their actions into information which potentially challenges and revises the knowledge that directs their future actions. This describes a reflexive loop within which knowledge can remain viable. Figure 4.2 depicts an abstract version of my reading of Giddens’s construction.

76 Communicating Medium of embodiment in: Human agent

Environment

Information

Monitored actions

Knowledge

Latent consequences

Figure 4.2. Giddens’s Construction of a Knowledgeable Agent

In constructing his knowledgeable agents, Giddens maintains a position outside these agents. In Figure 4.2 this is indicated in the epistemological status assigned to “latent consequences”; the more knowledgeable sociologist conceives of these consequences as unintended and outside the agent’s experiences. My second proposition suggests that these two consequences – monitored and latent – be understood as such but by their observer (here Giddens) who can distinguish between the two kinds of consequences of an actor’s unfolding reality constructions. To capture this, Figure 4.3 embeds an observed agent’s understanding in the observer’s understanding, such that each involves both a construction of reality (knowledge) and the practices that derive from it.

A’s construction of reality

O bj

ecti on

A’s understanding

Observer’s understanding

My understanding

A’s monitored practices

A’s unmonitored medium

Entailments of my construction

Figure 4.3. An Observer’s Construction of Someone’s Understanding in the Medium of that Observer’s Understanding

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Herein, understanding is constituted in a reflexive loop, in the unfolding of one’s reality construction into one’s practices and in turn their reentry into the very construction from which they were derived. It is not physical stimuli, tangible objects, or messages as may be seen by an external observer that enter a reflexive loop, but confirmations of, challenges to, or constraints on someone’s understanding. I will call challenges and constraints objections from the medium of a recursive loop’s embodiment. Objections are experienced as “saying NO” to someone’s construction of reality when the expectations that derive from that construction are not met by the experiences following one’s actions. A medium, by definition, provides the background of one’s reflective monitoring and hence resides outside the horizon of an actor’s understanding.This outside, unknown to the agent but observable by a theorist, includes the actor’s latent consequences, unconscious motives and conceptually inaccessible biological determinisms along with the environment in which the actions take place. A reflexive loop is always “meaning-tight,” “informationally closed,” or “hermeneutically impenetrable.” This suggests a major difficulty in conceptualizing communication among reflexive practitioners in which their understanding is constitutively involved. Note that my second proposition refers to understanding, not comprehension. Understanding has nothing to do with representation. Comprehension, however, always invokes a norm, an external standard imposed by a privileged observer external to a reflexive loop, such an instructor assuring correct recitation of histories, spelling, use of equipment, or decoding of an encoded message – wherein the Russellian Ghost is again evident. Understanding, by contrast, simply is. A knower may feel it as confidence in the viability of one’s constructions of reality, certainty of acceptance in a community, etc. in any case according to her own criteria. This understanding should not be confused with the one in Alfred Schutz’s (1970) phenomenology, an entirely subjective understanding not embedded in a reflexive loop constitutively involving interaction with an unknown medium. Thus, the assertion “I understand (you)” does not entail comprehension of what someone else had in mind, but can be taken as an indication of a sense of coherence or closure of one’s state of knowing and as a signal marking readiness to proceed in a conversation. This is similar to Wittgenstein’s (1953) example of understanding a sequence of numbers, as expressed in the assertion,“now I can go on.” Conversely, a lack of understanding signals a state of not being in touch with “reality,” a feeling of uncertainty or a strangeness that ethnographers after Martin Heidegger call (the likelihood of) “breakdown” (Agar, 1986) and which I describe as the fear of experiencing objections. Ultimately, my proposition claims humans to be cognitively autonomous.To support this claim, I submit that: (1) Nobody can be forced to understand something as intended, as it exists or as it should be understood from someone else’s perspective. (2) Nobody can directly observe or access someone else’s understanding (its inference from observed practices, discursive and non-discursive, is always one’s own).

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(3) The reflexive circle involving the repeated construction, decomposition, and re-construction of realities, the continuous enacting of these constructions into practices and the re-entering of the consequences of such practices into the very reality that justified them initially is dedicated to preserving human understanding by criteria internal to the process. (4) Understanding is never finished, even in the absence of objections from an environment.The process directs itself. For me, understanding cannot be abstracted out of its embodiment as cognitivists routinely suppose, nor can it be reduced to a subjective representation of objective features of an individual’s biology or environment, as logical positivists insist. Only by reference to understanding’s embodiment can one see how objections (perturbations or breakdowns) limit the space within which it is creative and nonrepresentational. Next to sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and kinesthetic sense, understanding may be regarded as the seventh sense. Fatal accidents, suicides, and martyrdom exemplify the cognitive autonomy of individuals to construct realities whose practices can become biologically non-viable. Under such extreme conditions understanding destroys itself via its embodiment. It follows that the persistence of one’s understanding through time indicates not a state of adaptation to an environment, but rather that one’s constructions of reality as invented and practiced have remained within whatever the unknowable medium of its embodiment has afforded. Thus, cognitive autonomy can reach beyond the biological autopoiesis that embodies it, but practicing one’s understanding cannot violate its own embodiment. Recursive Constructions for Communication (Theory) In view of the foregoing, I should not write about communication without reminding myself that I am also communicating at the same time, that communication cannot reside entirely outside or independent of my understanding and that my cognitive autonomy grants considerable freedom in constructing fellow beings as participants in the process. In particular, I should not subscribe to notions of communication whose practices are predicated on denying others – readers or partners in communication – the kind of cognitive abilities the preceding proposition claims.This brings me to a third proposition: Human communication constitutes itself in the recursive unfolding of communication constructions held by participants (including of each other) into intertwining practices that participants can recognize and explain in terms of communication. I offer five interpretations of the propositions proposed here. First, this proposition locates constructions of reality and individual practices (of communicating and saying things) in some participant’s understanding. But it

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extends the second proposition by asserting that communication arises in the concurrent unfolding of communication constructions simultaneously held by its participants into intertwining communication practices. Here, each reflexive loop, each individual’s understanding is challenged potentially by the consequences of other participants’ practices. These practices could be said to be in coordination when intertwining practices no longer challenge or object to each other’s unfolding reality constructions, when they are viable relative to each other or when understanding resonates. Figure 4.4 depicts this extension of the proposition. Medium

B’s understanding

B’s practices as seen by B

ecti on

A’s practices as seen by A

B’s construction of communication

O bj

A’s construction of communication

O bj

ecti on

A’s understanding

Medium

Figure 4.4. An Observer’s Construction of Communication between Others

Figure 4.4 fundamentally differs from linear diagrams commonly used by communication researchers investigating what A communicates to B and from simple interactions, for example in conversation analysis that studies what A says to B, B’s response to what A said, and how longer sequences unfold. Such researchers take their own understanding as the only understanding that matters.Their research does not allow for others’ understanding and thus only inquires into their own. My second proposition encourages an external observer to explain what causes the challenges or objections to the reflexive loop involving someone else, but does not demand that this observer’s accounts enter the understanding of the observed. In contrast, Figure 4.4 does not suggest that whatever A hears herself as saying, A’s practices correspond to what B hears A as saying. Rather, both communicants understand separately and include each other by correlating what they hear themselves as saying with the response of other. Maturana calls this “con-sensual coordination of action,”2 2 The hyphen between “con” and “sensual” is my insertion to avoid the confusion with consensus, an agreement. Con-sensual is intended to mean sensing jointly: communicants acknowledge each other’s presence, and something sensed jointly – what is being said – and act accordingly.

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a coordination that makes possible the viability of participating constructions. Constructions of communication that emerge in such a process accommodate the objections they pose for each other through their continuous unfolding in intertwining practices. Coordination is simply that intertwining as understood by participants. While Figure 4.4 is fair to both communicants, it demonstrates that ignoring my first proposition necessarily privileges the vantage point of the external observer. Here, from the perspective of the reader, there is no problem describing what A and B (mean to) say to each other and assessing the sharing of their constructions of reality, misunderstandings, and the reliability of information transmission. This privileging of the observer is once again a trace of the Russellian Ghost.The symmetry in my third proposition is intended not to make epistemological exceptions, either for any of the communicants involved or for their scientific observers. Second, this proposition realizes human communication as a social phenomenon. Social phenomena, like culture, institutions, conventions, language, and human relationships, are constituted in participants’ understanding. By “constituted” I mean defined from within the processes being defined, a reflexive phenomenon that makes observation by outsiders difficult. Berger & Luckmann recognize this to have farreaching implications; they argue that since an “institutional order can be understood only in terms of the ‘knowledge’ that its members have of it, it follows that the analysis of such‘knowledges’ will be essential for an analysis of the institutional order in question” (1966:65). Giddens (1984b) also gives “knowledgeability” a defining role in his construction of social agents. But neither answers the question of how such knowledge enters social processes, much less human communication. Thus, my third proposition does not echo merely the importance of such knowledge in understanding human communication, but describes also a recursive form that incorporates into this understanding the very understanding communicants have of communication. It no longer conceptualizes communicants as observers of social events outside themselves (a position into which the viewer of Figure 4.4 is thrust) but as co-creators of the social phenomenon of communication in which they participate. This is an important deviation from traditional conceptions of communication as the sending and receiving of mutually known messages, symbols or meanings, of social phenomena as shared, and of facts as objective, observerindependent, and decided by someone outside the phenomenon in question.To avoid objections or breakdowns in the reflexive monitoring of one’s part in intertwining communication practices, it becomes natural that one: (1) Invents others in one’s own construction of reality. (2) Grants these invented others the ability to understand the unfolding of their own reality constructions into their own practices and to monitor them in their own terms. (3) Assumes these others to understand the coordination that arises in terms of their respective conceptions of communication.

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Figure 4.5 depicts an individual’s (A’s) minimum understanding of her communicative involvement with another (B) – minimum in the sense that the embedding of constructions into each other may have greater recursive depth. In this figure, communication cannot be confused with a variable to be entered into an equation. As a social phenomenon, it is constituted in a reflexive practitioner’s understanding. Nor does communication require mutually shared knowledge (Giddens, 1984b:375). Rather, it depicts communication as a construction that constitutively involves one’s own and others’ understanding, including these others’ understanding of their own and others’ understanding, etc., which returns to one’s self from these others’ perspectives. Individual differences in understanding communication are considered natural rather than deviant from some outsider’s theoretically motivated norm.

tio

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Figure 4.5. A’s (Minimum) Construction of Communication

This framework for communication is recursive, applicable to itself, as promised in the beginning of this essay. Appropriately, Figure 4.5 includes at least one reference to itself; “A’s construction of communication” on the left side of the diagram refers to the diagram as a whole, rendering the whole as its own part. In practice, such a recursive conception for communication is fractal-like extendable

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– without invoking the Russellian Ghost. A diagram with greater recursive depth would exhibit many more such self-references.This may unsettle readers with strong preferences for linearities, but this difficulty may stem from the necessity here of envisioning from a two-dimensional diagram a space in which apparent part-towhole relations become recursive constructions of unities. Paper is an awkward medium for the representation of the recursive construction of communication. Communication researchers who consider interaction with subjects as a social phenomenon, as they should, might recognize in Figure 4.5 the frame for a theory of themselves that can be recursively extended to embrace the understanding of those they theorize. In practice, though, human beings are able to track only a few levels of recursion at the same time.3 However, the realities of such cognitive limitations should not serve as an excuse for ignoring recursive accounts of social phenomena. For example, a candidate for political office who considers what voters think of her – including what they believe she thinks of them – is likely to be a better communicant than one who merely knows how many know of her. Understanding human communication as a social phenomenon requires recursive depth at least equal to the understanding of those communicated with. Third, language is constitutively involved in any recursive construction of communication. This is not to deny the possibility that non-verbal phenomena such as gestures and appearances enter communication processes.The embedding of one’s construction of reality in that of another corresponds to the linguistic possibility of embedding clauses in one other.According to Noam Chomsky, this linguistic feature is universal to all human languages, suggesting that recursive conceptions of communication are thinkable in all languages. Visual images, too, can depict recursions as in the above figures, for example, in fractals, visualizations of partwhole similarities, mirror-like reflections of reflections and the visual embedding of narratives in film. Regarding the non-verbal, consider human communication with pets. Pet owners often create elaborate constructions of what their pets can understand, usually including an ability to read the owners’ intentions in talking to them.Anthrozoologists4 likely dismiss attribution of this ability as anthropomorphic projections. However, as long as such constructions of communication remain viable in the practices they inform, owners’ accounts of how they communicate with pets have to be respected as explanations of what owners do and experience in return. The therapeutic value of practicing such constructions is unquestioned.The fact that humans, including anthrozoologists, do not have evidence of how animals see their world (notwithstanding Uexküll’s [1934] respectful gedanken experiments) gives pet owners considerable liberty to invent a world for pet owners until they

3 See a review of R.D. Laing’s work by David and Dorothy Miell (1986). 4 Anthrozoology is an interdisciplinary field studying human–animal communication. It draws on anthropology, ethology, medicine, zoology among others.

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experience non-compliance by their pets, but they cannot expect confirmation in language. This disparity demonstrates the central role of language in human communication. Pet owners can explain their constructions to each other, including those for their pets – as the propositions imply – however, pets cannot offer such explanations. It would be a mistake to exclude non-verbal aspects from the study of human communication, phenomena that Michael Polanyi (1969) calls “tacit knowledge,” Giddens (1984b) describes as “practical consciousness,” and Mark Johnson (1987) analyses in terms of “non-propositional meanings.” It is insufficient to rely exclusively on such otherwise agreeable metaphors as in Heidegger’s (1962:271) contention that “language is the house of Being” (suggesting that we construct the world in the language we live in).The fact that human communicants (even pet owners) can be held socially accountable for their actions (Shotter, 1984), and can offer verbal explanations, clarifications, justifications, and even whole theories of their realities, demonstrates that language is part of the very construction of communication that unfolds into social practices. Thus, communication is constructed in language while being practiced (see my first proposition) and involves not only the coordination of practices (as in communication with pets) but also the coordination of that coordination. Space limitations do not allow exploration in depth of the many roles that language can play in communication, but I offer three implications of my propositions: (1) Language cannot be regarded as being about a world outside its speakers, as representative of objective facts, or as a conveyor of information. Since everything said must be understood as such, meanings always reflect a speaker’s cognition, feelings, experiences, intentions, and constructions of reality.Tropes such as substitutions, categorizations, metonymies, and metaphors, which do not play important roles in conceptions of language as a medium of representation, are seen here as indispensable windows into a speaker’s or writer’s process of re-ception, re-cognition, and re-construction of realities.5 (2) Language cannot be considered shared in the sense of being identical for every competent speaker of a language. Dictionaries give such an impression and indeed can serve con-sensual coordination of language use, but not much more. Austin’s performatives or Searle’s speech acts (for example, declarations, promises, questions, apologies, greetings) may not express much about a speaker’s cognition but they do coordinate actions, create what they assert and commit participants to particular communication practices. Gregory Bateson’s analysis of the message “this is play” (1972:177–93) shows that language provides speakers with the ability to coordinate shifting from one socially constructed construct of communication to another. Coordination surely is a more appropriate explanation of the use of language than sharing. 5 See Chapters 3 and 10 in this volume.

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(3) Language use is not governed by abstract and disembodied rules, for example, of grammar and semantics, but by speakers’ narrative and conversational competences – which may include creating rules and applying them until new ones find their place. In linguistics, rules of language are concerned primarily with the generation of well-formed sentences; in family communication with the evolving relationships among members and in organizational communication with how commitments are negotiated and maintained. Rules of language are always in the process of being negotiated, except that they are all stated in language and communicated among its users, thus constituting the very language used in communication. Here, language is a medium of coordination not only of something else but also of its own understanding. The foregoing three points suggest that language is a prerequisite for understanding communication as a social phenomenon, hence “everything said …” Fourth, my third proposition neither preconceives a particular theory of communication nor does it require participants in the process to agree on one. By not specifying from the outside or in advance of an encounter what communication is or how it should be understood by those involved – whether as conveying information, reproducing pattern, maintaining relationships, exerting influence and control, negotiating meanings, or cooperating in the consensual pursuit of goals, etc. – this proposition provides no more than a recursive frame whose space can be filled by any construction participants bring to it or develop in the process of communicating. This scaffold invites practitioners to invent and test their own constructions of and relative to each other. It also invites communication researchers not only to observe but also to listen and respond to accounts. The open yet formal nature of this recursive theory for communication might be alien to traditional social scientists accustomed to formulating disembodied theories of communication that predict or control observations without realizing their hermeneutic participation in what is always a social process. My propositions are neither true nor false in the representational sense. For communication researchers, they offer conceptual spaces in which observed forms of communication can be explored relative to those that do not yet occur in practice. For the theorized, it provides spaces for participation and respecting each other’s contributions in the social construction of theories concerning them. One could say that the propositions “socialize” communication theory construction but without ideology or idealism – for they potentially embrace markedly unequal constructions of communication provided they lead to behaviors that afford each other, such as human communication with pets, or where one claims privileges and others willingly accept inferior roles. Do humans prefer creating their worlds in spaces that encourage mutual respect? This recursive frame preserves that possibility, even if research requires more effort. Fifth, and finally, recursive communication among knowledgeable human agents provides an opportunity to move within the virtual space in which one enacts one’s conception of communication.This entails the ability:

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(1) To position oneself in one’s constructions of reality. In human communication, this must include one’s constructions of the realities of other human beings. (2) To move from one’s own position into the positions others take in their realities (as constructed by oneself). (3) To understand others in their worlds, to accept their difference from one’s own reality, enables one to see oneself through others’ eyes. This recursive frame applies beyond the recommendation to keep others in mind (an entailment of the control metaphor of communication6) or to treat others as serviceable to the controllers’ needs. A recursive framework maintains symmetry, dialogue, equal participation, and the possibility of mutual respect; it does not reify, as do many communication researchers, the inequalities that exist in the world. Without encouragement to construct others as endowed with similar or more advanced capabilities, communication would be reduced to monologue, to performing for audiences or mere producing and disseminating messages, as mass communication is often inadequately described.Treating the behavior of others as causally determined and predictable disrespects the constructed nature of the realities of those studied or faced in communication. It reduces society to a mechanism.Without the ability to appreciate the astounding differences in others’ understanding, empathy and love could not arise and creativity would be stifled by authority-imposed or socially enforced (in any case from outside) rules. Without the ability to explore others’ reality constructions, one would not realize the constructed nature of one’s own reality. Finally, without the ability to see oneself from a new perspective, one would not be able to escape one’s cognitive traps whose nature can be realized only from an accessible outside (Krippendorff, 1989b), a fundamental requirement of all emancipatory pursuits.7 The recursive frame for constructing communication from theories that participants bring to it supports emancipatory possibilities. To be clear, there is no way to escape one’s horizon of understanding. Positivists attempted this, only to find themselves entangled in epistemological contradictions and authority struggles. Phenomenologists’ mistaken assumption that it is possible to enter someone else’s understanding to assess commonalities and differences produced many popular theories of communication-as-sharing.To make sense of one’s practices of living with others and to sustain one’s understandings while respecting the cognitive autonomy of others, recursive constructions of reality suggest themselves. Such constructions are inconsistent with the idea of a single uni-verse; they instead support a multi-verse of distributed but coordinated constructions of reality continuously unfolding into mutually challenging but socially coordinated practices of living together.To me, communication is to participate in such an unfolding.

6 See a discussion of metaphors of communication in Chapter 3 in this volume. 7 See Chapter 8 in this volume.

Chapter 5

Conversation or Intellectual Imperialism *

Introduction To begin, let me say that I have always gained new insights from being communicatively involved with unusual people and groups or by experiencing cultures different from my own.1 I am therefore intrigued by proposals to enrich communication theories through the systematic application of comparative methodologies. But I am also worried, and this essay is largely motivated by fear that the epistemological assumptions built into such comparisons may frustrate the promise of broadened horizons and new insights, fueling instead an intellectual imperialism that privileges human communication theories by denying those theorized therein the ability to construct, understand, and communicate theories of their own. Human communication theories often are embedded in cognitively disabling constructions of reality and unwittingly institute technologies of oppression that are all the more persuasive as their creators feel compelled to reject responsibility for them. Clearly, the appropriateness of any comparative methodology is linked intricately to what is to be compared; here I am concerned with theories and practices of human communication that invariably entail conceptions of human participation. I wholeheartedly agree with Brenda Dervin when she writes “that we have failed to develop powerful approaches to comparative theory and this failure … [lies] in the very nature of the analytic we are now using” and in “how we conceptualize … the communicating human” (1991:60–61). Her essay seeks to effect a shift from comparing entities to comparing processes. I hope to contribute to the idea of a comparative methodology by proposing an epistemological framework not only for the twin problems of constructing communication theories comparatively and of making appropriate comparisons among them communicable, but also for enabling human participation in them at the same time. * Krippendorff, K. (1993a). Conversation or intellectual imperialism in comparing communication (theories). Communication Theory 3,3: 252–266. 1 This essay responds to an intercultural discussion and subsequent commentary of “comparative communication theory” at an International Communication Association conference from which several papers were published in Communication Theory 1.1.

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I encountered considerable difficulties expressing these intentions in a language whose everyday realism is alien to what I wanted to say. I hope that the six propositions I offer on human communication (theory and comparisons) overcome the intellectual imperialism that I fear. Working through these one by one, I was surprised, as the reader may be, by the harsh conclusions they support. In the same way that these propositions have affected my own thinking, they could motivate a radical reformulation of our theoretical and comparative efforts. Regardless of their truth value, they will prove themselves viable in their own terms if they stimulate conversation about human communication (theory). One To begin, the common meaning of “comparison,” “com” (together) and “par” (equal) would render “comparison” an act of sorting out likenesses (and by implication an act of ignoring differences) among objects brought together. Consistent with this etymology, and speaking about social systems as the objects of his concern, Majid Tehranian suggests in an essay that comparative theory be based on three premises: “(a) that all social systems are unique, (b) that there are yet some features common to all systems, and (c) that the uniqueness of any social system can best be appreciated by comparing it with what it has in common with others” (1991:44). In order to avoid the ethnocentrism of a dominant society,Tehranian suggests, communication systems should be compared in terms of the variables “continuity and discontinuity in time, center and periphery in space, domination and dependency in structure and communication and control in function.” He suggests that these are “dialectical contradictions” with which all societies have to cope (1991:49). Let me draw attention to the objectivism this notion of comparison presupposes. The features found to be either universal or immanent are taken to be features of the objects (systems or theories) being compared.These features as well as the objects that possess them are thought to reside entirely outside their observers or exist independent of them.The language that brings them together seems to play no role here or is transparent (self-evident and hence ignorable), and the contribution of the scientific observer making the comparison (enacting the proposed comparative theory) is nowhere recognized in the reported differences. In his response, Barnett Pearce (1991) similarly points out that Tehranian compares theories (not the systems they purport to describe) as if they were different but commensurate along the dimensions of time, space, structure, and function. Such comparisons, Pearce argues, are based on a notion of language assumed to be already in place, neutral because it applies equally to all theories being compared, and elementary or foundational as its meanings and logic are thought to be common to these theories and hence to be found in them.As Pearce suggests, a language that would be appropriate for comparing incommensurate theories must be invented to embrace their disparate elements, must have the status of a theory (about theories), cannot invoke the kind of certainties that objectivist comparisons seek,

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and must inform acts of comparison as well. I suggest that the emphasis on commonalities and differences among objects that are assumed to reside outside their observer obfuscates their origin in the language in use. For the same reasons, we cannot claim to distinguish between commensurate and incommensurate theories (as if commensurability were a relational property of the theories themselves) without recourse to a language (Pearce would say “a theory”) that makes them one or the other. My first proposition seeks to overcome the objectivist views expressed above: Commonalities and differences are brought forth in an observer’s language. This proposition suggests that all comparisons presume a conceptual system, a space or a language into which various objects can be placed.There is nothing “objective” about a space. Spaces always are observers’ constructions, and it is within such cognitive/linguistic inventions that objects acquire the commonalities and differences that interest observers or serve a community of peers.While such comparisons take place in someone’s understanding, they manifest to others in that person’s languages. I use the plural here because individuals rarely ever use only one language, and any effort to make incommensurate theories comparable requires, as Pearce recognizes, linguistic inventiveness.An objective or observerless reality neither knows a language nor recognizes commonalities and differences. Two I suggest that theories are special kinds of phenomena and that comparing them cannot be based on a metaphor of comparing tangible objects side by side. Let me state what I hope will be obvious: A theory is constructed in language by someone understanding it as such. Accordingly, theories cannot exist outside someone’s understanding or outside their embodiment in someone’s experiences, actions, and languages.This is so for scientific theories and folk theories as well, including anyone’s verbalization of what might be to others tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1969) or practical consciousness (Giddens, 1990).Theories must be constructed and will always be meaningful to someone who has created or reconstructed them, regardless of the differing purposes they serve for different people in different situations and regardless of whether this someone is an active proponent, opponent, or silent practitioner of any of those purposes. The self-reference in the proposition (the “as such” pointing back to “theory”) is important here. It is intended to overcome the popular temptation to separate what something really is, for example a text, and its subjective interpretation or meaning – as if anyone could describe a text without or independently of seeing it as such, as if the dualism implied in this traditional distinction could exist outside an observer’s

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conception. Self-reference also dedicates all distinctions, all comparisons, and all acts of cognitive construction (theories included), to the preservation of one’s understanding. The fact that nobody can be forced to understand something as intended, as it exists or as it should be, together with the fact that nobody can directly observe someone else’s understanding, attests to the cognitive autonomy of individuals involved in communication. Understanding always is someone’s own, scientists included, and theories cannot be divorced from their embodiments. Since theories always are one’s theories, comparisons of them should account for and respect their embodiments in the lives of those who understand, use, or practice them in their own terms. Without involving their embodiments, comparisons of theories remain entirely imprisoned in the comparing scientist’s self-righteous understanding. Three In addition to the apparent relativism of the foregoing statements, theories of human communication cannot easily escape the self-implication involved in the following dual requirement: Human communication theory is about communication but must be communicable as well. This self-implication is not common to all empirical domains. In physics, for example, theories are communicable among physicists and the manner of their communication is a key to understanding how physics works. But, since matter does not understand the language of the observing physicists, theories in physics are prevented from entering what they claim to describe.This situation, however, does not apply to inquiries into human communication. Human subjects communicate among themselves much as their scientific observers do among their peers and often are able to understand theories about themselves. Moreover, it is inconceivable that anyone could say anything to anybody without some understanding of what saying things does, without some knowledge of what interacting with others means and hence, without at least some (folk) theory of communication.The contention that every competent communicator is ipso facto a theorist and a practitioner of communication merely echoes Anthony Giddens’s (1984a:13) claim that knowledgeable social actors are both social theorists (on the level of discourse consciousness) and methodological specialists (on the level of both discursive and practical consciousness). Much as natural scientists may have reason to exclude themselves from the empirical domains of their own theories, social scientists can do this as well, for example, when presenting an elaborate literature review and empirical evidence for a strictly causal theory of human communication. Since the creative process leading to the construction of a causal theory can hardly be construed as causally

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determined, this theory is already contradicted by its very communication and could be taken seriously only when one either fails to recognize or denies the above selfimplication.The exclusion of the theorist from her domain of theorizing is neither a necessary requirement for social science nor an ethically acceptable practice (see Krippendorff, 1989a:86–90).2 This would argue against Giddens’s distinction between lay actors’ understanding and sociologists’ understanding as logically necessary, especially when he notes in practice a continual “slippage” from one to the other (Giddens, 1984a:374).As will become apparent here, this self-implication, noted also by Jacobson (1991), has profound consequences for the conduct of human communication research, especially for appropriate validity criteria. Four Even for physicists, the claim that a theory is valid implies that it brings forth the phenomena it describes – see Einstein’s insight that it is theory, not nature, that guides observation. Valid theories of human communication must do this as well. But the above self-implication makes validity a special problem. When people are faced with a theory concerning them and thus become aware of (someone else, for example, a theorist, noticing) something about themselves, the validity of this theory comes into question. A theory of certain habitual communication practices, the use of sexist pronouns, for example, enables those addressed to reflect on the previously unnoticed practices and to act on those reflections. A theory could be adopted as a guide for knowledgeably pursued practices. It could also be opposed by people who either no longer conform to these practices or who construct a more acceptable countertheory in its place.Within this wide range of possible responses, then, coming to know a theory of human communication, especially while opposing it, is also a process of changing what that theory means, the communication practices it describes and what if anything it can bring forth thereafter.This process can either converge to a practice in the presence of which the theory (or what has become of it) becomes in the traditional sense valid or drifts off to something altogether different. A human communication theory, communicated among those it claims to be about, either constitutes itself in the very communication practices it comes to guide or becomes invalid. Generally, “to constitute” means to define itself in terms of and from within the very phenomenon being defined. In the empirical domain of human communication, convergence may be experienced when a theory of communication is being (re)negotiated and recedes slowly into the background as a guide for communication

2 See Chapter 1 in this volume.

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about other subject matter, reaching a point at which the practices it brings forth cohere in each participant’s mind with how this theory is understood – without implying any cognitive sharing. Constitution is not the fate of every theory however, and social constructions like human communication are far from arbitrary. They require at least acquiescence if not consent. Five What must go into the construction of human communication theories that respect the above-described contributions of its human constituents? I begin with a premise: In any empirical domain in which the processes to be explained are influenced by or rooted in its constituents’ understanding, knowledge, or conceptualization of them, analysis of this understanding is a key to understanding these processes (Berger & Luckmann, 1966:65; Giddens, 1990:38). This premise also applies to social scientific theories whose public and privileged nature makes them all the more likely to become part of everyday discourse and to constitute themselves in the very social processes they claim merely to describe. In applying this premise to human communication, there are two circularities that no human communication theory can ignore. The first circularity resides in individuals’ enacting their understanding, in this case, communicating according to their own theories of communication and monitoring their continual unfolding into their individual communication practices. This first circularity can be likened to a hermeneutic circle of making sense out of one’s own communications. The second circularity is constituted in the participation of several individuals and renders human communication as a social phenomenon. To me, communication manifests itself in a coordination of individual behaviors, a braiding of human practices – a dance, if you wish – that is directed not only by each participant’s notion of communication but more importantly by what each knows of her partners in communication. This second circularity emerges precisely when (at least some) participants grant their partners the same cognitive autonomy (in the form of their ability to construct and to monitor the unfolding of their own cognitive constructions into their own practices) they claim for themselves. It becomes a second-order circularity because it involves not merely an understanding of human communication but an understanding of the understanding of human communication as a concurrent unfolding of its constituents’ potentially very different communication theories into communication practices and as an individual monitoring of the intertwining of these practices. More concisely: Human communication resides in the recursive unfolding of communication theories held by its human constituents, including theories of each other, into intertwined practices that each understands as communication.

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Let me elaborate on this complex proposition by highlighting three implications for theory construction and comparisons. First, the proposition embeds communication in a phenomenon without insisting on any one definition of communication, for example, as the production of messages, as the transmission of information, as the control of an effect, as vicarious experiences, as the maintenance of interpersonal relationships, or as the reproduction of social institutions. It suggests merely a recursive frame or a generative grammar for relational explanations that can become a predictive theory of communication only after the communication theories held by the participants, including the theories of their partners, are entered into this recursive frame. In effect, this frame invites communicators to participate in the simultaneous construction of theories about themselves and each other, in the unfolding of these theories into intertwined practices and in a mutual acknowledgment of their participation in communication. This frame can accept any individually held theories; the models that thereby come into being can explain the consequent intertwining of practices provided the participants act consistent with their understanding of themselves and their partners.3 With the help of such operational constructions, one can explore cognitions that lead to a variety of stable human relations, from dominance to love, or to breakdowns in communication (conflicts resolved by termination of the intertwining). One can also explore the interactional consequences of certain epistemological assumptions, such as a variety of folk objectivisms regarding, for example, the notion of power (Krippendorff, 1989b).4 Since communication is both collaboratively constructed and individually recognized in the consequent intertwining of practices (including the intertwining of social scientists’ interactions with their subjects), there is no need for an external observer to presuppose the existence of agreements on rules, the sharing of a symbolic repertoire and the use of a common language or rationality (although these phenomena are not prevented from emerging in the process). Presumptions of this nature would merely amount to the unilateral imposition of one possible theory of communication. Second, I am careful to preserve the two circularities in the proposition because they act as important escape routes from objectivism, which is predicated on privileging one participant’s conceptions at the expense of all others. Sometimes this is the sender of messages and designated controller of intended effects; often it is the external and detached scientific observer who claims objectivity for her observations and whose institutional role makes her assume cognitive abilities superior to those of the observed. If the proposition is adhered to, then all communicators, including the communication researchers who interact with their communicating subjects, would have to be granted the like ability to enter into their own understanding of their under-

3 See Chapter 3 in this volume for Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction. 4 See Chapter 8 in this volume.

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standing of their partners’ understanding and to reflect on their own constructions via those of their partners. This reveals human communication processes, and I generalize this to all social constructions constituted in human communication, as recursively self-embedding phenomena. The second-order circularity resides in the process of unfolding such recursive theories into practices whose intertwining can then no longer serve as theory-independent data, but reenter each participant’s theory through observation as either self-confirming or self-perturbing. Any researcher who makes the ethical commitment not to claim cognitive superiority over her subjects and takes an interactive/interventionist approach to social inquiry is invariably involved in such a recursion. This second circularity can also be likened to a hermeneutic one. However, it is neither a circle constituted by the dynamics between someone’s reading and a text, nor one of (re)constructing a theory as a consequence of observing the practices to which it leads (see Giddens, 1984a). Rather, it involves several individuals in a process of coordinating their individual practices, who in turn collectively probe, shape, reconstruct, and ultimately make sense in the potentially very different reality constructions (here the human communication theories) each participant creates for herself to live in with each other.The hermeneutic metaphor of “fusing horizons” (Gadamer, 1975a:273ff) may divert attention from the central recursiveness of understanding human communication as an intertwining of human practices that takes place under conditions of preserving individual understanding. Here, I interject a self-reflexive note. Although the medium of writing prevents me from practicing what I am suggesting – putting my own constructions of the readers’ theories of communication to a test, monitoring the intertwining my conceptions could set in motion, continually reconstructing my own theory of the unfolding process, including accounting for the readers’ communicational involvement, and so forth – this limitation does not stop me from assuming that readers are capable of putting their potentially very different communication theories into their own equations and responding in whichever way this medium permits.This writing is no more than a moment in a yet-to-be continued process of communication. Third, the proposition points to a methodology for comparing theories of human communication. I have suggested that even ordinary communicators hardly can avoid constructing the communication theories of others, entering these into their own theories and unfolding them into communicative practices.What can be “compared” here is neither the cognitive constructions held by each communicator (the claim of which would assume direct access to them) nor one’s own theory with one’s own constructions of the theories held by others (the claim of which would ignore that only the behavioral implications of holding such theories can be observed and hence matter here), but how these theory-based constructions recursively constrain each other’s unfolding into