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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A’s construction A’s B’s B’s construction of communication practices practices of communication

ec bj

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tio

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A’s A’s construction A’s B’s B’s construction practices of communication practices practices of communication

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 intertwined practices.Thus, questions of commonalities and differences between human communication theories here become replaced by questions of whether the recursive embeddings of these theories either are viable or break down in the context of the practices they engender.

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Six In view of the cognitive autonomy that is constitutively human, social theories that are published and thereby enter processes of human communication hardly could pose a threat to anyone’s understanding were it not for the larger world constructions in which they become embedded. I refer here to the kind of realism that the natural sciences with their objective procedures for establishing facts, testing truth claims, and finding ever more abstract generalizations have nourished for centuries and from which the traditional social sciences have not freed themselves entirely.Although the first three propositions point to a viable alternative, they also suggest that for those who have constructed for themselves a world in which the institution of science operates as the ultimate arbiter of reality, scientific claims are not ignorable. Granting scientists privileged access to an objective reality prevents people from realizing their cognitive autonomy and gives scientific theories the license to override individual experiences. This kind of submission to scientific authority is neither necessary for the institution of science to exist nor desirable for a society that wishes to be informed about itself. However, as long as this received ontology persists, I plead with those who enjoy scientific privilege, social scientists primarily, and who propose to inquire into and theorize about the lives and knowledge of people other than themselves, to accept my propositions and assume the social responsibilities these entail. One way of assuming responsibility for one’s theories is to take the role of a patriarch who knows better than anyone else what is good for society and for those being theorized and guided in applying these theories in their lives. Functionalism in sociology could be said to have taken this route, perhaps unwittingly. Another approach is to distribute this responsibility among all those who are either affected by or referred to in a proposed theory.This is required especially in understanding human communication because the very process implies, in the spirit of proposition three, acts of comparing the communication theories in use by participants.To speak authoritatively about the communication theories of others, without enlisting where possible the participation of those who are claimed to practice them, could be seen as an intellectual imperialism that delegitimizes incommensurate communication practices and marginalizes what such theories fail to embrace. This practice is particularly obnoxious when theories of social phenomena, including human communication, are compared cross-culturally.The results of such nonparticipatory comparisons are insensitive almost always to indigenous conceptions and could annihilate them by becoming true through acquiescence or by decree. I assume that social scientists are not in the business of supporting oppression, domination, and control, and instead explore theories that enlarge the range of options available to those who practice them5 to show not only what is but also what is not possible (Carter, 1991), or what is emancipatory (Krippendorff, 1989b).With 5 See my social imperative in Chapter 1 in this volume.

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this assumption and propositions four and five in mind, it becomes imperative that social scientists respect the cognitive autonomy of practitioners of the social theories being explored and allow their understanding and language to play a role in those theories.This requires engagement, dialogue, or conversation between scientists and practitioners, a process of exploring each other’s potentially very different theories through the coordination of communication practices they jointly enable. I do not propose anything unusual here. Even in everyday conversations among people who respect each other’s differences, participants listen, check their own perceptions against those of others, revise or redraw their distinctions, negotiate mutually appropriate practices, deconstruct and reconstruct the theories their partners in communication seemingly enact, and so forth.Thus, my sixth proposition: A comparative methodology for human communication theories should be embedded in conversation with and among those who practice these theories, as individuals, as constituents of communication systems, or as members of a culture. Let me add a clarification. In proposing conversation as an appropriate medium for comparing human communication theories, I do not align myself with ethnomethodological claims that entirely emic theory constructions, relying on validity criteria entirely indigenous to those who practice them, are more accurate than etic theory constructions by outsiders. Accuracy is not the issue; indeed, my first and second propositions make it inconceivable that ethnomethodologists could claim with validity to understand and describe something just as someone else would. Belief in the superiority of entirely indigenous accounts is also dispelled by the possibility that self-deceptions, illusions, and oppressions may not reveal themselves without conversation with someone less entrapped in these conceptions (see Krippendorff, 1989b6). Conversation does not privilege either participant’s theory constructions. It encourages collaboration among those whose theories enter the comparisons, particularly including those of the inquiring scientists. Conversation is not aimed at forging consensus; ideally, it converges toward each individual’s understanding of mutually tolerable pluralities that respect the cognitive autonomy of all participants. Proposition five outlined a frame for this process. Last With these propositions in place, I return to Tehranian’s question, “Is comparative communication theory possible or, indeed, desirable?” (1991:44). Obviously, it is possible always to choose or invent a language that brings forth commonalities, even among objects from seemingly incommensurate empirical domains; for example, “hickory,” “communication,” “Tibet,” and “I” have the letter “i” in common but also 6 See Chapter 8 in this volume.

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their occurrence in this sentence. Whether particular comparisons make sense depends on whether a discourse brings the fruits of such comparisons to someone’s attention.Thus, my answer to the first part of his question is unequivocal: yes, it is possible. In proposing an answer to the second part, I adopt its presupposition that there is no socially neutral theory. Every theory claims to be about something and engages those understanding it – theoreticians, communicators, and students alike – in practices that, whatever their differences, all create, reproduce, manipulate, utilize, or diminish the phenomena they address. Only in the dualist world construction of objectivists can social theories be imagined as apolitical, independent of anyone’s understanding and divorced from more or less desirable practices. We know how theoretical advances in atomic physics led to the construction of atom bombs and nuclear reactors, which in turn posed additional theoretical problems and set in motion a process of reconstructing portions of our world. A predictive theory of attitude change can have similar reality transforming consequences regardless of what motivated its original construction. If it enables advertisers, politicians, trainers, or psychologists to mold the attitudes of particular groups of people, for example, then such a theory will further instrumental intents and give rational support to institutions that can thrive in the reality it brings forth. Communication theories are no exception.They can inform unwittingly a variety of communication practices, whether they come to be built into communication technologies or social organizations or institutions, the mass media for example, or inform individual speech practices ranging from public to therapeutic discourse. The choice of an appropriate comparative methodology depends on the social practices it encourages. As the anthropologist Roy Wagner notes: “Every time we make others part of a ‘reality’ that we alone invent, denying their creativity by usurping the right to create, we use those people and their way of life and make them subservient to ourselves” (1981:16). The construction of human theories in conversation could safeguard against such intellectual imperialism and shift attention toward a conversational kind of truth. In conclusion, an answer to Tehranian’s second question, “Is comparative communication theory … desirable?” cannot escape its political nature. For objectivists, the answer would not be in doubt, speaking as researchers who benefit intellectually from using this methodology expertly. When claiming superiority in theorizing others, there would be no point in taking the cognitive constructions of the referents of their theories seriously. For social constructivists, I suggest that the answer will depend on whether it offers those theorized a space for participation in settling comparisons of their theories conversationally. Summary In the preceding, I have argued that human communication is a special kind of phenomenon, one that cannot exist distinct from its practitioners’ awareness,

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learning, and understanding of it.Theories of human communication must then not only account for the knowledge and language participants bring to communication, but also constitute themselves in the very communication practices they inform. This unique characteristic of human communication led me to conclude that comparisons of theories that do justice to the practices they claim to describe should transpire and prove their viability in conversations among those whose theories are compared, especially including the inquiring social scientists.With this provision in mind, conversation can be fair only when there is respect for all participants’ cognitive autonomy and when all have the opportunity to coordinate the construction of their theories and redraw their distinctions relative to the positions of all others. My methodological proposal is to distribute responsibility for constructing and comparing theories of human communication, where possible, among all who do or might want to live and practice them. When this includes inquiring social scientists, as it should, these scientists can no longer claim the socially superior roles of observers. They must instead recognize and account for their own active participation in bringing forth the processes they seek to understand. Conversation – its interactivity, mutual respect, and implied openness to exploring new conceptions – is the appropriate medium in which to compare and (re)construct all kinds of social theories whose empirical domains are constituted in human communication practices. Social theories constructed in the absence of conversations among theorists and theorized or compared without the latter’s participation and consent leave those they claim to speak about no chance to realize their cognitive autonomy in them. When such exogenous theories are accepted nevertheless as valid accounts of social practices, which is all the more likely when proponents can claim to be ultimate authorities on reality, they encourage widespread submission on one side and intellectual imperialism on the other. Social scientists should be the first to be aware of the reality-creating consequences of communicating their theories and recursively include this awareness in their own constructions.

Part 2

Otherness Introduction

If we acknowledge, as proposed in Part 1, the creative possibilities of language, the need to include the theorist in theories, and the need to grant the others that occur in a theory the same autonomy as that practiced in theorizing about them, then the role of theory needs to be revisited.Theory cannot be conceived of as an objective description. It is a creative enterprise that occurs in language, and constitutes reality rather than representing it.Thus, it entails responsibilities to the theorized others, responsibilities that can only be negotiated in dialogue and with those theorized. Otherness becomes a central topic for the social sciences, and Part 2 is devoted to articulating its relevance. Chapter 6 examines the social role of theory and the particular relation between theorists and the theorized others who are the natural focus of social scientific inquiries. The dependence of theory on ocular metaphors, the purported unidirectionality from observations to theories, and the conception of theories as accurate representations are examined to show how theories become monological constructions that rely on a single logic and on a single voice at the expense of others. Krippendorff proceeds to show how theory cannot be separated from what language makes available and how social theories reenter the very phenomena they attempt to describe. The chapter concludes by suggesting that prevalent forms of theory “subject its subjects,” leading to the creation of distant others, silencing their voices, preventing meaningful conversations with them, and depriving us of understanding how theories operate and social phenomena arise. The place “others” occupy in social theory and research, and, in particular, how communication theorists construct the otherness of “others,” becomes the focus of Chapter 7. It starts by acknowledging the reflexive nature of communication theory in terms of both its being communication and its becoming part of the phenomenon theorized. Subsequently, and with Martin Buber’s distinction between I–It and I–Thou as a reference point, this chapter reviews the range of possible ways of understanding “others” through social scientific inquiries. Chapter 7 ends by comparing the vulnerability of others and the social and methodological implications of these different ways of constructing otherness.

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The issue of otherness is further illustrated in Chapter 8, which surveys theories of power before it turns to an examination of the power of theory.The chapter starts by offering a negative and self-applicable definition of “communication ethics” as a use of language that prevents social pathologies, helps overcome existing pathologies, and does not constitute a pathology in itself.This self-referential definition of ethics leads to the concept of “pathology,” which is described as a “cognitive trap without apparent hope for escape.”A review of the constitutive traits of traps demonstrates how theories of power are trapped in physical metaphors and take the concept of power as being self-evident and undoable, hence powerful. The genesis of these pathological constructions of power is exposed by showing how they conform to a “trick in three acts” originally described by Marx and Engels in their critique of German idealism: abstracting units, systematizing these abstractions, and mythologizing the system thus constructed. Awareness of this trick invites its reversal, which amounts to a process of emancipation from the pathologies of power. Chapter 8 ends by going beyond the deconstruction of theories of power with the proposal of additional steps toward critical scholarship: opening up new possibilities, making constructions that can be rearticulated, and being accountable to others. If Part 2 begins by exposing the monological nature of theorizing, it ends by proposing in Chapter 9 a way of writing theory that attempts to preserve dialogical elements. It introduces the idea of “ecological narratives” as “a way of writing social phenomena that embraces the stories of its human constituents and can be reembodied in their lives.” It establishes a parallelism between the biological concept of “ecology” and the proposal to write with respect for the diverse conceptions that people bring to a situation of interest. Krippendorff discusses the main characteristics of “ecological narratives,” such as, their recognition that knowledge is embodied, their reliance on others’ voices, their rejection of overarching and positionless theoretical propositions, their taking seriously assertions of mutual understanding among constituents of the narrated phenomena, their tentative and open-ended nature, and their viability in communication as their ultimate test.The goal of this chapter is to challenge the monologism of mindless writing, the temptation of writing as superior observers, and the belief in the rightness of one’s own conclusions about others.

Chapter 6

The Otherness that Theory Creates *

Introduction The urge to theorize is a driving force of Western intellectual tradition. It underlies academic discourse, giving scientific enterprise its vitality. Much of contemporary culture, particularly technology, would be unthinkable without systematic theorizing. Naturally, theorizing has its critics. Skeptics raise voices against the ability of theory to describe anything at all. Radical empiricists such as Francis Bacon and even some logical positivists, told stories of the “blindness of abstraction.” Recently, postmodernists, poststructuralists, constructionists, deconstructionists, and many others questioned the intelligibility of master narratives and the ability of unifying theories or logical/mathematical systems to represent reality. From their perspective, science, literature, and law are three among many literary genres, each cultivating its own reading of texts. A recent critique comes from feminist scholars. Although feminism is not a unified perspective, feminist thought has expanded far beyond its early advocacy of equal rights, from conceptualizing patriarchal society to exploring gender differences and contributing scathing critiques of male rationality, technological world constructions, and the oppressive consequences of theory. Along the way, feminists emphasized the embodied nature of knowledge, for example by accounting for voices instead of texts. Feminists advocated relational epistemologies, insisted on the participation of emotions, and discovered validation in practical actions that could lead to personal liberation. Opposition to theory by philosophers concerned with ethics is narrower in scope but no less important. Dwight Furrow (1995), for example, on rereading Aristotle, questions the capacity of normative ethical theory to guide normative inquiry and challenges its relevance to the lived experience of moral agents. A quest to understand the Holocaust and other atrocities committed since World War II fuels such critiques by people with theories of moral life.

* Krippendorff, K. (2000). On the otherness that theory creates. Pages 1–13 in Jose V. Ciprut (Ed.). Of Fears and Foes: Security and Insecurity in an Evolving Global Political Economy. Westport CT: Praeger.

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Literary scholars continue to reexamine their own tradition, questioning the intelligibility of texts in terms of the theory-driven distinction between meanings and an author’s intents. For these writers, nothing in a text could point to the difference between the two; no method could shed light on what this distinction creates. For Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels (1985:30): “[theory] is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside [the] practice [of reading and interpretation] in order to govern [that] practice from without.… [N]o one can reach [such] a position.”This leads them to propose that “the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end.” The foregoing critiques have different histories and little in common with each other aside from their opposition to systematic theorizing. Often critics oppose each other. Critics excoriate feminists for essentializing the very gender differences they oppose, and proponents of postmodernism for their silence on moral questions that undermine the intelligibility of moral experiences. Many critiques rely on what I call deficiency arguments, a rhetorical strategy that illuminates blatant omissions or surreptitious distortions to show the failure of a theory without recognizing that such critiques rely on another theory, usually one closer to these critics’ hearts and therefore more “real” to them. Critiques of ideology, Marxist for example, excel in this.They argue against theories of knowledge from a perspective assumed “free” of ideological biases, more encompassing in scope, capturing a broader territory or offering a greater number of distinctions. Yet, using one theory to criticize another remains entirely within the practice of theorizing and cannot therefore reveal the blind spots of theorizing. Worse, the inability to recognize these blind spots renders theorists blind to their own blindness. Here, I examine the social role of theory and the particular relation theorizing entails between theorists and the natural focus of social scientific inquiries, theorized others. Some Entailments of Theorizing Etymologically, theory comes from the Greek “theoria,” whose meaning comprises not only the process of “looking at,”“viewing,”“contemplating,” or “speculating,” but also the object perceived,“a sight,”“a tableau,” or “a spectacle.” These meanings imply a distinct attitude vis-à-vis the theorized. Spectacles are created to be seen and discussed, not to be altered. Spectacles confront the viewer. In such accounts of theorizing, the use of ocular metaphors entails a tacit preference for sight over sound, touch, and feelings, and assigns secondary importance to voices, stories, oral traditions, and practical knowledge. It is no accident that we speak of scientific “observers,” not scientific listeners. There is no auditory or tactile analogue to “observation” and, although reading and writing would be difficult without sight, we tend to exclude them when we speak of observing things. As spectators, theorists observe but do not allow themselves to enter their domain of observation. Consequently, theorists endow facts, naively conceptualized

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as residing outside us, with the power to determine theoretical validity. Only the belief in this ontology ultimately justifies claims to the ability to theorize facts for what they are in the absence of preconceptions and accountability to those affected by these theories. Since the seventeenth century, science has been increasingly “successful” conceptually distinguishing theory from fact and observation from practice, notwithstanding that the etymology of “fact” links fact to having been made. Perhaps with the exception of hermeneutics and constructivism, scientists conceive of theories as derived from observational data. Aside from the rare admission that theory informs data, I know of no formalization of this reverse dependency or interactions between the two (see Woolgar, 1993:36, 53–66). Ethnographic analyses of scientific practices reveal as myth the cherished unidirectionality of proceeding from observations to theories (see Garfinkel, 1967, 2002). Overcoming this uni-directional conception is impossible so long as scholars state theories in terms of an extensional logic such as of propositions or sequential computational models. To preserve this uni-directionality of scientific discourse against the threat of vicious paradoxes, Bertrand Russell invented his famous Theory of Logical Types, which has the effect of outlawing self-reference. It is this restricted notion of logic and of language that places scientific observers at the top of logical hierarchies, that conceptualizes description top-downwards, and that leads theorists to believe they could observe their world without being observed by the objects of their observation. The use of ocular metaphors of perception, linking phenomena that confront the eye to images in the brain, as in cameras, is so prevalent within the scientific community that theorists are encouraged to keep their distance not just from the observed but from their theories as well.The distinction between theories and beliefs is a case in point. In scientific texts, theories appear as more or less confirmed hypotheses, each having a calculable probability, however small, of being invalid. Not so for beliefs.When we theorize, we theorize about something.When we believe, we believe in something. In beliefs, the emotional detachment that theorists claim to have vis-à-vis their theories vanishes in the virtual certainty that things exist in the ways they are seen and described. In the words of Stanley Fish (1985:116): [a] theory is a special achievement of consciousness; a belief is a prerequisite of being conscious at all. Beliefs are not what you think about but what you think with. It is within the space provided by their articulations that mental activity – including the activity of theorizing – goes on. Theories are something you can have – you can wield them and hold them at a distance; beliefs have you, in the sense that there can be no distance between them and the acts they enable. The truths of theories may be pondered; the truths of beliefs are held. Contrary to popular conceptions of theories as accurate representations, theories are attractive because they exceed their domain of observation in at least five ways:

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(1)Theories generalize to cases claimed to be similar to those observed.Yet, without further observations, there is no assurance that unobserved cases would support a theory’s claim.Therefore, generalizations rely on belief. (2) Theories predict on the assumption that patterns observed in the past will persist in the future. Belief in continuities has practical values, but as Francis Bacon noted, they are ascertainable only in retrospect. (3) Theories integrate several propositions into a single coherent network, (4) generate empirical hypotheses from few quasi-axiomatic propositions, and (5) rest on the belief that propositional logic corresponds to the logic of the world.According to Carl Hempel (Mitchell, 1985:7), a theory tends to be taken as “a complex spatial network [that] floats … above the plane of observation and is anchored to it by rules of interpretation.” Yet, rules of interpretation are not drawn from observed nature; they are always the rules of a theorist or a community of theorists. Rules allow theorists to justify omission of details deemed irrelevant, accidental, unique, inconsistent, or subjective; to fill gaps of missed observations; and to smooth rugged curves, none of which is derivable from observation and measurement. The more territory a theory covers the more it is preferred, the better it will be remembered, and the more likely it will be applied. Thus, theorizing supports a conceptual imperialism: the urge to oversee, predict, control, and govern expanding territories (Krippendorff, 1993a)1 – a tendency that science shares with other forms of government in political, spiritual, or commercial spheres of life.True, theories alone neither reign nor rule. Once institutionalized, however, they encourage their users to “survey,” “capture,” “represent,” “monitor,” and ultimately “manage,” if not “discipline” what they claim to describe. The underlying logic of propositions, especially Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, encourages the construction of logical hierarchies of expanding levels of abstraction, from objects to language, to metalanguage, to meta-meta-language, and so forth, with theorists comfortable only at the top. For example, Foucault (1977) uses the panopticon as a metaphor to describe how knowledge works in society. The panopticon is an ideal prison design that enables centrally located guards to monitor the behavior of all inmates; inmates can see only the observing guards, not each other. Here, the efficiency of observation assures discipline. To explore power relations in society, Foucault equates knowledge and theory and carries the built-in ocularity of the metaphorical panopticon to its ultimate socio-logical conclusion: the government of one view at the expense of all others. Theories also are expected to be rational and consistent, ideally in the form of mathematical expressions, for example, as systems of equations. Such formalizations have a dual advantage; they are computable in principle and avoid complications of context and meaning. Mathematical theories provide the backbone of the natural sciences, but have penetrated also explanations of social phenomena in economics,

1 See Chapter 5 in this volume.

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linguistics, psychology, and systems science, for example.While rationality and consistency are twin values of scientific explorations, they are also different aspects of the monologism that theory implies. Being “rational” is tantamount to speaking in the voice of one’s community, a voice assumed and sanctioned as common to all. Rationality defers voice to a fictional authority. Being “consistent,” on the other hand, is tantamount to avoiding contradictions among the propositions of a theory. Consistency entails the belief that a single overarching logic could govern the phenomena a theory explains.The requirement that theories be both rational and consistent thus reduces them to monological constructions in a dual sense as products of singular voices and singular (coherent) logic. This has considerable implications for social theorizing. The Languaging of Theories Consider the following propositions characteristic of social science writing: (1) (2) (3) (4)

Institutions have four functions. Nationalism is an outgrowth of modernism. Terrorism is caused by a breakdown in political structures. Unemployment feeds crime.

In the context of the foregoing, these four propositions are troublesome: none of them indicates whose truths they state, attesting to their complete disembodiment. All hide that they fundamentally describe human behavior. Institutions, nationalism, terrorism, unemployment, and crime do not exist without performers. Yet, each of these generalizations silences the voices of those performers without indicating how behaviors came to be categorized. Such generalizations hide even the voice of the theorist, perhaps deliberately, behind an objectivist language. In addition, language is implicated here in fundamental ways: of the four propositions, (1) asserts that a concept “has” or is “in possession of ” properties, which lends a near physical existence to the concept, to institutions as it were. Proposition (2) applies an agricultural metaphor to two high-level abstractions from a complex nexus of human behaviors without referring to a particular group or locale – but metaphors reside in language, not in nature. Proposition (3) claims the causal relation of two abstractions: a category of human behavior and a stable pattern abstracted from a process. How could that be? Finally, (4) proposes a statistical correlation between two variables in terms of nutrition, one an agent, the other its target.A casual reading of these propositions suggests that they state facts. However, such a reading overlooks their metaphorical nature. Concepts cannot “cause” anything analogous to how billiard balls bounce against one another. How could measurement variables act or interact? In what sense could non-material structures break? The failure to recognize the metaphorical nature of language, including in rigorous scientific discourses, attests to a remarkable lack of awareness that language directs the world we theorize.

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Clearly, theories appear in the form of language, but they also must be languaged into being, fit to survive processes of human communication.The notion of theory, in the context of communication, suffers from two illusions. The first stems from the belief that the form of theory can be separated from what language makes available, and that human communication does not influence how and where theories materialize. Theories are not found. They are constructed, proposed, promoted, published, discussed, and either adopted or rejected. Their reality lies in stating them, understanding them, and enacting them into actual practices.These are acts of real people, actors who see virtue in promulgating what they propose. It follows that theorizing cannot be understood from a notion of language as a neutral medium of representation (as formalized in propositional logic) nor from its corollary of theories as solely justifiable by observations of objects outside language. The notion of languaging as a dialogical process permits us to recognize theories as mediating among stakeholders residing in processes of communication. From this perspective, theories lie not in the contents of statements or individual minds, but in the processes of continuous rearticulations.Theories that fail to compel people to reproduce and circulate them within communities simply fade away. As communication, theories serve social functions. They can define a theorist’s identity.They can form the basis of research programs or schools of thought.They can be institutionalized in disciplines that require adherence or belief in them by practitioners. Theoretical beliefs allow linguists, psychologists, biologists, indeed scholars in all academic disciplines to distinguish among themselves. Sometimes theories are abstract paradigms that privilege particular scientific explorations. At other times, they certify and protect practitioners against criticisms from other disciplines.Thus, theories are political phenomena. The second illusion arises from the conviction that social theories have invariant and single meanings. Unlike natural scientific theories, social theories, once published, can reenter and touch the lives of the people they concern (Krippendorff, 1996).2 When such a reentry occurs, theories and those theorized interact and modify each other in ways that violate the idea of theory as a descriptive account of stable facts, a representation of an unintelligent world.Those theorized might use this publicity to enhance their status or construe a threat to their identity. A known theory can strengthen or invalidate the behavior of those theorized. Black Power and feminist movements, for example, developed theories of their own to counter prevailing theories. People adopt theories and find new meanings in living through theoretical propositions, acting out their stereotypes and preserving their distinctions, thereby confirming theoretical truths.The mass media, targeting audiences conceptualized in terms of their size and attractiveness to advertisers, “mainstream” the public, disseminating the same messages to more people in the expectation that audiences become similar to each other, thus making advertisement easier.The trend towards audience segmentation (Turow, 1997) suggests that more sophisticated advertisers 2 See Chapter 7 in this volume.

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develop different theories for different segments of target populations, but that segments are nonetheless homogeneous.To treat theories, especially predictive ones, as prescriptions for action can render them self-fulfilling prophecies.This approach is typical rather than the exception in a social reality that relies on the knowledge people bring to it. Thus, theories of social phenomena, in the process of their communication, not only represent but also transform their objects.The reentry of theories into their domain of observation could undermine their validity; positivists take methodological precautions to protect theoretical ontology from such challenges, including stating theories in language incomprehensible to those theorized. If theorizing is a political process and if the dissemination of social theories challenges validity, political science might have much to say about the politics of theorizing; and the theories created in the social sciences might at least account for their own social consequences. However, social theorists, inspired by the successes of the natural sciences and convinced that the social sciences too could discover and accumulate a body of theories, have rendered social theory “unsocial,” political theory “a-political” and so forth. The widespread practice of theorizing the social conceals its communicative and political nature. Theorizing the social seems to work only where theorists, institutions using their theories, and theorized others collude to hold theorized reality constant while collectively denying that they had anything to do with it.This grand self-deception correlates well with the myth that theorists can remain outside the language they use, explain a world as inhabited by people who lack linguistic intelligence of their own, and take a “God’s Eye view” (Putnam, 1981) of the universe. Scholars who dare question such monological views have been criticized, including several philosophers of science, for example Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn. Physicists singled out Feyerabend as “The Worst Enemy of Science” (Horgan, 1993). The foregoing offers a choice.We can continue to use methods of natural science to theorize our domain of observation, hide ourselves behind an objectivist language, and lose touch with the social world we unwittingly transform or help create. Or, we can involve ourselves deliberately and responsibly in the politics our inquiries set in motion.The urgency of this choice resides in the ways fellow humans fare as theorized others. Theorizing the Other (1) Theorizing gives birth to distant otherness. As generalizations, theories classify observations and theorize people in terms of the third person plural. “They” are experimental subjects, survey interviewees, and questionnaire respondents. “They” also are the conservatives, the unemployed, the Catholics, and the terrorists, all of “them” labeled and assigned to particular classes according to characteristics assumed shared by all members. Such classification begins at the stage of generating data in social research. In interviewing, for example, neither the identity of the interviewee nor that of the interviewer enters data. When experimenters come too close to subjects, they systematically repress personal knowledge that emerges for fear of biased

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data. In theater, spectators distinguish between actors and the characters they play on stage. In social research, however, individuals become the very categories that a theory provides for them.Where individuals identify with a group, belief, or trait, theorists can dismiss such declarations as subjective, lacking abstraction, or irrelevant to theory. Theorists quote individual voices to exemplify the voice of a class, channeling a polyphony of voices into a single artificially constructed voice – one for each class or category of the theorist’s choosing. However, classes never speak, only individuals do, albeit always to others, even virtual others. In the reality of everyday life, collective monologues, for example choruses, are rare.To take such exceptions as a norm for social scientific insights attests to the artificial and unsocial nature of theorizing. In conversations, third person pronouns refer to those absent. Theorizing inscribes this absence in text and makes it a virtue that frees theorists to characterize others as radically different and inferior. Whether one calls this a professional disability (a deafness to individual voices or an institutionalized disrespect for otherness), theorizing estranges others from us. (2) Theorizing trivializes others by reducing them to obedient mechanisms.As spectators, social theorists observe human behaviors, including verbal interactions, from outside the spectacle. From this perspective, behaviors appear as linear sequences, temporally ordered chains of events or trajectories in a Cartesian space within predefined coordinates.To understand trajectories, natural scientists seek to discover regularities. However, talk of “regularities” assumes that they are followed by theorized others without choice.Talk of the “discovery” of regularities presupposes existence prior to observation and measurement. Such assumptions, built into mathematical theories of behavior and inscribed into computational techniques for analyzing behavioral data, also enter less formal talk of social causation. For example, scripts of plays explain much of what theater audiences see. In the strict determinacy of machines, scripts are to performances as computer programs are to computations. Scripts control the plot. Describing human behavior in terms of scripts, rules, and grammars, or as reactive to messages, conjures the determinism of obedient mechanisms. Since spectators never can be sure whether, when, and to what extent an observed behavior is scripted, responds to unobserved conditions, or emerges spontaneously, deterministic accounts are one of many kinds of explanations.They are a matter of preference. Unless theorists leave their observer roles to ask pertinent questions, as in the Turing Test3 designed to distinguish machine from 3 A 1950 proposal by the computer scientist Alan Turing to replace the question “can a machine think?” by involving the human ability to determine whether the answers to questions are provided by another human being or a machine. To avoid irrelevant (physical) features from entering such judgments, questions are submitted and answered electronically. A machine passes the test when its behavior is indistinguishable from that of a human respondent. It is possible, however, for human participants in this test to fool the judge by answering questions in ways a machine would – just as it is possible to enact a script written to give the impression of human agency. Yet, asking unanticipated questions could reveal what underlies the observed behavior.

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human intelligence, they cannot obtain data relative to other explanations.The use of this test tells us that human interaction is a necessary but insufficient condition to determine the presence of human intelligence or agency.Yet, theorists are not supposed to consult with theorized others on a theory concerning them.This would grant authority to observed subjects and erode the theorists’ status as objective observers.Thus, theorizing remains stuck in causal and mechanistic explanations of human behavior that excludes the act of theorizing. Without engaging theorized others in conversations on developing theories about them, social theorists preserve the freedom to explore any theory of interest to their own community. Though novel conceptualizations may not come easy, the convenient position of outside observer enables sociologists like Goffman (1959, 1963) to describe social interactions in dramaturgical categories, psychologists like Schank & Abelson (1977) to interpret the same behavior in terms of individuals following rules and scripts, literary scholars like Hirsch (1967) to extract intentions from an author’s writings, cognitive scientists to develop algorithms presumed to govern individuals’ processing and exchange of information, and economists and political scientists to measure the efficacy with which actors apply available resources. Without consulting the constituents of social phenomena of interest, almost anything goes. (3) Theorizing inscribes its monologism into its observational data and creates the very unsocial conditions in which theories can survive. At moments of contact between the theorist and the theorized, social research depends on collaboration and dialogue. Human subjects can be used in scientific experiments only with informed consent. Yet, after signing a consent form, subjects’ ability to understand the nature of their involvement and to say “no” to practices they consider unconscionable rarely arises again; it does not enter the data and therefore has little chance to inform a theory that speaks to such capabilities. To uphold the notion that theory responds to observations only, the dialogical nature of the actual contact must be hidden and the collaboration needed to conclude an experiment concealed. Similarly, consider interviewing. After agreement as to who interviews whom, interviewers ask questions and interviewees are expected to answer truthfully. Interviewees accept the constraints of speaking within the confines of the questions posed. In effect, interview designs embed the researchers’ categories and support arguments researchers intend to make. The exploitation of interviewees necessarily and irretrievably inscribes these asymmetrical power relations in the data on which theories are constructed (Krippendorff, 2005a). Deceiving informants as to the purpose of their participation in a research project, questions irrelevant to an interviewees’ life and contrived stimulus conditions to which subjects respond, affirm the essential asymmetry, artificiality, and asocial conditions that spawn the data for social and psychological theories. These power relations creep into the data construction process in obvious violation of the idea of theory as observer-independent. Thus, theorizing subjects its subjects. It renders them serviceable (Sampson, 1993) to theories that demonstrate little more than

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how well theorists managed to disable the social nature of human beings. True, submitting to authorities and following instructions is part of what we do. However, replicating these less than desirable human conditions at the expense of human agency for the sake of theorizing is political suicide for the social sciences. (4) Theorizing nurtures a culture of blindness to the political nature of theory – for theorist and theorized alike. The social sciences are or should be concerned with the ways human beings can live together: sociology, with how people organize themselves into larger wholes and coordinate action to sustain these wholes; political science, with how people create publics, arrive at consensus on agendas and mandate leaders to form governments; international relations, with how peoples perceive each other across national boundaries, resolve international conflicts, and regulate the myriad of interactions between diverse constituencies of nation states; and communication research, with how people construct, sustain, and enact social realities while communicating with each other. However, none of these social phenomena can be understood by straitjacketing people into mechanistic conceptions and removing from them the spaces in which they interact.The celebration of theory, the use of ocular metaphors for knowing, the reliance on extensional logic and the naturalness with which people accept confinements during data-making processes all have become part of a culture that suppresses awareness of the political nature of theories – not only for theorists but also for those who see each other in these terms.The culture of theorizing makes it difficult for the social sciences to reflect on its social nature. This self-defeating consequence of theorizing cannot be recognized from within a representational notion of language, a notion that philosophers like Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, Bakhtin, and Rorty have challenged systematically in preference to less abstract and dialogical conceptions.Their critiques posit words as actions and languaging as productive of things beyond mere description. Reentry adds a cybernetic spin to their critiques, illustrating languaging as recursive. Where language informs action, theories likely become self-validating. Under these conditions, generalizations of others, as published in scientific journals or disseminated by mass media, provide fertile ground for social prejudices to arise and become truths that can subordinate, discipline, marginalize, and criminalize others for their otherness. It always is possible to contest and reject a claim. However, in view of the authority that scientific theories conjure in our culture, contesting them violates a complex of deep-rooted cultural beliefs; for example, that theories are validated by observational data not by theorists, and have but one legitimate interpretation.The first leaves no real target for challenges, no easy way to hold proponents of theories accountable for social consequences; the latter renders political considerations irrelevant. Whenever scientific accounts concern specific populations – for example the homeless, women, homosexuals, African-Americans, Catholics, teachers, consumers, or Chinese – they achieve two things: in the immediate, they entice “us” to

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treat “them” in the categories these accounts employ. In the long run, this treatment transforms “them” into the homogenous groups we claim “they” are. Self-validation or reification is typical in the social sciences.As Giddens (1984a) observed: has not the metaphorical use of the term “market” in nineteenth-century academic writings about economic activities materialized that reality, so that, today, neither economists nor CEOs question the existence of markets? Has not our conception of “the public” shifted from the content of discussions in salons and street cafés to what scholars theorized as public opinion and then encouraged polls to measure? Has not the use of hydraulic and archeological metaphors in Freud’s writing of the human psyche produced an industry of psychotherapists and clients for whom mental disorders have become reality? Have not theories of consumer behavior and mass media consumption, avidly embraced by advertising agencies, brought forth the very consumerism such theories needed to survive by creating the passive audiences that theories of mass communication describe? Do not correlations reported between intelligence, ethnicity, and crime, together with genetic explanations, inform educational policies and hiring practices that keep such assemblages real, well beyond the life of published data? Do not statistics of cultural, racial, sexual, and national population characteristics inform and reify the very distinctions that statisticians build into survey instruments and then naively “discover?” Is it not then likely that theories, which cannot but describe human nature in mechanistic terms, create the cultural dupes necessary for effective television, abet the behaviors necessary for institutions to persist, discourage theorized others from contesting scientific theories, and create obedient citizens who differ in candidate preference but not in how they might be influenced? Theories encourage constructions of this undesirable kind of reality. I do not suggest that the social sciences are doomed to undermine their own project of rendering social processes visible and improvable. I suggest, rather, that if knowledge obtained from theory born of detached observation continues to dominate our understanding of each other, we unwittingly install mechanisms in our social world that systematically create distant others, silence the voices of the theorized, prevent meaningful conversations with those who constitute the social phenomena we wish to understand, and deprive us of understanding how theories operate and social phenomena arise.

Chapter 7

A Cybernetics of I–Other Relations *

… any theory not founded on the nature of being human is a lie and a betrayal of [hu]man[ity].An inhuman theory will inevitably lead to human consequences – if the therapist is consistent. Fortunately, many therapists have the gift of inconsistency.This, however endearing, cannot be regarded as ideal. (Laing, 1967:31) … coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. (Rorty, 1989:xvi) Introduction In 1974, Heinz von Foerster initiated a quantum leap in cybernetic thinking. Following a lecture by Margaret Mead (1968), who suggested that cyberneticians apply the principles of cybernetics to themselves, Foerster distinguished between the then prevailing cybernetics of observed systems – the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby – and the cybernetics of observing (systems) (Foerster et al., 1974). This posed new questions and opened an area of inquiry variously called cybernetics of cybernetics or second-order cybernetics. To me, the shift from first-order to second-order cybernetics signaled a shift in scientific attitude toward reality, from privileging the perspectives of detached observers, spectators, or engineers of a world outside themselves to acknowledging our participation in the world we observe and construct as constituents. He also added to Humberto Maturana’s (1970) proposition, “anything said is said by an observer,” (my emphasis) another proposition: “anything said is said to an observer” (Foerster, 1979; my emphasis), thus highlighting the construction in language of observational accounts for people capable of observation.

* Krippendorff, K. (1996). A second-order cybernetics of otherness. Systems Research 13,3:311–328 – contribution to a festschrift for Heinz von Foerster.

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In this essay I take seriously the notion that communication involves people – not only as participants in observed communication practices, as speakers, listeners, or bystanders, but also as those who reflect about communications whether as critics, theorists, or researchers of communication. Participating in communication is primary. Without language, however, participation has no discernible structure. Talking about communication implicates participants who commit themselves to being in communication, while speaking of communication. Speaking of communication is communication about communication, or second-order communication for it presupposes communicative involvement. Communication, defined by and embodied in those speaking of it, thus becomes a fundamentally locally embodied and self-referential phenomenon. Indeed, what communication is or entails varies from one situation to another, from one culture to another. In academia, explaining practices of living in terms of communication is surprisingly recent and continuously evolving. The practice of writing scholarly essays on communication attests to my claim that nothing is ever entirely settled. (Re)conceptualizing communication – talking or writing of communication, that is, communication about communication – is what we communication scholars do. Communication scholars must communicate what they investigate and talk about. This is unique to communication scholarship and requires them to include themselves in their domain of inquiry.When one takes theories as plausible accounts of particular practices, communication theories cannot exclude scholarly communication practices, including the creation and dissemination of theories. Consequently, communication theories must be applicable to themselves. This is not a trivial matter, as discussed below. Social scientists communicate in numerous ways – interviewing subjects, engaging discursively with colleagues, publishing their work – but self-applications of communication theories are surprisingly rare if not absent from the literature. It is as if scientists’ communicative involvements were immune to critical examination or so self-evident as to be unworthy of attention.This schism leads easily to theories difficult for people to incorporate in daily life. I do not know communication scholars who communicate with colleagues by the protocols of theories they advance; for example theories of communication as attitude change (e.g., Craig, 1993), as information transmission (e.g., Shannon & Weaver, 1949), as prediction and control, as management of meanings, or as institutionalized mass-production of messages (e.g., Gerbner, 1985).The way communication scholars communicate is not the way they theorize it.This essay, for example, does not intend to change readers’ affective evaluation of something they already know or to impart information that I as the writer possess while readers do not. One of my aims is to describe a serious shortcoming: our lack of recognition that we live in communication while theorizing it. All theories reside in talk and in publications. Some theories are difficult to understand while others may become popular and transform existing practices.This is true for theories in natural as well as in social sciences. However, unlike theories in physics, social theories not only are created by people who claim to understand

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them, they are about people capable of understanding and may be understood by the very people of whom they speak.When this happens, social theories can be said to reenter the very practices they claim to describe and change their truths right before the theorists’ eyes. Figure 7.1 depicts this for the social sciences essential recursion. Social theories

Theorist

Others in communication

Figure 7.1. Reentry of Social Theories

The paths along which theories are allowed to travel and reenter demarcate disciplinary boundaries.The natural sciences, for example, have conveniently defined nature to make reentry problems meaningless. Matter is conceived not to understand theories of it, and naturalist methods of observation do not allow scientific observers to enter their domain of observation. “Objectivity,” which Foerster (1995) aptly called “the illusion that reality could be observed without an observer,” still dominates much of scientific methodology. In this illusion, scientific observers occupy places unlike those of the objects they theorize. Social theories reenter the practices they describe through the people who apply them. In such applications, theories can legitimate, reconceptualize in “scientific” terms, or terminate social practices. Indeed, upon reentry, social theories behave more like self-fulfilling prophesies (Merton, 1963; Watzlawick, 1984a) than statements of fact – regardless of theorists’ intentions. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) documented reentry in a study of classrooms where teachers received arbitrarily assigned intelligence scores for students who then scored according to the teachers’ expectations.We know that women who grow up steeped in cultural narratives of their inferiority easily assume subservient positions as adults. We know that psychiatrists tend to talk patients into psychopathologies that lie within their expertise. We know how theories (or should I say myths) of communication drive teaching practices, therapies, self-improvement courses, literature, international relations, and above all the design of communication technologies. Thus, social theories can profoundly change the social worlds that give rise to them. The positivist injunction against observers entering their domains of observation attempts to prevent theories from self-fulfillment, maintain a representational notion of truth, dissociate theorists from the consequences of theories, and preserve the monologic of scientific communication. This unwarranted injunction denies the

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voices of human subjects because it is incompatible with the reality of reentry and allows social scientists an excuse to evade responsibility for the consequences of interventions in their domains of inquiry. Acknowledging this responsibility leads me to see social scholarly pursuits as relational practices (see Gergen, 1994). The central contention of this essay as that when we, as social scientists, abstract social theories from their primary settings (of people, situations, individuals, or institutional practices) and communicate them as valid accounts of social phenomena, we assign roles to people and designate places for them to occupy. How we conceive or speak of these others, even when we omit explicit references to them, always directs our listening, (re)search, and interaction with these unnamed and (likely) unknown others.When we publish scientific theories of communication, we speak as communication scholars and assume the authority to construct the otherness of others. This scientific authority is likely to influence what happens when such theories reenter the lives of people who may talk about them, rearticulate them, test them, and adopt them as their own (folk) theories.This possibility demands that social theorists assume considerable responsibility. To criticize social theories for being influential, politically “biased,” or lacking neutrality is besides the aim of finding a way of understanding social theories as communications, as relational practices. To understand these theory-motivated practices I take to heart the existentialist distinction between two kinds of world constructions: one in which people perceive themselves as surrounded by tangible objects they can take advantage of in achieving goals; the other in which people see themselves in relation to fellow human beings much like themselves and whose company they appreciate as part of their being. Martin Buber (1958, 1970; Horwitz, 1978) calls these the I–It and I–Thou relation, respectively.At least one study generated convincing data concerning the reality of this distinction (Roberts, 1985). I am not an existentialist, however, nor am I satisfied with the binary nature of Buber’s distinction and the contrast between the instrumental-rational and non-instrumental-intuitive ways of knowing it suggests. However, I will expand Buber’s distinction to several I–Other relations that retain the notion that selves and others are constructed relationally in communication with each other. English offers pronouns to refer to people in singular and plural and in first, second, and third person terms. These provide a natural means of illuminating relational differences. I also take the liberty of drawing a distinction within Buber’s “Thou” according to misgivings expressed since the second translation of his book regarding the English for the German “du” in the title of his original (Horwitz, 1978). Finally, I am concerned less with facts than with our epistemological blind spots, and less with finding flaws in communication theories than with creating possibilities where few existed. Foerster (1981c) considered it an ethical imperative to increase the number of choices. I argued for the need to preserve or open new possibilities for others when constructing human communication theories (Krippendorff, 1989a)1 and suggested the creation of possibilities as axiomatic for critical 1 See Chapter 1 in this volume.

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scholarship (Krippendorff, 1995b).2 In this essay, therefore, I hope to expand the range of possible ways of understanding others through social scientific inquiries. In addition, I urge social theorists to enter their domains of observation, enable researchers to cooperate with those others they investigate, grant them a voice if not the last word on how they appear in scientific accounts, and encourage theories that have a chance to develop ‘a social life of their own.’All of these call for a radical opening of a participatory form of inquiry and a dialogical way of knowing. I will outline and compare five I–Other relations. I–They: Statistical Aggregates They are the subjects in experiments, the interviewees in public opinion polls, and the respondents to survey questionnaires.They are observed via one-way mirrors, assessed by standard measuring instruments, manipulated to provide analyzable answers. For the inquiring I, they are male or female, black or white, heavy or light television viewers, employed or unemployed, or of a certain IQ.They cannot contest the terms of their description nor identify themselves as individuals.They may not know who looks at them, or why, how, and where. They are the data points in a statistic.This treatment makes them different from us.They are others with whom we have nothing in common. y

z x

Figure 7.2. They

Statistical aggregates are artifacts of research processes constructed in a particular way.To be fair, researchers draw a representative sample of members of a community of people, at random for example, but sampling individuals ignores their relatedness, the fabric of their community involvement, and, by implication, discards all evidence of communication among them. This forced individuation enables researchers to render people as data points in multivariate distributions (Figure 7.2) whose dimensions primarily are researcher-imposed or etic in nature. On the other hand, such “objective” accounts of the properties of observed subjects (demographic characteristics, social positions, ethnicity, nationality, knowledge, attitudes,

2 See Chapter 8 in this volume.

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preferences, etc.) fail to acknowledge the researchers’ role in making these properties salient. Although interviews and observations often precede such aggregations, this analytical practice erases all evidence of I–they communication as well as of the constructed nature of accounts of “them.” Moreover, measures of frequencies, averages, standard deviations, correlations, etc. characterize properties of aggregates at the expense of constituent members. In statistical propositions, people become passive bearers of group characteristics, not necessarily applicable to individuals. For example, a family of average size – 3.14 according to the 2000 U.S. Census – cannot exist in fact. Or, women may be statistically shorter and physically weaker than men, but this inequality is demonstrably false in large numbers of male–female pairs. Similarly, probabilities of disease are not predictive of any one individual’s health. Statistical accounts surrender the properties of individuals to that of conceptual groups.This is what makes “them” different from “us.” I–It: Trivial Machines i

F

o

Figure 7.3. A Trivial It

Figure 7.3 depicts trivial machines as input driven.To describe something as a trivial machine is to focus on the predictability of its behavior, o, from the conditions that impinge upon it, its input i, by formulating a relation between the two observables, ideally in the form of a mathematical function F: o = F(i). Functions do not offer choices.They explain no more than responses to inputs. In trivial machines, inputs are undetermined, open to specification by outside occurrences or their users’ choices, for example by the inquiring I, who may manipulate trivial machines for observable effects. Deviations from the mathematical function ideal tend to be explained either as variations that unaccountably ‘enter’ a trivial machine – in communication theory called noise and in measurement theory called unreliability – or as breakdowns – unanticipated and perhaps undesirable changes in function. This vocabulary excludes and thus rules out the intentions, agency, creativity, or dialogical practices responsible for variations in human behavior. Trivial machine conceptions of others are the backbone of behavioral research. Most texts of social research methods regard the distinction between independent and dependent variables as self-evident, and the discovery of the relations between them as the empirical problem of research. Methodological commitments to trivial machine conceptions have the advantage of creating observationally determinable objects for research, which is to say that their input-output functions are computable from observations. Correlation coefficients, for example, indicate numerically the degree to which any two variables are related linearly – as in the stimuli and responses of an

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organism. Regression equations express the extent to which predictor variables shed light on a chosen criterion – as when the causal link between television exposure to violent fiction and physical violence is explored empirically. Claude Shannon’s (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) information quantity expresses the degree to which the input to a transmission channel is reproducible at its output. Most of these statistics measure the extent to which one can treat a system as a trivial machine. We heavily rely on trivial machine conceptions, though not by this name, for example, in logic, major premises transform a minor premise into a conclusion, pens transform hand movements into lines on paper, teller machines transform keypad entries into cash, codes transform ciphers into clears and hearing the voices of others through telephone lines results from a sequence of reliable transmissions. All are trivial machines. People can be forced to behave like trivial machines. In ideal bureaucracies, in the military and on assembly lines, people are meant to serve functions in the trivial sense. From an advertising perspective, the ideal consumer turns ads into purchases. Controlled scientific experiments instruct subjects to respond to stimuli, yielding trivial forms of explanation. In such experiments as well as in institutional contexts, people who are unwilling to conform to such expectations easily are considered unreliable, unmanageable, or crazy. Maintaining trivial machine conceptions as yardsticks for human behavior blinds researchers to human capabilities outside those conceptions. I–It: Nontrivial Machines Nontrivial machines respond not only to inputs, but also to their internal states. Foerster (1984) introduced this notion and diagrammed their simplest case in terms of inputs i, outputs o, and internal states z, which are related by two functions, the driving function F: o = F(i,z) and the (internal) state function G: z′ = G(i, z). i

F

o

z G

Figure 7.4. A Nontrivial It

Cursory inspection of Figure 7.4 yields four important properties. First, the internal states of a nontrivial machine affect themselves, as seen in the recursive loop involving z. A nontrivial machine thus maintains “a life of its own.” Second, while the internal states of a nontrivial machine are a kind of repository of its internal

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history, this repository escapes observation. Third, because the behavior of a nontrivial machine results from the interaction between its inputs and internal states, its output o is not predictable from the input i, even after extensive observation. Internal states can lie dormant and affect outputs after long periods of time, giving the impression that nontrivial machines change behavior in unexpected ways. It is tempting to see human qualities in nontrivial machines. Consciousness certainly is recursive. History is important in people’s lives. Human cognition is complex, self-referential and unobservable from the outside.We know it is difficult to determine what people think and to predict what they do, even in everyday situations. We assume the interaction of sensation, memory, and action and feel comfortable constructing cognitive models on this assumption. However, none of these commonalities suggests that humans could be assembled from known components. Although medicine has made considerable progress in transplanting organs, the human ontogeny follows a different path than that of artificial mechanisms. Computers are adequate prototypes of nontrivial machines. Ross Ashby, one of my teachers, once built a simple nontrivial machine and asked students to figure out what it did. Each time students thought they had worked out its pattern, it displayed another surprising move, leading to considerable frustration. Ashby then revealed the staggering combinatorial possibilities against which they guessed. Foerster (1984) computed the number of possible nontrivial machines having a single binary output o with values 0 or 1 for n = 1, 2, 3, 4 binary variables i and z.The possibilities grow beyond practical considerations. For one (n = 1) input variable there are fewer than 105 possible machines. For n = 2 there are already nearly 1077, for n = 3 there are 104002 and for n = 4 there are 1070003. Considering the richness of the human senses and the human brain’s approximately eleven billion unobserved neurons firing or at rest, understanding humans by observation alone is a hopeless undertaking.With an unrealistically small number of inputs in the above example, 1077 exceeds the possibility of systematic hypothesis testing. To predict the behavior of nontrivial machines by observation alone amounts to a transcomputational task. It follows that, within real time, nontrivial machines afford explanations, theories, models, or hypotheses that are too numerous to disconfirm and the likelihood of correctly accounting for how nontrivial machines work is observationally impossible. Foerster, on concluding his exploration, described nontrivial machines as analytically indeterminable. I prefer: Nontrivial machines are observationally indeterminable. This sets a profound epistemological limit for all observational inquiries. Foerster notes that this indeterminacy joins Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Gill’s (statistical) Indeterminacy Principle, all of which assert limits on knowability by observation. Yet, nontrivial machines can be built from trivial components such as the abovementioned functions – notwithstanding the complex functions embodied in computer keyboards, memories, and screens. It follows that:

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Nontrivial machines are synthetically determinable. Thus, the nature of nontrivial machines leaves researchers three options. First, since they cannot select among a transcomputationally large number of conceivably valid descriptions, they cannot continue the traditional quest for single correct descriptions and instead rely on linguistic accounts, stories, metaphors, and analogues that offer more human ways to cope with such numerical complexities. Second, they may have to abandon their observer roles and disassemble a nontrivial machine, study each part in isolation and the network of connections among them, and take advantage of the synthetic determinability of a machine to derive its behavior.Third, concerning humans – who have rich inner lives and more abilities to cope with complexities than machines – I suggest that researchers discontinue searching for mathematical models of human behaviors that trivialize human beings, and take seriously the verbal accounts that people can offer about their conceptions, motivations, and actions. When treating humans not as trivial machines, but as informants about their worlds that researchers cannot possibly observe, one can no longer justify the scientific ideal of detached observation, or gathering and analyzing data in terms of nontrivial machines. The human ability to converse mandates a different relationship between the inquiring I and others. I–You: Persons in Communication As seen above, third person accounts of “they” and “it” exclude others from communication, deny their personhood and justify their appearance in the monologue of an observing I.Third person accounts in terms of “he” and “she,” by contrast, hold others in reserve for potential inclusion in communication. However, second person references always occur in the bodily presence of speakers and listeners and thus add language and dialogue that could be ignored in I–it accounts. “You” occurs in talk among people responsive to each other. Neither speakers nor listeners escape knowing something of each other.You and I denote persons bodily present to each other. Communication between them is collaborative and inquiries within I–You relations are participatory.As therapists know, observation is essential, but dialogue provides a more important window into the lives of others. Indeed, a great deal can be learned about others and selves while communicationally involved. Conceptions of You and I always are complementary. A mother does not exist without a child.There can be no buyer without a seller.Actors and audiences require each other. On the behavioral level, a joke needs a teller and someone to laugh. Complementarity must not be confused with equality or sharing. It simply suggests that roles somehow fit like hand-in-glove (not hand-in-hand) and the difference between them is constitutive of a particular relationship. Not all possible pairs of roles fit that way, however.When a senator meets a dentist, the senator becomes a patient, the dentist speaks as a member of the senator’s constituency, or they find a third way of relating outside those roles.

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In I–You communication, each I is I’s other’s other. I speaks in expectation of You’s understanding, in anticipation of You’s ability to rearticulate what is said in You’s terms, always awaiting evidence of I’s understanding in turn – all of which manifests in their intertwined practices. Participants observe and monitor this intertwining. In this recursion, accounts may not reflect I’s cognition or internal make-up, but I’s history of interaction with You, including a virtual I’s construction of self and other as well as that virtual I’s construction of a virtual You′’s construction of self and other.Thus, in communication, persons become embedded recursively in enacted accounts of each other. Such accounts not merely occur within this relationship, they also constitute it. This understanding moves communication beyond notions of “sending and receiving messages,” which may be adequate for conceptualizing the interaction of technical devices, but not the dialogical engagement of human beings (including via mediating technologies).The oft-feared infinity in this recursive conception is merely an artifact of logic. It is not bothersome in practice.We shift between levels of recursion without the need to think on many of these levels at any one time (Laing in Miell & Miell, 1986). I''’s accounts of what we have in common

I

I''

I''’s accounts of what they have in common

I'’s accounts and enactments (may interfere with You’s Other)

Other

I'

You'

Other

You'’s accounts and enactments (may interfere with I’s Other)

You

Figure 7.5. An I–You Relation

Relational accounts are constructed always in the expectation of being understood, which presupposes some ability to simulate or ponder interactions in a space before they are enacted. Figure 7.5 suggests that dialogues with others may be rehearsed before they are enacted into outer dialogues, which in turn can affirm or challenge expectations of each other, of each other’s other, and so forth, thus braiding each other’s reality constructions into each other. In this way, theories of human communication embrace the consequences of understanding and enacting them. Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach exemplifies the complementary construction of persons.The work of R.D. Laing (1967) exemplifies the structural symmetries of these constructions. John Shotter (1984) suggests the notion of an account as a joint accomplishment replacing the non-interactive notion of theory.

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It seems difficult to understand I–You relations without taking part in them (Roberts & Bavelas, 1996). Detached observers cannot experience precisely what makes such relations real: the unfolding history of particular engagements and the embodied feelings of being in communication. Eduard Jones and Richard Nisbett (1972:80) found “a pervasive tendency for actors to attribute their actions to situational requirements, whereas observers tend to attribute the same actions to stable personality dispositions.” In view of this robust finding, the psychological concept of personality, the stable character of a person, is more likely an artifact of detached observation than an empirical or experiential fact. Sigmund Freud, unaware that his authoritarian relationship to his patients dictated his perceptions, might be said to have built a science on this artifact of observation, an artifact that fueled an industry of psychoanalytic practices. It appears that such monological theories (of stable personalities) bar the dialogical understanding of human communication. Because I–You accounts of communication must account for diverse ways of understandings and enacting them into intertwined practices, I and You are not only observationally but also synthetically indeterminable. Nor can we understand a You as an isolated individual from a detached observer’s position.We cannot compose a You from known parts as engineers design systems from existing components, because I and You as well as the particular relations between them evolve in processes of con-sensual coordination. During communicative involvements, nothing is stable except what participants preserve or refuse to change. The empirical fact that we nevertheless learn of each other while in communication leads me to conclude that I and You are “interactively determinable.” Dialogical involvement is necessary to understand I–You relations. Communication theorists may be temped to construct commonalties for I and You: a common ground, a common situation, a common language, a common culture, a common history, a common ethics, a common mission, consensus, or agreement. The etymology of the word “communication” – a stem shared with “commonality,” “community,” and “communion” – encourages this temptation.The everyday conception that successful communication converges toward consensus echoes the idea of eigen-values as a property of recursive systems. Many scientific theories of communication adopted this as a premise, as in, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s (1975b) merging horizon, constructionists’ (e.g., Gergen, 1985) common language, or Jürgen Habermas’s (1970) universal pragmatics. I suggest that “commonalities” are artifacts of observing communication from its outside.The “we” of participation as conceptualized in this essay, however, looks more like going along, coordination, togetherness, or Shotter’s (1984) joint action. Insistence on commonalities appears often in relation to the exertion of power and control and hence the subversion of dialogical processes. Rhetorical moves, for example, “don’t we agree on that?” or references to “[our shared] family values,” and declarations that “we speak the same language”, always originate with someone who values commonalities with the expectation that others comply or risk exclusion from “us.” Asserted commonalties may seem real by acquiescence within com-

A Cybernetics of I–Other Relations 123

munication and may acquire the appearance – but only that – of “objectivity.” One must keep in mind that a “we”never speaks.Individual “Is” do – but always in continuation of a history of interaction with others.The authoritative assertion of commonalities, while contestable in principle, can silence divergent voices and become oppressive. Claimed commonalities can be seen from exclusive or inclusive perspectives, from a position outside that relationship – when an observer describes what they have in common – and from a position inside that relationship – when an I asserts what we share. Either perspective privileges the I that claims cognitive authority; however, those referred to might not see the commonality claimed by an outsider I, or, they may have reasons not to dissent openly from the claims of an insider I. Acquiescence assures the speaking I’s authority. A good example of the above is the claim of hegemony as an existing social condition. According to Antonio Gramsci’s (1987) widely accepted definition, hegemony denotes an all-pervasive, discursively mediated, and consensual superstructure. In Cultural Studies, hegemony supplanted the older notion of ‘ideology’ but continued to depict those affected – in Gramsci’s conception the dominant as well as the dominated – as unable to recognize its presence and pervasive power.To avoid the paradox of claiming the ability to see what one’s theory declares invisible to everyone else, assertions about “hegemonic conditions” can be made only from the position of a privileged observer who is hegemony-free. This places the theorist outside the supposed commonality and into an I–they relation to those about whom he speaks and for whom he claims the phenomenon to exist. Thus, the theory constructs others as blind to what the I claims able to observe with clarity. In I–You communication, conversely, the theory of hegemony is a pathological construction that dismisses disagreement by any You as evidence of You’s lack of awareness of her condition.This denies respect for You and transforms all Yous into ignorant Theys.The theory-guided exclusion of the voices of affected others reveals the concept of hegemony as a kind of “paternalism” toward others. I–Thou: Human Beings in Ideal Conversations Just as in I–You relations, I and Thou denotes a pair of complementary constructions of people characterized by their ability to speak for themselves and with each other, creating complementary worlds and including therein the worlds of others. However, unlike in I–You relations, there can be no mask that hides a “true self,” no institutionalized role-playing, no accounting for benefits of being in communication and no representations of absent others. In I–Thou relations, participants constitute themselves in conversational practices of dialogical equality. Neither seeks to convince the other. Neither unilaterally imposes her categories on the other or assumes a position superior to the other. Neither claims to be the caretaker of the other, the guardian of a joint purpose or the owner of a universal truth. All rules of interaction that could develop in conversations remain contestable within them. In other words, there can be no authority, reality or commonality that I or Thou could not question. In I–Thou relations human beings are true to themselves (Gadamer, 1975b),

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authentic (Roberts, 1985), intimate with, and respectful of each other. Martin Buber speaks of “grace” (1958:11) and of “love” (1958:14). One of the features of I–Thou relations is that the positions of I and Thou are freely interchangeable. This surpasses regard for I as its other’s other. I and Thou have the ability to take turns speaking from each other’s perspectives and to shift freely across all complementarities that preserve the qualities of Thou.The kind of power that arises with the presumption of non-interchangeability has no place in I–Thou relations. Roles construed as non-interchangeable – for example, male and female, parent and child, therapist and client, or ethnographer and native – are incommensurate with I–Thou relations.This does not mean that people who see inalterable differences in each other could not participate in I–Thou relations outside these perceptions; I suggest only that individuals in I–Thou relations do not draw on such differences. If relational practices become questionable within I–Thou conversations, accounts of them must circulate freely among those involved. Just as in I–You, accounts that reenter I–Thou communication may transform what they speak of and reconstruct the conversational history, the I–Thou relation and the very I and Thou that embody them. However, unlike in I–You, I–Thou accounts must respect each other’s being without conditions and preserve the possibility of further conversation. Although this condition would not lend itself to formulating accounts of this relation from its outside, Figure 7.6 offers a sketch of what I mean: let I′ indicate the virtual I that observes, conceptualizes, and evaluates I’s embodied participation in an I–Thou relation from a position that I does not momentarily occupy, for example, from its past, its future, or its other (as seen in Figure 7.5 as well). Let Thou′ indicate the equally self-reflecting Thou, with I and Thou being in “view” of or present to each other without mediation.When I or Thou speak, they always enter their own explicit or implicit accounts of what they see happening into an always-ongoing conversation and thus acknowledge each other’s histories, presences, expectations, and commitments. Furthermore, let this diagram be the form of the accounts that I′ and/or Thou′ enter into their conversation (from left and right of the diagram).Thus (though not apparent in this figure), accounts of I–Thou relations contain themselves, are recursively self-embedded in the conversational dynamics they unfold and are local if not closed to outside interventions. I', I'’s Thou'’s Thou',…

I'’s accounts

I

Thou

I'’s Thou', …

Figure 7.6. An I–Thou Relation

Thou'’s accounts

A Cybernetics of I–Other Relations 125

Writing of dialogue, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975b:323) says:“In human relations the important thing is … to experience the ‘Thou’ truly as a ‘Thou’, i.e. not to overlook [Thou’s] claim and to listen to what [Thou] says to us.To this end, openness is necessary.… Without this kind of openness to one another there is no genuine human relationship.” I do not interpret this to mean that listening could lead to seeing who the other “really” is. Gadamer seems to have this in mind. All others occur in I’s constructions, as suggested also in Figure 7.6.Yet, by attentive listening to Thou’s voice, not insisting on the exclusive validity of any one I’s constructions, not looking for Thou’s faults or weaknesses, not assuming that historical trends must continue into the future, and not attempting to persuade or use the other for whatever purpose, in other words, by not privileging one’s own (more familiar) logic over the logic of one’s others, an I can open itself and reserve a dialogical space for Thou to emerge and be Thouself therein. The concept of “dialogue” is only one logical complement of “monologue.” I propose “multilogue” as another. In multilogue, several distinct and possibly incommensurate logics or several parallel worlds grow side by side. In choosing this term I wish to oppose two tendencies toward single world accounts (including of dialogue). First, efforts to impose coherences construct either an overarching metalogic or a common ground.This would enforce the merger of several worlds and frustrate multilogue. Second, inasmuch as the voices of others always must be able to introduce new perspectives if not entirely new worlds into a conversation, I and Thou must maintain or continuously expand their clearings for listening to each other, and to invite each other to enter and meet in these open and deliberately unstructured spaces.Thus, it is the condition of multilogue that any I must preserve against the temptation of monological certainties that merely tolerate the logic of others as an inferior version of one’s own logic or as distortions of I’s reality or universe. Being in conversation means the continuous creation of spaces for the worlds of I and of Thou to expand and for both to move about, make their homes, be-with and appreciate each other. Applying his conception of dialogue to Dostoevsky’s writing, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984:292) says much the same. “Monologism, at its extreme,” he suggests, “denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights [thou].” In the “homophonic” text, all aspects of narrative are subordinated to the will of the author. Others become mere mouthpieces of that author’s ideological viewpoints. In multilogue, I resists the temptation to shape the voices (and logics of reality) of others. Instead, I invites the worlds of others to enter I’s accounts in ways recognizable by these others as their own. Multilogue necessarily emerges when I and Thou thrive on discovering possibilities that neither could imagine by themselves. Multilogue describes the multiple social realities needed for Bakhtin’s polyphonic dialogue to not only take place, but also enable participants to move out of burdensome if not oppressive relational practices (Krippendorff, 1995b). As Buber suggested, I–Thou relations are informed by love – not love of someone, but love of the multi-faceted (to which I add unmediated) otherness that creates and

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complements the I, the feeling of being in sync with others’ understanding and of appreciating the diversity of otherness that love makes possible. “Love is between I and Thou … Love is the responsibility of an I for a Thou” (Buber, 1958:14–15). Celebrating the Other, as Edward Sampson (1993) suggests, is a start but may not be enough. The construction of a Thou in a world (radically) different, if not incommensurate with, one’s own, yet also habitable opens the possibility for I to see itself through Thou’s eyes.3 Some Comparisons Table 7.1 summarizes some distinctions drawn by pronoun use in the five I–Other relations discussed above. I will travel through these in three ways: regarding the vulnerability of otherness, methodological issues of inquiring into others, and social implications of knowledge generated in different I–Other relationships. For lack of space, I leave further explorations of the table to the reader. Vulnerabilities of Othernesses

The five I–Other relations are tabulated in the order of the complexity of explanations they require and in their resistance to erosion from one kind into another. Clearly, I–they relations are most stable. People represented as statistical aggregates cannot talk or object to how they are represented. The other extreme, the I–Thou relationship, is most vulnerable to decay. In I–Thou relations, when the I tries to influence a Thou, when that I encounters instrumental intents in what Thou asserts, or when either insists without consent on consistency, rationality, or conformity to conventions, for example on an overriding ethics or theory of human nature,Thou ceases to exist.Then the I–Thou has eroded into an I–You relationship where interests can govern communication, and institutionalized differences may rule. For example, lovers who examine the costs and benefits of being in their relationship, keep tabs on favors each offers the other or play “tit for tat,” introduce rational rules of conduct into their relationship which transform a relationship of love into an economic one where a common currency matters (Solomon, 1990). Similarly, I–You relations can erode into I–It relations when I does not respect the identity of the other and uses the other as a means to ends. Most breakdowns of marriages are erosions of relationships. In the extreme, I–It relationships are generalized to I–They relationships – not only as in the population statistics discussed earlier, but also in the identification of outcasts, enemies, and terrorists – justifying complete disrespect if not violence. In the domain of interpersonal relations, Mary Roberts (1985) observed difficulty moving in the opposite direction (counter to erosion). She found that subjects who related well to a story about I–It relationships could not imagine themselves in an I–Thou relationship; they remained stuck in I–it world constructions, treated their 3 Although I used this metaphor in a 1984 version of this chapter, I was pleased to learn that the Austrian Therapist Victor Frankl had used it previously in similarly circular constructions (Foerster, 1991).

I–You: persons in communication

Interactively determinable (mutually, but only partially understandable) Recursively embedded constructions of Is and Yous with I–we/they commonalities I and You – emerge in each Other’s complementary and cooperatively maintained reality constructions The agency of one constrains the agency of the Other, both converge to commonalities Viability in communication, intertwined understandings separately benefiting each Other Political

I–Thou: human beings in conversation

Not at issue

Multilogues of togetherness, dance, language games

I and Thou – emerge in mutual respect for each Other’s authenticity of being

Agencies are mutually constituted with joint possibilities expanding

Possibility of continued conversation – of continued being – with each Other

Emancipatory

Others’

Determinability

Structure

Source of identity

Agency

Assigned purpose – the criteria I’s accounts seek to meet

Kind of society

Table 7.1. A Comparison of I–Other Relations

Technological

None – I’s inability to observe its structure gives the appearance of pseudofreedom Serviceability to I: providing I with accounts for its synthesis and use

I– in terms of how it is built, what it can be substituted for or do for I

Structurally determined system (logical net, rules, rationality)

Synthetically determinable (structurally reproducible)

I–It: nontrivial machines

Manipulability by I: predictability/ controllability derived from observations over time Functional

None

I– in terms of the functions I prefers it to perform

Observationally determinable (behaviorally predictable and controllable) Mathematical function or code

I–It: trivial machines

Mass

Surveillability by I: providing I with information that “captures” them in I’s view

None

None, a point within mathematical coordinates, member of sets I– in terms of I’s categories of surveillance

Statistically determinable (locatable in classes, groups)

I–They: statistical aggregates

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partners as serving their needs or as “doormats,” seemed uninterested in partners’ feelings and conceptions, and blamed the other rather than assume responsibilities for the ways their relationship developed. In contrast, subjects who related to narratives of I–Thou in dialogue were conscious and accepting of their partners’ being. To be stuck in instrumental or functional I–It or even in businesslike I–You relationships is not uncommon. Newspaper accounts, fiction, and entertainment promote such relationships. I do not think that I–Thou relationships would be appropriate for scientific inquiries – after all, the knowledge generated under these conditions is intimate and confined within that relationship – however, I suggest that scientific research does not delegitimize this possibility. Being stuck in I–It conceptions should be considered problematic when the nature of human beings is discussed. Buber (1958), too, sees the vulnerability of Thou, but differently. He considers love as focused on whole human beings. Hate, he says, always is limiting and focused on parts of others, which breaks Thou into components (that have no agency by themselves). Hating the whole person transforms the Thou into the It of an object (1958:16–17). Apparently, human relations erode easily in careless practices and the process often is irrecoverable. Methodological Implications

Our well-worn social scientific methods for analyzing observational data favor statistical and deterministic or mechanistic explanations and thus trivialize people. This essay showed that observational methods lose their ability to determine and predict when faced with nontrivial – human or not – objects of inquiries. It showed the impossibility of testing with certainty hypotheses and theories as their numbers are transcomputationally large and questions the possibility of knowing by detached observation and of achieving representational truths. Faced with nontrivial objects, researchers must construct or build what they seek to understand and be concerned with the consequences of their constructions. Even that is not enough, however.To inquire into persons as knowledgeable communicators and as active constituents of social systems, researchers cannot avoid active involvement in co-creating the complementary social relations they seek to understand – without being in control. Reciprocated and rearticulated I–You accounts of social phenomena become constitutive of the realities they assert, and interactively determine the behavior of their human constituents, now necessarily including the inquiring I. Such accounts are dialogical, not monological, and they must prove their viability in interactions, not in the truths of propositions. I suppose we come to know each other in ways that have much to do with how we treat each other. If the knowledge we generate collectively leaves no space for I–Thou relationships, for example, such relations are unlikely to happen. It is important to acknowledge with Bakhtin (1984) that every verbal expression occurs in a context of human relationships – whether between spouses or among a social theorist and those her theory addresses, talks about, or affects – here distinguished in terms of explicit or implicit pronoun use. Figure 7.1 suggested that theories we create as social scientists tend to reenter the social realities they describe and to

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change them.Therefore, it is important for social theorists to express their results in relational terms – always including the I of the researcher – and not to limit themselves to observational descriptions of what exists at present. Social theory needs to preserve or expand the spaces for those it theorizes. It needs to enrich I–Other relationships. Social Implications of Knowledge Generated within Various I–Other Relations

The final question I address concerns the social entailments of these five ways of knowing others.The preceding examples might give the impression that my concern is interpersonal – not quite so. For me, larger social phenomena are constituted in people doing things with each other, i.e., in micro processes. All social scientists ultimately face people, generate data about them, and publish findings in the very society in which both reside. Publishing statistically aggregated population characteristics, perhaps most common in social research, provides overviews of large populations from superior (or objective) perspectives. This type of knowledge supports largescale surveillance of populations and, when published, offers individuals a sense of where they stand in their surveyors’ terms.This is what polling does to public opinion. The massive reentry of population statistics that convey distinctions by intellectually superior scientific observers in relation to synthetic aggregates of (skillfully constrained, purposefully disabled, and methodologically inferior) others is reproduced in the social distinction between superior users of statistical generalizations and the masses of so-called cultural dupes that populate these accounts. Oscar Gandy (1993) analyzed the political economy of automating such knowledge in the form of increasingly sophisticated electronic surveillance systems that remain hidden from view.The social use of this kind of knowledge nourishes a mass society governed largely by institutions, corporations, and governments that command instruments of large-scale surveillance. Accounting for people as trivial machines equates them structurally with technical devices and easily manipulable tools.This kind of knowledge surfaces where there is a need for human beings to perform like tools, reliably, mechanically, and mindlessly. Research methodologies that produce trivial machine models of others – theories of attitude change, advertising effects, and adoption and dissemination of technologies – deliver people into the hands of those with access to their inputs and interest in their outputs: the institution of the mass media, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and election spinners. Theories of nontrivial machines drive the ongoing computer and information revolution that replaces routine, repetitive human activities, especially massive searches and long calculations that people find time-consuming and difficult to complete reliably.4 These successes fuel the general use of technological metaphors 4 Note that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, computers were humans who could calculate with paper and pencil. Now such referents are unheard of, suggesting how far humans have been liberated from having to perform tasks considered dreadful.

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to explain human behavior. For example, computer metaphors to explain human cognition have lead to such academic disciplines as cognitive science and artificial intelligence; and transmission metaphors to conceptualize human communication have fueled the authoritarian idea of communication as conveying (factual) information from knowledgeable senders to ignorant receivers, teachers to students, or politicians to constituencies. Studying humans in terms of technological metaphors much as defining social problems in technological terms not only justifies substituting technologies for human behaviors, it also values reducing the understanding of humans to understanding machines. It creates a schism between those who can perform according to technological ideals and those who cannot. With machine conceptions as standards, people become “serviceable others” (Sampson, 1993), perform functions and – since humans cannot be built to specifications – are the weak links in technological systems (Flach, 1994).This kind of understanding others evidences an overwhelming technological rationality presumed to govern all dimensions of everyday life. Knowledge arising from I–You relationships – persons in communication – is more situational, mutually recognizable, rearticulable, and public.Theories of communication that acknowledge speakers and listeners as partners in communication, responding to each other and in view of each other, are theories that acknowledge the political nature of communication – political in the broad sense of observing and responding to each other. And when such theories permit differences among communicators to coexist in respectful discussion, they encourage citizenship if not micro-level democracy to come about. However, while I–You relationships may converge toward reality constructions that enrich each other, the received concept of communication expects communication to converge on a shared understanding which privileges the (often institutionalized) I who claims such common grounds – the We of sharing – and thus remains in charge of the political realities that can grow on it.This vocabulary, mostly taken for granted and unquestioned, provides hidden support for political institutions to develop and thrive. Political institutions become oppressive when they act to preserve the unquestionability of their foundations.A society in which people can contest claims of common grounds, question its authorities, and reflect on whatever creates barriers to open conversation can be called emancipatory. Such a society respects others as human beings, as Thou, cherishes the diversity of otherness, and practices multilogue naturally.This society continually expands the possibilities for self and others to be with each other and to move on. Social scientists’ most important contribution may be to preserve the possibilities of I–Thou relationships, multilogical world constructions, and dialogue between diverse people, even if these possibilities arise only occasionally.

Chapter 8

Pathology, Power, and Emancipation *

Ethics Let a communication ethic be any use of language that prevents social pathologies from arising, helps to overcome social pathologies that may have arisen elsewhere, and does not constitute a pathology itself.This involved and unusual definition requires elaboration. Note the negatives in the definition. To say that an ethic prevents something undesirable is not to specify a normative ideal. I suspect that the prescription of ideals for how humans should live together, whether in Marx’s equality, Benjamin’s happiness, Pareto’s optimality, or Habermas’s ideal speech community, can germinate pathologies. A negative definition, by contrast, leaves many systems unspecified, open for exploration without presupposing whether they turn out to be good. The negative reasoning that Gregory Bateson (1972:399–410) found in cybernetics is fundamental to evolution. In ethics, injunctions against practices that make living together impossible have ancient roots, for example in the Old Testament’s “thou shalt not.…” Negative definitions transcend polarities like good versus evil or right versus wrong, because any single-minded pursuit of the bright side of a distinction could turn dark eventually. The definition also mandates self-reference.To require that a communication ethic prevent or overcome social pathologies and not constituting itself as a pathology means that ethics must be ethical by its own criteria.This is consistent with the selfapplicable nature of human communication: one cannot speak about communication without communicating. I suggest there is something ethical in not treating aboutness separate from being, purpose separate from process, ends separate from means, and I separate from others. Unfortunately, good intentions are rarely applied to themselves. For example, a society whose ideals can be realized only by ignoring

* This chapter combines two publications: Krippendorff, K. (1989b). The power of communication and the communication of power, toward an emancipatory theory of communication. Communication 12:175–196 (published 1991) and Krippendorff, K. (1995b). Undoing power. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12,2:101–132.

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parts of its population features inhumanity. It is troubling to justify war in terms of ending all wars, undemocratic to invade a country to install democracy, discriminatory to grant equal rights to everyone save to those who have no rights, and patronizing to help where help is not wanted. Such situations lack selfapplicability. This communication ethics informs the following formulations. Pathology The concept of pathology, a key term in the definition of communication ethics, needs clarification. Etymologically, pathology – Greek “pathos” = “feeling” or “suffering”; “logia” = “study of ” or “discourse” – is the logic of suffering and disease, commonly explained in terms of the cause of a deviation from a normal state of being; in medicine, for example, the anatomical or physiological conditions that explain a disease. In the social domain, one can distinguish two epistemologically different notions. I will use a reflexive concept, but let me first distinguish it from the common normative definition. In the social domain, normative notions are familiar and understood as collectively established, widely accepted, and often institutionalized standards or norms. Whereas in medicine pathologies are conceived to have bodily causes, in society, the very application of norms is the main cause for social pathologies to arise and be identified. Norms are always established by groups who intend to comply with them and wielded against groups who either cannot comply with them or oppose them. Normative notions of social pathology are variously authoritarian – when the determination of abnormality is invested in a judge; objectivist – when that determination is inscribed in formal procedures; or the result of mob rule – when a group of people takes its own standards above others, such as in lynching. In a reflexive notion of pathology, by contrast, criteria are found where pathology is embodied or felt. For example, when finding oneself doing something one knows one should not or does not wish to do, when being caught in untenable or incomprehensible situations; one may feel incompetent, powerless, overwhelmed or burdened by happenings, or the loss of one’s identity or meaning of life.1 Such conditions, disabling and bewildering without a clear understanding of why this is so, imply reflexive pathology as a cognitive trap without apparent hope of escape.2 A reflexive pathology, emotional in feeling, cognitive in the realization that there is no way out and social in the perception of others – individuals, groups, or complex social situations – considers such conditions as co-determinants of entrapment. A social

1 The loss of meaning in life has been identified by Victor Frankl (1963) as the root cause of psychological disabilities, and writing as a former inmate of a Nazi concentration camp, as cause of terminal medical conditions. 2 For regarding hope as an important construct see Bloch (1986).

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pathology constituted in the interactive use of language, in discourse is a social pathology of communication – my main concern. What constitutes a trap? I describe below and elaborate on four conditions before linking each by example with the notion of power.The first three conditions follow Gabriel Stolzenberg’s (1984) examination of traps in mathematics.To these, I add a fourth, embodiment. The first condition necessary for a trap is a closed system of reality constructions, institutionalized attitudes, rationalizations, beliefs, habits of thoughts, actions, and experiences. Closed systems offer coherent explanations, admit only systemconsistent experiences, and suppress the aberrant. In closed systems, all acts of observation, judgment, and elaboration, all cognitions serve the maintenance of the system’s identity. Closed systems preserve their essential self-referentiality under continuous perturbation from their outside. An ideology, religion, scientific paradigm, or sociology – any rational system – interprets everything in its own terms, and includes its criteria of validity and coherence as its constituents.A closed system does not preclude the possibility of change, for example, by natural drift, elaboration of its parts, or systematic extensions. The second condition for the existence of a trap is that the closed system – or some of its constituents – is demonstrably non-viable, incorrect, invalid, or untenable. Non-viability arises at a boundary where the unfolding of a system of thought and action yields incoherent experiences, potentially life-threatening conditions and unmanageable perturbations.When the system is one of formal logic, the emergence of internal contradictions betrays the system as inconsistent, non-working or nonviable. When the system is a scientific theory, counter-evidence would render it invalid, threatening its viability.When the system is one’s reality construction, loss of competence, alienation from reality, and the inability to achieve expected outcomes would render it non-viable. When the system is a social organization, inefficiencies, breakdowns, internal conflicts, or unjustified exclusion of members would prove it non-viable. The third requirement for a system to be called a trap is that certain of its constituents prevent examination of the system’s non-viability. For example, the system of self-fulfilling beliefs and actions called paranoia constitutes a trap; its demonstrably incorrect construction of others’ (including therapists willing to help) persecutory intents leads only to those responses that confirm what was accepted as evidence. Paranoid patients feel haunted by their condition but cannot identify the source of these feelings from within their reality constructions. Stolzenberg suggests that the inability to identify the reasons for the non-viability of a cognitive system stems from taking for granted certain attitudes, beliefs, and meanings that thereby serve as barriers to critical examination. Traps have a way of deepening, drawing people into them. For example, someone who fears death must take precautions to prevent or postpone it. If she takes this fear seriously, she also must be afraid of losing her fear and failing to take the necessary precautions when they happen to matter, thus raising fear to an obsession with death.

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Traps can be quite ordinary. People who spend less time with their spouse and children to gain rewards at work may ultimately lose the family for whom they wish to succeed.Traps emerge from plausible reality constructions, but become manifest when their enactment leads beholders into hopeless and inescapable emotional entanglements. Traps can be socially enforced and directed toward particular ends; for example ethnic paranoia that leads to racial violence and wars.The above three requirements render political alienation, racial prejudice, Bateson’s (1960) double bind, and, as I will show, powerlessness, as social pathologies. I suggest that all pathologies are addictions to particular constructions of reality and their habitual enactment, which are social when people and institutions participate in them. Recognizing different positions – from inside or outside a trap – is crucial. The most pervasive feature of traps is that they cannot be recognized as such from positions within pathological reality constructions.The viability of a system depends on its embodiment (logic in the operations of logicians, scientific theory in relevant data, the performance of individual identity in communication with others or the nature of a social organization in the context of its environment). Recognizing the non-viability of a system always requires a perspective from which to view that system’s boundary and then to examine the interactions between the system and its environment. Such a perspective may be obtained from a position outside or above the system in question, but not from within. The human nervous system is operationally closed but open to perturbations from its environment, rendering human cognition inherently self-contained, though not necessarily entrapped. A positionless objective observer – a cognitively impossible scientific construction in any case – would render the notion of a cognitive trap incomprehensible. Imagine a mountain-encircled valley. Its inhabitants construct their world according to what they can see themselves as doing. But the peculiarities of their world, their way of life, their hardships and pleasures, would become apparent to them only in the context of other worlds, a possibility that would call for either venturing across the mountain ridge or assuming a bird’s-eye perspective from which to see and compare life in other valleys. However, accepting an injunction against taking alternative positions makes a trap self-sealing and prevents understanding of why this is so. Stolzenberg’s (1984) examination of mathematical systems did not require explication of when or why entrapment is undesirable. According to my definition of a reflexive pathology, I must acknowledge the feelings that a trap can produce, the feelings of something being wrong without – at least not at first – comprehending why. Feelings always happen. Feelings accompany almost every activity except the most routine and automatic.They are diffuse, not localized easily. Feelings have no form unless we explain them in language or correlate them with other sensations, of body parts for example. We may associate pain with a bleeding finger, learn in psychoanalysis to hold a miserable childhood responsible for unhappiness, see social

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discrimination as a cause for feeling held back, or be told that combat experiences cause depression and/or post-traumatic stress disorder. Feelings result from drawing distinctions within emotions. My fourth requirement for a system to be called a trap is that it is felt as burdensome (including, for example, feelings of hopelessness, alienation, frustration, incompetence, inauthenticity). Inasmuch as feelings call for explanations, we invent them, pointing anywhere, inside or outside, provided they make sense.A common means of avoiding the recognition of one’s entrapment is to blame one’s feelings on external conditions, personal losses, or the devious intentions of powerful people.To disown the causes of one’s feelings – having constructed “good reasons” for why bad things are outside one’s control – is a way to draw one deeper into a trap. Economic or political oppression is a good example of entrapment. From a position outside it, oppression appears most effective precisely when the oppressed cannot manipulate its mechanism, i.e., from within the pathological system. This was the basis for many older forms of government, including fascism and Stalinism. While oppressed people readily acknowledge and share misery and pain, they typically deny themselves the ability to change a situation that seems hopeless from their position. Scapegoating and identifying or revolting against and removing particular classes of people, technology, political structures, or social conditions may do nothing more than replace one source of oppression with another without solving the underlying problems, thus germinating new pathologies elsewhere, and so forth. To escape a cognitive trap requires assuming a position from which to recognize and alter one’s participation in the pathology. Paulo Freire’s (1970, 1973) “conscientization” exposes people to contradictions and nudges them toward liberation by making them aware of how they contribute to their entrapment. In my opinion, although Freire appeals to a universal notion of humanness, there is no universal ethics – as suggested above – only paths out of burdensome communication pathologies. In the following, I suggest that social theories of power, of existing power relations, resources, and resistances or the lack thereof demonstrate a conceptual entrapment from which escape may not be easy. Power in Social Science Discourse How does power appear in social discourse? First, “power” is a word.Words, when used, are public; they do something. “Power” is no exception. Let me give some examples of its uses before coming to how social scientists have developed it. Robin Tolmach Lakoff (1990:12), a linguist, offers a good sense of what power connotes. Power … is vibrant, the very word conjuring up images of strength, force, action.Whether positive or negative, those images are strong. Power is physical: it changes reality; it gets things done or undoes what exists. It creates effects that can be seen, felt, and measured. Power is the engine of the 747 that lifts the behemoth off the runway; it is the “plow that broke the plains”; the firing squad; the nuclear bomb under discussion at the conference table; the parent who can

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give or withhold the keys to the car; the boss who can hire or fire at whim. All of these operate to change reality for better or worse.We may admire power or resent it, but we can see its operations and feel its physical effects on us. Let me also add a couple of passages written by Michel Foucault, who introduced a new vocabulary into the discourse on power. He dismissed the notion of power as a simple, isolatable relationship between master and slave or oppressor and oppressed. Suggesting power as manifest instead in complex networks of relationships – including of institutions, of knowledge, and so forth – he saw power as double-sided (1980:119): What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says “no,” but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance whose function is repression. Foucault also recognized its pervasiveness: “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere.… Power comes from below.… There is no binary and allencompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix” (1978:92–94); “… power is ‘always already there,’ … one is never ‘outside’ it, … there are no ‘margins’ for those who break with the system to gamble in” (1980:141). Roland Barthes (1982:460) virtually echoes Foucault’s voice: Power is present in the most delicate mechanisms of social exchange: not only in the State, in classes, in groups, but even in fashion, public opinion, entertainment, sports, news, family and private relations, and even in the liberating impulses which attempt to counteract it. These passages use power as a metaphor, a metaphor from physics, where power denotes the rate at which work is performed or energy is transmitted.What does a metaphor do? A metaphor is a figure of speech that has the remarkable ability to take the perception of its users hostage to its entailments. It imports conceptions from a familiar domain of experiences into the domain presently attended to, not merely clarifying what is not understood but also undoing all conceptions in its way.To use a non-controversial example, speaking of the earth as a mother or as a resource entails fundamentally different attitudes towards interacting with the planet. The mother metaphor entails love and suggests cherishing the earth’s beauty as a source of life. The resource metaphor entails dividing the earth among people to extract from it the resources it offers. Note that once either metaphor is used, its entailments seem natural and justified; alternatives are not apparent.3 3 See Chapter 3 in this volume.

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The use of the power metaphor is not natural or old.According to Andrew King (1987), the vocabulary of power entered discourse with Niccolo Machiavelli’s (1469–1527) The Prince, a manual for rulers who wish to gain or hold on to power. Before Machiavelli, theorists of government focused on law and justice, obedience and the virtues of rulers, but also rhetoric.The passages quoted above use a notion of power closer to modern physics. In Machiavelli’s time, physics was in its infancy and the metaphor of power did not provide the entailments it does now. Foucault makes no reference to human agency or social-psychological variables accounting for compliance. For him power is everywhere where something happens. Like in physics, it is the performance of work in a complex system of power relations. Nor is there any differentiation among mechanisms through which power works. For Foucault, power can be both constructive and destructive. Earlier sociologists focused on actors and targets of power. Max Weber defined “power [a]s the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests” (1922:152). Robert Dahl suggests that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (1957:202–203). Dennis Wrong extends Bertrand Russell’s (1938) notion: “power is the capacity of some persons to produce intended and foreseen effects on others” (1988:2). Ellen Langer (1983:15) ties power to possessing adequate resources: Power is the ability to effect tangible outcomes whether that power is achieved through the accumulation of money, property, muscles, beauty, or knowledge and whether the effect is for self or others. As those commodities increase, one’s power proportionally increases. People vary in their desire and need for power … In an influential paper, social psychologists John French and Bertram Raven (1959) distinguish five bases of power: legitimate power, the power of political office; charismatic power, the power from admiration and identification; expert power, the power to use superior knowledge; reward power, the power to grant or withdraw rewards; and coercive power, the power to use physical force. While these authors distinguish among types of resources and perhaps implicitly acknowledging different mechanisms involved, categorizing all of them as power suggests that the outcome for all of them is the result of an asymmetrical relationship between the powerful and the powerless, invoking the idea of a common quantity of which one can have more or less.This ties power to a simple calculus suggesting that it is the difference between haves and have-nots that moves politics, work, and society for good or for bad. Power has no morals. The literature on human communication has not escaped the seductiveness of the power metaphor. As early as 1951, Stanley Schacter defined “communication [a]s the mechanism through which power is exerted” (1951:191).The idea that linguistic expressions are powerful in themselves, that words cannot be resisted, is as old as

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magic. Now this notion is built into theories of communication effects along with the ideas that speech acts have illocutionary forces and messages exert compelling influences. In a review of the contributions of rhetoric to understanding human communication, Kurt Black claims two functions of language: transmission and influence. “Rhetoric … depends on a passive view of the audience” and “takes the actions of the orator as the principal source of influence.… Rhetoric presupposes a belief in the power of language” (1989:132–133).4 There are other conceptions of power. However, mainstream social and political theorists conceive of power as a depersonalized resource. The regime of power determines the dynamics of everything. For Foucault it is a technology of control. Thermodynamic laws conceive energy as flowing one way, from a source (of high levels of energy) to a sink (of low levels of energy), as from the powerful to the powerless. Whatever appears in energy’s path slows the process, but creates nothing of its own. In physics, power and resistance always are equal in magnitude, but opposite in direction. Power is active. Resistance is passive, unproductive. Most writers on power mention “power” and “resistance” in a single breath – see Weber’s definition – and subscribe to a simple calculus: to generate effects, power must overwhelm or circumvent the resistance it meets. Physics formulates this calculus for rational deployment. The design of mechanical systems fueled by energy and technologies of control are logical consequences of such world constructions. In these conceptions, there is nothing personal about power. Power asks no questions and yields no answers. Awareness of how it works does not matter.The exertion of power creates subjects, yet grants agency to none. For Antonio Gramsci (1971), hegemony affects the dominant and the dominated alike. One can’t argue with an entity that is omnipresent, not constructed, and not undoable. Power renders everyone a subject. The metaphor of physical power has hijacked social science discourse. The Genesis of Pathologies of Power How does one become entrapped in construction of power? From the above quotations, the conceptions of power following Weber, Dahl, Foucault, Barthes, Wrong, Langer, and French and Raven fail in three respects. Adopting the entailments of the metaphor of power from physics, these entailments (1) have no place for the constitutive use of language, including what that metaphor does, (2) fail to consider where power is embodied – “exercised” as Foucault calls it – and, (3) provide disabling formulations – taken as facts, these formulations make emancipatory moves incomprehensible and a communication ethics senseless.

4 As of 2007.10.24, Google shows over one-third of all 843,000 hits for “power” due to the “power of language,” attesting to the extraordinarily pervasive association of language and power.

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To my surprise, some of these deficiencies have been recognized before, although in the context of criticizing another and classical epistemological pathology. In their German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1970, 1978), writing almost two hundred years ago, described what they called a “trick in three acts” that theorists, ideologists, and philosophers – especially Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – perform to prove the hegemony of the human spirit in history or the importance of ideas ruling an epoch. Marx and Engels were clear that detaching these ideas from those who hold them not only was a mistake, but “an illusion” that played into the hands – one might say into the language and minds – of the ruling classes who distinguished themselves from those ruled by adopting and thriving in such ideas. Marx and Engels described this “trick” in the following three acts: No. 1. One has to separate the ideas held by the class of [for a variety of reasons actually] ruling individuals and take them to be the ruling ideas.… No. 2. One has to bring an order into these ruling ideas, show [empirical] connections … [between them] which is accomplished by providing a [complete and] self-contained account of these … (this is possible because these ideas really are connected through their empirical grounding and produced by distinctions intrinsic to these ideas). No. 3. To remove the hypothetical appearance of this self-contained account [of the order, history, system, or logic of ideas], one attributes agency to it, refers to it as a person – “the self consciousness” – or, to appear thoroughly objective, as a sequence of persons [– the historical consciousness –] who represent these ideas in history. The thinkers, philosophers, or ideologists then come to be its “counsel of guardians” … Herewith, all material elements have been removed from history, and speculation [mythology] is given free rein. (Marx & Engels, 1978:49; my translation; square brackets my insertions)5 Here, I am not concerned, as Marx and Engels were, with idealism, how it provided the ruling classes with self-serving illusions or what caused their inability to listen to emergent revolutionary voices. Other issues concern us today.Also, one could apply their criticism to their own theorizing and show the historical determinism they developed to exhibit a similarly self-sealing pathology which made Marx’s worldview no longer contestable. My contention is that we social scientists continue to perform similar tricks in processing our data, as we would call it now, creating disembodied theories and regimes of power whose formulation makes their understanding and contestation increasingly difficult. How do the three acts –

5 I am grateful to John Shotter who brought this passage to my attention.

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abstracting, systematizing, and mythologizing – work in familiar scientific practice with respect to power? First Act: Abstracting (Disembodying)

Identify and abstract relevant and objectively describable units or events from the (often “messy” and for external observers confusing process of) languaging among real people, coordinating their lives relative to each other. There is a considerable consensus that power is transacted through language. Barthes says:“power is inscribed, for all human eternity, (in) language, or to be more precise, (in) its necessary expression: the language we speak and write.… Once uttered, … speech enters the service of power” (1982:460–461); “I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipients” (1982:495). Foucault suggests: “the fundamental operation of power [should] be thought of as … a speech act: enunciation of law, discourse of prohibition. The manifestation of power takes on the pure form of ‘thou shalt not’” (1978:140).And Lakoff sums up: “Language is the initiator and interpreter of power relations” (1990:13). How is this consensus achieved? By abstracting power from all manifestations conceived as power. Note that the act of describing human involvement takes the experiencing body out of descriptions. Feelings and actions become words.This is inevitable, but one can make at least an effort to account for embodiments in real people in diverse terms. Barthes mentions engendering blame, hence guilt in the recipients of power, to which we add the feeling of being forced to do something one would not otherwise do, deprived of rights granted others, singled out for unequal treatment, or stigmatized. These feelings result from the performance of such speech acts as being accused, commanded with the understanding that one’s privileges are at stake, fired from a job, or judged as deviant. Each of these phenomena has an elaborate history and invokes logics of interpersonal relations that are part of the social reality from which power is abstracted. But categorizing such complex social relations as evidence of power leaves unattended and no longer recognizable the contexts in which these speech acts make sense to participants.“Acts of power” once abstracted, invite explanatory structures that may not have much to do with the empirical domain from which power is abstracted. The structure of social scientific language has much to do with this abstraction as well.The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, determined that the acts of speaking are too complex to handle and that linguistics should be concerned with the formal system of language, looking at its syntax and semantics synchronically and diachronically. Both Saussurian and Chomskyan linguistics acknowledge this distinction – Saussure (1960) in seeking to account for langue as opposed to parole and Chomsky in being interested in competence rather than performance. Their conception of language is an abstraction from the process of languaging in which human bodies and a diversity of social phenomena participate. There are other

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conceptions of language, such as Wittgenstein’s (1953) language games, John Austin’s (1962) performatives, George Lakoff’s (1987) embodied accounts, and Richard Buttny’s (1993) accountability. However, Saussurian linguistics sits readily with descriptive accounts of power, especially in causal terms. Neither provides places for situational or relational accounts of speaking. To which comes that Saussurian linguistics, by constructing rules of grammar, thesauri, and dictionaries, has served bureaucratic, educational, and other institutional interests (Harris, 1981:12), the very interests that are served by its human constituents’ compliance. The ideal outcome of abstraction is a causal account,“A affects B,” that generalizes to large categories of people, A or B. Second Act: Systematizing Abstraction Units

Give exhaustive and coherent accounts of the network of connections between these abstractions; develop theories of how they behave as an autonomous system – independent from its embodiment, but possibly related to other systems, economic, political, or cultural. Recall Weber’s definition of power in terms of probabilities. To obtain probabilities, one needs large samples of observational abstractions of the kind “A affects B.” Finding uneven distributions in these probabilities calls for explanations. The power metaphor directs the researcher to what those with high probabilities have and those with low probabilities lack.Thus the need to invent resources of power that can be possessed and do work at the expense of intentions, information, and responsibilities that actors display in communication with others. I mention a diversity of resources that theorists of power identified from Langer’s money, property, muscles, and beauty to French & Raven’s formal, charismatic, expert, reward, and coercive power. Thus, the complexity of human relations is mapped into a singular concept of power and theorized and systematized in terms of physics. This reduces all human interactions as pitching resources of unequal potentiality against each other. Foucault takes a slightly different perspective but with the same results. He stresses the relational character of power between the haves and the have-nots and between those with interest in producing effects and those who produce them. However, the relationships he examines do not account for people but their actions, depicting human beings as the mere conduits of the work that power does, without agency, without a voice, and without a place. In his terms, “What defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions” (1982:220). In Foucault’s writing, power relations naturally turn into “networks of power,” “technologies of power,”“economies of power,”“systems of power,”“regimes of power,”“hegemonies,” and into virtually autonomous power fields: Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations imminent in the sphere in which they operate and in which they constitute their

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own organization; … as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system; … and lastly as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. (1978:92–94; my emphasis) Here, Foucault acknowledges the complexity and dynamism of power relations, not in human terms, but in terms of a physical system of actions. Just as Marx and Engels’s criticism of idealism, such explanatory systems (1) Are analytical abstractions invented by experts (here, by sociologists, political economists, cultural theorists) (2) Describe empirically testable connections between the abstracted units of analysis (here in terms of “networks” of “force relations”) which substitute for these units’ embodiment in the communicative practices among real people from which they are derived (3) Exist as exhaustive and coherent explanations – the ideal of a closed system in Stolzenberg’s (1984) sense – in the discourse of the community of experts within which they are characterized as having a life of their own, independent of the languaging among real people and determining their behavior. Let me comment on the “power of language,” a cliché woven into most manifestations of power. Some writers see natural language as a constraint, a collective “instrument of oppression” from which no speaker of that language can escape. I contend that this harsh judgment derives from conceptions of language as a disembodied system abstracted from processes of languaging. For Barthes (1982:461), [l]anguage is legislation, speech is its code.We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive: … In French … I am obliged to posit myself first as subject before stating the action which will henceforth be no more than my attribute: what I do is merely the consequence and consecution of what I am. … I must always choose between masculine and feminine, for the neuter and the dual are forbidden me. Further, I must indicate my relation to the other person by resorting to either tu or vous; social or affective suspension is denied me. Thus, by its very structure my language implies an inevitable relation of alienation.… [L]anguage – the performance of a language system – is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. His extraordinary conclusion that language is fascist led to much discussion in France and alarmed semioticians like Umberto Eco (1986:239–255).

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Barthes’s statement logically follows from the conception of language as a system of rules taught in school, instituted in dictionaries, enforced in administrative practices, and studied by modern linguistics after Saussure. When language is conceived as a disembodied and autonomous system with a super-individual reach and communication as the correct performance of that system, Barthes’s conclusion is not surprising. It aligns with Foucault’s conception of power as omnipresent and confining. Interestingly, Barthes calls linguistic change a “cheating of language,” which confirms his conception of language as a powerful governing structure – notwithstanding that Barthes adopted and promoted this system and that he and many French semioticians take liberties with the vocabulary of language. Third Act: Mythologizing Systems

(1) Declare the system as autonomous, self-determining and independent of its creators (by not recognizing theorists as creating it, taking theorists’ accounts as objective and representational and absolving the scientific community from communicating it) and (2) ignore its embodiments (without which it could not have empirical relevance). Marx and Engels criticized their scholarly opponents for attributing “personhood,”“self-consciousness,” “historical consciousness,” or “will” to “systems of ideas” (we now consider these phenomena attributes of “agency”) and accused their philosophical opponents of practicing a kind of animism. I am suggesting that “regimes of power” arise from similar attributions.They are fueled by nothing other than metaphors from physics. It is amazing to observe that social scientists, despite their overt commitments to writing in literal (non-metaphorical) language, have embraced physics uncritically as a metaphor. Indeed, causally determined regimes of power – constructed without acknowledgement of their constructedness – become difficult to question and enslave even social scientists. Emancipatory Moves How can one overcome or get out of burdensome, non-working, unjust, or oppressive situations? Such feelings can arise in many situations. Combined with the belief that one is helpless to do anything about them, they could be read as a sign of entrapment. If other people are part of such situations, they are social pathologies. However, as suggested above, the nature of a trap is such that one cannot – at least not easily – recognize one’s entrapment from inside it, much less conceive path out of it. As already suggested, blaming the situation for one’s feelings or attributing them to people in power or uncooperative others reinforces one’s entrapment. No doubt, there are terrible circumstances and blameworthy people in the world, but to make others responsible for one’s feelings and take measures against them usually deepens one’s entrapment. I cannot provide particular solutions for situations of entrapment but believe that many forms of entrapment are due not to inescapable conditions and others’ evil

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intentions but to social constructions of reality that give the appearance – and only that – of an unalterable reality from which there is no escape. Living in a refugee camp, suffering a military dictatorship, having a dominating parent, or joblessness can be tough and painful. Even lacking sufficient time to do what one desires is frustrating. I suggest that the use of power metaphors in explanations of poverty, injustice, oppression, domination, and the like is a source of being so entrapped. I challenge constructions of power as the inevitable ruler or cause of apparent miseries by offering a path out from under them. The previous section discussed how metaphors can seduce social scientists to construct realities that pathologize those who live with what they describe. My suggestion is to simply reverse the steps to entrapment typically taken. I am convinced that entrapment in “networks of power relationships” is prototypical of many communication pathologies. To me, it is the task of critical scholarship to engage in systematic de(con)structions of such pathologies. First, one must distinguish between the physics of power and the metaphor of power, and to treat each according to its own properties, metaphor being a phenomenon in language. One must remove the alleged agency from the concept of power or “de-mythologize” power as an inevitable force. Second, one must de-systematize the empirically or statistically corroborated reality that seems in some sense true, by introducing conceptions at variance with the phenomena it claims to explain. Third, one must revert the abstractions on which the system is build to what they were before they were considered evidence of power. Once the latter have been located in processes of language use, one can deal with them as such. In the section that follows, I add four more emancipatory moves that critical scholarship might want to encourage. 1 Removing Agency from Systems – De-mythologizing

Nobody believes that abstractions have agency, yet we talk about wealth determining health – two abstractions, one causing the other – the office of the president as having power, the unemployment rate influencing voter dissatisfaction, and divorce as breaking someone’s heart. Recognizing the removability of agency from systems of power presupposes distinguishing physical power, which I call “force,” from its metaphorical use, which I continue to call power.The unexamined use of metaphors makes this distinction sometimes difficult. Force refers strictly to causal phenomena resulting from energy flows that meet resistance without human intervention, for example, when two cars collide, people ride a roller coaster, or a bomb explodes.When someone puts a gun to someone’s head, the fear of being shot is not physical. It results from the realization of what could be. Physical laws apply only after the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun.That bullet follows its trajectory until it hits something or someone – regardless of anyone’s intentions – and sufficient resistance, an object dense enough to oppose penetration – stops it.

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In contrast, power relies on distinctions drawn in language. A robber knows that the fear of being shot is psychological. Until that robber pulls the trigger, the relation between him and his victim is social.The robber must impress on his victim that the gun is real and loaded and that he will use it if he doesn’t get what he wants – all of which is social and the content of speech. Physics doesn’t enter into it. Someone who does not fear death cannot be threatened by the prospect of dying. This is why martyrs, suicide bombers, and the like are difficult to threaten.There is a scene in the 1988 movie Crocodile Dundee II in which a thug wielding a knife in NewYork City demands Dundee’s wallet. Dundee turns the relationship around and teaches the thug how to be more convincing, after which they shake hands and part company.As long as power remains a word, it cannot kill. Power carries no agency. Confusing the entailments of the physical metaphor with the effects of physical force is what renders the power construct powerful, decisive, ruling, inducing fear and demanding obedience. People can liberate themselves from power by questioning its agency, but cannot argue with force. Hannah Arendt (1970) draws a similar distinction between violence and power, characterizing violence as a consequence of non-consensual political acts such as torture and imprisonment. While torture clearly involves force, there are nonviolent effects of force as well, in sports for example.There also are symbolic uses of force, ethnic “cleansing,” for example. The virtue of Arendt’s distinction lies in her ability to identify misuses of power, misuse given the a priori meaning of “without consent.” C. Wright Mills (1956, 1959:100) applies a definition of power whose virtue is to hold “men of power” responsible for specific courses of events they initiate. Both conceptions of power acknowledge agency, tied to acts originating in agents and affecting their targets, for Arendt the granting or denying of consent, and for Mills the demand for accountability. My distinction between power and force embraces Arendt’s and Mills’s, placing power in the dialogical processes of languaging, where articulations are created, acquiesced, or contested, where responsibilities are assigned, assumed, or rejected and where undoing but also reification can take place. Liberation is a way of talking into (not about) power. It is not an application of force. Confusion or equation of power with physical force is, I suggest, an entailment of the casual use of physical metaphors. It renders the two forms indistinguishable, blinds one to see the emancipatory options available in social relationships and accounts for the belief that one cannot do anything to alter a reality ruled by power relationships.The language of physics, accepting propositions as either true or false, does not provide physicists a stance from which to see physical reality as their construction. Physical reality simply is; thus the notion of construction and entrapment in that reality becomes incomprehensible. Similarly, the ignorance of the effects of using metaphorical language accounts for the frequency with which even social scientists enter pathological reality constructions. “Entrapment,” Stolzenberg (1984:260–261) writes,

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consists, first, in being taken in (a) by certain uses of language that have the appearance, but only that, of being meaningful; and (b) by certain modes of reasoning that have the appearance, but only that, of being self-evidently correct; second, in being locked in as a result of the psychological act, or process, of accepting these appearances as being “really so.” Somehow, by a process that may be quite complex, they become so thoroughly woven into the very fabric of what we take to be our web of reality that it no longer seems possible to adopt a standpoint from which the question of their correctness may be entertained seriously as a “mere” hypothesis.What were, originally, assumptions have now become givens and the idea of calling them into question is no longer intelligible. I read this passage to mean that the emancipation from pathological reality constructions requires first the denial that positionless abstractions, which reside only in language, have agency; and, second, the recognition that the same situation may appear differently when changing one’s standpoint or position. In particular, such constructions as Foucault’s “regimens of power” require reinterpretation and identification as Foucault’s conceptual system, nothing more or less, just as Jacques Derrida’s “regimen of différance” should not be confused with the truths he claims. The idea that power is a technology that asserts its force on everyone should be revealed as myth. And abstractions called resources of power – wealth, muscles, position, and beauty – must be debunked; they have no constructive or destructive abilities. Power resides in how real people in social relationships language with these qualities. Abstractions do not speak and cannot act for good or ill; only people can and therefore should be careful how they use them. 2 De-systematizing, De(con)structing, Reverting to the Abstractions that Theory had Systematized

Separating force from power enables treating the physical metaphor of power as a metaphor in the language about power.This is the language of experts – sociologists, political scientists, cultural theorists – and of ordinary people using the vocabulary of physics – not the language in which power transacts. In the language about power the entailments of physical metaphors are selectively forged into a system, often closed, in which everything has its place.The point of addressing accounts of power as linguistic artifacts rather than as descriptions of facts reveals the optional nature of their systematicity and the diversity of data they organize. Regarding Foucault’s notion of power, his system – minus its presumed agency and governance or “regime” – is a network of actions that affect each other causally. Individuals are the conduits of power, locked into facilitating the flow of power through a network of power relations; they possess no agency. Foucault is an accomplished conceptualizer, not a researcher working from data. He no doubt has observed people who accomplish things and induce others to do things for them.

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What motivated him to ignore common evidence of human agency in such situations and to reduce human behavior to an autonomous system that governs everything that happens in society? Was Foucault carried away by his use of the physical metaphor, or attracted by trivial systems of explanations that physics provides, not needing to acknowledge the complexities of human nature? Similarly, beginning with Max Weber’s idea of rational bureaucracy, a sociological tradition developed that theorizes organizations as functional organisms. In an ideal bureaucracy, people do not act as knowledgeable actors, but perform functions assigned to them by organizational hierarchies. In this conception, power resides neither in individual actors, as Giddens (1984b) proposes, nor in their actions, as conceived by Foucault, but in the authority of an office within an organization.The power of an office is measured by the number of other offices supervised or under its control.This organizational theory constructs functional, hierarchical, logically closed, and rational power relations among offices that work like a determinate organism and trivialize its human participants. Unlike Foucault, after applying this strictly functional theory to real social organizations, sociologists observed that it worked only on the surface of informal communications among employees, which maintained it as a façade or as the official theory, undermined by informal social relations or a theory in use. This is another example of a system of power relationships that is abstracted from actual practices, upheld in language about power, but ignorant of what is said and done on the ground. Other social theorists such as Talcott Parsons (Parsons et al., 1965), Karl Deutsch (1963), and Niklas Luhmann (1989) describe power as a currency that circulates within society, unevenly accumulating and selectively transforming that currency into individual and institutional actions.This group of theories draw on economic metaphors, implying units of power, analogous to money, that accounts for exchanges within a system – as in “I will do you a favor if you do me a favor in return,” for example, the bargaining in politics for which lobbyists pay. Economic metaphors and physical metaphors have different entailments, but share their determinism, leaving no place for the use of language and denying their human constituents intelligent roles.6 3 De-abstracting, Relocating the Manifestations of Abstractions in the Use of Language

Categorizing numerous instances of “A causes B” into the category of a power relation is an abstraction that no longer lets us recognize what was said, by whom and to whom, and what actually happened when people used language to coordinate

6 Barry Barnes (1988) pursues still another metaphor of power, derived from the kind of synergy that arises from collaboration, the strength derived from belonging to a group and the weakness of acting detached.

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(to use a less loaded word) their actions.Whereas de-systematization operates on the use of language about power, de-abstracting intends to recover the use of language that theorists or ordinary speakers take as manifestations of power. It returns these manifestations to the context of interactive practices from which they were removed and simplified, and enable one to observe their diverse workings. As a first example, consider the well-known tendency in male–female conversations for men to interrupt women more frequently than the other way around. I do not count interruptions that confirm listening or encourage the continuation of conversation, but those that change topics or challenge a contribution before it has been stated completely.With the power metaphor in mind, it is only natural to look for what he has that she lacks and conclude that a power differential is at work – without the ability to identify a property that accounts for this phenomenon and without counting the interruptions.This is another example of a system of power relationships that is abstracted from actual communicative practices, upheld in the language of managers who are cognizant of their formal powers, but blind to what is said and done on the ground. Counting occurrences of interruptions does not help one cope with them in conversations; and explaining these differences as caused by power differences is tautological. In contrast, recovering the feelings consequent to interruptions allows one to consider conversational counter-moves. The logic of threats is understood better than the logic in the previous example. Suppose a mother tells her daughter “if you do this again you are grounded for a week.”With this threat, the mother assumes that her child (1) does not like to be grounded, (2) understands that her mother is committed to enacting the threat, and (3) accepts as rational the injunction against the actions specified by her mother.The mother can control her daughter’s behavior only if she accepts her mother’s reality construction in these three respects. Suppose the child knows that her mother has no interest in having her around for the week, that her mother cannot monitor whether she stays at home, or has never made good on similar threats; the threat is empty. Suppose the child wants to stay home for a week; the punishment turns into a plus, extinguishing the threat. Suppose the child is no longer interested in doing what the mother does not want her to do; the mother may think her threat was effective, but the daughter was unaffected and the mother’s power is illusionary in the child’s reality. De-abstraction can reveal this kind of logic. Explaining what the mother says to her child in terms of power exerted over her daughter would be a gross simplification that relegates communication to a categorical abstraction void of understanding. However, placing the mother’s threat in the context of past conversations enables reflection on what happens between the two, illuminating complexity. As to Crocodile Dundee, he reinterprets a threat as a situation from which he can walk away without harm. I mentioned martyrs and suicide bombers as immune to threats on their lives. Someone who claims not to have control over her actions, like a pilot who convinces a hijacker that the flight path of her plane is controlled from the ground, cannot be made to alter behavior. Someone who creates options

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more favorable than those a threat intends to limit cannot be threatened; for example, an employee whose attractive job offers make being fired an opportunity to move to a better place. Threats involve one kind of interactive logic. Many interpersonal logics disappear in the face of the abstract categorization, “A causes B.” To escape the grip of conceptions of power and the binaries of oppressor and oppressed or powerfulness and powerlessness, de-abstracting uncovers the logic of speech acts used in actual situations in order to address them in their own non-abstract terms. For example, there is a vocabulary for blaming, humiliating, embarrassing, denunciating, ridiculing, intimidating, degrading, ostracizing, accusing, scapegoating, criminalizing, and so forth. Such terms take effect when asserted before a community, in public through the mass media, for example. Related to this are induced feelings of shame (causing one to wish one could disappear from view) or of guilt (the feeling of having done something wrong). The Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa declaring The Satanic Verses blasphemous makes it blasphemous for those for whom Khomeini’s words carry meaning – and certainly affects the book’s author – but finding Khomeini to possess power over followers or the fatwa itself as powerful does not lend understanding to the meaning of the act of declaring.7 The actor-action-target schema – built into the English grammar and largely relied on in abstracting power relationships from complex social relationships – is not always appropriate to describe what happens. For example, obedience is not always caused by efforts to control. Display of obedience can invite others to assume leadership and fill a power vacuum.This is not to “blame the victim.”What happens in social relationships rarely results from a single driver. Social relations can also be paradoxical, as in “commanding disobedience,” “forcing someone to be free,” “punishing a child for her own good.” Gregory Bateson’s (1972:242–249) doublebind shows how paradoxes work in families. I could go on, but the point, I hope, is made. Abstract categories of power are simplistic; they are the basic units of disabling constructions. De-abstraction is a move to reverse these debilitating abstractions and open the possibilities of dealing with the very language use that brings about pathology. On the Ethics of Emancipation The preceding reversed the acts responsible for the rise of pathologies of power. However, the above account of its genesis is not the only possible account. It probably applies more to academic constructions of social reality and the consequent use of language in everyday life than to how populations come to be oppressed and are 7 To complicate the situation even further, Khomeini’s use of language has a history that goes back to the twelfth-century Persian ruler Hasani Sabbah, who founded the order of the Assassins, based on the knowledge that the very threat of murder can be as disabling as its execution. A man who fears that he may be killed is often no stronger than a man already dead (Iyer, 1989).

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taken advantage of politically, economically, and psychologically. These groups undoubtedly have different histories and arrive at different pathologies. However, I believe that (1) gaining insights by conceptually reversing the genesis of entrapment – at least examining the mechanisms of how it happened – is generalizable to histories other than that described above; (2) in all communication pathologies, people feel something as being wrong without actionable understanding of why this is so and emancipatory moves have to contextualize such feelings fruitfully; and, (3) the ability to change one’s behavior presupposes conceiving alternatives. Seeing pathological realities as constructions, not as taken-for-granted conditions, amounts to realizations of what a pathology prevents and of ways out of one’s entrapment. It amounts to regaining cognitive autonomy, the ability to reconstruct one’s reality and exercise one’s agency. Pathological reality constructions may differ radically from each other, but the linguistic devices that underlie entrapment is much the same.Whatever path is taken to realize the nature of one’s entrapment, (4) it always returns to language or an understanding of what the use of language does: articulating the history of one’s condition, using nouns as active or passive, becoming clear about the nature of metaphors, especially what they entail, performing speech acts rather than describing what exists, and seeing oneself as a constituent of one’s world. Emancipation is not a textual matter.The first three emancipatory moves are not limited to writing. It concerns real people in their bodies communicating with each other. In this context, people are important in three senses. First, they may be part of the pathology and have an interest in keeping it that way. Second, they may support each other, including their pathologies, perhaps unwittingly, and it may be difficult for them to escape pathological communication patterns without such others. And third, people might be needed to realize one’s pathology; they might at least provide second-order understanding – the understanding of others’ understanding – offering the possibility for self-reflection, if not help, through them. Emancipatory discourse – discourse directed towards emancipation – may be motivated by empathy, perhaps beginning with the vicarious feelings associated with a recognized pathology in someone else’s reality construction. However, communication between those who identify the pathologies of others with those who do not see them can be problematic for two reasons. Not only does it imply that those who see them are free of it and conceptually superior to those who cannot, but it also invokes norms. The latter would be at odds with the concept of communication ethic described in the beginning of this essay. However, respect for the cognitive autonomy of others should prevent impositions of one’s own conceptions, leaving emancipatory discourse the task of rendering the connection between feelings of disablement and the makeup of the pathological reality as a mere hypothesis, for this is the precondition for the ability to bootstrap oneself out of pathologies.To make people aware of what they are prevented from seeing – Freire’s “conscientization” – communication cannot mean control, but challenges of the very assumptions of stability that are the root of pathology, playing out all the perturbations one is capable of generating; for example, creating

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unsettling paradoxes, encouraging extrapolations of one’s beliefs to their extremes, using alternative metaphors that create awareness of what metaphors do, or practicing second-order understanding – all of which can introduce uncertainties, questions, and doubts into accepted reality constructions. Regarding power, the three emancipatory moves demonstrated above could do no more than returning to language that which theorists of power ignored in the process of constructing their disabling systems.They raised the awareness of the use of language and the communicative nature of social pathology. Awareness may not be enough, however, and the above emancipatory moves need to be extended to those who perform such speech acts, usually in terms of theories of power they have learned to follow, mindlessly. To be able to aid changes in people’s lives, I am suggesting four additional emancipatory moves to the three discussed above.They do not merely locate the roots of the debilitating notion of power, but enable people to undo the confining conceptions of power. 4 Taking Responsibility for One’s Participation

This is to overcome the knee-jerk response of blaming others for one’s feelings of entrapment.As already suggested, blaming is a form of denying one’s participation and responsibility in a painful entrapment. There may be external conditions that limit one’s abilities, including people in one’s life who inflict harm or even thrive on one’s misery, but if the issue is to overcome pathology, one must recognize one’s part in it, what one can do differently. The obvious way to take responsibility for being in a trap is to realize that reality is not a given but one’s own construction, and that communication is not about something (with the implication of being either true or false) but accomplishing something that one can control using language knowledgeably. As Stolzenberg suggests, one can be “taken in by certain uses of language that have the appearance, but only that, of being meaningful and by certain modes of reasoning that have the appearance, but only that, of being self-evidently correct … [and] by accepting these appearances as being ‘really so’” (1984:260). Taking responsibility is not to be confused with “blaming victims.” It is to find something that one can vary for effects, something one can change in one’s construction of reality, a narrative that can lead one down a different path (Anderson, 1997). Complicity in one’s entrapment is difficult to admit; seeing one’s contribution is the first step to emancipation. 5 Invoking Accountability, Contesting

Accountability – holding each other accountable for what is said or done – is one of the fundamental features of using language interactively, and the failure to hold others accountable or, conversely, to deny accountability selectively is one of the most important ways of complying with or exerting authority. Accountability – asking questions, expecting answers, and presuming the right to accept or reject

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those answers – is the dynamic in which authorities can be contested, entrapments revealed and interrogated, constructions of power made visible, and new reality constructions jointly evaluated and coordinated. Accountability is a fundamentally social process. It can also prevent or at least question the habit of complaining and enrolling others in one’s misery; for example, it can reveal the costs and apparent benefits of pathologies. Seriously contesting the reality constructions that surface in communication demonstrates one’s choice to accept or reject the constructions of reality under discussion.When exercised, this choice has the potential of overcoming pathologies jointly. 6 Re-articulating and Re-envisioning One’s Reality

Articulating the realities one experiences, and re-articulating the stories of the experiences of others, are prime demonstrations of one’s ability to modify one’s construction of reality or even invent new realities to be experienced in the future – as in designing technological artifacts.Articulation and re-articulation presuppose, however, a conception of language not as a medium of representation of the world outside one’s experiences, but as alterable by speakers, listeners turned speakers, and so forth, each re-articulating what they heard with modifications that suit their purposes.Attentive listening to the stories told by others is an opportunity not only to cognize how these others narrate their world but also to appreciate the diversity of re-articulations possible. Moreover, envisioning the worlds of others opens the opportunity to enter their worlds vicariously, to assume positions in their worlds and examine how they see us in return. Emancipatory discourse is aided by the human ability to re-articulate pathological constructions of reality. However, because re-articulations are creative acts, it is impossible to tell where such moves will lead – except, and this is my point, that the awareness of the possibility of re-articulating reality constructions cannot be reversed or lost, but only grow. 7 Enabling Others

In discourse, by definition, people do not act alone. Discourse is a joint accomplishment. The ethics in emancipatory discourse moreover suggests that neither participant can be in charge.Any re-articulation of individual realities, when taking place in communication, always will be meaningful to the other participants in the process – though not necessarily as intended. Since all forms of power imply togetherness, emancipation from burdensome reality constructions means rearticulating that togetherness and affecting people – family members, coworkers, citizens – by one’s own process of emancipation. Emancipation can be contagious but also meet opposition. Communication ethics suggests that one individual’s liberation must not be achieved at the expense of others. Because power arises in pathological relationships, the undoing of that power must not deny, or, stated positively, should encourage others to take emancipatory paths as well.

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If challenging someone else’s pathology fails, emancipatory discourse cannot be righteous, invoking norms, as suggested above. It must turn back on us questioning our own reality constructions, authority and the right to help others who may not want to be helped. Once, when visiting Japan, I learned that my friend had married a famous potter.When I asked this potter about her work, she replied that she had to take care of her 13-year-old daughter. I inquired about women’s liberation in Japan and was told that this Western idea had little resonance in the lives of Japanese women. I remained, and continue to remain, unconvinced, but decided not to pursue the conversation as there was no feeling that abandoning entirely a career of pottery-making for a young woman was a problem. Since that incident, I have reflected on whether my recognition about women being entrapped in a men’s world is a specifically Western construction, not necessarily exportable to other cultures – unless the burden of such relationships becomes felt. There are limits to this tolerance, of course, when violence is applied to those developmentally or mentally unable to understand what is done to them, for example, the practice of circumcising girls in Africa or taking advantage of the elderly. The ethics of emancipatory discourse suggests that one might not want to help without invitation into the reality of those one sees as suffering from social and cognitive disablement. On entering the worlds of others, emancipatory discourse naturally leads one to new perspectives, perspectives that solipsists can never know and positivists cannot conceptualize. If such invitations are not granted, if help is not wanted or seen as inappropriate, one may have to look into whether one’s own conception of the suffering of others might contain pathological elements on the grounds that they failed in some respects.The second-order understanding gained on one’s own construction of reality is not a mere role reversal but transcend one’s own limitations by a form of communication through which one can bootstrap oneself out of one’s own (albeit collaboratively created) mess – just as Baron Munchausen could grab his own pigtail and pull himself and his horse out of the water (Raspe, 1928). Critical Scholarship To criticize is one thing; to undo communication pathologies is something different. Scholars mostly write hoping that others – therapists, social workers, legislators, and activists – take advantage of their writing. I suggest that critical scholarship be deliberately constructive of new realities in which people could live and conceivably find each other. Given that scholars, like poets, are best situated to create new vocabularies that could enter and fuel the communication among others, and given also that all social theory is a way of languaging, critical scholarship could move beyond being merely critical or condemning existing conditions and concern itself with co-inventing alternative versions of reality. “Co-inventing” is important, as – unlike in the natural sciences – critical scholars cannot impose their solutions to social problems; they are not social engineers. To be effective, their writing not

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only must be communicated, but also invite others to realize what it promises. As critical scholars, we should set ourselves three tasks and develop methodologies to accomplish them: (1) Unflinchingly invent new vocabularies that open possibilities of living with others in language, dialogue, or conversation. (2) Critically and caringly examine these inventions for their political implications, realism, potential to provide spaces in which communities might live and realize themselves, and support emancipation from pathologies that seem to exist or could arise. (3) Unquestionably accept accountability to those who might use these vocabularies in constructions of their realities and communicate with each other (and with us) in them. With (1), I propose that critical scholarship commit to the continuous creation of new possibilities of languaging, introducing distinctions heretofore unthinkable, enabling social constructions of realities not yet tested, and assuring that this kind of critical scholarship stays alive. While history has taught us the difficulty of predicting how societies unfold, it assures us that new vocabularies, new ways of languaging, can participate in overcoming existing pathologies. By analogy to evolution, where mutations provide possibilities of change but natural selection operates only on the embodiments of these possibilities (in organisms), critical scholarship can provide not much more than vocabularies that potentially aid their users in constructing realities in which they could live.This is why it is important not to fall prey to any particular social theory, philosophy, school of thought, or doctrine that ends in adjudicating who is right or wrong and what is good or evil. The communication ethics proposed here call on our unrelenting creativity. With (2), and consistent with the communication ethics described above, I insist that critical scholars delegate the criteria for their scholarship to their stakeholders – proponents and opponents – who might be affected by it, who might take advantage of it, or are willing to adopt its new vocabularies. Critical scholarship cannot avoid being political when serving people, especially those in distress. It cannot avoid being realistic by being understandable and attractive to those who could benefit from reconstructing their realities with it. To be justifiable, critical scholarship must show evidence of its scholars’ ability to listen in conversations with those who can talk but especially with those whose voices have been silenced by overwhelming pathologies. By this criterion, critical scholarship cannot pursue selfserving missions; it needs to be of service, not to governments and institutions, which are but abstractions, but to real people. If emancipatory discourse is not communicable, does not reach those who could make use of it – directly or indirectly – it fails. With (3), I suggest that critical scholars commit themselves to the basic and fundamentally democratic feature of language use: accountability to those who have

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a stake in their scholarship. If they could not be held accountable for their work, what it encourages and whom it does or fails to serve, or whether it fulfills its emancipatory promises, critical scholars would place themselves beyond reproach – like natural scientists who describe reality and accept observational data as the judge of their findings. Critical scholarship becomes valid only in use by others and requires justification regarding its emancipatory potential. Since the realities that critical scholarship encourage always involve stakeholders, scholarship must accept accountability to its stakeholders to prevent at least the known pathologies. This proposal for critical scholarship could give the social sciences new life, a methodology and purpose beyond the recording of unpleasant facts.

Chapter 9

Writing Ecologically *

Writing Monologue Writing is a solitary activity. I sit before a computer screen. On my desk lie piles of paper, notes about what I want to say and unfinished projects awaiting attention; books stand ready for consultation on nearby shelves. I must be alone when I write. Most writers I know prefer a secluded place free of the distractions of telephones and other people. Writing requires a concentration absent in ordinary conversation. This affects how we communicate in writing.Writing flows differently from how a conversation proceeds; it flows from word-to-word, interpretation to interpretation, comment to comment.Writing has a beginning, a middle, an end, and headlines that introduce parts of the whole.These are units of thought, not interaction.Writing comprises small building blocks. Composition is deliberate, more or less controlled and moves through a topic without loosing track of the overall purpose, the whole.We review to ensure that a composition is coherent; we eliminate redundancy, improve the wording, and insert thoughts that clarify text. Undoubtedly, other people enter one’s writing but only through the writer’s imagination. John Shotter calls these others his textual friends (1999), as represented in papers and books that populate our surroundings. Other authors enter a text in the form of quotes, citations, and paraphrases, and unconsciously through an acquired vocabulary or thought style. The individualist ideal of the author as a composer of original work tends to relegate textual ancestors to the background – except where they appear as authorities to support arguments. There is a difference between writing to a friend whom we imagine as a person and writing for publication. Popular or scientific publications on writing generally advise writers to “keep the reader in mind.” In fact, we hardly can imagine THE

* Excerpt from Krippendorff, K. (2005b). Writing: monologue, dialogue, and ecological narrative. Pages 119–159 in Michael B. Hinner (Ed.). Introduction to Business Communication. Freiberger Beiträge zur Interkulturellen und Wirtschaftskommunikation, Band 1. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. First presented at a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) conference in June 1999, Ithaca NY.

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reader.THE reader is a verbal fiction, a stereotypical abstraction of people we never met. Readers rarely speak or write to us; if they do, it is well after publication.Those who read drafts are friends, editors, or institutional reviewers far from representative of the diversity of readers that our writing faces.We assume readers will understand what we say in ways that do not differ radically from how we might read and understand what we wrote. The writers who preceded us and the readers we keep in mind, including friends we expect will read what we wrote, always are virtual.We imagine their voices and anticipate their responses from what we know of them. Our “textual friends,” no matter how often we read their work or whether we “discover” something new on rereading them, cannot talk to us, object to what we write, take exception to how we use them, or ask questions we have not anticipated.They have no voice without ours. Writing leads us into a monological mode of communication. Based on how we read the virtual voices of previous writers, we selectively appropriate, re-contextualize, re-voice, or rewrite. Ultimately, the composition of a text conforms to the logic of its writer, not of those quoted or the imagined readers. In a coherently composed text, a single overarching logic governs.That composition functions as a constraint on reading. Thus, despite the freedom of reading a text in unintended ways, the composition of written text is fundamentally univocal and monological. Writing Otherness As Charles Bazerman suggested repeatedly, “knowledge produced by the academy is cast primarily in written language” (1988:18). I write as a social scientist (though I could assume other roles).This associates my writing with a particular discourse. As a human being, I live in dialogue with a diversity of people, with others. My language comes from talking with others. Conversation with others triggers my most important insights. I coordinate my practices of living with others. Without others, I would not know who I am.Yet, because writing is solitary and removed from other people, even when I write of social phenomena, I am unable to be with those of whom I write, I do not write while in communication with them; I must write about them instead. The medium of writing distances writers not only from previous authors and their readers, but also from those who constitute their subject matter. Most fiction renders the characters that authors create as third persons, as he, she, or they. Scientific discourse discourages the use of the first person pronoun,“I,” which would affirm a writer’s subjectivity and invite accountability. Social science discourse imposes other constraints. Social scientists theorize social phenomena; since social phenomena involve people as constituents, social scientists always theorize other people, even in the abstract.1 Theory also discourages the use of third person singular pronouns, “he” and “she,” for fear of appearing too close to subjects, interpreting 1 See Chapter 7 in this volume for the cybernetics of pronoun use.

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personal acquaintance as a sign of potential bias.We refer to participants in social phenomena in the third person plural, “they”; this maximizes the distance between writers and these participant others. “They” can be categorized as convenient stereotypes of the other: subjects, interviewees, outsiders, and strangers, even enemies, in any case, without faces, personality, and voice.This prescription limits social scientists to a reduced or “disciplined” vocabulary in which others appear in serviceable categories, unlike “us.” Although I am part of social science discourse, I am uncomfortable placing other people into categories not of their choosing. One reason for discomfort lies in my inability to see myself in the terms that social science discourses deem applicable to subjects. I have yet to see a theory that accounts for why I live the way I do, how I read The NewYork Times, or what I attempt to achieve in this essay. Inversely, I do not like others to assume the authority to tell my story so long as I can tell it myself – unless it resonates with my experiences and adds to my understanding.Why should I do to others what I do not want done to me? The dichotomy between what social theory is about and what social scientists do manifests in a social science discourse that inhibits an understanding of its own social nature.The convenient exclusion of the “I” of the writer in this discourse protects scientists from accountability for the social consequences of their work. Social theory is the celebrated outcome of established social science writing. Denying theorists’ involvement in their subject matter in the above sense is a way of disciplining theory.The supposition that theories should represent what they are about regardless of who authors or reads them neglects that theories also must be languaged into being.They must be read, interpreted, compared with other theories, debated, justified, and applied; thus theories play social roles in various stakeholders’ interconnected lives.All theories encounter competition, not only from alternative theories or hypotheses that explain the same phenomenon or from evidence that supports or weakens them, but also from different kinds of communication that compete for the attention of theorists, readers, and users.Thus, theories must enter dialogue among interested people and 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, regardless of good intentions or truths. The monological nature of social theories and their inability to respect the individuals they theorize – directly or implicitly – should make theories a particularly unattractive form of social science writing. Dialogue What is dialogue that writing seems to miss and theorizing fails to recognize? Let me sketch my experience and reading without references to the voluminous literature now generated in various areas of human inquiry. My influences include the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Buber and Paulo Freire (Buber, 1970; Freire,

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1970; Morson & Emerson, 1989, 1990; Holquist, 1990; Sampson, 1993;Anderson & Cisna, 1997; Schuster, 1998) as well as writings on second-order cybernetics and constructivism (see Krippendorff, 1993a,2 19963). (1) Dialogue involves real people alternating as speakers and listeners. Dialogue is not a mere exchange of words, however. Voices come from bodies; speaking and listening require the co-presence of human bodies with everything they do in addition to talking. (2) Dialogue takes place in an interlacing of expectations: everything said is said in the expectation of being understood by someone. Everything heard as being said is taken as having been said by one person to another. Understandings need not be mutual and shared, but complementary in their enactment. (3) Dialogue jointly creates newness and explores it in turn. Dialogue continually disturbs, revises, and reconstructs participants’ understandings of each other. There is no preordained path a dialogue must take. There is no necessary outcome such as agreement or consensus. (4) Dialogue also has no clear beginning and no necessary end. Not even the death of a participant necessarily terminates a dialogue.Third person singular pronouns “she” and “he” refer to absent others, whether they are in waiting to be included. Dialogue may be interrupted and continued internally before reemerging again. (5) The meanings of what is said, the meanings of utterances, surface in response to them. Meanings reside not in words, speech acts, or in participants’ minds, and especially not in reference to events outside a dialogue. Meanings are double-faced, responsive links among speakers and listeners. (6) Dialogue is self-organizing. It interactively constructs its history and generates its future. The meanings that emerge inside a dialogue – being a function of their history of uses – are unique to that process and usually clear to its participants, but from its outside, often uncertain to non-participants or detached observers. Dialogues cannot be managed by any one participant nor governed by an overarching principle, a theory, ideology, or hegemony. (7) At moments of dialogue, participants are open to each other’s presences. Buber characterized this tension as “letting the other happen to me while holding my own ground” (Stewart & Zediker, 1999). Buber also saw dialogue happening in I–Thou relationships in which the emergence of differences (conflicts and incompatibilities) between an “I” and others is cherished as a fundamentally human condition, neither despised nor merely tolerated.4 (8) Dialogue takes monologue or univocality only as a temporal condition that has its history in dialogue and cannot continue without facing dialogical challenges.

2 See Chapter 5 in this volume. 3 See Chapter 7 in this volume. 4 See Chapter 7 in this volume.

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Dialogue thus undermines external authorities and invokes the possibilities of emancipation. Obviously, experiences of reading and writing are far removed from those of dialogue. Here, I hope to preserve an aspect of dialogue in a form of narrative that I call ecological. Proposal for Ecological Narratives To begin, I admit that while writing this essay I feel the pull of its monologism. Writing of theorists and theorized in their absence is easy. I stand accused of theorizing about theorizing, about discourse and about dialogue, as if there were no need to consult those who engage in these phenomena, as if my abstractions were sufficient.This reveals that dialogue, as I characterize it, does not translate easily into the medium of writing: An ecological narrative is a way of writing of social phenomena that embraces the stories of its human constituents and can be re-embodied in their lives. Why ecological? By ecological, I do not mean practices of living with renewable resources, or maintaining endangered species and the like, which are human constructions of nature’s past. I am drawn to the concept of ecology for another reason.As in dialogue, in an ecology no single species directs the whole or ruins the ground of its existence, as Gregory Bateson (1972:426–447) taught us (see also Birke & Hubbard, 1995). Ecologists must recognize their theories as human theories that might explain how we humans interact with other species, but they cannot account for how other species interact with each other and with us in their world. An ecology of diverse plants and animals, human populations included, is not designed, nor is it a hegemonic system. Its government, so to speak, is distributed radically among all species. It has no common language or currency. Organisms of each species live in species-specific worlds, yet respond to each other individually.5 To me, An ecology arises in the interactions among its many constituents, who, by distinguishing among kinds of interactions, organize themselves into families, cultures, species, and enact localized, positional understandings of themselves, of members of their species and of other species, and their understanding of their environment. (5) An ecology is always larger than the world of any of its constituents. Hence, an ecology is neither theorizable (comprehensible) from any one position within

(1) (2) (3) (4)

5 In biology, a species is defined as embracing all organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. As such, species are our abstractions. Species do not interact, its organisms do.

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that ecology nor fully exploitable (controllable) by any one of its species, dominance relations among species notwithstanding. For example, individual foxes and individual rabbits interact.Yet, a fox’s world surely is different from that of a rabbit and so is ours.We observe their interactions only in our terms.We never can know how they occur in each other’s cognition, in each other’s worlds.This limitation does not preclude human participation in shaping a complex ecology of which each species knows only its own version. We may theorize ecology, but humans are not exempt from this epistemological limitation. Why narrative? Narratives create worlds that narrators and their listeners can imagine and make present to themselves and to each other, and perhaps live within. These worlds need not be identical; a story may not be the same for unlike listeners – as evident in their subsequent retellings – but may be understood nevertheless. All texts afford multiple readings. Herein lies the analogy to ecology. Species interact without sharing their worlds; so, too, people talk with each other and write to and of each other without sharing their understandings of what is said or written. A narrative, told and heard, brings different worlds into contact with each other and maintains that contact as long as it is rearticulated and circulated within a community of narrators. Thus, I suggest a one-to-one conceptual correspondence between ecology and narrative. Regarding the latter: (1) A narrative arises in the process of (re)telling or (re)writing stories – always by someone and in the expectation of being understood by others who (2) rearticulate to each other some stories but not others, especially concerning themselves, (3) forming various narrative communities whose individual members (4) understand and enact these stories in the context of living within their communities while cognizant of the communities of others. (5) Narratives consist of many stories. However, narratives always are incomplete. They may not embrace everyone’s story nor carry the whole history of their rearticulations into the future.They may be reproduced selectively.They may merge various stories into one narrative or divide one into several.They may open spaces for voices heretofore unheard. Narratives tend to preserve the process of their rearticulations. One could liken an ecological narrative to the written record of a dialogue, a transcript of a conversation whose readers can distinguish among several voices responding to each other, understand what is going on in the exchanges and carry the process onward – ideally by feeling invited to join that conversation as participants to continue the process in real time. As in an ecology, no single party manages a conversation, nor do participants reach identical understandings of what transpires. Conversations cannot be theorized completely from any single position. Consensus cannot be expected or demanded. Conceptual diversity and conflicts,

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struggles over meanings, and accountability for what was said, are constitutive of multiple and emerging conversational realities precisely because these conceptions live in processes of communication. Should alien conceptions – theories, for example – enter from outside a conversation, their viability requires that constituents find them meaningful and open to rearticulation. Ecological narratives must encourage such readings and preserve the possibility of readers to enter and continue the narrative as conversation. An ecological narrative is inherently social, not because it might concern social phenomena, which a social theory may be about as well, but because it is written with intent to constitute the very phenomena it concerns. The distinctions such a narrative draws become an acknowledged part of what the human participants in that phenomenon understand, enact, and experience. This self-referencing aspect of ecological narratives precludes theoretical models emulating mechanistic, organismic, or mentalistic systems. The notion of language underlying ecological narratives rules out being a medium of representations (see Rorty, 1979, 1989) which celebrates monologue; it demands dialogue, languaging, or conversation. An ecological narrative mitigates the natural tension between social and individual explanations. For one, it acknowledges social realities as brought forth in language (a prototypical social artifact).The conceptual, narrative and conversational abilities of individual constituents inform and constitute such realities What then does it mean to write ecologically? I state my proposal in six points. First,to narrate ecologically is to acknowledge that observational accounts do not exist without narrators and that knowing is embodied and positional. Observers make observations. Narrators create narratives while being observers as well. Narration always entails a particular standpoint or perspective from which they are told or written. Positionless texts, propositions that do not acknowledge their makers, divert attention from the writer/reader relationship that texts create to phenomena (contents) outside written communication. As a consequence, narrators of positionless rhetoric remove themselves from accountability for what they say or write. Theorizing exemplifies this practice in its extreme. The social consequences of positionless writing render social theory troubling.To counter this rhetoric, I recommend that we acknowledge accountability for what we write. For example, we might adopt the first person pronouns “I” or “we” when appropriate, explicate our thought processes and (inter)actions in preference to their products or conclusions, use verbs that clarify the process of our involvement, speak of knowing instead of knowledge, assure our readers that the path we happen to take need not be theirs, and understand the consequences that our narratives might have for readers we do not know. In ecological accounts, theories that arise should be attributed to those who promulgate and apply them, just as readings should be attributed to particular readers. As I suggest, anything said can lead to many interpretations, insistence on single readings notwithstanding. Ecological narratives should acknowledge their situational and positional contingencies and their polysemous nature.

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Second, the validity of ecological narratives rests on the voices of the constituents of social phenomena narrated. To understand the constitution of the social phenomena of our attention, we must find ways to allow the human constituents of such phenomena to speak for themselves and of themselves from positions of their own choosing and in which they feel comfortable and at home. Interviews involve an asymmetrical relationship, but positions of choice might elicit voices. Listening to what people say, taking their narratives seriously, opens alternative worlds unthinkable without communication, potentially surprising and perhaps uncomfortable or troubling. Granting others the same agency that we claim for ourselves, we appreciate the identities others create for themselves, the spaces in which they see themselves interacting and the positions from which they view their world. Otherness is the most important challenge to writers of social phenomena. In scholarly writing, to be sure, we quote our sources, often extensively, but mostly to support a point we attempt to make. In an ecological narrative we must resist censoring the voices of others.We cannot dismiss others’ stories when they do not fit ours. Even lies serve communicative purposes. We cannot presume the motives and intentions of speakers without consulting those speakers. In particular, we might renounce our self-celebratory “hermeneutics of suspicion” or Gramsci’s (1971) notion of “hegemony,” comprehensible only from a position of knowing denied others. Nor can we engage in systematic doubt regarding the sincerity of others, for example, in pursuit of conspiracy theories – unless “hegemony,” “deception,” or “devious intent” reveal themselves through their stories and play a role in the conversation we attempt to understand and enter. Even lies must stand as truths until identified as lies within the dialogue we narrate. Several research traditions, ethnography and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967),6 for example, record the stories of those whose worlds we wish to understand. Unfortunately, even ethnography has acquired the flavor of applicability only to ordinary folks. The method does not prevent (mostly anthropological) ethnographers from floating above their informers much as theorists remain above their facts.The role of the ethnographer should be considered neither uncontestable nor immune to ethnographic research. In a way, ecological narratives could provide a way of showing ethnographies in interaction, including ethnographers’ writings. My review of the effects of writing social theory is not intended to suggest that ecological narratives simply dismiss the theories and abstractions that others cherish. Because conceptualizing realities in positionless, abstract, theoretical, and stereotypical terms can provide their users power and influence over those who do not recognize the consequences of such rhetorical moves, we must accept these 6 Ethnomethodology, literally, “the study of a people’s (folk) methods,” is a sociological discipline which examines the “rational properties of indexical expressions and other practical actions as contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life” (Garfinkel, 1967:11).

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moves as social practice. However, in order to reveal what such languaging does, ecological narrators must not fall prey to this rhetoric and must avoid it in their writing. Ecological narratives cannot exclude the voices of those who use such rhetorical devices – scientists, and politicians, but also journalists who claim authority in reporting facts. However, this does not prevent ecological narrators from showing the effects of this rhetoric. Narratives that ignore or disrespect the constituent voices of the social phenomena they claim to describe can have disastrous social consequences. Holocaust deniers, for example, argue from abstractions that systematically ignore the reports of those who have experienced the Holocaust first hand – among them the inmates of concentration camps, witnesses, perpetrators, and decision makers. As long as first-hand stories are preserved and brought together in an ecological narrative, denying accounts of experiences becomes difficult if not reprehensible. Of course, one must authenticate stories that survive their narrators, but to ignore them for political convenience, play games with numbers, and declare them irrelevant to baseless abstractions is a strategy that ecological narratives must oppose. Third, the stories that ecological narratives embrace (1) need to be understood in terms of listeners’ or readers’ responses and (re)articulations, and (2) should be approached with as few theoretical presuppositions as possible. Part (1) of this recommendation is not new, but rarely heeded. It takes seriously Bakhtin’s notion (see Todorov, 1988:41–60) that any utterance implies at least two voices, that of the speaker and that of the addressee.The meaning of an utterance – the speech act it performs, or the sense it makes to those involved – critically depends on the relation between what we hear a speaker say and how its listeners respond (see Holquist, 1990).We might take what we hear being said and the stories we read and quote, not as “inherently” meaningful, “containing” meanings, or “conveying” their authors’ “intentions,” even when meaning seems definite to us. “Containing,”“conveying,” and “intending” invoke metaphors that objectify meanings as entities and ignore their embodiment in reading. Semiotics, for example, followed this line of theorizing meanings.7 Searle’s (1969) speech acts “possess” illocutionary forces. In ecological narratives, by contrast, we must refrain from vying to be the sole authority on meanings and how others read and understand. Instead, we must find ways of listening to how people respond to what they read or hear, through which we may ascertain how they understood it, especially when we find it unexpected or even incomprehensible. Speech acts are speech acts only after they are affirmed as such.We know the meaning of an utterance only by examining what it triggers. Someone’s understanding of a story becomes clear to us on hearing it retold (rearticulated). We get a sense of acceptance or disagreement with what speakers say by observing how they are held accountable for what they say. 7 See Chapter 10 in this volume.

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It follows that ecological narrators should take the stories they hear only as seriously as they are taken by the constituents of the phenomenon narrated. Lies are not lies until identified as such. Hegemony – a construction by superior observers assumed to be above it – means nothing until people become convinced of it and discuss it.The voices of social scientists, important as they may be in social science literature, might have little currency for participants in the events articulated.Thus, mere reports of the actions or speech of others, assemblages of parallel ethnographies or recordings of a polyphony of voices, are insufficient. Therefore, to provide readers of ecological narratives access to these meanings, it is essential not only to collect the writings of the constituents of a social phenomenon but also to assemble them as sequential responses to each other.The transcript of a conversation is the prototype of this presentation.The responsiveness of assertions must be preserved when quoted, for each makes sense only in the context of an interactive sequence. Participants who generated data for the narrative can confirm the validity of this construction.Writing a polyphonic novel – as Bakhtin would say – is a start.Whereas ethnographers assemble individual stories, ecological narrators will have to weave them (back) into social fabrics. Concerning part (2) of this recommendation, in order to minimize the conceptual limitations that theoretical presuppositions entail, the assemblers of ecological narratives should approach the stories of others as naively as possible, with deliberately open minds and from a position of “not knowing,” as the therapist Harlene Anderson (1997) recommends.This effort to hear and to echo what others say they do and how, why and who they say they are, overcomes the temptation to project one’s own theories onto others. Are ecological narratives, then, more complex (and possibly less elegant) than monological theories? I suggest that conflicts and opportunities, public policy debates, political scandals, social problems, and even family happenings seen through such narrative networks rarely are more complex than the stories their constituents tell of these events, of each other’s stories of these events and of their responses to them. To be sure, as ecological narrators we cannot ignore our position from which we read and write. Our bodies always are present. However, our interpretations count as merely one among many. I suggest reliance on our interpretations only as a last recourse, following examination of all available responses, but even then, not with finality because the reception and rearticulation of our narratives become important sources of validation and qualification. To narrate ecologically means to curb the temptation to assume we are better informed or can offer better interpretations than everyone else. To show what our ecological narrative means is to embed it, where possible, within the networks of its responsive (re)articulations. Writing of terrorism provides a good example of communication across considerable differences.Terrorists tend to hold finely honed constructions of reality that render their actions meaningful to them and to supportive bystanders. We should be aware, however, that terrorists are products of our normative theory of

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how good citizens behave. Our dismissal of their world as pathological8 makes sense only in contrast to our own constructed realities. Our actions against uncomfortable others can encourage mere deviants to become active dissenters and then terrorists. “They” may enter the very categories we fear but also require in order to apply selfserving disciplinary actions. Our concept of terrorism preserves our world without the need to grant spaces for alternative realities to coexist.An ecological narrative, in contrast, postpones condemnation and instead presents the narratives of all of its stakeholders sequentially and interactively, enabling a reading of the development of a phenomenon in terms of responses to responses and interpretations of interpretations across different worlds. From these actors’ different constructions of reality, an analyst might explore why interactions unfolded how they do. Undoubtedly, an ecological narrative inserted into the process as described would arrive at conclusions unlike either side could alone. Still, it could lead to outcomes that the participants might understand.The point is not to condone and then justify why, but to understand the differences of the discourses across which we write, add the dynamics an ecological narrative suggests and see what happens. Fourth, social realities are constituted in the understandings their constituents display of each other;our understanding of the consequent dynamics between them is our entry into the very process we narrate ecologically. In ecological narratives, what matters most is how the constituents of a social phenomenon perceive each other’s capabilities, intentions, and views and respond to what is said or done. In classical systems theory, the theorist specifies relations between components of a system before attending to its dynamics. Systems theory, like all mathematical theories, provides no room for human agency. It does not allow the possibility that system “components” hold their own systems conceptions and act according to them. Nor does it conceive of spaces for the human constituents of social systems to act in the awareness of each other’s choices. Game theory might approach such awareness were it not for a theorist who imposes payoffs to its players, allowing little room for players to (re)define the game. In contrast, narrating ecologically means respecting how a social system’s constituents language each other and the whole into being, thus they coordinate the dynamics of engagement from inside the process they narrate. Just as conversations are self-organizing, so should ecological narratives unfold from within the narratives of its constituents. Ecological narrators try to extend the network of recorded stories into the future, articulating pertinent continuations – if only in rough outlines. The ability to extrapolate interactions or continuations of the stories that people tell demonstrates that an ecological narrator understands the network of stories of which she writes but also enables her to enter the process as a participant. Without acting as a recognizable participant within the interlacing expectations developed in an ecological narrative, that narrative would remain questionable. 8 On the conception of pathology see Chapter 8 in this volume.

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One might slip into predictions here, but predictions deny those narrated their agency, treating them as mechanisms and dismissing the possibility of their accepting or contesting the narratives concerning them. In order to extend a narrative into the future, ecological narrators must avoid not only treating participants as causally determined mechanisms, but also avoid assigning agency to abstractions, ideologies, or systems. Ecological narratives may find storied commitments, hopes, and fears of each other that are somewhat unchanging or stable and give the impression of being fixed, but these too must be woven into expectations of what may follow. Conversation always requires respect for others and a recursive embedded understanding of others’ understanding. Ecological narrators commit to just that. One example is Nicole Keating’s (2000) dissertation on the politics of shaping historical reality exemplified in documentary film production in the U.S. Keating interviewed representatives of major stakeholders – documentary filmmakers, academic historians, funding institutions, government agencies, and audiences. Audience members turned out to be too diverse and played no role in the production process except in the arguments of other stakeholders. Instead another stakeholder emerged: film distributors. The interviews concerned not only stakeholders’ concerns, as she called them, but also how they saw the entire system of documentary film production, how stakeholders communicated with each other through proposals, scripts, contracts, funds, personal contacts and the roles they reserved for each other or resented when forced to play. Her interviews yielded stories about the complex network of professional/institutional relations in this part of the art world. Keating’s interest was the system of documentary film production, not the individuals interviewed; therefore, she grouped individual narratives by recurring themes and assembled them into a script of a hypothetical roundtable discussion during which stakes were asserted and arguments were pitched against each other. Keating realized that her interviews made her part of the system she studied and that her dissertation also would become a narrative in this system.To see whether her narrative fairly represented the system known to those involved, she sought validation from the players. Her script was the topic of a second round of conversations with stakeholders. She distributed her script to all interviewees and reserved the final chapter of her study for stakeholders’ comments as an extension of her script. Interviewees adjusted their contributions to the script in view of what others had said and added new insights to the hypothetical stakeholders’ dialogue. It may not be easy to implant complex ecological narratives in the conversations that stimulated them, but returning the narratives to their origins is a simple means of validation; its results can be revealing. Fifth, ecological narrators must accept the humbling experience that the social phenomena they narrate are uncontrollable and constitutively incoherent, and that accounts of them must therefore remain tentative and open-ended. To take the stories of others seriously, we must consider a narrative offered by an ecological narrator as merely one of several possible and future stories.Writing

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social theory assumes a superior perspective, a God’s Eye view that claims access to a world inaccessible to observed others. If social theory is not vetted for validation against the theories of these observed others, wherein lies validation? Ecological narrators cannot hide behind certainties derived from theory. Ecological narratives cannot escape the tension between outsider and insider perspectives. From outside a social phenomenon, narrators more readily assert conceptual control over data.Theorists have carried this advantage to its extreme. From the inside, however, in response to encounters with potentially incompatible worlds, narrators tend to surrender some conceptual control to the varied interests and circumstances they face. Insiders act not according to stable predispositions or general principles, but situationally (Jones & Nisbett, 1972:80).While the myriad accounts that social phenomena generate on their own make sense to insiders, they may appear incoherent to outsiders. Conversely, outside observers’ generalizations may appear shallow and irrelevant to those involved.This points to the significance of the reentry of ecological narratives into the narrated, but implies also the unfinished, open-ended nature of ecological narratives. Efforts to embrace all narratives of all constituents of a social phenomenon can be fair at best, illusionary at worst, but always contestable. Ecological narratives thrive in parallel conversational realities that together form loosely connected “multi-versa.” Such realities are complex, multi-faceted, fractionalized, tentative, continually reconstructed, and selectively maintained. In multi-versa, narrators cannot be everywhere simultaneously. Globalization, the claim that mass media technologies induce a convergence towards a unified world, is a myth born of an outsider perspective. Technologies of communication create communities whose members, aware of each other, contest nation states and larger social constructions. The internet does not unify the world; rather, it increases conversational diversities. Even academic discourses divide into sub-disciplines that increasingly experience difficulties co-mingling. Ecological narratives respond to these phenomena without promising to simplify the tasks of ecological narrators. Ecological narratives must embrace at least as much diversity, inconsistency, and contradiction as encountered in the multi-verse they attempt to narrate. Discrepancies and discontinuities across worlds motivate communication and dialogue; the stories ecological narrators generate should enable those narrated to extrapolate narratives of what might happen to them. In communication, stories are not static; they evolve in the context of their retelling, here in anticipation of what they entail. Sixth,ecological narratives prove their viability by having a life within the very phenomenon they narrate. The criterion for ecological writing is viability in communication. Theorists sit back, observe the world from a distance and await satisfaction if predictions prove accurate. Ecological narrators, on the other hand, acknowledge their social/ political involvement in the worlds they narrate and write in the expectation that stakeholders whose lives their narratives affect will hold them accountable

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for their work. Demonstrating viability means the survival of a narrative after reentry into the social phenomenon narrated. Viability does not preclude considerations of accurate representations – if a search for “truths” is how narratives are read and interpreted – but it means above all that criteria for viability emerge in the social practices of those who find such narratives meaningful in, if not informative about, their own lives.Viability in communication is not a cognitive (monological) criterion.Viability cannot be imposed self-righteously by a single narrator. It cannot be assumed to be generalizable beyond the communicators involved.The opposite of viability is not dissent or rejection by a majority, but lack of public interest or irrelevance. Ecological narratives, in order to survive the processes they narrate, must be understandable to constituents and make their actions meaningful. Of course, this is a requirement of any communication. All stories are told in the expectation of being understood, at least by someone; this makes ecological narratives social or relational. It does not imply that ecological writing must be representative of everyone or cater to the lowest common denominator among its readers. Nor does ecological writing require everybody’s approval – as long as the stakeholders of the narrated phenomena have a chance to respond. If ecological narratives address controversies and conflicts, they must survive in controversies and conflicts. The addition of the ecological narrator’s voice to those of other participants, along with the likelihood that ecological narratives take larger perspectives, weave more voices into a story than any one participant may experience and re-contextualize familiar voices, suggests new meanings. Ecological narratives disturb existing practices and provoke new perspectives. Thus, ecological narratives create openings for critical scholarship. As mentioned, one way to assure viability is to invite those narrated to contribute to its writing. I do not suggest traditional co-authorship of a coherent document; co-authorship typically fails to disclose who contributed which parts, where coauthors agreed, compromised, or yielded or what emerged during the collaboration. For example, when Eleanor Novek (1991) expressed an intent to study empowerment in women’s groups, no such group agreed to admit her to regular meetings. She resorted to working with individual members of such groups. Rather than follow the protocol of survey research interviews, she enrolled participants in a collaborative project to understand what happens in these groups. She treated collaborators as experts in their own group experiences and promised them the last word on what she wrote. After assembling the stories women told her, she requested their comments and criticism. Naturally, not everyone took the time to read Novek’s narrative – a disappointment that reflects, perhaps, the low currency that social science writing has outside academia and for those intent to understand their own condition. Reading is not as rewarding as participation in dialogue.Yet, those available for a second conversation reported discussing the preliminary narratives a rewarding experience, able to see a more diverse world than they were able to acquire as

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individuals in separate groups.Viewing one’s experiences through those of others generated feelings of validation, “a-ha” experiences, realizations that one was not unique or alone and knowledge of diverse paths to empowerment. Novek’s 1991 research demonstrated the natural flow of ecological narratives without proposing a methodology. However, in a subsequent study (1999), her writing had changed, positing the reentry of her narrative and acknowledgment of her participation in the process she sought to understand as keys to her method.The project was no longer hers alone but a true collaboration; even negative comments were part of the published paper. Novek’s interviewees-turned-collaborators literally had the last word. Concluding Remarks Writing social theory, writing about diverse others, first of all, is writing; it is partial to solitary construction and monologue, as suggested.This medium privileges the conceptions of authors at the expense of readers. More problematically, it tends to ignore the conceptions of those described or implicitly involved.The challenge for the social sciences is to find ways to generate accounts of social phenomena that respect the voices of their constituents, people without which the phenomena would not exist. Ecological narrative is one approach to counter the monologism of writing, the temptation of writing as superior observer, and the belief in the rightness of one’s conclusions about others. Ecological narrative recovers instead the narrative ground that makes social phenomena real to their constituents. My proposal for an ecological narrative may challenge the tradition of academic writing, but some elements exist in newer media that might in any case undermine the rigid monologism of social science writing. For example, email messages enable receivers to enter comments inside senders’ texts, textual interruptions impolite in conversation but acceptable because individual writers assume opportunities to make their points without interference. In internet news group texts the > signs at the beginnings of lines count the number of transmissions of a text, thus distinguishing a comment from what it comments on and preserving the history of comments on comments as a whole. Participation in electronic discussion groups is ecological writing because it generates its own history. Email, news groups, chat rooms, and other electronic conversations resist the monologic tradition as a relic of authorship as undisputed textual authority and consistency valued at the expense of narrative diversities. Reclaiming respect for the otherness of others is of pressing importance, especially in social science writing whose interests always include people other than the inquiring observers.Writing ecologically obligates us to acknowledge that we have one of several legitimate stakes in any social reality we choose to write into being. I submit that the social benefits of ecological narratives are worth the costs of respecting the diversity of voices that can challenge and thereby contribute to our understanding of how we live together.

Part 3

Meaning Introduction

Krippendorff’s approach to communication also calls for a revision of customary notions of “meaning.” This part presents ideas that go beyond semiotic conceptions and delves into a discussion of the meaning of artifacts, the logic of content analysis, and the dynamics of discourse. The revision of the concept of meaning starts in Chapter 10 with an analysis of epistemological problems of mainstream semiotics, contrasting the objectivism on which it is based – manifest in the foundational concept of “sign” – with a constructivist approach to meaning. It identifies five problematic features of mainstream semiotics, suggesting that it has come to a dead end and needs to expand its conceptual horizons.They are (1) its inherent irresponsibility, derived from its omission of human bodily presence; (2) its predisposition for institutionalized standardization, manifest in the conception of communication as shared coding; (3) its dualist world construction, evident in the fundamental distinction between physical representations and what they represent; (4) its paradoxes and contradictions, apparent when the theory – requiring signs to mean their referents – is applied to objects or artifacts, and concluding that they must be referring to themselves or possess intentionality; and (5) its inability for self-reflection, derived from assuming detached observer positions. The alternative discussed in Chapter 10 is to pursue a constructivist semantics that places understanding and action at its centre, acknowledges meanings to become manifest in recursive processes of conversation, and takes into account the coordination of meanings with others.The chapter elaborates on some of the properties of “understanding” (cognitive autonomy, creative and constitutive features, definition of its own horizon) and explores concepts that a constructivist semantics might want to embrace: embodiment, metaphor, metonymy, polysemy, synecdoche, cognitive models, and interactivity. The challenge to semiotics continues in Chapter 11 with the proposal of a nonsemiotic analysis of the meaning of cultural artifacts, exemplified by a popular movie that illustrates the idea of “meaning as use.” Subsequently, and by weaving together three different notions – second-order cybernetics’ inclusion of the observer in the observed, Bateson’s and Wittgenstein’s recognition of the significance of multiple descriptions, and dialogue – Krippendorff suggests conceptualizing cultural artifacts

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as constituents of larger social/cultural realities and uses a personal experience in a museum to illustrate how artifacts can move through systems of meaning. The chapter concludes by proposing that we (1) locate meanings in the cultural practices that artifacts afford their users, (2) describe meanings in the narrative interrelation of multiple descriptions by different users, bystanders, or stakeholders of artifacts, and (3) concern ourselves with the ecologies of artifacts whose affordances and constraints account for a variety of temporary opportunities and stabilities in social life. While the very name of content analysis conjures the idea of a technique for extracting content from texts, Chapter 12 rejects this conception and presents a comprehensive description of content analysis methodology, with a special emphasis on its logic. The chapter starts with a brief history of content analysis and then proceeds to contrast the essentialist and behavioral definitions of content analysis with a relational and process-oriented one advocated by Krippendorff. His definition considers content analysis as “a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use.” After illustrating this definition with several examples, the second half of the chapter provides a conceptual framework for content analysis that takes abductive inferences to be its distinctive feature by comparison to inductive and deductive inferences typical of other techniques for social research. Starting from the concept of conversation, employed in previous chapters, Chapter 13 takes discourse – scientific and professional – as “constrained conversation” and uses these constraints as keys to understanding institutionalizations of language use. It examines the dynamics of discourse through five constitutive features of discourse, namely, the surfacing of discourse in bodies of textual matters, including their intertextualities; the involvement of a discourse community in rearticulating and evolving its textual matter; the institutionalization of recurrent practices, especially the use of a specialized language; the drawing and maintenance of a boundary within which discourse can preserve its coherence and autonomy; and the justification of discourse practices to those outsiders who are essential for a discourse to remain viable. This final chapter in Part 3 reveals how discourses develop their own vocabularies and meanings, and interact with each other for dominance, often despite their member’s blindness to language.

Chapter 10

A Constructivist Critique of Semiotics *

Introduction In this essay, I examine several epistemological problems of mainstream semiotics. However, in order to be constructive, I also will sketch a way out of them. Seeking to understand meaning quite generally – that is, how we use the term – we are led to a critical choice between two alternative paths of understanding.The well-trodden path of mainstream semiotics is called objectivism. I will call the other constructivism without denying that there are various shades of objectivism and various shades of constructivism,1 just as there also are many variations in approaches to semiotics. I do believe the two paths are epistemologically incommensurable and lead to significantly different social practices. Roughly, objectivism is a commitment to the belief that one could describe the world as it exists objectively, without reference to observers, in effect excising the researchers’ bodily involvement from the descriptions they generate. Consequently, for objectivists, humans are plagued by observational biases, inadequacies of perception, illusions, and ideological commitments that scientific observers seek to overcome in order to obtain accurate accounts, ideally measurements, of the one universe presumably existing outside of them.Along the objectivist path, if a sufficient number of observers concur in their descriptions of a phenomenon of interest, it is assumed that it exists independent of these observers. This methodo-logic justifies taking observer accounts as propositions that are either true or false, failing to realize that intersubjective truths may well be due to the group of observers being biased by sharing a common paradigm if not other prejudices. But having to systematically omit observers from observations, what is ascertained as intersubjective truth is interpreted as the correspondence truth of objective representations. * Abridged from Krippendorff, K. (1992). Transcending semiotics; toward understanding design for understanding. Pages 24–47 in S. Vihma (Ed.). Objects and Images: Studies in Design and Advertising. Helsinki: University of Industrial Arts. 1 For example Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (1984) radical constructivism, Kenneth Gergen’s (1985) social constructionism, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) Social Construction of Reality, George Lakoff’s (1987) and Mark Johnson’s (1987) cognitivism and various shades of naive constructivisms ranging from George Kelly (1955) to Jesse Delia (1977).

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I suggest that mainstream semiotic scholarship relies on the above-described objectivism.This is evident in its foundational concept: the sign. For something to be a sign, there must be a (physically existing) sign-vehicle and the meaning it carries, a proposition and what it is about or a symbol and its referent (what the symbol refers to or stands for). Although semioticians sometimes acknowledge the relationship between the two domains as cultural, for example, in acknowledging the conventional nature of symbols in contrast to the similarity of icons and the causal connection of indices, this has not prevented semioticians from describing signs as if the semioticians’ interpretive abilities had no hand in constructing the signs as such. Constructivism, as I see it, locates reality neither outside and independent of human observers (the objectivist stance) nor inside an imagining human mind (as solipsists hold true), but within circular processes – perception and action or conception and construction of things. In other words, constructivism locates reality in practices and when other human beings are involved, in social practices, which implicate the use of language. Consider the meaning of a gift.We give all kinds of things all the time as part of the role we play, in exchange for a previous gift or in expectation of a future benefit. However, what constitutes gifts is negotiated carefully between givers, recipients, and third parties or judges, not to be confused with bribes, blackmail, burdens, insults, obligations, or charitable assistance. Semioticians would have difficulty identifying a sign-referent relation to explain the meaning of a gift. Constructivists would consider a gift a social construction negotiated in conversations before and after giving or receiving one. Consider the meaning of a car. A Porsche, for example, is expensive, can reach high speeds, may impress others, and often is an important part of its owner’s identity.These meanings may come to mind on seeing a Porsche driven on the road. They have much to do with how we talk about Porsches and their drivers. Neither a gift nor a Porsche relates to reality, as does a photograph or a roadmap. There seems to be no referent. When a discipline encounters challenges to its paradigmatic commitments, challenges for which there are no readymade explanations, it either withdraws into a smaller domain within which its paradigm continues to work, or it questions its challenged assumptions and expands its conceptual horizon at the risk of losing its heretofore comfortable identity. I prefer the latter and suggest that traditional semiotics shed itself of old epistemological ballast. Therefore, I begin by proceeding along the familiar objectivist path of mainstream semiotics until some of its entailments become clear; I then return to the less traveled constructivist path, engaging with a few conceptual milestones I encounter in passing. The Road of Mainstream Semiotics Consider the famous semiotic triangle in Figure 10.1.The corners of this triangle are occupied by sign-vehicle, user, and meaning, by symbol, thought, and referent, by signifier, interpretant, and signified or by related tri-partitions favored by

A Constructivist Critique of Semiotics 175 User Thought Interpretant

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Sy mb o

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liz es

he ot

( to

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se

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s fer Re ) es

Sign-vehicle Symbol Signifier

Pragmatics

Stands for (imputed relation)

Meaning Referent Signified

Syntax Semantics

Figure 10.1. The Semiotic Triangle

individual semioticians since the work of C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards (1938). Within this triangle, Charles Morris (1938) divided semiotics as the study of signs into three branches: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. These widely accepted foundational distinctions are evident in encyclopedias and dictionaries (e.g., Sebeok, 1986). I state Morris’s definitions for the sake of laying ground: • • •

Syntax is the study of the relations between sign-vehicles (to which some physical existence is ascribed) – without regard to meanings. Semantics is the study of the relations between sign-vehicles and their designata, particularly the objects to which they apply, their referents. Pragmatics is the study of the relations between signs and their users; it includes in its domain all psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena that occur in the functioning of signs.

Although these definitions appear obvious and benign, they define a vocabulary that drives semioticians, possibly unknowingly, along the objectivist road. Notice the propositional forms these definitions generate. In the domain of syntax, “A follows B,” “‘A and B’ is a grammatical construction,” and “A is next to B.” In the domain of semantics, “A stands for B,” “A is a sign for B,” and “A means B.” In the domain of pragmatics, “A is used to point to B,” “A is thought to refer to B,” and “A is interpreted as B.” Since the physicality of the sign-vehicle, symbol or signifier is usually all one can observe, these propositions are more like declarations of their meanings, referents, or the signified – but without naming their proponent.This is

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unlike a priest saying, “I declare you hereby husband and wife.” Such a declaration is a constitutive part of a wedding ceremony. It acknowledges a speaking priest and it concerns two other people. Semiotic propositions state facts without revealing who is behind them and who is addressed, thus excluding human beings from the constitution of semiotic facts. Reframing the three areas of semiotics makes the nature of the implied objectivism more transparent. •

•

•

Syntax is the description of a reality in which humans do not exist or cannot enter. Relational accounts of the elements of musical compositions, geometrical descriptions of forms, structural explanations of systems, and grammatical analyses of sentences – without concern for their origin, basis, meaning, or intentions – exemplify what syntactical descriptions of sign-vehicles can offer. None presumes human creators or provides a place for users or observers. Semantics is the description of a reality in which all humans are considered the same and interchangeable, hence ignorable. Notwithstanding acknowledgment that some semantic relations are established by convention, symbols for example, implicating an authority to institute them and people to comply. Describing symbols in terms of “standing for” or “designating,” icons in terms of “resembling” or being “similar” and indices in terms of “correlating” or “causing,” omits all reference to human agency.The semiotic distinction between symbols, icons, and indices is purely classificatory. It is widely used in talking about meanings, and says nothing about for whom these distinctions might be real and what semioticians had in mind when highlighting these rather than other differences.This objectification divorces meanings from the very “somebody” that Charles S. Peirce (1931), in his definition of the sign, made responsible for some thing to have meaning. Pragmatics is the description of how humans respond to a reality that is the same for everyone. Studies of “the uses of signs” presuppose certainty about the existence of the signs whose use is investigated. Inquiries into “the interpretation of a text” presuppose the existence of a text as separate from its interpretation. Packing into pragmatics all the biological, psychological, sociological, and political aspects of signs presumes a non-biological, non-psychological, nonsociological, and non-political realm of existence in which signs, their syntax and semantics, reside unaffected by their use.This kind of objectivist pragmatics (which sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms) acknowledges individual variations, whether due to biases, incompetencies, misunderstandings, or particular interests. But it can explain such variations in the use of signs only by assuming that the signs in question, their syntax and semantics, are fixed, known, and the same for everybody. Biases, incompetencies, and misunderstandings cannot be established except by reference to an objective and shared reality, serving as a standard for all.

Semioticians have no reasons to like my characterization of their distinctions, but I suggest it describes fairly accurately mainstream semiotics’ epistemological

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assumptions as manifest in its vocabulary and linguistic practices in which human beings serve merely as unacknowledged background for semiotic conception. Let me elaborate five entailments of mainstream semiotics that reveal its inherent irresponsibility, predisposition for institutionalized standardization, dualist world construction, paradoxes and contradictions, and lack of self-reference. Semiotics’ Inherent Irresponsibility Consider the prototypical statement “A is a sign for B,” the basic form in which semiotic studies tend to cast their findings. Such a proposition may be true or false but nothing else.An objective test of its validity is achievable by asking a large enough sample of semiotically competent people whether they agree with it. People are necessary because meanings cannot be observed, only elicited. Since such prototypical statements do not name the speech community for which they should be true, they imply universal validity.This is the mark of intellectual imperialism2 on the part of semiotics. Worse, the qualification of competence easily leads to the dismissal of subjects who disagree, in effect confining affirmations to semioticians and their audiences. Statements do not grow on trees, however. Somebody utters them, and they always reside in communication with others. Hiding the advocates of propositions behind their presumed objectivity amounts to a convenient rhetorical device: evading accountability. Indeed, propositions like “A is a sign of B” carry flavors of objectivity and authority precisely because they are not stated as someone’s claim, readers would not know who is responsible for what they state, contest them or ask for validating evidence. Propositions entail no responsibility! Unable to respond renders such propositions non-responsible or literally irresponsible, much like the pronouncements of unquestionable authorities.The priest in a marriage ceremony acknowledges his act by saying “I declare …” There is a real person speaking. In the belief that data speak for theories, that laws of nature are manifest in observable facts, and notwithstanding the need to dig for supporting evidence, scientists therefore could not possibly be held responsible for mere “findings.” The reliance on irresponsible propositions is disheartening, as accounts of meanings arise in human communication, and I would insist, including that of semioticians. I suggest that it is unethical to create propositions that make it difficult if not impossible to hold their proponents accountable for what they claim, especially when such propositions are about human beings – as are all semiotic concerns. Semiotics’ Reliance on Institutionalized Standards From the perspective of semiotics, communication involves the use of signs chosen from a common repertoire. Such theories tend to use Venn diagrams of two or more

2 See Chapter 5 in this volume for an elaboration of intellectual imperialism.

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repertoires of signs to say that only their intersections, the use of shared signs, assure communication. In these intersections, signs have but one meaning. Only under these conditions are semantic relationships reversible and describable as code. Only then can one describe communication as encoding meanings into sign-vehicles, transferring them to a destination and decoding them back into meanings, ideally corresponding to those of the sender. To accomplish communication, authors and readers, speakers and listeners need to use the same code and shared signs.This is a simplistic and entirely mechanistic model of communication. In it, choice of meaning resides with senders; receivers merely follow. Conceptualizing communication as the use of shared codes implies communication failure to be the absence of code sharing, which is merely one example of semiotics’ idealized standards. Polysemous signs such as “A means B1, B2, B3, …, or Bn”; “A means B1 for John, B2 for Jane, …”; or “A means sometimes B1 and sometimes B2” would be irreversible and hence unsuitable for communication. Roland Barthes (1983) observed that meanings naturally shift and change unless powerful institutions intervene to keep them in place. Indeed, institutionalized sign systems are the most stable: traffic signs, systems of writing, legal contracts, military communications, and mass-produced consumer goods. Clearly, the preference for simple propositions such as “A means B” and the ideal of unambiguous communication is most in tune with situations in which signs are institutionally standardized. Thus, semiotics thrives on and plays into institutional interests in standardizing uses of signs – without recognizing its dependence on what Michel Foucault (1980) called regimes of power relationships. Semiotics’ Dualisms Cartesian dualism is fundamental to all kinds of objectivism and naturally at home in mainstream semiotics.This is evident in the foundational distinction between the world of physical representations and what they represent. John Stewart (1995) aptly calls it a “two-world ontology” on which semiotics depends and constructs its theories: the world of signifiers and the world of the signified. Signifiers have the power to signify the signified, but the signified cannot signify its signifier. This conception echoes Cartesian mind–matter dualism and finds formal treatment in Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Logical Types. The latter states that propositions on one logical level must be about propositions on a lower level, but not in reverse and particularly not about propositions on their own logical level. The latter creates paradoxes and plays havoc with a logical system. At the bottom of this hierarchy of logical types are facts of nature, things without names in an undisturbed reality that are describable but cannot describe. Jean Baudrillard (1983) carried this semiotic ontology to another extreme. He notes that the images we face, for example, in the media, can hardly be construed as depicting reality.They present at best clippings, reproduce other images, simulate events, and use paid actors to perform them.They are representations that represent

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other representations, signs that point to other signs, imitations of imitations – all of which distort distortions. Baudrillard concludes that we live in a “hyper-reality” from which the “reality” that may have given rise to it has disappeared or become invisible.While this move pulls the rug from under hierarchies of representations, it does not challenge the notion of representation. He merely saw them everywhere, as objectivist would, as distortions all around. Semiotics’ Paradoxes and Contradictions Ulrich Neisser (1976) concluded from experiments that we do not see things, but meanings. James Gibson (1979, 1982) similarly suggested that we do not perceive objects for what they are but for what they afford us to do with them, their affordances. Gestalt psychologists built their theories of perception on evidence that we cannot identify absolute tones or colors, only contrasts between them, for example, melodies or figures against a ground. In other words, an observerindependent physics of sensory stimuli has little to say about what and how we see. Immanuel Kant, centuries ago, concluded: things as such are constitutively inaccessible to us. Obviously, one cannot claim that we see only meanings and simultaneously insist on the distinction between the physical properties of a sign and what it refers to or means. Insistence on this distinction puts semioticians into the privileged position of god-like observers who see what humans cannot. What would happen to the semiotic triangle if the sign-vehicles, stimuli, or artifacts on one edge are taken as inaccessible and all we can correlate are two (or more) kinds of meanings? As suggested earlier, semiotics can of course maintain its paradigm and retreat into a narrower domain by excluding such epistemological challenges, declaring them to belong to another discourse. Semiotics does precisely this. Unicorns exemplify another semiotic oddity. Unicorns do not exist in nature. When we see one, we must deny its reality; when we see an image of one, we know it does not have a referent in the real world. The absence of a reference leads semioticians to describe unicorns syntactically, without bringing into play that unicorns remind us of experiences we have with animals. A film shot on the stage set of an imaginary town is equally paradoxical.The camera shoots something that is at once real and imaginary, an original fake. Computer-generated images that represent nothing outside that computer’s own mode of operation pose similar problems to semioticians, and artifacts or objects of design occupy the same semiotically paradoxical state. Saying that something – a unicorn, Gotham City, a computer-generated image, or a stone – refers to itself (Eco, 1980) is a misguided effort to save a paradigm by attributing actor status to objects.Things, like unicorns, are what they mean to us in our experiences. A theory that requires a referent for something to have meaning contradicts everyday experiences, as does the attribution of intentionality to objects by suggesting that they refer to themselves.

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Semiotics’ Inability of Self-Reflection If one insists, as semioticians do, on distinguishing between a realm in which natural laws are observed to govern (broadly the domain of physics) and a realm consisting of semiotic phenomena – signs, symbols, and linguistic expressions, arguably the products of human consciousness – how do mainstream semioticians justify studying signs from the very same detached observer’s position that served physicists? How can one claim meaning to be a phenomenon of human consciousness (or culture) and at the same time describe it without acknowledging one’s own consciousness (or membership in one’s culture)? The short answer is by locating oneself above or outside the empirical domain of semiotics, by declaring one’s theories and empirical accounts of semiotic phenomena immune to semiotic considerations.This surely is convenient for it renders accountability mute, as discussed. But this convenience comes with a price: semioticians’ inability to reflect upon the very semiosis in which they are engaged, their use of rhetorical claims making devices, and their participation in constructing signs and accepting them as given facts. I assume no unethical intentions but suggest that the vocabulary and paradigm of semiotics keeps semioticians on the well-paved road of unreflective objectivism. In concluding this part of the journey, I suggest that the objectivist path of mainstream semiotics leads to a semioticized world construction of epistemological problems that may leave little space for alternatives in which to feel at home. Let me therefore retract from the road non-reflectively traveled to the point at which a smaller path diverges in a radically different direction (Figure 10.2).

Understanding and Acting Knowledgeably

Interactivity Cognitive models

Synecdoche Metonymy

c

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Co

tru

ist tiv

th pa

Polysemy

Position and embodiment

Metaphor

Implied Social Practices Semantics

Coding

Objectivist path of mainstream semiotics Syntax

Pragmatics

Figure 10.2. Two Paths to Study Meanings

Irresponsibility Institutionalization Dualism Paradoxes/contradictions Lack of self-reflection

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The Trail Worth Blazing: Toward Constructivist Semantics I demand, foremost of myself and with justifications implicit in the preceding, to regard: •

•

•

Semantics as a discourse on meaning embedded in recursive processes of conversation among interested participants. Human cognition and constructive practices need to be recognized as constitutive of the worlds that conversations construct. My understanding and hence the semantics that concern me here, must embrace (leave space for and take account of) others’ understanding in the conversational practice of coordinating individual understandings. Semantic concerns arise of a desire to understand something, shape that something in return, and be understandable or valid for observers and observing others alike. Semantic practice and articulation within a community go hand in hand. Understanding as someone’s self-reflective achievement is never finished as such. Constructivist semantics has to be creative and constructive of further understanding and in its service enable the invention of new vocabularies, use of new practices, design of meaningful artifacts, and expansion of the community of participants in the discourse on meaning.

It follows that such a semantics cannot designate a class of objects of interest outside of human beings, such as signs as conceived by semiotics, but must explicate the cognitive operations and linguistic expressions manifest in constructing and understanding the domain of interest. Next, I suggest a few concepts that a constructivist semantics might want to embrace. Understanding Understanding is a recursive process of constructing (deconstructing, reconstructing, inventing, and enacting) constructions of reality whose cognitive unfolding into various practices preserves the very process of construction within one’s alwaysembodied experiences. I elaborate on some of its properties. Understanding is cognitively autonomous. It arises within individual cognition. It is personal and private. It cannot be observed from outside its embodiment, communicated to someone else nor imposed. “Influence” is always a matter of one’s own causal constructions of how one’s experiences change relative to each other. Understanding is not of something outside one’s experiences; it does not represent the outside world more or less accurately (the mind’s function as conceived by Descartes). Understanding is a correlate of what one does or can think of doing.The eigen-value of understanding – what the process converges to in time – may be the feeling that one’s reality is coherent, sufficiently understood, viable in practice, and in any case no longer problematic.

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Understanding is a creative and constructive undertaking. It directs its own history of involvement in one’s world, constrained by the choices of constructions being unfolded into practices and experiences that do not fit one’s expectations (also called perturbations). It is within these constraints that artifacts arise spontaneously as things that can be relied upon repeatedly, having foreseeable consequences. If understandings were structure-determined and individuals would therefore have no choice in how they construct their realities, a sense of self could not arise and nobody could be held accountable for her actions. If understanding were arbitrary, lacking any viability check, individuals would be solipsists unable to accept, respect, live, and communicate with like others.Thus, the notion of understanding proposed here is the creative perpetuation of viable constructions, which are social when coordinated with others in communication. Understanding defines its own horizon. What is within the horizon of one’s constructions or reality seems coherent and meaningful; what is beyond it escapes comprehension or may not be noticed. A horizon may expand when one responds constructively to challenges of understanding. It may shrink when one exiles such challenges and withdraws into the remaining certainties. In effect, all we have is our understanding, the constructions of reality we feel comfortable with and can continuously and problemlessly unfold into individually or socially viable practices. External reality is noticeable only in the experiences of challenges to understanding. Thus, all reality constructions, including of one’s body, social self, relations with others and physical surrounding are dedicated to the preservation of understanding. Alternatively, the purpose of understanding is to sustain itself in the face of perturbations arising from the embodiments and practices of one’s reality constructions.3 In reference to others who occur in one’s constructions, cognition and communication operate to recursively coordinate that understanding. Or, as Spencer-Brown concluded, while more observer-centered than participatory, “we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself ” (1979:105). With this understanding of understanding in mind, I develop a few concepts for a constructivist semantics.

3 This formulation of understanding resembles that of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1988). Autopoiesis explains the living of biological systems as a recursive network of interactions of components that produces all components necessary to continuously embody the very process that produces them. Autopoiesis is an explanation authored by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. As an explanation, autopoiesis is not required for living systems to live. Life goes on regardless. Understanding too cannot exist outside of its embodiment in a circular network of perception and action constitutionally involving one’s own body and that of others while the autopoiesis is maintained. In human communication, one’s own understanding and one’s understanding of others’ understanding cannot afford to contradict the autopoiesis of its embodiments in all those involved.

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Position and Embodiment The distinction between my construction of reality and those of others – which I can experience only in their consequences, including in responses to me – implicates different positions that I may assume within my reality constructions. For example, in the study of literature, one typically distinguishes between the positions of an author, different kinds of readers, and the scholar who links all three through the con-sensual reading of a text – “con-sensual” in the sense of reading the same text. That text may mean entirely different things to each.To capture these differences (without privileging one’s reading as right and everyone else’s as biased or mistaken) requires acknowledging different reality constructions and the ability to assume different positions from which to understand why a text is read differently.Assuming different positions from which to see what we are jointly exposed to – a text, an object, what we say to each other or the context in which we face each other – implies choices and enables one to appreciate alternative constructions of reality and hold each other accountable for the realities constructed from these positions. All knowledge is embodied and positional but we become aware of different positions largely in communication with others. Objectivist knowledge (propositional knowledge), by contrast, is essentially positionless. David Sless (1986) tried to introduce positional accounts of sign processes into the vocabulary of semiotics but his work was not embraced. The entrenched paradigm of semiotics resisted such challenges. From an objectivist perspective – note that I am demonstrating my effort to take the position of semioticians here – alternative readings and understandings of texts are more likely interpreted as failures, mistakes, or distortions and explainable in terms of incompetencies or devious intents. Such designations privilege one’s own position and discourage venturing into the realities of others. Contrary to the aforementioned semiotic concept of communication as the encoding and decoding of meanings into and out of sign-vehicles, constructivist notions suggest that communicators act in view of their expectations of partners’ responses to what they say, i.e., in view of their understanding of their partners’ understanding and of the relationship they wish to achieve or maintain via communication with one another. Understanding others’ understanding, understanding understanding or second-order understanding is different qualitatively from the first-order understanding pursued by subscribers of objectivism. Second-order understanding entails respect for different reality constructions, the ability to take positions in the realities of others and view our world from their perspective. In its acknowledgment of the positional nature of knowledge and of one’s ability to assume the positions of others even only temporarily, second-order understanding is central to a constructivist approach to human communication and the conception of meaning.4 4 See Chapter 11 in this volume.

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Metaphor Semioticians have little use for metaphors, variously describing them syntactically as literary figures of speech, semantically as making vague or illusory references, pragmatically as forms of poetic embellishment, and blaming them for inconclusive thinking. However, metaphors, while identifiable in certain linguistic figures or visual forms, manifest an important feature of cognition, one that is creative of novel meanings, perceptions, and understandings. Metaphors appear vague and uncertain only from a position that identifies meanings as representations, as in what signvehicles refer to, stand for, point to, or signify. Roughly, “metaphors make us see one thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987). Their use changes the perceptions of users. More specifically, (1) they involve two distinguishable domains of experiences, one present and in need of understanding, the other, the source domain, familiar but absent. (2) Vocabulary from the source domain is introduced to the present context, but only in the presence of a minimal structural resemblance between the two domains. (3) Structures, explanatory patterns, or principles of construction are channeled from the source to the present domain, which (4) organizes the perception of the latter in ways usually experienced in the former.This involves reconfiguring the parts in the present context into the structures provided by the source domain. Once the imported structure takes hold, (5) it serves as a bridge for bringing additional entailments from the source to the present.5 To make this account less theoretical, one example may suffice. The use of psychoactive substances is a problem in the U.S., but it is not so clear what sort of problem it is. Each definition calls for its own solution. In 1969, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” War metaphors powerfully organize perceptions. A war entails urgency, mobilizes extraordinary resources, and calls for personal sacrifices, ultimately involving military-like operations. Inevitably, the U.S. Congress followed Nixon’s declaration with legislation authorizing extraordinary measures. However, to fight a war requires enemies.Who would comprise that enemy? Drug addicts? Farmers who grew marijuana? Legislators who made the use of psychoactive drugs illegal? It seemed convenient but perhaps an arbitrary choice to single out those who profit from drug sales, normally an accepted business practice. It was not easy, however, to fight business practices with weapons.The “war on drugs” metaphor in use by the White House, politicians, the mass media, and drug enforcement agencies eventually justified the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama and the removal of its dictator, but the “war on drugs” has yet to be won. 5 Note that this definition too makes use of several metaphors, such as domains, source-target, channeling, and bridging. Evidently, to understand this definition presupposes the ability to handle metaphors intuitively. Ordinary language is full of metaphors. One can hardly communicate without them. See Chapter 3 in this volume.

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There are alternative metaphors for understanding the drug problem as, for example, a disease (medical metaphor), a community or educational issue (social metaphor), or criminal behavior (legal metaphor). A medical metaphor entails treatment and care for the diseased; a social metaphor entails strengthening community and improving living conditions. One would not fight drug addicts with machine guns or admit drug dealers into a rehab facility.We can hardly conceptualize the drug problem non-metaphorically. But the use of one metaphor preempts the use of others, which accounts for their extraordinary roles. Metonymy: Sense and Function Metonyms relate parts to wholes. They explain and thereby overcome difference created by drawing a distinction between something and wherein it resides, what it is a part of, the background against which it comes to the fore – for example, between inside and outside, text and context, an organism and its environment, and an observer and the observed. Clearly, neither wholes nor parts, which may be wholes with parts in their own right, can exist without the two cognitive operations of drawing distinctions within a whole and making sense of what keeps the distinguished parts together.6 Elsewhere (Krippendorff, 2006b), I suggested a distinction between meaning and sense in metonymic terms.When we say that something makes sense,when we understand the role it plays in a particular context, we have a metonymic understanding of what we see that it does. It makes sense that the movement of a pen over paper leaves a mark. It makes sense that a couple of nails hold two pieces of lumber together. In contrast, the meaning of something is the sum total of all the contexts for which we are able to imagine a sense for it. My pen does not just write. It can serve in numerous capacities – for example, as a stylus, a bookmark, a tool to poke holes in paper, or a hairpin. In short, the sense of something metonymically invokes its meaning by making us aware of what else we can do with it and in which contexts such uses could occur.Thus, by analogy, sense is to meaning as actuality is to potentiality, as performance is to competence (Chomsky) or as speech is to language (Saussure). We acquire sense by perception and action.We acquire meaning by organizing the many senses we could imagine of something in different settings into a recognizable whole of which each sense is a part. Metonyms also underlie functional analyses ranging from social systems theory to engineering. Sociology distinguishes between functional acts, which contribute to the well-being (essential prerequisites) of a society, and dysfunctional acts, which detract from it. Organizational theory defines social roles in terms of the functions that a person performs by holding an office, position or title. Biology distinguishes the function of an organ by its contribution to the living of the organism in which

6 See Chapter 2 in this volume.

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it resides. By focusing on the cognitive operations that create meanings metonymically, we retain embodied explanations. Metonymy is the cognitive prerequisite of something serving as a sign – without the semiotic commitment to objective and disembodied descriptions. For example, words serve particular functions within a sentence. Grammar describes their syntactical role, but the possible meanings of the constituent words must be played against each other to make sense of the sentence as a whole.The cognitive operations of metonymy can be exemplified with the semiotic category of indices; for example, smoke as an index of fire, or fever plus maculopapular rash as a symptom of measles. From a constructivist perspective, unlike the semiotic emphasis on the existence of causes, these connections are constructed and must be learned to invoke the meanings they provide. Much of the history of medicine is a tale of the construction and reconsideration of symptoms for treatable diseases. Diseases are not found; they are socially constructed and distinguished according to possible treatments. Classical examples of metonymies are taking a crown as a sign for a monarchy, using the image of a table setting as the sign for a restaurant, displaying a garbage can on a computer screen to suggest the possibility of discarding a file. Polysemy: Context and Affordances As discussed above, semiotics favors one-to-one relationships by accounting for meanings in terms of container metaphors, as in “message A contains meaning B”; in terms of correspondences, as in “A is similar to and hence substitutable for B”; or in terms of codes, as in “A is encoded in B and must be decoded to gain access to A.” From the constructivist perspective, polysemy is the norm, not the exception. Consider the use of the word “play”: to play tennis to play down an issue to play information into someone else’s hands to play around with someone to play a game of chess a play by Shakespeare child’s play a playboy playboy magazine The character string “play” plays different roles in different contexts. In these examples, there are few commonalties among their senses. It would therefore be difficult to explain this polysemy as mere variations of a core meaning. From a constructivist perspective, to be polysemous means to be able to occupy a range of roles in different contexts. The only constancy in these examples is the character string “play.”

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Earlier I mentioned semiotics’ close alliance with institutions that hold the meaning of signs stable and describable in terms of propositions, for example, the police regarding traffic signs, the medical establishment for terms of diseases, symptoms, and remedial drugs, and text books of a language and aptitude tests for literacy.Yet semiotics does not acknowledge much less theorize its reliance on such institutions. Constructivist semantics, on the other hand, would have to explain how this diversity is controlled and how institutions do it. Besides institutional constraints on the polysemous nature of signs, contexts can do much the same except by the sense-making efforts of their users or readers.To make the point of the polysemous nature of “play” in the above list, I included enough contexts for different meanings to become apparent.When reading the word “play” in the context of a larger text, its meaning is less likely ambiguous; in reading, one is rarely aware of the polysemy of words.Yet, dictionaries usually list a variety of meanings for each entry. Usually, users have no difficulties selecting the right meaning. A concept closely related to polysemy is affordance. Gibson (1979, 1982) coined the term originally to account for his observation that pilots, seeking to land aircraft, look for and see in the surfaces they are facing not their physical characteristics but whether their aircraft is “landable.” He conducted many perception experiments and concluded that we do not see things but what we can do with things. Something becomes a chair because we perceive its affording us to sit on it; something becomes a cup because it affords us to hold fluids and drink from it, etc. Gibson’s work suggests that all objects of nature and artifacts are inherently polysemous. However, when a user approaches them, they become what they afford the user to do with them, immediately excluding the many possibilities they otherwise would support. In other words, the meaning (possible uses) of an object shrinks to the sense it makes in the context of a particular use.A constructivist approach to meanings focuses primarily on use. Entities like road maps (which semiotics reduces to representations) are considered in terms of how people use them. Synecdoche: Types and Tokens Often confused with metonymy, synecdoche reflects the cognitive operation of relating species to genera, tokens to types, or objects to their categories – not parts to wholes. It is the process by which one identifies how something is to be regarded and to which category it belongs, especially in the absence of previous experiences with it.Tokens obtain meanings by relating them to a familiar type. Logicians – most early semioticians were logicians, from Peirce and Alfred Tarski to Morris – define categories in terms of what the objects in a set have in common.This most naturally leads to logical taxonomies of upwardly increasingly abstract categorizations and downwardly increasing specific commonalities. The elaborate classification systems of signs in semiotics provide ample examples of the consequence of such a definition.

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In contrast,7 constructivist semantics defines categories not by drawing boundaries around all possible objects of a certain kind, but by starting instead from experiences, relating objects to the center of a category, its prototype. For example, in the U.S. the most typical bird (the one most closely resembling its prototype) seems to be the robin. We describe other birds by how they deviate from that prototype, for example having a longer beak or blue feathers. Penguins are far from the prototypical bird; some consider them a category of their own.This shift from logical to empirical categorization may have begun with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1958) exploration of the meaning of “game.” He enumerated instances of the category of game and found that they had nothing in common except pairwise commonalities constituting a network of what he called family resemblances. Most important is Eleanore Rosch’s (Rosch et al., 1976; Rosch, 1978) work on prototypes showing experimentally that it is far more natural for us to express how close something is to the prototype of a category, its prototypicality, than to draw a boundary around all members (including members not yet experienced). She defined three kinds of categories: basic categories easily envisioned, like chair, subordinate categories distinguished from the basic by the attribution of specific qualities, like baby chair, and superordinate categories that escape visualization, like furniture, which is abstract. Cognitive Models: Schemas and Scripts When approaching new experiences in the absence of appropriate prototypes, we usually have great conceptual resources available to make sense of them and respond appropriately. Johnson (1987) analyzed basic schemas in the development of language skills – like inside–outside, up–down, front–back, toward–away from – that are thought to come from early bodily experiences, are evident in language and underlie the construction of many cognitive models for creating the realities we come to conceptualize and live in. Others include cause and effect, text and context, territory and its map, actor-action-targets and social relationships that provide simple building blocks for constructing complex models of experiences. Cognitive models enable us to drive a car, which consists of managing numerous causalities and associated perceptions, order food in a restaurant, navigate political systems, and handle a job.Verbalized cognitive models may be interpreted as reports, or, in order to direct behavior, as instructions or scripts to be learned. For example, Kempton (1987) analyzed the verbal accounts by users of thermostatic home heat control devices and extracted from them what seemed to be the guiding conceptions of their users. He found that subjects approached thermostats with the cognitive model of either a valve or a feedback loop. He also recorded temperature fluctuations and thermostat settings over time. Subjects guided by the 7 See George Lakoff (1987) for a good discussion of this difference.

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valve model caused more extreme temperature fluctuations, felt the need to reset the thermostat more frequently and experienced more frustration than those guided by the feedback model. Engineers’ conceptualizations of the system did not enter the experiences of either type of user. It is noteworthy that the system afforded both cognitive models and neither group had reasons to change its model, but these models brought forth different behaviors and experiences for their users. The ability to use personal computers also demonstrates that cognitive models are not representative of an objective reality that exists outside us. Almost nobody knows what happens inside a computer or where and how it stores a particular document and how many bit-strings it takes.Yet, computer users develop ways to cope with the complexities they face. A computer interface is full of what we can identify as metaphors, metonyms (icons), lists, and correlates, including reproductions of texts and images that users can handle. Users develop heuristic models of their abilities and use them more or less effectively. Users’ cognitive models do not represent what a computer is, but what one can do with it. Sherry Turkle (1984) analyzed children’s cognitive models of computers and traced their origins to experiences with videogames, smart toys, and human interactions. Users often attributed social qualities to computers.These models are not therefore wrong, as long as a computer affords them. Models not afforded, however, misguide users into unwanted territory or cause interruptions, which invites users to discontinue or reconstruct them. Cognitive models can involve entirely manual activities like knitting and playing the piano. Many reveal themselves in stories, but all can be interpreted as accounting for the interactive involvement of their beholders with their environment. Interactivity: Semiosis and Involvement As a final point, I suggest that a constructivist approach to meaning must embrace processes of emergence, the evolution of one’s understanding while interactively engaged with one’s environment including other human beings. I suggest that the static propositions that now dominate mainstream semiotics betray the more dynamic conceptions of its founders, Charles S. Peirce for one, namely semiosis, the process by which signs come to be, or semiogenesis. As above noted, objectivist concerns with semantic relationships presuppose that they exist as such. Looking now into how signs come to be easily entraps contemporary semioticians into focusing on the learning of established signs and codes and their institutionally correct uses, but not on the creation of new ones. Semioticians’ lack of selfreflectivity unwittingly hides the institutional interests the study of signs serves, in effect denying semiotics the ability to create the signs it claims to study. A theme running through this essay is the inherent restlessness of cognition. People’s understanding evolves continually, adapting to an external world and creating constructions that render the world manageable. The polysemy of reality enables numerous forms of social interaction: coordinating understanding (not to

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be confused with sharing) as evident in affirmative response to the question “do you understand?”; coordinating the drawing of distinctions, as evident in affirmative response to the question “do you see the difference?”; and coordinating actions, as evident in affirming commitments. In social interactions through language, cognitions are expanded but also constrained, creating cognitive models and supporting artifacts not explainable from the individual cognitions of participants. All social artifacts like money, family, and government, but also scientific disciplines including semiotics, develop interactively. Science always has had an affinity with technology, relying on measuring instruments that substitute for the supposed unreliability of human observers, employing models for testing causal explanations, or unreflectively using mechanical metaphors such as conceptualizing the brain as a computer. A constructivist semantics, on the other hand, cannot be trapped into mechanistic (logical, causal, and disembodied) explanations. It must seek to understand meanings in terms of how language is used in communication for all theories and explanations are constructed in language and must survive in human communication. Meanings reside in processes of use, which includes what is being talked about. Locating meanings where they are negotiated and explaining meanings in the terms in which they are proposed may not be comprehensible to mainstream semioticians married to representations of the world that have no place for languaging the world into being. Let me conclude with the quote from a magician of our trade, who through his own “looking glass” may have anticipated much of what I proposed here by engaging his characters in this dialogue: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” (Lewis Carroll, 1982:184) My answer to Humpty Dumpty would designate not a master but the social constructions we create jointly and live with, and for which we hold each other accountable.

Chapter 11

The Dialogical Meaning of Cultural Artifacts *

Introduction I write here from two perspectives. I am a communication scholar; much of my work centers on epistemology and meaning, particularly in human dialogue. I am also a designer who occasionally lectures and writes on interfaces between humans and technology. Such interfaces are cultural artifacts, not technological ones. I join these two perspectives in an exploration of the social construction of realities to propose a non-semiotic etymology for artifacts. First, I ask where issues of meaning arise. I then use a popular movie to illustrate how artifacts could mean something, a largely neglected area in need of explanation. Third, I weave three notions into an explanatory framework: the effort of secondorder cybernetics to include the observer in the observed, an expansion into the social domain of Bateson’s/Wittgenstein’s recognition of the significance of multiple descriptions, and dialogue. Finally, I suggest that we conceptualize cultural artifacts as constituents of larger social realities.To illustrate the latter, I rely on a personal example of how artifacts move through systems of culturally conditioned meanings. My concern for language ties these points together. Where Do Issues of Meaning Arise? All questions concerning meaning occur in language. In the con-sensual (jointly sensed) experience of something, for example, A, we ask: What does A mean? In this question,A is something named or pointed to, an artifact, phrase, traffic sign, human action, or natural phenomenon.We reply to this question saying, perhaps: A means B. But what is the difference between A and B? * From Krippendorff, K. (2006a). The dialogical reality of meaning. The American Journal of Semiotics 19,1–4: 19–36 (nominally 2003).

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First, we note that both A and B occur in language, not outside it.We cannot ask or answer questions without that extraordinary means of coordinating human actions, without the assurance or assumption that mentioning A is based on something jointly sensed, present, or somehow understood.Without this assumption, we would not know what we are asking or answering. Second, question/answer pairs, so-called adjacency pairs, occur in conversations or dialogues. There is always someone who asks about A and someone else who responds with a proposition relating B to A. Answering one’s own question, as I do in this essay, simulates what would be incomprehensible without prior experiences of conversations with real people. Third and most importantly, in this verbal interaction, in the question as well as the answer, A is presupposed while B is not.This is demonstrable by observing the effects of negation. In negating a proposition, its presuppositions survive unscathed. In negating “A means B,” A remains unquestioned, and its ontological status is unaffected. Only B changes its truth-value and reveals itself variable. I suggest that most of our ontological constructions manifest linguistically in presuppositions that we do not question as such. As artifacts of language, they are not tested empirically. In a semiotic answer to questions concerning the meaning of A, “A is a sign of B”; the sign-vehicle or signifier A is assumed while what it stands for, B, becomes the focus of attention. Cartesians locate A in an objective reality, existing unquestioned, without observation, before any human mind attaches the meaning B to it. Peircean semiotics uncritically formalizes such answers and thereby pursues a two-world ontology, the world of the signifiers and the world of the signified, which shall not overlap (Stewart, 1996). The physical manifestations of symbols, sculptures and monuments are objective sensory facts while their meanings are determined by conventions and, hence, considered arbitrary. It is amazing to realize that these constructions are products of how we speak, based on constructions that language makes available habitually. Meanings in Use But what is A that could mean B? I answer this question using familiar intercultural experiences, exemplified in the first 12 minutes of a popular 1984 movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy. It plays on the conceptual relativity of Western civilization and the culture of Bushmen living in the Kalahari Desert. A small airplane crosses the Kalahari Desert. Bushmen live there; we are told they consider airplanes evidence of gods in the sky. The pilot finishes a Coke and throws the bottle out the window. It lands near a bushman named Xi. Having never seen a glass bottle, he carefully probes it with a wooden tool. Convinced there is no apparent danger; Xi takes it home to his tribe. There, the bottle is examined collectively with curiosity if not awe.The consensus is, we are told, that it is a gift from the gods.The Bushmen ingeniously find all kinds of uses for it. In a place without rocks, the hardness of the bottle encourages its use as a pestle for smashing roots. Its smoothness aids the flattening and stretching of

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snakeskins. Its opening serves as a stamp for decorating a garment with circles.The bottle makes sounds when the Bushmen blow air over its opening as well as when it turns, tied horizontally at the end of an untwisting rope. No one discovers its use as a container for fluids, perhaps because water is scarce in the Kalahari desert. Because it is the only one of its kind and much in demand for its many uses, the bottle encourages competition and hostility, we are told, previously unknown to the Bushmen. Eventually, someone is hurt when hit over the head with it.The Bushmen do not understand how the gods, who always had been kind to them, the gods’ own children, could send a gift that does such evil things. Xi wants the gods to take it back, hoping that happiness returns to his tribe. He throws the bottle into the sky, but it falls back and hurts someone else. He buries it in the sand, but again, it turns up in the life of the tribe as an object both prized and harm-inducing.To rid the tribe of this evil thing, Xi takes the bottle and sets out on foot for the edge of the world. (The remainder of the movie is less significant for us here.) What does this story teach us? First, we have no difficulty observing that the Coke bottle acquired meanings rather different from ours.The movie depicts several novel uses of the bottle, several sensory-motor coordinations, from Xi’s first curious touch of something he had never seen before to various practical uses the Bushmen invent. I have shown this movie to students and afterwards asked: “What fell from the sky?” Most respond with the obvious answer, “a Coke bottle,” typically followed by statements that the Bushmen were unable to recognize it for what it “really” was. Ethnocentric accounts like these, easily comprehended within one’s group, fail to acknowledge culture-specific differences in perception. They objectify one’s own culture, equate one’s conceptions with what exists outside us and manifest our unwillingness to acknowledge cultural others as equally qualified. What is most important and easily sidelined by reference to the Coke bottle, a cultural icon of the West, is that the Bushmen talk amongst themselves while attending to something undeniably physical, perhaps considering new uses, certainly regulating possession and making fun of Xi when he gets his finger stuck in it. Evidently, the Bushmen play all kinds of Wittgensteinian (1953) language games in which talk and the handling of the artifact are closely coordinated. Unfortunately, we learn what they say only through the voice of an English-speaking narrator. For the Bushmen,A is not a Coke bottle. It is a visible, touchable thing that acquired the meaning, we are told, of a gift from the gods, B, in effect summarizing the many uses they invented for it. Although I doubt that the Bushmen ever literally ask what the bottle means, language clearly plays a role in what becomes of it and the roles it plays in the community. Through the use of language, B, that is, the con-sensual use of A, becomes part of and transforms the Bushmen’s world. Surely, all of these meanings are not representational. Even for us the Coke bottle does not signify any other piece of reality, as a semiotic sign must, and what its designer inscribed in its form has no relevance for the Bushmen. I contend that the conception of meaning as use – without presupposing a two-world construction, “standing for” relationships or reliance on

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objective accounts of sign vehicles – is incompatible with Peircean semiotics. I venture a step further in this direction. Meanings in Dialogue Here, I weave three conceptions together.They seem abstract only in wording but do not go beyond what “every teenager knows.”1 First is the second-order cybernetic fondness for including the observer in the descriptions of the observed (Foerster et al., 1974; Maturana, 1970; Maturana and Varela, 1988). As movie audiences, we never merely register the shapes projected on a movie screen as a camera records patterns of light. Perception means actively attending to something; our biology and sociolinguistic history influence what we see. For a biological example, consider the wellknown fact that the outside world knows no colors. Color is a product of our perceptual apparatus. For a socio-linguistic example, consider that we must literally learn to see, and our categories of perception are coordinated largely con-sensually within a linguistic community. Whorf (1956) provided ample evidence that grammatical constructions in language shape categories of perceptions. Sacks (1996:108–152) showed that visual perception is learned early and may not be learnable or teachable at a later age, for example when someone born blind regains her functional retina.The claim that A means B, without stipulating for whom this is so, implies that it must be so for everyone at all times and under all circumstances. This violates human biology. Such a claim can be upheld only where institutions that enforce the relationship between A and B are taken for granted, unacknowledged, or rendered invisible deliberately.Theorizing this institutionalized objectivism has gotten semioticians into trouble. So, acknowledging ourselves as observers and reporters of our (sensory) experiences, we should say always: A means B to me. Figure 11.1 depicts this conception in (a). (b)

(a) I’s world

I’s world

(d)

(c) I’s world

of Your world

I’s world

of Your world of I'’s world

A For I:

B A is A means B (to I)

A

B'

For I:

A is A means B' to You For You: B' is For both: B ≠ B'

A For I:

B'

A"

A is A means B' to You For You: B' is B' means A'' to I' For both: B ≠ B'; A ≠ A''; I ≠ I' For I: A is relativized by You

A For I: A is The meanings of A drift as it travels through different bricolages, through the many worlds of others and back to I’s, the narrator’s work

Figure 11.1. Meanings in Dialogue 1 See Bateson’s discussions with his teenage daughter, presented as metalogues in Part I of his (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

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The second concept I wish to introduce is Bateson’s (1979:75–98) observation that multiple descriptions add to our understanding and often are necessary to develop insights about a phenomenon of interest. He explores physiological phenomena like binocular vision, and logical ones like abduction. In answering questions about meaning, one difference already mentioned is that A is presupposed while the nature and truth of B is in question – for example regarding what one can do with A, how A appears to us, and what others say about A.To me,A and B do not differ along the sign–referent dimension of semiotics or according to the Cartesian objective– subjective distinction. Bateson discovered that B differs from A by relativizing for whom this is so; this presupposes the possibility of multiple descriptions. Wittgenstein (1953:194) investigates that phenomenon with the help of so-called flip-figures, a single figure that affords two alternative and mutually exclusive interpretations. He uses a figure that sometimes (or for some people) appears to depict a duck and sometimes (or for other people) appears to depict a rabbit. Wittgenstein makes us aware of the crucial difference between the figure – A – printed in black on white paper that can be handled, turned around, and moved in and out of sight, and what we actually see – B. If we come across this figure, we see a duck or a rabbit but not both, and we do not distinguish between what we see and what we could see. However, as soon as we are made aware of being able to see it differently, we draw a distinction between A, the immutable figure, and B, one of at least two possibilities of seeing A. We take A as independent of us and assume responsibility for seeing B as our way of seeing A, as our interpretation of A and as what A means to us. Language is often implicated in the flipping of our seeing A (Krippendorff, 1995b).The point being that multiple ways of seeing and describing are fundamental to all issues of meaning. Returning to the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, how might we prevent falling into the epistemological trap of ethnocentrism, seeing the worlds of others only our way? The theoretical answer is simple. We must acknowledge that others too see meanings, construct their worlds, as we do and that the worlds they construct are not inferior or wrong, but different. Thus, we should not stop at recognizing or theorizing “A means B to me.”We must recognize others as con-sensual observers of A, granting their different perceptions equal validity for them. It suggests casting our observations in these terms: I understand A to mean B′ toYou – B Þ B′ To apply such constructions rigorously is not easy. I mentioned the logic of presuppositions that makes us see a Coke bottle as an objective fact and the Bushmen’s interpretation as deviant, mistaken, and perhaps therefore entertaining. The above asks us to abandon the idea of describing others – as to who they are – in observers’ terms without acknowledging their use of language, and instead grant them the same capacity for understanding that we assume for ourselves.The issue is not to understand others but to understand the understanding of others as manifest

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in what they say and do. Understanding others’ understanding, understanding understanding, is epistemologically quite different from understanding objects incapable of understanding. I have called this second-order understanding to contrast it with the kind of knowledge that the natural sciences celebrate (or restrict themselves to exploring) and the kind of constructions Buber (1970) locates in I–it relations that reduce other human beings to objects performing functions or being of service to the superior knowing I (Krippendorff, 1996, 1997a, 1997b, 2006b:65–75). Second-order understanding means acknowledging that the worlds of others could be different radically from our own. Because we cannot enter the Bushmen’s world with all its sensory affordances, our acknowledging their world is an opportunity to reflect on our own, make our own world transparent, understandable, and appreciable without considering it superior.Without the worlds of others, we could not reflect on our own. Second-order understanding always entails a struggle against our temptation to think that everyone understands as we do, unwittingly making us oppressors, controllers, and engineers of others’ lives. Accordingly I suggest that questions about meanings always arise when the difference between two descriptions is puzzling yet cannot be ignored. Meaning is our linguistic effort to make sense of seeing something from two or more perspectives: one obvious, unproblematic, seemingly given and often sensorily present, the other perhaps less obvious, unobserved, hoped for, or feared and always relative to a context, but especially in the context of others.What is a Coke bottle for us need not be, cannot be expected to be, and most likely is not a Coke bottle for the Bushmen.We see not the physical properties of things but what things mean to us individually and socially; there is no reason to assume that Bushmen see what is unquestionably our cultural artifact. In The Gods Must be Crazy, once the bottle exits the airplane, it enters a different world in which it becomes an evil thing. Note that A is not a signifier and that B′ is not the signified. In our world, A and B′ belong to different worlds of our own construction as seen in Figure 11.1(b). Meanings are asserted in language, link different descriptions, join different perspectives, and bridge different worlds. In saying, “I understand A to mean B′ to You,” “I” can be a viewer of the movie. “I” can be a historian interpreting a set of documents relative to what their writers may have meant in the historical context in which these documents played a role. “I” can be a therapist attempting to make sense of the world that a client finds troubling. “I” can be a politician speaking in view of how her speech will be received. “I” can also be a social scientist, an ethnographer, for example, who attemps to add to the descriptions of her observations her informants’ accounts of their perceptions, actions, and communications. Bateson thought multiple descriptions added information to our understanding. In the social domain, the comparison adds second-order understanding. I suggest that this interlaced understanding constitutes social reality. Finally, I weave dialogue into this conception. Clearly, a movie engages its viewers in one-way communication. Viewers find themselves in a hermeneutic cycle of

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interpretation but cannot interact with those the movie presents on the screen, except vicariously. Much as in scientific theory, observed others have no voice except that granted by the scientist, here the filmmaker. Enabling dialogue requires three things. The first is symmetry. If the word “meaning” makes sense to others, we cannot claim to be the only ones capable of comparing multiple descriptions and considering multiple perspectives. Unless social theorists assume the position of god-like observers and interpret meanings as subjective correlates of physical facts, they must grant to others the ability to understand and interpret and apply explanatory structures capable of such symmetry.Theories of the kind “A means B” cannot grant different understandings to others.They objectify meaning, as semioticians do.To acknowledge the ability of others to consider multiple descriptions of A – as we claim we can – requires symmetry.Thus, we must be able to say: You understand B′ to mean A″ to me – A Þ A″ as depicted in Figure 11.1(c). Second, enabling dialogue requires recurrent interaction. When we interact with others, we enact our constructions of them and what we know about them and their worlds. Sending a message A, we cannot expect receivers to read it as B but as B′, from which would follow their responding to B′.Yet social theories seem blind to such complementarities, perhaps because such theories entail a recursion, as emerges in Figure 11.1, in progression from (a) to (c). In this recursion, we see the construction of worlds within worlds. To bypass such constructions of us and of others, to ignore meanings, as behaviorists prefer, and to think only in terms of causal chains would be easier, but mistaken. Recursive constructions of social reality call not only on a certain openness, indeterminacy and acknowledgment of others’ agency, but on us to abandon the position of the superior outside observer. In interaction with others, we cannot observe, of course, their worlds as they see them, except through their articulations and consequences. If Your response does not confirm my construction of Your world, I may have to modify my constructions and consequent action so that I can continue living with You. It does not really matter what Your world “really” is – this is why Your perceptions and interpretations are apostrophized in Figure 11.1(c) – as long as it remains complementary to or compatible with my enacted constructions of it. One could call this process (inter)active (dis)confirmation; it allows for conceptual shifts in the presence of an unknown and objectively unknowable world presumed populated by others who, like us, live in their own drifting constructions. Our constructions are no doubt hypothetical, much as theories are. However, unlike theories in the natural sciences, social theories must prove themselves in social interactions with others equally capable of understanding, albeit in their own terms. Our understandings let us go on as usual or produce warnings or stressors when they do not complement the understandings of others – producing even death when

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fatally unfit. I suggest that our ability to apply theories of meaning to interactive practices makes social theory social – but not yet dialogue. Interaction among people who respect each other’s world constructions is possible but uncommon. Often we disparage others for enacting reality constructions that are strange to us and for using words or artifacts in ways we would not.Where we do not notice these differences we may become the best of friends and where we find these differences troublesome we may become the worst of enemies. Dialogue calls for more than using complementary reality constructions. Israelis and Palestinians both claim to know their others too well to trust each other. For interactions to be called dialogue, mutual acceptance of each other’s worlds is required. I once formulated an ethical imperative (Krippendorff, 1989a:86–90)2 for communication researchers. Paraphrased, it suggests avoiding god-like objective observer roles, instead granting others in our constructions at least the same cognitive and dialogical capabilities we claim for ourselves in processes of constructing them, listening to others without losing the ground on which we stand – even if we do not like what we hear. Thus, acknowledging that we cannot escape our own world constructions, that we cannot enter the worlds that others see literally, and respecting the cognitive autonomy of those with whom we want to live requires us to set aside a space within which others can construct their own world in their own terms – without our claiming superiority, for example, insisting that our theories or cognitive models of reality are better than theirs.The latter would constitute a first-order understanding – celebrating our manner of being at the expense of others. It would amount to instruction, not dialogue. Third and last among the requirements for dialogue to occur, I argue that social theories must be embedded in those theorized, respect multiple and potentially inconsistent perspectives, and prove themselves in social practices involving them. Theories in the natural sciences demand consistency consequent to the idea of a universe, and are validated by additional observations. However, unlike natural scientists, social scientists must employ a language capable of embedding different reality constructions in each other. A language that accepts different positions, inconsistent realities, in order to understand the practices they bring forth.This is the basis for a concept of meaning that can form the ground on which conversations develop and dialogue can take place. Meanings in Social Reality Before our Coke bottle entered the Bushmen’s world as a gift from the gods, their culture furnished many stories that kept their environment – its tools, resources and threats – meaningful and manageable. In The Gods Must Be Crazy, we hear talk,

2 See Chapter 1 in this volume.

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but without understanding what the Bushmen say, we can say little about their reality, their world, other than what we see and what the narrator tells us. This difficulty supports my contention that much if not all of our understanding relies on language and con-sensual interaction. Let me therefore turn to a personal and perhaps for us more accessible experience to develop a notion of meaning in social realities. The first time my children and I visited the arms and armor collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with its shields, helmets, swords, and firearms displayed in neat categories, I noticed a suit of armor of blackened steel inlaid with silver medallion. Its description informs us that Julius, Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg (1528–1589), wore this armor during tournaments held on the occasion of his marriage in 1560 to Hedwig of Brandenburg (1540–1602). This armor triggered a story from my childhood of the Black Knight of Brunswick who appeared at night to restore the rights of the disenfranchised and unfairly treated, and punished the powerful perpetrators of injustice. He performed heroic deeds at a time when, as we know now, the knights had lost their political influence. The Black Knight was a judge and executioner from the past. I was excited to find his armor and related this story to my children, imagining that I was the only one in Philadelphia who knew the secret of this armor. Tales of courage and justice are familiar in many cultures and typically emerge well after the facts.The mystery of not knowing the identity of the Black Knight is part of the fascination of such stories. If he existed at all, I supposed, he must have lived some time after the Duke of Brunswick, who apparently lived a welldocumented life. I asked myself, how did the Black Knight acquire the Duke’s armor? Was he a descendant? Who taught him the use of the sword? What informed his sense of justice? What happened after he died? – Questions that the curator of the exhibit seemed unconcerned. In response to my children’s rising curiosity, I wondered what happened during such tournaments and how the Duke participated. Who helped him into this complex garment that consisted of numerous pieces? Did he have to prove himself to his bride? Was she interested in such manly games? Did he have real adversaries whose victories could have meant his defeat, or was the contest rigged merely to demonstrate the Duke’s wealth, power, and privilege? I imagined the blacksmith’s shop in which the armor was tailored with its master and his journeymen piecing this remarkable artifact together, probably under the pressure of deadlines with inadequate compensation and daily visits by an evidently large-bodied Duke, who may have been difficult to please, demanding frequent adjustments. Having worked in metal once, I knew how difficult it must have been to shape these complex humanoid forms; I can barely imagine artfully inlaying them with silver. In the sixteenth century, wearing armor was not limited to tournaments. Knights fought wars; armor protected them from the deadly weapons of opponents.Armor also was heavy; it must have hurt simply wearing it, and it restricted the bearer’s sight and movement to the point of making him vulnerable to unexpected blows.

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Armor also hid signs of emotion from opponents – the fear of wounds or death as well as the joy of victory. None of these meanings could be seen in the hardware on display. We know what happened to many of these armors. Those no longer wearable were either recycled or kept in special places to commemorate a glorious ancestor, perhaps the ancestor from whom the family received its name, coat of arms, castle, and wealth. After a war, victors robbed victims of prized possessions – treasures, armories, women – and brought them home where they became trophies that proved the victors’ prowess. By the eighteenth century, armor had become obsolete; knowledge of its production had all but disappeared. Knights lost their influence to the cities and the princely armories fell to neglect.The only value of such armor remaining was the price it fetched by sale to someone with “new wealth” but no family history.Armors became curiosities, conversation pieces. Private collections of fossils, coins, stuffed animals, masks, and exotic objects usually included a few swords, helmets, and armor parts.The motivations for such collections are not clear – except that antique dealers later fashioned their business from the decorative functions such objects could serve. We do not know how the Duke’s black armor fared in these transitions but for its appearance in a 1974 photograph of a private armory. It is recognizable in a Gothic living room crowded with other medieval and Renaissance collectibles. Over a seventy-year period, Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch, who at the end of his life gave his collection to the museum, had visited European castles, museums, dealers, and fellow private collectors, assembled perhaps the best American collection of medieval and Renaissance armor. A brochure tells of his connoisseurship and his unrelenting fascination with the material evidence of a heroic era, informed by the later Gothic Revival and Romantic movements. He was a major figure among a small group of wealthy collectors who knew each other well and competed to build private armories reassembling relics scattered over Europe, driven by a shared conception of what belonged together. In the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent exhibit, these pieces play yet another role. They now reside in a large white-walled room and several adjacent smaller rooms.There are a few noticeable Gothic markers, a fake lead window high up on the wall, a doorway framed with rough stones as in a castle. Most of the armor is in showcases behind glass, facing the visitor.The exhibit, as the word suggests, is limited mostly to visual experiences. Sensing the heaviness of these implements or what it feels like to wear a suit of armor, swing a sword, or fire a musket becomes impossible.The museum ordered these artifacts chronologically and by type. Gallery guides praise the pieces as outstanding specimens in their respective categories. Schoolchildren scout dates to fulfill assignments.There are no stories save a short description near the entrance relating how the museum acquired the collection.The curator’s reasons for arranging the pieces in this manner are unquestioned, hidden behind a taken-for-granted factuality.

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Conclusion What does this tell us about the dialogical meaning of cultural artifacts? I build my answer on the above accounts – imagined, recalled or generally known – in six points. First, the above accounts support the contention that artifacts do not have intrinsic meanings. People who use them in particular situations at particular times and in con-sensual coordination with other people attribute meanings.Attributions occur in language. For the Bushmen, our Coke bottle was something quite different from what it is to us.The movie showed us that the gift from the gods acquired many uses and consequently meant many things that we cannot access without understanding the Bushmen’s language, their culture.The armor had many uses too, but a far longer history. Shielding the human body accounts for only a small part of its “etymology.” To its makers, the armor was proof of outstanding craftsmanship.To the Duke it was a garment that made his wedding memorable. To those who had done wrong, the sight of the Black Knight’s armor induced fear.To those whom he helped, he brought relief.A family heirloom is not the same as a war trophy plundered from a defeated enemy. For the antiques dealer the armor meant profit. In the museum, it is one specimen of its kind. Second, the two fixed references in all of these accounts are the narrator, I, and the object A being talked about. I am the narrator; the armor takes the form of a presupposition, as discussed above. It occurs in variations of “A is for me,” “I see an A in the showcase,” and serves as the ground for elaborating on B,A’s meanings.This does not make the Coke bottle or the armor a physical object to which meanings are attached. Physics cannot account for the human uses of material things – language and culture does.We know how a Coke bottle feels in our hand, and, for visitors of the exhibit, the armor has an undeniable sensory presence. These are human artifacts, not clumps of matter of a certain chemical composition, weight, volume, melting temperature, and hardness. The armor is numbered and labeled. It can trigger memories; seeing it conjures conversations in which it or its kind appeared. Narratives are threads that string different interpretations into a story.The artifact A means many things, but not physics. Third, to conceptualize the multitude of meanings that artifacts can acquire in different contexts, I rely on Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) concept of “bricolage” somewhat liberally to suggest that artifacts, for instance our armor, pass through many loose assemblages of other artifacts, people, practices, and events, jointly participating in the constitution of systems of enacted meanings: the shop of the armor maker, the tournament during which the armor was “performed,” a transitional society that made the hiding of a knight’s identity a virtue, the armory of a wealthy collector organized in conversations on medieval artistry among armament buffs, and the exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (see Figure 11.1(d)). For Lévi-Strauss, a bricoleur is someone who uses available means, not necessarily as originally conceived, adapting them by trial and error to a current situation and

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combining them with little regard for conventions of what should go with what else. To me, a bricolage is a relatively loose ecology of artifacts, produced or at hand, whose uses are guided by conceptions that its many participants bring to it. Complementary practices like buying and selling, winning and loosing, even organizing an exhibit and visiting it, bring these artifacts into often novel interactions with each other and their users.As users change, artifacts change their meanings.When institutionalized, such practices may systematically specify and limit appropriate conceptions of and human interactions with artifacts of a certain kind. The sixteenth-century guilds, the armaments they produced, the wars and tournaments that the nobility engaged in, and the codes of honor it defended all worked together as do twentieth-century universities, corporations, mass media, computers, software, social networks, and their participants. Artifacts can be seen as playing different roles in these ecologies of artifacts. People collaborate in preserving their own conceptions of what their immediate environment should be, but concern themselves little with the whole bricolage, hence its heterogeneity.Whether we consider what we know of the worlds of Bushmen, knights, antique dealers, or museum curators, artifacts that did not fit into existing bricolages were either actively removed or forgotten, perhaps later recovered as something else.We see this in the loss of much of the sixteenth-century European armor during the following century. Bricolages can collapse, evolve, intrude into, or replace each other; those artifacts that survive successive bricolages are able to acquire new meanings and sustain fit during such transitions.The armor displayed today exhibited these characteristics during its long journey from the blacksmith to the museum. Fourth, through each transition from one bricolage to another some meanings are lost irrecoverably. The Bushmen had no idea what a Coke bottle means in our culture. After the Duke of Brunswick got married, the blacksmith creator of the Duke’s armor receded, having served his function; his craftsmanship was no longer an issue. The trophy that the victor took from the armory of his defeated opponent destroyed a token of a family’s legacy, its identity and certainly a trigger of its memories. In the hand of antique dealers, the pride and honor for which the armored knights fought were lost, just as the museum display destroyed the meaning the armor had for its private collector. The museum is merely another bricolage assembled and organized in terms alien to the succession of bricolages through which its artifacts passed and emerged as outstanding exemplars in a curator’s categories. Fifth, my role as a teller of the armor’s story is not different from those of the curator, the collector, the knight, and the blacksmith – excepting that I am aware of composing that artifact in narrative. I took the liberty of tracing the single artifact that I wanted to understand, the suit of armor that triggered the legend of the Black Knight of Brunswick, through other bricolages that I knew, could imagine, and convey. I sketched a story of this armor’s travels through different bricolages, its assumption of different meaning to different people, interactions with other artifacts in ways that made sense to participants in these bricolages and ultimately to me. My

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notion of bricolage conceives an artifact as a temporary resident en route to other bricolages, where it is assigned related or entirely new meanings.The story I told had the form: In my narrative,A means {B′1 to X1}, then {B′2 to X2}, ... , then {B′n to Xn} where X are specific others. This, I propose, is the form of stories in which social realities come alive for us, as meaningful and real. Things without a story may exist but have no meanings, no uses, no users, and no relevance in anyone’s life. Questions concerning meanings may be answered by simple impersonal propositions, as suggested in the beginning of this essay. However they are answered more likely in conversations that coordinate participants’ lives around them, resulting in stories that may continue in other conversations and determine the futures and uses of artifacts.The above form invites us to listen to the stories told by others whose bricolages we wish to understand and whose stories we therefore must retell with respect. It manifests the kind of second-order understanding I suggested as central to questions of social reality. Regrettably, we learn of the Bushmen’s world construction only through a cultural outsider, a narrator reading a script that in the guise of humor patronizes if not trivializes the Bushmen’s culture.This is unfortunate because the Bushmen have a voice to tell their own story.They would be available to talk with us rather than be talked about. Naturally, the stories of older artifacts are constrained because the sources of their meanings no longer speak to us, but more because our often-overriding preferences for conceptual shortcuts, simple explanatory schemes that systematically ignore them. Scientific theory, for example, privileges detached observers who tend to dismiss or assign lesser status to the voices of those involved. Semiotics’ preference for “A stands for B” two-world propositions denies space to those who state propositions and to multiverses, heterogeneous assemblies of artifacts that do not stand for anything in particular but play important roles. Moreover, rigorously institutionalized systems of categories such as museum curators’ conceptions of historical sequences tend to detach human experiences from artifacts. Sixth, what is the import of these suggestions? Briefly, they encourage us to move from abstract objectivist theory to self-reflective human-centered accounts of our social worlds. In the context of use, I propose that we locate meanings in the cultural practices that artifacts afford and that their users envision, distinguish, and enact. Accordingly, and given the enormous creativity with which humans perceive their world, I argue that objects of nature, too, be treated as human artifacts.Apple trees and Mount Everest have meanings that render them cultural artifacts with diverse histories of use. In the context of dialogue, my proposal suggests that we look for meaning in the narrative interrelation of multiple descriptions by different users, bystanders, or stakeholders

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of artifacts. Differences of this kind do not exist without acknowledging acts of drawing distinctions3 in the stories we tell, perform, and pass on. In the context of larger social realities, the above six points regarding the dialogical meaning of cultural artifacts recommend that we concern ourselves with ecologies of artifacts whose affordances and constraints account for many temporary opportunities and stabilities in social life. While technological artifacts can be engineered, ecologies cannot. I see bricolages as linguistically assembled, disassembled, and furnished with artifacts from previous bricolages, as well as embracing technological innovations, selectively supporting institutions that in turn selectively nourish artifacts. I call these ecologies bricolages to emphasize the non-theoretical haphazardness of their assembly and the multiplicity of roles that we can play in them. Entering a bricolage as one thing and moving to another as something else, is typical for artifacts as well as people. It is not plans, designs, and grand theories that hold bricolages together and keep them alive but the telling of multitudes of stories – from myths to the narration of technology – by their human constituents, by us.

3 Here, I am relativizing Bateson’s (1972:448–465) notion of difference, especially in his definition of information as the difference that makes the difference, as the product of drawing distinctions. Whereas differences give the impression of being objective, distinctions are acts performed by someone, by human beings, capable of creating innumerable kinds.

Chapter 12

The Methodo-logic of Content Analysis *

A Brief Historical Sketch Content analysis utilizes text – writings, images, and all kinds of symbolic matter – as data to answer various social research questions. The word first appeared in a 1941 research report (Waples & Berelson, 1941:2) and has appeared in Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language since 1961, but the use of texts to answer questions not necessarily prompted by their authors has longer roots. In the seventeenth century, at least three dissertations in theology addressed the effects of reading of non-religious matter, for example newspapers. The first welldocumented series of studies concerning the consequences attributed to text occurred in eighteenth-century Sweden during a controversy over the use of a popular songbook, seemingly undermining the authority of the Swedish State Church (Dovring, 1954–1955). By the end of the nineteenth century, newspapers had become a business. Significant shifts in content raised public concerns and stimulated several quantitative studies in the U.S. that measured column inches by content categories to show declines in coverage of matters perceived worthwhile. Conclusions were colored in moralizing terms. In 1910, the sociologist Max Weber (1911) foresaw the possibility of using newspaper content to study changes in the nature of the public, reader attention, power structures, employment patterns, and politics.World War I frustrated such research. His proposal did not influence newspaper research in the U.S. where quantification of newspaper content by critical journalists continued (e.g., by Woodward, 1934). Social scientists entered these debates in the 1930s and made several important methodological contributions to the analysis of newsprint. One was the introduction of theoretically motivated units of analysis – political symbols, references, * Original chapter, summarizing material from the first two chapters in Krippendorff, K. (1980a, 2004). Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. 1st and 2nd edition respectively. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.

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propositions advanced during elections, images of self and other, attitudes, pro and con, etc. – that replaced journalists’ informed quantifications of their own subject matter categories. Another was the use of statistical tools developed in other branches of science. Finally, the importance of the analysis of texts became recognized in sociology (Lazarsfeld, 1940; Merton, 1957a), political science (Lasswell, 1941), psychology (Allport, 1942), and other social sciences. During World War II, content analysts inferred military intelligence from enemy propaganda (George, 1959; Lasswell et al., 1965).This presented a major conceptual challenge and a well-funded opportunity to develop new conceptions. The social scientific study of printed matter resumed post-war, heralding the emergence of communication theory (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) and the institutionalization of the academic study of communication (Lasswell, 1948; Schramm, 1997) with content analysis as its key methodology. Content analysis spread to other academic and practical areas that heavily relied on previously difficult to analyze naturally occurring speech, interviews, and all kinds of written communications (Berelson, 1952; Pool, 1959). Large-scale content analyses were limited by the time-consuming task of reading and reliably coding large volumes of text. In the late 1950s, mechanical translation became of academic and practical interests and stimulated new computer software for manipulating literal (as opposed to numerical) data. In 1963, the first operational computer content analysis system, the General Inquirer (Stone et al., 1966), could process large quantities of text. Philip Stone’s hope, echoed by many subsequent software developers, was to replace human coders altogether. However, computational aids for content analysis required computer readable data, which shifted manual efforts from coding to data entry – only a slight simplification. Before the massive use of word processing software in the late 1970s, experimental use of typesetting tapes enabled the analysis of oneday-old newspaper issues (DeWeese, 1977).The 1980s witnessed the growth of the internet, rendering electronic versions of text, images, and sound the norm and paper the exception, providing content analysts an enormous wealth of analyzable data. Now, almost everything of interest to anyone is available electronically and computationally; numerous text analysis software programs compete for the attention of social scientists without providing a more general General Inquirer. While such software does not match human abilities to interpret written matter – not to forget visual images – the processing of large volumes of text at amazing speed provides attractive tradeoffs.Where such tradeoffs are infeasible, qualitative text analysis software has been developed to capture some advantages of computer text processing. Current online search engines can be interpreted as text analysis tools whose sophistication increasingly resembles what content analysts hope to accomplish – except that they are designed to make the internet accessible to everyone and are not configurable to answer specific social research questions. The concept of a “semantic Web” reflects the hope for more complex search/analytical capabilities.

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Definitions A definition suggests the correct use of a term. Definitions of content analysis also conceptualize the target of the analysis, specify criteria to be employed, and may guide users of the technique. In the literature, definitions of content analysis paralleled the evolution of concepts of communication, from essentialist definitions, through behavioral definitions to the relational and process-oriented definition advocated here. I review definitions in that order, citing only a prototype for each. An essentialist definition of content analysis takes content – the target of analysis – as inherent to a text. Bernard Berelson’s original definition exemplifies the essentialist orientation of his time:“a research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Berelson (1952:18). Setting aside the attributes objective, systematic, and quantitative for later comment, my chief objection to the essentialist definition concerns the phrase “description of the manifest content of communication.” Descriptions imply something observable, which presumes that content so exists. Berelson felt no need to elaborate on the crucial concept of “content” because for him and his contemporaries, there seemed to be no doubt about its meaning. Printed matter “contained” content for everyone to see. Except for the above-mentioned qualifications, Berelson’s definition reduced the method and the object of analysis to a tautology: “content analysis is the … description of … content.…” I will say more about this conception later. Berelson’s concept of content is informed by the popular, unreflected and continued prevalence of the so-called container metaphor,1 suggesting that messages contain information, hold their contents while in communication from one place to another as in envelopes, with the implication that authors write content into messages and receivers remove that content. Berelson’s operationalization of the attribute “manifest” is telling as well. When sources and receivers – I would add content analysts – interpret the same message differently, which is not unusual, Berelson’s definition restricts content analysis to what is intersubjectively verifiable – what is common to all of these interpretations or what everyone can agree upon. Accordingly, differences among interpretations are considered subjective variations of the objective core and are excluded as unanalyzable. Communication researchers need to be aware of the entailments of the popular container metaphor. The very term “content analysis” suffers from them, with essentialist definitions probably being the main culprit for content analysis methodology’s slow development. Careless users of the container metaphor, including many content analysts, may not see how the metaphor takes hold of their thinking, leading them to believe they study the obvious: what a text “contains.” George Gerbner (1985) starts from a similar assumption when he insists that mass-media messages carry the imprint of their industrial producers. For him, too, 1 See Chapter 3 in this volume.

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content resides in messages which can be described for what they contain. However, Gerbner goes beyond Berelson’s notion, suggesting that the real messages of the mass media are revealed in statistical accounts of their contents. He suggests that producers and audiences of mass media messages are unaware of how their statistical properties affect the perceptions of audience members, carrying industrial interests into popular culture. It is noteworthy that both Berelson’s and Gerbner’s conceptions of content privilege content analysts’ accounts over readings by ordinary readers. Behavioral definitions take content to be a property of the source of a text. Such definitions are in partial agreement with the tradition of literary scholarship that follows the container metaphor to authors’ intents and take analytical advantage of a simpler validity criterion for analyzing meanings. However, content analysts of behaviorist orientation build causality, not the container metaphor, into their definition. For the psycholinguist Charles Osgood (1959:35) “content analysis [is] a procedure whereby one makes inferences about sources and receivers from evidence in the messages they exchange.” Notice that this definition relies on sendermessage-receiver causalities, bypassing the notion of content altogether. Ole Holsti (1969:25) elaborates on Osgood’s conception, committing content analysis to an encoding/decoding paradigm in which message sources are linked causally to the effects that messages have on their recipients.The given messages are linked to sources by reversing the latter’s encoding processes and to their recipients through how they decode them. Leaning on Laswell’s (1948) influential questions that define communication research, Holsti wants content analysts to describe message characteristics in terms of “what,” “how,” and “to whom” in order to infer their antecedents in terms of “who” and “why,” and their consequences in terms of “with what effects.” It is understood that antecedents and consequences could be determined more directly if sources and recipients were accessible to observation or questioning by the analyst. But unable to observe causally involved properties directly, content analysts cannot but infer them. I am sympathetic to Osgood’s and Holsti’s logic, but putting sources or receivers in charge of the questions that content analysts pose may be too limiting, and describing message characteristics in terms of “what,” “how,” and “to whom” unnecessarily constrains analysts’ reading of texts. Moreover, behavioral definitions fail to acknowledge analysts’ contributions to the reading of analyzed texts in view of a given research question. The definition I have pursued generalizes content analysis to any situation where specific inferences are justifiable in terms of the known or hypothesized relations between text and what the analyst wishes to infer: Content analysis is a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts … to the contexts of their use. (Krippendorff, 2004:18) As a technique, content analysis offers specialized procedures that can be divorced from the personal authority of the researcher. As a research technique, content

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analysis provides ways to knowledge about textual phenomena and their meaningful uses.Techniques are expected to be reliable. Specifically, research techniques should result in findings that are replicable; researchers working at different points in time and perhaps under different circumstances should obtain the same results when applying the same technique to the same data. Replicability is the most important form of reliability. Research must also yield valid results. It must be open for careful scrutiny and the claims resulting from its efforts must withstand independently available evidence.The methodological requirements of reliability and validity are not unique to content analysis but make particular demands on its use. The criteria of reliability – the reproducibility of the analytical procedure – and validity – the reality of the inferences to which that procedure leads – are both measurable, validity at least in principle, whereas Berelson’s criteria are uncertain in this regard and carry with them epistemological baggage. “Objective” means independent of observers, yet texts do not analyze themselves. Researchers’ questions, their conceptions of the situation in which they obtained data and the tools they have available determine how an analysis proceeds and where it leads. Content analysts cannot hide behind a façade of objectivity. They must justify everything they do with the texts they analyze. For Berelson, “systematic” assures that the analyst does not exclude cases that do not fit their hypothesis.Today, this is an issue of sampling subsumed under the criterion of validity.The requirement that content analysis be “quantitative” stems from an earlier and naive definition of science. Not only is all reading of text qualitative to begin with, but during the last fifty years we have seen compelling qualitative content analyses that should not be excluded. Finally, the already mentioned criterion of “manifest content” would limit the concern of content analysis to common or dictionary meanings. However the most insightful content analyses make use of unusual but still informed readings and content analysts often have good reasons for interpreting given text other than how ordinary readers would read them. The most distinctive feature of this definition of content analysis is its insistence on inferences from texts to their contexts of use. As will become clear below, these inferences are not inductive, i.e., generalizations from data, or deductive, i.e., implications of general theories or propositions, but abductive, i.e., answering specific research questions about features of an unobserved empirical domain that is logically distinct from the domain of available texts. Consider four examples of what the definition embraces. Examples (1) In peacetime, research on international relations is not too difficult. One can examine existing treaties, interview the governing elites of different countries, obtain data of trading activities, and survey the attitudes of the population of one country about another. But in wartime, information about opponents is difficult to obtain. During World War II, several U.S. agencies systematically monitored German

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domestic propaganda with the aim of extracting military intelligence, information about the intentions of the Nazi elite, and indications of the psychological effects of Allied bombing, to name a few objectives. The analyst’s task was not to tender generalizations about these broadcasts or to reveal lies of propaganda but to make specific inferences from public broadcasts about phenomena of interest to U.S. policy makers, phenomena that could not be observed directly – thus conforming to the defining feature of content analysis. Inferences had to be trusted, i.e., had a good chance to be valid, or they would not have been taken seriously. In the absence of direct observations, all content analysts must provide compelling reasons for what they infer, especially spelling out the knowledge – how the propaganda machine used the often-unknown facts – that was assumed invariant during the analysis. Using documents available after World War II, Alexander George (1959) validated many of the inferences made by FCC analysts and described the analytical constructions that the analysts employed successfully. (2) Public opinion research using large samples is costly, takes time to complete and can be biased by the questions asked of interviewees. Inferences about the attitudes of individual readers from what they read have proved difficult because of the determinants of attitude change are many; thus, opinion research favors interviews over content analyses. However, David Fan (1988; Fan & McAvoy, 1989) developed text analysis software that can process day-by-day news coverage concerning contentious issues – attitudes toward political candidates, environmental issues, and AIDS, for example – and can predict from it the opinions in a population, the proportion of pros and cons on an issue. The key to his content analysis is a dynamic model, taken in part from epidemiology but refined to account for how people respond to frequencies of exposure and forget past coverage. His model is not concerned with individual attitudes but with population proportions of the kind that public opinion typically reports. It infers these proportions from the fluctuations in mass media coverage and, after a few iterations its predictions converge to results that public opinion researchers would obtain as well. The work suggests the possibility of substituting the direct measurements of public opinion surveys by the more efficient inferences that content analysis can provide. (3) Psychology has a long tradition of experimenting with human subjects. Such experiments are limited to presently available subjects and prevent psychologists from exploring subjects’ pasts or studying people who are unable to come to a lab, including historical figures or inaccessible dignitaries. To expand the scope of psychological research, Gordon Allport (1942) proposed to add the analysis of personal documents to the repertoire of psychological methods. His suggestion amounted to conducting content analyses of individual writing: personal papers, diaries, letters, and recorded speeches. Importantly, Allport allowed researchers from different schools of psychology to construct their own contexts for analyzing such texts. In his own work, he formulated relationships between what people say and a variety of psychological variables in terms of personality theory (Allport, 1965), inferring attitudes, emotional states, personality traits, ethnic prejudices,

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perceptions of social environment, or psychopathologies. Since Allport’s proposal, psychologists have standardized numerous tests embracing content analysis; for example, discomfort/relief quotients, graphological interpretations, readability yardsticks, contingency analysis, thematic apperception tests, interaction process analysis, and personal structure analysis. (4) Political scientists always have been interested in what is called the succession problem, predicting the future leadership of a country.This was particularly difficult regarding the Soviet Union under Stalin as succession of party leadership was unregulated and the proceedings of the politburo shrouded in secrecy. Nathan Leites et al. (1951) reported obtaining all speeches made by politburo members on the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949. Naturally, all speakers expressed adulation of Stalin. Initially, the only noticeable differences seemed due to individual styles and therefore of no interest to political scientists. As experts on the Soviet Union, however, the researchers also knew that closeness to people in politics could not be expressed too freely in public. They noted two kinds of expressions of nearness. One set, “symbols of nearness and intimacy (father, solicitude, and so on) appears most frequently in the popular image of Stalin and [is] stressed for that audience, which is far removed from him.” The other set derives from the prevailing “depreciation of such nearness in political relationships. The ideal party member does not stress any gratification he may derive from intimacy for political ends.… Those closer to Stalin politically are permitted to speak of him in terms of lesser personal intimacy (‘leader of the party,’ etc.),” and are thus privileged to refrain from the crudest form of adulation. The authors concluded that the difference between using the “Bolshevik image” or the “popular image” of Stalin “not only reflects the Bolshevik evaluation of the party as distinguished from and superior to the masses at large, but also indicates the relative distance of the speaker from Stalin” (1951:338–339). The researchers ranked politburo members according to their relative emphasis on one kind versus the other, and found Molotov, Malenkov, and Beria (in this order) to have the highest number of references to Stalin’s Bolshevik image. From this ranking, the researchers concluded that these three politburo members were probably closest to Stalin. The power struggle that ensued immediately after Stalin’s death confirmed the validity of these inferences. Although not of interest and therefore not noted by the researchers was that Khrushchev turned out to be furthest removed from Stalin by this inferential rule, immediately preceded by Bulganin and Kosygin. As we now know, those furthest removed from Stalin played major roles in overcoming Stalinism in the Soviet Union, further validating the researchers’ approach. The Analytical Logic of Content Analysis A conceptual framework that follows from the definition of content analysis, Figure 12.1, depicts the major concepts for design and evaluation of the method. I will describe each briefly and highlight where it differs from essentialist or behavioral

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The many worlds of others

Context as conceived by content analysts

Validation Validating Validating evidence evidence

? Meanings, Meanings, referents, referents, uses uses of oftexts texts

Answer Answer

Inferences

Research Research question question Analytical Stable Relations relations

Content analysis

construct

Text

Figure 12.1. Framework for Content Analysis

definitions of content, and then contrast content analysis with familiar techniques in social research. Content analysis starts with available Text. To recognize something as a text implies an invitation to read it. Content analysts follow such invitations in their own terms. By this definition, text is not restricted to writing. It includes images, sound, and physical artifacts, and anything that points the reader to something other than the text. •

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So conceived, texts may be found in the form of historical records, diaries, newsprint, enemy broadcasts, or Stalin’s birthday speeches, or, they may be generated for the purpose of content analysis, such as by means of interviews, focus group discussions, or in psychotherapy. Texts have no objective – reader-independent – meanings, unlike what essentialist definitions claim. All texts are created to be read and understood by someone; they are of interest to content analysts precisely because of their ontogenesis. It is in the process of reading that the meanings of texts arise and inform their readers. Content analysts too must be able to read the texts they analyze. Texts can be read variously, from numerous perspectives. There is no need to assume a single shared core – as in essentialist conceptions and often implied by coding texts into mutually exclusive categories. In conducting a content analysis, coders may be trained to read texts in ways unintended by the producers or sources of texts and in contrast to coders’ everyday reading habits. Texts occur in contexts of their use by readers. A reader connects what she reads to a context through the meanings this connection has for her. A context is the environment of text – not only linguistic but also mental, situational, behavioral, and cultural. A command relates to actions. A telephone call from a friend concerns interpersonal relations.A television show may be enjoyed and

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discussed among viewing family members. Publications in different languages connect to different cultures. Content analysts must define the Context in which they wish to analyze their texts. •

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Content analysis starts by decontextualizing the texts to be analyzed. The very act of finding, collecting, sampling, and bringing texts to the site where their analysis is performed removes them from the context of their original use, which is irretrievably lost in this step. Content analysts must then invent, construct, or imagine a context in which they can work and in which the text makes sense to them. Some recommend reconstructing the context of the texts’ original use. Behavioral definitions of content suggest focusing on the network of causal connections in which sources occur. Neither is required. Often, the choice of a context for analysis is informed by analysts’ academic perspectives, theories pursued, or practical intents. Psychiatrists analyze texts from their perspective; political scientists pursue different questions and corporations that survey their environments have their own conceptions of the world. Unlike the multiplicity of contexts in the minds of the original users of sampled texts, the analysts’ context must be explicit and should be examinable by fellow researchers. Choice of context effectively disambiguates original meanings and directs analytically relevant meanings toward what matters in the research. While content analysts enjoy considerable freedom to choose any context deemed suitable for their research efforts, two limitations apply. (1) The choice of a context and everything embraced by it must be logically consistent and justifiable to the researchers’ peers, clients, or users of the content analysis results. (2) The context must be productive of results (Janis, 1965). A Research question is what a content analysis is designed to answer.

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One motivation for using a content analysis is that the questions it seeks to answer pertain to phenomena presently unobserved or unverified while the analysis is in progress. As the above examples suggest, there would be no point to inferring something already known. Whereas scientific hypotheses usually are tested with available data for their generalizability to a larger population, in content analysis, research questions pertain to specific phenomena that are part of the context chosen for the analysis. Testing statistical hypotheses on the characteristics of sampled texts may well be a step in the process of analyzing texts, but it cannot stop there. Research questions must imply or explicate a set of possible Answers. What selects among the possible answers are Inferences from texts (ideally only

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one). To acknowledge the uncertainties of such inferences, answers to the research question are characterized by probabilities, controlled for errors of omission and commission.Answers to content analysis research questions must not be confused with hypotheses; specific inferences are not generalizations. The former is achieved by abduction, the latter by induction.Typical research questions are: is the newspaper biased in favor of a controversy, can the patient be considered schizophrenic, who is the likely successor of Stalin, how would ordinary readers interpret a political speech, does watching violent television programs contribute to an increase in violence? In contrast, questions concerning whether a particular variable can be measured pertain to a researcher’s ability. Questions about how often particular words appear in a text are decided by counting. Questions regarding whether a text is correctly categorized, interpreted, or rearticulated are semantic issues. The latter are answerable without inferences, without venturing outside the given texts, and therefore do not qualify as research questions for content analyses. Research questions must be stated so that their answers can be validated in principle. This excludes mere descriptive accounts, translations, and literary interpretations of the analyzed text. For example, asking how teachers are represented on television fails to specify for whom this may be so, thus making validation logically impossible. Essentialist definitions of content do not need to make room for validation, as content is presumed objectively present, merely awaiting accurate description. Behavioral definitions have difficulty validating inferences about variables other than psychological ones as they have to be available for observation.

Besides demonstrating the reliability of the process of a content analysis, its inferences must be backed by reasonable knowledge of the Stable relations between the readable characteristics of the available text and the answers to the analyst’s research questions: stable = invariant, unchanging – at least when the results of a content analysis are considered seriously. •

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Such relations must be unintended by the sources of texts, at least while backing the analyst’s inferences. A source that knows how it is being analyzed and is able to control the texts in the dimensions in which they are processed could direct the analysis towards desirable results and render them invalid. While almost all texts are of instrumental value to their sources, content analysts need to look for relations that the source of their texts does not, or, better, cannot manipulate for effects (for example, see previous discussion of the birthday speeches for Stalin). Such relations must be able to distinguish among the possible answers of the research question, for example, select among possible authors of an unsigned literary work, render a psychiatric diagnosis, or predict audience responses to

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a television show.Technically speaking, such relations must transmit information from given text to the research questions.2 Evidence about such relations may be obtained in preparation of a content analysis, for example, by searching for correlations between the rate of identifiable speech disturbances and the anxiety of speakers, between the frequency of mass media references to crime and public concerns about crime (moderately successful) or crime statistics (less successful). Such relations may be deduced from established theories, for example, from cognitive dissonance theory regarding how readers evaluate texts (which informed evaluative assertion analysis). They may also be obtained from subjects, such as by asking them to rank, q-sort, or perform other tasks on texts, or from informant who can explain common conventions underlying these relations. In any case, content analysts need to provide plausible arguments for the relations on which their inferences rest.

As already suggested, the feature that distinguishes content analysis from other techniques of social inquiry – survey research, experiments, network analysis – is the nature of its Inferences. •

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Whereas most analytical techniques in the social sciences are inductive in the sense of moving from detailed but numerically limited data to generalizations, testing hypotheses or theories about populations from which the data were sampled; content analysis provides inferences by abduction. Abduction proceeds from one empirical domain – here of available text – to another empirical domain – the research questions about features of a chosen context of this text, not observed.The two domains are logically distinct and any motion from one to the other must be backed by demonstrable or assumed Stable relations between the two. The frequencies of mentioning an issue on television are logically distinct and observed independent from the attention that a public pays to that issue. Possible links between the two domains requires evidential support or compelling arguments. In the process of a content analysis, inferences are formalized as Analytical constructs. Such constructs operationalize relevant stable relations between texts and the answers to research questions so as to be applicable to available texts. Some analytical constructs may be taken for granted and applied without substantiation, for example, when declaring the frequency of mentioning a political candidate for office as an index of his or her importance. Some analytical constructs are simple, as when they instruct a computer to categorize semantically similar words, such as in the above-mentioned General Inquirer (Stone et al., 1966). Some rely on seemingly obvious empirical truths but are

2 See Chapter 14 in this volume for the concept of transmission.

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used to infer more complex concepts with them, such as when the proximity of co-occurring words known to correlate with their users’ word associations are used to compute (infer) elaborate word clusters.The analytical construct that Leites et al. (1951) assumed to rank politburo members regarding their closeness to Stalin operationalized considerable insights about public speaking in the Soviet Union. The analytical construct that World War II propaganda analysts developed and used to justify their inferences from enemy broadcasts was far more complex – without the use of computers. Content analysis is often identified with coding textual units into categories and counting incidences of these categories. Some early scholars limited their vision of content analysis to coding (Miller, 1951) and the first large computer content analysis system, the General Inquirer (Stone et al., 1966), essentially implemented this conception albeit on a massive scale. Meanwhile, text analysis software has mushroomed and is used in areas other than social scientific explorations. Today, computers process vast amounts of texts and routinely mine huge electronic data banks for relevant textual data.Talk of the next generation of search engines for the internet increasingly conceptualizes them as what one may call content analysis agents, and their availability promises novel applications. Unfortunately, the analytical constructs built into or implied in available content analysis software have not developed the sophistication that human coders bring to a content analysis. While human coders cannot possibly match computers in reliability, speed, and reach, they remain indispensable parts of an intellectually necessary human– computer cooperation toward productive content analyses.

Chapter 13

Discourse as Systematically Constrained Conversation *

Introduction Over the last forty years, a slow epistemological revolution has been taking place – in philosophy beginning with Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), John L.Austin (1962), Richard Rorty (1967), and continuing with John Searle (1969, 1995); and in the social sciences beginning with Peter Winch (1958). It realizes language not merely as a reflection of reality, a simple medium of representation, but as constitutive of reality. In the social sciences this view, increasingly accepted since Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) pioneering work and the anthropological writings of Clifford Geertz (1973), was extended by Ernst von Glasersfeld’s (1995) radical constructivism, Kenneth Gergen’s (1999) social constructionism, and Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) sociological theory of communication. Recognizing the constitutive role of language problematizes the enlightenment notions of all science as objective, neutral, and practice-independent. It implicates language in an observer’s perceptions and questions the development of social theories that bypass the meanings and interpretations of the people theorized.This recognition moves language into the center, not only of social scientific pursuits, but of all branches of learning, knowledge creation, and information transmission. The contention that social organizations, whether churches, businesses, or scientific laboratories, consist of networks of conversation calls for language to be a primary source of explaining social phenomena and for reconceptualizing language in terms of how linguistic practices accomplish what they do. These developments render discourse the key to social constructions of reality. This essay will elaborate a notion of discourse that integrates several concepts into a comprehensive framework. I will illustrate the distinctions made in the process with a few familiar professional/academic discourses. However, I see discourse as * Substantially rewritten from Krippendorff, K. (1995a). Redesigning design: an invitation to a responsible future. Pages 138–162 in Päivi Tahkokallio & Susann Vihma (Eds.). Design – Pleasure or Responsibility? Helsinki: University of Art and Design, maintaining only the propositions illustrated here.

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a far more general concept than can be illustrated here, the primary requirement of which is that people participate in social constructions that are constituted by communicating and acting. Discourse Dictionaries define discourse as text above the level of sentences or prolonged monologue. Linguists surprisingly have little to say about discourse, limiting themselves to studying smaller units of speech, the morphology and phonology of words and their syntactic and semantic roles in sentences of natural languages.The analysis of discourse – going beyond linguistic concerns – becomes an interdisciplinary venture although more at home in the humanities and social sciences than in the natural sciences.There are at least three ways of conceiving discourse. One is found in content analysis.1 The aim of content analysis is to make inferences from large bodies of text to specific features of a chosen context (Krippendorff, 2004). Usually, but by no means exclusively, content analysts categorize many small textual units and develop statistical accounts of these units, revealing distributional patterns not identifiable by reading from which analysts make inferences about readers, producers, or situations in which the texts play roles.Typical examples are analyses that reveal portrayals of candidates for political office in mass media, authorship of unsigned documents, an author’s ethnic prejudices, military intelligence extracted from enemy domestic broadcasts during war, and the pathology of a psychiatric patient.All of these examples discover statistical contingencies in large samples of communications or texts and infer from them phenomena of interest to the analyst. The second is discourse analysis, traditionally involving reading across a body of texts and conceptually placing these readings in the contexts that generated the body of texts. In line with the tradition of literary scholarship, analysts might look for structures in texts – how sentences are organized into stories or other cultural forms – and extract dominant themes or overarching narratives that characterize genres, authors, readers, eras, or cultures. On the other hand, analysts might establish connections between larger collections of texts to look for patterns of similarity and difference. For example, Michel Foucault (1965) studied how the emerging discourse of nineteenth-century psychiatry brought forth the concept of the unconscious. For Norman Fairclough (1988), discourse is a social practice that reveals how social and political domination or power relations are reproduced. He proposes three dimensions of discourse: the text, its production, distribution, and consumption practices, and the events that relate to or enter texts. Teun van Dijk (1985a, 1998) treats mass communication as discourse and uses ideology as an explanatory frame to see how groups are represented across texts. Similarly,

1 See Chapter 12 in this volume.

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Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter (1992) analyze the language of racism that permeates a body of texts.These conceptions of discourse have also entered cognitive psychology (Edwards, 1997; Potter, 1996; Potter and Wetherell, 1987), which pursues the construction of individually significant realities. My approach is interactional. I contend that natural conversation is the basic, common universally practiced use of language. Writing is always secondary to conversation; it presupposes experiences of conversation, and written communication between people is clumsier than talk. Notwithstanding its benefits, writing constrains communication. Thus, written discourse is constrained conversation, constrained relative to the freewheeling openness of everyday conversation. Discourse can be described as a Wittgensteinian language game in which players accept restrictions such as complying with formal rules of conduct to deliver a sermon, conforming to the APA stylebook for citations, using specialized professional vocabularies, accepting a disciplinary thought style or allowing one person to exert power over others, for example, by not performing certain conversationally possible speech acts. I am less concerned with abstractions such as power2 than with how they manifest themselves in interactions among people, what they do there. Interactions also provide data other than from reading someone’s writings.They add valuable information about sequential organization, interpersonal relationships, and speech acts, which escape traditional discourse analysis. Discourse involves people in various roles and is fundamentally self-organizing or autonomous. My conception of self-organization relates to what is true for conversation – the ability to direct itself from one topic to another, including toward outcomes – and is informed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s (1980, 1988) conception of autopoiesis, a biological conception of how organisms sustain their living through time. However, I do not adopt Maturana and Varela’s determinisms. Discourse is embodied in the agency of members of a community of practitioners without whose bodily and linguistic participation discourse could not exist. A discourse community causes changes in the world of its discourse, whether by altering individual perceptions, directing members’ activities, collectively composing discourse-specific artifacts, including written texts, or reflecting and rearticulating itself. While I would like to see discourse analyzed in the microcosm of specific interactions in the traditional methods of conversation analysis, as initiated by Erving Goffman (1959), pursued rigorously by Harvey Sacks (1992), and continued by Charles Goodwin (1981) among many others, here I am concerned only with macro-level concepts. Therefore, I will not comment on turn-taking, adjacency pairs, interruptions, and repairs but define five constitutive components of discourse (numbered). I will describe larger social constraints on language use accepted within a community, and expect these constraints to manifest also in verbal interchanges, speech acts, that would be analyzable by traditional conversation analysis.

2 See Chapter 8 in this volume for an elaboration of the metaphor of power.

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My concept of discourse could be characterized as sociological, except that I avoid the superior observer stance typical of sociologists who often define social phenomena from the outside, in terms of theoretically motivated categories. If discourses are self-organizing, then they develop internal practices and categories to talk of these practices which are not easily recognizable from their outside.To understand what constitutes a particular discourse, I suggest describing what is going on inside that discourse from within it, ideally in its own terms. Of interest beyond describing what a particular discourse does is the dynamics between or among discourses, which has so far escaped traditional analysis and may not be obvious from within any participating discourse without the distinctions that I propose. This essay therefore provides useful distinctions for analyzing, or, applying the concept of discourse to my effort, for constructing discourses so as to be recognizable and analyzable regarding what they do to and with each other. 1 Discourses Surface in Bodies of Textual Matter, as Artifacts Textual matter is the literal heritage of a discourse.This “matter,” having a material base, endures repeated handling within a discourse community and typically survives the life span of its individual members. It consists of artifacts – physical objects, images, records, and literary works – left behind for subsequent (re)examination, (re)search, and (re)articulation.The discourse of art history includes works of art, objects, images, and publications that order them and place them in various contexts. The discourse of design includes exemplars of good design in museums, private collections, or publications, and handbooks, codes, and devices that aid the creation of design specifications. The discourse of physics includes reports of experiments and the experiments reported, theories and what they are meant to explain, publications in the form of books, journals, and textbooks, as well as measuring instruments demonstrated at scientific meetings. Discourses surface in textual matter – its artifacts – because, like icebergs, there is more to what is obvious, visible, readable, and usable. I equate textual matter and artifacts to emphasize that the origin of text is human and that what discourses bring forth is not limited to writing. Note that I do not make the semiotic distinction between artifacts that represent and artifacts that are represented. I avoid the trap of regarding discourse as a representational medium.3 Even in scientific experiments, the data generated are evidence of an experimenter’s ability to create them. They are artifacts transformed into other artifacts, demonstrating what people can do and recording what they have done in their world. That discourses bring forth artifacts underlies Foucault’s (1970) notion of discourse as well, echoed by Parker’s definition of discourse as “a system of

3 See Chapter 10 in this volume for a critique of semiotics.

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statements which constructs an object” (1989:61). As such, they are involved in an important circularity: the artifacts a discourse constructs are constructed in support of the very discourse practices of a community that produces them.Accordingly, despite the claim of physicists of describing nature the way it is, I argue that physics constructs nature to be observable, measurable, and explainable in terms of causes, a form of explanation that defines the discourse of physics. Physics rules out phenomena that cannot be so construed, which distinguishes physics from what it is not. In this sense, the nature that the natural sciences construct in texts and through experiments is nothing but an artifact of their discourse. What integrates the multitude of artifacts (texts) created by a multitude of members of a discourse community into a body of artifacts (texts) are the connections among them, their intertextualities. This becomes apparent in at least four ways. First,the sharing of a distinct vocabulary. Discourses have distinct vocabularies whose combinatorial possibilities generate innumerable artifacts and discourse-specific practices. By being constructed from the same vocabulary, the artifacts of a discourse share an identity while allowing for variety.This is how the artifacts of physics, and, say, of biology differ. They are constructed from different vocabularies to be submitted to different inquiries. For example, the word “function” is used freely in biology to denote roles that parts of an organism play in relation to their whole, the whole organism in turn serving a function in relation to its species, for example, maintaining its size through reproduction. Functional explanations permeate much of biological theory construction, research, and writing and hold the discourse together. Functional explanations have migrated into other discourses, for example, engineering and sociology, without however weakening biology.The vocabulary of physics, by contrast, has no place for such functions. Although physicists also deal with different levels of explanation, they consider functional explanations metaphysical, unworthy of a science of nature. Evidently, the difference between the two natural sciences is not due to differences in nature, but the result of discourse that gives rise to particular artifacts. Second, creating networks of connections among artifacts. In addition to unifying vocabularies, discourses connect their artifacts in other ways.All scientific writings have histories of building on each other.All artifacts improve on previously produced artifacts.Theories improve their reach over time or disappear. Members of discourse communities come to know the parts of these histories as they live with them. Members also create explicit connections among texts, quoting one in a later one, citing the works of previous authors, or assembling different texts in a book, much as engineers build an automobile from available parts. Hypertext is a contemporary example of networking electronic texts, enabling users to experience intertextuality by moving from one text to another. Networks of citations and references similarly organize the artifacts of a discourse into connected “data bases,” into systems. I might mention the difficulty of connecting and retrieving pictorial matter. While some software recognizes shapes, it is far from being able to scan collections of visual

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records for ideas or past uses. This amounts to a serious bottleneck for design discourse where connections among visual forms are likely to remain individual conceptions. Third,bundling artifacts by categories and making them selectively available. Prototypes for bundling textual matter are journals, archives, and, one might as well add, bookstores and museums.These holding devices usually are specialized by subject matter and bring different textual matters into proximity, affecting their access. Museums are devices for bundling cultural artifacts; factories bundle production machinery. Artifacts, having physical properties, occupy space, which in turn limits the amounts that journals publish, archives hold, museums exhibit, and bookstores stock. Space limitations force institutions managing such bundles to weed out irrelevant matter, which keeps the collections current. Fourth,the necessary openness of textual matter.Vocabularies enable new combinations to be formed, thereby expanding the artifacts of a discourse quantitatively. But discourses can also prohibit alternative readings, heretical interpretations, and rearticulations inconsistent with their past, thus limiting the combinatorial possibilities of a vocabulary. At least one hypothesis, by John Horgan (1996), suggests that the natural sciences are approaching their end at which everything that could be explained has been explained. At such a point, the body of scientific knowledge is complete, the discourse community has nothing to contribute, and scientific discourse dies. Horgan’s projection is controversial, of course, but his point is well taken. If a discourse insists on constructing a single and consistent universe in which everything has its place, and which makes alternative texts increasingly difficult if not impossible within it, that discourse could exhaust itself. There were cultures that ceased to exist not because of famine or natural disasters but by exhausting their intellectual or cultural creativity, for example, the Etruscan culture, whose dissolution seems to defy external causes. 2 Discourses Are Kept Alive within Communities of Their Practitioners Using the popular container metaphor entails conceiving of messages as having contents and of information as residing in text. This prevents us from seeing the human involvement in the discursive creation of textual matter or artifacts. Categorizing something as a text or an image amounts to an invitation or intent to read or use it as such. Ignoring the role of knowledgeable readers of texts or users of artifacts probably has the same metaphorical root, suggesting something behind its appearance.This is why I avoided the tradition of discourse analysis and instead turned to an interactive conception of language derived from conversations, which led me to acknowledge that every discourse constitutively involves a discourse community that keeps it alive. Just as a language dies with its last speaker, so does a discourse. This is not to say that the artifacts of one discourse could not be

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appropriated by another, for example, the language spoken and used by ancient Mayans is now an artifact of the discourse of anthropology; paintings that were meaningful to their painters and sponsors after some years become part of art history that art historians construct for discussion with colleagues.What keeps a discourse alive within its community? I suggest three answers. First,the artifacts of a discourse,its texts,must be continuously (re)read,(re)written,(re)built, (re)produced, (re)searched, (re)articulated, or rejected. If a discourse is to exceed the lifespan of its members, reading its texts is essential to recruiting new members, remembering the past, affirming what is important, and noticing what is missing. Recruiting new members may follow a sequence of studying increasingly demanding texts, which gradually ropes newcomers into a discourse and into how its members think and what they say and do. Making creative contributions to a discourse entails knowing what was there before. One could say that the life of a discourse hangs on its community to continuously reconstruct the artifacts of their discourse. As suggested above, where reinterpretations become difficult or are prohibited, a discourse ceases to be viable. Among the personal rewards contributors to a discourse receive are freedom to rearticulate its textual matter and acceptance by its community for their creativity. Second, members of a discourse community continually test each other’s readings and uses. The reading of a document may well be a solitary experience at first, but its rearticulations and the objects that emerge as a result of reading usually are observable by other members, thus reading becomes a social phenomenon. In conversations, the diversity of readings becomes the subject of attention, praise, criticism, and elaboration, which reduces them to what is mutually acceptable within a discourse community. Thus, readings remain within what is acceptable within a discourse community. Assuring this in scientific discourses is the purpose of seminars at universities, presentations at professional meetings, publications, and scholarly debates. Third, meanings can cross discursive boundaries. People sequentially participate in many discourses. For example, an individual may be a scientist, a family member, a local politician, a plaintiff (in court), and the driver of an automobile. Each role entails the use of different vocabularies.As a scientist, one speaks of theories, ways of generating data, analytical methods, validating evidence.As a parent, one speaks as a care-giver and in consideration of a child’s developmental needs.As a politician, one responds to the needs expressed by a constituency. From a sociological perspective, discourses are conceptually distinct and incommensurate; as individuals move from one discourse to another they not only play different roles, they become different persons.This makes sense logically, but since we have only one body that makes these transitions, things are not that simple. We learn to read and write habitually and automatically without remembering where our words come from, how this ability was acquired and are unaware of the cognitive processes involved in reading and writing fluently; this is a bodily adaptation to the literal and cultural environment and to various discourses.With

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only one body in which to play, meanings resulting from reading texts in one discourse can resonate with meanings such texts have in another. Let me elaborate on two ways meanings can cross discursive boundaries: metaphors and emotions. Metaphors4 occur in language and import conceptions from another, usually more familiar discourse into the present one, enhancing understanding of what one faces (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987), but in “alien” terms. For example, “time is money” brings the economic discourse into one’s busy life;“collecting facts” renders facts as preexisting entities that can be picked up from the ground, sorted, weighed, and counted (Salmond, 1982). Since Aristotle, metaphors, i.e., understanding something in terms of something else, are considered suspect, inconclusive, misleading and therefore rejected from scientific discourse – but only when noticed, for they permeate language use everywhere. Taking metaphors as natural demonstrates the hidden connections across discourses through the body of members of any discourse community. To feel obliged to dismiss metaphors when noticed demonstrates the constraining nature of a discourse. For slightly different reasons, emotions are considered irrational in most discourses and therefore suppressed or ignored. For example, in a court of law, while everyone commits to and follows protocols of legal discourse, it is almost impossible to prevent extraneous experiences from coloring participants’ perceptions.A judge who is also a caring mother may show more compassion to a child in a custody case than one who does not have such experiences.A scientist who feels insecure at home may perceive himself personally attacked when questions are raised about his research methods. Emotions rarely are part of professional discourses. Regarding them as “irrational” is evidence of their ability to intrude and of efforts by a discourse to prevent this from happening. 3 Discourses Institute Their Recurrent Practices Since Berger and Luckmann (1966), institutions have been identified as historically derived habits and conventions that are self-policing in the sense that deviations from them are counteracted regularly in predictable ways by those who are part of them. Institutions are not designed de novo.They emerge in processes of “freezing” recurrent and successful interactions into habits and traditions that come to be taken for granted, proceed unquestioned and transform communication into reproducible and reliable practices. One could regard discourse as an institutionalized use of language. It provides numerous stable forms, for example, its vocabulary, grammatical constructions, rhetorical tropes, and language games. Deviations from standard uses of language carry social costs, for example, not being understood and not getting what one wants.To avoid paying such costs one needs to fall back on widely shared meanings and habits of speech. As Nelson Phillips et al. (2004:638) suggest,

4 See Chapter 3 in this volume.

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institutions are not merely social constructions, they are social constructions constituted through discourse. Fairclough (1992) writes that discourse constructs its own conventions for how to see reality, ruling out ways of thinking and action that do not fit.Well before these scholars, Ludwig Fleck (1935/1979) described the same phenomenon in terms of “thought styles” that are typical of “thought collectives” of scientists. Institutions are the third constitutive component of discourse. First, the viability of a discourse depends crucially on its institutionalization. Practices proven successful repeatedly are adopted easily within a discourse and are perceived as natural, unquestionable ways of proceeding. Indeed, much research is routine, “normal” as Thomas Kuhn (1962/1996) suggests. Everyone knows how to proceed with some guarantee of success. Discourses that do not do this well have difficulties. For example, the discourse of cybernetics emerged in the 1950s without developing an easy fit among established academic discourses, proving itself by creating numerous novel artifacts of amazing usefulness: digital communication, information technology, automata, sequential and parallel computers, self-organizing systems, autopoiesis, constructivism, and an epistemology for scientific conduct. It gave birth to numerous specialized discourses such as computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. But cybernetics remained an inter-discipline without an institutional home, without institutions to normalize it; cybernetics can be enormously creative but does not display the stability of other disciplines despite a remarkable history of accomplishments. Second, institutionalization of discourse enables social organizations to thrive by facilitating the conduct of a discourse. For example, institutionalization makes the (re)production and dissemination of a discourse more efficient not only by communicating its artifacts and systematically regenerating its community, but, more importantly, by organizing the work that a discourse does. The distinction between institutions and organizations is important. Institutions are, as already noted, habits and conventional practices that individuals are expected to follow and from which deviations incur social costs. Organizations, by contrast, are networks of conversations in which individual participants can be recognized for their part. So, in my family, my parents, my children, all relatives, and I have individual names and distinct bodies. By contrast, a family specifies roles but not who assumes them. I know that my family is a family because it conforms to what is expected of a family. Journals seize opportunities to spread the accomplishments of members of a discourse community while “living into” what is expected of a journal. Academic departments organizationally respond to the educational needs of a discourse without violating their university’s expectations. The institution of recurrent practices stimulates organizations to make a discourse more efficient and productive. Third, organizations conserve themselves and shape the discourses they serve in their own terms. In academic discourses, publications are important.They inform a scientific community, but only at the convenience of their publishers. For example, a journal published in regular time intervals, with fixed numbers of pages per issue, papers

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of a certain style and length, using standardized peer reviews, regularizes production, which benefits the publisher economically but has little to do with the mission of the discourse within which the journal thrives. A similar argument has been made for newspaper publishing: whether there is news or not, newspapers are printed daily or weekly. Members of a discourse community might be better served when only important contributions would be published and whenever they turned up, but this would not serve the publishers. Journals also legitimize research methods, theories, validity criteria, topics, and schools of thought; they create the reputation of researchers and facilitate the promotion of academics, but only through the filter of the publishers’ interests. Perhaps more influential are funding agencies ranging from fiduciary institutions to the military, political interest groups to businesses.They set research agendas and direct the focus of a discourse to where funding is available. Fourth, discourses institute their own paradigms, whether in the form of axioms, rituals, exemplars, or definitions by which they can achieve a certain coherence and direction. The idea that normal science accepts and works under a paradigm, and that advances in science can be explained by paradigm shifts rather than the systematic accumulation of evidence, was originally proposed by Fleck (1935/1979) but has found its most popular formulation in the work of Thomas Kuhn (1962/1996). Kuhn was criticized for not clearly defining paradigms; he later modified his definition in the direction of exemplars, i.e., documented processes that serve as models of scientific conduct and argumentation. Treating discourse as constrained conversation, I am less concerned with supposedly ambiguous definitions of the word “paradigm” by those outside a discourse. I agree with Fleck and Kuhn that discourses change course when their members begin to talk differently, adopt a new vocabulary as Rorty (1989) would say, find a new, more appealing epistemology, or construct problems that did not exist or could not be addressed before. In acknowledging that discourses define their own identity from within, paradigm shifts would be evident when a discourse community creates new possibilities to realize itself and reflect on what enabled this new identity. 4 Discourses Draw Their Own Boundaries Probably the most consequential feature of discourses is their autonomy, the ability of a discourse community to organize itself and create its own textual matter, artifacts, members, and practices. When a discourse community faces people or practices that create havoc within their own discourse, boundaries are drawn to prevent “chaos” at the edge of a discourse from threatening its self-organization. Autonomy is always bounded, not totalizing. Inasmuch as a discourse is autonomous, its boundaries cannot be imposed from its outside, say, by government authority. This would violate a discourse’s autonomy.The boundaries of a discourse must be drawn from within it; for example, nobody can tell a physicist what physics is unless he or she is a member of the discourse community of physicists, and, while there

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are numerous institutional efforts to control medicine, medical judgments are always reserved for practitioners of the discourse of medicine. Niklas Luhmann (1989: 36–43), taking a communication perspective for his conception of social systems, describes such boundaries as resulting from the application of binary codes: something either fits into one’s discourse or it does not. Everything that matters belongs, and whatever does not belong does not matter.The distinctions invoked by the use of binary codes are drawn in conversations or negotiations.They may be discussed but end in speech acts, in declarations. Declarations have no truths; the act of stating them and accepting them makes them real. Binary codes may be applied within a discourse community concerning its own integrity – as when medical doctors censure the behavior of a colleague as unprofessional – at the edge of a discourse – as when someone is told that a grave injustice is outside the jurisdiction of a court of law – or between different discourses – as in turf wars between university departments in which the discourse boundary of one department is seen as transgressed and the department attempts to repair or redraw that boundary by referencing institutionalized practices of the discourse in which the department plays a part. Every discourse seeks to preserve its autonomy. Discourse boundaries are manifestations of autonomy and a realization that discourses are not totalizing. From inside a discourse, outside influences are interferences. For instance, health insurance companies determine what they pay for medical services, government controls the use of drugs, and hospitals and medical practices need to be economical, but medical opinion is always reserved to members of the medical community. No other discourse has been able to break into the self-organizing nature of medicine. Discursive boundaries are drawn in several dimensions. First,textual matter/artifacts. Members of a discourse community know their own vocabulary, can identify what they create and decide whether a product is acceptable, for example, which topics are hot, which scholars to cite (and which not to mention), and where to publish. Reviewers of submissions for journal publications usually are given the option to suggest that a manuscript be submitted to the journal of another discipline. Papers submitted for presentation to a conference must fit the discourse within which the conference locates itself, or be rejected as irrelevant. Criteria for fitting a discourse are rarely spelled out; however, to be a member of a discourse community, awareness of one’s fit is necessary. In professional meetings one hears, “this lecture was interesting but had little to do with (say) communication,” after all, “she is an artist,” for example, or “a lawyer,” in any case, “not one of us.” Designers too, know what is designed or merely pieced together, and say so. Assertions of this kind are manifestations of existing boundaries drawn around the artifacts of a discourse; unless disconfirmed by a legitimate authority, that boundary stays where it momentarily is. Second, membership in the discourse community. A discourse community sets its own standards for membership.Academic disciplines award titles in the course of academic education and after successful defense of a dissertation that contributes to the discourse, publishing in respectable journals, and so on. In the medical community,

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the earliest criterion for membership is someone committed to live up to the Hippocratic Oath formulated in the fourth century BC.This oath, modernized and reformulated many times, preserves the original commitment to selflessly care for, be honest with, and respect the sick and suffering. Educational and residence requirements have replaced parts of the oath, which had included among other stipulations a prohibition on charging patients for medical advice. Moreover, the medical community has instituted procedures for revoking licenses should a member not live up to standards. Legal discourse, too, sets its requirements for practicing law and the disbarment of those who violate legal standards. Discourses that do not have formal membership requirements, for example, that of designers, are weak by comparison. Third, organizational or communicative practices. Discourse communities can legitimize specified practices that their members may or must engage in, but they rarely can police members of other discourse communities.The design profession, for example, cannot prevent people without design degrees from employment as designers. Nor can the medical community on its own prevent someone without medical certification from providing services, for example, abortions. However, unlike the design profession, the medical establishment has managed to delegitimize the use of their practices by outsiders with the help of courts. Performing abortions is legal in the U.S. (with various restrictions imposed by states) but only when performed by a certified medical practitioner, with various other limitations imposed by states. Medical discourse can rely on the courts to enforce boundaries it cannot control on its own.This attests to the strength and proliferation of medicine.While the discourse of physics enjoys considerable strength as well, it does not need courts to make its truths count. Members of discourse communities that do not have such clout struggle at their boundaries. Fourth, integrity. Discourse boundaries preserve a discourse’s unity against what could destroy it, its coherence in the face of serious challenges, and its integrity where dishonesty is conceivable but should not occur within a discourse. The objective of physics, for example, is to describe a consistent universe, a single version of what exists, in causal terms. All theories intended to account for particular observations and experiments made by physicists are required to comply with its self-defining objective. Should a situation give rise to alternative or conflicting explanations, physicists do their best to overcome them. Their rejection of teleological, supernatural, and metaphysical explanations has a long history. The above-mentioned idea of a function, at home in biology, also has no place in physical explanations.The wave and particle theories of light exhibit a conflict within physics; both offer plausible explanations and there would be no reason to accept both but for a foundational belief in a universe that cannot accommodate more than one correct explanation. Consequently, physicists are working to find a theory of light that overcomes particle/wave duality. Note that both theories of light have adopted different metaphors – waves experienced in open water and particles experienced in sandstorms – with

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incommensurate entailments. Metaphors occur in language, not in the universe. Moreover, the etymology of “universe” points to uni = one and verse = version, universe = one version. Locating the universe outside of language demonstrates the blindness of the natural sciences to their own discursive practices. Consistency is a property of statements, the artifacts that physicists construct in the course of running experiments, not of the phenomena they observe. Economists theorize the values of everything, provided they can be measured in the same units. Other properties of the valued entities are not part of the discourse of economics. Physics, chemistry, engineering, and politics take care of them – perhaps. Social values such as honesty, fairness, or friendship, and religious values such as faith, piety, even martyrdom, are outside the discourse of economics unless they can be measured in monetary terms and lead to statistics and calculations.The binary code of economics – values measurable or not – preserves the possibility of doing economics as usual, but of course only inside the discourse. The economic concept of an externality suggests as much. Externalities are measurable effects that are not describable in economic terms, for example, if they contradict cost-benefit calculations and are therefore located outside the system theorized or modeled. Externalities are not facts. They are artifacts of particular economic theories or discourse; they amount at least to an admission that there exist phenomena that economic discourse will not accommodate without risking the loss of the integrity of its explanatory practices. Note that the binary code of economics protects economic discourse from paradoxes and contradictions;5 economic discourse is attractive also to other social sciences, which has had the effect of expanding economic thinking to empirical domains previously not considered economic issues, for example, treating social relations such as friendships in terms of payoffs, politics (for example, holding political offices) in terms of money raised, or culture (for example, the reproduction of a cultural heritage) as a financial investment. In its capacity to undermine other discourses, economic discourse has been characterized as intrusive. 5 Discourses Justify Their Practices to Outsiders I suggest that discourses, while autonomous and therefore not easily influenced from their environments, cannot be studied as logically isolated entities, not only because they constitutively involve humans whose bodies participate in other discourses as well, as suggested above, and could colonize other discourses but also because its continuation depends on access to human and material resources. Unlike biological theories of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1980, 1988) that refer to chemical and material couplings and the physical space in which they reside, discourses reside in

5 See Chapter 16 in this volume.

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the use of language, in communication and need to create an environment that supports their practices. There are several reasons why a discourse depends on its environment. First, a discourse must maintain its discourse community bodily. A discourse that cannot motivate people to want to be part of it dies with its current members. Even secret societies, to continue beyond the life spans of their members, need to recruit. Second, cooperation is necessary among members of different discourses in the form of interdisciplinary teams to address problems that neither discourse can solve alone: city planning, national science policies, technology transfer across national borders, or development of technology for human use, all presuppose some knowledge by members of one discourse community about others. Third, most discourses need customers, patrons and funding agencies willing to pay for what a discourse offers. To attract such human or institutional resources, a discourse community needs to create favorable expectations and fulfill them. The self-organizing nature of discourses makes their practices not so easily accessible to non-practitioners, so discourses have to justify themselves to those who matter to them. Justifications are speech acts performed at the boundaries of discourses. They explain the desirability or benefits of a discourse to those who should know.As speech acts, justifications can be accepted or rejected. However, to be accepted by outsiders, justifications must appeal to what outsiders know and cherish.Three such appeals are most important. First, appeals to a discourse’s reality (its truths and epistemology) in its outsiders’ lives.This appeal may appear odd but is fundamental in understanding the struggle between different discourses. The historical fight between science and religion since the age of the enlightenment is about what constitutes truth and whose epistemology is right. One could say that science won or pushed religion into a niche that science is not interested in exploring. But enlightenment science has been challenged by recent developments in the social sciences. I mentioned the linguistic turn in the beginning of this essay. Berger and Luckmann (1966) were careful not to shake the epistemological foundations of the natural sciences by limiting their discussion to social reality. Searle (1995) tried to preserve the idea of objective reality by distinguishing between social facts and what he calls “brute facts.” This essay is more radical than either constructivism; I suggest that even physics, while it claims to describe nature by objective observation, is a discourse that constructs nature for the convenience of physical descriptions. Legal discourse constructs a different reality but employs binary codes at their boundary as well. It assigns guilt or innocence to defendants by formal procedures designed to make the application of law decisive and efficient. Legal reality has nothing to do with fairness and justice but with the institutionally convenient and legally correct procedures. The reality constructions of the natural sciences have been remarkably successful, insisting on the objective–subjective binary. In everyday life, appeals to “facts” are often tied to scientific truths, but there are also legal, historical, religious, economic, political, emotional, and narrative truths.Truths not

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rendered acceptable to outsiders most likely fail to gain inter-discursive support and cooperation. Second, appeals to the virtue of a discourse (its value). To be of use to outsiders, a discourse must justify itself in terms of the values or benefits it can provide them. “Knowledge for its own sake” rarely is of interest to non-academics, expecting usability. Agencies that fund scientific research may have specific applications in mind, but for some it may be sufficient to be publicly associated with a high profile research project. Medical discourse is particularly successful in communicating its benefits to the ill and disabled – potentially everyone. I have mentioned the Hippocratic Oath. It has now evolved into guarantees called “patients’ rights,” a justification that appeals to what patients value.A discourse that cannot convincingly justify its virtues to those on whose participation it depends cannot survive for long. Third, appeals to the competencies (proven abilities and possible responsibilities) of the practitioners of a discourse. One consults a therapist not only because one needs and values psychotherapy but also because of that therapist’s reputation.To attract foundations for research grants, principle investigators must demonstrate a history of relevant publications.To become a medical doctor, one must satisfy the requirements of medical school and survive several residency requirements in medical specializations under the close supervision of senior physicians. Creating such individual track records assures the public that medical doctors have a history of accomplishments and can assume responsibilities on their own. Promotions to positions of increasing responsibilities are justified always on the basis of demonstrated competencies. These practices are not merely for internal convenience of a discourse. It creates conditions for its members to be judged competent by outsiders who matter: clients, patients, lawyers, funding agencies, and more. Discourse Dynamics I found the above distinctions useful to understanding how different discourses work and for participating in them – albeit with awareness of one’s linguistic involvement. These distinctions are not meant to be an intellectual tour de force but provide research questions that should reveal something about the dynamics of discourses in everyday and professional life. Since I take conversation as a baseline, the most general question to ask is how a particular discourse deviates from ordinary conversation. In unconstrained conversations, participants speak for themselves. However, when they start speaking in the name of organizations or judge others in reference to institutionalized practices, then they have left the domains of conversational practice and entered those of discourse. Similarly, participants may speak as members of discourse communities by appealing to knowledge, competencies, or authorities in that absent community and hold each other accountable for community standards. In such constrained conversations, boundaries between discourses – belonging or not belonging to one’s own – are negotiated and settled, which divides the world into separate professional

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areas, highlighting or questioning their truths, their virtues and the competencies of their practitioners. Typical of discourses, certain speech acts, common in conversations, do not occur, for example those that could challenge the basic premises of a discourse or its cherished icons. In conversations participants speak from their own experiences, while in discourse they more likely are preoccupied with whether documents are genuine, experiments are conclusive, proposed theories contradict previously accepted theories and what one is expected to do when they fail on institutional grounds. The ranking of members of a discourse community also becomes visible within constrained conversations. In public opinion research, we distinguish opinion leaders from followers. Fleck (1935/1979), writing about scientific discourse, distinguished many more grades of membership, based on the scientific literature they are acquainted with, which could also be indicated by who cites whom, who is invited as a key speaker, whose name is associated with a theory, method, or statistic, or who is employed at a more prestigious institution. As noted above, traditional discourse analysis has focused on written text.There is of course a place for analyzing writing, provided one does not limit the conception of discourse to conveniently available texts and adopts the popular notion of language as a medium of representation.The latter leads one to validating propositions against a supposedly known reality, which is always discourse-specific reality, linguistically constructed, not objectively accessible. Texts do not mean anything and do not construct anything. Readers, authors, and users interpret texts. For these reasons, I am contextualizing the use of texts in how a community uses them, how discourse practitioners decide what belongs and what does not, and who applies which criteria to evaluations of texts and more generally to what are thought of as contributes to the discourse – as opposed to taking one’s own interpretation most seriously. What is the aim of this discourse analysis beyond curiosity as to how discourses work? The original version of this essay (Krippendorff, 1995a) was written for human-centered designers to realize that their design discourse was becoming a risk to their profession. Designers create many things – largely tangible artifacts woven into a discourse that makes them meaningful to a variety of stakeholders – moving the human use of technology into the future. But what designers do is rarely written, hence difficult to retrieve, build on, and transmit to future designers. Designers have reputable educational institutions that grant degrees, but industry does not care for certifications; it hires anyone who can do the job. This is possible only because designers have not yet developed a sufficiently nuanced discourse that outsiders respect and cannot match. Some designers have Ph.D.s, but mostly in related disciplines such as education, art history, human engineering, and cognitive psychology. From these paradigmatically different perspectives it is difficult to institute recurrent design practices.An internet discussion board on Ph.D. education and research in design6 features recurring topics: “What is design?” and “What is

6 [email protected] last accessed 2007.10.29.

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design research?” If designers have difficulties drawing a boundary around their competencies when publishing their work or working with clients or non-designers, the boundary around design discourse is weak and not defendable against efforts of other discourses to usurp it. For example, marketing self-servingly relegates design to a sub-discipline of marketing that increases the value of marketable products. Cognitive engineering claims design as the application of theories developed in cognitive science. Some universities treat design as applied art, inferior to art but discussable in its terms. Some designers want to improve their reputations by conducting scientific research, not realizing that the goal of science, to describe what is, conflicts with aims to bring forth something that does not yet exist or has no precedent, thus constraining design research to minor elaborations of what is already known (Krippendorff, 2007). If designers want to build a solid profession, one that makes significant contributions to society and cannot be colonized by other discourses, an analysis of their discourse can reveal weaknesses and suggest how design can redesign itself. Nursing is involved in similar struggles.Although there are universities that grant Ph.D.s in nursing and demand graduates to do serious research, many dissertations are underfunded medical research projects.This has historical roots in the “helping” position of nurses relative to doctors. But nurses serve a function other than curing the sick and injured: caring. Caring for patients, translating the technical discourse of doctors into the patients’ vernacular, helping people regain strengths, providing support for the aged, and the like is not what doctors are trained to do. Caring could be the paradigm of nursing discourse, a binary code that defines its boundary, generates research and theory and informs practices that advance nursing as a profession, not as a mere appendage of medical discourse. I already alluded to several discourse dynamics, for example, the difficulty of religious discourse to justify its reality relative to scientific discourse of the enlightenment. An effort to turn back that evolution of reality can be observed in religious communities that deny evolution as an explanation for the origin of the (especially human) species, challenging the construction of reality and truths that led science to evidence for evolution. Discourse in religious communities has produced numerous narratives around that denial and has taken concrete steps to remove the teaching of evolution from schools. Here one can observe discourses clashing for hundreds of years and clarify perhaps or redirect the discursive energies to more constructive domains. I alluded also to the strength of economic discourse, a discourse often mentioned as the most rigorous and advanced of all the social sciences. Fascination with mathematical accuracy by other social scientists opened a door for economics to subvert their discourse. Perhaps economics is not a colonizing discourse but fills a felt void due to social scientists’ lack of understanding of their own discourse. Biological discourse is interesting for another reason. In the 1930s, Jacob von Uexküll (1934/1957) fought against the tendency of biological discourse to drift

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from the study of living organisms in their environments toward the study of their physiology – how an organism’s components interact. His fight seemed lost until Maturana & Varela (1980, 1988), influenced by cybernetics, invented autopoiesis, which theorizes processes of living in living systems. Autopoiesis is defined as a network of interactions among components that produces all and only the components necessary to continue the interaction that is producing them within a boundary maintained by this process – a circular process similar to von Uexküll’s, but half a century more advanced.This may well split the discourse of biology onto two, one concerned with the physiology of organisms – allied with medicine and moving toward the discourse of physics – and the other relying on more powerful circular explanations of processes of living – allied with the original idea of bio-logy, but also with cognitive constructivism and other discourses that acknowledge the reflectivity of human existence. The self-organizing nature of conversation, from which I described discourse as deviating, is inherently self-reflective. However, this is not true for the traditional natural sciences, especially physics, which exclude attention to their own discourse. This exclusion is what this essay is meant to challenge. What then is the logical status of this proposal? From a logical-positivist perspective one might say that it is a discourse about discourse, i.e., a metadiscourse. I would disagree. It contests claims of privileged access to reality, questions absolutisms promulgated by discourses unaware of how the language used speaks the members of their community, and makes discourse practitioners aware of how their use of language opens doors for usurpation, colonization, and sidelining by other discourses whose power lies in one’s own discursive weaknesses.This essay invites seeing any contribution made to one’s discourse as strengthening or weakening it and thus participating in the inevitable dynamics if not struggles between discourses. My transgression of discourse boundaries is intended to reveal how discourses do what they do with and for their communities and may uncover their members’ blindness to language. In that sense this essay is critical, emancipatory, and embodied not in texts but in human beings who create texts and build their worlds with them.

Part 4

Information Introduction

The concept of information, traditionally linked to the richness of the content of communication, has become central to the understanding of modern societies due to the changes introduced by new communication technologies. Shannon’s 1948 information theory offered a solid ground from which to examine information related issues. However, while information theory has had an enormous influence in the field of communication and in the social sciences in general – and has often been used to establish a scientific basis for communication research – it also has been widely misunderstood and shallowly interpreted.This last section pursues notions of information that are still pertinent today, extending information theory to the testing of complex models of data in research and discussing issues of information in paradox, cyberspace, and social memory. Chapter 14 offers an accessible introduction to relevant concepts in information theory. It conceives the theory not as predictive, as customary for theories “about” a subject matter, but as a calculus that, defined on a common unit of variation, provides a flexible system of accounting for quantities of variation and information. This chapter is not limited to Shannon’s statistical theory, however. It relies on Shannon’s unit of measurement as a common thread of three calculi for information and, after distinguishing these, takes the reader, step by step, into an examination of the combinational and semantical theory, the statistical theory and outlines issues that the algorithmic theory of information is concerned with. It is noteworthy that semantic notions of information were not part of Shannon’s theory but turn out central to human use of technology. Chapter 15 applies information theory to processes of data analysis in social research and uses this possibility as a springboard to extend Shannon’s theory to complex qualitative data, to modeling the interactions in multivariable systems. Tracing the flow of information through social research, which this extension enables – as demonstrated by the modeling of a given set of data by reconstructability analysis – leads to surprising generalizations about traditional data analysis. For example, the conception of data as the objective ground of research, as “found,” is questioned in view of how data are shaped by the researchers’ distinctions, revealing both, the researchers’ participation in creating the very data they are analysing and

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the role of theory in informing the analytical process. Data-based scientific research can be characterized as systematically eliminating variations that do not fit the preconceptions and analytical tools that researchers bring to a task. The issue of paradox, mentioned in several previous chapters, becomes the focus of attention in Chapter 16.This chapter presents a history of dealing with paradox, and explores paradox in relation to information theory. While the established scientific paradigm considers paradox to be logically flawed and hence undesirable, Krippendorff identifies its informational quality and links the successful resolution of paradox to morphogenesis and structural growth in cognition, society, and scientific work. Ruling paradox out of existence has prevented the proponents of the established paradigm from coping with the kind of structural growth that paradox can initiate.The chapter distinguishes between four classes of paradox and their resolutions, enabling an understanding of how individual and social systems can increase their descriptive power and ability to cope with increasing environmental complexities. Continuing with the epistemology outlined in Part 1, Chapter 17 applies the combinatorial/semantic theory of information to the human reality of cyberspace. It proposes a new interpretation of space as a set of possibilities, which are the precondition for exercising human agency, for making choices that are afforded, here by a world under continuous constructions by the collectivity of its human users. The chapter estimates the enormous size of cyberspace and explores how individual users manage to cope with it in their own terms, aided by the simultaneous emergence of conventions for designing electronic artifacts.As this chapter leads the reader into new territory, care is taken to develop its ideas slowly, providing answers to critical questions in terms of what everyday users of cyberspace experience, the externalities of cyberspace. The chapter concludes by embedding the technology of cyberspace in the discursive practices of its users which are dominated by metaphors, for example, of information from handling the paper world and of experiences with traveling, meeting people, and forming communities – virtually.This chapter continues to confront issues of meaning raised in Part 2 and begins to fill the gap in understanding the growing complexity of contemporary information technology. The last chapter, Chapter 18, has a dual goal. It argues for a user-initiated communication model that reverses widely used and institutionally preferred sender-initiated models, and relates this model to social memory. Here, memory is said to be present whenever current observations can be explained in terms of events that took place in the past.This operational definition of memory is then applied to social memory, which is routed in various fabrics of society rather than individual cognition. Four kinds of social memory are identified – recorded, temporal, associative, and structural – and analyzed in terms of what constitutes them, what each is capable of retaining, what causes them to persist or disintegrate, and what actively searching within them entails.This chapter ends by suggesting that conceptions of social memory open the door for new inquiries into the information society.

Chapter 14

An Introduction to Information Theory *

Introduction The concept of information is central to understanding human communication.We value a letter from a friend because it informs us about something that interests to us. In communication, we inform each other about each other and create worlds of coordinated concerns. The significance of information does not derive from the matter and energy that is inevitably involved in any exchange of messages, but from the interpretations it affords. Information is what we do with the messages we receive, not what they contain. Information is also a key concept in decision-making.We prefer to decide based on what we know about the world and such knowledge may have been accumulated, perhaps subjectively arranged, from bits and pieces of information received previously.We think that information can be stored, not only in the brain, but also in libraries, in various artifacts with which we surround ourselves, and in the social structure in which we participate and to which we delegate some decisions for convenience.1 Information is also the concern of an increasingly important sector of the economy. Digital technology has played a major role in transforming society from an industrial society to one in which computers, communication, and access to large data bases are the defining features. Computers have been called “information processors.” Much economic activity centers on handling information in some form. Economists consider information a valuable commodity. Information theory is not a theory about the operation or role of these technologies. Rather, it offers the possibility of quantifying what they can do for us. It provides a calculus that defines units of measurement of some generality, and a system for accounting for quantities of information.The notion of a calculus began perhaps with the ancient Egyptians’ way of calculating the sizes of acres after the Nile’s annual * From Krippendorff, K. (1975a). Information theory. Pages 351–389 in G.J. Hanneman & W.J.E. McEvan (Eds.). Communication and Behavior. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley. 1 See Chapter 18 in this volume.

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floods receded, which evolved into geometry. A calculus is the underlying idea of how economists theorize the exchange of goods and services, using monetary values as a common currency. An information calculus allows us to follow the flow of information through all kinds of systems,2 not just between senders and receivers, and it allows us to state and test quantitative hypotheses about the conversion of information into choices under various circumstances. This makes information theory a fertile basis for social theory. Some scholars have resisted quantifying information, preferring to treat it as a non-analyzable intellectual quality. Still, we do not hesitate to compare, say, the accounts of two witnesses in terms of who provided more information.When faced with an important decision, we might justify a delay for not having enough information.We might complain about experiencing “information overload,” or request a cost-benefit analysis of the services provided by an information broker. Comparing messages for the information they provide and talking of “more or less” suggest information to be some kind of quantity, however vague it may be. Information theory may not embrace all of these intuitions, but it begins to systematize some of them. The history of science is full of examples in which heretofore unanalyzable qualities became quantified and in turn paved the way to new insights and laws. Information theory is not the invention of a single person. The idea came to several authors virtually independently, which leads us to think that is has some universality.The mathematician Norbert Wiener (1948), the founder of cybernetics,3 came to it while at MIT working on statistical aspects of communication engineering. The Soviet logician Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (1941) came to it from his studies of complexity and probability theory.The British statistician Ronald A. Fisher (1935) had developed a measure of information in conjunction with his analysis of variance; and Claude E. Shannon developed it while solving problems of coding and deciphering messages during World War II working at The Bell Telephone Laboratories, which had a history of assessing the capacity of telephone cables. His work, together with an interpretative essay by Warren Weaver (Shannon & Weaver, 1949), was the first detailed exposition of the theory, and had a major impact on the development of academic communication research in the U.S. and on information technological developments, digital computers in particular. Interestingly, their book is titled The Mathematical Theory of Communication, acknowledging the link between information and communication. Today, information theory embraces several different calculi, which have much in common.To keep them apart, let me draw two kinds of distinctions.The first is due to Weaver (Shannon & Weaver, 1949:95–117). An information theory on the syntactical level is concerned with quantities of variation within a single medium –

2 See Chapter 15 in this volume. 3 Defined as the science of control and communication in the animal and machine, a significant part of it concerns developing a statistical theory of information.

An Introduction to Information Theory 239

electrical impulses, for example, or the characters of text. An information theory on the semantic level is concerned with how messages are read, in which contexts they are perceived or how much they say about something other than themselves. A pragmatic theory is concerned with how humans make use of the information obtained in the process of interpretation. The second distinction is due to Kolmogorov (1965), who distinguished between combinational, statistical, and algorithmic theories. Combinational theories calculate with logical possibilities – regardless of whether or how often they are used. Probabilistic or statistical theories calculate with frequencies of occurrences, ideally of large numbers of observations. Algorithmic theories consider amounts of information in instructions – for example, how much space a computer program needs to specify the performance of a function. Space does not permit a discussion of all six approaches, which also are uneven in their state of development. I will develop the principal ideas of the semantical theory of information applied to combinational spaces, the syntactical and statistical theory of information, and merely offer a sketch of the algorithmic theory. The semantical theory is important in the social and cognitive sciences; the statistical theory is the most highly developed theory and has found applications in communication technology and statistics.The algorithmic theory is fundamental to computation. Together, they may give the reader a feeling for what information theory entails. All use binary digits as units of measurement. Binary Digits All information calculi measure variations, varieties, numbers of alternatives, and their distributions.They are concerned with choices and uncertainties inherent in a situation.The simplest variation is between two states, yes or no, on or off, left or right, male or female, positive or negative, requiring one binary digit, 0 or 1, to represent that number. Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) took the number of binary digits – abbreviated “bits” – as the basic unit of information and this has been accepted widely. The number of bits is a dimensionless quantity bearing no resemblance to measures of material entities, such as square inches, tons, or mph. Ordinarily, we count in decimal characters between zero and nine. When a decimal count exceeds nine, we use a second decimal character and can then count to 99 and so forth.The same holds true when counting with binary characters, with 0s and 1s.With 0 and 1 we can count two things.With two binary characters – 00, 01, 10, 11 – we can count four. With three – 000 to 111 – we can count eight. Counting to the year 1975 requires eleven binary digits: 11110110110.The decimal system of counting may have come from using our fingers as aids. Counting in binary digits more closely relates to asking yes-or-no questions, drawing distinctions and making binary choices. But what do bits have to do with information? Suppose the road you are following leads to a fork, at which you are uncertain whether to veer left or right. Since there

240 Information

are only two alternatives, you may ask a bystander a question calling for a yes-orno answer, such as “Does this (pointing to the right) road lead to Philadelphia?” You might also discover a road sign that tells you concisely what you would learn from striking a longer conversation with a local. Obviously, the length of the messages is less important than what the situation calls for: one decision between two alternatives. If your question is answered in full, it has removed your uncertainty and you can proceed knowingly. In the absence of information, you would be condemned to proceed by chance, not knowing where you will end. Let me now extend this to different numbers of alternatives:

Only one way to proceed = no choice or 0 bits Two ways to proceed = one binary choice or 1 bit Four ways to proceed = two binary choices or 2 bits Eight ways to proceed = three binary choices or 3 bits 2X ways to proceed = X binary choices or X bits N ways to proceed = log2N binary choices or log2N bits.4 Combinatorial Uncertainty To make intuitive sense of how bits work, consider the notion of uncertainty.We are uncertain when we face several alternatives but do not know which ones to choose. Uncertainty is the absence of knowledge. Without knowledge, picking any alternative would be arbitrary.Without a clue as to which road goes to Philadelphia, reaching the city would remain as uncertain as we were at the fork. Even recognizing we made a mistake implies some knowledge of what we should have done differently. Informed choices, by definition, are better than chance. Uncertainty increases with the number of alternatives we are facing and among which we feel the need to choose. If N is the number of possibilities inherent in a situation S, the uncertainty U is

U(S) = log2N bits Figure 14.1 shows a cross tabulation of 8 by 16 possibilities. Rows and columns can be chosen independently.This makes combinatorial uncertainties additive:

U(Rows 3 Columns) = U(Rows) + U(Columns) With log28 = 3 bits, log216 = 4 bits, the uncertainty associated with this grid would be 7 bits.

4 To get to the actual numbers of binary digits needed to count N, log2N must be rounded to the next higher integer. But information theory allows fractions of bits.

An Introduction to Information Theory 241

Figure 14.1. The Uncertainty in a Situation with All Options Open

Let me discuss two simple examples to show the additive properties of the combinational uncertainties just defined. Suppose you want to take a vacation and you consider the following variables: you think of spending your vacation either in Las Vegas, in Amsterdam, in a cottage in Maine, or on a cruise to the Bahamas.With these four alternative vacation places, the uncertainty about where you will go is:

U(Places to go) = log24 = 2 bits You are also not so sure whether your spouse will join you or whether you will go alone:

U(Spouse joins or not) = log22 = 1 bit Finally, your employer suggested that you choose between Christmas, Easter, and an early or a late summer slot:

U(Times available) = log24 = 2 bits Thus, you could take an early summer vacation in Las Vegas without your spouse, you could enjoy the beautiful spring in Amsterdam with your spouse, you could go alone for skiing in Maine, etc. 4·2·4 = 32 possible vacations in all,

U(Vacations) = log232 = 5 bits Since these possibilities are independent, their uncertainties add to the total. Another example might reinforce this point. A standard Hollerith card5 has eighty columns and twelve possible positions per column. In each of the

5 This was the medium on which we punched computer code and data as input to computers in 1975. While now outdated, this technology nevertheless resurfaced in Florida during the controversial 2000 U.S. Presidential election.

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80?12 = 960 positions, a hole is either punched or it is not. The uncertainty of whether or not a hole is punched amounts to one bit. If conventions for using these positions are ignored, i.e., punching one position is independent of punching another, the total uncertainty of what could be on a Hollerith card is 960 ?1 bits. It also means that there are 2960 ≈ 10289 cards one could possibly create, which is an enormous number. The additivity of combinational uncertainties is an important property of the information calculus. Elsewhere (Krippendorff, 1967), I have shown that the use of the logarithm in the measure of combinational uncertainty is the only way to accomplish the intuition that two CDs can store twice as much information as one, that the information of several separate messages are additive, and that, as in the above example, the uncertainties of different dimensions of possibilities sum to the total. Semantical (and Combinatorial) Theory of Information As suggested in the introduction, the semantical information of a message (BarHillel, 1964) is always about something and for someone in a particular situation. It directs one’s attention to something other than the message, something located in a domain of one’s interest: a letter may inform us about what its writer experienced, and the pointer of a thermometer gives us a number presumably indicating an object’s temperature – but only if this means something to us. Moreover, information is always selective among a set of recognizable alternatives, like the answer to a question. Evidence gathered in the course of a scientific experiment should lead to the rejection of some of the hypotheses under consideration – otherwise the research would be inconclusive or uninformative. The thermometer settles on one temperature within its range.Whether a message is informative in this sense therefore depends on the context or situation in which we find ourselves, the uncertainty that is relevant for us and what we already know. Figure 14.2 shows information as a constraint on the uncertainty inherent in a situation, as depicted in Figure 14.1, and the arrows suggest the process of getting there. A present situation

Remaining uncertainty

Figure 14.2. Semantical Information as Reduction of the Uncertainty in a Situation

An Introduction to Information Theory 243

This leads us most naturally to view the “amount of information” as the difference between two states of knowing, measured by the uncertainty before minus the uncertainty after a message was processed. In formal terms:

I(Message:S) = U(S) – UMessage(S) where “I” stands for the semantical information conveyed by a “Message” in a situation S, “U” stands for uncertainty as defined above, and “UMessage(S)” is the conditional uncertainty, that is, the uncertainty that remains in the situation after the message is received. A message that points to exactly one alternative leaves no uncertainty behind and thus conveys the maximum amount of information possible.A message that fails to reduce the uncertainty in a situation – for example, by being incomprehensible or irrelevant regarding the situation – provides no information. Information can also be expressed in terms of logical probabilities, the probability of narrowing the choices informed by a message. By simple algebra:

Nafter

I(Message:S) = log2Nbefore – log2Nafter = –log2 ——

Nbefore

In this theory, information is always identified with a constraint on what is conceivable.As Bateson (1972) observed, information theory, cybernetics, and the theory of evolution share this negative form of reasoning. We commonly explain events in terms of their causes or think of messages having particular meanings; however, the measure of information assesses the strength of a constraint – what a message excludes – not the number of possibilities that remain uncertain. Information is a measure of the work that a message does for its receiver, not its product.This is a gestalt switch that one needs to make in order to understand what follows. Moreover, information as measured does not address its kind. For example, after the birth of a baby, the message “It’s a boy” conveys exactly one bit of information, but so does “It’s a girl,” although the course of action taken following either answer may differ.The combinatorial part of the theory quantifies information as the degree to which uncertainty is reduced, the semantical part concerns the actual sets and subsets of alternatives before and after a message was received and understood. Possibilities may be concepts, meanings, referents, courses of action, or objects, whatever the messages in question pertain to; and to obtain the amounts of information for these possibilities, one has to observe how sets of them are related to each other. The “division of labor” between combinatorial and semantical parts of the theory is not so uncommon. Physical measures always measure something. A gallon of wine is not a gallon of milk, while both have the same volume. To further exemplify what information does, suppose a customer enters a hardware store. Let the shopkeeper’s universe be as in Figure 14.1. From the shopkeeper’s perspective, the initial uncertainty as to what the customer could possibly buy is the logarithm of the number of items in the store, say the white area

244 Information

in Figure 14.2. The customer who enters the hardware store lives in her own universe, overlapping with that of the shopkeeper, as in Figure 14.3. Suppose her problem is that the door to her home failed to open last night and she had to climb through a window. Her story contains much with which the shopkeeper can empathize without being able to help.This includes ideas that the customer imagines might solve her problem, such as moving elsewhere, suing the landlord, asking a carpenter to install a new door. None of these overlap with what the shopkeeper has to sell, and the customer mentioning these has no effect on the shopkeeper’s universe. Shopkeeper’s universe Client’s universe Available stock

Irrelevant client concerns Area of common interest and meaningful discussion

Figure 14.3. Uncertainties in the Overlapping Domains of Two Communicators

The area of meaningful discussion is the overlap between what the customer conceives as solving her problem and what the shopkeeper can sell toward this end. To reduce this area of common interest, the customer’s “message” might well consist of showing the shopkeeper the broken lock and asking for a replacement part. If this reduces the shopkeeper’s uncertainty to an item he has to sell at an acceptable price, they have a deal marked 3. At that point, information has removed all uncertainties for both parties to the transaction. Note that the amount of information involved in the process of getting a deal need not be the same for both communicators, which is why the metaphor of “exchanging information” as if it were a tangible entity does not work.Although the two universes in Figure 14.3 are about the same size, this need not be so. Most likely, the shopkeeper’s stock is larger than the customer’s concerns and selecting one mutually agreeable transaction may require the shopkeeper to make more choices, processing far more information, than the customer has to consider to get what she wants – after all, the shopkeeper is consulted as an expert. Duplicative and Implicative Redundancy

One important relationship between two or more messages is their redundancy. In the above examples, multiple messages were logically independent, for example, choices among places to go on vacation do not affect the choices on when to go.The information quantities of logically independent messages are additive. Redundancy, by contrast, is a measure of dependence.When two messages overlap in meaning,

An Introduction to Information Theory 245

say similar things in different words, or have the same implications, their information quantities have to be treated differently. Generally, the total amount of information of a sequence of messages M1, M2, M3, … is the sum of the information quantities provided by any one message conditional on all messages preceding it. Stated formally:

I(M1&M2&M3& ...:S) = I(M1:S) + IM (M2:S) + IM

1 M2

1

(M3:S) + IM

1 M2 M3

(M4:S) + ...

Each succeeding message adds only the amount of information not already provided by the preceding ones.The amount of redundancy of any two messages is what they share, or the extent to which their information overlaps:

R(M1,M2:S) = I(M1:S) + I(M2:S) – I(M1&M2:S) = I(M1:S) – IM (M1:S) 2

We can distinguish two kinds of redundancy, both quantified as above.The first and simple case is duplicative and visualizable as the intersection between what two messages say separately. Receiving the copy of a previously received message would make the second message completely redundant R(M1,M2:S) = I(M1:S) = I(M2:S) and add nothing to the first: IM1(M2:S) = 0. The situation would be less extreme if the second message repeated only some aspect of the first, adding IM1(M2:S) to I(M1:S). The second kind of redundancy can be described as implicative and occurs when two messages in different domains imply something about each other. For example, the number of tree rings and the age of a tree have nothing to do with each other, unless one knows their correlation in which case one can infer the age of a tree from a count of these rings. Content analysis is based on inferences from texts to their context, which are two different domains that can be linked by what I call analytical constructs (Krippendorff, 1967, 2004),6 for example, inferring the author of an unsigned document from measures of his or her vocabulary. Let us briefly examine with Figure 14.4 the informational implications of three kinds of situations in which one may find oneself, whether because of previous knowledge or because the world appears that way. A

B

C

D

A

B

C

D

A

1

1

1

2

2

2

3

3

3

4

4

4

S1

Figure 14.4. Three Logical Relations 6 See Chapter 12 in this volume.

S2

B

C

S3

D

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In situation S1, there are four possible cells, one in each row and in each column. The two orthogonal domains, numbered rows and lettered columns, exhibit the strongest relation possible, i.e., selecting a column implicitly selects the corresponding row and visa versa. Selecting B, for example provides I(B:S1 ) = 2 bits information about rows in S1 and so does selecting 3 about its columns. Either is completely redundant to the other and their redundancy measures R(B,3:S1 ) = 2 bits for each letter and for each column. In situation S2, there are eight possible cells, two in each row and in each column. Selecting B yields I(B:S2 ) = log28 – log22 = 2 bits of information about rows in S2 and so does I(3:S2 ) about its columns. But jointly, I(B&3:S2 ) = log28 – log21 = 3 bits, which results in a redundancy of R(B,3:S2 ) = 1, half of the previous example. Situation S3 is less symmetrical. Selecting 3 implies B as in S1. But selecting B implies rows 1, 3, and 4, leaving a greater uncertainty and providing less information. Given 3, B is completely redundant, and adds nothing to 3. For a narrative example, reconsider the problem of planning your vacation. Let us compare two categorical statements: I am going to Las Vegas this summer. You: Your spouse: I am spending Christmas at home;Amsterdam is too cold in the spring and I will not go there, but if we can’t vacation together, then I want a divorce. Your statement selects one place out of four, and two time periods out of four. The two variables being independent, your statement provides 2 + 1 = 3 bits of information to your spouse.Your spouse’s assertions are stated differently.They refer to several combinations of travel plans, creating an albeit moderate implicative relationship. They reduce the common space from 32 possible travel plans to 3?1?3 = 9, 1.83 bits in effect.Although your statement is shorter, it provides more information than your spouse’s does. But how are they related? Can divorce be avoided? Although the statements have different forms, there is some redundancy: going to Las Vegas implies not going to Amsterdam, and a summer vacation implies not going over Christmas. Jointly, the two statements reduce the number of travel plans from 32 to 2, and thereby provide 4 bits of information, so that the implicative redundancy becomes

R(You, Spouse:S) = I(You:S) + I(Spouse:S) – I(You&Spouse:S) or 3 + 1.83 – 4 = 0.83 bits. So, the two of you have more in common than is evident by examining your two statements for meaning alone.You will be able to enjoy a vacation together, and in fact have still one bit left to decide.7 7 It is conceivable that you and your spouse’s preferences mutually exclude each other. Under these conditions and in the absence of compromises, the number of remaining possibilities would then reduce to zero. Since log20 = – `, the combinatorial theory would seem to be in trouble as the amount of information then becomes + infinite. However, Chapter 16 in this volume discusses the exciting implications of this condition.

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While redundancy is often conceived as waste, in human communication, it serves important functions. Interferences caused by unclear pronunciation, environmental noise, or attention deficiencies can be eliminated partly by conveying the same information in different ways. Spelling errors are discoverable and correctable only when words are redundant, i.e., when not all possible character sequences are legitimate words. Messages that are free of redundancies like telephone numbers, license plates, and email addresses are prone to incorrigible errors. A single typing mistake in a potentially large URL address is a fatal error. Statistical Uncertainty As mentioned, a combinational theory of information is not concerned with whether possibilities are used frequently or rarely, or merely are considered.This makes it possible to address issues, meanings, actions, and future consequences, conceived but not yet observed. However, situations arise in which it matters greatly how often something occurs.A statistical theory addresses this condition, ignoring possibilities that may be on someone’s mind but unobserved. Although logical possibilities and empirical probabilities are worlds apart, besides expressing quantities of information in bits, there are several conceptual resemblances between the two theories. Consider four situations of a game in which symbols occur with probabilities as indicated in Figure 14.5.

Situation A

1/4

1/4

1/4

1/4

B

1/2

1/4

1/8

1/8

C

13/16

1/16

1/16

1/16

D

1

0

0

0

Figure 14.5. Four Probability Distributions

The combinational uncertainty U would depend on the number of symbols distinguishable – here four – and this would be the same for all situations as all suits are logically possible. However, considering the probabilities assigned to them, intuitively, uncertainty should decrease from situation A to situation B to situation C, becoming zero in D. The statistical uncertainty in situation A with all symbols equally likely would have to be identical to the combinatorial uncertainty as the logical probability, one out of four, is the same as the frequency interpretation of probability 1⁄4 in situation A.To guess a particular suit in A would be more difficult than in B, in B more difficult than in C, and in C more difficult than in D, in which no uncertainty remains. The probabilistic or statistical measure of uncertainty that conforms to these intuitions is:

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H(Situation) = –

O p log p i i

2 i

where H denotes the uncertainty – Shannon calls it entropy – pi the probability with which the ith event occurs and the O symbol means the “sum of,” in this case, of all: pilog2 pi of i. Before attaching bits to these uncertainties, let Figure 14.6 depict the above four distributions.

Situation A

Situation B

Situation C

Situation D

Figure 14.6. Graphical Representation of the Four Situations

Numerically, the statistical uncertainties H in Figure 14.6 are:

H(A) = –(.25)log2(.25) – (.25)log2(.25) – (.25)log2(.25) – (.25)log2(.25) = 2 bits H(B) = –(.5)log2(.5) – (.25)log2(.25) – (.125)log2(.125) – (.125)log2(.125) = 1.75 bits H(C) = –(.8125)log2(.8125) – (.0625)log2(.0625) – (.0625)log2(.0625) – (.0625)log2(.0625) = 1 bit H(D) = –1log21 = 0 bits Apparently, H(A), assessing a situation with all alternatives equally likely, is identical to the combinational uncertainty U(A) = log24 = 2 bits. The decline in uncertainty H in the other situations is a property of the distribution pf probabilities, intuitively anticipated above. But what does the statistical uncertainty measure? • •

H is an average, ∑i pi of (–log2 pi ). Since log2 enumerates binary decisions, H is the average number of binary decisions made within the probability distribution of pi. The minus sign should not be disturbing.The logarithm of a number between zero and one is always negative, hence –log2 pi is a positive number.The negative sign has given rise to calling H a measure of neg-entropy. Using the minus sign is of mathematical convenience only, unworthy of a different concept.

An Introduction to Information Theory 249

• •

The pi is the relative frequency ni/n with which the event i has been observed. H increases with the number of alternatives possible, Hmax = U. Figure 14.7 depicts three examples of partitions of the same territory with different uncertainties.

West

Middle East South

H(districts)

> H(states)

> H(regions)

Figure 14.7. Largest Statistical Uncertainty H is the log 2 of the Number of Distinctions

•

H has numerous interpretations, not just as the average number of binary decisions needed to enumerate a variety, but also as a measure of dispersion, as a measure of diversity and, as demonstrated in Figure 14.7, as a measure of the fidelity of a partition. Be warned against equating H with a measure of information, which can be found in the communication research literature. In anticipation of this confusion, Shannon called H a measure of entropy as its behavior resembles that of the entropy in thermodynamics.

Efficient Coding

A code is a translation rule from one set of symbols into another, sometimes requiring a key.The Morse code, as in Figure 14.8, is a simple substitution code that translates letters of the English alphabet into dots and dashes, easily transmitted by switching a medium on and off.The conventions to transcribe natural conversations constitutes a code meant to preserve a variety of extra-linguistic phenomena. Coding occurs in many ordinary situations, from color coding of files to professional uniforms. In social research, codebooks are used for categorizing observations and texts into analyzable terms. Often, when the code is lost, social science data are reduced to meaningless numbers. Usually, codes can be used in reverse.The encoding of messages into a medium is complemented by decoding the encoded message back into its original form. In the language of many communication researchers, encoding is the process by which symbols or messages are chosen to represent objects, ideas, and relationships, whereas decoding is the reverse process of interpreting symbols and messages. As a metaphor, coding has been used to explain communication as the processes of getting ideas from one person’s head into that of another. Statistical uncertainty measures have greatly influenced the design of codes. One can distinguish four kinds of coding problems.

250 Information INTERNATIONAL MORSE CODE 1. 2. 3. 4.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T

A dash is equal to three dots The space between parts of the same letter is equal to one dot The space between two letters is equal to three dots The space between two words is equal to five dots

U V W X Y Z

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

Figure 14.8. International Morse Code

•

•

•

Transmission codes. Three concerns dominate their design: efficiency, error detection and correction, and networking.The Morse code is an early example of a code designed for efficiency. It assigned shorter dots and dashes to letters with higher frequencies in English (Samuel F.B. Morse was an American).The time needed to transmit a text in Morse was thereby minimized. Similarly, the QWERTY typewriter keyboard was designed so that the most frequently used letters are keyed easily. Shannon’s tenth theorem concerns the possibility of error detection and error correction codes that can counteract unreliable transmission – see Figure 14.15. For networking, one should mention the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) that assures reliable communication among computers on the internet. Cryptographic codes arise with secrecy concerns.Attempts to decipher encrypted messages intercepted from enemy communication as well as designing codes that unauthorized persons have difficulties breaking have a long history. Such codes require knowledge of keys, which are given only to trusted users. Data compression codes are intended to make the storage and communication of data more efficient. They utilize redundancies inherent in the data, creating

An Introduction to Information Theory 251

•

more compact representations with the aim of being able to reconstruct the original data when needed. Interfaces represent the working of complex technology in terms users can understand and handle. For computer programmers this amounts to writing codes that translate user-relevant states of a machine into manipulable visual displays, using easily recognizable icons and everyday metaphors. For example, the user might think of deleting a file by dragging it into a trash bin, while the computer merely changes the index of the package of bits involved.

While these codes are mostly designed, increasing coding efficiency is a natural phenomenon in most social practices. For example, in language, words used most frequently are also shorter, like “do,” “go,” “be,” or are abbreviated in common use, like “U-turn,” “email,” or “PC” as opposed to rare words like “homomorphism,” “contraposition,” and “perturbation.” Moreover, there exists a relation between the frequency of word use and the amount of information they convey. In texts, high-frequency words generally carry less information than low-frequency words, require less time to process and, as all studies of readability show, are easier to understand. In computer content analysis, it has become a practice to eliminate high-frequency as well as rare words before making statistical inferences from texts. Statistical (and Syntactical) Theory of Information All communication requires variability, the ability to say different things, hear different things said, and put what is said in the context of what could have been said. The ability to vary something, variability, is of primary importance. If one knows that someone had no choice in what she said, one would not know what she had in mind, and if the recipient of a message cannot distinguish what its sender chose for its significance, communication is impossible.Ashby (1969) tells an instructive story. Suppose a prison guard wants to prevent the wife of a prisoner from communicating an illegal message. The couple could have agreed that when an accomplice was caught, she would send him one kind of cake, and if he were not apprehended, she would send another. Since the guard could not know the meanings of these cakes, the messages would pass unnoticed. One could consider more subtle clues, like writing a note on one size paper and writing a note on another size paper. However, if the guard could restrict the variety of things that a prisoner could receive or, better, if he could convince the prisoner that his wife had no freedom of choice in the matter, say, that the prison allowed only one kind of cake or authorized paper, then communication would be prevented.Without variety or knowledge of possible choices, information would be a meaningless concept. Evidently, physical restrictions limit the possibility of semantic interpretations of messages. Physical variability is a precondition for meaningful communication.

252 Information

A second defining condition of communication is a demonstrable constraint on the relationship between the freedom to send messages and the freedom to interpret them. Agreement on a code would be one way of characterizing that constraint. Belonging to the same speech community whose members speak and listen or write and read alike is another way for such constraints to be manifest and facilitate communication within a community A third defining feature of communication is the ability of communicators to select the messages they send in view of how receivers might interpret them, and conversely, of reading messages in view of the choices that their authors made when creating them. The statistical theory of information does not treat information as an entity transmitted from one point to another but as a statistic of the relationship between the choices made by senders and the choices available to receivers after receiving what was sent. This theory of information is concerned fundamentally with how freedom among communicators is intertwined, how actions of one affect the actions of others, and how their effects can be explained by the choices responsible for them. One can conceptualize the statistical measure of information as a relationship in a cross-tabulation of actions, assertions, messages or, not to overload these entities with distracting meanings, signals sent, and signals received, as in Figure 14.9.This cross-tabulation contains probabilities psr, the probabilities of sending a signal s and receiving signal r.These probabilities are summed to their margins, the probabilities ps of the sender sending s and the probabilities pr of the receiver receiving r. Signals received 1 2 3 . . . .r . . . . . . m 1 2 3 . Signals sent s . . n

psr

ps

pr

1

Figure 14.9. Table of Co-occurrences of Sent and Received Signals

Statistical measures of information are similar to statistical measures of association, as might be applicable to tables as in Figure 14.9. Information and the familiar chi-square statistic are both zero when there is no relation between two variables and they have no upper limit. However, χ2 is a function of the number of cases observed, and designed to test the significance of associations between two variables, whereas information is computed on probability distributions, which are not affected by the sample size. Pearson’s correlation coefficient r is similarly unaffected by the size of the sample. It is zero when correlations are absent but has an upper and lower limit of +1 and –1 respectively. Information theory, however, does not merely offer another measure of association. It provides an elaborate

An Introduction to Information Theory 253

calculus for computing uncertainties – a taste of it may be seen from Figure 14.10 – and thereby traces the flow of information, understood as the flow of relatedness or choices from one variable to another. With only two communicators, the full power of the information calculus is not demonstrable. Nevertheless, let me use the simple sender/receiver concept as a conceptually convenient prop to develop the following measures and equations. With data as in Figure 14.9, three basic uncertainties can be obtained.The total statistical uncertainty of entries psr in the table:

H(SR) = –

O O sPS

p log2 psr

rPR sr

The uncertainty at the sender (margins of rows in Figure 14.9):

H(S) = –

O

p log2 ps

sPS s

And the uncertainty at the receiver (column margins):

H(R) = –

O

p log2 pr

rPR r

Three secondary uncertainties can be defined by adding or subtracting primary uncertainties.This creates two conditional uncertainties:

HS(R) = H(SR) – H(S) HR(S) = H(SR) – H(R) and one relational measure, the amount of information transmitted between sender S and receiver R, obtainable in at least four ways:

T(S:R) = H(R) – HS(R) = H(S) – HR(S) = H(S) + H(R) – H(SR) = H(SR) – HS(R) – HR(S) = T(R:S) i.e., T(S:R) is symmetrical.The algebraic relationships between these quantities are visualized in Figure 14.10. H(SR) H(S)

HS(R)

HR(S)

H(R) T(S:R)

Figure 14.10. Quantitative Relationships Between Six Statistical Uncertainties

254 Information

Single Messages

The strength of the statistical theory lies in computing what happens to large numbers of observations. It is possible, however, and instructive to consider the amounts of information of one message among many.To appreciate the following, let me depict with Figure 14.11 the transition probabilities psr/ps in Figure 14.9 as a code, a probabilistic or imperfect code. 1

1

2

2

3

3

S

4

5

5

6

6

7

7

8

r

9

9

10

10

Figure 14.11. Transition Probabilities psr/ps , Constituting a Transmission Code

When message 1 is sent, it is unequivocally received as 1. No uncertainty remains at the receiver R. No noise entered during its transmission. However, sending s could be received as one of five messages. All one knows is that it is not received as 1, 7, r, and 9 – exemplifying Bateson’s negative reasoning. Analogous to how the combinatorial information was defined as U(S) – UMessage(S), the statistical information of any one message s is

T(s:R) = H(R) – Hs (R) One could interpret H(R) as the uncertainty in the receiver R before the message s was received and

Hs (R) = –

O

sPS

p p —sr log2 Ps —sr ps ps

as the remaining uncertainty.When sending message 1, as depicted in Figure 14.11, H1(R) = 0 and T(1:R) = H(R) or the largest amount possible.When sending message s, Hs(R) would not be zero. Since accounts of information transmissions are symmetrical, one can ask the same question for received messages. How much is the receiver of messages informed about what was sent? The answer is:

T(S:r) = H(S) – Hr (S)

An Introduction to Information Theory 255

where

Hr (S) = –

O

rPR

p p —sr log2 —sr pr pr

Equivocation and Noise

As may be verified with the help of Figure 14.10, the total amount of uncertainty can be partitioned into the amounts of transmission, noise, and equivocation.

H(SR) = T(S:R) + HS (R) + HR(S) In an ideal communication channel, signals sent and signals received are in a one-to-one relationship. Under these conditions, there is no noise HS(R) and no equivocation HR(S).The total uncertainty in the channel is utilized for transmitting information and all three uncertainties are equal:

T(S:R) = H(SR) = H(S) = H(R) Generalizing from our experiences with radio communication, noise introduces uncertainty into reception. Noise can be due to atmospheric interferences in radio transmissions, blurred television images, bad Xerox copies, typos, unclear pronunciations, or a decaying medium of written messages. Jamming undesirable radio stations is an intentional introduction of noise. Noise can be calculated algebraically from two primary uncertainties as in the above definition of HS(R). It can also be conceptualized as an average, the average uncertainty in the rows s of Figure 14.9, of Hs(R) defined above – which is the average uncertainty at the receiver R when individual signals s are known and depicted for one signal in Figure 14.11:

HS (R) =

O

p H (R) sPS s s

Equivocation is the algebraic complement of noise. Equivocation literally means “making equal,” simplifying. It is present in newspaper images, for example, whose grids lose many details of the scenes that the photographer saw. Categorizing data equivocates all incidences that find themselves in the same category.All abstractions equivocate variety. It too can be calculated variously and expressed as the average uncertainty Hr(S) in the columns r of Figure 14.9, and interpreted as the average uncertainty regarding what caused the reception of rs:

HR(S) =

O

p H (S)

rPR r r

In Figure 14.12, from the receiver’s perspective, one can see that noise competes with information within a communication channel. From the sender’s perspective, it is equivocation that competes with information during transmission. By reference

256 Information Noise HS(R)

H(S) Entropy of sender

H(R) Entropy of receiver

T(S:R)

HR(S) Equivocation

Figure 14.12. Transmission, Noise, and Equivocation in a Communication Channel

to Figure 14.10, it should be clear that if the receiver’s uncertainty exceeds that of the sender’s, as in Figure 14.9, which is not a square table, noise is inevitable, whereas the other way around, it is equivocation that is inevitable. Information

Information is a relational measure. It quantifies the extent to which one can link what is received to what was sent and conversely, what is sent to what was received. Just as the statistical uncertainties from which information quantities can be obtained by addition and subtraction, information is an average, the average of an s-r pair, of a signal sent and a signal received, being unlike what would be expected by chance.This can be seen by expressing the amount of information transmission as that average and in terms of the probabilities in the table of Figure 14.9:

T(S:R) =

O O sPS

p rPR sr

p (log2 —sr ) ps pr

Wherein (log2 psr/ps pr ) is related to the combinatorial information measure –log2 Nafter/Nbefore , ps pr representing a situation of statistical independence between sender and receiver, and psr the situation as actually observed.8 Thus, except for the averaging, the two kinds of theories conform to a common logic. Shannon conceived of communication as the exact or approximate reproducibility of messages from one place or time at another place or time.The statistical measure 8 The absence of the minus sign in the definition of T(S:R) is due to its expression as a function of probabilities, which are # 1, whereas the combinatorial information measure I(Message:S) is a function of possibilities, which are $ 1. The negative logarithm yields positive values from arguments , 1.

An Introduction to Information Theory 257

of information does not measure sameness, however. For example, when one opens a text file using the wrong program, one may see strange and unreadable characters. Here, communication was not accomplished while the information in the original was retained – provided there is a program to transform the unreadable file into something that resembles the original. The example stresses the importance of coding and the design of codes that can decipher encrypted messages, correct transmission errors, decompress compressed data, and make communications comprehensible in human terms. It suggests also that the statistical measure of information has nothing to do with senders’ intentions.A predictable but unintended effect is not a random effect and does maintain information from what was sent. Information measures nothing other than relatedness, the persistence of pattern or reproduction of choices across space or time. Should the need to reconstruct the original messages arise, it also expresses the degree to which codes can be devised to reconstruct the originals. Channel Capacity and Overload

One of the theorems of information theory states that a chain of communication channels is limited in capacity by its bottleneck. To use a few examples, a stereo system that consists of the best components except for a bad pickup head will reproduce sound no better than the pickup head permits. Similarly, a business organization in which departments work together within specified functions is limited in growth by the department that least effectively processes information. For example, when a company’s sales department is reduced suddenly in capacity, the whole company must slow as well – unless it can reorganize itself. In data analysis, which often proceeds through a sequence of steps – recording of observations, data entry for computer processing, analysis and interpretation of the computational results – noise may enter at any step that reduces the ability to process information from the data to research conclusions.The most unreliable step limits the validity of the results. In the content analysis of text, categorizing the text is often the bottleneck. In technical systems, the capacity of storing or transmitting information has absolute limits. A one-megabyte diskette can keep eight megabits of information, not one bit more. Here, information overload has little meaning. But it is an important concept in describing information transmission through biological organisms, cognitive systems, and social organizations. Neither has absolutely fixed channel capacities. Numerous experiments with cells, the human brain, small groups, and large social institutions have shown that a comfortable rate of information transmission can be temporally exceeded, but that such excesses usually are accompanied by increasing strains and stresses, introducing processing errors and reducing information transmission, until the system breaks down completely. J.G. Miller (1962), Richard Meier (1972), and many others have studied the ways in which organisms, organizations, and communities react to and cope with overload.These researchers have identified several strategies including: omissions,

258 Information

response errors, queuing for processing at subsequent lulls, filtering according to the priority of messages, abstracting principal features at the expense of detail, and processing in chunks, all of which amount to forms of equivocation. Coping with information overload is probably one of the most important problems of our times.The mass media bombard us with information, most of it irrelevant to everyday life. Inexpensive methods of generating and disseminating messages cause a flood of junk mail, advertisements, spam, magazines, and even an increase of scholarly publications. The internet houses information far beyond our capacity to read, understand, and act on it.9 Besides the necessary increase of equivocation, which presupposes access, attention is the currency of our new economy. Humans have only a limited attention span.Attention to something excludes attention to other things; settling among alternatives often results from cultural habits or the intellectual curiosity directed by prior information, but most importantly by contingencies, chance, or serendipity – which is not theorizable by definition. Redundancy

In the statistical theory of information, redundancy is the difference between the capacity of a transmission channel and the amount of uncertainty inside that channel. It can be of three kinds: • •

•

Unlike probabilities of signals used. Syntactical restrictions on the usable combinations of signals. A grammar, for example, excludes the occurrence of ungrammatical sentences, enabling some autopredictability, the ability to predict the continuation of a sequence of events from what preceded them. Duplications, sending the same signal or message or some of its properties within the same or through an additional channel to the same destination.

For an example of autopredictability, suppose I have the word “INFORMATION” in mind and I ask you to guess this character string letter by letter.To guess the first of the 27 letters of the English alphabet (including space) correctly is most unlikely. Using a dictionary, p(h)=1/27. For the first letter, ph(I) is about 0.04. Guessing the second is easier, as some letters are unlikely to follow “I,” phI(N) is about 0.59. As there are many words starting with “IN,” the probability phIN(F) goes up to about 0.13, … Once one comes to “INFORMATIO” the letter “N” follows with certainty, phINFORMATIO(N) = 1, but, because the character string need not end there, phINFORMATION(h) goes up again. Figure 14.13 shows the entropy profile for the word “INFORMATION.” If letters would follow each other with equal probability, one would obtain a straight line at zero redundancy and predictions would be no better 9 See also Chapter 17 in this volume for the significance of chunks for users’ ability to handle artifacts in cyberspace.

An Introduction to Information Theory 259

than chance. Redundancy in the form of knowing the conditional probabilities of characters within English words makes guessing them less a chance event. One may note in Figure 14.13 the dips at the end of linguistic building blocks “in,” “form,” and the suffix “ation.” 0

All characters equally likely Redundancy

Probability 0.5

1

I

N

F

O

R

M

A

T

I

O

N

Figure 14.13. Entropy Profile of “INFORMATION”, Demonstrating Its Redundancy

Two visual examples from Attneave (1954) are depicted in Figure 14.14.The left image shows an experimentally obtained entropy profile of a visual figure. Subjects were asked to identify ten points on a line drawing that would best characterize the figure. The right image was obtained by connecting the 38 points of maximal curvature of a richer drawing of a sleeping cat by straight lines.The sleeping cat is still recognizable, despite the loss of much of the redundancy in the original drawing. It has lost much of its redundancy. Cartoonists are often masters in reducing the redundancy of images, highlighting the information they wish to convey.

Figure 14.14. Redundancy of Visual Images

Redundancy is not quite as useless as the word suggests. For example, redundancy can protect us from the effects of a variety of errors. Shannon has computed the English language to be 50 percent redundant. Others have upped that estimate to

260 Information

70 percent. The actual percentage does not matter, but we make use of that redundancy whenever we correct grammatical mistakes and typing errors.We would not know if something is misspelled unless a character string does not appear in the dictionary of a language or is ruled out by a grammar.Taylor (1953) used the correct guessing of words left blank in a text as a measure of readability. Readability requires a certain amount of redundancy. Human face-to-face interaction relies on several mutually supportive channels of communication, the verbal, the paralinguistic, and the non-verbal, including smell and touch. Gestures underline what we say and paralinguistic signs parallel intended meanings. This redundancy makes human interaction naturally resistant to noise and allows constant checking and testing of whether information is sincere or sarcastic, important or of passing interest, etc. On a different level, but similar in principle, the large amount of redundancy in the human brain makes it possible for the brain tissue to sustain partial damage with little or no effect on human behavior. One of the important theorems of Shannon’s information theory, theorem number 10, asserts that in order to correct for the noise in a communication channel, an observer – see Figure 14.15 – with access to the input and output of that channel requires additional channel capacity equal or larger than the quantity of noise to be corrected.Without an observer, the same can be accomplished by an error-correcting code, which requires the appropriate amount of redundancy. Noise Input signals Sender

Communication channel

Output signals Receiver

Correction device

Correction output

Equivocation Observer Additional channel

Figure 14.15. Shannon’s Theorem Number Ten Diagrammatically

Information in Complex Systems

When Shannon wrote his landmark work, he conceived of communication mostly as originating at a sender and terminating at a receiver. Such linear conceptions were sufficient to decipher enemy communications during World War II.They aided the design of emerging digital media and conformed to social concerns with intended as well as unintended mass media influence. The psychologist McGill (1954) first considered extending information theory from two variables (sender and receiver) to three, not necessarily in a chain. Later, the cybernetician Ashby (1969) extended

An Introduction to Information Theory 261

the ability to account for information flows to large systems. Here, we can only outline some of these ideas.10 Briefly, a system consists of a set of variables or components together with the network of relationships among them. A biological organism with its many organs and complex hormonal interchanges can be regarded as a system. A city, too, consisting of many people connected through various means of transportation, communication, and collaboration, is a system by this definition. These different phenomena have in common that their parts are distinguished or distinguish themselves in terms of patterns of interactions or networks of relations of various complexities. Information theory can quantify such networks of relations. It is tied neither to what senders communicate to receivers nor to the chain-like structures often assumed in communication studies. Extended to many variables, statistical information theory suggests a way of expanding the traditional horizon of communication research. Let me present a few accounting equations for amounts of information within systems and interpret them briefly. Ashby extended Shannon’s amount of information transmitted between senders S and receivers R

T(S:R) = H(S) + H(R) – H(SR) to systems with any number of variables A, B, C, ..., Z by

T(A:B: ... :Z) = H(A) + H(B) + ... + H(Z) – H(AB ... Z) Herein, H(A) + H(B) + ... + H(Z) is the statistical uncertainty in the system that would be observed if the components of the system were unrelated or statistically independent, whereas H(AB ...Z) is the uncertainty in that system actually observed. Their difference, T(A:B:C: ... :Z), measures how much information is circulating within that system and the complexity of the network of interactions among its components – without actually locating or differentiating these interdependencies. The latter is the task of algebraic accounting equations. A reasearcher trying to understand the complexity of a system may ask whether it can be partitioned into smaller semi-independent subsystems that can be treated more easily as separate entities. This would be justifiable when information transmitted within these subsystems is high while information transmitted between them is negligible. One accounting equation available for this purpose algebraically decomposes the total amount of information into three quantities, the information within two subsystems and between them. Exemplified with seven variables,

T(A:B:C:D:E:F:G) = T(A:B:C:D) + T(E:F:G) + T(ABCD:EFG) 10 For another approach to information in complex systems see Chapter 15 in this volume.

262 Information

This equation would be true regardless of the partition.The system researcher will want to find a partition so that the transmission between the partitioned subsystems is absent or minimal. Having found this minimum, the researcher can continue partitioning each of the subsystems thus distinguished until further partition seems to have no empirical base. Suppose a partition of the first of the above subsystem yields T(A:BCD) to be a minimum,

T(A:B:C:D) = T(B:C:D) + T(A:BCD) Inserting this equation into the total amount describes the whole system as consisting of two richly interconnected subsystems, BCD and EFG, and a lone variable A with minimal information transmitted between the three,

T(A:B:C:D:E:F:G) = T(B:C:D) + T(E:F:G) + T(A:BCD:EFG) If transmission T(A:BCD:EFG) is indeed negligible, the researcher can take advantage of the absence or near absence of higher-order complexities in the system and study the two simpler subsystems separately. The extended calculus lends itself to another approach, to test hypotheses concerning specific communication structures. For example, suppose we hypothesize that four variables A, B, C, and D constitute a chain in that order. In such a chain, communication between A and D would go only through B and C, requiring:

T(A:D) > 0 but TBC (A:D) = HBC (A) + HBC (D) – HBC (AD) = 0 Communication research often makes analytically convenient assumptions that could, however, be tested for validity. For example, the network approach to communication studies assumes that a system involving many communicators is reducible to the binary relations between them, described as a collection of links between any two nodes (communicators) and depicted as graphs. It is conceivable, however, that tertiary, quaternary, quintenary, and in any case higher-order interactions are operating in such systems as well,11 for example, in the form of coalitions or communities. Given suitable data, the information calculus can account for such complexities. A priori simplified data cannot. Algorithmic Theory of Information 12 Providing the background for studies beginning in the 1960s of the complexity of computation, Kolmogorov (1941) had come to conclusions similar to Shannon’s 11 See Chapter 15 in this volume. 12 This part is taken from Klaus Krippendorff’s contribution on information theory to Wolfgang Donsbach (Ed.) (2008). The Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

An Introduction to Information Theory 263

(Shannon & Weaver, 1949). He equated the descriptive complexity or algorithmic entropy of an object such as a text or a process of analysis with the computational resources needed to specify or reproduce it. Consider the two strings of 0s and 1s:

001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001 111101101000010110000001010010101110001110101111000110000111 The first affords a short description in English:“20 iterations of ‘001,’” which consists of 20 characters as opposed to 60, whereas the second affords no simple description, its 60 binary digits being arguably the best. Representing computational objects by strings of 0s and 1s not only conforms to their representation in the memories of computers; it is also fortuitous that each amounts to one bit, tying the objects of the algorithmic theory into the information calculus. So, the length of a sequence s is the log2 of the number of possible sequences of that length and the –log2 of its probability Ps – much as in the combinatorial theory of information.The shortest description of s is called the Kolmogorov complexity K(s), which leads to this inequality:

K(s) < Length(s) = – log2 Ps Given two strings of instructions s and t, the joint complexity is

K(s, t) = K(s) + Ks(r) + ε It states that the shortest instruction to produce two strings s and t is the length of the shortest instruction to reproduce s plus the length of the shortest instruction to produce t, given s, plus a small logarithmic factor.This form may be recognized in the algebraic accounts provided by the combinatorial uncertainties, as diagrammed in Figure 14.10. The difference between Length(s) and the length of its shortest description K(s) is the redundancy R in s:

R(s) = Length(s) – K(s) It has been proved that K(s) is not obtainable by computational means and that K(s) is language-dependent. Approximating K(s) is not entirely an art, however. Computer programmers use software for optimizing computation, in effect reducing the length of the algorithm they have written, without assurance that the result is indeed the shortest possible description. Good computer programmers recognize the difference between the unavoidable complexity K(s) and the dispensable redundancy R(s). In the evolution of computer languages, compilers have become more powerful, allowing shorter written programs but taking up more computer space and time.

264 Information

This has accelerated greatly information technology developments. There exists a proposal to shift attention from theorizing the shortest programs for solving a problem to the shortest time required to accomplish the same. The algorithmic theory of information need not be limited to evaluations of computer programs. Questions of the efficiency of instructions are raised in many empirical areas, for example, in tax form booklets, manuals for handling technical equipment, rules for conducting particular business transactions, and recipes for cooking. Such instructions do not convey semantic or statistical information but specify sequences of actions for how something is to be accomplished. Efficiency and understandability are important issues; many institutions test such instructions for length, readability, and the errors they invite without necessarily quantifying them in terms of bits.The ideas that go into information theory are followed in such applications as well. As stated above, redundancy is both a waste and an assurance that people are not thrown off course easily when they make minor mistakes or do not quite understand.

Chapter 15

Research In-Formation *

Introduction This essay exemplifies the application of information theory to processes of scientific research.Textbooks in social research prescribe procedures for collecting data and analyzing them to gain valid representations of the world they are presumed to represent. Statistical techniques, for example, for sampling, reliability assessments, pattern extraction, and testing hypotheses amount to tools for assembling a procedure for moving data to conclusions without, however, saying much about what happens to these data quantitatively. Information theory provides a general calculus for qualitative variations, not only to test hypotheses concerning communication, but also to trace the flow of data through complex systems. Doing research can be conceptualized as such a system. Speaking of sampling, finding, and collecting data implies that data were there to begin with, and testing hypotheses about systems that emit them implicates objectivism, a philosophy of science that presumes the systems of interest to reside outside and independent of our observing them. Subscribers of this philosophy are convinced that their research methods enable them to describe this reality objectively, that is, without entering the process. Aiming at accurate descriptions of facts also implicates a notion of language as a system of representations. This essay will challenge or at least qualify both assumptions. This challenge is grounded in cybernetic epistemology (Bateson, 1972; Krippendorff, 1984a,1 1989a), including radical constructivism (Glasersfeld, 1984), and social constructionism (Gergen, 1985). From these perspectives, the issue is not how to represent reality as accurately as possible, but how we come to know. For example, Glasersfeld rightly questions our ability to step outside of our cognition and compare what is in front of our eyes with what we are seeing. For him, coming

* This essay is part of Krippendorff, K. (1991). Reconstructing (some) communication research methods. Pages 115–142 in F. Steier (Ed.). Research and Reflexivity, Newbury Park CA: Sage, and is complemented by material from Krippendorff (1986). 1 See Chapter 2 in this volume.

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to know means actively constructing what we know. Such arguments doubt the possibility of objective, that is, observer-independent representations.This doubt is also informed by language philosophers like Wittgenstein (1953) and Rorty (1989) who have focused our attention on the use of language, denying the possibility of truths by correspondence. One aim of this essay is to use the flow of data to demonstrate how researchers are far more involved in creating the data they end up analyzing than embraced by standard methodology. It turns out, data are not found and truths are not discovered, as commonly presumed.They are largely generated by actions that researchers are taking to transform the data into publishable research results. A second aim of this essay is to present an important extension of Claude E. Shannon’s (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) information theory to complex systems of qualitative data, to circular models of data in particular (Krippendorff, 1986). Circular processes in systems have largely escaped quantitative analysis. I will discuss these extensions in the context of what has come to be known as reconstructability analysis, a way of explaining data in terms of models that are simpler than the original. Information in Simple Systems 2 Shannon’s basic information measures involving two variables, a sender and a receiver, for example, can be stated in terms of simple entropies and as a function of distributions of probabilities pab, pa = b pab and pb = a pab:

O

In the sender In the receiver In total

O p log p H(B) = – O p log p H(AB) = – O O p H(A) = –

aPA a

2 a

bPB b

2 b

aPA

bPB ab

O

O where p = O where pa= b

p

bPB ab

p

aPA ab

log2 pab

And three secondary quantities

Noise

HA(B) = H(AB) – H(A)

Equivocation

HB(A) = H(AB) – H(B)

Transmission

T(A:B) = H(A) + H(B) – H(AB)

These are the terms needed for the first part of this essay. Conceptually, noise is the entropy that enters a communication channel, usually spuriously and unwanted. It is the entropy of the receiver, given the knowledge of 2 See Chapter 14 in this volume.

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what was sent. Equivocation is the complement of noise. It is the entropy of the sender which is removed in the cause of transmission, due to simplifications, categorization, or failures on the part of the receiver to distinguish what the sender sent. Both errors distract from perfect transmission as can be seen in the partition of the total entropy into the three secondary definitions defined above:

The total

H(AB) = T(A:B) + HA (B) + HB (A)

Accordingly, one could say that transmission, noise, and equivocation compete for the total entropy in such a simple system.As one quantity becomes larger, the others are forced to become smaller. Let us now see what we can learn from applying some of these quantities to processes of generating empirical data for analysis. The Flow of Information in the Process of Generating Data for Analysis As an example, I am using 4764 homicide cases tried in Florida between 1973 and 1979 (NewYork Times, 1979). Figure 15.1 depicts each case as a dot and shows three distinctions drawn within them. One may notice the conspicuous absence of death sentences for white convicts when the victim is black.This naturally aroused interest among civil rights advocates and the analysis of the complexities hidden in these apparently simple data proved challenging for an extension of information theory (Krippendorff, 1986). Selecting that sample from a larger population of, say, m cases requires log2(m/4764) bits of information.The Florida legal system did not choose the sample, a researcher did. Faced with essentially unknown populations, statisticians justify black white victim

white black murderer death other penalty

Figure 15.1. Racial Discrimination Data

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sample sizes by reference to the “law of large numbers.” This “law” has little to do, however, with the source that provided the data. The research question, the researcher’s resources and convenience determined the sample and its size. Figure 15.2 visualizes the tremendous reduction of variety from log2m (m being unknown but potentially large) to log24764 = 9.22 bits – prior to any data analysis. Note that each of these 4764 cases is unique. No two are alike.Yet, one can see three binary distinctions drawn within them, yielding 23 = 8 categories of cases of unequal size, one empty. There are 24763 – 1 or about 101434 binary distinctions possible.This is a huge number. It has 1435 digits, would easily fill half a book page and is transcomputational in magnitude.There is no way to justify the choice of the three distinctions in the Florida justice system’s terms. A content analysis of the records it keeps surely could give rise to very many distinctions, and racial categories do not officially enter the formal procedures by which the legal system sees itself as operating.A computational method for making an informed decision in favor of the three out of the 101434 possible distinctions does not exist.The only way to explain this choice is by reference to the concepts, theories, and social concerns the social scientists had in mind while designing the study and training readers to classify cases into the desired categories for the analysis.The theory hypothesized that the relation between the race of the victim and the race of the convicted murderer had something to do with (or statistically predicted) the death penalty and these notions surely arose out of a larger social concern with overcoming racial injustice.Thus, it is fair to say that data depicted in Figure 15.1 are far removed from what existed outside of the researcher’s discourse.They are constructed with the help of the researcher’s theories not simply emitted by the source. Figure 15.2 shows a comparatively huge amount of equivocation. As defined above, equivocation measures the variety lost in the process of transmission by categorizing the 4764 cases into fewer categories.The equivocation equals 7.66 bits – the entropy in the sample, 9.22 bits, minus the entropy in the distinguished data, 1.56 bits – or 83 percent of the total. This is an amazingly large proportion and, again, largely the researchers’ choice. To categorize these cases non-randomly requires 7.66 bits of information that could have been buried somewhere in the written court proceedings, but we do not know. We also do not know how much noise entered the process of categorization, unwittingly contained in the 1.56 bits of categorized data. Noise is a measure of unreliability; and in my experiences with content analysis (Krippendorff, 2004), unreliability is a large bottleneck for empirical research when based on the reading of text, as in this case. Unreliable data limit the chance of drawing valid conclusions from them. In the assessment of reliability, one can distinguish two kinds of errors, random and systematic. Random errors introduce noise into the data that increases the likelihood of accepting a null hypothesis when it should have been rejected. Systematic errors are more dangerous as they introduce spurious patterns into the data that may end up in the research findings, increasing the likelihood of rejecting a null hypothesis when it should have been accepted. Systematic errors are more

Research In-Formation 269 Researcher’s theory Specifies

?

log2m bits in population

Sampling

m bits 4764 lost by sampling log2

Specifies

9.22 bits in sample of cases

Drawing distinctions

Structural

hypotheses

1.56 bits in data Analysis

Result

7.66 bits lost by equivocation

Figure 15.2. The Flow of Information in the Process of Generating Data

difficult to detect but particularly problematic in these data because data can easily be biased by coders with common prejudices. In the absence of reliability tests, one can only assume that the amount of information actually transmitted in the process is less than the 1.56 bits that ended up in the data. This is not to suggest that the Florida homicide data are biased and that the analytical results would therefore be questionable. On the contrary, the notion that distinctions are actively drawn rather than passively recognized in the analyses texts, that researchers participate in the creation of data rather than finding them, that data are informed by theory rather than informing it, is an anathema for objectivists who are blind and unable to see the social or psychological foundation of their own reality. The foregoing leads to two obvious generalizations. First, the objects of an inquiry cannot possibly be found in an externally constituted nature. An overwhelming amount of information that objectivists prefer to attribute to an undisturbed reality must be seen as constructed in a more or less public discourse about them. It is information, formation from within, not ex-formation, formation caused by external phenomena. Second, in empirical research, an enormous amount of information in data is discarded or ignored. I would say that the success of scientific research depends on throwing away information. Neither generalization supports the illusion that data are objective manifestations of a system that one intends to analyze. Data reflect our own research questions more so than the properties of their sources. Information in Multi-Variable Systems Data in the social sciences typically involve many variables. Information theory would severely limit its usefulness if it were restricted to two variables, above called sender and receiver. As it turned out, and quite unexpectedly so, when more

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variables are involved the complexities that are possible within such data increase not merely quantitatively but qualitatively as well. The psychologist McGill (1954) expanded the bivariate transmission measures to three variables and discovered the existence of tertiary interactions, Q, which could not be explained in terms of the sum of binary interactions:

T(A:B:C) = T(A:B) + T(A:C) + T(B:S) + Q(ABC) Expanding the information calculus to systems with any number of variables, Ashby (1981) continued the definition of information as the difference between the entropy in a hypothetical system void of information transmission between pairs of variables and the entropy of the observed system, but now for any number of variables A, B, C, ... , Z

T(A:B:C: ...:Z) = H(A) + H(B) + H(C) + ... + H(Z) – H(ABC ... Z) Ashby’s aim was to create a general method of accounting for the information flows within large systems.To do so, he developed several accounting equations, for example:

T(A:B:C:...:Z) = T(A:B) + T(AB:C) + T(ABC:D) + ... + T(ABC...Y:Z) which shows the total amount of information circulating within a system to be decomposable into the sum of any one transmission between two variables, the transmission between the two and a third, between the three and a fourth, etc. up to the last variable.Another and perhaps more powerful equation shows the quantities of information involved when decomposing a whole system into two subsystems:

T(A:B:...:F:G:H:..:Z) = T(A:B:...:F) + T(G:H:...:Z) + T(AB...F:GH ... Z) Here the total amount is the sum of the information within each subsystem and the information between the two subsystems. This decomposition equation can be applied to each subsystem, thus breaking the whole amount into larger numbers of smaller quantities. These are accounting equations. Their information quantities add to the total. The point of these equations is to algebraically locate, isolate, and quantify complex information processes occurring in large systems. When an information quantity turns out to be zero or negligibly small, this permits the analyst to simplify the description of a system. For example, if the transmission between two subsystems, T(AB...F:GH...Z) in the above equation, turns out to be zero or insignificant, this justifies treating the whole system as two independent subsystems. As a research strategy, one may want to search through all possible bi-partitions to find the one with the smallest amount of information transmitted between its two subsystems,

Research In-Formation 271

then apply the same strategy to the subsystems identified as independent, until all justifications to introduce partitions are exhausted.The point of such a strategy is to find hidden simplicities and take analytical advantage of them and focus on modeling the remaining parts in depth. For example, if a system can be decomposed into dyadic communication channels without carrying information from one dyadic communication to another – like in a telephone network – this would mean a tremendous simplification. In communication research, network analysis makes this assumption. Given suitable data, this assumption could be put to a test, and if it fails, the quantities that turn out to be positive would show the communication researcher what needs to be explained. Ashby’s extensions proved limited with the discovery that McGill’s quantity of interactions Q, on which Ashby relied as well, was an algebraic artifact due to the inability of calculating probabilities algebraically whenever systems exhibited circular dependencies (Krippendorff, 1980b). This was already true in the tertiary interaction Q(ABC), which responds to the circular dependency A → B → C → A or A ← B ← C ← A, calling for a different approach. Information in Interactions within Systems A system of data, characterized by its variables – the distinctions in the data depicted in Figure 15.1 – may be conceived of as containing more or less complex interactions. A telephone network, for example, without conference calls consists of binary relations only. Complexity emerges when there are higher-order interactions, various forms of coordination or cooperation among a system’s variables. For example, a system with just four variables A, B, C, and D can contain: 1 4 6 4 1 16 = 24

Quaternary interaction involving all four variables ABCD Tertiary interactions involving any three variables: ABC, ABD, ACD, BCD Binary interactions involving any two variables: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD Unary interactions or properties, involving separate variables: A, B, C, D Zero-order interaction, void of any knowledge of variables Interactions in total, 4 being the number of variables involved.

One can create a lattice of progressively simpler models of a system by analytically removing their governing interactions one at a time, without, however, losing any of the variables of the original system. For example, removing the unique quaternary interaction ABCD from a four variable system creates a model consisting of four tertiary components ABC:ABD:ACD:BCD, each component representing a different tertiary interaction. Removing one of the tertiary interactions, say BCD, from the preceding yields a model with three tertiary components ABC:ABD:ACD, and removing a second tertiary interaction, say ACD, yields a model with one binary and two tertiary components ABC:ABD:CD. Now one has the choice of removing the binary interaction CD, which yields ABC:ABD, or removing one of the two tertiary interactions, say ABD, which yields a model with these components ABC:AD:BD:CD.

272 Information

This process stops at a model of the system consisting of four independent variables A:B:C:D, from which all information is removed. In the above, I called a set of components of a system that embodies all the governing interactions a model of the system. Each of these models possesses a structure that can be depicted by connecting their components with the variables they have in common. For example: The structure of ABC:ABD:ACD:BCD is:

A

The structure of ABC:ABD:CD is

C

B D

C

D A B

A B

The structure of ABC:CD is

A

The structure of AB:AC:BC:D is

D

C C

D

B A

B

C

D

The structure of A:B:C:D is The right side of Figure 15.3 depicts all possible structure types – omitting the actual labels – that can occur in systems with four variables. As can be seen, these structures form a lattice. There is a definite order in which interactions can be removed to derive one model from another. It also depicts the structure types originally investigated by Ashby (1964) in terms of what he called “cylindrance,” and the lattice of structure types of loopless models investigated by Klir (1976). Ashby’s total amount of information T(A:B:C:D) circulating in a system turns out to be the difference in entropy between the model on top of the lattice on the right side of Figure 15.3 and its bottom, generally:

T(A:B:C:...:Z) =

O O O aPA

bPB

cPC ...

O

zPZ pabc ...z log2

pabc ...z pa pb pc ...pz

= H(mind ) – H(m0 ) In its logarithmic expression, the enumerator, pabc ...z, is the probability distribution of all cooccurrences of states abc ... z in ABC...Z, which will be called m0; whereas the denominator, pa pb pc ...pz, is the probability distribution of a model in which all variables of the system are considered unrelated,A:B:C:...:Z, which will be called mind and is the condition under which information is absent.To serve as an accounting equation for models of systems, his total needs to be expressed as the sum of quantities of information associated with individual interactions.

Research In-Formation 273

Ashby’s (1964) Constraint Analysis

Klir’s (1976) Structure Types

Krippendorff’s (1981) Structure Types

4

3

I(m0 → mi–1) Cylindrance

T(A:B:C:D) = I(m0 → mind ) 2 I(mi–1 → mi)

I(mi → mind)

1

Figure 15.3. Structure Types for Explaining Data

274 Information

Going back to Figure 15.3, the difference between models containing loops and those that do not is important for computing the needed probability distributions. To understand the reason for this difference, one must realize that the addition of logarithms is grounded in the multiplication of probabilities by which traditional information theory computes its expected probability distributions. However, multiplication also presupposes a linearity that circular structures do not possess. This is why algebraic accounts of interactions among three or more variables prove impossible as their removal always creates loops. To compute the probability distributions for models with loops, I designed an algorithm that goes around and around the loops of a model and iteratively converges on the probabilities that satisfy the probability distributions all of its components (Krippendorff, 1981, 1986:57–60).3 This algorithm enables us to define and compute the amount of information in interactions, present in a model mi and absent in a model mj as a difference – much like T is a difference – where mj results from removing one or more interactions from mi:

I(mi → mj ) = H(mj ) – H(mi ) =

Op

abc ... z

abc ... z(m0

log2 )

pabc ...z (m ) i

pabc ...z (m ) j

Naturally, the sum of these information quantities along any one path of possible simplifications from m0 to mind add to Ashby’s total amount of information in the observed system:

O I(m

i = ind i=1

i –1

→ mi ) = I(m0 → mind ) = T(A:B:C: ... :Z)

Reconstructability Analysis We can now attend to the box labeled “Analysis” in Figure 15.2 and consider the information flows involved in testing various models of data. The term reconstructability analysis is due to Klir (1976), who extended Ashby’s (1964) idea of cylindrance to models of data without loops. In simple strokes, our more general and information-based procedure can be described as follows. Given original data m0, which are to be explained. Initially, m’s subscript is i = 0. Subsequently, mi consists of components Ki1, Ki2, Ki3, ... (1) For each component Ki of mi i Remove the governing interaction from one Ki to obtain several components Kj, each covering fewer variables than Ki does.The descendent 3 Reproduction of this algorithm would go beyond the scope of this essay.

Research In-Formation 275

model mj contains all interactions of mi minus the one removed and replaced by what it brings forth.The resulting set of components exhibit no redundancy but cover all variables of m0. ii Decompose the original probability distribution in m0, into the probability distributions for each component Kj of mj. iii Enter the probabilities for Kjs into the iterative algorithm which (a) constructs a model mj of m0 from these Kjs and (b) generates the probability distribution that satisfies the components Kj of mj. This transfers entropies H(Kj1 ), H(Kj2 ), H(Kj3 ), ... to the algorithm, which produces the entropy H(mj ). (2) Select the model mj from all descendants of mi for which I(mi → mj ) is smallest. (3) If I(m0 → mj ) is statistically significant, stop. mi is the model of the data. If I(m0 → mj ) is not ststistically significant, and mj 5 mind, stop. m0 contains no significant amount of information. Otherwise, rename mj → mi and go step 1. Figure 15.4 shows the flow of information through a reconstructability analysis. After removing one interaction at a time, the probability distribution in the original data with entropy H(m0 ) is decomposed into less complex probability distributions, one for each component Kj of the proposed model mj2, in effect transmitting the Structural hypotheses Analysis

Construction of a model mj

Components K for model mj H(K1) H(K2) H(K3)

Original data m0

…

Decomposition

H(mj )

Test of I(m0 → mj ) > 0

H(m0 ) = 1.56 bits

Move to next model mj

Figure 15.4. Information Flows in Reconstructability Analysis

Result mi = mj –1

276 Information

entropies H(Kj1 ), H(Kj2 ), H(Kj3 ), … to an algorithm.This algorithm computes the probabilities that the proposed model mj would generate, without the removed interaction, satisfying the probability distributions of the components Kj of that model.The resulting entropy H(mj ) is then communicated to where it is compared with H(m0 ). If the difference between H(mj ) and H(m0 ) is not statistically significant, more interactions are removed. If it is significant, the ancestor mi of mj is taken as the best model of the original data m0. The above amounts to an extension of information theory – much in the spirit of Ashby’s work, but turning attention from information transmissions between subsystems of variables to interactions of different complexities within systems, especially circular flows of information. The latter heretofore escaped Shannon’s theory. Applying such a powerful analysis to the data depicted in Figure 15.1 does not serve to demonstrate its analytical capabilities. Three variables cannot have much complexity in them. Nevertheless, let me present what such an analysis will produce. In the traditionally algebraic terms, the entropies and the information transmission within the data after their categorization are:

Entropies:

Information:

H(Race of murderer M) = 0.9976 bits H(Race of victim V) = 0.9997 bits H(Outcome O of the trial) = 0.1818 bits H(MVO) = 1.5578 bits T(M:V:O) = H(M) + H(V) + H(O) – H(MVO) = 0.6215 bits to be analyzed

In terms of the interactions in the data of Figure 15.1, separated by reconstructability analysis:

Removing MVO: I(MVO → MV:MO:VO) = 0.0000 bits I(MV:MO:VO → MV:VO) = 0.0102 bits Removing MO: I(MV:V → MV:O) = 0.0158 bits Removing VO: I(MV:O → M:V:O) = 0.5955 bits Removing MV: Removing all: I(MVO → M:V:O) = T(M:V:O) = 0.6215 bits, hereby analyzed The results suggest that there is no tertiary interaction between the race of the murderers M, of the victims V, and the outcomes O. However, there are significant binary interactions between the race of the murderers M and the outcomes O as well as between the race of the victims V and the outcomes O. The most significant interaction occurs between the race of murderers M and of victims V.This confirms that most violence occurs intra-racially.These results are not meant to be particularly profound.They merely serve to demonstrate the method.

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Conclusion If the process of generating data is one of discarding information that a researcher considers irrelevant to the theories or concerns pursued, the process of analysis demonstrates another important principle, largely ignored by objectivist philosophies of science.The small amount of entropy, 1.56 bits in our categorized data, stands in no obvious relation to the amount of information processing that a researcher undertakes to identify patterns in the data. Numerous analyses are available. Reconstructability is an attractive choice but just one among many and choosing an analytical method is not entirely data driven, as I have suggested. Regardless of the method chosen, within N distinctions drawn within data, there are 2N interactions among which the analyst needs to select suitable subsets, covering all the variables N of the system and jointly specifying testable models of data.There are 22 such subsets, not all of them form proper models, but those that do call for an enormous number of informed choices. Each model serves as a theory of the data. The number of decisions that researchers need to make among them far exceeds the information in the data, suggesting that such an analysis cannot be conceptualized as mapping of data into research results, as a linear processing of information through a channel depicted in Figure 15.1. Instead, reconstructability invokes evolutionary processes. The theory of evolution concerns mutations – which are not environmentally determined – and selective elimination of what does not fit that environment. Likewise, reconstructability involves constructing numerous “theories,” allowing each to specify a model that generates hypothetical data which in turn can be matched against the data as recorded, and selecting one or more that do not fail the test.What survives is not a model that represents reality as it is but one that fits the data as generated by the analyst. Thus, in line with what cybernetic epistemology, radical constructivism, and social constructionism have been suggesting, the accuracy with which reality is represented is not the issue, but whether the constructions one generates do not contradict how one happens to record and categorize the variations (perturbations) experienced.This seems to be true not only for human cognition – where the brain provides a wealth of constructions of reality through which we see and act in the world – but also for scientific research, usually undertaken by teams of researchers who are well advised not to restrict themselves to the pursuit of a single theory but to generate an abundance of conceptions and models in order to experience and discard the ones that do not.4 Reconstructability, as presented above, is at the root of an evolutionary approach to scientific explorations. It affirms that we cannot access reality directly or truly but only through models of what we manage to channel through our conceptions to the empirical tests. It operates on these models not by matching them against what exists but by testing whether our own conceptions and categories are viable. 4 See the empirical imperative in Chapter 1 in this volume.

Chapter 16

Paradox and Information *

The logic of the world is the logic of the descriptions (of the world) Heinz von Foerster Introduction Ever since the Cretan philosopher Epimenides put forth the proposition that “All Cretans are liars,” paradoxes have challenged orthodox thinking. Paradoxes have not only paralyzed human interaction – as with the command: “Disobey my orders” – but also stunned numerous logicians and mathematicians. Whitehead and Russell considered paradox a central issue in logic, and devoted the introductory chapter of their Principia Mathematica (1910) to the problems arising from certain contradictions, and how to avoid them. The essence of their proposal is their Theory of Logical Types, which distinguishes between different logical levels – one being about the other – and demands that no proposition link and, thereby, confuse the two – or else contradictions and paradoxes are likely to arise. Since Bateson’s (1972, 1978; Bateson et al., 1956) recognition of Whitehead and Russell’s Theory, the notion of paradox has gained increasing importance in theories of human communication.1 In Bateson and his followers’ works, paradoxes are seen as contributing to mental disorders and to problematic forms of interaction, thus establishing the pathogenetic aspects of paradox.2

* From Krippendorff, K. (1984b). Paradox and information. In B. Dervin & M.J. Voigt (Eds.). Progress in Communication Sciences 5:45–71. 1 Starting with Bateson’s (1955) theory of play, logical types and paradoxes have entered the communication literature through Bowers & Sanders (1974), Smith & Williamson (1977), and Wilmot (1979), but particularly through the literature on family communication, e.g., Sluzki & Ransom (1976), Harris (1980), Wilder-Mott (1980), Cronen et al. (1982), and Wilder-Mott & Weakland (1981). 2 Watzlawick (1963, 1976) and Watzlawick et al. (1967, 1974) for elaborations; Olson (1972) for a good critique; and Ringuette & Kennedy (1966), Bugental et al. (1971), Kafka (1971), Jacob

Paradox and Information 279

My thesis is that paradox also has important morphogenetic dimensions and might be a stimulus,3 if not the stimulus, for human cognitive growth and socialorganizational development, especially in overcoming orthodoxies. I contend that paradoxes paralyze the routine information-processing abilities of systems and that morphogenesis is a way to overcome these difficulties. Paradox Etymologically, the word paradox comes from the Greek para + dokein and means, roughly,“to think beyond.” It shares its prefix with many familiar words like “parallel,” “paranoia,” “paranormal,” “paralysis,” all of which suggest a unity of two conceptual opposites, like the two sides of a coin. A paradox could be characterized as a phenomenon that requires us to reconcile two apparently conflicting views,“to think beyond” or embrace both parts. Webster’s Dictionary (1967:610) stresses the logical nature of paradox when characterizing it as “an argument that apparently derives self-contradictory conclusions by valid deductions from acceptable premises.” Quine (1981:178) points out that some paradoxes are resolvable by showing that a premise was slightly false, that the inferences included unjustifiable steps, or that the conclusions turned out to be more plausible than initially thought. However, the paradoxes of interest here cannot be reduced to mere “human errors” of deduction. Referring to a 1906 article by H. Poincaré, Whitehead and Russell (1910:40) suggest that paradoxes possess what Poincaré called a “vicious cycle”: “take, for example, the law of excluded middle in the form of ‘all propositions are true or false.’ If from this law we argue that because the law of excluded middle is a proposition, therefore the law of excluded middle is true or false, we incur a vicious cycle fallacy.” The underlying structure of these vicious cycles is self-reference. The law of excluded middle is a proposition and refers to a proposition. Its truth is embedded in its circular form. Not all self-referential propositions are vicious in this sense. Some are redundant, in the sense that they assert a quality already manifest in them, and create no problems at all: This is a sentence. I am speaking. Am I asking a question?

(1975), Berger (1978), Doane (1978), Jacob & Grounds (1978), Harris (1980), Weeks & L’Abate (1982), and many others for further work in this thriving field of inquiry. 3 In his later work, and with reference to communication within families, Bateson is said to have thought that paradoxes may have pathological as well as creative consequences (see Cronen et al., 1982). The creative aspect of paradox has been emphasized by Kafka (1971) and in logic by Chihara (1973).

280 Information

Some are demonstrably false.Their very existence invalidates their claim: This sentence has six words. I am not talking to you. Can’t I ask a question? I am sorry. I never apologize. A vicious cycle emerges, for example, in the above-mentioned liar paradox in which Epimenides is telling the truth just when he is lying, and he is lying just when he is telling the truth. A similar example is found in the dialogue: Socrates: “What Plato is about to say is false.” Plato: “Socrates has just spoken truly,” which condenses to the well known self-reference: This sentence is false. appears also in the sign: Please ignore this notice

and in numerous everyday examples: Be spontaneous! We accept only one rule: break all rules. Tell me you love me. I love you. You said it just because I asked you to. Vicious cycle paradoxes or antinomies, as Quine (1981:178) calls them, may be characterized by the logical formula: P implies P′ where P is a proposition (e.g., “Epimenides the Cretan is telling the truth”), P′ is the complement of P (e.g., “Epimenides the Cretan is lying”), and the implication involves time to realize. In the example “be spontaneous,” the speech act precedes the recognition of its content.The addressee cannot accept the imperative and its denial simultaneously, but in sequence, changing one’s relationship to the source of the imperative from an authority to a friend.

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By contrast, contradictions, which are non-vicious, may be characterized by the logical formula: P and P′. They assert that something exists and does not, that a statement is true and false at the same time, which excludes all interpretations. Paradoxes allow one to select one part; but as soon as one has made this choice, one is forced to abandon it in favor of its complement, and as soon as one has accepted the latter one is lead back to the former, ad infinitum – hence the viciousness of the cycle. Contradictions do not allow the possibility of settling on one part, even temporarily. I might add that many of Bateson’s paradoxes, for example of the two-channel communication: Verbally: “I love you” Nonverbally: I don’t want to have anything to do with you appear to be contradictions.They may become vicious, however, when the addressee of such messages vacillates between privileging one channel as being of a higher logical type, and the other merely (dis)confirming the former or vice-versa (Cronen et al., 1982). Paradoxes are not limited to logic.They may become manifest in other communications. Information Gregory Bateson (1972:381) defined information as “any difference which makes a difference in some later event.” Acknowledging that differences do not reside in nature, but are the product of someone drawing distinctions, leads me to define information as the difference that the act of drawing distinctions in one domain makes in another.Thus, information affects an empirical domain other than where distinctions are drawn. Bridging these domains is a matter of abduction, an inference relating distinctions to conclusions. For instance, tree rings inform the forester of the age of a tree.Tree rings become meaningful only when knowing how trees grow rings and informative only when the number of rings is known to correlate with a tree’s age. Without knowing of that correlation, the age of a tree remains a wild guess. Counting tree rings changes what one knows, can say, or do. Logically speaking, abduction is informative, deduction and induction, however, say nothing new. Building on the logical or combinatorial theory of information (Krippendorff, 1975a)4 and using “message” as a mere generic, I define information I as the difference between two states of uncertainty U: 4 Chapter 14 in this volume.

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I(Message:Situation) = U(Situation) – UMessage(Situation) wherein uncertainties U are functions of the number N of uncertain alternatives available.With reference to time:

U(Situation) = log2 NIn Situation before receiving the Message UMessage(Situation) = log2 NIn Situation after receiving the Message By simple algebra and with subscripts simplified, the above information measure is a function of the logical probability of the message’s impact on the uncertainty in a given situation:

I(Message:Situation) = log2 NBefore – log2 NAfter = – log2

NAfter NBefore

Thus, if a message failed to make a difference in the uncertainty of the situation, NBefore = NAfter, the logical probability is 1, and the information is – log21/1 = 0. If a message pointed to one of the initially uncertain alternatives, the logical probability of that alternative is 1/NBefore and the information is – log21/NBefore = U(Situation), or at its maximum. Information is the work that a particular message does and is measured by the difference in uncertainty or lack of knowledge before and after the message was considered. Dropping the logical probability from 1 = NBefore/NBefore to NAfter/NBefore, may leave some possibilities NAfter for subsequent messages to reduce. The choice of the base of the logarithm is arbitrary. Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) chose dual logarithms, so that the answer to a yes-or-no question amounts to I(Answer:Question) = – log21⁄2 = 1 bit of information, which is the basic unit of information and an abbreviation for “binary digit,” the number of binary characters, 0 or 1, to represent a number N. Usually we face larger uncertainties.Think about the number of meanings listed for a word in a dictionary and where one needs to look in order to select the appropriate meaning.Think about the number of gates of a major airport your plane could depart from and how much the gate printed on your boarding pass tells you. Or, think about the opinions you can get by browsing the internet for a disease and what else you would have to examine to narrow them down to what you are willing to accept as sound medical advice.These are all issues of processing information. The physics of a message, it needs to be pointed out, has little to do with the amount of information that message can provide. The absence of an awaited telephone call is informative as are the energy-free gaps between Morse impulses. This justifies an epistemology of information that is entirely independent of how physics or the natural sciences theorize their subject matter. Ashby (1956a) recognized this for cybernetics.The explanations provided by human communication theory and research cannot rely on conceptions provided by the natural sciences

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either. They define a separate object, always involving human agency. Shannon’s theory is a mathematical theory. It is not tied to physical signals, as some critics insinuate. One of the phenomena obviously absent in energy flows, but present in processes of communication, is paradox, to which information can now be linked. Informational Cause of Paralysis All paradoxes claim something impossible. Contradictions of the kind “P and P′” arise from the supposed coexistence of mutually exclusive alternatives.Antinomies of the kind “P implies P′” add a temporal dimension to contradictions. Assuming that our experiences, our observations, and the practices we engage in are possible – otherwise, neither experiences, observations, nor practices would make sense – the impossibility that paradoxes manifest cannot arise from anything other than our inability to cope with the consequences of what we are told or read. What is at issue is the conceptual context in which a message is placed, especially the relationship between the domain within which distinctions are drawn and the domain in which they make a difference, the domain they inform.The latter is conceptualized, described, or hypothesized but not – or not yet – experienced. How much information do paradoxes convey? Consider the uncertainty of “P and P′.” Separately, the uncertainties of P and of P′ are unproblematic (unless P is a paradox as well). But jointly, they leave no alternatives in the given situation, and, since the logarithm of zero is minus infinity, the information in paradoxes becomes

I(Paradox:Situation) = U(Situation) – UParadox(Situation) = log2 NSituation – log2(0) = +` Infinity! In algebra, calculations with infinity always are disastrous, destructive, producing unimaginable quantities; they paralyze whoever encounters them. One cannot decide among infinite alternatives; and the finite amount of uncertainty in the above equation is totally overwhelmed by the negative infinity. For quite some time I thought this finding to be an undesirable artifact in information theory which could put the finite quantities in doubt as well. I asked myself how infinite amounts of information could arise within a cognitive system of finite distinctions. I even thought to rule out this anomaly – but then I would do precisely what Russell and Whitehead did by ruling self-reference out of logic and mathematics. However, a closer examination revealed this infinite quantity to be instructive though in a different sense. Recall that paradoxes arise not in the character sequence “P and P′,” but in the difference it makes in another domain, the domain in which it is interpreted – conceptualized, hypothesized, or anticipated – here, in logic. Infinite amounts of information indicate that the cognitive space of the situation in which one sees oneself as operating is simply not powerful enough to cope with the complexities of a paradoxical world.This suggests that the paralysis induced by infinite amounts of information is not the fault of logic, but due to one’s inability to comprehend the reality one is facing in its terms. Paralysis does not need to be the

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end of the road, however. It could also be seen as an invitation to “think beyond,” to examine the axioms of one’s own constructions of reality and try to resolve the problematic paradox constructively. I am proposing that the familiar measures of information are simultaneously informative on two levels: •

Finite quantities of information (1) measure the differences that drawing of distinctions in one empirical domain make in another (2) assure the viability of the construction of the situation one is attending to.

•

Infinite quantities of information indicate the non-viability of one’s current construction of reality in the situation one is facing, induce paralysis, and can be interpreted as an invitation to reconstruct that reality so as to render the amount of information one desires to process finite and manageable.While infinite quantities of information signal the failure of the current construction of reality, they do not suggest, however, why or where.

The paralysis caused by contradictions and paradoxes can be experienced in domains less formal than logic.They may go by different names and may not need to be as debilitating. “Dissonance,” “incongruity,” and “imbalance,” for example, are words used by cognitive scientists to refer to attitudes and concepts that create problems when subjects try to fit them into their cognitive systems. Festinger (1957:13) defines dissonance as arising from a situation in which two cognitive elements are related, i.e., co-occur, but the obverse of one follows from the other, i.e., they are mutually exclusive. His own examples, of a person being afraid while knowing that he is in the vicinity of only friends, or of a person who buys another car while already heavily in debt, largely concern irreconcilable expectations. These are intolerable when experienced and require some resolution.5 In the social domain,“conflict” and “struggle” are near synonyms of paradox. Social conflicts characterize a situation in which two parties claim possession or control of something both agree only one can have – see the Palestinian–Israeli conflict over the control of land. Invariably, the key to the resolution of such conflicts lies in reconceptualizing the situation without mutually exclusive claims. Struggle merely adds interaction to a conflict, enters available resources into the game, and might well end in one party subjugating the other. 5 For reviews of cognitive dissonance theories see Brehm & Cohen (1962), Abelson et al. (1968), and Zajonc (1968); for subsequent refinements see Festinger (1964) and for further applications see Wicklund & Brehm (1976), Bowerman (1978), and Carroll (1979). Chihara (1973:1) quotes Gottlob Frege’s account of his own feelings after receiving a letter from Bertrand Russell showing his Grundgesetze to contain a paradox.

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Clearly, experiencing dissonance, conflict, struggle, and breakdown are forms of paralysis, in the extreme, an inability to act knowledgeably – despite the participants’ usual intellectual abilities of drawing distinctions, processing information, and deciding among conceptually available alternatives. Paralysis may also be managed in communication. Consider this tale: A crocodile snatched a baby from its mother and offered to return it if the mother could correctly answer the question: “Will I eat your baby?” The mother said “yes” and saved the baby. Had the mother said “no,” the crocodile would have had no problem eating the baby. With the mother’s “yes,” the crocodile could no longer eat the baby without thereby proving the mother’s answer to be correct and return the baby as promised (Hughes & Brecht, 1979:3).The mother’s answer paralyzed the crocodile. The paralyses caused by more realistic paradoxes, inconsistent testimony, marital conflicts, revolutionary struggles,6 etc. are well documented and lead to the conclusion that serious paradoxes cannot be part of the stable state of any viable system. If paralysis cannot be dismissed or coped with in some way, the individual or organization experiencing it becomes unable to act and is ultimately bound to disintegrate or escape, which are two resolutions of paradox. However, if such a system is able to introduce changes in its organization, especially in reconceptualizing its situation, the ability to process information routinely is regained, and the system persists in a new and more powerful form. In viable systems, I am suggesting that paradoxes characterize structures – cognitive in individuals, institutional in social organizations, or discursive in academic disciplines – in transition from one form to another, in the course of which the quantities of information they encounter are rendered finite and manageable. Just how this change is accomplished is largely a mystery.The time seems not yet ripe to propose a dynamic, but we know of many examples of how paradoxical situations have been resolved. In the following, I will try to distinguish several basic types, characteristic of different worlds or world views: • • • • •

In an orthodox world In an algebraic world In an Euclidean world In a cybernetic world In a dialectical world.

6 See Hiniker (1977) for an application of dissonance ideas on the revolutionary struggle in China.

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Paradox in an Orthodox World For the orthodox, the aim of science is to discover the ontology of the world. Orthodox observers believe they can observe this world and state its facts without entering their domain of observation.7 In their view, the logic of the world must be mapped into the logic of its description, and, since nature is free of paradoxes, paradoxes are flaws in the language used to describe the world as is.8 To preserve the orthodox view of the world, paradoxes, therefore, must not be allowed to enter the language of science for they threaten the validity of scientific accounts. Representing this view of the world and of language most clearly,Whitehead and Russell’s (1910) solution to the problem posed by paradoxes is to exorcise them from scientific discourse.They were correct in recognizing that paradoxes arise from self-references, statements asserting their own truths, sets of elements that include themselves as members, or self-denying constructions.To prevent such “anomalies” of language, their Theory of Logical Types distinguishes logically different levels of description – propositions on one level are about objects or propositions on a level below them – and rules that propositions on any one level must not refer to propositions on their own level, i.e., not to themselves.Thus, Epimenides’ paradox is ruled out of existence by separating the proposition “Epimenides is a Cretan,” asserting the membership of Epimenides in the class of Cretans, from “Cretans are lying,” asserting a property of the class of Cretans. The paradox disappears by disallowing any member of a class to speak about that class. Howe and Foerster (1975) maintain that, since 1910, this ingenious theory has prevented logicians – and I would extend it to psychologists and social scientists alike – from coming to grips with the concept of self-reference.This has led social research methods to avert multilevel descriptions, which, according to the Theory of Logical Types, are a potential source of paradox. The orthodoxy of quantitative methods, especially in the social sciences, has effectively blinded quantitative researchers to the possibilities of paradox and morphogenesis.They tend to follow two related research strategies that effectively prevent paradoxes from entering social science data: the preference for logically homogeneous samples and the preoccupation with testing the statistical significance of hypotheses. Consider Osgood et al.’s (1964) semantic differential. It is designed to represent concepts in a multivariate attribute space, typically containing at least three dimensions: evaluation, potency, and activity. Each concept is rated on several seven-

7 See Chapter 1 in this volume 8 See Chihara’s (1973) account of Russell’s solution to paradox and the philosophical implications of contributions to paradox in logic by Gödel (1962), Quine (1976), and Poincaré (Whitehead and Russell, 1910). Chihara’s book provides probably the best guide to literature on paradox in mathematics and logic. Hofstadter (1979) contains colorful examples of these problems and elementary formalisms resolving them.

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point scales, which constitute the dimensions of that space. Thus, concepts are represented by points in that space. The representation of concepts in a common space cannot distinguish concepts of different generality nor among different logical levels. It treats all data on the same logical level. Should someone include a scale for rating the experiences of rating the concepts in question or what subjects thought about the semantic differential scales, this inclusion could not possibly threaten the method.All data recorded by this instrument are forced onto the same logical level, whether these are colors, personalities, word meanings, consumer product qualities, ideologies, or experiences with participating in the scaling task. Increasing the number of dimensions does not increase the descriptive power of the instrument. Osgood realized this by claiming that the semantic differential has nothing to do with reference. The point to be made here is that treating all stimuli as logically homogeneous makes paradoxes unrecognizable. Consider survey research. Typically, an interviewer follows a schedule of questions and records interviewees’ answers to multiple choice questions. Should interviewees ask a question about the meaning of a question or assert that the prepared answers do not fit their conception, such interjections are about the questions; allowing them would threaten the presumed meanings of the recorded answers. Interviewers might rephrase a question, but questions about questions have no place in this kind of research.They could render cross-tabulations of interviewee responses paradoxical. Testing of statistical hypotheses requires counting – people, opinions, responses, words, or income. Counting presupposes that the units counted are of the same logical level. The hypotheses under investigation are, however, on a logical level above the numerical evidence used to test them.They are the researcher’s choice. Should respondents, say in an opinion survey, have an opinion about the researcher’s hypotheses, the protocol for testing their statistical significance has no place for opinions concerning them. It keeps these levels neatly separate, thus preventing paradoxes from entering the research process.Yet, especially on opinion surveys, the possibility that interviewees have opinions about the very hypotheses that pollsters seek to test is most likely. I remember a former teacher of mine who, interested in preference ordering, became quite uncertain when finding inconsistencies of the kind A > B, B > C, and C > A. His puzzlement was justified but standard multi-dimensional scaling techniques merely record and compute preferences in pairs, conveniently ignoring relationships among more than two units, rendering inconsistencies invisible and successfully protecting the method from being threatened by paradox. One would think that the family of theories of cognitive dissonance would have overcome this orthodoxy. But on close inspection, this seems not to be the case. These theories are stated within several researcher-defined variables and aim to predict how subjects will alter the evaluative signs and magnitudes of attitudes to achieve stable (balanced, nonconflicting, or consonant) configurations. They are essentially closed systems and as such provide no space for recording subjects’

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responses to paradoxes, to infinite amounts of information, to experiences of paralysis – if they are experienced – and to resolutions other than those theorized by the researcher. Quantitative data are not only flat, logically speaking, but being a product of counting also presupposes that the units counted are independent from each other. This is why interviewing individuals can say nearly nothing about interpersonal communication and why we know so little about conflict resolution. Orthodox reliance on quantification implicitly accepts Whitehead and Russell’s prescription to rule paradoxes out of existence. Paradox in an Algebraic World Ruling paradoxes out of existence is not the only way to cope with the paralysis they can cause. It is possible to identify the conditions for paradoxes to arise, create concepts for these, and prevent them from paralyzing the remainder of the system, thus limiting their threat to the viability of the whole. I call this kind of resolution of paradoxes algebraic, not because they offer calculations but because they involve creating new symbols, and new operating rules for them. This resolution is conservative in spirit and algebraic in form. The simplest example of an algebraic solution to paradox comes from equation theory. In ordinary algebra, one assumes that numbers are either positive, zero, or negative.9 Take this numerical equation as an example:

x2 + 1 = 0 To solve it, we might transpose it into:

x2 = – 1 and divide both sides by x, yielding:

x = – 1–x Assuming x = +1 yields the contradiction:

+1 = +1/–1 = –1 and assuming x = –1 yields the contradiction:

–1 = –1/–1 = +1

9 This assumption is analogous to the law of excluded middle according to which propositions are either true or false, here + or –, except for the value zero, which is unmarked.

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Clearly, this is paradoxical.The expression x = –1/x is self-referential: the root value of x that we seek must be put back into the expression from which we seek it. In the orthodox world, such expressions would not be allowed.The emergence of such a paradox could threaten the whole system of algebra. But one might also conclude that x must have a value other than positive, zero, or negative.This led to the invention of imaginary numbers: i = Îãã –1 with which one can calculate just as with all other numbers. In the process, the paradox was identified, a symbol was invented to stand for it, and rules to handle this symbol were invoked, thus not threatening the remaining system of algebra. Algebraic handling of paradox might appear to be mere patchwork, as it attempts to identify the problem without examining the underlying cause, name it and develop rules to isolate it and thereby preventing it from causing trouble to the remainder of the system. Society is not as formalized as algebra and could be described as a patchwork of solutions to problems that emerged earlier. Naturally, many social problems are solved that way. One obvious example is the system of tax laws and regulations. Paradoxes appear when so-called loopholes are exploited by taxpayers who take advantage of unintended meanings of wordings. Loopholes constitute conflicts between lawmakers’ intentions and allowable practices. The government tries to close such loopholes by introducing laws that bring the intentions of the tax laws closer to the legally possible readings.As the system tries to remain viable, it grows in complexity, demonstrating its morphogenesis. Society’s coping with social deviance provides many examples. The label “criminal” is applied to someone who violates or contradicts lawful conduct. Once the correctness of the label is established by a court, special rules apply to this category of citizens. More extreme is the label “terrorist,” which is applied to individuals or groups whose actions, if allowed to take roots, could paralyze a large part of society and disable the whole. Governments try to prevent this possibility by instituting procedures that isolate terrorists from what they could do, treating them unlike law-abiding citizens. Marking people that require specialized treatment is common and includes the “mentally ill,” “revolutionaries,” “alcoholics,” “minorities,” and “children,” for which institutions are created to protect society from the paralysis they could cause or protect them from the forces in society that could harm them. Such labels manifest algebraic resolutions of paradoxes by identifying and confining conflicts, deviance and abnormalities. Paradox in an Euclidean World An Euclidean world consists of numerous dimensions that form hyperspaces of different ordinality within which images appear and can be seen from different

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perspectives. Paradoxes emerge when these perspectives differ despite the knowledge or assumption of an underlying unity. In this world, paradoxes are resolved by adding new dimensions to the conflicting perspectives, increasing the logical level of the space within which they arise until these conflicts are explained and no longer pose a threat to the assumption of unity. To start, take a simple example from projective geometry. Suppose we are given three geometrical images, as in Figure 16.1, of what we have reasons to believe to be a single unity:

Figure 16.1. Three Different Two-Dimensional Forms

The paradox lies in the apparent impossibility of reconciling these shapes as coming from the same object. However, as this case turns out, the images can indeed be rearranged as in Figure 16.2 so that they could be considered two-dimensional projections of a single three-dimensional object. The increase in dimensions from two to three creates one three-dimensional object that perfectly explains the three unlike images. In the Euclidean world, paradoxes are due to inadequate ordinality. An n+1dimensional representation is of one order higher than an n-dimensional representation – as exemplified in Figure 16.2. In that world, paradoxes are resolved by increasing the descriptive power of the space in which the paradoxical phenomenon arose, until it becomes unproblematic. I should mention that adding a dimension must also increase the power of description within the Euclidean space. Adding a scale to the semantic differential, for example, would not do that as this space represents only points, not configurations. It stays within the orthodox world. Bateson (1979:75–98) examines several paradoxes of this kind. The one resembling the foregoing example is binocular vision. When our two eyes, being apart from each other, are aimed at the same object in the environment, two somewhat conflicting images appear on the two retinas. Unable to decide between the two, and unable to escape from these experiences, the brain reconciles these differences by constructing a third dimension, which resolves these differences on a higher level. For most of us who grow up with binocular vision, the resolution of this paradox is so automatic that we do not even recognize differences in retinal images and always conceive of physical reality as three-dimensional. Bateson also shows how the addition of the time dimension led to the discovery of Pluto and its designation as a planet in 1930, revoked in 2006 for mere definitional reasons. Planet or not, its detection was made possible by an instrument that astronomers call “the blinker.” It visualizes change (a concept of a higher ordinality

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Figure 16.2. One Three-Dimensional Form Embracing Three Different Two-Dimensional Forms

than position) on a two-dimensional screen. Bateson found evidence of paradoxinduced morphogenesis in neurophysiology and in biology (sexual reproduction). One of the more important contributions by Bateson and his collaborators10 is to link the emergence of paradoxes in human communication to certain mental disorders. The social situation that has attracted the widest attention by other scholars is called “double bind.” It consists of (1) a contradiction, a message that asserts something it also denies (sometimes in different but simultaneous channels of communication, for example, verbal and gestural). But more important, (2) the relationship between the source of the contradictory communications and its addressee is so important to the latter that running away from it is inconceivable.A psychiatrist demanding from his or her patient to “be independent” is one albeit weak example. A mother who punishes her child while verbally assuring it of her love is another. Prevented from stepping out of such double binds, according to Watzlawick et al. (1967), the addressees of such communications are looking in vain for external clues to resolve the paradox. Paralyzed, they feel guilty and inadequate, projecting the problem on themselves. A way to survive under such

10 For references see notes 1 and 2.

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circumstances is to construct incommensurate worlds with separate truth criteria and to take up different roles in them. For patients, double-binds are resolved by the orthodox solution of accepting simple truths but in different worlds. For psychiatrists, explaining the paradoxical situation in terms of mental illness, schizophrenia, for example, adds a new dimension to what otherwise would be hopelessly disorienting. For another and obvious example of an Euclidean resolution of paradox, consider the phenomenon of lying. Statements of liars and of people who always tell the truth are informative. If one knows who lies and who does not, negation can take care of what the liar says. Contradictions arise only when a person lies for convenience, inconsistently.The dictum “don’t trust liars even when they speak the truth” amounts to a rejection of all of occasional liars’ assertions, which is an orthodox solution to prevent contradictory communications. But in an Euclidean world, the dimension that needs to be added to resolve such contradictions is “motivation,” the variable and situation-specific interest in the consequences of one’s speaking.The conception of a situation in which only truth is spoken is simply not powerful enough to cope with people who subordinate truths to the intended effects of communication. Invoking consequences of communication amounts to a qualitative extension of the space in which conflicts about truths arise. Paradox in a Cybernetic World In cybernetics, circular processes reign supreme and conceptions of self-reference are common.Already in simple feedback loops, information processes are manifest (Bateson, 1972). For example, home heat control is triggered into action not by existing temperatures, but by differences between them and what they are set to be. It stops acting when these differences have disappeared.This circularity has long been recognized as embodying a uni-dimensional world or “image” in Boulding’s (1966) terms. Temperature differences are on a logical level above the physical temperatures.They can therefore be considered a rudimentary form of paradox that is resolved in the process of converging to equilibrium, an eigen-state, the desired room temperature. Cyberneticians routinely design systems that affect themselves. Feedback (which may be not only negative or deviation-reducing, but also positive or deviationamplifying) is but one example; self-organizing systems are another. Instead of being frazzled by their self-references, cyberneticians look into the dynamics they entail. In a cybernetic world, paradoxes are resolved by finding the characteristic behaviors that paradoxes specify and the equilibrium properties or values toward which they converge. Opposing the Theory of Logical Types, Spencer-Brown (1979) pioneered the resolution of paradoxes of self-reference in logic. He dissolved them into a series of distinctions and indications of the forms brought forth by these distinctions.Varela (1975) subsequently developed a calculus of self-reference from Spencer-Brown’s

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ideas. It relies on time as the key to overcoming what would otherwise be paralysis. In fact, time is always involved in antinomies, whether for processing the implications of implications or writing the string of symbols that a circular process generates. Consider a story that children tell in one form or another: Once upon a time, deep in the forest, there lived a wise man. When a child asked him to tell his most famous story he began as follows: “Once upon a time, deep in the forest, there lived a wise man.When a child asked him to tell his most famous story he began as follows: ‘Once upon a time.’” etc. After a few iterations, readers see the self-reference and can continue without needing to know how the story started. All antinomies are similar in this regard. Beginnings and endings do not matter. Accordingly, the clue to resolving Epimenides’ paradox lies in the alternating interpretations: he is lying, he is telling the truth, he is lying, he is telling the truth, etc.This sequence is in a dynamic equilibrium – repetitive without generating new states – called the eigen-behavior of Epimenides’ paradox and of an order higher than the two conflicting propositions, and hence no longer paralyzing. SpencerBrown and Varela investigated more complex self-referential expressions, all converging to dynamic equilibria that uniquely characterize different systems of selfreferences. This amounts to redescribing paradoxes in non-paralyzing terms. This led Varela (1981, personal communication) to say: Self-reference is the infinite in finite guise. Following are some examples from human communication, which is my ultimate concern. One communication paradox is due to unequal punctuation of interaction sequences. Watzlawick et al. (1967) give the example of a sequence of verbal exchanges in which the husband withdraws and the wife nags. The husband sees himself as withdrawing in response to the wife’s nagging, while the wife sees herself as nagging in response to the husband withdrawing, and both feel increasingly uncomfortable about it.The process essentially is circular, without an initial cause and a definite outcome.The paradox stems from describing that process in terms of two linear causalities, which moreover are conflicting, and allow each spouse to blame the other’s action for their own response. This paradox can be resolved by showing, first, that punctuating theoretically infinite interaction sequences is essentially arbitrary and, second, that linear causal explanations are logically inferior accounts of circular processes. The communicators remain trapped in their paradoxical conceptions, unless they see that larger picture. Examples of such paradoxes are not limited to interpersonal communication. Nations develop hostilities when they fail to realize the circularity of their involvement with each

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other and start seeing the other as causes to which they feel forced to respond. Seeing one’s actions as defensive or retaliatory in the face of others’ aggression or provocation always results from perhaps politically convenient or historically based punctuations. Another communication paradox appears in efforts to predict the outcome of elections. Politicians are never shy to rely on self-fulfilling prophesies when displaying confidence without ground, or making supporters believe they are just behind the majority when that belief compels them into supportive actions. Pollsters face the dilemma of publishing politically relevant findings, which, as soon as they are discussed and influence the public, become invalid indicators of political leanings; or withholding their findings from public scrutiny, which eclipses their value as news and advice to politicians.To overcome the paradox of publishing about the public – a perfect self-reference – Simon (1957) suggested that predictions cannot be yesterday’s findings but must include the effects on what these findings predict. Unfortunately, survey research methods, avoiding self-reference, are not equipped to account for the effects of their own findings. It would call for a cybernetic model of the self-reference inherent in the dynamics of public opinion (Krippendorff, 2005a). For psychologists the very concept of communication can be paradoxical, which shows the limits of their discourse. They observe individual behavior in various settings, explain it in cognitive terms, and generalize their findings to larger populations of individuals. In situations in which two individuals converse with each other, social psychologists are inclined to observe participants separately, explaining the responses by each in terms of what the other said or did. But explaining one in terms of the other, and the other in terms of the one brings them right back to where they started from – a circular process that may need several iterations to grasp. Psychologically oriented communication researchers find themselves in the paradoxical situation of trying to explain one individual in terms of another and vice-versa.The process and its explanation are rooted largely between individuals, not within. Communication needs to be explained on a logical level higher than that of the individual participants’ cognition. Some cyberneticians say that communication coordinates mutual understanding. Indeed, communicators bring different and potentially conflicting views into a conversation, try to understand how they differ from each other, respond to how they understand each other’s understanding, and enact their understanding of the conversation of which they are a part. Because multiple self-references are involved – the “I” of speakers, responding to others’ responses to one’s own, and participating in a self-organizing conversation – it is difficult if not impossible to understand a conversation without participation. I would suggest that a conversation is the best explanation of how participants participate in it and reveal their understanding to each other. The eigen-dynamics of a conversation – if such dynamics develop – unfolds by going around and around, allowing participants to contribute what they consider appropriate and adjust to each other’s contributions. Conversation can

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create interactive paradoxes, as exemplified above, but it is also the best way to resolve them – which is what therapists do.11 Finally, consider the consequences of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It acknowledges the obtrusive nature of observation and measurement and states a limit to obtaining knowledge by observation. In the domain of nuclear physics, locating an atom precludes knowledge of its speed, and measuring its speed hides its location – a paradox. One cannot come to know both.When interviewing people, experimenting with subjects, and observing others who are aware of being observed, researchers cannot observe the object of their interest as it was before being attended to.They always observe the effects of their own observational efforts – an inescapable self-reference. Orthodox observers therefore limit themselves to studying objects that are only minimally affected by their data gathering efforts. Cyberneticians, by contrast, taking for granted that they affect what they observe, do not see this as a problem because their aim is not accurate representation, but viable constructions of reality. Constructions are viable when the actions they entail are afforded, not contradicted, by whatever it is that they are interacting with.Thus, the paradox of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is no longer a problem. Cyberneticians would become concerned, however, when the constructions of reality they enact are not afforded, when the objects of their interest do not respond as expected or cannot be designed as intended, including when the data they generate under their auspices do not fit.This resolution of Heisenberg’s Principle is the entry to constructivism (Glasersfeld, 1995;Watzlawick, 1976, 1984b). Paradox in a Dialectical World In classical philosophy, dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar constitute a triology of methods with dialectic being the art of transforming propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) into syntheses. So conceived, dialectic is a move within dialogue aimed at resolving disagreements.The Socratic method, for example, consists of showing that a given hypothesis leads to paradoxes or contradictions, which forces the debaters to withdraw the hypothesis or find a more general truth. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel revived the ideas of the dialectic and rearticulated the history of Western civilization in its terms. He described that history as in an

11 Although feedback is a well-known concept, taking communication as a circular process is not too common in the practice of communication research. Many of its models of communication are derived from the one-way communication of the mass media, and the monologue of lecturing, presenting, or publishing, which are blind to the morphogenetic consequences of paradox. Communication research is even more impoverished by the habit of segmenting information processes into separate areas of study using different kinds of data as outlined in Lasswell’s (1948) formula: “who” “says what” “in which channel” “to whom” and “with what effect.” This cuts a circular process into conveniently researchable linear pieces, creating data that no theory can put back together again (Krippendorff, 1970).

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endless cycle of theses attracting their opposites, antitheses, and leading to their syntheses, which in turn become the new theses – a cycle of the kind cyberneticians would study. As long as a thesis and its antithesis are alternatives – as in hypothesis or its negation, example or counter-example, good or evil – they provide a choice and would keep information quantities at bay. In Hegel’s theory, however, theses cannot stay unopposed forever and end up not being able to coexist with their antitheses. In terms of this essay, he would probably claim that any proposition becomes paradoxical in time, at which point paralyses need to be resolved.This essay is not concerned with why, how, and when a thesis becomes opposed. Marx turned Hegel’s dialectic upside-down, as he said, and interpreted history as a succession of class struggles. Every social system (thesis), he theorized, carries with it the seeds of its own destruction (antithesis) and, out of the ashes of the old system, a new one must emerge (synthesis), which resolves what brought the old system down. For example, capitalism, he theorized, creates inequalities and injustices that lead to struggles between the class of capitalists who control the means of production and the class of workers who have only their labor to sell. He was sure that the society that follows the collapse of capitalism would be free of the very inequalities that brought it down.There are good reasons why Marx’s predictions failed. One is that capitalist society was never that uniform and consistent. But the most important one is that his concept of language was descriptive or representational. He could not imagine that language does things, especially constructing realities. Capitalists could read Marx and see the paradoxes in their system well before they led to serious violence. Governments resolved enough of them, creating a patchwork of institutional improvements (Dahrendorf, 1965). Equal rights legislation, democratic institutions, market economies, and communication technologies allowed tensions, strikes, conflicts, and revolutionary activity to become integral to the larger system. The vocabulary we use today is no longer capitalist as it was at the time of Marx’s writing. Although positivism has not embraced the dialectic, it is my contention that science is heavily invested in resolving emerging paradoxes. For example, the particle theory of light and the wave theory of light are fundamentally different in conception, but concur in some of their predictions. In the orthodox belief that language must represent the world as is, two radically different theories are paradoxical and a thorn in the eyes of theoretical physicists. Indeed, unable to settle on one and dismiss the other, there is much effort to find a synthesis that replaces both. In Buddhism, paradoxes have been used in teaching its principles for thousands of years. In Japan, students often are given paradoxes, called “koans,” through which a student may achieve a state of enlightenment and thus realize the Buddha-nature of the world. Examples of such koans are: Show me your original face before you were born. Two hands clapping make a sound.What is the sound of one hand clapping?

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If you meet someone in the street who has attained the truth, you must pass him neither speaking nor in silence. How would you meet him? Even after many readings, koans are paralyzing. To transcend such paradoxes requires supreme mental efforts, usually calling for years of self-torturous meditations. This is because, for Buddhists, insights cannot be expressed in words and transmitted from teachers to the students.They must be realized from within, and tests for having achieved these insights are rather indirect and perhaps even alien to Western conceptions of proof. Yet, psychotherapists have succeeded in using paradoxes of this kind to jolt their patients out of their paralyzing entrapments.12 Lao Tsu (sixth century BC) seems to have another form of morphogenesis in mind, acknowledgment and acceptance of the paradoxical nature of living in language, when he wrote: Under heaven all can see beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good as good only because there is evil. Therefore having and not having arise together. Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short contrast each other: High and low rest upon each other: Voice and sound harmonize each other: Front and back follow one another. Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking. The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease. Creating, yet not possessing. Working, yet not taking credit. Work is done, then forgotten. Therefore it lasts forever. (Lao Tsu, 1972) Summary This essay was prompted by a seemingly odd property of information measures: they rise to infinity when the alternatives they measure vanish. It turns out that this is the condition of contradictory or paradoxical propositions coexisting or following each other. It suggests that infinite amounts of information signal, not an abnormality in language – as Whitehead and Russell assumed in their injunctive Theory of Logical Types – but a cognitive incapacity in the case of individuals or organizational

12 See note 3.

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inadequacy in the case of social systems, to deal with the world as present. Infinite quantities are at least inhibiting if not paralyzing in the handling of information and responding knowledgeably and appropriately to a situation. Instead of forcing contradictions and paradoxes out of human communication practices and researching communication with methods that do not allow them to enter the data, which is what the orthodox consensus encourages, I am suggesting that they can be resolved by creating cognitive or organizational forms that are on logical levels higher than those in which the infinite quantities of information and the paralyses are experienced. I suggest that these conditions are the most important stimuli of morphogenesis, in terms of both cognitive growth and organizational development.This was recognized long ago in the East: In formal logic contradiction is disastrous, but not in real life. It may be an invitation to new fascinations. Discrepancy is the doorway to discovery. (Siu, 1957) This essay explored ways paradoxes are coped with in several worlds. I contend that the ability to overcome paradoxes is the ability to keep the quantities of information to be processed within finite and hence manageable limits, and to stay on a path to create constructions of reality that fit the complexities encountered in the world.This essay is just a beginning, with all its uncertainties transparent. I hope it contains no flaws, but I do not fear when its premises seem paradoxical.

Chapter 17

Cyberspace and Its Artifacts *

Space Space is the product of human agency, experienced as the ability to act and change something in one’s world, for example, to move bodily in several directions. So conceived, space cannot exist without human actors who recognize possibilities, choose among them, and experience the consequences of their actions. Possibilities are conceptual, but not entirely subjective.To act with some degree of confidence requires, in James Gibson’s (1979) sense, that actions are afforded or supported by the environment in which they are performed – presuming no knowledge of the objective or actor-independent nature of that environment. Space is recognizable by its limits, where actions thought to have been possible are not afforded, expectations associated with these actions are not met and obstacles that are encountered require removal, circumvention, or acceptance as a constraint. We experience numerous spaces. Physical space in which we move with our bodies may be a developmentally early construction.We construct mental spaces in which we can see us moving analogically and anticipate what may happen to us.We experience social spaces through which we progress in stages of life, become recognized for who we are and acknowledge and relate to each other in numerous capacities. Lawmakers debate possibilities of passing laws that would improve the lives of citizens. Designers create spaces of alternative solutions to technological problems from which they hope to select the best alternative. In communications, we recognize narrative spaces that offer access to the worlds of others as conveyed through their stories. There is also cyberspace – originally a literary creation by William Gibson (1984) – a much-used, but somewhat unclear concept that acknowledges the ability to communicate, compute, visit places, and meet other people, virtually, without being there in person. * From Krippendorff, K. Information and cyberspace: re-embodying information theory. Presentation at the University of Vienna on the occasion of receiving the Norbert Wiener / Hermann Schmidt Prize by the German Societies for Cybernetics, and for Pedagogy and Information, 2004.8.14.

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My concept of space is not merely metaphorical, as some have suggested cyberspace to be. Such suggestions privilege one space as the sole true space and all others as fictional, unreal, and therefore dismissible as an object of study.Typically, the privileged space is physical and conceptualized in terms of geometry. Privileging geometry goes along with the illusion, shared among objectivists, that one can observe reality without an observer, act without a body, speak without consequences, and discover laws of nature, mathematics being its language. Notwithstanding the convenience of geometrical calculations, I consider the exclusion of experiences that lead humans to spatial conceptions a barrier to understanding human abilities. Therefore, I take space to be a human construction within which we conceptualize choices among possible ways of being and acting. So conceived, space is not a metaphor or a mathematical construct; it is real to human actors. Cyberspace Accordingly, I consider cyberspace concretely as the possibilities of human actions, supported by technology or nature. It accounts for our ability to act in our world and to monitor the consequences of our interventions for consideration of subsequent actions. Building a house changes not merely a landscape, but where neighbors might build theirs.Writing a document occupies a certain amount of space – on paper or in computer memory – thereafter not available for expressing other things. Dialing a telephone number establishes a connection with someone at the exclusion of connections not chosen. Possibilities invite choices that exclude others. Choices of technology not only exhaust possibilities; they always trade acceptable constraints on less important possibilities for desirable possibilities that would not be available otherwise. For example, the telephone limits communication to voice within a narrow bandwidth, but extends our ability to converse with people at distances far greater than could be reached acoustically. Actions within cyberspace are limited to what computer interfaces enable, but they make possibilities available beyond the imaginable.This is why we have difficulties formulating adequate theories of cyberspace. To me, cyberspace originated when early humans found sticks, stones, and fire to be separable from where they found them and moved them to where they might accomplish something not previously possible. Sticks, stones, and fire may have been the first human artifacts.The path from that early beginning to where we are now took several millennia of technological development.What has changed during this remarkable history, in my view, is due less to an increase in information, as current writers on information society suggest, than to an increase in our collective ability to draw more and finer distinctions, and to handle, assemble, communicate, and use the parts thus distinguished more freely than the wholes within which these parts originally occurred. Artifacts make possible something that would not come about naturally; the space within which their design takes place does not represent what exists but what is conceivable. By tying cyberspace to the possibilities offered to its

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users, I refer not to the materialities of contemporary technology – using electronic signals for communication rather than sound, transmitting information rather than transporting written matter, working in global rather than local organizations – but to the actions that technologies afford.Therefore I am less concerned with whether people add bricks to build a wall, use a keyboard to select characters from an alphabet, send emails to friends, or rearrange molecules for a new chemical, but with how many possibilities technology makes available to its users. In cyberspace, we create new kinds of artifacts and move among them in new ways. Obviously, our ability to rearrange our world has grown drastically from the time when early humans learned to handle sticks, stones, and fire to our contemporary ability to manipulate increasingly smaller entities, for example, the conceptual zeros and ones of computational algorithms, which are represented by extremely small differences in the states of a microchip.The belief that everything could be explained in terms of combinations of basic elements is due to the Greek philosopher Democritus (about 460 BC). But the smallest elements he could see, his atoms, were like kernels of sand on a beach and the explanations he sought were limited to material objects, not human actions. He had no conception of the processes of combining these atoms and no way to demonstrate his claims. Instead, we will not address material compositions but our ability to rearrange things, ranging in magnitude from molecules such as in chemical substances or nanotechnology, the individual bytes in computer memories or the pixels of digitized images, to communication networks, cities, or technological complexes.Today, we can manipulate not only far smaller entities than could be imagined in the ancient world, but also infinitely many more. Electronic artifacts have dramatically increased the number of combinatorial possibilities of what we can conceptualize, realize, and engage with in the artificial world.This is my key to the size of cyberspace. What is the Size of Cyberspace? In a world of rapid expansion of technological possibilities, such a question cannot have a precise answer. Nevertheless, we can say something of its order of magnitude. I begin my argument with what we face today, being generous with the numbers involved. •

Instead of enumerating existing possibilities, I want to focus on what humans can do with them and express possibilities in terms of the number of choices needed to select any one from a set. Choices depend on the vocabulary available to distinguish among alternatives, not on differences presumed to exist in nature.The smallest choice is binary.The answer to a yes-or-no question, for example, selects between two possibilities. The number of binary choices needed to select one from a larger set of possibilities equals the number of binary digits – 0s and 1s – needed to count these possibilities. Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) took this to be the basic unit of information and

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•

• •

called it “bits.”A bit can represent the minimum change in state of a computer, veering left or right at a fork in the road, clicking or not clicking on a button with a computer mouse, moving a file or leaving it where it is, voting for or against a proposal, etc. Counting bits rather than the number of possibilities they represent has algebraic advantages,1 but also yields smaller numbers. I take a bit as the basic unit of measurement of cyberspace. A byte is an atomic unit of data in a computer, increasingly used by computer manufacturers to quantify information processing capacities. One byte is an 8bit string of 0s or 1s, which can take any one of 28 = 256 numbers or characters – ASCII, foreign, or mathematical.As I am not concerned here with computer architecture, I measure cyberspace in bits: 1 byte = 8 bits. A contemporary 200 gigabyte computer can store 200?109 bytes, or 200?8?109 = 1.6?1012 bits. With an estimate of one billion (109) 200 gigabyte computers (personal and midrange servers) in use in the world (to err by exaggeration) one could collectively determine 109?1.6?1012 = 1.6?1021 bits.2 Therefore, at any one moment, say in 2008, the size of cyberspace was about: 1021 bits

•

Considering the speed of computation, say 1 GHz = 109/sec, during one year of continuous processing – 1 year = π?107 sec – we could collectively compute about 1.6?1021?109?π?107 = 5?1037 bits,3 bringing the cyberspace that one can explore in 2008 to an upwardly rounded: 1038 bits

1038 is an enormous number.To grasp it, consider a few examples.A well-known 20-question party game can exhaust 220 = 1,048,576, over a million > 106 conceptual alternatives.With an array of 20-by-20 = 400 light bulbs, one can display 2400 > 10120 distinct patterns. The human retina has not 400, but about a million independently responsive receptors. If one prefers naming these numbers, consider what the familiar prefixes of our number system designate:

1 See Chapter 14 in this volume. 2 Lyman and Varian (2003) of the School of Information and Management at the University of California at Berkeley, found that, in 2002, 200 million personal computers, laptops, or workstations and 20 million midrange servers were produced. Considering the attrition rate, the assumption of one billion computers currently in use is quite reasonable. They also calculate the total capacity for the 2002 computer production to be 9.9 million terrabytes or 8?1019 bits, which is quite consistent with my estimate. 3 In the original presentation, I computed this size for the life span and time available for one generation of cyberspace users. A better and simpler assumption is that computation can also proceed when users are not attending to cyberspace and one year seemed to be a more convenient time period.

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21 = 2 possibilities

1 bit

=

1 byte

= 8 bits

1 decabit = 10 bits

= 101 bits or 210 = 1024 possibilities

1 hectobit = 100 bits

= 102 bits or 2100 > 1030 possibilities

1 kilobit

= 103 bits or 21000 > 10301 possibilities

= 1000 bits

or 28 = 256 possibilities

1 megabit = 1000 Kbits = 106 bits or 21,000,000 > 10301,029 possibilities 1 gigabit = 1000 Mbits = 109 bits or 21,000,000,000 > 10301,029,995 possibilities 1 terrabit = 1000 Gbits = 1012 bits or 21,000,000,000,000 > 10301,029,995,664 2008 Cyberspace

= 1038 bits or 21 with 38 zeros > 103 followed by 37 numerals

To place these numbers in historical perspective, during the last century, we experienced a dramatic increase in the size of cyberspace.This was due largely to the emergence of three features of technological development: electronics, digitalization, and miniaturization.Turning the clock back one hundred years, the telephone was in its infancy and electronic computers were unimaginable. Two hundred and fifty years ago Benjamin Franklin first experimented with electricity in nature. Six hundred years ago Gutenberg invented moveable type for his printing press. Each invention increased the number of possibilities available to us. Before Gutenberg’s time, knowledge was encoded in and communicated through handwritten letters and books.Two thousand years ago few people could read and write. The smallest independently manipulable element was the character of an alphabet written on papyrus, later parchment. Undoubtedly, there were other creative activities, like mechanical inventions, pyramids, and cities, but most of these constructions ended up in the form of documents and drawings on architecture, mechanics, and hydraulics. Writing characters on blank surfaces was easier than building what they described; the two acts were redundant as far as the information they provided. The monks who did much of the writing during medieval times mostly copied established texts. They created, in modern terms, redundancies. Libraries, collecting largely unique pieces of writing, were known for two millennia, but few people had access to them. However, the growth of libraries could give a clue to how cyberspace expanded. •

Reputedly the largest library of ancient times was the Royal Library of Alexandria. It was destroyed by fire almost two thousand years ago; current estimates of its holdings range between 40,000 and 700,000 books and scrolls. Documents were likely small in size, probably not exceeding 10,000 characters each. Each letter of, say, a 32-character alphabet, amounts to log232 = 5 bits. Although the Library of Alexandria was unique, representing five hundred years

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of writing, to be generous, suppose at that time there were ten times as many unique volumes distributed all over the world – including China which probably was more literate than Europe, although little is known about the volumes it kept. Thus, the writings of the ancient world contained between 5?104?10?40,000 = 2?1010 and 5?104?10?700,000 = 3.5?1011 bits, roughly: 1011 bits

•

By comparison, the collection of printed matter of the U.S. Library of Congress is estimated to contain 10-terra bytes (Lyman & Varian, 2003), which is about 1014 bits or ten thousand times the size of the library of Alexandria. The searchable World Wide Web contains about 136 times the number of bits in the Library of Congress. In the paper world, unlike today’s electronic world, there probably was not much excess space available. Papyrus or parchment was produced as needed for writing – much as contemporary paper production merely satisfies the demand for printing (copies).The about 1011/5?104 = 2?106 unique documents were copied by scribes. Suppose each document was copied 100 times; this would bring the total cyberspace at that time to: 1013 bits

Consider the speed of human information processing, estimated not to exceed 16 bits/sec. This is far slower than what electronic computers can process; and assuming that readers can spend about 10 percent of their time intensively reading, requiring 90 percent for sleeping, eating, and socializing with other people; during one year or π?107 sec, one reader could digest about 16?π?107?10–1 = 5?107 bits. The number of readers that could explore the Royal Library of Alexandria or 1011 bits of cyberspace in one year would be 1011/5?107 = 2000 – a quite reasonable number for a time when literacy was uncommon. Monks took far longer, of course, to copy documents; a large number of them must have been employed to do just this. If these estimates are approximately correct, over nearly two millennia, the size of cyberspace – the number of choices available to us, the number of distinctions we can draw, the number of technological artifacts we can construct – has increased by a factor of 1038/1013 = 1025, doubling every 24 years. Intuitively, during the last 24 years the size of cyberspace has grown much faster, suggesting that it grows not merely geometrically but hyper-geometrically. Indeed, developments during the last 40 years seem to have followed Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on microchips – and thereby the speed and size of computer memories, including the number of pixels in digital cameras – doubles approximately every two years. Is there a limit to the size of cyberspace? Some futurists claim there is none. Nothing could be more unrealistic, however.4 Hans Bremermann (1962:92) derived

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a limit for computation by assuming that any computer – present or future – will have to have some mass and change states marked by recognizable energy differences. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle suggests that these energy differences, which need to be observed or measured, cannot be arbitrarily small.This, and Einstein’s mass-energy equation lead Bremermann to conclude that no computer can exceed 2?1047 bits per second and grams of its mass. If the earth’s mass of about 6?1027 grams could be converted into the most sophisticated hardware theoretically possible and allowed to run for a year, one would have been able to process no more than 1082 bits (also see Ashby, 1968).There is no way that cyberspace could come close to this limit. Hence: Size of Any Cyberspace