By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication

FOUR Incommunicable Boundary

FOUR Incommunicable Boundary What hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are separated by what unites them. —Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community J ohn C. Lilly’s The Mind of the Dolphin opens with the following statement: “Communication, when it succeeds, is one of man’s greatest assets, and when it fails is his worst enemy” (1967, 19). “The best communicators,” he adds, “are those who are the most mentally healthy, happy, natural, spontaneous, disciplined persons” (ibid., 19). Emphasizing the correlation between successful communication and mental health, Lilly, an accomplished psychiatrist, has ventured to combat “man’s worst enemy” by means of facing the ultimate challenge: interspecies communication. To Lilly, such an exploit could serve as a template for human problems—interspecies communication as a parable of the intraspecies condition. Thus, by traversing the border between human and nonhuman—the boundary between the familiar and the utterly foreign—an invaluable truth about the generality of communication might be revealed. 151 152 By Way of Interruption The challenge, Lilly stresses, is a momentous one: “For the mental health of each one of us, for the national and international peace of all of us, communication is a paramount and pressing issue” (ibid., 22). Lilly’s approach may indeed be extraordinary in its candor or simplicity, but its epistemology hardly constitutes an exception. It reflects three sides of a conceptual triangle that will be the focus of the following discussion: (1) the relationship between mental and social well-being and communication; (2) the dangerous or even disastrous effects associated thereby with communication failure; and (3) the relegation of incommunicability to the perimeters of ordinary processes. As I hope to show, these three facets do not merely form a simple conjunction, but are in fact causal and interdependent insofar as they work to constitute a conceptual framework of communication that is predisposed to the regulative ideal of transparent interaction. What this causality entails, then, is situating the incommunicable boundary at the edge of existing possibilities , at the divide between ordinary and extraordinary and hence as the next frontier to be conquered. Thus, the location and the locating of that boundary introduce questions of liminality and heteronomy, of transgressing and traversing the interface between Same and Other—in short, the makeup of an encounter with alterity. As a way of intervention, I turn to a phenomenon that is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of a communicational boundary: autism. By examining the ways in which autism has become an object of knowledge in disciplines concerned with mental and social life, I will unpack the modes by which communicability and incommunicability have been perceived, distinguished and deployed in clinical, scientific and social research. The theme of communication is an Ariadne’s thread that runs through some key works on autism, which I weave out in order to discover what this phenomenon has come to denote. The next section addresses the ethical challenge introduced by an alterity that insists on remaining beyond communication. Turning to Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, I will unravel a tangle of risks and possibilities instituted by an encounter with a figure that prefers not to interact, a singularity that upsets binary classification and calls for an equally singular response. Extending from the literary case of Bartleby, the following section proceeds to generalize on the possibility of failure in communication. Drawing on speculations by Derrida and Levinas, I propose that the risk of failure is a necessary and positive condition of communication, and, consequently, that incommunicability is in fact intrinsic to and constitutive of communicability. Such reconceptualization, I argue, recalls the relation with the Other back into communication and summons an encounter with alterity. Autism: A Brief History of a Communicational Boundary The term “autism” was originally coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911. Stemming from the Greek autos for “self” or “same,” the term denoted a special disorder Bleuler associated with severe cases of schizophrenia (another term he coined) manifested in detachment or escape from reality. Bleuler’s definition seemed to have captured a condition that presumably had been floating around long before it was circumscribed as such. One early and well-documented case was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, a feral child who had been found wandering naked in the forest in the winter of 1800. The child, named by the Parisian press “Victor,” looked to be about 12, unable to speak, highly irresponsive and incapable...