By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication

CONCLUSION: The Messenger Is the Message

CONCLUSION The Messenger Is the Message Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn’t know the fare of the streetcar, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves. —Albert Camus, The Wrong Side and the Right Side T he approach of the Other summons communication otherwise conceived. One usually learns that he or she is able to communicate most effectively when using prepaved channels of discourse: that speaking the same language, sharing the same codes and adhering to the same discursive rules guarantee an unbiased and undisturbed interaction. Common discourse assures that the proper reception and perception of a message is achieved when interacting units are equivalent and interchangeable, that easy passage is best facilitated on the basis of a common ground, and that familiarity reduces the risk of things going astray. Within such confines, one feels comfortable and secure, confident in an appearance of a harmonious state of being. But when a face that cannot, does not, or does not want to share the common idiom appears, something 239 240 Conclusion intelligible happens at the edge of discursive competence, which may nevertheless be resolved before long, declared a mistake, or simply ignored. This interruption conveys a message still in abeyance: an invitation that cannot be answered within existing modes of communication that seek to integrate individual fields of perception or extend one mind to the other. But precisely for this reason, one finds oneself compelled to respond and to venture beyond the familiar. It is here that one discovers that saying something matters most when it is impossible to say anything.At the end of practices one usually reckons to master, a space is opened where communication would have to proceed otherwise. The end marks a new beginning, perhaps the beginning, of communication. The Work of Interruption Interruptions transpire without respite. Their occurrence, however minimal or fleeting, upholds the possibility for the Other to appear, intervene and instruct. An interruption is an event that communicates through its very eventuality, and as such has no proper shape, form or structure.Although the possibility of its occurrence persists, the chances that it will be admitted as conveying an ethical message can nevertheless be reduced considerably. Interestingly, some of the most effective means of disqualifying the immanence of interruptions are found in traditional conceptions of communication. It is possible to delineate in this respect two general modalities: the one follows the Cartesian principle of extension by which communication is accomplished in a timely and accurate relaying of messages from one point to another, in the closure of the transmission-reception circuit, and in a process of encoding that is commensurate with that of decoding. The other follows a Hegelian vein of dialectics whereby different meanings, symbols and assertions compete, conflict and conflate, a transformative process through which certain options prevail while others wane, and that ultimately culminates in synthesis, agreement or reconciliation. At least in this respect, it is possible to read many traditional theories of communication not simply as perspectives to understand the exchange of ideas, symbols or meanings, but also, to a greater or lesser extent, as devices for the excommunication of interruptions. Not only does interruption inhere in communication, it is, in fact, what constitutes the very possibility of communication. Marcel Proust once remarked that the only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes. But embarking on a Proustian voyage into another’s vision would mean interchangeability of points of view and therefore reduction of that very thing that makes another’s outlook different. Thus, if accomplished, such a voyage would immediately lose its original appeal. Likewise, were the fantasy of uninterrupted interaction to miraculously materialize, its corollary would be an instant termination of communication itself. Perfect communication means noncommunication , a veritable example of a self-refuting ideal. This leads, by way of contradistinction, to viewing the possibility of communication as a paradox: the condition of its possibility as its impossibility, and instances that interrupt communication—indeed, that make it impossible—as precisely what gives rise to its possibility . Hence the immanence of failure, refusal and risk: not merely as deleterious exceptions but as intrinsic to the work of communication itself. To posit an...