By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication

INTRODUCTION: The Other Side of Communication

INTRODUCTION The Other Side of Communication And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it includes. That is true of the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment. —Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence W illiam Harben’s short story “In the Year Ten Thousand,” which was published in 1892, tells a futuristic tale of one afternoon shared by a father and his son in a great museum. The father recounts the story of humanity starting from the Dark Ages: it is not easy to understand the past, says the father, since “it is hard to realize that man could have been so ignorant as he was eight thousand years ago” (1892, 743). The father leads the boy to a cabinet containing a few timeworn books: “You have never seen a book,” says the father, “There are only a few in the leading museums of the world.” The boy is perplexed: “I cannot see what people could have wanted with them.” The father explains: “to make 1 you understand this, I shall first have to explain that eight thousand years ago human beings communicated their thoughts to one another by making sounds with their mouths, and not by mindreading , as you and I do” (ibid.). He continues: “Humanity then was divided up in various races, and each race had a separate language. As certain sounds conveyed definite ideas, so did signs and letters; and later, to facilitate the exchange of thought, writing and printing were invented” (ibid.). The father then shows his son pictures from the past, and the boy is perplexed again: “these men have awful faces . . . they are so unlike people living now. The man you call the pope looks like an animal. They all have huge mouths and frightfully heavy jaws” (ibid., 744). The father explains that human beings had borne a resemblance to animals because in those days humans’ thoughts were not refined. Social life had been similarly corrupted, as during that time “human beings died of starvation and lack of attention in cities where there were people so wealthy that they could not use their fortunes” (ibid).All that changed with a discovery that transformed the face of history—thought-telegraphy. So great was the progress in that branch of knowledge that speech was eventually employed only among the lowest of the uneducated. This discovery, states the father, civilized the world: slowly it killed evil, wrongdoings were prevented, and crime was choked out of existence. The progress of mankind culminated in the year 6021 when “all countries of the world, having then a common language, and being drawn together in brotherly love by constant exchange of thought, agreed to call themselves a union without ruler or rulers” (ibid., 747). This story joins many other narratives in turning to the future as a source of inspiration and as an anchor for human faith in modern progress. However, what makes this futuristic tale distinctive is the explicit depiction of a link between an aspired social existence and the status of communication therein, a link that seems to be causal, namely, that perfecting the work of communication would ultimately lead to the creation of a utopian society. As a view of the 2 Introduction future from the past, the story may also reveal something about the time and place of its writing, a period that saw the rapid expansion of transportation, electricity, telegraphy and early experiments with radio transmission—but also major social, political and economic transformations that gave rise to many social ills. The trajectories sketched out in the late nineteenth century prescribe communication with a special role in social organization, which has since been a source of hope for social change. At base, it is the hope that ideal communication would lead to the ultimate cessation of all conflicts and disputes, that once all people can achieve a common experience of reality, agree on that experience, and reach greater understanding , there will be no ignorance, intolerance or cruelty. Effective communication is thus regarded as the cure for various tribulations as well as the means for constructing a harmonious social reality. Such is the dominant understanding by which the relationship between communication and ethics has traditionally been and continues to be...