By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication

TWO Communication as Ethics

TWO Communication as Ethics The encounter with otherness is an experience that puts us to a test: from it is born the temptation to reduce difference by force, while it may equally generate the challenge of communication, as a constantly renewed endeavor. —Alberto Melucci, The Playing Self I n this chapter, I set out to stretch the idea of communication to its limit. By “limit” I mean the two following senses: the point of boundary, frontier or separation, and concurrently the point at which communication might reach an impasse, failure or possibly breakdown. Thus, instead of approaching the subject matter from the terra firma of a successful exchange, which, as illustrated in the previous chapter, characterizes many of the traditional conceptions of communication, my aim here is to explore the perimeters and make my way in the opposite direction. I do not, however, intend to delineate the limit as something that marks the termination or negation of communication; rather, following Emmanuel Levinas I propose that the limit of communication is precisely what gives rise to communication as an ethical event. I want to further suggest 67 68 By Way of Interruption that Levinas’s philosophy opens the way for a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between communication and ethics, and hence, for a different meaning of the combination “ethical communication .” Its import is best encompassed in the concept of “interruption.” My reading will posit interruption as bearing a special ethical significance: as a point of exposure and vulnerability upon which the relation with the Other may undergo a profound transformation. What is introduced thereby is a way of thinking about communication beyond essences and ontology, as an ethical involvement whose stakes exceed the successful completion of its operation. The Common Foundation In “Platonic Dialogue,” Michel Serres proposes the following: “For the moment let us agree that . . . communication is only possible between two persons used to the same . . . forms, trained to code and decode a meaning by using the same key” (1982, 65). Serres’s formulation is clear: in order for communication to take place there must be an antecedent background for its operation. Communication is dependent upon an infrastructure constructed prior to the first exchange and the first attempt at making meaning. For Serres, the existence of a common key allows the coding and decoding of meanings. As such, this formula manifests the prototypical elements of many traditional conceptions of communication as either relying on a preestablished order or involving the construction of a transcendent one. “For the moment,” Serres asks, “let us agree.” Let us accept that communication is possible between two persons accustomed to the same procedures, to the same forms, exercised “to code and decode a meaning by using the same key” (Serres 1982, 65). In effect, what he asks is to agree before proceeding any further, before reading the rest of the sentence; indeed, before communicating . One is asked first to agree on the nature of communication— and it is, unmistakably, an a priori commonality, accord and rapport —and only then will communication take place.Yet by the time Serres’s words are read, the Platonic moment has snuck away and elimination has already been made: dialogue over polylogue, commonality over difference, and meaning over nonsense. Communication has already crystalized into a compatible form. Serres continues: “let us call noise the set of . . . phenomena of interference that become obstacles to communication” (ibid., 66). Already having a common goal, Serres’s interlocutors now also have a common enemy—noise. Tied together by a mutual interest, they battle against interference and confusion, against something or someone with some stake in interrupting their union. United against such a “parasite,” they stand on the same side of communication, on the side of the Same.1 Serres, both as a communicator and as a formulator of communication, is thus concerned with reducing the phenomenon of communication before it actually takes place. But what if one does not agree with Serres, or for that matter with any definition of communication that forecloses the irreducible difference between self and Other? The problem with this approach can be stated more generally: it presupposes a common foundation, one that is prior to any communication and might thereby entail disregarding otherness. Under these conditions, communication with the Other, l’Autrui, the always already different from the selfsame, is unconceivable. What is intimated by insisting that communication be dependent upon some type of...