The Bare Experience of Communication: Slippage, Risk, and Un-knowing

ABSTRACT

This essay offers an alternative perspective on the dominant view of communication that focuses on message exchange and calculative thinking. It highlights communicators as embodied beings who experience communication and enquires into the contact that takes place at the level of sensation (i.e., in the coming together of the sense organ, the sensed object, and consciousness). I first present a non-western perspective on bare awareness that offers specific instructions on mindfulness of monitoring the interpretive construction of one’s experience and follow this with three themes based on Georges Bataille’s work that facilitate the inquiry on the “bare experience of communication,” which underlines a suspension of meaning in making sense of the world, each other, and of human communication. I focus this discussion on three particular concepts: slippage, risk, and un-knowing. I conclude by stating that the possibility for optimal communication necessitates slippage as a movement outside one’s self-centeredness that the practice of mindfulness facilitates.

Acknowledgments

The author is thankful for the thoughtful comments of the reviewers and the kind and encouraging feedback of Dr. Manusov.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.