On the Nonlinearity of Human Communication: Insatiability, Context, Form

Abstract

This manuscript defines nonlinearity, outlines the phenomenon of insatiability, and shows how alphabetic literacy and technologies made possible through such literacy increase the possibility of experiencing insatiability. It also attempts to demonstrate how notions of context, insatiability, expressive form, and denotative content can be integrated into a broad-based model of the nonlinearity of human communication. Finally, it argues that only by learning how to articulate difference and distance, (i.e., build form) can we deal sufficiently with the nonlinear dimensions of human communication and life more generally.

Once it is ours, we crave for something else. So an unquenchable thirst for life keeps us always on the gasp.

Lucretius

Exceed due measure, and the most delightful things become the least delightful.

Epictetus

Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found.

Wendell Berry

A highly modified version of this paper was presented to the Semiotics and Communication Division at the 2003 National Communication Association Annual Convention. Miami, FL.

Notes

¹I wish to thank Valerie Peterson for her useful and extensive assistance.

²Consider, for illustration, what may appear to be a linear system: a pendulum bob hanging from a string before a clock-face. Holding the bob at 10:00 and then releasing it, we can predict its counter-clockwise swing, its momentum, and its apex at 2:00. Or, starting at 4:00 it will swing clockwise to apex at 8:00. These cases demonstrate a constant proportionality between initial location and final location, a constancy that enables accurate prediction, and, the ability to predict final ends or future states typifies the use of linear measurement systems. But, the whole story told, this case is deceptively over-simplified. For example, what happens if we hold the pendulum bob as close as possible to 12:00 and then release it? The bob falls and jerks around rather radically, ever varying the path taken toward its final resting state. The general point here is that although most areas allow us to equate the unequal and thus give the appearance that the system is linear (i.e., that it does not sensitively depend upon precise initial conditions), as we near the apex we find that the parameters of the system are pushed to its limits. Here, in this region, we find the smallest of differences make all the difference. Nonetheless, although we find an erratic course of movement, one that is not easily replicated, this fact per se is predicted easily enough. The above example—a pendulum as a whole system—shows itself as in fact a nonlinear system. Broader and more classic examples include: what happens in the long run of weather prediction models if decimal-places are cut prematurely short? (E. Lorenz), or perhaps, if we change the measuring unit as we measure along the coast of Great Britain? (B. Mandlebrot)

³Gregory Bateson's regard for differences might be brought to chaos theory's regard for unpredictable change (too much ‘sensitive dependence upon initial conditions’). Additionally, part of what sets Bateson (1972, 1979) a world apart from Nietzsche (1968) is this: Nietzsche was vexed by the question of how humanity came to equate the unequal. Bateson attended, on the contrary, to how different kinds of differences can make all the difference.

⁴The master dialectician who helps to spell out how money relates to insatiability is Georg Simmel. His thoroughly anti-disciplinary masterpiece, The Philosophy of Money, dialectically details how valuation is related to distance and desire. Simmel writes,

…the possibility of desire is the possibility of the objects of desire. The object thus formed, which is characterized by its separation from the subject, who at the same time establishes it and seeks to overcome it by his desire, is for us a value. The moment of enjoyment itself, when the opposition between subject and object is effaced, consumes the value … value does not originate from the unbroken unity of the moment of enjoyment, but from the separation between the subject and the contents of enjoyment as an object that stands opposed to the subject as something desired and only to be attained by the conquest of distance, obstacles, and difficulties.… Since the desire encounters resistances and frustration, the objects gain a significance that would never have been attributed to them by an unchecked will. (pp. 66–67)

It is only because of distance and difference—frustrations that can be temporarily overcome—that valuation becomes possible. Moreover, it is here that Simmel adds: “hence too a basic capacity of the mind becomes apparent: that of separating itself from the ideas that it conceives and representing these ideas as if they were independent of its own representation. I have observed that the value of things belongs among those mental contents that, while we conceive them, we experience at the same time as something independent within our representation, and as detached from the function by which it exists in us” (pp. 67–68). Beyond the scope of the present essay is the role played by money in all these developments. Suffice it here to acknowledge, as Simmel suggests,

Such a disappointment will always be experienced where monetary wealth, which has been passionately desired and considered an unquestionable happiness, reveals what it really is after it has been acquired: money is merely a means, whose elevation to an ultimate purpose cannot survive after it has been acquired. Whereas the greatest discrepancy between wish and fulfillment exists, the exact reverse takes place if the psychological character of money as a final purpose has become permanently solidified and greed, too, has become a chronic condition.… All objects that we want to possess are expected to achieve something for us once we own them. The often tragic, often humorous incommensurability between wish and fulfillment is due to the inadequate anticipation of this achievement of which I have just spoken. (p. 243)

⁵The logic of insatiability is amplified by various communicative technologies and such an account may help to shed light on the modern phenomenon of anorexia nervosa; it may be linked to modern photographic images and their capacity to separate an expressive form from the once-occurrent event of life; a fetish content such as a “sexy body” is eidetically abstracted out from the presentational expressive form of photographic images.

⁶More contemporary examples from television include: “Wife-Swap,” “The Swan,” “Extreme Makeover,” “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire” as well as “The Bachelor” and “Bachelorette.” To understand this list we might comparatively consider how Bill McKibben's The Age of Missing Information documents the way that nature doesn't seem as lively now that we've watched so many action-packed nature documentaries. On a more social and political level we can draw from C. Kaha Waite's Mediation and the Communication Matrix the hypothesis that our increasingly flexible space and time, our altered sense of duration, is subject to compartmentalized experiences—life-experience-packages—that are pursued in their own right.

⁷It should be acknowledged that at the end of their book, Lakoff and Johnson conclude: “Communication theory based on the CONDUIT metaphor turns from the pathetic to the evil when … applied indiscriminately on a large scale.… What is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included.… When a society lives by the CONDUIT metaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products” (1980, p. 232).

⁸Also interesting are Burke's uses of Freud's related analytical terms of “displacement” and “condensation” which, as meta-symbolic resources, are arguably also symptoms of alphabetic literacy. Obviously, dreams typify a natural experience of presentational forms, but the meta-symbolic terms by which we interpret our dreams analytically disentangle the forms from what is taken as the “content.”