Colloquy with Juan José García-Noblejas on understanding communication from the perspective of Aristotle's Poetics

Abstract

In this interview we will explore García-Noblejas’ thought on public communication, which is deeply marked by his interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics and influenced by some contemporary thinkers. For García-Noblejas, communication is a service and a form of practical knowledge with five dimensions: ethics, politics, rhetoric, aesthetics, and poetics. Poetics is the most important of these, since its symbolic perspective of the representation of human actions allows us to deeply understand the narrative and dramatic texts typical of journalism, advertising, and propaganda, as well as written and audiovisual fiction. Poetics is the art of creating “possible worlds” in which the reader/spectator recognizes himself (or herself) and with which he dialogues starting from his own identity. García-Noblejas defends public communication that is based on the gift of self and looks to community fruitfulness. He also discusses some frequent pathologies in the media. Finally, he proposes his theory of the Second Navigation to discern the meaning of a text and explains why it is necessary to give a transcendent meaning to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis.

Keywords:

• Public communication
• Aristotle
• poetics
• catharsis
• possible worlds
• audiovisual fiction

Introduction

As is known, journal articles are prepared far in advance. The present interview with Professor Juan José García-Noblejas (Burgos, Spain, 1942) took place over three different meetings, the first of which was held on May 10, 2021, in Rome. The interview was conducted when he was teaching a doctoral course at Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (returning to a school where he had taught for over twenty years).

García-Noblejas did his doctoral thesis with the well-known Italian semiotician Gianfranco Bettetini.¹ He published it with the title, Poética del texto audiovisual [The Poetics of Audiovisual Text] in 1982 (García-Noblejas 1982). Since then, he has continued to address issues associated with poetics in all spheres of communication, for example, the notion of ‘myth’, understood as ‘representation of vital praxis’ and as the ‘soul’ of narrative and dramatic compositions.

His thought—developed mainly in seminars, conferences, and articles—has been collected in three volumes published over the years: Comunicación y mundos posibles (García-Noblejas [1996] 2005), Comunicación borrosa (García-Noblejas 2000), and Medios de conspiración social (García-Noblejas [1997] 2006) [Communication and Possible Worlds; Blurry Communication; and Means of Social Conspiracy]. These three books bring together contributions that are geographically and temporally disparate but that form a coherent corpus.

García-Noblejas is currently working on a volume provisionally titled Repensar la comunicación [Rethinking Communication]. Next on his agenda is to publish a book on the Estructuras profundas de la ficción [Deep Structures of Fiction], which included some of his writings from the last few years, mostly on film and television. And then another short book on the Actualidad de la Poética Aristotélica [Timeliness of Aristotelian Poetics] in the context of contemporary thought.

Communication as practical knowledge

Two weeks before this interview, Spanish reporter David Beriain² was murdered in Burkina Faso while preparing a documentary on poaching. His death was widely reported in the international media, as he was held in high regard as a person and as a professional. Throughout his prolific career, Beriain had interviewed Taliban, FARC guerillas, members of drug cartels, and hitmen. Shortly after his death, the University of Navarra (where he had studied) decided to posthumously award him the prestigious Luka Brajnovic award for his journalistic work distinguished by the defense of freedom and human values.

The academic life of Juan José García-Noblejas has always been linked to the University of Navarra. Even today he can still be seen sporadically on the Pamplona campus or, more often, on the Madrid campus, where he currently resides. David Beriain was a student of his, and when he died, García-Noblejas was quick to publish a heartfelt tweet that included the news on the front page of the Corriere della Sera. It thus seemed natural to begin our discussion there…

What would you highlight about Beriain as a journalist?

He knew how to look for the people behind the figures. He did not interview the drug trafficker, but the person who trafficked drugs, trying to understand why he did what he did. The journalism Beriain did was risky not just because he went into conflict zones, but because he engaged with other people (colleagues, interviewees, spectators), directly and personally. In addition to disseminating data or opinions, journalism is a vital matter: the good journalist is personally committed to the search for the truth.

You often say that communication is a practical matter—does this have to do with the personal commitment you're talking about?

Of course. Theoretical issues and technical issues are, so to speak, rigid: if you want to accomplish that, do this. I press a button and the elevator goes up, to give a mundane example. Communication, however, is a practical knowledge: it is not enough to theorize about it, it must be ‘done’. And when the truth is established in one’s own life, what emerges is goodness and beauty. The communicator deals with the ethical good, the political possibility, aesthetic beauty, rhetorical credibility, and the poetic myth. And he errs in all these areas because it is inevitable to err. As Leonardo Polo used to say,³ ‘the correct is the corrected’. Or say it with Aristotle, in a phrase that became Fernando Inciarte’s recurring maxim:⁴ ‘to know what we have to do, we have to do what we want to know’. In the world of personal action, you do not have all the information and you cannot foresee all the consequences; that is why it is always necessary to take a risk by acting. And that is also why it is natural to make mistakes and it should be equally natural to rectify them.

Is that why you titled one of your books ‘Comunicación borrosa’ [Blurry Communication]?

Well, yes. Communication deals with highly complex realities, which are unclear at the outset. It is resistant to any theorization. The title comes from the expression ‘Fuzzy Logic’, which is what Lotfi Zadeh⁵ dubbed his logical-mathematical theory in 1965; Fuzzy Logic is used to reason ‘by approximation’ about complex realities.

Juan José García-Noblejas began studying Mathematical Physics in Grenoble. As a member of the university film club there, he had the opportunity to meet Jean-Luc Godard and other young directors of the Nouvelle Vague. Although he loved physics, he already felt strongly drawn to the humanities: film, literature, newspapers… After three years of Physics, he decided to return to Spain to study Communications at the University of Navarra in 1964 and concluded his studies in 1967 at the top of his class and as winner of the national graduation award.

Despite your background in physics, you prefer to approach communications from practical philosophy.

Other people come from sociology, law, political science, or languages. Coming from physics and faced with the pretensions of some to consider journalism or communications as something ‘scientific’, from the beginning I found myself more comfortable in the field of practical philosophy, which to me always seemed more connatural with the phenomenon of communication. When I joined the University of Navarra and began to study it in a non-formal way, I was fortunate to have the support and advice of some fellow philosophers with whom I was immediately in tune and from whom I have learned so much over the years. Some of the ones I am thinking of include Leonardo Polo and his ethics and transcendental anthropology; Alejandro Llano⁶ and his epistemology and political philosophy; and the moral philosophy and aesthetics of Fernando Inciarte, who was part of the ‘rehabilitators’ of practical philosophy in Germany and who later came to Pamplona.

Practical philosophy traditionally encompasses ethics and politics, but you have also spoken of aesthetics, rhetoric, and poetics.

Yes, it seems to me that communication cannot be properly understood without considering five dimensions. Take, for example, rhetoric. It is a tool that not only works in sophistic terms, but also makes plausible what one holds to be true, because what is true is not always evident and is not always rationally imposed. That is why it is necessary to argue and to exemplify, to convince and not merely to persuade. Or take aesthetic beauty, a way of reasoning that is natural in Italy, since things that are called ‘good’ (buenas) in Spanish are called ‘beautiful’ in Italian.

The Aristotelian approach

How did you discover Bettetini and Aristotelian poetics?

I met Gianfraco when he was invited to the University of Navarra. I was preparing for my doctorate and had very seriously studied the three volumes of Lausberg’s rhetoric and the works of Jean Mitry, but I needed someone to guide me. Gianfranco Bettetini gladly agreed to supervise my thesis and we soon became friends. Those were very fruitful years. We would meet in Pamplona, Milan, Paris, or Rome, with the excuse of some conference, since at that time something like Zoom or Skype was inconceivable. Through him I met some French semioticians: Roland Barthes, who I had taken an interest in, and Christian Metz, who I had personal dealings with and who described himself as a sophist. I also came across the magazine Poétique, in which Todorov, Greimas, Genette, Kristeva published… Of all of them, Todorov has interested me the most. Among the Spaniards I have always found friendship and help in Garrido Gallardo.⁷ The point is that, encouraged by the writings of some of these structuralist theorists, I began to work on Aristotle’s Poetics (Aristotle 2013).

Applying Aristotle in this way at that time was something new…

It was not what was in vogue. In that time, it sounded strange to associate poetics with journalism, advertising, or film. When I published my thesis, some colleagues joked about ‘film as Aristotle saw it’. That is why it was a relief when I was at UCLA in the ‘80s and found that there, in the field of screenwriting, Aristotle was mentioned quite naturally—though sometimes in a somewhat immature or superficial way. The fact is that, working there for almost two years as a visiting scholar, I found that they were very interested in what they called ‘the European poetics perspective’, because it allowed them to reason about the characters and themes of the stories.

So you went with poetics and moved away from Bettetini…

Structuralism dominated the academic world at that time, and both Gianfranco and I tried to overcome its urge to classify things: he without straying too far from semiotics, and I from the standpoint of poetics. I will always be grateful for Bettetini’s love of freedom and the respect he showed for my ideas when we disagreed on something. It seemed to both of us that structuralism fell short, that it was not enough to study the meaning of the phenomena of public communication. It has been jokingly said that it would be necessary to write on some people’s tombstones, ‘pertransiit classifying’. Structuralism was a thoroughly exhaustive process that led to a dead end, leaving no room for intertextuality or the relationship with other texts or the fact that the text points to something real. As the popular saying goes, ‘when the finger points to the moon, the fool looks at the finger’.

What does poetics offer for overcoming structuralism?

Aristotelian poetics opens and broadens human perspectives. It allows us to dig deeper, to establish a real referential sense with respect to people, as well as other texts, social and political ideologies or linguistic and communication theories. For me it is the most appropriate basic focus for studying communication, due to its symbolic perspective. As ‘pragmaton systasis’ (or plausible web of human actions), poetics makes it possible to unite, with real meaning and in ‘possible worlds’ made of narratives and dramas, multiple fragments and diverse aspects of human life that otherwise remain loose.

It can be said that poetics is a representation of human actions…

Yes, a representation of human actions in terms of habits, virtues, or vices. A representation in which knowledge about what accompanies worthy or unworthy human life is shared. Poetics is the art of creating possible worlds in which we recognize ourselves and in which we could live. And with which we can enter into dialogue as readers or spectators, relating to them from our own personal identity.⁸

‘Possible worlds with which we can enter into dialogue…’ According to this, we dialogue not only with the author but with the text itself.

Of course! There is a dialogue with the text and with its implied author, according to the view of scholars such as Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Thomas Pavel, or Umberto Eco, with whom I agree on this point. The ‘empirical’ or true author disappears once the text leaves his or her hands, taking on a life of its own, in a certain way existing autonomously. The implied author—or what Eco called ‘intentio operis’ or intent of the work (to distinguish it from the ‘intentio auctoris’ or intention of the author)—remains, guiding the reader from within the text itself. The implied author (or the ‘involved’ author as Paul Ricoeur sometimes calls it) is equivalent to the ‘sense’ that guides the work as a whole. And it is subject to different interpretations, since such meaning is always actualized by a reader.

Just as we affirm the existence of an implied author, can we also speak of an implied reader?

I believe so. It would coincide with the interpretation that a hypothetical reader could give without distorting the text. The boundaries for reception are far apart, even very far apart, but not infinitely so. The text has the capacity to say different things depending on the reader, and even depending on the moment and the attitude of the reader when he reads it, but there are pertinent interpretations and then there are others that we can consider abusive. I am with Todorov when he criticizes the over-interpretation and pragmatism of Richard Rorty and others, who postulate that readers can manipulate the work at will and say anything they want about it. As Todorov and Eco say, a text is not just a potluck in which the author brings the words and the readers bring the meaning.

The purpose of the media and the attitude of the user

We shall return later to the concepts of the implied author and meaning of the text. Now I am interested in highlighting the dialogical aspect in order to get at the media’s social function…

Which is fundamental.

Do you think this is its main function?

I believe so, in the sense that it looks towards what could be called ‘community fruitfulness’, as Martin Buber said, or as was intended by the ‘international solidarity’ of the failed MacBride report⁹ (‘Many Voices, One World’). Although aiming at a more concrete and achievable ideal, in this age of the internet I prefer to understand the mass-media as community ‘third places’. That is to say, if home is the first place and work is the second place of social anchoring, then the third places look like—as Ray Oldemburg states—coffee shops, bookstores: places where we hang out, relax, and make new friends. And where we ‘conspire’, in the positive sense of the expression.

Is that why you titled one of your books ‘Medios de conspiración social’ [Means of Social Conspiracy]?

Yes, according to the sense of solidarity that the concept of ‘conspiracy’ had in its Roman origin: conspire as ‘breathe together’ for a better society, seeking the common good.

A challenging ideal…

I know that these ideas are difficult to reconcile with the multiple interests that converge in the media, including the achievements of the internet that—as Orihuela reminds us—are sometimes ‘solutions in search of problems’. But in my view, the media do not speak of or address massified man, but instead speak of persons (not only readers or clients) and in this they are essentially social. Ultimately, the mass media speak of the multiple paths and ways that we use to orient ourselves in the search for happiness, for a good life, as Martha Nussbaum says, which is life lived according to virtues such as trust, love and friendship, hope, forgiveness, etc.

According to this, would you say that it is the mission of the media to educate or moralize society?

No, absolutely not. It is one thing for the media to have an intrinsic ethical dimension, but another for them to be moralizing. This is not about, let’s say, infusing moralization in a paternalistic way, looking down on the reader or viewer from on high. The education provided by the media is, or should be, indirect, along the lines of truthfully stating that which humanizes.

As medical knowledge is concerned with health and juridical knowledge with justice, what is knowledge of communication primarily concerned with?

I would say with knowing the truth—and not just with opinion, belief, or subjective certainty—about free human decisions and actions in historically situated circumstances. I mean freedom in its radical and profound sense, that is, in terms of growth in giving to others, which implies the intimate fact of being children of God and freely coexisting with Him.

To recapitulate, we could say that the media is concerned with how people are oriented toward the pursuit of happiness, of a successful life, thus enriching community life.

Yes indeed. The media opens horizons in people’s lives and fosters social dialogue. It has a mission of service. Communication can be seen as the natural way of putting giving into practice. It is ultimately understood only from the relational dimension of people, which the Italian sociologist Pierpaolo Donati,¹⁰ whom I have read a great deal lately, has skillfully and profusely treated.

At this point, it is best to make explicit something that we have taken for granted: that in the media we include both the supposedly ‘objective’ journalistic media (because in theory they tell reality as it is) and what is commonly included in the term fiction, that is, novels, TV series, etc.

In effect, in both cases we are dealing with poetic constructions and representations, and the boundary between them has never been as clear as it is sometimes believed. For Aristotle, the poet is the creator of myths, not of verses. And in the world of communication everything is more intertwined than it seems. That is to say, informative journalism also has a dimension of fiction, which does not mean that it is not true or, in a certain sense, real, like a road map. When giving an account of how things have developed, there is always an important element of subjectivity. This is not in itself bad—it is what it is. We must accept it in order to overcome once and for all the famous maxim that facts are sacred and comments are free, as if there were a perfectly neutral and objective journalism and another type that is almost indifferent to the truth. It is a truism, but we cannot forget that the knowledge provided by the media is always mediated.

For a long time, we have thought—or it has been naively thought—that the ‘news format’ was in itself a guarantee of objectivity, as opposed to the subjectivity of the opinion piece or editorial. If we readers cannot trust even that, then what are we left with?

Personal and professional honesty.

Do you mean that there is no difference between what is said in a newscast and what is told in a film?

No, there certainly is. They are different genres, and the viewers’ expectations are different. In a newscast, the story is told in an attempt to be consistent with what happened, while in a film it is invented to be consistent with some basic features of human life. But both are poetic works that create possible (plausible) worlds that reflect different ways of seeking happiness. Journalists must know that, as represented, people become characters who act in their texts. And their task is to make these characters as close as possible to the actual people they represent. Whereas when screenwriters or novelists create characters, they make of them what is best for the story.

Accordingly, even in journalism, as in literature or film, we must speak of implicit covenants for reading, which give rise to horizons of expectations…

I believe so, as with any narrative.

And what would be the implicit attitude of someone reading a newspaper?

I would say that the reader expects to be told something relevant. Readers do not want to know everything that happens. There is also a right to ignorance. Today we are inundated not only with fake news, but also with completely irrelevant news. On the other hand, the reader also expects to find a coherent interpretation of reality in the newspaper. Today, the disconnect between the contents of the different sections is striking—they seem all watertight containers—as is the lack of editorial unity offered by most of the media in the presentation and assessment of human actions (leaving aside those that blindly raise some ideological banner).

On the subject of irrelevance, in a 2017 conference called ‘A mission for journalism in a time of crisis’ the editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Katherine Viner, lamented that the fragmentation of the audience and advertising scarcity are driving the media into a desperate search for clicks with ‘less and less meaningful’ stories.

There you have it.

Identification and recognition of the person in dramatic texts

From what you have said, the key concept for understanding the communicative process would be that of ‘person’.

That is correct. Let us think, for example, of public communication, in which we can identify three facets. Who is speaking? A person vested with power or authority. Who is being spoken of? A person. And finally, who is being spoken to? A person, who is more than just a consumer or client, and with whom a relationship of trust is—or should be—established. Someone to whom one gives something, or even better, to whom one gives oneself. As you can see, one arrives at the gift of the self, and the recipient of this gift is always a person. In all three facets we find, at the center, the person.

As has already been implied, we could analyze any narrative starting from the habits of the characters who populate it, from the cardinal virtues or from the emotions or passions manifested in the pursuit of happiness and the fundamental tendencies of sociability, which shape and govern common life. However, there are many ways of classifying virtues, as well as the passions…

Yes, yes of course. In both cases I have primarily employed the Aristotelian-Thomistic model, updating it when it seemed appropriate. One can be more detailed in the description of the passions, but I consider the synthesis that distinguishes between the concupiscible appetite and the irascible appetite to be perfectly valid: love/hate, desire/aversion, joy/sorrow, hope/despair, anger, and courage/fear.

And as for the tendencies of sociability…

Saint Thomas called them roots of sociability and distilled them into nine kinds: the ‘pietas’ or piety, which is respect for God, parents, and country; ‘observantia’, which is respect for legitimate authority and ‘oboedientia’ or respect for rules; ‘honor’, which leads to the recognition of the merit of the best; ‘gratitude’ or reward for the good received and ‘vindicatio’ or punishment for evil perpetrated; ‘sinceritas’, the tendency to manifest oneself as one is; ‘amicitia’, which leads one to give of what one is, to give oneself; and finally ‘liberalitas’ or the inclination to give what one possesses. Other thinkers have emphasized some of these. In a certain sense Hegel absolutizes honor as the foundation of social dynamism. Hobbes gives more importance to respect for authority, Kierkegaard emphasizes authenticity or ‘sinceritas’, and Aristotle stresses ‘amicitia’, while according to Polo, the two great social ethical tendencies are piety and fame.

In a dramatic work, in your opinion, these personal social habits and feelings are reflected not only in the characters but in the entire work.

In a way, yes. Explaining Aristotle, we would define drama as a ‘quasi-persona’ in which the myth unifies and pulls the other qualitative parts of the dramatic work (character, thought or dialogue, song, spectacle and elocution) toward its own perfection or culmination. As it happens in human beings, who moved by their spiritual dimension, by their souls, tend naturally toward perfection or happiness.

In other words, the myth would act in the manner of the human soul.

Yes. Thus, textual statements can be seen as a kind of ‘virtuous man’ from whom we can learn or ‘vicious men’ with whom we should dialogue or even argue. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven leads us to think about the real meaning of forgiveness and mercy in people’s lives. And it is a consideration prompted by the entire film, not just by some of its characters. Or to cite an example from advertising, let us recall Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad directed by Ridley Scott: a young athlete throws a sledgehammer at a giant IBM-style blue screen, freeing the viewers who were watching that screen like enslaved zombies. Then a phrase appears that says: ‘You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984’, in reference to the title of famous Orwell's novel. It is difficult to watch that ad and not be tuned in to the idea and the spirit of liberation that the whole thing provokes. Flaubert’s famous ‘Madame Bovary c’est moi’ refers to the character of Emma, but also to the whole novel. We recognize ourselves in this hard-working, complete, and complex action, that is to say, in this myth that the narrative represents and that constitutes that world’s quality of being ‘like the soul’.

Journalism as service rather than power

We will delve deeper into texts of pure fiction later. Now let us focus a bit more on journalism and those three facets of communication you referred to, namely, ‘who’ is speaking, ‘of whom’ is spoken, and ‘to whom’ this is spoken…

Which, by the way, I have borrowed from Varro, a Latin author from the first century B.C. (although he applied them to grammatical discourse).

Let us move on to ‘who is speaking’. Some call journalism the ‘fourth estate’, which theoretically should provide a check on the other three great powers that constitute democratic societies: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. Is this still the case?

It is clear that when we say journalism, we are also referring to the media in general, including radio and television, or the internet, and such forms as advertising and public relations, as well as pure fiction in the form of literature or movies and TV series, today’s social media, etc. But yes, scholars have long since stopped referring to the media in the Anglo-Saxon way as supposedly reliable witnesses, in favor of considering them also in the continental European way as influential social actors. I mean that they undoubtedly wield power, although it is not so clear that this power is a check on the other three classical powers. It is also not clear who holds this power and is responsible for it. Everything is more mixed up than it may seem at first glance or than would be desirable, at least in some cases.

In what sense?

Unfortunately, conflicts of interest are not rare, and communication has its own (to some extent unavoidable) encumbrances. I am reminded of a scene from Michael Mann’s The Insider, in which the television journalist says to a burgeoning young executive: ‘The fact that we work in the same corporation doesn’t mean we work in the same profession’.

In other words, journalism or the media would be a power that has lost its original function.

Probably. But the fact is that, moreover, this whole separation of powers has been blown to bits. In my view, the three powers that count today are the political, the economic, and the communication powers, which together give rise to what Alejandro Llano calls the ‘techno-system’ that endangers life in a democratic society. This is because the political or executive power has wound up swallowing the legislative and judicial powers, as we can observe in the countries in our western orbit. To properly carry out the function they claim to perform, these three new de facto powers should be seen not as powers but as services for the life of the citizenry in common.

Communication would be a service vested with ‘authority’ rather than ‘power’.

These are concepts that come from Roman Law and have been very much studied by Álvaro D’Ors,¹¹ with whom I had the good fortune to speak on many occasions. To simplify, I understand that what is proper to the communicator is primarily the ‘auctoritas’ or authority that gives him the knowledge of what he is talking about, rather than the ‘potestas’ or power conferred by his position or office. Authority is granted by the listener and cannot be delegated. Journalists earn their authority with their professional wisdom and their good work; that is what makes them worthy of readers’ trust.

Communication pathologies

You often use the expression ‘communication pathologies’ to describe the diseases afflicting the media. Have these pathologies always existed?

Yes, although each era has its own. When I used to teach Epistemology of Information years ago, I liked to look at the typology of aestheticism established by Kierkegaard and see how the characteristic defects of superficiality were also manifested in journalism. I reviewed those archetypes which the Danish thinker spoke of—the drunkard, the executive, the Don Juan, the scholar—and applied them with concrete examples to the world of communication. These archetypes can be readily detected today both in real life and in public figures.

In your essay ‘Alicia en el país de los mundos posibles. Los telediarios como espejos opacos’ [Alice in the Land of Possible Worlds: Newscasts as Opaque Mirrors] you spoke not of pathologies but of syndromes.

Another way of saying it. The title obviously comes from Alice in Wonderland (Carroll 2021). I applied those syndromes primarily to television, which at that time during the end of the ’80s, was the absolute king in terms of media prominence; but the diseases described were just as predictable of other sectors of information.

You mentioned Scheherazade Syndrome, referring to the character from the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’ whom the Sultan forced to tell stories non-stop.

What I meant by this is the fatal alternative of either entertaining the public at all costs or disappearing. Today we speak of ‘infotainment’.

I think of Jabberwocky Syndrome, taken from the poetic nonsense in ‘Through the Looking Glass’, about which Alice said: ‘It seems very pretty, but it’s rather hard to understand’.

Programs can be as aesthetically fascinating as they are vapid.

… Humpty-Dumpty Syndrome…

Another character in Through the Looking Glass, who states: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean’. Sometimes journalists exercise their ‘power’ in a tyrannical and manipulative way, in a sort of ‘magical’ way, adapting reality to their interests. A very clear example is the use of the euphemism ‘pregnancy termination’ to mask, with techno-scientific words, the moral reality of abortion.

… White Queen Syndrome, also from Alice, in which time is lived backward, so that memory works in both directions…

I used this to describe the fallacy that something can be told without knowing the end. The gaze of the one who tells, and who knows where the story is going because he knows the ending, necessarily permeates the mode of narration.

… Red King Syndrome. Alice lived in the Red King's dream, so if he stopped dreaming, Alice would cease to exist…

Sometimes journalists behave as if all that exists is what they publish.

Werther Syndrome, however, refers to the protagonist of Goethe’s novel, whose suicide led to a wave of suicides among readers.

The correlate in Alice would be the forest where things lose their name, where someone enters and ceases to know who she is, becoming disoriented. When the viewer ‘leaves’ the fictional and returns to her daily life her existence is no longer the same: contact with the television has enriched or impoverished it.

Leviathan Syndrome, the last one you described, also has to do with the viewer.

And with the communicator; with both. Sometimes journalists and viewers tend to see television as a public institution, in the style of ‘Hobbesian’ state: immobile, unappealable, and all-powerful. We cannot ignore the enormous influence of television or the internet on our lives, but neither can we fall into media worship.

Indeed, these are diseases that persist today. I suppose, however, that the internet has led to new pathologies. Do any examples immediately come to mind?

Blind faith in the algorithm. In fact, the fathers of the new technologies are taking a step back, because they realize the negative consequences in the invention. The web not only offers unlimited information, but in a way, it also shapes the mind—it educates. But who educates? Who is behind the algorithm? There is a great deal of opacity. And in general, in all these systems, the person is considered more as a consumer or customer than a person.

After a career dedicated to teaching communication, what do you consider to be the most important thing when it comes to training future communicators?

To prepare them to be able to decide and to make up their mind freely, which is the opposite of telling them what to do.

This journal is published by a school that specializes in Church communication, where you yourself have taught for about twenty years. Do you have anything to add to what has already been said about the communication of this institution?

Propaganda—and institutional communication has a propagandic trait—has been tinged with a negative connotation throughout the years, but in itself it is something perfectly honorable: it refers to the transmission of ideas. The concept of propaganda, which was already present in Ancient Greece, was spread in the West by the Catholic Church in the 17^th century, with the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. However, the term was soon used in political and military matters, losing its initial respect for individuals and giving a name to an activity often identified with manipulation and disinformation: sometimes referred to as ‘black propaganda’. The problem is that because of the influence of such propaganda, today even the transparent ‘white propaganda’ is looked upon with suspicion.

Like other institutions, the Church also propagates its message, but we have to recognize that it is a unique institution.

Yes, and for that reason it is important not to lose sight of its nature, origin, and ends, which differentiate it from corporate or commercial institutions. At the same time, communication takes place in the sphere of the Church with all the complexity and greatness of a communicative phenomenon. It is true that all the faithful communicate, or should communicate, giving witness to the Church, but we require professionals who communicate ‘about’ the Church from within it, and therefore communicate also ‘with’ the Church.

Professionalism is key.

Without professionalism, there is no competence. It is also important that those who dedicate themselves to this work do not lose their breadth of vision. Communicating the Church that was founded by Jesus Christ as His Bride cannot be reduced to reporting that three cardinals have retired and suggesting who the possible replacements might be according to rumors, or to distributing agreements or disagreements in territorial conferences—to put it ironically. We are in another order of things. It includes that, but it is much more. It involves putting on record through the media, even fiction, our native and common dignity as children of God, with the enormous consequences that this true reality has for the humanity of our time. The Catholic message is a valid doctrinal proposal of strength and hope for society—we have seen this, for example, in Ratzinger’s dialogue with Habermas—even if it is not as present as we would wish in contemporary culture (Ratzinger and Habermans [1994] 2007).

The Second Navigation

Throughout his long career, Juan José García-Noblejas has taught Epistemology of Information, Communication Theory, Audiovisual Scriptwriting, and more. These may seem like disparate subjects, but from his standpoint they are not, since they are united by poetics and other dimensions of practical philosophy. Among his philosophers of reference, in addition to those already mentioned, is Paul Ricoeur.

How did your appreciation for Ricoeur begin?

I began to read La Métaphore vive, which was newly published in 1975 (Ricoeur 1975), on the poetic function of language in its threefold perspective: linguistic, poetic, and philosophical; and I observed that it was in line with the thesis I was working on at the time, which we have already discussed. Ten years later I read Time and Narrative, and I was surprised to see that his interpretation of the Poetics was very similar to how I understood it. Ricoeur was already an established thinker, so that coincidence reaffirmed me in the path that I was then embarking on. Shortly before his death in 2005, he published his texts on recognition and gift: issues that are so important for public communication.

What drew you to his thought?

Apart from his reflection on recognition and gift, I am drawn to his way of approaching the fictional text, the acceptance that it is possible to encounter truth and meaning in what is read/seen. It seemed to me that he was saying things that I was thinking myself and that no one else was saying (at least at the time), and that in his methodology of ‘prefiguration’, ‘configuration’, and ‘refiguration’ he took the reader into account (Ricoeur 1983, 1984, 1985).

Is that where your theory of the Second Navigation comes from?

It is more of a coincidence. Even before I read that, I had already published things along the same lines. I remember coming up with the name Second Navigation when I was preparing a paper for a conference at Syracuse University in 2004. It is a sailing expression: the first navigation is done by sail, and the second, when there is no wind, is by oars. Plato (Plato 1993) uses the expression in the Phaedo to speak of the difference between physics or philosophy of material things, and philosophy of the supra-sensible world or that of ideas. I use the concept in a different way. It is related to that of Plato, but only partially. Although it allows the study of all kinds of narrative texts, I apply it mainly to the study of audiovisual texts, specifically to films.

Can you summarize what it is about?

In the first navigation we follow the characters and their relationships in the plot (sensible things that are seen and heard), exercising what Coleridge called ‘willing suspension of disbelief’; in the second navigation, with the end in mind, and distancing ourselves from the fiction, we discern the meaning of the whole text. The first is easy, like sailing; the second is more arduous, for one has to row. It coincides with the distinction Ricoeur makes between intellectual and technical ‘comprehension’ of the text, and the vital ‘application’ of meaning by the reader.

In other words, to carry out the Second Navigation you have to reach the end of the story.

Strictly speaking, yes, but one can already distinguish these two navigations when viewing a film or reading a journalistic or literary text, because they are not really two chronological moments, but instead are distinct from an epistemological perspective—two phenomena that can take place almost simultaneously, perhaps with a slight forward shift of the second navigation. When watching the film, one looks at oneself and one’s own life; one compares the meaning of what one is seeing with the meaning of real life, so that simply ‘learning’ what happens there is transformed into ‘understanding’ it poetically and vitally.

You also sometimes use the distinction between ‘superficial’ and ‘deep’ structure.

In the first navigation the viewer catches the ‘surface structures’ or the floating swell of the plot; in the second he gets down into the ‘deep structures’, to the undercurrents of the text, through a hermeneutic analysis that leads him to discover its ‘meaning’, discerning which aspects of real life it points to. In the end, this is what it is all about: getting at the ‘meaning’, understood as what a film ‘says’, or better yet ‘shows’ or ‘indicates’ with respect to what it speaks of—beyond ideological questions or ‘moralizing’, that is, overcoming superficial or false moralisms.

Do all texts allow for a second navigation?

No, just those that have a sufficient poetic consistency. For example, sometimes the lack of verisimilitude in the plot or characters—or the ideological pretensions and the moralizing—make a deep structure, and therefore a second navigation, impossible.

But moral judgment is inevitable, and it is good that it exists.

Yes, but bearing in mind that the important moral judgment is not the one we make about the actions of the characters (whom we judge as people while knowing that they are not), but the one we make about work as a whole. Because the characters exist as a function of the story.

That is to say, you take for granted that there is always a meaning, a vision, or a point of view on the subject being explored.

Yes, it is inevitable. Each author dips his pen into his own veins. His vision will probably manifest itself implicitly, or even unconsciously, but it will always be there. Works do not resonate in the same way with all viewers, but that does not mean that their meaning is completely arbitrary, as Rorty argues. We have already talked about this: a film may have one meaning or many meanings, but it cannot have any meaning. As Umberto Eco says to Rorty in the ‘Tanner Lectures’¹² of Cambridge: While I can use a metal ashtray as a hammer or a projectile, I can never use it to scratch inside my ear, which I could do with a screwdriver (Collini 1992).

The concept of ‘myth’ in Aristotle

I realize that we are moving in concentric circles, returning to the same themes again and again, from slightly different perspectives, with the intention of going deeper. How does the Aristotelian ‘myth’ enter in here, in regard to the superficial and deep structures?

In Aristotle, ‘myth’ or narrative has two meanings. One is, as I said earlier, that of myth as ‘pragmaton systasis’, or better yet, a plausible framework of human actions that is represented through the characters who act as if they were persons. Another is myth as ‘mimesis praxeos’, literally ‘imitation or representation of human actions’. Aristotle says that this second meaning is ‘like the soul of tragedy’, that is, it acts with respect to the other parts of tragedy as does the soul in living beings in general. In people, the soul acts as a unifying principle that equips them for ‘praxis’, for immanent and self-perfective actions. That is to say, just as in man there is a natural, spontaneous tendency towards his own perfection or happiness, in tragedy, in the artistically successful work, there is also a final sense, like a ‘vocation’, which draws or pulls the poetic work towards its ontological end (towards its ‘telos’), beyond the strict term (‘peras’) or denouement (‘lusis’). The myth as plot corresponds with the superficial structure, which characterizes the first navigation; the myth as bearer of meaning is identified with the deep structure, characteristic of the second navigation.

That is to say, myth performs two functions and can be seen from two complementary perspectives.

Exactly. There are two meanings that actually constitute two ways of reasoning about the poetic myth, the first in a descriptive and psychological way, the second in a synthesizing and ontological way. This is what one expresses in other words when saying that in the work of art, the form is intrinsically linked to the content, since what the work substantially expresses could not have been expressed any other way. That is why when someone asks the poet what he wants to say with his poetry, his answer is a repeat of the poetry. And for the film director, what he wanted to say is the film.

Isn’t ‘myth’ confused with ‘meaning’ in this approach?

In some way they can coincide, because the meaning, which can be identified with the implied author, is like a strategic principle that unifies, but I understand that they are different things. The meaning has more to do with the vital application, with the ‘reading’ that the receiver carries out, with the famous concept of ‘catharsis’…

Of which we have not yet spoken, but which we will deal with in a moment…

On the other hand, we always speak of all these things by approximation. It is important to avoid any attempt at objectifying scientism, because reality is always complex and always escapes us. Myth also has something invisible or ungraspable, like the soul. We can never say ‘here it is’ and narrow it down with unappealable words. Just as the battle line or frontline is never really a precise line but rather a zone, a no-man’s land, so to speak, that sometimes belongs to one side and sometimes to the other.

Earlier you commented that one recognizes oneself not just in the characters but in the whole work.

Yes, the identification is produced with the characters in a way that we can call allegorical, and with the entire work in a symbolic way, considering the original meaning of ‘symbol’, which indicates bringing together what by nature must be united. The referent of a film is always the human person. The myth, narrative or drama, novel or movie, whatever we want to call it, has the capacity to bring together what we find disconnected (or what we hold together with some or extreme difficulty) in our personal, inner, spiritual life. As readers or viewers, we live the conflicts represented in the story, and that rift between who we are and who we are called to be.

In one of your books, you talk about a saying by playwright and film director David Mamet who said something like: the time we spend in the theater is not deducted from the time we live. What does that refer to?

To the attitude of the viewer and to how art has a decisive influence on life. He says it in reference to a famous proverb that says that the time we spend fishing is subtracted from the time we live; that is, it is as if it did not count, as if it were a parenthetical in life in which absolutely nothing happens. Mamet argues that the same is not true of theatre, film, literature, etc.; they are activities that make a contribution, that can make our life more intense and authentic, even if their sole purpose is entertainment, the weight they can have for our existence is undeniable. Ricoeur says it in other words, when he says that if art did not have the capacity to break into the heart of our world, it would be totally innocuous, like a parenthetical in our daily concerns. In this same vein, I like to say that cinema is a ‘cultural institution’, beyond an entertainment industry.

The transcendent meaning of catharsis

Leonard Cohen sings, ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’, and in one of your essays you speak of ‘cracks of transcendence in poetically outstanding works’.

The second part of the phrase is important: that the work is poetically outstanding, that it is not just entertaining or aesthetically pleasing. For example, in Hero by Yimou (otherwise a good director) there is room for the political dimension of the person, but no room for his or her transcendent dimension. There is lack of an opening to allow for the illumination of the political dimension with contents of a further transcendence, in which there is true and complete justice. Other times, the film leaves enough room for the viewer to put that transcendence into it. This happens with Blade Runner. Ridley Scott is not a believer, or at least he was not when he made the film, judging by his statements. But that does not preclude a transcendent interpretation of the film. Steiner (Steiner 1989) said the same thing in Real Presences when he affirmed the need for God’s presence in art to be ‘a sustainable supposition’ or its absence ‘an overwhelming weight’. In the world of Blade Runner, we notice that overwhelming absence.

The viewer always plays a role.

And a fundamental one. Like any artistic work, the film is updated when someone watches it, with the fruition of the viewer. Without the viewer there is no film. And each viewer sees it in a different way. It is received according to the recipient’s way of being, as St. Thomas Aquinas would say. The viewer has to play his part, has to do his job, to enjoy the work and grasp in its depth the meaning of what he is seeing. And that requires an active, non-passive attitude, bearing in mind that the film influences us even if we watch it passively.

Now, let’s talk about catharsis. Why do you insist on the need to give a transcendent meaning to Aristotelian catharsis?

Because Aristotle, undoubtedly a brilliant thinker, did not have a view of the person as a transcendent subject. As we know, that came later with Christianity. In the Greek context, what we have are citizens and slaves. But the Poetics points or goes further and has a greater impact, if one considers that the audience is made up of person and not only of citizens or mere consumers. Aristotle had the merit of having planted the seed. Somehow the transcendent sense is already implicit in what he says—one need only pull the thread.

That concept of catharsis is quite controversial.

Yes, it is mentioned only once in the whole Poetics and is uncommon in the texts of other authors of the time. It can be translated as purgation in the metaphorical medicinal sense, but many interpretations are offered on the meaning of that purgation. A long scholarly tradition distinguishes between the ‘objective catharsis’, understood as fear and pity for the hero, and ‘subjective catharsis’, understood as the fear and pity that the spectator feels for himself and for humanity, as when one thinks that what the hero suffers could happen to me and my fellow man.

Sometimes you also distinguish between ‘immanent catharsis’ and ‘transcendent catharsis’.

Yes, that distinction is along the same lines. The ‘immanent catharsis’, or the one within the text, would correspond to the ‘objective’, and would be the aesthetic pleasure derived from following the plot and the evolution of the characters, living their vicissitudes, and capturing the internal coherence of the work. While the ‘transcendent catharsis’ or outside of the text can be associated with the ‘subjective’ and comes from the purification or application to my own life—a life in which I seek fulfillment and happiness.

Here too, there would be correspondence with the two navigations.

Indeed. The immanent would be proper to the first navigation, the transcendent to the second. Catharsis takes place when the poetic work, understood as a whole, is capable of drowning the moral evil that it represents in the possible world of the narrated story, with the superabundance of good that implies recognizing the evil as evil. This is what produces the purification or pacification in the spirit of the viewer, who after watching the film leaves the theater renewed.

Regarding peace, somewhere you have distinguished between the peace in the work and the peace in the soul of the viewer.

They are different things. ‘Film peace’ arises from the stability of its parts, of its cohesive end and internal consistency, and of course it has nothing to do with box office success or with the intentions of its author, however admirable they may be. It is a peace that does not guarantee the peace of the viewer, because for this to happen, the viewer must know how to position himself before the work and live up to the demands that derive from his dignity.

To what extent is it important to reach catharsis?

For Aristotle, without catharsis there is no true and proper poetic work, and I agree. By experiencing pity and fear for the characters and for ourselves and all humanity, we reach a deeper understanding of the world, of the obstacles to goodness, of the need for others’ help to do good, etc.

This is the cognitive effect of tragedy.

Yes, it is. For Aristotle, the pleasure that drama unleashes is directly related to the knowledge it procures. It is seen very clearly with evil: evil repulses us in real life, but we like to see it artistically represented, because it leads us to recognize it and to fear it, growing our wisdom.

Thus, a work can be enriching even when it represents evil.

As long as the viewer knows how to dialogue with it; that is, as long as he has sufficient competence to access the myth (the soul of that work) and the necessary deference and courage. Deference to let it speak and courage to put himself personally in play. As David Mamet says, genuine dramas exist to deal with the mysteries of the human soul, something that the common viewer is not always willing to face, since such mysteries are overwhelming.

The concept of ‘play’ is also linked to the poetic work in the simple usage as playing. Perhaps we can say that in front of a work ‘we put ourselves in play, playing’.

Yes, seen in this way ‘putting oneself in play’ refers to being willing to confront one’s own soul, to examine one’s own life, in light of what has been learned; and playing has to do with the ‘reading covenant’, or with accepting the rules of that ‘possible world’ in which we enter in order to dialogue without renouncing our own identity. As Spaemann (Spaemann 2007) explains, play is a specifically human activity that is distinguished by the fact that it is not functional but is an end in itself, and the fact that in this sense it is related to the sacred. Free activity in our close personal relationships of love with God takes the form of play, as Leonardo Polo’s transcendental anthropology reminds us, and as the book of Proverbs (8:31) says: ‘ludens in orbe terrarum et deliciae meae esse cum filiis hominum’.

We play for the pleasure of playing.

It is what children instinctively do and what we, if we are good readers or viewers, do when we pick up a novel or go to see a movie. These are activities that we engage in primarily for the pleasure we find in doing them, not to be more cultured or better citizens. And this is compatible, as we have seen, with the pleasure we find in that play being linked to a certain cognitive growth. The Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky (Tarkovsky 1986) is right when he says that didacticism kills art and that the purpose of art is not to instruct—even if it is in itself instructive—but to prepare man for death, touching him at the most intimate level of his being.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Enrique Fuster

Enrique Fuster is a Professor and Vice-Dean of the School of Church Communications at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, where he teaches Film History and Theory and Screenwriting. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Church, Communication and Culture.

Notes

1 Gianfranco Bettetini (1933–2017) is considered the father of Italian audiovisual semiotics. See the interview by Paolo Braga and Armando Fumagalli Church, Communication and Culture Vol. 2 Issue 1: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23753234.2017.1287289.

2 David Beiráin (1977–2021) was a Spanish journalist, producer and documentary anchor. After graduating from the University of Navarra in Communication, Beriáin became known for presenting and directing the television show Clandestino, on Discovery Max. He worked for La Voz de Galicia and was special envoy for this newspaper in the Second Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan, but he also covered conflicts in other countries, like Sudan, Congo and Libya. He was one of the few reporters in the world able to enter the FARC camps in Colombia. He also worked in TV for Cuatro and Antena 3. In 2012, he founded the audiovisual company 93 Metros. He was killed in an ambush by jihadist organization Nusrat al-Isalm at the age of 44, alongside journalist Roberto Fraile and Irish conservationist Rory Young, while filming a documentary about illegal hunting in Burkina Faso.

3 Leonardo Polo (1926–2013) was a renowned Spanish philosopher. He taught most of his life at the University of Navarra and is best known for his proposal of the ‘abandonment of the mental limit’ and the profound implications of this philosophical method. His works include Evidence and Reality in Descartes, Access to Being, Course of Theory of Knowledge and Transcendental Anthropology.

4 Fernando Inciarte (1929–2000) was a Spanish philosopher and professor at the University of Münster, who also taught at Freiburg and Cologne, and at the end of his career at the University of Navarra.

5 Lotfi Zadeh (1921–2017) was a Persian engineer and mathematician, as well as a professor at University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for the introduction in 1965 of the ‘fuzzy set theory’.

6 Alejandro Llano (born in 1943, Madrid) is a Spanish philosopher and professor who has taught most of his life at the University of Navarra, where was also rector from 1991 to 1996. He is the author of The New Sensibility.

7 Miguel Ángel Garrido Gallardo (born in 1945) is a Spanish philologist and semiotician. He is the author of a large collection of works on Spanish Language, Culture and Literature.

8 On this subject to which we have repeatedly returned throughout this interview, the reader can consult the article by Juan José García-Noblejas published in Church, Communication and Culture Vol. 2 Issue 1 with the title Practical Philosophy and Television Drama: Ethical and Anthropological Remarks on Some European Television Series (2015): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23753234.2017.1287279.

9 ‘Many Voices, One World’, also known as the ‘MacBride report’, was published in 1980 by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Named after Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Seán MacBride, the report presented the situation regarding mass media all over the world and suggested a new order of communication to promote peace and human development. It was condemned by the United States and the United Kingdom as an attack on the freedom of the press.

10 Italian sociologist Pierpaolo Donati (born in 1946) is considered one of the main exponents of relational sociology. His work The Pandemic: An Epiphany of Relations and Opportunities for Transcendence [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23753234.2022.2043712] has been published recently in Church, Communication and Culture Vol. 7 Issue 1, a special on ‘Covid-19, Communication and Religion’.

11 Álvaro D’Ors (1915–2004) was a Spanish scholar of Roman law, currently considered one of the best and most influential 20th-century experts on the field. He taught for most of his career at the University of Navarra.

12 The ‘Tanner Lectures on Human Values’ were established by the American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner in 1978. It is considered one of the most important lecture series among top universities.