Communication as Gesture: Media(tion), Meaning, & Movement (Digital Activism and Society: Politics, Economy and Culture)

The Digital Activism and Society: Politics, Economy and Culture in Network Communication series focuses on the political use of digital everyday-networked media by corporations, governments, international organizations (Digital Politics), as well as civil society actors, NGOs, activists, social movements and dissidents (Digital Activism) attempting to recruit, organise and fund their operations, through information communication technologies. conceptions of what human being is because being human happens in communication. Over the past few decades, a loose collection of broad themes has variously coalesced in Western theoretical circles involving the deep relationality of all things, broadly considered in terms of 'posthumanism', for example. This underlying relational ontoepistemology entails a spatialized account of interaction (as in, for example, the use of 'ecology', or more reductively 'network', as a general structural metaphor), which further entails the imbrication of interaction, communication, and mediation as basic theoretical concepts across a wide range of interests and disciplinary perspectives. 'Communication', broadly conceived, has thus moved to the heart of contemporary philosophical and theoretical trends across a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, while, simultaneously, the continuing dynamic evolution of communication technology has set in high relief the myriad complex interactions that constitute mundane human life and beyond. However, the diverse fields of investigation comprising communication studies, importantly including new and digital media studies, have arguably contributed little to the shaping of these theoretical currents (apart, perhaps, from the reductive metaphor of 'the network'). The reason for this is that the basic assumptions of communication studies, rooted in classical rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, classical information theory, and cybernetics, are bound to linear, reductive, positivistic philosophical assumptions that are broadly incompatible with any kind of relational onto-epistemology. Ironically, these assumptions, of which the conventional 'sendermessage-receiver model' is emblematic, are almost universally acknowledged to be inadequate. Nevertheless, that acknowledged inadequacy has done nothing to uproot or weed out the linear positivistic assumptions that ground communication studies. We all accept that 'everything is connected', but we approach connection itself in terms of the analytical separation of both discrete entities comprising 'information' and linguistic categories that uncritically conceive 'text' (in varying conflated senses of the term) as 'data'. This book makes three broad, imbricated moves to address these problems. First it reconsiders the roots of the study of communication in rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics, to uncover the underlying theoretical and methodological limitations embedded in traditional assumptions about communication. Second, it demonstrates that a more relational understanding of communication x Prologue processes can be recovered and gathered from the inherent relations among these roots. Third, it reintegrates these theoretical and philosophical roots with more recent work in spatial cognition, interactional sociology, and ecological and relational psychology to provide a matrix for a meta-theoretical account of communication based on a theoretical concept of 'gesture' that emanates from a fundamentally relational onto-epistemology. The purpose of this book, then, is primarily to articulate the problem and prepare the ground for further conversation. The final section of the book provides a coalescence and integration of the major themes, and (perhaps despite my title) just the barest hint of what a posttransmission or post-exchange communication theory could be. I very much look forward to those conversations and, in the meantime, I hope that this book can serve to introduce future interlocutors to a variety of disciplinary histories and theoretical perspectives that share roots but have only rarely interacted directly. This book is a focused extension of my dissertation, completed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For that reason, all of those who supported and contributed to that exercise are similarly culpable for this one. However, I must acknowledge the continued support of Athina Karatzogianni, the Editor of this series, without whom this book and much of the broader project to which it belongs would certainly not have been possible. Sincere gratitude to Roy Christopher and Andrew Rojecki for both valuable feedback and moral support. I also want to thank Cindy Sherman Bishop for her interest, her gracious and insistent sharing of vast social capital, and just for listening. Finally, but most importantly, thanks to Betty Chun for continued faith and support (and prodding). While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of information, very few scholars of communication would argue that these assumptions are realistic, without a long list of qualifying caveats. But the concept of communication, built from the integration of semiotic signification with the idea of information as the 'carrier' of transmitted meaning, is so deeply ingrained and simple that even displacing it can seem futile, if not absurd. Nevertheless, these foundational assumptions tightly constrain the ways in which any interactional phenomena can be conceived--and constraints upon our ways of understanding communication drastically limit our capacity to understand our worlds and the social processes that generate them, at any scale or level of abstraction. Communication as Gesture traces the concept of communication from its roots in classical rhetoric to its integration in structural linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics, integrating perspectives from contemporary rhetorical theory, relational psychology, interactional sociology, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, multimodal semiotics, and more. Because so much of our contemporary world is lived with and through digital media technologies, the study of new media and social media provides a rich illustration of the constraints imposed by our reductive assumptions--and hints at the possibilities generated by rethinking them. The gesture theory of communication introduced presents a dimensional account of communication that is intuitively accessible and theoretically rich while overturning reductive assumptions of the linear character of interaction. This book critiques current assumptions about 'communication', particularly digitally mediated communication, by re-examining conceptual foundations in rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics. The result is a dimensional account of interaction that is at once both intuitive and revolutionary.