Contenu du sommaire : La communication : une interrogation philosophique

Sociology is today confronted with a hypothesis more and more frequently formulated in which communications should become a purely instrumental activity, an intransitive one, and is confronted also by the idea that media would no longer serve to support the conflictual construction of representations, of standards, of values, but only an empirical juxtaposition and uncoordinated information lacking sense. Confronted with this acknowledgement, it is useful to ask ourselves what may remain of pertinance in notions such as opinion and public space. Concerning the former, it is necessary to recall that it is a demand of modern societies that, deprived of recourse to tradition, they take up argumentation and intersubjectivity to assure their ability to function. As to the pseudo-scientific positivism that would be substituted in the public space for a teleological discourse, it must be as such considered as a rhetoric, as a means of argumentation.

Taken up by the sciences of language or by cybernetics, communication is reduced to the process of informing and thus engaged in an enterprise of integral modelling. The development of the pragmatic of systemic inspiration as well as the expansion of the cognitive sciences appears to confirm the disqualification of the hermeneutical and ethical points of view to which philosophers have been attached. It is, nonetheless, by references to Kantism that intersubjectivity imposes a problematic in the sense of that which Apel, Habermas, or Grice try their best to satisfy. The conceptual aim is to admit its limits. Conversation, and in a general way literature, seem to promise a non-reductional elucidation of the acts of communication.

The manuscript archive (as for example the legal archives of the 18th century) is for an historian neither a reflection nor a proof. It is a means that lends itself to communication with the past. The archive « lacks » always, often abundantly. Using the archive is a matter of translating this gap and making sense of it. The archive is a text because it can find a recipient who creates a new elaboration of it. Thus, this language that harnesses both the words of others and of the past is subject to a history of its constitution and even of reorientation as we reconstruct the subjects of history.

To study technique, it is useful to recall Braudel's suggestion and to blend historial and sociological research. Only the first permits one to extricate movements of long duration that are so important for the analysis of the evolution of the technical and the social. These two evolutions must be studied simultaneously. In fact, it is important to avoid the traditional separation between the history of technologies and the history of their uses. These principles are illustrated by the study of the birth of sound-oriented machines (the telephone and the phonograph).

This article outlines an approach to communications that is an alternative to the classic theory of Shannon. Rather than intervene in the context marginally and after the fact, at the moment of rendering unambiguous the received messages, one can think of the context (which can be inspired by the model of interlinked computer files known as hypertext), as the essential stake in the act of communications. Following the approach in a number of works in pragmatics and the micro-sociology of communications, it is suggested here that the usual problematic be inverted. Far from only being a useful adjunct to the understanding of messages, the establishment of a context is the proper goal of the communications act. In a communications situation each new message fulfills the role of further defining the context and its sense. As a successor to that of the telephone, the hypertext metaphor can inspire a hermeneutic theory of communication centered on sense rather than on the transmission or decoding of messages.

This article calls for the development of a communicational paradigm in social analysis, including in the analysis of social communication itself. It tries to make clear the difference that such a paradigm introduces in the approach to social facts. Considering that the predominant conception of communication, that is representationalist and cognitivist, gives in to the myth of fact and of determination-in-itself , the author opposes an intersubjectivist and pragmaticist model. This article thus joins the debate conducted among authors who propose a cognitive theory of communication.

In the face of the propensity to declare the « paradigm of the subject » outdated and « monological », a re-reading of the modern history of subjectivity causes some of the virtualities contained within it to appear, except when confused with that of the individual, as a notion in reality inseparable from an intersubjective horizon. In this sense, much earlier than the overstatement of the neo-structuralist subversions of the subject, it was a matter of giving all the rights in philosophy to the problematic of communication, to recomposition, against their individualist dissolutions, the values of subjectivity.

The thesis advanced in this text is that one can only understand that which are thought of and understood as « communications phenomena » if a number of analytic threads are untangled and then recontructed historically. The example of the « cable plan » allows one to see how, on the one hand, a decision whose interpretation is contingent upon the result of a process and of a logic that will be later put to work. Yet, on the other hand, in following one of these dimensions , that of symbolic politics, one can at the same time interpret this process in the long term and mark the discontinuities that lie beneath the continuities. That being the case, « communications phenomena » can be siezed as a moment in the historical evolution of symbolic politics or as the manifest cumulation of a « long 19th century ». One thus initiates a social history of communications that may also contribute to a history of the present.

The notion of communications does not permit a discipline to be delimited. One can speak of communications in the context of any phenomenon that living beings are take part in. Most of those who speak of communications, including members of the various schools of semiology, conceive of an inherently linear process. Here, the author proposes that we speak of the production of sense, and gives himself the means of treating the construction of sense as a complex, non-linear process : there is an interval or gap that is an important component that places itself between the production and the acknowledgement of sense. This leads, under the inspiration of Peirce, to the proposal of a compound model as the basic means by which sense may be constructed. In the end, the crucial question for the observer is based on a hypothesis that rests upon the undecidability of the way this implied third level stands between production and recognition.