Page 148 - Communication Theory Media, Technology and Society

Holmes-05.qxd 2/15/2005 1:00 PM Page 131

Interaction versus Integration 131
medium for transporting sense. Such a medium is conceived as having
authors who are autonomous, unified meaning-creators, who must draw
upon the stock of meanings available to them to produce symbolic forms.
The meanings which can be conveyed in a given medium are regarded as
stable, and antedate the actual communication event. Communication is
the transport of these stable intended meanings: the communication of con-
sciousnesses. The task of readers, listeners or viewers of texts is to under-
stand what the author intended to say – what Derrida calls ‘hermeneutic
deciphering’.
In pre-Saussurian accounts of communication this meant that to
repeat a signifier is to repeat the meaning or the concept that supposedly
accompanies it. The task of the author is to select the appropriate signi-
fiers: ‘I am searching for the word to convey what I mean.’ For the reader
or audience, meanwhile, communication is completed by identifying the
signifieds which the author is seen to have attached to the chosen signi-
fiers. This notion of correspondence also implies that it might be possible
for a signifier to fail to carry the signified that should accompany it. This
logocentric system implies that it is somehow possible to re-create
the ‘original context’ in which a signifier had meaning for an author, or
producer of symbolic forms.
However, for Derrida, as we have seen, the meaning of a signifier at
the point in which it is consumed will always be different from its mean-
ing at the point of production. The so-called ‘original context’ can never
6
be reproduced. Moreover, signifiers do not even exhibit stability within
the same context, and may be read by different audiences in a diverse
number of ways.
The open-endedness of writing-as-language ensures that there is no
such thing as understanding an author ‘out of context’, because there is
never an ‘original’ context which can be captured by a logocentric read-
ing; rather, the context is the reading, the translation, etc.
For Derrida, we would be searching in vain to find an original con-
text or an original author, just as we would be to yearn for an original
‘meaning’ or, perhaps, as positivist philosophers do, search for the ‘mean-
ing of meaning’. It is radical alterity which ensures that the one-to-one
correspondence between a signifier and a signified, intentionality and the
‘original context’, is a myth, a theological idea.
Nevertheless, Derrida would be one of the first to acknowledge that
the logocentric mode of experiencing communication is a pervasive one in
Western societies, and one that looks set to survive the de-parochialization
that accompanies new means of global communication.

Experiencing mediums as sites of ritual

In keeping with the logocentric metaphysics of communication, transmis-
sion accounts take dyadic interaction as their building block of analysis,