Reading Rethinking communicative interaction (henceforth RCI), I realized that the final word of the subtitle, “horizons,” is an accurate allusion to the main difficulty and contribution of the book: the quest for interdisciplinarity. RCI advances the idea of communication as a fiction; the same applies to interdisciplinarity, a commonplace in the social sciences to which RCI at least contributes a “programme,” as Colin Grant suggests in his Introduction, acknowledging the difficulties of “pluri-disciplinariety.” A wealth of sources to advance such an ambitious project is presented. RCI develops key methods to fulfill the interdisciplinary endeavor: ways of bridging the macro and micro gap by studying the connection of the self's participation in the social construction of the communicative process and the interplay between linguistic and biological facts in human evolution and language acquisition, among others.
Most telling in regard to the state of the art of communication studies, RCI oscillates among many approaches that reflect methodological, political and ethical dilemmas related to different orders of observation: Bakhtinian theory embracing dialogical analyses (Ivana Markova's “Dialogicity as an ontology of humanity”), computational neuroscience (Bernd Porr & Florentin Wörgöter's “Autonomy, self-reference and contingency in computational neuroscience”), theoretical debates in the sociology of communication (Loet Leydesdoff's “Interaction versus action in Luhmann's sociology of communication), communication and cognition in second language use (Beatriz Mariz Maia de Paiva), ethnomethodological analysis of language games (Brian Torode), an ergonomic approach to conversation (Mario Cesar Vidal & Renato José Bonfatti); even more “applied” research – as described in Kesi Mahendran's “The dialogues of a Young Person's Centre” with its reflections on the need for shifting the balance of power in the doing of research. Moreover, in RCI's final chapter, “Constructing the uncertainties of bioterror,” Austin Brabow & Mohan Dutta-Bergman allude to the incipient possibility of bridging the gap between academic work and public opinion, a badly needed exercise in public sociology or anthropology. Since it is impossible to discuss all this wide diversity here, I concentrate on what I find most appealing for the readers of Language in Society.
Theories of interaction are usually far behind actual empirical phenomena, as witnessed in new forms of communication such as the Internet (Crystal 2002), an interesting study of which is found in RCI, “‘Flaming’ in computer mediated interaction” (Avgerinakou). This invites rethinking both the universal claims sustaining current theories of communication and their empirical bases. To cope with the ecodynamics of the often-denied phenomena of uncertainty, contingency, vagueness, or the role of the self in shaping communicative realities, RCI revisits communication from at times overtly antagonistic historical and philosophical traditions, ranging from information theory to reproduction theories, symbolic interaction, and phenomenology. While such developments nurture the debate on the nature of communication, facing key albeit fuzzy issues such as the self's role in communicational variability, RCI ironically emphasizes the lack of cross-disciplinary fertilization between different social sciences, such as the tradition of linguistic anthropology (see the recent collections of Goodwin & Duranti 1992 and Gumperz & Levinson 1996, which also invite rethinking communication).
Dialogicity is key to defining communication, as the idea of co-authorships advanced by Marková suggests, from the perspective of both the analyst and speakers themselves. But dialogue is seen as the field of conflictive interactions and their resolution, as in Davey's exploration of the fictionality of dialogue and subjectivity in contending interpretations of individual biographies suggests. This not only permits a critique of solipsistic approaches to language, with their essentialist perspectives, but also enables conceiving dialogicity and communication as conflictive, not just as reciprocal and mutual, appealing to different levels of interaction organization, both universal premises as well as the specific political economy of languages.
Opposing cognitive to representational approaches, echoing heteroglossic voices in the human sciences, RCI shows that against received paradigms, which view the ontogenetic development of the self as an instructional process, knowledge and the development of the self cannot be conceived as corresponding to an “objective, external reality.” Rather, cognition is a proactive (constructivist) process. Contributions to understanding the role of the self in the complex construction of communicative variability include the concept of autopoiesis, with its implied “organizational closure,” which allegedly allows for self-imputation of the individual's identity and its (relative) cognitive autonomy. Such conceptualizations view language as an instance in which all individuals socially recognize themselves, albeit allowing for self-perception and differentiation, as unique participants in interaction, giving rise to personal experience and consciousness. Along these lines, in the chapter “Language, communication and the development of the self,” Renato Proietti opposes the reduction of language to its referential function, opening up the distinction between inter- and intra-subjectivity. As an excellent illustration of an interdisciplinary approach in RCI, Proietti leads us through the connections of the development of cultural and material artifacts. The “progressive expression” of “the non-linear rules” of human evolution corresponds to different stages in the emergence of linguistic abilities, from the vocal grooming of the macaque to the “vocal and body language expressions” of Homo erectus, to the emergence of Homo sapiens, with its “looking glass self,” enabling the first forms of “mentalism” and incipient alter-ego constitution. This is parallel to the barely explored field of early language acquisition in which the newborn develops “emotional schemata,” ranging from the non-self-conscious emotions embedded in protolanguage and conversation to the awareness of the self, materializing in feelings such as shame and pride in the first year of existence and foundational of the emotional substrate of the human being. Thus, cognitive abilities are not a reflex of a presumed objective reality, but rather the interplay of emotive and referential knowledge that gives rise to the appropriation of meaning by the persona.
Opposing the concept of the sovereignty of the self characteristic of Western thought, RCI opens up the possibility of conceiving interaction as dominated by teleological (power) issues. The array of perspectives contained in RCI provides a wealth of elements to explore the complexity of human interaction in hic et nunc situations. RCI also theoretically explores the series of paradoxes that enable the possibility of communication, such as the “openness by closeness” of human communication (Luckman), or what I have called the “conversational paradox” (Flores Farfán 2003). Such paradoxical complexity of communication is reviewed in Grant's “Complexities of self and social communication.” Exploring what Leydesdoff terms “the communicative turn,” going beyond the concept of referentiality that has dominated linguistic thought ever since Saussure's linguistic turn, the concept of fictionality is an important one in this respect. Cognition in relation to communication is conceived as the “closure” of the individual mind to which the individual has a privileged access, while simultaneously facing the contingency of social interaction – another paradoxical fiction or “form of indeterminate determination” (Grant 2003:103). Developing a critique of monologism and stability in communication, Grant appeals for a substitution of presumed universal principles such as Habermas's validity claims. But how can intersubjectivity be possible with only contingency and complexity? If communication is a fiction, it is a consensus fiction by which actors orient themselves in interaction; that is, communication operates by means of “functional fictions” (Schmidt). I see no dramatic difference between this approach and the classical ideas of phenomenology's anticipations of reciprocal perspectives (Schutz 1973), as different ways of phrasing the conditions of possibility for human communication. What I found most valuable in the theory of fictionality is a set of concepts (such as the porosity of communication) to account for social human interaction in empirical situations – that is, at the level of specific rather than universal pragmatics. After all, connecting (presumed) cognitive autonomy to social orientation as a homeostatic coupling of expectations is not so different from the rational counterfactual orientation of Habermas's ideal speech situation. The concepts advanced by RCI are all valuable additions to our means of understanding the complex, multiphasal phenomenon of interaction in human communication. If, as Grant states, meaning escapes nothing, not even the negation of meaning, or as Schmidt's doublets suggest, communication should be seen in terms of “the fictions of fictions,” “the reflexivity of reflexivity,” or “the imputation of imputations,” the idea of the “double contingency of communication” might be a gateway to reconcile universal and empirical pragmatics, advancing a deeper understanding of language in society.
