The Culture of Communication

Hélé Béji

What is there to say? That from now on, every culture will have to face the challenge of finding a form which can be perceived and identified by all humanity if it wishes to exist other than as a subject of ethnological study. Whatever reservations we may have about the world of communication, we have to admit that no culture will have a chance of survival unless it acquires the ability to communicate. A culture which failed to do so would be condemned to a state of serfdom.

If we acknowledge this, we must examine the implications of this state of affairs, this new reality which constitutes the truly contemporary dimension of culture; first, however, we need to put forward a few ideas about the nature of communication itself.

This is a new form of culture, the logic, dynamic and purpose of which are to tend towards hegemony and domination. Accordingly, it will modify a number of perceptions that people have about cultural awareness, both their own and that of others. Culture as a whole will thus undergo a number of modifications which will make the word 'culture' itself shift towards becoming problematical and almost suspect. I should like to present a few of these modifications, by way of illustration.

1. The first major cultural modification that I see is that communication does not necessarily require an act of comprehension: it is based more on the perception of messages, images and signals the intellectually undemanding nature of which encourages rudimentary forms of expression. The strength of the message does not depend on its content, but on its resonance, after-effects and range of dissemination.

We are thus forced to spell out the paradox that communication, despite being the primary instrument of information between human beings, both near and far, nonetheless does not provide them with an instrument of comprehension. On the contrary: we feel instead that it is precisely owing to the trickery of communication that we are finding the world increasingly unintelligible. What we now call loss of meaning perhaps does not mean that the world around us no longer has a meaning, but that it is our instrument for analysis and comprehension which is at fault, which is stripping away our power of discernment, because it is wholly occupied and swallowed up by the space of communication. We are thus faced with the dilemma of having to use the world of communication to express ourselves, but at the same time what we express there acquires a resonance which is caricatured, ephemeral, selective and bound by circumstance, which increases the discomfort of reason, the need for clarity and the dissatisfaction of the mind.

2. The second modification that I see is that the loss of intelligibility of the world related to the development of communication is making this cultural tool into an object that I shall deliberately call 'obscurantist'. If we do not wish to deceive ourselves, we have to admit that there is actually an obscurantism specific to the modern world, which is something different from a simple fixation on what is archaic. In our present era there are forms of 'active' ignorance, which I distinguish from 'passive' ignorance such as illiteracy, for example, and which present themselves in the guise of half-knowledge and false knowledge that derives its power from dominating the credulity or weakness of others. We must not believe that obscurantism and ignorance are one and the same thing; the former is, instead, a power usurped over ignorance. As Condorcet would put it, it is the tyranny that guile exercises over ignorance.

Reducing intelligible content to rudimentary or insignificant forms of perception, the intellectual weakness of which, as I have said, stems from the very nature of its dissemination, makes it easier to effect mental domestication and to weaken the defences of awareness, and hence liberty.

So here is another paradox, to the effect that the democratic broadening of culture in communication (because communication is undoubtedly a vehicle of democracy, as well) will lead to a contraction in the real exercise of liberty. We can see new forms of mental submission developing and, as a result, techniques of domination being refined. We are not dealing here, as some believe, with a plot or conspiracy with specific designs, but with subservience caused by a gradual levelling-down of awareness. It can therefore easily be concluded from this that a culture whose raison d'être was solely communication could no longer be regarded as a product of awareness.

3. A third transformation that culture is undergoing within communication is that the current, which must be distinguished from the present, has become a religion. The present is not the same thing as the current, because the present is also a category of timelessness, whereas what is current, by contrast, immediately becomes obsolete; it expires in an instant, and is outmoded as soon as it has hit the headlines.

We are thus seeing the emergence in human civilisation of a novel culture which seems to be the first appearance in history of a culture without memory, a phenomenon not all of the consequences of which have yet been assessed. This is a culture in which there is no such thing as duration, and this absence, or temporal void, brings us back to the question of lack of comprehension and the very impossibility of the perception of meaning. We are confronted by a culture which destroys, which instantly annihilates what it produces, in a frantic quest for the factual. Timelessness is sacrificed in favour of the factual.

Here again, by fixing attention almost exclusively on the current, the subservience of the spirit and its difficulty in orienting itself are reinforced. Moral and intellectual disorientation are promoted and, as a consequence, vulnerability to standards and systems which claim to make sense of the world.

4. Finally, the last metamorphosis of culture that I should like to refer to, which is connected to those mentioned above, is that communication, by weakening the values of knowledge and, in particular, the knowledge of works (as opposed to the perception of facts), compensates for this intellectual atrophy by values of self-affirmation replete with hyperbole, and by forms of increasingly radical cultural and ethnic narcissism. This is what I refer to as 'cultural existentialism'.

What is this based on? Solely on its aptitude for communication. Communication fuels and enthrones the burdens of identity that culture bears, it encourages all forms of spontaneity based on identity and it takes culture away from the sphere of what has been acquired and shifts it to the expression of an elementary innateness, where the least symptom, however crude, will be gratified by a coefficient of cultural justification, and where the least primary reaction will be elevated to a principle.

II.

Generally speaking, then, communication develops ideological reflexes more than the resources of thought. Where communication presents itself as most transparent in itself and most accessible to others is where those claims are least true, and where it becomes opaque. In the final analysis, communication is in the process of fuelling multiple representations of a totalitarian nature, where auto-affirmation and auto-celebration win out over any other considerations.

This development is taking place at the expense of two vital human faculties: the moral faculty and the scientific faculty.

1. The moral faculty, or discernment of self - i.e. the capacity to discern, within one's own cultural identity, the proportion of good and evil, of human and inhuman aspects, this subtle combination of cruelty and altruism which exists in every culture - is dwindling within the elevation of identity. Every individual now tends to make his or her own culture into a virtue, i.e. to sublimate the reference to the origin as such, as if the origin were in itself a synonym of something good, or absolute.

The difficulty is that every culture, taking itself essentially to be the centre of the universe, will believe that it exists in the gesture of its proclamation (as if self-proclamation were sufficient), so that each one will find itself positioned awkwardly in relation to the others, since it will be constrained to affirm its validity, and thus the lack of validity of all the others. We can see the extent to which such a situation may contain the inevitable seeds of intolerance, confrontation and violence.

Communication develops new forms of primitive, sectarian and regressive consciousness; religious expression is only one aspect thereof. I stress this idea that religious movements must be interpreted actually as expressions of modernity, and not as its negation. Julien Benda said that the intellectual organisation of political hatreds was the distinctive feature of the modern age.

Finally, this democratic age of cultures is leading to a generalised self-affirmation, where the greater the demand for opening becomes, the more individuals seek to mark themselves out and protect themselves. Achieving an absolute mix of cultures seems to me just as much a utopian dream as the quest for their absolute purity. Both are fictions which may reveal themselves to be equally dangerous.

The result is that, through communication, we are sinking into a kind of slightly frantic, excessive and generalised incitement, a false mutual recognition (this is, in fact, the precise experience of misunderstanding), which ineluctably leads to the ego, the only point of balance for the disorientated being, to resurface. The ego radicalises itself in order to recapture itself. In communication, in fact, identities give way to a massive illusion in which they abandon themselves to the habit of spontaneous self-appeasement.

The reaction to this generalised levelling will be the development of the illusion of an restoration of tradition. Religious fundamentalism, for example, irrespective of the name that it bears, believes that it will reverse the ratio of modernity in its favour. That is where it would appear to make a fundamental mistake.

At this point I should like to say briefly, in parenthesis, that when faced with the radicalism of a utopia, it is better to make a point of refuting its mistakes rather than denouncing its crimes. What I am saying is that there is no certainty that denouncing the criminality of a movement or a system is an effective way of combating it. On the contrary: it may even strengthen it, since throughout human history terror has been as much an object of fascination or prestige as of fear, owing to a sacrificial power that may appear, in the eyes of many intellectuals, as the very expression of its truth or necessity. Consequently, I believe that refuting the errors of a political or historical evil will discredit it more quickly than simply denouncing its crimes.

I would say that religious radicalism today makes at least two mistakes. The first is to believe that religion is a magical equivalent of technology, and that modernity will be vanquished by the means of prophecy. This is a danger for credulous Muslims, but it is a godsend for Western cynics, because the West is drawing from it an unhoped-for intellectual renewal following the fall of communism. The spectre of fundamentalism is enabling it to establish the power of its hegemony in an even more sophisticated way. Religious radicalism is thus ending up strengthening the civilisation that it believes itself to be fighting.

The other mistake fed by religious ideology can be found in the illusion of its own restoration, whereas the direction actually taken by religious movements is to reflect the most up-to-date culture of our time, the skill of controlling the masses by rudimentary messages and the art of propaganda. Such movements actually speed up the destruction of tradition itself.

This is why an uncritical, i.e. ideological, attitude towards tradition destroys and perverts it. Tradition can become an instrument for interpreting the world, and hence a tool promoting comprehension, only by being an subject of knowledge, rather than of communication. Criticising tradition comes down, in a way, to saving it. Claiming it means losing it.

2. The other harmful effect generated by the culture of communication, in addition to our moral weakening linked to idolatrous forms of representation of the self and the loss of clarity regarding one's own human or inhuman leanings, is the impact on our scientific capacities. Here again, consciousness is the victim of a mystical orientation which subjects it to the communication of identity that discredits reason.

In the phenomenon of the elevation of origins that I referred to a little while ago, which seeks to make origins sacred, as if they were a higher virtue, there is silence about the actual nature of such origins, which in every case remains obscure. The original cultural criterion is obscure, so that it can never be clearly established, and can gain in affective power what it loses in terms of intellectual discernment.

For in the end, where does all this present-day pretension about cultural origin come from? Is it like those sons of the former nobility, whose vanity about their lineage becomes more passionately attached to their name as the branch to which they claim allegiance fades away? The rights of blood? Memory? A murky atavism? Family? Race? A golden age? A feeling of anguish? Where can the search for cultural origin lead to? Nowhere. Is there a tangible criterion for cultural origin? None. The presumption where it is to be found is insufficient. The apologia for cultural origin are separations within human awareness which are as rigid as they are uncertain, and as blurred as they are despotic.

III.

Yet where does this new discourse of communication, which elevates identities and origins, come from itself? From extreme strength and extreme weakness. From America and the Third World. For these two extremes of wealth and poverty are as one in their cultural expressiveness. The disinherited of the earth use the same patterns to exist as the privileged use to exert domination; some use them to dominate more, and some to serve more.

The point where people think that they are combating the uniformity of communication by elevating their origins is where it exhibits the links in the chain of its power. Communication thus appears to us as a misleading manifestation of the expression of identity.

I believe that the concept of the equivalence of cultures that communication disseminates is an illusion, because once beyond the principle of the human value of any culture, of its moral equality in relation to others, the issue of their unequal power gives fresh impetus to our difficulties.

On the one hand, as I have already stated, it is by no means certain that the formal recognition of cultures (of identities) has genuinely modified the belief that we hold , to the effect that ours is the centre of the universe.

On the other hand, the moral validity of all cultures cannot prevent there being those which have global ambitions. A certain clear-mindedness is needed here. The acceptance of other cultures has not weakened the natural pride that each individual takes in seeing the affirmation of his or her own culture.

So nothing can divert a culture which is aware of its achievements from the force of obeying the call of what it regards as its own genius, and from serving the development of that force. Since each culture is led to differentiate itself from others by all the material and moral means at its disposal, how could a culture focused on the values of exploration and conquest be persuaded to moderate what it regards as the foundation of its reason for existence, what has enabled it to become what it is, its creative originality, even if this were at the expense of those cultures which are content to enjoy their particular existence without worrying about things beyond their own horizons?

After all, cannot Western society be regarded as a gigantic, very complex tribe which draws its enjoyment of life from its Promethean energy, its curiosity, its technical bent, without troubling itself about the destruction that it causes as a result of the combustion that it deems essential to its self-fulfilment? Pushed to the extreme, does this not end with an intellectual and moral dictatorship of Western culture? Is this not what is happening, fundamentally, with 'occidentalism'? Cultural doctrines, which raised up the weak as part of the process of decolonisation, dealt a powerful hand to the strong, whose aim is to exercise cultural control over their era so that it does not subjugate them.

As always, it is the age that settles things, rather than morality. Even with the best will in the world, modern culture finds it difficult to avoid crushing traditional cultures, not because it is superior to them in intelligence or humanity (in many ways it is far more stupid and inhuman), but because it has the advantage over the others of being the culture of the present-day - not that the present is qualitatively better than the past, but it is there and exists, while the past no longer does.

The retort will undoubtedly be that, for a traditional culture, its past is still its present, but for that very reason the energy which passes intact through the survival of memory cannot cope with the incomparable strength of reality posed by the faculty of creating the age, of producing the age. This struggle, whether we want it or not, is unequal and undoubtedly immoral, and the past, despite all its savour, will always betray its unreal state of weakness when confronted with the power of the present.

For all that, doesn't the implacable nature of modernity, this new face of Necessity, lend an even more poignant aspect to the claim of identity when it joins the tragic presentiment of modern man's lack of a homeland, his 'world destiny' according to Heidegger? The quest for a genuine, tangible and human place, the fear of a civilisation that Freud had already stressed would be achieved at the expense of psychological renunciation and existential despair which may be experienced as inhuman: doesn't all this make cultural resistance perfectly rational?

What does such resistance say? That man, rightly, cannot resist in the abstract external or foreign cruelty, that he can only manage to do so by leaning on beliefs, reflexes and balances which are precise and coherent enough to give him a feeling of courage and invulnerability against adversity and the world's insensitivity.

As we have seen, however, communicating one's culture amounts to joining that globalisation of behaviour and discourse which promotes uprooting, rather than preventing it. In this way, radicalism fall into the trap that it sought to avoid. And it is again the form of modern society that dominates, in which individualism appears as the final nihilist and spectral image of cultural communication.

The question which ultimately arises is the following one: what can be done to ensure that modern culture, the essence of which is communication, once again becomes an instrument of comprehension and not of subjugation? And what can be done to ensure that cultural claims, whatever the tradition they spring from, are not an instrument for self-blinding and a presumption permitting any form of arbitrariness?

By rehabilitating something which is not entirely communication, and which I shall call 'conversation'.

Conversation is not communication. When everyone communicates with everyone about something, no-one is conversing with anyone. Conversation collects what communication disperses. Communication is a fact of society, conversation is a calling of the spirit.

Communication is to do with power, conversation is a method of recognition. Communication gives the illusion of self-expression, but only conversation holds the will to think. Conversation, in its etymological meaning, implies frequenting, familiar traffic with associates, proximity, whereas communication does not necessitate any proximity, or frequenting, or understanding.

In my view, the only legitimate cultures are those which are capable of 'holding conversations'. Conversational skills are those which bestow a comprehensible, familiar and intimate face on what is furthest away from oneself. It makes the 'other' comprehensible. It reintroduces moral consciousness and ethics into the heart of the exchange. Going beyond communication, it re-establishes the act of generosity of spirit in favour of the truth, unlike communication, which despoils the spirit in favour of power.

Conversation, rather than communication, is all the difference between listening attentively to someone and anonymous distraction, which doesn't encounter anyone. Conversation is the spiritual, timeless art practised in company, which is so familiar to all cultures, from the newest to the most archaic, and the only one that can help human beings to overcome the cruel banishment of modern communication, which deprives them of the pleasure of contemplating a world to their scale and in their image.

This is an article prepared for the Global Progress Commission

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