The Evanescence of Ritual and Its Consequences: Reflections on the Phenomenology of Human Communication in the Rise of Cybernetic Culture

Abstract

This paper addresses semiotic elements of ritual in human encounter. The notion of an essential ritual presence in the existential/communicative connection of persons has been established in the work of Langer, Gadamer, and Jakobson. Yet, as Richard Lanigan maintains, vital aspects of Jakobson’s model of communication are typically missed in the application of his work, a consequence of which is that social science no longer differentiates between “communication” and “information”. As such, everything perceived as meaningful is reducible to “message”, and thus, effective communication means merely “finding the right message”. The regression to our current cybernetic world, along with the intellectual paradigms enabling it, was never a foregone conclusion, but the entrenchment of social science in information theory makes it clear that an epistemological commitment to a semiotic phenomenology of communicative existence—and the visibility of ritual life—may well be our only way out.

1. Introduction: The Presupposition of Communicative Experience

I have spent my entire adult life as a Professor of Communication. My initial faculty appointment commenced over four decades ago, roughly ten years before academic departments such as the ones in which I have worked came to be organized around the concept of “communication” rather than “rhetoric” (or “speech”, which in the United States came to be the more commonplace term). During this time, inquiry into the notion of what “communication” is as a human experience, or how it might be distinct from rhetoric and dialectic, speech and expression, or networks and information, has—for all intents and purposes—become a matter of epistemic closure1. In a recent essay in the European Journal of Communication, Burak Özçetin [2] comments, “Communication is among the most used and least theorized concepts across various disciplines, including communication studies [emphasis added]. There are many communication theories and models, most of which take communication for granted, only as a name and an unproblematic/self-evident concept”. All of this is to say, in the research and teaching of “communication”, for all intents and purposes, the event and experience of communication itself are entirely presupposed.

It is not that the question is never raised as much as the now-familiar answers have become very satisfying and settled into the research agendas and curricula of my colleagues and the strategic designs of university administrations (see Eadie [3]). To offer a quick impression of how these familiar answers are translated into a general definition of how the field of Communication is studied and practiced, I would say that the word “communication” has been blurred with rhetoric, that (through its most common curriculum) it is a field in which strategic information (i.e., “the message”) is formulated to produce positive outcomes in interpersonal, group, and mass (or cultural) frameworks, that “listening” and understanding (like dialectic) is taken to be a rational and, thus, cognitive process and is effectively captured by the cybernetic notion of feedback, especially as it represents a ratio of signal to noise.

For decades, the dominant curricular theme of undergraduate academic work in Communication has been, by and large, toward the achievement of communication “competency” or communicative “effectiveness” (see Morreale, S. P., and Pearson, J. C. [4]; see esp. Myers, Goodboy, et al. [5], (p. 427). What is meant by this phrasing is, essentially, indistinguishable from what has been termed “social skills” (with one key difference being the capacity of a student to deliver a dynamic public speech). The most common element of the curricula that has emerged over the course of the last half-century is a concern with navigating the traffic of complex social and cultural situations, which is to say that communicative experience, considered alongside the now-standard notion of communicative performance, is saturated with a modern consciousness of demography, especially as it highlights the complexity of managing outcomes in interpersonal and group interactions. And importantly, the dominant framework for thinking about communication is more about populations and systems than it is about individual persons. That is, the student is taught to navigate complicated webs and networks of people that define difficult social situations in a manner that—surprisingly, considering the ostensible maturation of the field (see Eadie [3])—parallels Dale Carnegie’s influential How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937) from nearly a century ago.

For about a decade, from the late 1960s through the late 1970s, it was not unusual for courses focusing on interpersonal relations to explore themes of dialogue and authenticity, drawing upon the literature in existential philosophy, humanistic psychology, psychoanalytic theory, and psychotherapy. A number of textbooks were published that were built around the work of the Palo Alto Group, Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, Fritz Perls, Alan Watts, R. D. Laing, Rollo May, and Martin Buber, with a small number of Communication departments beginning to introduce phenomenology into their curriculum. By the end of the decade, those trends shifted in the direction of social scientific orientations toward the development and management of relationships. The existential reflections on relationship that had, for a time, enabled a closer examination of self and consciousness shifted toward the reduction of conflict and the cultivation of productive (“solution-oriented”) interaction.

In addition, for the last quarter of a century, the component of academic work in Communication that had been focused on rhetoric and argumentation saw a significant shift from the analysis of public oratory to the analysis of cultural expression (see Schiappa [6]). That is, “rhetorical criticism” expanded to become the critical analysis and judgment of cultural expression writ large. The work has become increasingly dominated by critical methods in Continental thought and has become, for the most part, largely indistinguishable from the “cultural studies” model that has come to define interpretive scholarship in the Humanities (see Bérubé [7]). (Bérubé [7], following the work of Fredric Jameson [8], makes the case that cultural studies—which cannot be tied to merely one academic field—is best defined as a project to engage in close reading of texts and expressive actions. By definition, this has come to include the work of contemporary rhetoricians, who now only rarely address matters of public oratory rather than signs, symbols, and artifacts of contemporary culture.)

What this all amounts to is that from the early studies in speech and rhetoric to the quantitative social scientific assessment of signals and feedback to the critical-cultural interpretation of signification, expression, and performance, the work of communication research has not broken from its preoccupation with “the message” (i.e., its strategy and effectiveness) as the principle focus of intellectual reflection. What I am describing is a human science problem that, for complex reasons, goes beyond the all-too-familiar critique of behaviorism and the dominance of the natural science paradigm. The epistemic closure that arises from limiting intellectual exploration of human communicative experience reduces everything to a kind of circuitry, a perception that human interactive life obtains in the realms and avenues of feedback that greet us upon picking and executing our expressive strategies. Again, when the research and curricular focus is on “messages” and their strategic deployment what is emphasized is intentionality in association with a particular quantity—a quid, a content transferred to a receiver. What is missed is the disposition and quality of the connection itself.

2. Jakobson, the Relationship, and the Problem of Transactionality

This essay concerns the fragility and fracturing of ritual in human encounter. What is required is a theory of communication that is fundamentally distinct from a theory of information processing. Roman Jakobson furnishes such a theoretical approach, as Richard Lanigan [9] (p. 1) fully explicates:

Jakobson is the modern source of most of what communication scholars theorize about and practice as human communication, and he will be the source of how communication scholars shall come to understand communication in the future as the theoretical and applied use of semiotic principles of epistemology. Roman Jakobson alone offers a theory of communication … grounded in the study of human language as … an integrated practice of thought, speech, and inscription … all of which are explicated by a semiotic understanding of what it means to be human.

Jakobson’s framework for understanding and explicating human communicative experience is rigorously phenomenological and serves as a thoroughgoing contextualization of the concept of information flow and exchange that helped launched the field of cybernetics in the 1940s.

In 1949, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, both of whom were scientists in cybernetics and machine intelligence, published The Mathematical Theory of Communication [10], which presented a circuitry model of coded information exchange that introduced the notions of “feedback” and “noise”. The contributions of Shannon and Weaver—as far as their work was intended—stand as a significant threshold of achievement in cybernetic theory. What was not anticipated is the way in which their model of signal to noise ratio became translated and applied as the standard “model of communication” that would be taught to students enrolled in Communication curricula for the next seven decades. Even more surprising has been the way the essential design of the Shannon and Weaver model is preserved in the models offered as corrections to the “mechanistic” and “linear” orientation of their cybernetic schema.

Information theory demands that a “message” (or signal or, simply, “sign”)—i.e., the intentional cognitive/rational content—be centered in interaction and exchange. A failure of “communication” (framed in terms of information theory) is a failure to “understand” (or “grasp” or “appreciate”) what a speaker has coded; in other words, the message was not received as intended. In this regard, the most common method for enhancing the quality of interaction is to enlighten the “communicator” (or “sender”, in Shannon and Weaver’s terminology) about choice and variability in the ways message content can be represented (relative to intent), as well as the role that codes and contexts can play in strategic choice. The term “feedback” has been preserved from Shannon and Weaver’s 1949 model and has become an integral element of both the theoretical and curricular discourse of the Communication field. The feedback is, of course, a coded message response. In other words, it has emerged as the sign through which we assess the effectiveness of the semiotic strategy.

The term chosen for the model of communication dominating Communication curricula in the United States is “transactional”. The use of this term is interesting. It emerged in the 1970s in an attempt to transcend a growing critique of the Shannon and Weaver model as excessively mechanistic and to suggest that, with culture and socio-psychological factors taken into consideration, meaning should exceed the basic ratio of message and code2. The word “transaction” was seen as more expansive than the word “interaction”, which was characteristic of the literature on conversation and social behavior in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s. “Transaction” would come to include situational elements of human interaction, as well as the contexts of time both defining and surrounding the communicative event.

All of this is explicitly argued in just about every introductory communication textbook as an advance beyond both the mechanistic framing and terminology of the information flow model, and the scheme of “mere” interaction inasmuch as Shannon and Weaver’s essential framework is not designed to view interaction beyond the scope of particular episodes; that is, only a transactional approach is capable of seeing the “whole” of the person engaged in all forms of cultural behavior, as such considering the complete life situation of which both perception and object are part. This assertion is put forth despite the fact that a message-centered circuitry model does not exclude an examination of culture, context (of any sort—historical, political, dramatic), or a detailed investigation of “code” as grammar, discourse, or rhetoric. Moreover, the theoretical limit that quickly announces itself in relation to this framework is that there can, thus, be no such thing as a non-transactional relationship in human experience. And, so, it is at this particular juncture that the existential and phenomenological thematic of this paper will find its theoretical footing.

Jakobson’s [12,13], see also Holenstein [14], approach to communicative experience, emerging from his immersion in the work of Husserl via the Prague Linguistic School before the War, is phenomenological, and it is unbounded in ways that the transactional approach simply is not and cannot be. As Lanigan [15] (p. 16) has noted,

Communication theory for Jakobson is the phenomenological structure that separates… by combination… certain features of speech such that distinctive features (appositions and inclusions) are created by redundancy features (oppositions and exclusions) in discourse. Jakobson formulates these linguistic features as a theory of communication in which six elements achieve six functions in the operation of human discourse.

The layout of the six elements is simple: the relationship of an Addresser and Addressee is a horizontal, syntagmatic connection, and the other four elements (code, context, contact, and message) are arranged vertically and paradigmatically. Importantly, the Jakobson model describes not a “process” but an experience. In a moment of meaningful connection, people are intertwined in narrative time and space (context, in other words) through a shared habit of mind (a code, in other words). The focal symbols of expression (in other words, the message) thematizes dialogic elements, enabling propositions or topics or concepts to flow as dialogue is sustained. None of these elements and their functions holds priority or pre-eminence in the exploration of communicative experience. Again, unlike an interactive or transactional model, we are not expressly dealing with linear process—“experience”, again, is not a discreet account of sequence and circuitry—and the message (and its intentionality) is not at the center of the framework.

The last element I will discuss, which Jakobson terms “contact”, concerns the narrative of the relational connection itself. Jakobson chooses the term “phatic” to describe the function of contact in communicative experience, borrowing the term from Malinowski to describe ritual elements of communion and connection that he observed as a constant feature of human interaction. This aspect of ritual mutuality, for Jakobson, is not to be grasped as ritual in a formal or ceremonial sense. It is not a practiced or rehearsed routine or regimen. Instead, it surfaces as a sort of situational motif. Closely following the work of Gadamer, Niall Keane [16] (p. 382) notes, “the aim of ritual is not to communicate some specific content to one another… The goal is instead to participate in a collective activity that attunes us more intensely to the world and to the world less commonly experienced”.

As such, the phatic function of the “contact” element of Jakobson’s model is to draw emphasis to the quality of the connection between persons, the chiasm that is felt and considered as the persons address one another. It may or may not sustain the topical matters motivating the interaction. During a moment of phatic communion, as Jakobson observed and adopted from Malinowski, a listener, no doubt addresses a speaker with head nods and brief physical or verbal gestures encouraging (or perhaps punctuating) expression. But there is more to this connection than signaling! It captures elements of motif, tonality, texture, lighting—in short, everything that constitutes a backdrop from memory and value to light and color.

In any case, the utilitarian framework by which researchers throughout the social sciences (including some linguists) have appropriated various versions of the transactional model of communication and human interaction has limited the “phatic function” to providing merely supportive or punctuating gestures. As such, the Jakobsonian element of contact becomes yet another message—a secondary message primarily concerned with maintenance and feedback. Moreover, the relational aspect of connecting—the intertwining, the chiasm—is entirely presupposed as a function of code, strategy, and awareness of context.

3. The Flesh of the Phatic Function and the Emergence of the Enterprise Self

At this juncture, it becomes vital to take note of an observation made by Jakobson [11] (p. 356) regarding “contact” and the “phatic function”: “It [i.e., the phatic function] is also the first verbal function acquired by infants; they are prone to communicate before being able to send or receive informative communication”. This is to say that infants experience a meaningful communicative connection before producing or “intending” (sending/coding) semiotic iterations. Gary Genesko [17] (p. 25) comments, “This makes the phatic autonomous from position (as sender or receiver of well-formed messages): passage precedes position. It resists form and closure in the code-saturated message”. Genesko [17] (p. 68) succinctly summarizes that human contact and phatic communion “leads Jakobson to suggest … infants communicate before they can communicate”. That is, fleshly and embodied presence is primary in our experience of attachment; embodiment is where we begin. It is in this sense that language becomes flesh not simply in its phonetic and vocalic articulation but in its integration in the mutuality of our being-together.

The relational connection, I would argue, is the essence of ritual. It is, in its enactment, primarily visible as shadow. It defies the modern habits of exchange and rivalry, and it does so because it is not subject to calculation and cataloguing. Again, as Gadamer [18] (p. 30) maintains, ritual does not necessitate intentional sign activity to actualize itself; rituals thus occupy a space prior to language and are, as such, forms of action understood not individually but rather as an “activity of the whole”. The concept of intersubjectivity in the transactional mode resides right where analytic philosophy and cognitive science have tried to place it—as a “meeting of (intentional, thinking) minds”—as a circuitry and network of codes and significations, as a written and rewritten text, as an evolved rationality. The post-Cartesian awakening of embodied consciousness, of experience as a gestalt of symbol, myth, sensation, and reflection, is boxed up and set aside to enable the management of discourse.

For some time now, we have come to find ourselves living in an age that has become uniquely resistant to both the concept and the feeling of ambiguity. Quantitative precision—with the potential of isolating data beyond fractions to an infinite degree of number and code—has become the hallmark feature of the digital age, and this intentionality of scientific investigation and technological development, both implicitly and explicitly, shows no signs of abating (see Zuboff [19]).

The increasing level of default to a managerial perspective in the social sciences is not surprising. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault [20] took particular note of a central and emerging aspect of social relations organized around the notion of enterprise. Lois McNay’s [21] (p. 56) close reading of Foucault’s lectures reveals that “individuals would be encouraged to view their lives and identities as a type of enterprise understood as a relation to the self based ultimately on a notion of incontestable economic interest”. McNay takes special note that Foucault’s genealogical investigation of the social sciences in pursuit of the “policing” (or “governmentality”) of populations successfully “predicts crucial aspects of the marketization of social relations that has become such a widespread feature in the thought and practices of Western democracies in the last 30 years or so”.

The cultivation of the self—and with it, the habit and conduct of social relations and interactions—has both followed and reacted to these implicit epistemic shifts. In his reading of Foucault’s lectures, Mike Gane [22] (p. 358) observes, “Modern liberalism no longer privileges ‘exchange’, today it privileges ‘competition’…. The great mutation is that modern liberalism shifts the object of strategy from the individual (homo economicus) as producer or consumer, to the individual as the site of ‘enterprise’”. Foucault [20] (p. 148) argues that we have shifted away from classic models of exchange—that we have, in effect come to take the market as the most formative “truth and power of society”. Jacques Donzelot [23] (p. 129) thus concludes, “The homo œconomicus of the classical liberals was the man of exchange. He was posited as a partner of someone else in an exchange. The homo œconomicus-entrepreneur, however, as entrepreneur of himself, has only competitors”.

A key aspect of living in this era entails a regulative consciousness of one’s image of self. The contemporary practice of “self-awareness”—with strategies begun at an ever-earlier age—entails the control of information circulating about one’s persona. Rather than discovered in dialogue, the self is presented—expressed, performed, costumed, staged. The notion of controlling a narrative has become synonymous with coping. What is most present in transactional interaction is not so much the ambiguity of imminent encounter but narrative form and the performance of role. Byung-Chul Han [24] (p. 5) observes,

The information regime has no need for disciplinary pressure. It does not impose panoptic visibility on people. People expose themselves out of an inner need—without any external compulsion. People produce themselves, that is, play to the gallery…. Where the disciplinary regime imposes visibility, the information regime relies on the fact that people seek to be visible. They voluntarily enter the limelight. Whereas the inmates of the disciplinary panopticon try to avoid visibility, the subjects of the information regime actually desire it.

The performative elements of interaction take on shape and color in the limelight. Han [24] (p. 6) notes, “The role of the information regime is hidden because it is fully incorporated into everyday life”.

All of this is to say that the transactional view of human communication serves quite well as a descriptor of critical aspects of how we have come to live. It is not a problem that a vast number of our encounters on a daily basis are transactional. Nor is it a problem that we perform our selfhood in projected narratives of social relationships. Much of life is consumed with work and traffic. In the parade of regulated movements, we guard our boundaries with the same level of care as we watch the road in front of us and monitor our mirrors.

And, in truth, a body of research and a curriculum of interaction “skills” that helps facilitate understanding, that helps assemble common ground, and enables people to avoid offending one another does have enormous value in any society. What it amounts to, fundamentally, is a schema of management. (Again, “policing” and “governmentality” are the terms Foucault employs in his lectures at the Collège de France, but “management” has become the most accurate designator in academic schools of business.) That it is dominated by statistical paradigms is largely tautological, which is to say, the field of statistics does not originate as an ancient, esoteric mode of mathematics but as a technique of governmentality unfolding as the field of politics first emerged as a mode of strategic inquiry in the 18th century. (In German, the noun Statistich can also be translated literally and directly as “state-ism”).

And I want to be clear that management science certainly has a place in academic, corporate, and governmental work. The sort of knowledge that is marketed or curricularized as “communication skill”—as leadership, as public address, as conflict resolution and mediation, as rhetorical sensitivity, and so forth—tends to constitute, more often than not, rather useful advice. It is in this context that “communication” becomes a legitimate and worthwhile solution to problems of understanding, personal respect, clarity, organization, and so on. In this regard, effective communication is of a piece with effective social or “public” relations. Public relations and management consulting have become multi-billion dollar businesses for a reason. In this regard, “communication” is content and tactics. In this regard, “ambiguity” is the problem that needs to be solved, and transactional communication strategy is the solution to that problem.

4. The Crisis of Connectedness in a Hyper-Connected World

But this perspective on relationship—one in which we see the person principally in terms of a system and a network—addresses human crises from a bird’s-eye view. Though this work is important, it leaves open a whole area of concern that has been systematically neglected by the social sciences. Instead of a paradigm of communication understood as a solution to a problem of, in effect, “broken” networks and political, economic, and cultural systems, what might we learn from a rigorous examination of human communicative experience as a new way of looking at “broken” persons? My use of the word broken here is both intentional and figurative. Human beings are creatures of relationship. Even the social sciences know this much to be true. Yet the reverberations and tendrils and shadows and echoes of this reality extend much further than, say, sharing a language or a rational consciousness. We are born attached. Even with our umbilicus severed, we attach in other ways. We are immersed—encompassed, in Jaspers’ [25] terms—in the encircling warmth and clutch of intimacies from the moment we draw our first breath. We will eventually toddle and then walk away, step by step, but the symbols and sounds, the tastes and the touch of home shape us indelibly—and we never fully exit either the defaults of insecurity reminding us of the palpable psyche of home and that we are, in many ways, still children.

The wounds of childhood penetrate deeper than any other because a child’s mind simply cannot grasp the dynamics of these vital relationships—despite our desperate aching need to be seen and affirmed through them (see Karen [26]). Once emotionally nested in a relationship, we can never effectively observe it from the outside. And, as such, the relations of family can feel like the underground chamber in Plato’s Republic but a chamber that, try as one might, one cannot fully escape. Shadow projections and psychic wounds live with us and through us, in our speech and gestures but even more obliquely in our stumbles, twitches, and hesitations. We settle into adult bodies and feel our muscles and joints struggle against the demands we place on ourselves, but at no point have any of us ever fully transcended our childhood dreads or the confusion and frenzy of our sudden adolescent carnival of sexual awareness.

Our yearning for intimate contact leads us into close psychological connections with others through which we find ourselves reflected and affirmed. From childhood onward, we open up and let people into our dreams and visions, we play with images of new horizons, and we rediscover our boundaries as well as our possibilities and promise. Nevertheless, our experience with intimate contact has come to find itself at a problematic place. Earlier this year, the United States Department of Health and Human Services issued a report titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation”. It opens with the current U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy [27], writing,

It was a lightbulb moment for me: social disconnection was far more common than I had realized. In the scientific literature, I found confirmation of what I was hearing. In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.

He continues:

Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.

And so, in the midst of an information explosion, with an electronic global village connecting people constantly, relentlessly, with phones in our pockets and wireless internet in airplanes and automobiles, the citizens of the wealthiest nation in the free world are diagnosed with an epidemic-level communication crisis.

It may quickly seem as though widespread loneliness and isolation are crises of culture, Geist, and person. But the problem of loneliness is not a problem of “connection”, per se. It certainly is not a problem of proximity, nor is it a matter of needing more outlets for connection. The Surgeon General’s Report is 81 pages long and includes recommendations for improving social infrastructure and creating a “culture of connection”. On one level, the recognition of this sort of psychological plight as a matter of public health constitutes a notable threshold of maturation for a country that had been slow to recognize psychiatric diagnosis and psychotherapy as legitimate aspects of science and medicine. Additionally, the notion of a coherent and thoughtful response to the crisis describes the work of a government agency concerned with the happiness and vitality of its citizenry.

But this crisis—which is experienced by persons as a type of brokenness and grief—is not immediately a matter of public policy or systemic strategy. As I have maintained from the beginning, the crisis is essentially epistemological. What is needed is a way of thinking through relations between persons that deconstructs the sedimented narrative framework of talking about communication as a strategy—in particular, the strategy of coding and messaging and connecting as the critical exercise of communication skill. It is in this regard that the paradigm of transaction is stretched beyond its limits. The concept of transaction emphasizes a contract: a performance, an exchange, a transfer, an agreement between parties for which there is an account. Even in the limited context in which John Dewey [28] advances a notion of “transaction” as a collective covering term for a multi-dimensional mutually constructed “act”, the intellectual distance entailed by this philosophical strategy from the psychological and emotional world of the person involved in and embodying this act renders the concept intellectually empty.

In particular, the relationships that defy the rubrics of any sort of exchange—in particular, relationships that are, in essence, about care and hospitality, each of us for the other, as lovers, as folk, as companions, as brothers and sisters, and, importantly, as friends—are exercises in a vital and ineluctable ambiguity. And in some ways, it is the very ambiguity itself that both originates and delineates the intimacy of this communicative experience.

As we discuss communicative experience, with particular emphasis on the still inarticulate ritual element, I think it is important to acknowledge that the non-transactional, non-negotiative aspect of what occurs between us has never really been a part of the social sciences. The academic fields (and intellectual work) that historically preceded the investigations of either speech or communication science were rhetoric, philology, and linguistics, with foundational questions and themes provided by philosophy. Not all of philosophy lends itself to the all-too-familiar labors of modern scientific investigation, and the other fields have, since antiquity, properly been classified as the Humanities.

5. Intimacy, Ritual, Communion, and the Ambiguity of Friendship

When, from a bird’s-eye view (or, simply, from the outside), we find ourselves assessing the appearance and the structure, or even the “output”, of a we—of relational cords, of a network sign-system not unlike the blue highways on a Google map—we have simultaneously exited the “we” as an embodied space of consciousness. Even if what I am looking at is a first-person “we”—a “we” of which I am a part—I am, in looking at it, no longer at that precise moment a creature of its power and magic. This is why listening is such painstaking work.

Our tendency to exit the “we” of us even as we are conversing—perhaps to take note of the self in a narcissistic flash—describes a common sort of lapse. And it draws into focus that the experience of intimacy is a liquidity of the self (see Macke [2], (pp. 81–102), a softening of boundaries as we enter into a chiasm of presence—a movement, a moment, a shimmer of time that constitutes a vision, a sensorial amalgam, that is simultaneously thought and feeling and, paradoxically, neither. It is not so much that we bring the other closer to us through these experiences as much as it renews our sense of curiosity and our capacity to feel the elements of the world within us. Merleau-Ponty helps us grasp that body and world—that is, body and the seemingly exterior being of things—are experienced through consciousness as one common flesh. With reference to Cezanne, Merleau-Ponty [29] (p. 164) reminds us that “nature is on the inside”. And as we engage with this voice, this enigmatic voice that calls from the inside, we gain a sense of how this ambiguous yet marvelous sensation of intimacy reverberates within and between us. Merleau-Ponty [29] (p. 164) writes, “Quality, light, color depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body, and because the body welcomes them”.

Our experiential ambiguity of intimacy must also confront another obstacle—the event of naming this relationship. Jacques Derrida [30] opens The Politics of Friendship with a paradoxical quotation, attributed to Aristotle by a number of other philosophers but located nowhere in Aristotle’s collected works. (For Derrida, the mystery of provenance is clearly another important level of ambiguity.) “O my friends, there is no friend”, Derrida [30] (p. 1) begins. In this invocation, Derrida is both calling to others—his friends, or perhaps those who might wish to be his friends, or those who merely pretend to be—and calling attention to the inherent variability and volatility of friendship as a relational phenomenon.

But it is even more than that. Derrida is suggesting that how we talk about our relationships entails a different aspect of semantic expression than when we talk about other things. To speak of friendship, as to speak of love, is to offer a name to an inherently indefinable yet fundamental element of personal existence. This is to say, with Aristotle and Derrida, there may well be “no friend”, but there is a palpable and persistent (and, nonetheless, valued) ambiguity. We are immersed in lullabies of love from infancy onward, drawing from them an unabating association between feelings of succor and security, the comfort and trust of being held and cherished, along with the whispers and song of this new language. We each know on the basis of real moments of experience what this word means without ever being able to speak it beyond its poetic mystery. When we proclaim it to another, we are promising the impossible. To speak of friends, of those we love as we love our families and our homes, is to speak of those persons who generate feelings of comfort and trust, and to speak of them in a language of poetry.

By way of his late works, Derrida offers a new path, a new way of addressing this unmarked and uncoded territory between the Self and other. But before we explore what has been labeled his “theological turn”, I want to return to the problematic of ritual and Jakobson’s reflection on the phatic function. The phatic function—i.e., “Contact”—can be considered the most anthropological of the six elements and functions. Jakobson himself notes that the term “phatic” is inspired from Malinowski’s [31] intercultural research and refers to what he calls a phatic communion, which is a type of expression “in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words”. In other words, it is a ritual participation in recognizing the bond, the binding of the persons interacting with one another. It is a recognition not merely of the existence of a relational connection between persons but a recognition of the moment as an episode. That is, it enables a pivot point in a narrative of interaction that might well find continuity in other episodes, episodes that will be ritually connected in symbolic ways. Built within the phatic function is the notion that any episode is temporary and transitional.

Simply, we do not converse forever. As we handle our complex affairs as mature persons, we ritually manage greeting and leave-taking habits, as we also ritually touch, hug, or gesturally comfort, encourage, or perhaps espouse one another. As Lanigan [32], (p. 15) summarizes, “[T]he phatic function operat[es] in human communication such that a physical (interpersonal) and psychological (embodied, intrapersonal) connection is established between the Addresser and the Addressee”.

In an essay that directly parallels the notion of ritual I am advancing here, Byung-Chul Han [33] (p. 2) writes, “We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space; they render time habitable”. In this regard, ritual gives us each a sense of grounding, both in the situation of encounter (given that it can take each of us in new directions) and in the moment of expression. It should be emphasized here that the word phatic, although typically taken to mean “social”, finds its origin in the Greek phatikos, which literally means “affirming”. In the utterance of words, there is the possibility in which the revelation of a truth might suddenly shatter the narrative of who we each are together and, thus, dissolve our connection as the “we” of us transforms into snapshots of a different time with different people. And so the phatic ritual inherent to the non-transactional communicative experience of intimacy is uniquely affirming. What is ritualized, repeated in reference, however brief, are souvenir signs of pleasure, revealing that this new and unfolding relational moment is but a rehearsal of a mutually familiar past.

The ritual element of intimate connection is thus a return home and a poetic reminder that “home” should not be a lonely place. John Russon [34] (p. 58) comments that “the tragedy of family life is that it is that by which we escape our familial childhood, while simultaneously being that from which we can never escape. The tragedy and wonder of embodiment is that it always throws us beyond ourselves, making us open to ever greater sense while always holding us down to a determinacy we can never shake”. Russon [34] (p. 58) continues, “The family, then, is a form inherent to human experience. It is our entry into intersubjectivity…. it is the phenomenon of the initiation into familiarity with others”. Intimacy, then, implies an opening up and a freedom from transactional forms of work and information and relational management—a break in traffic, so to be heard, so to attend to the other. The time and space of our present intimacy might be new to us, but elements of the form will make this moment familiar—suddenly, perhaps immediately, or eventually, in time.

These moments are intermittent. They are also volatile, unstable, and, again, immersed in ambiguity. In this context, the ritual element of the communicative moment serves as a procrastination. It slows subjective impulses to act on subjective urges and appetites; this inhibition of movement is the essence of what we call “civility”. Theologian James Carse [35] employs the notion of a “mask” or a “veil” to describe this inhibition. Simply, there is a part of us that is held in reserve, if only because what is spoken is doubled and ambiguated by language itself. The veil can also effectively describe the surface of one’s self, and our various titles and costumes serve to mark these surfaces for the express purpose of social encounter. When we pull back and let our veils and masks navigate and negotiate the terms of dialogue, we are engaged in a transactional moment. Again, the vast majority of contemporary life must negotiate these exchanges. It is here that “communication skill” finds its curriculum. But the experience of intimacy, and with it the touch, the palpable impression of friendship on the horizon of our words, is communication both through and beyond our masks and veils. Carse [35] (pp. 90–91) writes, “When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all of the theatrical masks, but at the same time, I am changed from within—and whomever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching… We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched through our veils”.

Our awareness of inchoate friendship, of impressions and suggestions of intimacy lingering at the edges of moments, motivate our words and embodied movements. None of this can be tactically designed in any genuine or sincere way, and it is awkward and even absurd to give words to these impressions. Typically, we feel them, and then, we bend toward the affirmation of their reality. But their reality, as Derrida reminds us, is but a fiction. Now, in saying that friendship is a fiction, I am not saying that friendship is nothing. This fiction is an extraordinary something. It always has been. Neuroscience still insists that the feelings that surround it must be coded somewhere in the anatomy, that the code can be matched with a neurochemical event, and that the cognitive correlate can be explicated somehow. But we live and feel these fictions with more than our sensate bodies. History and culture and politics turn on these stories, and they do every bit as much as the solitary narrative of a person, any person, in a family in a world somewhere, who wakes up each morning to continue her or his life.

It is the poetic function of myth that inspires and obliges ritual. Han [33] notes that rituals of all sorts generate a dyad, a group, perhaps a community resonating with harmony and that move with a common rhythm. He writes [33] (pp. 10–11), “without resonance we are thrown back on to ourselves, isolated… Resonance is not an echo of the self; the dimension of the other is inherent in it. It means accord…. Digital communication channels are filled with echo chambers in which the voices we hear are mainly our own”. He continues [33] (p. 11), “Rituals are processes of embodiment…. They are written into the body, incorporated, that is, physically internalized…. A ritual community is a communal body…. To the extent that it exerts a disembodying influence, digitalization weakens common ties. Digital communication is disembodied communication”.

Bernard Stiegler, a philosopher of technology, has commented on the destructive effects of what he labels “short-termism” that have been exerted on every society by way of constant and ubiquitous marketing alongside narrow-minded investment and policy strategies. Stiegler [36] (p. 5) observes this political-economic (and, now, cultural) default as having “no goal other than the reconstitution of the consumerist model”. He notes [36] (p. 57) that this mindset has been brought “to bear on the public sphere as well as on the private sphere, leading to the pure and simple liquidation of social relations”. What Stiegler sees as a loss of solidarity is tied to a concomitant loss in what he has conceptualized as otium. Otium is a Latin term from early Roman philosophy that has come to refer to time sequestered from economic, transactional life—which Stiegler strategically terms “negotium”, which is time “neg-otiated” (or transacted) for calculated expression and performance in the world of exchange. Han [33] (p. 24) notes that “the ritual spaces that make possible playful and ceremonial exuberance have been eroded… Culture has been made profane…. The profanation of culture brings about its disenchantment”. Skill in transactional communication strategies does matter because human existence has become global and complex and ecologically out of balance. Spheres of commerce require a practiced civility. But the imperatives of the new strategies of information management have little tolerance for ambiguity, and unfortunately, neither do the epistemologies that guide the manner in which questions of human connection and meaning are pursued.

6. Conclusions: On Miracles and Machines and Martyrs

When we lose the vital relationships that transform us, that continually invent and reinvent us, that educate us, that tell us the truth, that let us be seen as we dream our horizons, that let us be seen beyond our expectations, we lose ourselves. Loneliness is not a quantitative empirical problem. It is not about the number of people in our lives. It is about the depth of the relationships we have and are able to hold onto. The loss of social connection produces a different form of the homelessness problem. What makes us feel at home in the world psychologically is having confidence that we are cared for. And this confidence is not so much a matter of knowledge as it is a matter of faith.

Derrida’s later works, often characterized as a “theological turn”, concern the relationship of faith to knowledge. He puts forth a notion of faith capable of gaining an account within the human sciences, particularly inasmuch as it draws immediate focus to the failure of our current epistemologies to address the ambiguities of human experience that have been systematically evaded via standard philosophical or social scientific explanation. For Derrida, the limits of the sciences in general (and the social sciences in particular) in their failed embrace of human meaning—especially in its intertwined complexity—can be found in the interstitial gap between “faith” and “knowledge”. This gap is less a chasm than it is a chiasm enabling a transformation of the mistaken illusions of objectivity into fruitful, perhaps poetic, illustrations of human experience—illustrations revealing both desire and vulnerability—as we encounter the depths of the world we mutually breathe in and out at the same time we confront the limits of our language, our anxieties, and our mortality.

Michael Naas [37,38] rephrases Derrida’s pairing of faith and knowledge as “miracle and machine” in his attempt to further enable the possibility of illustrating the moments captured in this interstitial space. The notion of the “machine” references the form, the formality, implied in the known practicalities, geographies, and textualities that facilitate our expressive movements with, around, and through one another. The “machine” enables conversation, discussion, competition, and contracts of all sort. In the language of the “models” taught to undergraduate students, it enables action, interaction, and transaction (see Eadie [15]) as rules, results, and cases of effective communication. The machine, as well, is the history of systems of abstraction that have engineered not just the illusions but the actual blueprints of objectivity that constitute territories, norms, and social, economic, as well as governmental institutions. A machine is an apparatus, a contrivance, a method, a system, perhaps a rehearsed skill, a mode of finesse, the taking of a trick.

Neither the theme of transactionality nor the continued information-theoretic emphasis on messages and circuitry in communication curricula “produces” the loneliness, alienation—or even short-termism—that have been convincingly diagnosed as social, cultural, and political problems. No, my critique is that this strategy of relating and connecting fails to account for what is missing in communicative experience. Transactionality, like all aspects of social exchange and reciprocal performativity, can be assessed. Not only can rhetorical and communicative competence be assessed in terms of outcomes, like all transactional behavior, the assessment also lends itself to quantitative measurement, producing data-based interpretations that have been accepted as contributing positively to disciplinary knowledge as a matter of course. As Donzelot [23] (p. 121) reminds us in his commentary on Foucault, “What matters in the framework of raison d’état is the quantity of population. It is an absolute commodity … on which a careful eye must be kept”. My argument is that what this dominant paradigm of management, performance, competition, and entrepreneurship systematically neglects is what makes life worth living.

Adam Smith [39] famously suggested that “sympathy” might well be an error of mutual recognition. Phenomenology demonstrates, to the contrary, that the mistake is to ignore our fundamental interconnections of body and spirit. The phatic communion that is obtained when a relational connection exceeds the implicit practicalities and civilities of rational exchange is the human event shifting the light of consciousness to the possibility that this encounter can (and thus might) occur again. The rituality of phatic connection begins in the wordlessness of being-with. It is in this unmarked moment that we reach out, finding affirmation in a sign whose ambiguity is nevertheless matched with an energy, a source of light that illuminates a changed horizon. Derrida [40] (p.88) views this as a moment of faith—“a kind of originary or elementary trust or confidence”. Rodolphe Gasché [41] (p. 83) posits that this energy or light is “at the very core of every social bond”. Gasché [41] (p. 83) continues, “Indeed, this ‘light’, or rather this ‘nocturnal light’, is the social bond ‘itself’ at its most elementary, inasmuch as it is an act of faith in the other … even though there is no way of verifying the validity of this trust in the other who remains irrevocably inaccessible. Differently put…the social bond, the engagement with another who remains other, can only take the form of an act of faith, of a commitment to believe the other”.

The Surgeon General’s Report on Loneliness [27] focuses on connection at a time when the healthiest choice for many, if not most of us, is to log off the internet and try to keep some distance from our smartphones. The phenomenology of communicative experience offers a rough parallel to the history of psychoanalytic theory in that falling back into the natural attitude is comparable to the human tendency to regress to childhood fears and anxieties when our coping capacities are exceeded by events. In the paralysis and withdrawal that follow, what we seek is a sign. This sentiment is poetically captured by Don Delillo in this passage from his novel Underworld [42] (p. 824): “And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope?… [D]oes the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?” Michael Naas [38] (p. 283) offers this immediate reply: “One answer, it seems, is that it all comes down to the kind of signs we need or think we need… or the kind of faith we still need as our search engine ‘searches’. It would thus all come down in the end to the way we read the signs, to the space that is or is not open and available for those signs, to whether we read them as true signs of a miracle”.

In those intervals when we find ourselves on the outside of “home”—that place, however embodied, that enables us to breathe with the world—we can gain a sense of just how light and delicate are the moments in which the tonality and texture of voices seem to be calling us (however briefly) to another horizon of possibility. The grief that we experience at the loss of love and friendship—by mortality and, alas, by betrayal—remind us that the existential contract of human existence makes no allowance for the intensity and tenderness of enduring intimacy. In truth, unless we can manage the everyday traffic of human affairs, we cannot even expect (and certainly cannot demand) the world to tolerate us. What makes life worth living is the world we gain from taking the risk to participate in a communicative moment—an epiphany that happens outside of the marketplace of calculation and assessment. Perhaps it is but a minor miracle. In any case, it cannot be purchased, and it cannot be won (either by “reason” or by force). And so, I would like to close with this remarkably fitting observation by John Russon [34] (p. 67): “In ancient Greek, the word for witness is ‘martyr’… ‘Witnessing’ … meant orienting one’s life around the need to answer to the epiphany, the miraculous revelation of a truth that has claimed one’s own most essence. It is in a like sense that we are witnesses to epiphany. We are claimed by our situation: we are called and only our commitment will answer the call”.