The title of this post is a nod to the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan^[1]. In today’s post, I am looking at the idea of communication. The etymology of “communication” goes back to the Latin words, com and munus. The basic meaning of communication is to make something common. “Com” means “together” while “munus” means “service”, “gift” etc. A closely related word to “communication” is “information”. Similar to “communication”, the etymology of “information” also goes back to its Latin roots. The two Latin words are “in” and “formare”. Taken together, the meaning of “information” is something like – to give shape or form to something. In the context of “information”, this would be – to give shape or form to knowledge or a set of ideas.

In Cybernetics, a core concept is the idea of informational closure. This means that a system such as each one of us is informally closed. Information does not enter into the system. Instead, the system is perturbed by the external world, and based on its interpretative framework, the system finds the perturbation informative.

Informationally closed means that all we have access to is our internal states. For example, when we see a flower, the light hitting the retina of our eyes does not bring in the information that what we are seeing is a flower. Instead, our retinal cells undergo a change of state from the light hitting them. There is nothing qualitative about this interaction. Based on our past interactions and the stability of our experiential knowledge we see the perturbation as informative, and we represent that as “flower”.  The word is used to describe a sliver of our experiential reality.

Now this presents a fascinating idea – if we are informationally closed how does communication take place? There can be no direct transfer of information happening between two interacting agents. All that is happening is a relay of perturbations mainly.  In order to posit the possibility of communication, the interacting agents should have access to a common set of meanings. When a message is transmitted, both the transmitter and the receiver should be working with a set of possible messages that are contextual. This allows the receiver to choose the most meaningful messages from the set of possible messages. For example, if my friend says that he has a chocolate lab, and I take it to mean that he has a lab where he crafts delectable chocolate creations, then from my friend’s standpoint a miscommunication has occurred. A person more familiar with dogs would have immediately started talking about dogs.

Communication takes place in the form of verbal and nonverbal communication. This adds to the complexity of communication. All communication takes place in a social realm in the background of history of past interactions, cultural norms, language norms, inside jokes etc. Language, as Wittgenstein would say, lies in the public realm. In other words, our private experiences can only be described in terms of public language. Being informationally closed means that we have to indeed work hard at getting good at this communication business. Language is dynamic and ever evolving, and this makes communication even more challenging. Our communication will always be lacking.

I will finish with the wise words of William H. Whyte:

The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it… we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society–and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.

Always keep on learning…

My last post was Absurdity in Systems Thinking

[1] The Democracy of the Objects, Levy Bryant