Why Communication Is Not as Certain as We Might Think

Abstract

One might wonder why mathematics could offer a starting point for a series of ‘theoretical investigations’ on human communication. After all, the two fields appear rarely to come into contact with each other. And yet it was Claude E. Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) that offered a breakthrough in the theory of information which has fascinated philosophers and social scientists ever since. In our everyday contexts and dealings we tend to associate information with concrete data, possibly evidence or news. By contrast, in his studies of telegraphy, Shannon rethought information as a measure of uncertainty. This theoretical news is a paradox: are information and uncertainty part of each other? Information in this sense is the selection of a message from a range of possibilities. This range forms a kind of background or penumbra to the message selected. And, as Dirk Baecker has pointed out, the fact that information always relates to a range of options which are not selected means that information is a relation of form (e.g. speech) and non-form (e.g. silence) or message and redundancy (the range of unse-lected messages). I develop this relational aspect further in these investigations as the porous form of communication. This theory of communication as a porous form of selected message and redundancy suggests the need to explore the unmarked spaces of communication, the interstices or gaps, the unspoken languages ‘no-one has ever spoken or will ever speak’.¹