Communication as Ritual
- Communication, commonness, communion.
- James Carey: the model directs our attention “not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs".
- Akin to religious mass.
- Akin to reading a paper “[n]ews reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world [emphasis added]” (p. 16).
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Dysfluent Accidents as Ritual
- Carol Padden: Ritual emphasizes “performance, activity, and the materiality of communication itself. In this framework, meaning is not so much the definition of a word or sentence but instead is constructed in situ, in social and cultural activity” (p. 44).
- Unlike sending a message, meaning gets enacted in the very midst of unruly bodies that excrete “all levels of expression, from the minute details of discourse—from pitch, emphasis, gesture, head tilts, and eye gaze” (p. 44).
- Moreover, since communication happens “on site,” time cannot be transcended or otherwise avoided with speed but must be lived through.
- Crossed Wires: perhaps it's not that my grumpy co-worker “misheard” my stuttered speech, but that he didn’t want to listen and did not want to belong in time to a common world with this disabled person.
- The Stall: “Part of it feels like my body goes into a kind of supplication or prayer almost. I have a friend who once referred to it as ‘watching me ask for the word’” (Ellis, 2020, n.p.).
- The misfire: “The unexpectedness of stuttering forces both listener and speaker into a space of trust and vulnerability. They must both give up control of the situation. The person speaking does not know when and for how long they will stutter. Likewise, the person listening does not know when to expect a stutter. In order for both people to communicate, they must trust one another. (Constantino 2016, para. 5)
- Ritual? Anti-ritual?
More information
Communication in this mode emphasizes the shared act of constructing, celebrating, and repairing common worlds.Carey famously suggests that communication is here akin to attending religious mass, where the point is not to transmit information but to draw people together in communion—to produce and maintain a shared view of the world through repeated practices. What makes the prayer, chant, and ceremony significant is their function as both social practices and techniques of the self. Through their repetition, we develop collective sensibilities and patterns of perception by which we can build common worlds. —meaning gets enacted in the very midst of unruly bodies that excrete “all levels of expression, from the minute details of discourse—from pitch, emphasis, gesture, head tilts, and eye gaze” (p. 44). Twitching bodies, stuttering tongues, signing fingers, and slurred lips (and all the affect they carry along) are no longer distracting “accidentals,” but the very materiality of communion. —In the mode of transmission, meaning would flee this scene, yet in the mode of ritual, the frozen supplication is a link to the body’s ancient relation to meaning and language, one in which we do not command but must together wait in the unexpected.
- Carey, J. (2009). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Routledge.
- Padden, C. (2015). Communication. In R. Adams, B. Reiss & D. Serlin (Eds.), Keywords for Disability Studies (pp. 43-45). New York University Press.
- Constantino, C. (2016). Stuttering gain [Paper presentation]. International Stuttering AwarenessDay Conference. http://isad.isastutter.org/isad-2016/papers-presented-by-2016/stories-and-experiences-with-stuttering-by-pws/stuttering-gain-christopher-constantino/
Related files
It is a common feeling for stutterers to feel out of control, veering beyond intentions and other guardrails. Also common feeling for stutterers to be a scapegoat for the structural sins of communication.In the mode of transmission, Lisbeth Lipardi writes “the accuracy of the message, the efficiency of delivery, and the precision of reception are in the foreground…” (p. 10). Greater control over these variables is meant to quicken the incident-free relay of messages in the pursuit of greater instrumental power.
- Lipardi, L. (2014). Listening, thinking, being: Toward an ethics of attunement. PennState University Press.
What does it mean to invent fluent communication?
James Carey – communication at this time meant both the movement of material things as well as the movement of immaterial ideasIn this model, “successful” communication is marked by a correspondence between the intentional idea of the sender encoded in the message and the idea reproduced in the mind of the receiver. This makes the process of communication brittle and prone to error, for the dream of imperial control it offers rests ultimately upon speeding the message, while protecting it from damage along the voyage.
Who or what is responsible? Where was the "message damaged"?? Systems theory can get us a little further than common sense understandings by attending to distributed agency. I agree with Perrow (1999) that individual failings cannot sufficiently explain “damage” to “symbols, communication patterns, legitimacy, or a number of factors that are not, strictly speaking, people or objects” (p. 64). But leave system theory insofar as deviations in functional systems must be errors, damage defined against system output.
Before going to ritual. so many actants crowd the stage that “it’s never clear who and what is acting” (Latour, 2007, p. 46). This gets at two senses of communicating by accident. For instance, I might say a good class is one in which I communicate a concept well. Yet the passive voice is far more honest. Can lead to resentment. Resentment against an untidy world I, I think, is a central component of disablist feelings against stutterers.
- Carey, J. (2009). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Routledge.
- Gleik, J. (2012). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. Pantheon Books.
- James, W. (1996). A pluralistic universe. University of Nebraska Press. Connolly, W. (2005). Pluralism. Duke University Press.
- Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
- Perrow, C. (1999). Normal accidents: Living with high-risk technologies. Princeton UniversityPress.
- Rosa, H. (2003). Social acceleration: Ethical and political consequences of a desynchronized high-speed society. Constellations, 10(1), 3-33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.00309
- Virilio, P. (2007). The original accident (J. Rose, Trans.). Polity.
