Word and communication

Abstract

This essay submits the modern communication theory to a critical analysis. This theory constructs an abstract and reductive model which can not give a pertinent account of what emerges in the process of existential communication which is a multilayered structure not only of being together but of becoming together one through the other. This notion of structure should not be confused with that of system. Ontologically speaking beings are structural phenomena which are essentially becoming in time and space in a situation of cocreative exchange amongst them. A becoming is always under way and can therefore also fail. The human self is such a structure in its interpersonal becoming through dialogue in which language has to be reinvented so that the interlocutors can co-create meaning and contribute reciprocally to their own becoming. The term ‘word’ refers to this co-creative process whereby the mere informational or communicational aspects of language are exceeded in the spoken word so that a true existential communication can become.