La Communication Quotes

Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.

Between two brains, there will always be misunderstandings and lies caused by parasitic smells, drafts and poor-quality reception.

Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.

If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can't exist if the participants aren't willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don't communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing.

We don't worship Satan, we worship ourselves using the metaphorical representation of the qualities of Satan. Satan is the name used by Judeo-Christians for that force of individuality and pride within us. But the force itself has been called by many names.We embrace Christian myths of Satan and Lucifer, along with Satanic renderings in Greek, Roman, Islamic, Sumerian, Syrian, Phrygian, Egyptian, Chinese or Hindu mythologies, to name but a few. We are not limited to one deity, but encompass all the expressions of the accuser or the one who advocates free thought and rational alternatives by whatever name he is called in a particular time and land. It so happens that we are living in a culture that is predominantly Judeo-Christian, so we emphasize Satan. If we were living in Roman times, the central figure, perhaps the title of our religion, would be different. But the name would be expressing and communicating the same thing. It's all context.

The history of commerce is that of the communication of the people.

Of these latter, desolating states, she comments: ‘Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person’s empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person’s loneliness.

Talking so much you horrify yourself and those around you; talking so little that you almost refuse your own existence: a demonstrates that speech is by no means a straightforward route to connection. If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don’t communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing.

The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) {Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Wiener for the field of control and communication theory.}

Every town is a state of mind, a mood which, after only a short stay, communicates itself, spreads to us in an effluvium which impregnates us, which we absorb with the very air.

Was he really willing to throw away what we had this easily? How could two people who loved each other so much be communicating so badly? When one of them was psychic, even?

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.

À medida que a mídia convencional tradicional é substituída por uma imprensa personalizada, a internet torna-se um espelho de nós mesmos. Em vez de usá-la para buscar notícias, informação ou cultura, nós a usamos para SERMOS de fato a notícia, a informação e a cultura.

La gente habla mucho sin utilizar ninguna palabra.

La gente habla mucho sin utilizar ninguna palabra

Un idioma es una tradición, un modo de sentir la realidad, no un arbitrario repertorio de símbolos. (A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.)

... she had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak.

The process which had begun in her - and in he a little earlier only than it must come to all of us - was the great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can't you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn't hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proferred sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That's how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock.

But despite its shared nature, language is also dangerous, a potentially isolating enterprise. Not all players are equal. In fact, Wittgenstein was by no means always a successful participant himself, frequently experiencing extreme difficulty in communication and expression. In an essay on fear and public language, the critic Rei Terada describes a scene repeated throughout Wittgenstein’s life, in which he would begin to stammer while attempting to address a group of colleagues. Eventually, his stuttering would give way to a tense silence, during which he would struggle mutely with his thoughts, gesticulating all the while with his hands, as if he was still speaking audibly.

For God is so desirous that the government and direction of every man should be undertaken by another man like himself, and that every man should be ruled and governed by natural reason, that He earnestly desires us not to give entire credence to the things that He communicates to us supernaturally, nor to consider them as being securely and completely confirmed until they pass through this human aqueduct of the mouth of man.

That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper’s images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as “our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness”... Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.

... was the great and general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed wherever life has been unduly prolonged; even in old lovers who have lived for one another with the utmost intensity of passion, and in old friends bound by the closest ties of mental sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make, the necessary journey, or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know well that they will communicate no more in this world.

Mira, Govinda, ésta es una de las cuestiones que he descubierto: la sabiduría no es comunicable. La sabiduría que un erudito intenta comunicar, siempre suena a simpleza.

Partnership, respect, honesty, kindness, communication, commitment, monogamy, children, humor, intellectual conversation, and—hopefully—impressive sexual congress à la der Rüssel.

La persona que se dice: me voy a informar seriamente viendo el telediario, se miente a sí misma. Porque no quiere reconocer que se deja llevar por su propia pereza.

El telediario no está hecho para informar, está hecho para distraer.

The idea that language is a game at which some players are more skilled than others has a bearing on the vexed relationship between loneliness and speech. Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants.

La información se ha convertido, sobre todo, en una mercancía. Ya no tiene una función cívica. Aunque algunos todavía lo creamos, pero ¿no somos solamente un recuerdo? ¿Somos reales? ¿No somos acaso virtuales?

As I feel less overwhelmed, my fear softens and begins to subside. I feel a flicker of hope, then a rolling wave of fiery rage. My body continues to shake and tremble. It is alternately icy cold and feverishly hot. A burning red fury erupts from deep within my belly: How could that stupid kid hit me in a crosswalk? Wasn’t she paying attention? Damn her! A blast of shrill sirens and flashing red lights block out everything. My belly tightens, and my eyes again reach to find the woman’s kind gaze. We squeeze hands, and the knot in my gut loosens. I hear my shirt ripping. I am startled and again jump to the vantage of an observer hovering above my sprawling body. I watch uniformed strangers methodically attach electrodes to my chest. The Good Samaritan paramedic reports to someone that my pulse was 170. I hear my shirt ripping even more. I see the emergency team slip a collar onto my neck and then cautiously slide me onto a board. While they strap me down, I hear some garbled radio communication. The paramedics are requesting a full trauma team. Alarm jolts me. I ask to be taken to the nearest hospital only a mile away, but they tell me that my injuries may require the major trauma center in La Jolla, some thirty miles farther. My heart sinks.

Just as making art allowed him to communicate his private experience, undoing the paralysing spells of speechlessness, so too sex was a way of making contact, of revealing the wordless, unspeakable things he kept concealed deep inside himself.

J’ai entendu tant de raisonnements qui ont failli me tourner la tête, et qui ont tourné suffisamment d’autres têtes pour les faire consentir à l’assassinat, que j'ai compris que tout le malheur des hommes venait de ce qu'ils ne tenaient pas un langage clair.

Rien n'est plus inconsistant qu'un régime politique qui est indifférent à la vérité: mais rien n'est plus dangereux qu'un système politique qui prétend prescrire la vérité. La fonction du 'dire vrai' n'a pas à prendre la forme de la loi, tout comme il serait vain de croire qu'elle réside de plein droit dans les jeux spontanés de la communication. La tâche du dire vrai est un travail infini: la respecter dans sa complexité est une obligation dont aucun pouvoir ne peut faire l'économie. Sauf à imposer le silence de la servitude.

Serán necesarios largos años", escribe Václav Havel, "antes de que los valores que se apoyan en la verdad y la autenticidad morales se impongan y se lleven por delante al cinismo político; pero, al final, siempre acaban venciendo." Ésta debe ser también la paciente apuesta del verdadero periodismo.

Dès que Séraphine l'a laissé seul, Gontran se jette à genoux au pied du lit ; il enfonce son front dans les draps, mais ne parvient pas à pleurer ; aucun élan ne soulève son cœur. Ses yeux désespérément restent secs. Alors il se relève. Il regarde ce visage impassible. Il voudrait, en ce moment solennel, éprouver je ne sais quoi de sublime et de rare, écouter une communication de l'au-delà, lancer sa pensée dans des régions éthérées,suprasensibles - mais elle reste accrochée, sa pensée, au ras du sol. Il regarde les mains exsangues du mort, et se demande combien de temps encore les ongles continueront de pousser.

Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others.

Pendant des millions d'années, l'humanité a vécu comme les animaux. Par la suite, quelque chose est arrivé qui a libéré le pouvoir de notre imagination. Nous avons appris à parler et à écouter. La parole a permis la communication des idées, abilitant l'être humain à travailler ensemble afin de construire l'impossible. Les plus grandes réalisations de l'humanité se sont matérialisées en parlant, et ses plus grands échecs en ne parlant plus. Cela n'a pas lieu d'être. Nos plus grands espoirs pourraient devenir des réalités dans le futur. Avec la technologie à notre disposition, les possibilités sont illimitées. Tout ce que nous avons à faire est de s'assurer que nous continuions à parler.

إن ما كنت افتقد في الولايات المتحدة الامريكية، أكثر من أي شيء آخر ، هو حرارة العلاقات الإنسانية. ومنذ اللحظات الأولى كان الانطباع الذي أعطتني إياه العمارات الشاهقة والمدن العمودية هو أن أمريكا جدار. نعم أمريكا جدار ينتصب شامخا بين الناس. إن الذي لا تعرفه هذه البلاد هو التواصل - La communication بين الإنسان والإنسان ولهذا كانت مدنها الكبرى تعج بالسكان ولكنها في ذات الوقت قفر. لم يسبق لي أن ماشيت من الناس بقدر ما ماشيت في الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية، ولكن لم يسبق لي قط أن شعرت بأني وحيد مثلما شعرت بذلك فيها. إن في قلب هذه الجموع البشرية المتدفقة فراغا لا إنسانيا: غياب التأثر - L’affetivité - ، إن التأثر يشكل في الوجدان الجزائري العنصر الأساسي للحياة، والمادة التي بدونها نفقد القدرة على التنفس.

En un mundo pilotado cada vez más por empresas colosales que obedecen únicamente a la lógica comercial fijada por la Organización Mundial del Comercio (OMC), y en el que los gobiernos parecen un tanto desbordados por las mutaciones en marcha, ¿se puede estar seguro de que la democracia será preservada, proyectada? En semejante contexto de guerra mediática encarnizada, a la que se libran gigantes que pesan miles de millones de dólares, ¿cómo podrá sobrevivir una prensa independiente?

Chères Petites Poucettes, chers Petits Poucets, ne le dites pas à vos vieux dont je suis, c’est tellement mieux aujourd’hui: la paix, la longévité, la paix, les antalgiques, la paix, la Sécu, la paix, l’alimentation surveillée, la paix, l’hygiène et les soins palliatifs, la paix, ni service militaire ni peine de mort, la paix, le contrat naturel, la paix, les voyages, la paix, le travail allégé, la paix, les communications partagées, la paix, le gonflement vieilli bouffi des institutions dinosaures...

ce qui diffère essentiellement entre un livre et un ami, ce n’est pas leur plus ou moins grande sagesse, mais la manière dont on communique avec eux, la lecture, au rebours de la conversation, consistant pour chacun de nous à recevoir communication d’une autre pensée, mais tout en restant seul, c’est-à-dire en continuant à jouir de la puissance intellectuelle qu’on a dans la solitude et que la conversation dissipe immédiatement, en continuant à pouvoir être inspiré, à rester en plein travail fécond de l’esprit sur lui-même.

He [Karl Deutsch] recommended abandoning the old concept that power was sovereign, which had too long been the essence of politics. To govern would become a rational coordination of the flows of information and decisions that circulate through the social body. Three conditions would need to be met, he said: an ensemble of 'capturers' would have to be installed so that no information originating from the “subjects” would be lost; information handling by correlation and association; and a proximity to every living community. The cybernetic modernization of power and the expired forms of social authority thus can be seen as the visible production of what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand,” which until then had served as the mystical keystone of liberal experimentation. The communications system would be the nerve system of societies, the source and destination of all power. The cybernetic hypothesis thus expresses no more or less than the politics of the “end of politics.” It represents at the same time both a paradigm and a technique of government. Its study shows that the police is not just an organ of power, but also a way of thinking.

Ces gens-là, les profs, il faut les éviter. Ils sont si habitués à s'écouter parler et à se mettre en scène qu'il n'y a rien à faire avec eux. Aucun échange n'est possible. En plus, ils sont champions toutes catégories de l'art subtil du humble-brag: « La semaine prochaine, je ne serai pas disponible. Je serai à San Francisco à me dorer la fraise au soleil après avoir lu ma communication de vingt minutes devant quatre personnes qui ne m'auront pas écouté. J'ai présenté le même texte le mois dernier à Dubaï, à Séoul et à Istanbul. Dans quelques années, je pourrai le publier dans un livre qui va moisir sur les rayons.

The process which had begun in her — and in her a little earlier only than it must come to all of us — was the great and general renunciation which old age makes in preparation for death, the chrysalis stage of life, which may be observed wherever life has been unduly prolonged; even in old lovers who have lived for one another with the utmost intensity of passion, and in old friends bound by the closest ties of mental sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make, the necessary journey, or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know well that they will communicate no more in this world.

Ce dernier talent correspond proprement à ce qu’on appelle l’âme ; car exprimer et rendre universellement communicable ce qu’il y a d’indicible dans l’état d’esprit associé à une certaine représentation – et ce, que l’expression relève du langage, de la peinture ou de la plastique -, cela requiert un pouvoir d’appréhender le jeu si fugace de l’imagination et de le synthétiser dans un concept qui se peut communiquer sans la contrainte de règles (un concept qui, précisément pour cette raison, est original et fait apparaître en même temps une règle nouvelle qui n’a pu résulter d’aucun principe ou d’aucun exemple qui l’eusse précédée).

The society of transparency not only lacks truth; it also lacks symbolic appearance. Neither truth nor symbolic appearance are see-through. Only emptiness is entirely transparent. To avert this emptiness, a mass of information is brought into circulation. The mass of information and imagery offers fullness in which emptiness is still noticeable. More information and communication alone do not illuminate the world. Transparency also does not entail clairvoyance. The mass of information produces no truth. The more information is set free, the more difficult it proves to survey the world. Hyperinformation and hyper communication bring no light into darkness.

- Quand j'aurai trouvé une réponse pour Roy, j'aurai l'esprit plus clair, plus libéré. Tant que je n'aurai pas de certitude à son sujet, j'aurai des doutes sur moi. Et quand on doute de soi-même, on doute de tout, tu le sais... Assise loin de moi, elle approuve de la tête, mais je vois ses yeux s'emplir de larmes. Je ressens tout à coup une véritable bouffée d'émotion pour elle, très intense. Je me lève et vais la prendre dans mes bras. Elle pleure doucement sur mon épaule. Je crois bien avoir pleuré. Un peu. Nous faisons l'amour. Pour la première fois depuis des mois, je me rends jusqu'au bout. Mais il y a quelque chose de désespéré dans cette communication, comme si nous le faisions pour la dernière fois.

Depuis la naissance de l'amour courtois, c'est un lieu commun que le mariage tue l'amour. Trop méprisée ou trop respectée, trop quotidienne, l'épouse n'est plus un objet érotique. Les rites du mariage sont primitivement destinés à défendre l'homme contre la femme ; elle devient sa propriété : mais tout ce que nous possédons en retour nous possède ; le mariage est pour l'homme aussi une servitude ; c'est alors qu'il est pris au piège tendu par la nature : pour avoir désiré une fraîche jeune fille, le mâle doit pendant toute sa vie nourrir une épaisse matrone, une vieillarde desséchée ; le délicat joyau destiné à embellir son existence devient un odieux fardeau : Xanthippe est un des types féminins dont les hommes ont toujours parlé avec le plus d'horreur. Mais lors même que la femme est jeune il y a dans le mariage une mystification puisque prétendant socialiser l'érotisme, il n'a réussi qu'à le tuer. C'est que l'érotisme implique une revendication de l'instant contre le temps, de l'individu contre la collectivité ; il affirme la séparation contre la communication ; il est rebelle à toute réglementation ; il contient un principe hostile à la société. Jamais les mœurs ne sont pliées à la rigueur des institutions et des lois : c'est contre elles que l'amour s'est de tout temps affirmé. Sous sa figure sensuelle, il s'adresse en Grèce et à Rome à des jeunes gens ou à des courtisanes ; charnel et platonique à la fois, l'amour courtois est toujours destiné à l'épouse d'un autre.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world? How can one control, and how make profitable, the dissonances between that account and the account given by the mind working independently of the novel? For Sartre it was ultimately, like most or all problems, one of freedom. For Miss Murdoch it is a problem of love, the power by which we apprehend the opacity of persons to the degree that we will not limit them by forcing them into selfish patterns. Both of them are talking, when they speak of freedom and love, about the imagination. The imagination, we recall, is a form-giving power, an esemplastic power; it may require, to use Simone Weil's words, to be preceded by a 'decreative' act, but it is certainly a maker of orders and concords. We apply it to all forces which satisfy the variety of human needs that are met by apparently gratuitous forms. These forms console; if they mitigate our existential anguish it is because we weakly collaborate with them, as we collaborate with language in order to communicate. Whether or no we are predisposed towards acceptance of them, we learn them as we learn a language. On one view they are 'the heroic children whom time breeds / Against the first idea,' but on another they destroy by falsehood the heroic anguish of our present loneliness. If they appear in shapes preposterously false we will reject them; but they change with us, and every act of reading or writing a novel is a tacit acceptance of them. If they ruin our innocence, we have to remember that the innocent eye sees nothing. If they make us guilty, they enable us, in a manner nothing else can duplicate, to submit, as we must, the show of things to the desires of the mind. I shall end by saying a little more about La Nausée, the book I chose because, although it is a novel, it reflects a philosophy it must, in so far as it possesses novel form, belie. Under one aspect it is what Philip Thody calls 'an extensive illustration' of the world's contingency and the absurdity of the human situation. Mr. Thody adds that it is the novelist's task to 'overcome contingency'; so that if the illustration were too extensive the novel would be a bad one. Sartre himself provides a more inclusive formula when he says that 'the final aim of art is to reclaim the world by revealing it as it is, but as if it had its source in human liberty.' This statement does two things. First, it links the fictions of art with those of living and choosing. Secondly, it means that the humanizing of the world's contingency cannot be achieved without a representation of that contingency. This representation must be such that it induces the proper sense of horror at the utter difference, the utter shapelessness, and the utter inhumanity of what must be humanized. And it has to occur simultaneously with the as if, the act of form, of humanization, which assuages the horror. This recognition, that form must not regress into myth, and that contingency must be formalized, makes La Nausée something of a model of the conflicts in the modern theory of the novel. How to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it? How to justify the fictive beginnings, crises, ends; the atavism of character, which we cannot prevent from growing, in Yeats's figure, like ash on a burning stick? The novel will end; a full close may be avoided, but there will be a close: a fake fullstop, an 'exhaustion of aspects,' as Ford calls it, an ironic return to the origin, as in Finnegans Wake and Comment c'est. Perhaps the book will end by saying that it has provided the clues for another, in which contingency will be defeated, ...

Ce qui est tout à fait extraordinaire, c’est la rapidité avec laquelle la civilisation du Moyen-Âge tomba dans le plus complet oubli ; les hommes du XVIIe siècle n’en avaient plus la moindre notion, et les monuments qui en subsistaient ne représentaient plus rien à leurs yeux, ni dans l’ordre intellectuel, ni même dans l’ordre esthétique ; on peut juger par là combien la mentalité avait été changée dans l’intervalle. Nous n’entreprendrons pas de rechercher ici les facteurs, certainement fort complexes, qui concoururent à ce changement, si radical qu’il semble difficile d’admettre qu’il ait pu s’opérer spontanément et sans l’intervention d’une volonté directrice dont la nature exacte demeure forcément assez énigmatique ; il y a, à cet égard, des circonstances bien étranges, comme la vulgarisation, à un moment déterminé, et en les présentant comme des découvertes nouvelles, de choses qui étaient connues en réalité depuis fort longtemps, mais dont la connaissance, en raison de certains inconvénients qui risquaient d’en dépasser les avantages, n’avait pas été répandue jusque là dans le domaine public (1). Il est bien invraisemblable aussi que la légende qui fit du moyen âge une époque de « ténèbres », d’ignorance et de barbarie, ait pris naissance et se soit accréditée d’elle-même, et que la véritable falsification de l’histoire à laquelle les modernes se sont livrés ait été entreprise sans aucune idée préconçue ; mais nous n’irons pas plus avant dans l’examen de cette question, car, de quelque façon que ce travail se soit accompli, c’est, pour le moment, la constatation du résultat qui, en somme, nous importe le plus. (1) Nous ne citerons que deux exemples, parmi les faits de ce genre qui devaient avoir les plus graves conséquences : la prétendue invention de l’imprimerie, que les Chinois connaissaient antérieurement à l’ère chrétienne et la découverte « officielle » de l’Amérique, avec laquelle des communications beaucoup plus suivies qu’on ne le pense avaient existé durant tout le moyen âge.

Truth also consists of relationships between events. Truth occurs when things communicate with each other on the basis of a similarity or some other form of closeness between them, when they turn towards each other and enter into relationships with each other, even befriend each other: truth [la vérité] will be attained by him [the author] only when he takes two different objects, states the connection between them … and encloses them in the necessary links of a wellwrought style; truth – and life too – can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor[, thus linking them to each other through the ineffable efficacy of the combination of words].22 Only relationships based on similarity, friendship or affinity make things true. Truth is opposed to the accident of pure contiguity. Truth means commitment, relationship and closeness. Only through intense relationships do things become real in the first place:

His mouth, his tongue, his voice box, seem to be working separately at first. His Adam's apple shivers, the skulls vibrate, his voice quakes. What's going on? It is as if a different Romeo is speaking, an interior Romeo. This unknown alternate Romeo has staged a coup. This Romeo Two has infiltrated his communication infrastructure. Are the drugs betraying him? What did he take again? What shape of pill? Romeo thinks it was a big white oval but there also were some smaller yellow articles. Perhaps crisscrossing side affects. Romeo is startled to silence even as Romeo Two becomes voluble, moved to unload certain acts undertaken for certain reasons. Romeo Two's mouth claptraps, his voice shifts gear, high and higher, until Romeo One understands in despair that Romeo Two has frog-leaped all the way to that holy step somewhere beyond three, maybe four, five, where you tell God and another human the exact nature of your wrongs. Talk about combined side effects. Where among the vertigo, gastric pain, incontinence, shortness of breath, and possible kidney failure was telling the truth?

Donner un avis n’est pas compliqué. On peut donner un avis au Maroc. On peut donner un avis sur la monarchie. Et d’ailleurs, on peut le voir, le Maroc applique une relative liberté où tout est accessible en termes de médias. Tous les sites internet sont accessibles à partir du Maroc et aucun site n’est bloqué. Il y a peu de pays identiques. Il n’y a pas de sites bloqués. Vous allez en Turquie, c’est différent. Vous allez en Thaïlande, ce n’est pas la même chose. Vous pouvez aller dans beaucoup de pays où j’ai pu voyager, il y a beaucoup de sites, parfois Facebook, parfois Twitter, qui sont soumis à des restrictions. Au Maroc, il y a eu le blocage de la VoIP pour les communications Whatsapp, ça a été un scandale et ça a été rétabli. Il y a, surtout sur les réseaux sociaux et sur internet, une liberté absolue. Liberté ne rime pas avec qualité. Parce qu’il y a toutes sortes de choses dans cette liberté. Il y a des sites qui sont orduriers. Ce n’est pas non plus la panacée, la liberté absolue. Encore faut-il qu’il y ait un peu de régulation. Il nous manque peut-être au Maroc un peu de régulation… Cela ne signifie pas qu’il faudrait interdire, loin de là, mais peut-être essayer de sévir aussi et de faire respecter la loi… Il ne faut pas non plus que ça soit l’anarchie, la diffamation, des maîtres chanteurs… C’est quelque chose qui peut influer négativement sur les médias marocains qui sont sur le net. Entretien avec Souleïman Bencheikh : « C’est quand même mieux ici qu’en Turquie… »

L’assemblée sentit que son président allait aborder le point délicat. Elle redoubla d’attention. « Depuis quelques mois, mes braves collègues, reprit Barbicane, je me suis demandé si, tout en restant dans notre spécialité, nous ne pourrions pas entreprendre quelque grande expérience digne du dix-neuvième siècle, et si les progrès de la balistique ne nous permettraient pas de la mener à bonne fin. J’ai donc cherché, travaillé, calculé, et de mes études est résultée cette conviction que nous devons réussir dans une entreprise qui paraîtrait impraticable à tout autre pays. Ce projet, longuement élaboré, va faire l’objet de ma communication ; il est digne de vous, digne du passé du Gun-Club, et il ne pourra manquer de faire du bruit dans le monde ! — Beaucoup de bruit ? s’écria un artilleur passionné. — Beaucoup de bruit dans le vrai sens du mot, répondit Barbicane. — N’interrompez pas ! répétèrent plusieurs voix. — Je vous prie donc, braves collègues, reprit le président, de m’accorder toute votre attention. » Un frémissement courut dans l’assemblée. Barbicane, ayant d’un geste rapide assuré son chapeau sur sa tête, continua son discours d’une voix calme : « Il n’est aucun de vous, braves collègues, qui n’ait vu la Lune, ou tout au moins, qui n’en ait entendu parler. Ne vous étonnez pas si je viens vous entretenir ici de l’astre des nuits. Il nous est peut-être réservé d’être les Colombs de ce monde inconnu. Comprenez-moi, secondez-moi de tout votre pouvoir, je vous mènerai à sa conquête, et son nom se joindra à ceux des trente-six États qui forment ce grand pays de l’Union ! — Hurrah pour la Lune ! s’écria le Gun-Club d’une seule voix.

Il y a un moment où il faut sortir les couteaux. C’est juste un fait. Purement technique. Il est hors de question que l’oppresseur aille comprendre de lui-même qu’il opprime, puisque ça ne le fait pas souffrir : mettez-vous à sa place. Ce n’est pas son chemin. Le lui expliquer est sans utilité. L’oppresseur n’entend pas ce que dit son opprimé comme un langage mais comme un bruit. C’est dans la définition de l’oppression. En particulier les « plaintes » de l’opprimé sont sans effet, car naturelles. Pour l’oppresseur il n’y a pas d’oppression, forcément, mais un fait de nature. Aussi est-il vain de se poser comme victime : on ne fait par là qu’entériner un fait de nature, que s’inscrire dans le décor planté par l’oppresseur. L’oppresseur qui fait le louable effort d’écouter (libéral intellectuel) n’entend pas mieux. Car même lorsque les mots sont communs, les connotations sont radicalement différentes. C’est ainsi que de nombreux mots ont pour l’oppresseur une connotation-jouissance, et pour l’opprimé une connotation-souffrance. Ou : divertissement-corvée. Ou : loisir-travail. Etc. Allez donc causer sur ces bases. C’est ainsi que la générale réaction de l’oppresseur qui a « écouté » son opprimé est en gros : mais de quoi diable se plaint-il ? Tout ça, c’est épatant. Au niveau de l’explication, c’est tout à fait sans espoir. Quand l’opprimé se rend compte de ça, il sort les couteaux. Là on comprend qu’il y a quelque chose qui ne va pas. Pas avant. Le couteau est la seule façon de se définir comme opprimé. La seule communication audible. Peu importent le caractère, la personnalité, les mobiles actuels de l’opprimé. C’est le premier pas réel hors du cercle. C’est nécessaire.

The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won't talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don't want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who's packing a couple of swords. Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you're ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these. Hiro's avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an expensive hand-tailored gray wool suit. You can't just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse, like Captain Kirk beaming down from on high. This would be confusing and irritating to the people around you. It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House. Most avatars nowadays are anatomically correct, and naked as a babe when they are first created, so in any case, you have to make yourself decent before you emerge onto the Street. Unless you're something intrinsically indecent and you don't care.

SCENE 24 “Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—” “II commence a tombez de la neige” someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair–mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans–rakes leaning on meaty rock–and piles of paper and official Club equipments– It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop–the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails– While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up–my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels–we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special–with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain– We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea–but something dark and rog-like.— J had seen it before … Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs)— SCENE 25 Someone ripped the pooltable cloth that night, tore it with a cue, I ran back and got my mother and she lay on it half-on-floor like a great poolshark about to take a shot under a hundred eyes only she’s got a thread in her mouth and’s sewing with the same sweet grave face you first saw in the window over my shoulder in that rain of a late Lowell afternoon. God bless the children of this picture, this bookmovie. I’m going on into the Shade.

SCENE 24 “Tiens, Ti Jean, donne ce plat la a Shammy,” my father is saying to me, turning from the open storage room door with a white tin pan. “Here, Ti Jean, give this pan to Shammy.” My father is standing with a peculiar French Canadian bowleggedness half up from a crouch with the pan outheld, waiting for me to take it, anxious till I do so, almost saying with his big frowning amazed face “Well my little son what are we doing in the penigillar, this strange abode, this house of life without roof be-hung on a Friday evening with a tin pan in my hand in the gloom and you in your raincoats—” “II commence a tombez de la neige” someone is shouting in the background, coming in from the door (“Snow’s startin to fall”)—my father and I stand in that immobile instant communicating telepathic thought-paralysis, suspended in the void together, understanding something that’s always already happened, wondering where we were now, joint reveries in a dumb stun in the cellar of men and smoke … as profound as Hell … as red as Hell.—I take the pan; behind him, the clutter and tragedy of old cellars and storage with its dank message of despair–mops, dolorous mops, clattering tear-stricken pails, fancy sprawfs to suck soap suds from a glass, garden drip cans–rakes leaning on meaty rock–and piles of paper and official Club equipments– It now occurs to me my father spent most of his time when I was 13 the winter of 1936, thinking about a hundred details to be done in the Club alone not to mention home and business shop–the energy of our fathers, they raised us to sit on nails– While I sat around all the time with my little diary, my Turf, my hockey games, Sunday afternoon tragic football games on the toy pooltable white chalkmarked … father and son on separate toys, the toys get less friendly when you grow up–my football games occupied me with the same seriousness of the angels–we had little time to talk to each other. In the fall of 1934 we took a grim voyage south in the rain to Rhode Island to see Time Supply win the Narragansett Special–with Old Daslin we was … a grim voyage, through exciting cities of great neons, Providence, the mist at the dim walls of great hotels, no Turkeys in the raw fog, no Roger Williams, just a trolley track gleaming in the gray rain– We drove, auguring solemnly over past performance charts, past deserted shell-like Ice Cream Dutchland Farms stands in the dank of rainy Nov.—bloop, it was the time on the road, black tar glisten-road of thirties, over foggy trees and distances, suddenly a crossroads, or just a side-in road, a house, or bam, a vista gray tearful mists over some half-in cornfield with distances of Rhode Island in the marshy ways across and the secret scent of oysters from the sea–but something dark and rog-like.— J had seen it before … Ah weary flesh, burdened with a light … that gray dark Inn on the Narragansett Road … this is the vision in my brain as I take the pan from my father and take it to Shammy, moving out of the way for LeNoire and Leo Martin to pass on the way to the office to see the book my father had (a health book with syphilitic backs)— SCENE 25 Someone ripped the pooltable cloth that night, tore it with a cue, I ran back and got my mother and she lay on it half-on-floor like a great poolshark about to take a shot under a hundred eyes only she’s got a thread in her mouth and’s sewing with the same sweet grave face you first saw in the window over my shoulder in that rain of a late Lowell afternoon. God bless the children of this picture, this bookmovie. I’m going on into the Shade.

My darling son: depression at your age is more common than you might think. I remember it very strongly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, when I was about twenty-six and felt like killing myself. I think the winter, the cold, the lack of sunshine, for us tropical creatures, is a trigger. And to tell you the truth, the idea that you might soon unpack your bags here, having chucked in all your European plans, makes your mother and me as happy as could be. You have more than earned the equivalent of any university 'degree' and you have used your time so well to educate yourself culturally and personally that if university bores you, it is only natural. Whatever you do from here on in, whether you write or don't write, whether you get a degree or not, whether you work for your mother, or at El Mundo, or at La Ines, or teaching at a high school, or giving lectures like Estanislao Zuleta, or as a psychoanalyst to your parents, sisters and relatives, or simply being Hector Abad Faciolince, will be fine. What matters is that you don't stop being what you have been up till now, a person, who simply by virtue of being the way you are, not for what you write or don't write, or for being brilliant or prominent, but just for being the way you are, has earned the affection, the respect, the acceptance, the trust, the love, of the vast majority of those who know you. So we want to keep seeing you in this way, not as a future great author, or journalist or communicator or professor or poet, but as the son, brother, relative, friend, humanist, who understands others and does not aspire to be understood. It does not matter what people think of you, and gaudy decoration doesn't matter, for those of us who know you are. For goodness' sake, dear Quinquin, how can you think 'we support you (...) because 'that boy could go far'? You have already gone very far, further than all our dreams, better than everything we imagined for any of our children. You should know very well that your mother's and my ambitions are not for glory, or for money, or even for happiness, that word that sounds so pretty but is attained so infrequently and for such short intervals (and maybe for that very reason is so valued), for all our children, but that they might at least achieve well-being, that more solid, more durable, more possible, more attainable word. We have often talked of the anguish of Carlos Castro Saavedra, Manuel Meija Vallejo, Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, and so many quasi-geniuses we know. Or Sabato or Rulfo, or even Garcia Marquez. That does not matter. Remember Goethe: 'All theory (I would add, and all art), dear friend, is grey, but only the golden tree of life springs ever green.' What we want for you is to 'live'. And living means many better things than being famous, gaining qualifications or winning prizes. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. I think I too had boundless political ambitions when I was young and that's why I wasn't happy. Only now, when all that has passed, have I felt really happy. And part of that happiness is Cecilia, you, and all my children and grandchildren. Only the memory of Marta Cecilia tarnishes it. I believe things are that simple, after having gone round and round in circles, complicating them so much. We should do away with this love for things as ethereal as fame, glory, success... Well, my Quinquin, now you know what I think of you and your future. There's no need for you to worry. You are doing just fine and you'll do better, and when you get to my age or your grandfather's age and you can enjoy the scenery around La Ines that I intend to leave to all of you, with the sunshine, heat and lush greenery, and you'll see I was right. Don't stay there longer than you feel you can. If you want to come back I'll welcome you with open arms. And if you regret it and want to go back again, we can buy you another return flight. A kiss from your father.

Cependant, l’ère de la communication a introduit un biais : la cause juste ! Il faut une « cause juste », compréhensible par tous, entendue par l’ennemi, ou celui qui serait tenté de l’être, pour que les peuples qui élisent les dirigeants de nos démocraties ne soient pas écœurés trop vite et qu’ils restent passifs suffisamment longtemps pour que le fait accompli s’impose à tous.

La lecture, acte de communication? Encore une blague de commentateurs! Ce que nous lisons, nous taisons. Le plaisir du livre lu, nous le gardons le plus souvent au secret de notre jalousie. Soit parce que nous n'y voyons pas matière a discours, soit parce que, avant d'en pouvoir dire un mot, il nous faut laisser le temps faire son délicieux travail de distillation. Ce silence-la est le garant de notre intimité. Le livre est lu mais nous y sommes encore. Sa seule évocation ouvre un refuge a nos refus.

TIZIANO : Le modèle occidental a désormais été accepté par tous. Il est arrivé jusqu'en Chine, en Asie du Sud-Est, à Singapour, dans toute l'Indochine ; seul le Laos survit en quelque sorte. C'est le thème sur lequel je reviens sans cesse dans "Un devin m'a dit" : le joyeux suicide des pays d'Asie décidés à suivre un modèle de développement de type occidental, et prêts à renoncer à leur propre modèle de développement. FOLCO : Pourquoi ? TIZIANO : C'est simple. Parce qu'ils pensent que c'est le seul moyen. Nous leur avons vendu le christianisme, le colonialisme, toutes ces salades ; et, pour finir, nous leur avons vendu l'idée selon laquelle il ne peut y avoir qu'un seul type de modernité, la nôtre. Alors, ce modèle s'est exporté grâce aux moyens de communication de masse comme la télévision, et il s'est imposé dans toute l'Asie. (p. 300-301)

de la Haye, Y. (1979), Marx and Engels on the Means of Communication, New York.

Prayer is the easiest form of communication with God.

Unabii ni uwezo alionao mtu wa kuongea mambo matakatifu ya Mungu, kuwaongoza wenzake katika njia njema. Mungu humwambia nabii kitu cha kusema na nabii huwambia wenzake kile ambacho Mungu amemwambia aseme. Mungu hawezi kuongea na watu mpaka watu wajue jinsi ya kuongea naye, na wakati mwingine ni rahisi sana kusikia ujumbe kutoka kwa mtu kuliko kuusikia ujumbe huo moja kwa moja kutoka kwa Mungu. Mungu anaweza kukwambia useme kitu fulani kwa mtu au watu fulani. Unaweza usijue kwa nini anakwambia ufanye hivyo, lakini utajisikia msukumo wa hali ya juu wa kutangaza ujumbe uliopewa kuuwasilisha. Mungu hatakulazimisha, lakini atakung’ang’aniza, na ni Mungu pekee anayejua lengo la mawasiliano hayo. Mungu akikwambia ufanye kitu fanya mara moja, usiulize kwa nini. Kazi yako ni kufanya unachotakiwa kufanya, kusema unachotakiwa kusema, si kuuliza maswali. Mtumie rafiki yako wa kiroho kukuongoza katika mema na mabaya, na usitambe – kwamba unaongea maneno uliyoambiwa na Mungu uyaongee. Ukiwa na uwezo mkubwa wa kuongea na Mungu utaleta mabadiliko katika dunia.

La Familia has gotten into the consumer loan business. Reportedly, the organization approves loans within 72 hours at an interest rate lower than banks charge. Within a week of the transaction, customers allegedly receive a communication stating: “Thank you for your trust, now you’re a part of La Familia Michoacán.

Dear Rebecca— You may have picked up on my growing disappointment with you this afternoon as our first meeting progressed. I have to say that though you seem quite personable in your electronic communications, in person your behavior is a little lacking in some of the traits that would let you get from a first to a second date with regularity. If Lovability had a rating system, I would award you 2.5 out of 5 stars; however, if it used a scale that only allowed for integral values, I would unfortunately be forced to round down to two. Here are some suggestions for what you could do to improve the initial impression you make. I am speaking here as a veteran of the online dating scene in LA, which is MUCH more intense than New Jersey’s—there, you are competing with aspiring actors and actresses, and a professionally produced headshot and a warm demeanor are the bare minimum necessary to get in the game. By the end of my first year in LA my askback rate (the rate at which my first dates with women led to second dates) was a remarkable 68%. So I know what I’m talking about. I hope you take this constructive criticism in the manner in which it is intended. 1. Vary your responses to inquiries. When our conversation began, you seemed quite cheerful and animated, but as it progressed you became much less so. I asked you a series of questions that were intended to give you opportunities to reveal more about yourself, but you offered only binary answers, and then, troublingly, no answers at all. If you want your date to go well, you need to display more interest. 2. Direct the flow of conversation. Dialogue is collaborative! One consequence of your reticence was that I was forced to propose all of the topics of discussion, both before and after the transition to more personal subjects. If you contribute topics of your own then it will make you appear more engaged: you should aim to bring up one new subject for every one introduced by your date. 3. Take control of the path of the date. If you want the initial meeting to extend beyond the planned drinks, there are many ways you can go about doing this. You can directly say, for instance, “So I wasn’t thinking about this when you showed up, but…do you have any plans for dinner? I’m starving, and I could really go for some pad thai.” Or you can make a vaguer, more general statement such as “After this, I’m up for whatever,” or “Hey, I don’t really want to go home yet, Bradley: I’m having a lot of fun.” Again, this comes down to a general lack of engagement on your part. Without your feedback I was left to offer a game of Scrabble, which was not the best way to end the meeting. 4. Don’t lie about your ability in Scrabble. I won’t go into an analysis of your strategic and tactical errors here, in the interest of brevity, but your amateurish playing style was quite evident. Now, despite my reservations as expressed above, I really do feel that we had some chemistry. So I would like to give things another chance. Would you respond to this message within the next three days, with a suggestion of a place you’d like us to visit together, or an activity that you believe we would both enjoy? I would be forced to construe a delay of more than three days as an unfortunate sign of indifference. I hope to hear from you soon. Best, Bradley

La publicité échoue, les dépressions se multiplient, le désarroi s'accentue; la publicité continue cependant à bâtir les infrastructures de réception de ses messages. Elle continue à perfectionner des moyens de déplacement pour des êtres qui n'ont nulle part où aller, parce qu'ils ne sont nulle part chez eux; à développer des moyens de communication pour des êtres qui n'ont plus rien à dire; à faciliter les possibilités d'interaction entre des êtres qui n'ont plus envie d'entrer en relation avec quiconque.

Given Emily [Dickinson]'s unwillingness to function more actively in a social context, she doesn't seem to fit the stereotype of a feminist in action. You might wonder why she is included among the five empowered women in this book. It is important to remember that not all feminists are activists, and I am including Emily as an opportunity to expand what it means to be a feminist. In her daily life, she was shy to the point of being a recluse, while in her writing, she revealed herself with a level of honestly that took enormous bravery. Her life is an example of the richness that can be found when one follows one's deep inner voice rather than conforming to societal pressures. This is a quality that Emily shares with other feminists who stayed on their own path despite the pressures of the status quo. Her life and her words make a unique contribution to the chorus of women's voices. They remind us that there is room for all of us in our uniqueness. There is no one kind of feminist. There are times in life when we may withdraw or set firm boundaries to protect our inner life and experience. The purpose of this is often to gain the strength and knowledge we need to communicate on a deeper and more honest level.

La communication supramentale requiert une réévaluation de la fonction egocentrique pronominale du « je » ainsi que sa substitution[129] par le concept transpersonnel du « tu », de manière à permettre la réintégration des circuits universels de communication, au sein du champ de la conscience humaine.

L'ivresse porte le legs du sacrifice: la communication, par le fluide et par son épanchement, avec le sacrum, l'exception, l'excès, le dehors, l'interdit, le divin. L'ivresse serait en somme la réussite d'un sacrifice dont la victime serait le sacrificateur lui-même. Àla limite où le sacrificateur de tous les sacrifices demeure intact Bataille reconnaissait pour finir un caractère comique. Sans doute l'ivresse est à son tour comique puisque l'enivré n'y disparaît pas sans reste et revient de l'ivresse piteux, dégrisé, parfois désabusé de l'ivresse même.

On dit père grec, mère suisse-française... On me demande, mais alors, quelle est votre patrie? Je dis que je ne suis ni tout à fait d'ici, ni tout à fait de là-bas. Ma patrie, c'est la relation. La relation est une réalité vitale. Parce qu'elle porte en elle le sens de l'autre. Pour la vie personnelle, et pour la vie collective - surtout aujourd'hui où les mentalités à cause des rapidités de communications coexistent -, si on n'a pas le sens de l'autre on a de la peine à vivre. (Le Temps, 17 Août 2007)

Ils [ces professeurs habités par la passion communicative de leur matière] accompagnaient nos efforts pas à pas, se réjouissaient de nos progrès, ne s'impatientaient pas de nos lenteurs, ne considéraient jamais nos échecs comme une injure personnelle et se montraient avec nous d'une exigence d'autant plus rigoureuse qu'elle était fondée sur al qualité, la constance et la générosité de leur propre travail. (p. 259)

Primer of Love [Lesson 54] La glorie ne va qu'aux hommes specieux. In our complex times, when human knowledge splits up, glory comes only to specialists. ~ G. Lachaud, 1846 Lesson 54) Become experts on each other's pleasures -- and things will be glorious. There's just too much useless, distracting stuff out there to derail youfrom your glorifying love. With the stakes so high, learn more and more about your lover's turn ons and turn offs through communication (rare), light conversation (medium) and trial and tortuous trial and egregious error (burnt to a crisp). Know important dates, their favorite things and dislikes. These details can express the uniqueness of your love in a world besieged by anonymity. Don't tell them everything -- leave a little to mystery. Let the private investigator earn their fee.

At some point, one would expect Christocentric believers like Weil and Grant to bow to Jesus' theology of God the Redeemer. We might ask whether the real offence for Grant and Weil was not also God's lack of intervention in their time. Where was the God 'who is able to deliver' for the Jews of Europe now? Had Yahweh evaporated in Hitler's ovens? To their credit, they looked for God in God's perceived absence, as the crucified Christ suffering with the afflicted once again. But is that really the final hope of the Jewish or Christian God? Grant and Weil were prejudiced against identifying God with victory (even in the resurrection) because they saw how triumphalism served the propaganda of empires. But in so doing, they are forerunners in idealizing 'the weakness of God' (a la Dietrich Bonhoeffer to John Caputo). But does such an impotent deity deserve the 'God' label? [Hence Caputo's denial of divine ontology…] In what sense does this God 'care'? How can their God be called 'Saviour'? Can such a God even be said to exist? Thus, S. A. Taubes dubs Weil's theology 'religious atheism.' Taubes surely overstates her case—for Weil faithfully extends the agnostic theology of the apophatic mystics (Simeon the New Theologian, 949-1042) and St. John of the Cross (1542-1591). Yes, her God is absent in the sense of intervention or providence, but very much present in the supernatural compassion of His people: 'God is absent from the world except in the existence in this world of those in whom His love is alive. …Their compassion is the visible presence of God here below. …Through compassion we can put the created, temporal part of a creature in communication with God. …Compassion is what spans the abyss which creation has open between God and the creature. It is the rainbow.

No podemos gloriarnos en aquello de lo que nos libera la gracia, sin aceptar también aquello a lo que nos llama.

But a new generation is on the rise and the first step to communicating with them, is understanding they aren't just another Millennial." ShoptheFloor.com

The presence of the individual in the institution, and of the institution in the individual is evident in the case of linguistic change. It is often the wearing down of a form which suggests to us a new way of using the means of discrimination which are present in the language at a given time. The constant need for communication leads us to invent and to accept a new usage which is not deliberate and yet which is systematic. The contingent fact, taken over by the will to expression, becomes a new means of expression which takes its place, and bas a lasting sense in the history of this language. In such cases, there is a rationality in the contingent, a lived logic, a self-constitution of which we have definite need in trying to understand the union of contingency and meaning in history, and Saussure, the modern linguist, could have sketched a new philosophy of history.

C’est le ton qui fait la musique: it’s not what you say but how you say it. If a message is communicated in different ways, it will also be received in different ways. In psychologists’ jargon, this technique is called framing.

les quatre activités les plus fréquemment compromises au début de la maladie d’Alzheimer sont l’usage sécuritaire des médicaments, l’emploi efficace des transports, l’utilisation régulière du téléphone ou d’un autre moyen de communication et la gestion responsable de ses finances.

Tout ça, les sciences communicatives ne le disent pas mais nous le savons très bien avec nos mains dans la nuit.

Axiomatic to my view of therapy is that one cannot not interact: one cannot not influence. The major instrument of mystification is language; language being not merely speech, but the sum of all its semi-otic cues: non-verbal—that is, tonal, prosodic—and nuances of irony, sarcasm, and humour. The child learns, as Laing put it, to not know what it knows it knows; that is, the child is essentially talked out of her perceptions. But language, unfortunately, is less about communication of information than about deception and control—power. This “anxiety of influence”, as every therapist is aware, may keep the patient from accepting insights from the therapist who may well be right but experienced as intrusive (Bloom 1973). So, again from the interpersonal view, resolving neurotic conflict means getting a better grasp of what’s going on around you and to you; that is, mastering the semiotic world of experience.

Chap. II – Les origines du spiritisme : « On sait que c’est en Amérique que le spiritisme, comme beaucoup d’autres mouvements analogues, eut son point de départ : les premiers phénomènes se produisirent en décembre 1847 à Hydesville, dans l’État de New-York, dans une maison où venait de s’installer la famille Fox, qui était d’origine allemande, et dont le nom était primitivement Voss. Si nous mentionnons cette origine allemande, c’est que, si l’on veut un jour établir complètement les causes réelles du mouvement spirite, on ne devra pas négliger de diriger certaines recherches du côté de l’Allemagne ; nous dirons pourquoi tout à l’heure. Il semble bien, d’ailleurs, que la famille Fox n’ait joué là-dedans, au début du moins, qu’un rôle tout involontaire, et que, même par la suite, ses membres n’aient été que des instruments passifs d’une force quelconque, comme le sont tous les médiums. Quoi qu’il en soit, les phénomènes en question, qui consistaient en bruits divers et en déplacements d’objets, n’avaient en somme rien de nouveau ni d’inusité ; ils étaient semblables à ceux que l’on a observés de tout temps dans ce qu’on appelle les « maisons hantées » ; ce qu’il y eut de nouveau, c’est le parti qu’on en tira ultérieurement. Au bout de quelques mois, on eut l’idée de poser au frappeur mystérieux quelques questions auxquelles il répondit correctement ; pour commencer, on ne lui demandait que des nombres, qu’il indiquait par des séries de coups réguliers ; ce fut un Quaker nommé Isaac Post qui s’avisa de nommer les lettres de l’alphabet en invitant l’« esprit » à désigner par un coup celles qui composaient les mots qu’il voulait faire entendre, et qui inventa ainsi le moyen de communication qu’on appela spiritual telegraph. L’« esprit » déclara qu’il était un certain Charles B. Rosna, colporteur de son vivant, qui avait été assassiné dans cette maison et enterré dans le cellier, où l’on trouva effectivement quelques débris d’ossements. D’autre part, on remarqua que les phénomènes se produisaient surtout en présence des demoiselles Fox, et c’est de là que résulta la découverte de la médiumnité ; parmi les visiteurs qui accouraient de plus en plus nombreux, il y en eut qui crurent, à tort ou à raison, constater qu’ils étaient doués du même pouvoir. Dès lors, le modern spiritualism, comme on l’appela tout d’abord, était fondé ; sa première dénomination était en somme la plus exacte, mais, sans doute pour abréger, on en est arrivé, dans les pays anglo-saxons, à employer le plus souvent le mot spiritualism sans épithète ; quant au nom de « spiritisme », c’est en France qu’il fut inventé un peu plus tard.

Chacun, de sa place, quelle que soit sa position sociale, quels que soient ses choix de vie, ses attachements, ses valeurs ou ses fidélités, finit par découvrir un jour avec plus ou moins de brutalité, de stupeur, de résistances, de lucidité ou d’ouverture qu’il est un infirme relationnel, un inadapté dans le partage intime, un handicapé de la communication proche.

Iata deci cugetarea mea profunda pe ziua de azi: e pentru prima oara cand intalnesc pe cineva care cauta oameni si care vede mai departe. Poate sa para ceva banal dar eu cred ca este profund. Noi nu vedem niciodata mai departe de certitudinile noastre si, mai grav, am renuntat la intalnirea cu ceilalti, nu facem decat sa ne intalnim pe noi insine, fara a ne recunoaste in aceste oglinzi permanente. Daca ne-am da seama de asta, daca am deveni constienti ca nu ne privim niciodata decat pe noi insine in celalalt, ca suntem singuri in desert, am innebuni. Eu insa implor soarta sa-mi acorde sansa de a vedea mai departe de mine insami si de a intalni pe cineva.

off from the same line, they were scattered peacefully across the globe for centuries, each mostly disregarding the others. But in the Middle Ages, the witches, who by nature did the most interacting with normal humans, began to be discovered. And then persecuted, and tortured, and murdered. Their leaders went to the vampires and the wolves and begged for help, but both groups turned away, the vampires from apathy and the wolves from fear of meeting the same fate. Wolves are pack animals, and look after their pack before anything else. So the witches did the only thing they could: they looked to strengthen their magic. They didn’t know about evolution and magical lines back then, but during their research, the witches managed to stumble upon a group of plants that magic had bonded itself to, just like the human conduits. They were known as nightshades: belladonna, mandragora, Lycium barbarum (which also became known as wolfberry), tomatillo, cape gooseberry flower, capsicum, and solanum. The entire subspecies was rife with magic. The latter four plants could be used in hundreds of charms and potions, many of which helped the witches to deter the human persecutors. But the former three plants were unique; they interacted with the remaining magical beings in mystifying ways. Belladonna was poisonous to vampires—it took unbelievable amounts to actually kill them, but even a sprinkle of the plant would work as a paralytic. Proximity to wolfberry caused the shifters to lose control, painfully unable to stop from changing, again and again, which was very dangerous to anyone nearby. And mandragora, also called mandrake, was the key ingredient in a spell that could grant a very powerful witch the ability to communicate between living and dead. Which is how I ended up disposing of that naked guy’s body in Culver City, all those years ago. This discovery was your classic Pandora’s box scenario. A small group of witches, furious that the vampires and the wolves had abandoned them during their darkest time, began to use wolfberry and belladonna against them—sometimes without much provocation. The balance of power shifted once again, and while the witches’ discovery didn’t cause a full-out war, it did spawn thousands of skirmishes, minor battles breaking out between the three major factions. Eventually, the use of those herbs was “outlawed” in the Old World, but it was done the way that marijuana has been outlawed in the US—basically, don’t get caught. The witches are always arguing about this among themselves; some of them think it should be open season, and others think the ban should be more strictly enforced. But while they may not be able to pull together a majority vote, in Los Angeles Kirsten has organized the witches into sort of an informal union. I know it sounds crazy, but if actors and directors can have unions in this town, why not witches? As I understand it, the real benefit to joining the union is access: to chat rooms, newsletters, support groups, spell sessions—and me. The witches’ dues pay Kirsten a small salary, and she uses the rest to organize the network and pay me. There are plenty of “non-union” witches in LA, too, ones who either haven’t

Rappelez-vous : tout changement est une interruption de schéma.

The alphabet is mischievous. In a scene cut from the final montage of "Habla Mudita", José Luis López Vázquez said that "an egg is used ad a great meal, but it can also be sold." Words are the same (as an egg): they are used to communicate but they can also be sold.

La posibilidad de afectar el Hipercampo y de modificar el enfoque de su Factor de Direccionalidad se fundamenta en el descubrimiento experimental de las influencias que la actividad cerebral de un sujeto ejerce sobre otros sujetos (ver: Grinberg-Zylberbaum J., y Ramos J, 1987. Patterns of interhemispheric correlation during human communication. Journal of Neuroscience. 36 (1-2): 41-54). En estos experimentos descubrimos que si dos sujetos interactúan en forma preverbal, aquel de los dos con mayores niveles de correlación interhemisférica modifica la correlación interhemisférica de su compañero atrayéndolo hacia su propio nivel.

Similar to the Rodrigo in form, “La Catedral” has a slow, atmospheric introduction, followed by an episodic, rhythmic dance. It is constructed around a simple figure, an arpeggio that Barrios pushes through a series of chord changes: a small gesture, undistinguished in itself, yet full of musical possibilities. I set the music stand aside and play it from memory. The first finger of my left hand holds a bass note while above the theme sways with a tentative rise and fall. My left hand feels secure and steady, the ground on which the music builds. My fingers make swift, pulsing motions that gain weight and mass when the sound is larger, louder. The arpeggio grows increasingly insistent and agitated. I feel every note, not just in my fingers but along my arms to the elbows, where the fingers’ motions begin, and into my shoulders, neck, chest, and back. Everything is connected. My ear, my muscles, my flesh, these notes, and this wood and string—all are parts of a single vibrating structure, communicating their movement to each other. Playing feels different now. For the first time this cathedral is really dancing. It's built on a questioning anxiety. But the structure develops a kind of reassurance, like pleading that becomes a prayer. This feeling is not notated on the page. It is something that takes place within the notes, or between them, and within my body, within the guitar's body. I first played this piece in my third year at the Conservatory, just about the time I bought my church door guitar. With so fine an instrument in my hands, I suddenly heard an unexplored dimension latent in everything I played, as if the guitar knew things I had never dreamed of. It was a moment of great promise for me. The guitar offered a quality of vibration beyond anything I had imagined before, bringing greater forces into motion than just the strings. But in those days I couldn't play it. I was braced too tightly. Playing now feels somehow simpler. I'm not practicing a fantasy of the guitar or of myself, but this instrument, this wood, these strings; I'm playing this music, letting these notes dance. It's easy to forget how simple music is. I'm like a soundboard, whose job is to communicate excitement, to balance tension. Building the instrument and learning to play it involve complicated physics. But music is about vibration, about allowing myself to be moved.

. . . The idea that sex is something grave belongs to a certain Judeo-Christian superstition. Georges Bataille sees eroticism as a wound through which beings communicate violently, and [René] Étiemble reproaches him for his ‘inverted Christianity,’ with his fascination for the Eros-Thanatos pair. True eroticism is gentle, airy, innocent. Even Sade looks still far too Catholic. We’ve got to de-dramatize. Think of springtime warmth, when the air becomes a vehicle for pollen and the perfume of vigorous activity: ‘All that wonderful awakening of April and May is the vast expanse of sex that proposes voluptuousness sotto voce.’ Let’s not be afraid to be as naive as flowers: pants off and under the sun. Let’s be as simple as doves: let’s mate without fear. Future purity consists of merging with that ‘endless sex orgy… With movies in between.’ The corpus cavernosum has not left the caves. It’s less than the shadow of a shadow. Now we only talk about the sex of the angels—without flesh nor pregnancies, without history nor intimacy, beyond the female and the male, far from marriage and circumcision (a pure spirit has no foreskin). But even angels still have too much consistency. And besides, we don’t believe in them. Rather, let’s compare our sex to Lichtenberg’s famous knife, ‘without a blade, for which the handle is missing’—a knife that cuts nothing…

LaTanya turned to look at Lisa. “We are all one body in the Movement. We may have different roles. Some of us will have to use weapons. Others will teach. Some will prepare equipment. Others will manage our communications. We are all working toward our liberation and overthrowing the violence of white domination. We are all fighting in different ways. So, yes, you will need to fight. And it will be your job to figure out what your chosen weapons will be.

...la vérité est impossible avec le langage

In the past few years he had become conscious of the burden of his own body. He recognized the symptoms. He had read about them in textbooks, he had seen them confirmed in real life, in older patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfect syndromes that seemed to come straight from medical texts and yet turned out to be imaginary. His professor of children’s clinical medicine at La Salpêtrière had recommended pediatrics as the most honest specialization, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick, and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concrete symptoms of real diseases.

RÉPONSES INTERROGATIVES À UNE QUESTION DE MARTIN HEIDEGGER La poésie ne rythmera plus l'action. Elle sera en avant. RIMBAUD. Divers sens étroits pourraient être proposés, compte non tenu du sens qui se crée dans le mouvement même de toute poésie objective, toujours en chemin vers le point qui signe sa justification et clôt son existence, à l'écart, en avant de l'existence du mot Dieu : -La poésie entraînera à vue l'action, se plaçant en avant d'elle. L'en-avant suppose toutefois un alignement d'angle de la poésie sur l'action, comme un véhicule pilote aspire à courte distance par sa vitesse un second véhicule qui le suit. Il lui ouvre la voie, contient sa dispersion, le nourrit de sa lancée. -La poésie, sur-cerveau de l’action, telle la pensée qui commande au corps de l'univers, comme l'imagination visionnaire fournit l'image de ce qui sera à l'esprit forgeur qui la sollicite. De là, l'enavant. -La poésie sera « un chant de départ ». Poésie et action, vases obstinément communicants. La poésie, pointe de flèche supposant l'arc action, l'objet sujet étroitement dépendant, la flèche étant projetée au loin et ne retombant pas car l'arc qui la suit la ressaisira avant chute, les deux égaux bien qu'inégaux, dans un double et unique mouvement de rejonction. -L'action accompagnera la poésie par une admirable fatalité, la réfraction de la seconde dans le miroir brûlant et brouillé de la première produisant une contradiction et communiquant le signe plus (+) à la matière abrupte de l’action. -La poésie, du fait de la parole même, est toujours mise par la pensée en avant de l'agir dont elle emmène le contenu imparfait en une course perpétuelle vie-mort-vie. -L'action est aveugle, c'est la poésie qui voit. L'une est unie par un lien mère-fils à 1'autre, le fils en avant de la mère et la guidant par nécessité plus que par amour. -La libre détermination de la poésie semble lui conférer sa qualité conductrice. Elle serait un être action, en avant de Faction. -La poésie est la loi, l'action demeure le phénomène. L'éclair précède le tonnerre, illuminant de haut en bas son théâtre, lui donnant valeur instantanée. -La poésie est le mouvement pur ordonnant le mouvement général. Elle enseigne le pays en se décalant. -La poésie ne rythme plus l'action, elle se porte en avant pour lui indiquer le chemin mobile. C'est pourquoi la poésie touche la première. Elle songe l'action et, grâce à son matériau, construit la Maison, mais jamais une fois pour toutes. _ La poésie est le moi en avant de l'en soi, « le poète étant chargé de l'Humanité » (Rimbaud). - La poésie serait de « la pensée chantée ». Elle serait l'œuvre en avant de Faction, serait sa conséquence finale et détachée. -La poésie est une tête chercheuse. L'action est son corps. Accomplissant une révolution ils font, au terme de celle-ci, coïncider la fin et le commencement. Ainsi de suite selon le cercle. -Dans l'optique de Rimbaud et de la Commune, la poésie ne servira plus la bourgeoisie, ne la rythmera plus. Elle sera en avant, la bourgeoisie ici supposée action de conquête. La poésie sera alors sa propre maîtresse, étant maîtresse de sa révolution; le signal du départ donné, l'action en-vue-de se transformant sans cesse en action voyant.

Art of Linguistics (Sonnet 1223) No language speaks of freedom better than spanish, No language speaks of love better than turkish, No language speaks of oneness better than sanskrit, No language interprets better than our good ol' english. No language speaks to computers better than code, No language speaks of matter better than physics. No language speaks of mind better than neurology, No language speaks pattern better than mathematics. No language speaks of thought better than philosophy, No language speaks of emotion better than poetry. No language speaks of justice better than sociology, No language speaks of behavior better than psychology. Purpose of language is communication not argumentation, If it doesn't bridge the cliffs it all brings but extinction.

Phrase par phrase l'amour se défait. Phrase par phrase L'amour devient silence. Phrase par phrase l'amour devient rumeur. Mot par mot l'amour devient métaphore tandis que la lune pend comme une tumeur au coeur de Sudbury samedi soir.

There are a number of potential answers. It could be that cogni­tive gadgets have not been genetically assimilated because they are locally but not globally optimal, or that genetic assimilation has been obstructed by fitness valleys, or by lack of appropriate genetic variance (West­Eberhard, 2003; 2005). But my guess is that the most impor­tant factor is the speed of environmental change. Distinctively human cognitive mechanisms need to be nimble, capable of changing faster than genetic evolution allows, because their job is to track specific, la­bile features of the environment. For example, social learning strate­gies track “who knows” in a particular social group, something that changes with shifting patterns in the division of labor and, there­ fore, of expertise. Imitation tracks communicative gestures, ritual movements, and manual skills that change as groups and, through the cultural evolution of grist, new group markers, bonding rituals, and technologies. And mindreading, like language, must not only track ex­ternally driven change in the phenomena it seeks to describe—for example, economically and politically driven fluctuations in the de­gree to which behavior really is controlled by social roles and situa­ tions rather than beliefs and desires—but also self­generated change. Because it has regulative as well as predictive functions (McGeer, 2007), changes in mindreading can alter their explanatory target—the way the mind actually works

I can't stand that shit - people talking about things they think they should talk about, so as not to be socially awkward.