As I’ve been writing on communication, I’ve covered Kierkegaard’s theory fairly thoroughly: communication can be primarily informational, appropriate for an academic lecture, or it can be capabilizing, as is the case with ethical and religious communication, both of which are designed not only to convey mere information but also to convey a know-how, a capability, a measure of force that affords new avenues for the individual’s action. Kierkegaard’s comments on communication echo the overarching theme of his authorship: that ethico-religious life exceeds the conceptual mode of speculation (he has in mind a kind of Hegelianism widespread in the Danish church at the time), that religion demands something “beyond” speculative imagination, and that this “beyond” occurs in actuality, in the medium of a spatiotemporal performance that undergirds and precedes representation. The beyond is actually the before, the prior, the genetic condition.
Interestingly, this insight (that representation lacks the kinetic richness of temporality and that representational thought fails to communicate kinetic capability to their property “faculties” outside the imagination) has a similar problematic structure to Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition. D&R seeks to outline a differential ontology that provides an account of the genetic conditions of actual experience (as opposed to Kant’s transcendental deduction of the conditions of possible experience, discussed in Joe Hughes’ commentary and in the literature more generally). For Deleuze, an organism puts its environment together by “contracting” the play of differences that constitute and interact with it. The contractile power of the organism determines its perception of the environment in the “living present,” that is, a present that is on the move. In the contraction, the richness of differential play is compressed, that is, smoothed over and lost (the language of compression here is mine, but I think it makes sense of Deleuze’s language of cancellation of difference in Chapter V). Identities emerge and repeat on waves of underlying, smoothed-over differences, and yet there is a strong mental tendency toward representational logic, which must overlook the differential core of phenomena. Life escapes and disrupts representation.
So, then, in the context of differential ontology, communication seems an interesting phenomenon for more than a few reasons, but one that comes to mind for now: A theory of communication as such is a theory of the dynamics of differentiation and integration, of simultaneous differenciation (Deleuze’s technical spelling) and unification, of microreconciliations that refract along macrocosmic lines. That is to say: as above, so below; the ordinary phenomenon of communication at the familiar level of the social provides insight into more generally applicable dynamics. Perhaps here I am a bit too Hegelian for Kierkegaard and Deleuze both.
Jacob N. Given 