Messages in Communication

Texts are artifacts insofar as they are products of constructive processes and are ontologically distinct from their authors (Barton 159). Thus, respecting how readers encounter texts, Derrida correctly says that “there is nothing outside the text” (Caputo 80; cf. Barton 220). That is, readers only directly encounter the text, not its “meaning,” the author’s “intention,” or anything else about the text; readers must construe these other things from the text. Moreover, a text’s context is not even “attached” to the text. The text may describe its context, but as such, this description is text, not context. Consequently, texts must be placed in contexts, and this placement requires textual data to be construed.

While Derrida used “textual autonomy” to help create play between the various signs in the text, his perspective on this issue has been rightly critiqued because it does not sufficiently account for the reality of human communication [Tennyson and Ericson, Jr. 45; cf. David McCarthy, “A Not-so-Bad Derridean Approach to Psalm 23,” Proceedings of the Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Biblical Societies 8 (1988): 178]. Part of the difficulty with Derrida’s view is that it discusses the child class “texts” in isolation from the parent class “messages.”¹ Two essential properties of the message class are: (1) ontological distinction from the sender and (2) the ability to function as a transfer medium (cf. Vanhoozer 218, 225–26). Indeed, ontological distinction might be designated as the primary presupposition of all communication. When a sender desires to send information to a receiver, the receiver cannot directly access this information as the sender conceives it in himself, so the sender creates something distinct from himself that the receiver can access. This transfer medium is the sender’s message. If it were not ontologically distinct from the sender, it could not function as a transfer medium, and communication could not occur. This type of ontological distinction between sender and message may be termed “soft autonomy.”

By contrast, the “hard autonomy” of Derrida and others views texts as so autonomous that they do not carry definite information perceivable by their readers. Thus, if a text exhibits hard autonomy, it cannot be understood as a message because the text cannot function as a transfer medium. In this instance, the text is a mere artifact insofar as it is an aesthetic object, which the reader can enjoy and with which he can play, but which serves no communicative function and exists for its own sake and its author’s pleasure in creating it (Barton 146–47; Hirsch 25). Thus, the message class does not have the property of hard autonomy.

Because of soft autonomy, a message’s sending is always temporally distanced from its reception. Senders take time to create messages, and receivers process these messages only after the messages are transmitted. Consequently, all interpretation of all messages is, to some degree, interpretation of the past. For instance, if a wife asks her husband to pass the salt, the husband interprets a message sent in the recent past, but he still interprets a past message. Thus, by analogy, understanding messages further in the past (e.g., the Bible) is also possible, but increased distance between sender and receiver increases the possibility of a communication breakdown and necessitates that the receiver work harder to ensure that the message is received accurately.

While time necessarily distances a receiver from a sender, other factors (like culture and sociology) may also remove the receiver from the context the sender projected, consciously or unconsciously, for his receiver (cf. Ricœur 13–14). To return to the salt example, the husband can understand the wife’s message almost as directly as possible because both spouses share a common linguistic system and context. If the wife wanted the pepper, however, and said, “Please pass the salt,” communication would break down because the wife expressed what she wanted with a term to which her husband assigns a different semantic range (cf. Vanhoozer 243). Thus, senders who desire to communicate should construct their messages so that receivers will be able to handle them properly;² hence, assuming that most senders are competent and desire to communicate to their messages’ receivers, one should generally seek to interpret a message as its original recipient(s) would have done. Of course, this conclusion itself implies that the interpreter’s hermeneutical goal is to understand the meaning a message’s author intended to send by his message, but this topic will be discussed later.

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¹ In what follows, I am partially indebted to Hirsch 173–98. The class “messages,” of course, includes both oral and written communication. Derrida contested the priority typically given to oral communication and attempted to assert the primacy of written communication and, therefore, its determinative function for all human communication. John Ellis, however, has adduced several problems with this argument (see Carson 113). While space precludes a detailed discussion of this critique, Ellis’s work suggests the validity, ceteris paribus, of treating oral and written communication on equal terms (see also Ricœur 13).

² Sometimes, of course, someone may receive and interpret a message whose sender could never have imagined, such as when modern historians interpret Tacitus. In this case, the burden for closing the communication gap falls entirely on the new receiver whose interpretive constraints the author could not have anticipated.

In this post:

• David McCarthy, “A Not-so-Bad Derridean Approach to Psalm 23,” Proceedings of the Eastern Great Lakes and Midwest Biblical Societies 8 (1988): 177–91