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Abstract: By giving full emphasis to the impossibility of not to communicate, the first axiom of communication stresses how communication is an event not subject to cessation. It is this never-ending characteristic that impels us to the need to ponder on metacommunication as "communication about communication". By taking a philosophically informed and pragmatic stance, this paper deals with the concept of "metacommunication" and tries to incorporate it in the theory of communication. It posits communication is a multilevel dialectical happening in which metacommunication presents itself a kind of second order communication. The paper describes communication as an ad infinitum process in which every communication supposes always more communication. Metacommunication is the answer to the relationship level of communication and that's why we postulate metacommunication as a re-communicating communication.
Keywords: Metacommunication; Communication Theory; Pragmatics of Human Communication; Bateson; Watzlawick; Metaporo
"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction"
Gregory Bateson, (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.
New York: E. P. Dutton, p.56
Introduction
One of the everlasting questions that Communication Theory answers is: what is "communication"? Despite the theoretical differences and scientific ambitions between them, several authors, from Dewey (1927) to Shannon & Weaver (1949) or Watzlawick et ali. (1967) point to its "'processus" aspect. Yet, considering communication as a symbolic process does not immediately give us a complete answer regarding its nature. Is communication a kind of vehicle giving place to a process of information transportation, a transitional medium of meaning? Does the notion of "communication" contain clearly transmissible content? Can it be envisaged as sheer content and form?
In a speech entitled "Signature, Event, ContextDerrida asked: "Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable? In accordance with a strange figure of discourse, one must, first of all, ask oneself whether or not the word "communication" communicates a determinate content, an identifiable meaning, or a describable value" (Derrida, 1988: 1).
Derrida is, of course, playing with common assumptions in order to deconstruct the concept itself and by doing so, it seems he is alluding to the common notion that to communicate is to "get someone to understand your thoughts or feelings or to give information about (something)...