The Subjective Condition of Human Communication, a Synthesis

What is Subjective in Human Communication?

Studies on communication have historically and mostly focused on the media, traditional and now digital. This approach avoids communication as the behaviour of the human subject, establishing an erroneous equivalence between media and communication that has spread to the interior of the field of communication studies from a sociological perspective.

At the bottom of this is the erroneous premise —not made explicit either by communication or by sociology— that the information that is communicated is something alien to the subject, that is, that the information is given in advance and that it can only be captured from the outside and communicated, as if the communication were alien to the information and therefore to the subject that produces it. From the sociological perspective, communication constitutes a phenomenon inscribed in the social, not in the subject.

However, the communicative phenomenon is not limited to the media or socialization phenomenon; Communication is also the cry of a baby, the announcement of the sale of a car, the food that is served at Christmas dinner, the dress that seduces and evens the writing of academic texts. What is communicative about all these phenomena is that they all say something and do it because they are produced by someone to say.

This is what places communication as a behavior of the human being, that is, as a behavior that manifests itself through saying, regardless of what it is said or to whom it is said. This behavior in the order of saying thus configures a subjective behavior of an expressive type that shows the ontological nature of the communicative phenomenon.

From this ontological nature, human communication manages to focus its description on the subject and his experience as an individual and social being; and this is what allows us to think of communication as a subjective phenomenon, opening an alternative for its study from this perspective. For this, it is necessary to reflect on its nature as a phenomenon linked to the experience of the human being as a living being, because rather it is something that happens to the subject during its existence. In this sense, it can be postulated that there is no human communication outside of human life.

The above places communication as a behavior, that is, as something that human beings do in their individual existence. But it is not about any doing, but rather about a doing that is manifested by means of saying, that is, by means of an expression, a projection of something in which the subject who says, the subject who does saying is involved. The expression, Ferrater Mora [1] would say, is something that is always derived from an experience, from what is experienced. In that sense, we are talking about a behavior of the subject, of a doing in the first person, unquestionable for whoever executes it, subjective.

Thus, we can argue that communicating is not equivalent to transmitting information or interacting with others through the exchange of information, much less is it possible to say that communicating is understanding. Certainly, communication uses codes of shared meanings to achieve the configuration of situations of understanding (codes that we usually call language); However, it seems clear that the use of social language is not enough to talk about communication, as is the case with thought, which also uses language, but cannot be reduced to it.

Understood in this way, communication constitutes communicating that it is a doing by saying in the style of Austin’s pragmatics [2] and this doing by saying requires both someone to do (who communicates) and something to communicate. The field of communication studies calls that someone a sender, thereby accusing a sense of transmission of information that, in addition to being erroneous, appeals to a concrete and strategic intention, inheritance of the aforementioned sociological mark; and also describes the something of communication as a message, typical of the information theory that gave life to communication studies during the first half of the last century.

However, from a ontological perspective focused on communication as a individual behavior that manifests itself through saying, that someone who communicates must be understood from its human complexity as a being that is biological, psychological, linguistic, symbolic, historical, social and cultural. The field of communication studies just taking into account the collective dimension of this complexity. He is a full-fledged human subject and his experiences constitute the amalgam of all his complex humanity. That is the reason why it is possible to affirm that what the subject communicates or expresses cannot be anything other than the subjective projection of their individual and social experiences, what else then?

If one takes into account that the experiences are cognitions that occur in the first person, configuring the universe of logical and affective meaning of the subject for his life management in the world in which he is inserted as a living organism, that which every subject communicates is the set of meanings and logics of meaning that the subject himself produces or constructs from his own existence as a living being both at the individual and social level.

From the neurophenomenology of Varela [3], the above is validated by understanding the processes of perception / cognition as a performance; Hence, the life experience of the human being —which is the result of his perception— constitutes at the same time his performance in the world in which he lives. In the case of the human being, this world is both physical and historical-social and cultural; so it is foreseeable that their behaviors, which according to Galarsi et al, [4] like that of any living being, constitute meaningful movements, are also behaviors through which the human being says himself, or what it is the same, through which he expresses himself or he communicates from himself by/ before others in each of these environments or areas.

In short: the subjective condition of human communication brings communication closer to the subject and reveals a different edge in the study of communicative phenomena at the social level, and in particular in relation to the study of affects that, although still marginal, are gaining ground in social and historical understanding of our contemporary societies.