Normally people think of communication with a transmissive view, i.e. there is a sender, a signal, and a receiver, and each part of this process can be checked for success or failure. Carey talks about this as the predominant mode in American discourse on communication, and that hasn’t changed much since he wrote in 1989 (Communication as Culture). He also talks about an alternative view, the ritual view, wherein communication acts like reciting lines of a play or of a religious service, reinforcing a community’s ideals.
But both of these views depend on a receptive audience: in the transmission view, the audience receives a new belief, and in the ritual view, the audience enforces an existing belief. I think this can be limiting, especially when we think about actual vs. imagined audiences, and if we think about art that may not be intended to encode a message but just to show something.
So what if it’s more like, communication is that which affects an intellectual context and you can walk through that mind landscape and react to it how you will? What if we throw word bombs at each other’s mind palaces? And more importantly, what would it mean to begin to analyze language/communication/representation from this perspective?
I had to reread the first chapter of Communication as Culture before I let myself write this post, and in so doing I realized that Carey approached this idea himself. Reality, for Carey, is constructed through symbolic representation (aka, communication).
…communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed” (Carey 1989, 23)
There’s another part of Carey’s argument about communication: it is social, public. It doesn’t necessarily presume an audience devoted to decoding, but it does presume an audience. Our communicative acts are visible. This is less symmetric than the transmission view of sender/signal/receiver, but more personable. More human.
Although, one important caveat about the similarity between my argument and Carey’s is that I believe this is what Carey refers to as the ritual mode, while I think it’s something other than that.
Two references which prompted me to consider the question of audience and art/communication (also more reason for me to read Dewey, I guess):
- Carl DiSalvo, “Design and the Construction of Publics,” Design Issues 25.1 (2009): 48-63.
- Ann C. Tyler, “Shaping Belief: The Role of Audience in Visual Communication,” Design Issues 9.1 (1992): 21-29. (Sorry for a JStor link…)
morbidflight 
Do you know of Toni Morrison’s concept of “thought pictures” and “rememory” as she explains it in her novel Beloved (1987)? Your remarks, here, about a “contextual theory of communication” remind me a lot of that passage where she defines these two interrelated terms:
“Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm-every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there-you who never was there-if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.”
Here’s hoping this passage will laissez the creative juices rouler!
I haven’t read Beloved, so I should probably start there. (I tend to find that I resonate with Morrison’s thoughts on writing, though.)
And yes, that is really interesting/useful, thanks!
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