Love and Communication. Paddy Scannell

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Introduction

This is the final volume in a trilogy that I planned years ago, as I worked out the books I wanted to write. And I should say (it seemed obvious then, and I did not need to mention it) that I meant academic books about the field I worked in: communication or media studies. The first, Media and Communication (Scannell 2020 [2007]) was a textbook pitched at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, in which I laid out the academic development of the field itself in the last century, in North America, the United Kingdom and (partially) Europe. I followed it with Television and the Meaning of “Live” (2014), written for colleagues as an historically informed theoretical account of live television. Subsequently, as time and I were getting on a bit, I retired from academic life and began to think about the final book I proposed, back in 2007, in the preface to the first book. Each stands on its own legs, and is independent of the others. But if you were to read them all (I’m not saying you should), you would see there is a continuum to them. Love and Communication was the title I came up with for this final volume long before I ever got round to writing it. I knew that I wanted to write about this at least twenty years ago, but when I eventually started work on it, both the world and I had changed, and I found myself writing something rather different from what I first intended. There is a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes and others – Karl Ove Knausgaard (2004) for instance, point out – and I instinctively felt that love and communication were matters best left until my academic career was over.

       I

Being an academic was something that, at the time, I took entirely for granted, but as I got older, I felt an increasing tension between my academic self (me the professor) and my human self (the me-that-I-am, the nonacademic self, a usual person like everyone else). And this tension between my institutional and noninstitutional self runs right through this book. I took the title from a longish review essay, “Love and communication,” that I wrote in 2005 about Speaking into the Air by John Durham Peters (1999). This was and is a book I deeply admire, and especially because it unashamedly brought religious thought into the usual thinking of the academic field I worked in. At that time, it was preoccupied with the politics of communication, the media as cultures of power, and so on. Peters’s book was different. It was focused on religious and philosophical thought in relation to communication, and particularly communication as love, and divine and human versions of it: the difference, as he puts it, between agape and eros. He takes Jesus and Socrates as two paradigm figures who express this difference – Jesus and divine love, Socrates and human love. Their distinctive forms of communication capture the difference between agape and eros.

Socrates to this day is known as a talker, whose mode of philosophizing was dialogue. He famously preferred speech over writing, as Plato (who wrote his dialogue) made clear in what is known as the Phaedrus. As a communicative method it is quite distinct from that of Jesus, whose manner of speaking was exemplified in the parable of the sower. It was a parable about parables, Jesus’s own justification of his method as a communicator. In this story (as written down by his followers), Jesus speaks to a multitude (a mass of people) by the lake of Galilee. Two different approaches to communication. Socrates goes for talk between two people in each other’s presence (the young Phaedrus, and himself) – talk as dialogue. Jesus speaks as one to many – talk as teaching – and it is a one-way, not a two-way process. These two modes of communication are distinguished as insemination (Socrates) and dissemination (Jesus). We, I supposed, naturally prefer two-way over one-way communication. It seems more personal, more genuine, and authentic than one-to-many discourse. But Peters prefers the latter: dissemination over insemination. I had never thought of it this way, but it is surely right. One-way communication is, by definition, nonreciprocal. And in this sense, it is like agape, the love of God, who “gives” without any expectation of thanks and recognition. This for me was a trope for public service broadcasting. The BBC, whose beginnings I had studied in detail, was exemplary (Scannell and Cardiff 1991). In Britain, radio and television were and remain broadcasting institutions. It is a one-to-many communicative system, in which the apparatus “speaks” and multitudes listen and watch. They do not engage in argument. They are not obliged to take heed. The indiscriminate scatter of broadcasting, as in the sowing of seed in the parable, goes everywhere. It is for anyone and everyone, not just some. Insemination (the planting of seed in another) is for the chosen ones, but not radio or television, who began the process of full, democratic, communicative inclusion.

      Broadcast radio and television defined (communicatively speaking) the twentieth century and, not by coincidence, their development ran in parallel with the full emergence of a certain version of politics (liberal democracy). This inclusiveness (all in, no one left outside the tent) is the basis of broadcasting. And like the love of God, it is one-way or one-to-many, and nonreciprocal. In what follows, I hold to Peters’s line that there are two kinds of love, divine and human, agape and eros. And each is a different kind of communication. They come together in the end, but the start of the journey lies elsewhere. It reminds me of the old joke about the Englishman lost in the back of beyond in Ireland, trying to find his way to Dublin. He asks a local for help. There is a pause, while the local thinks it over before saying, finally, “Well I wouldn’t start from here.” The local was right, but you have to start from somewhere, and I must clear up some motifs that run through what follows before finally reaching my Dublin. I kick off with human and nonhuman interaction, followed by speech and writing. My goal is the love of God, and everything that follows is working toward this.

II

God, whoever or whatever that may be, is not some kind of Übermensch or super human. The everlasting virtue of this placeholder word is that it prevents me from falling into human hubris. Man is just not (even allowing for its sexist implications) the measure of all things. “God” is the placeholder for a power that far surpasses my limited, fallible, human, understanding. For purely human reasons, I will think of Him as some kind of “almighty father,” because I cannot imagine any other way of thinking about Him and His world. But put this way, it draws attention to two quite distinct worlds: the divine and the human. With this in mind, I follow the Genesis narrative in which our first parents were cast out of the Edenic garden where they were naked and unashamed, and lived directly in the presence of God, and spoke with Him. Their expulsion from God’s presence was, as the story goes, because Eve and Adam “were tempted” by the fruit of the tree of knowledge. For the sake of knowledge, they were willing to lose paradise, or heavenly bliss. I don’t mean this literally, but neither do I mean it metaphorically. I simply take it as expressing essential human truth. Whether it is fact or fiction is, for me, neither here nor there. Leaving Eden was a deliberate choice by our “first parents” to live in a human world, rather than in God’s. It was the original sin, in which human beings began to take responsibility for the world, rather than leaving it to God. What followed from this, over many, many centuries, was the evolution into history of the totally human world in which we live today. And this is the point of the distinction. Today’s world (and we take it utterly for granted) was made by human beings, for exclusive human use. God was thought of once as the Creator of all life, of the living world in all its parts, including us. But now, we who live in our human world have no time for the rest of the living world and its Creator. We no longer share it with other nonhuman living creatures. We think of this “external” world as Nature, and it belongs to the natural sciences, if it belongs to us at all. We talk of the external world as external to inner mental life, but really the external world belongs to God and His creation. Leaving that world for our own was the original sin.

       III

These two worlds, the human and the divine, are quite simply separate, and the Genesis story is an ancient tale of how this separation began. And this original sin (the human desire for knowledge) was realized in the original technology of writing. Again,