This book is built around the generally endorsed view that communication has
gained a leading place in contemporary culture. But it likewise pays attention to this top
position’s scaffolding details and techniques which are more significant than even the
triumph of communication. The first chapter tries to show that if the body is winning the
battle against its soul, it does so in communication only as an image. The second chapter
contends that image conquers text, but that behind this image lays the digital texture of
codes and programs. The third chapter claims that in communication, being in a
relationship becomes more important than the transmission of information, but that in
this way the subjective identities of those who communicate tend to be dissolved. And
the fourth chapter argues that, consequently, practices and theoretical models of
communication are moving from persuasion to manipulation and seduction. The core
idea of the fifth chapter is that we live, for better or for worse, in a culture in which
communication has taken the place of knowledge: just as modernity culture overrated
knowledge, our culture overstates communication.
Author(s): Aurel Codoban
Year: 0
Language: English
Pages: 105
Table of Contents
Author's Note 7
Part I. Body, Image and Relationship 9
1. Body of language and body as language 11
The body of language of Freudian psychoanalysis 11
A paradigm shift: the body takes the place of the soul 13
Body as language in gesture semiotics 15
Body as Image: ostensive ideology of nude vitality 18
2. How does the image become an apparent indexical sign? 23
Birth of the modern meaning of the image 23
From the image as analogy to the image as index 28
The digital texture of the image in the visual culture 31
A culture of the visual or an ostensive ideology? 34
3. Communication like relationship: virtualized identities 39
From communication as transmission of information to communication as relationship
39
Virtualization of interactive scenarios 41
Installation of “network spirit" 45
4. From persuasion to manipulation and seduction - therapeutic-psychiatric
paradigm of communication 51
Influencing by the persuasive communication 51
Influencing by manipulation 54
Influencing by seduction 57
From rhetoric-oratorical to therapeutic-psychiatric model of
Communication 59
Part II. Towards a Culture of Communication 63
5. Communication culture versus knowledge culture 65
Quiet reading, modern education and the printed book or how appears first media
65
Media as a passage from the silent culture of knowledge to the talkative culture of
communication 70
„Communicate well with yourself” versus „Know yourself” 73
6
Part II. Is there wisdom in communication? 75
6. Wisdom of communication 77
Being, knowledge and wisdom 77
Printed book and the modern education and knowledge 81
Effects and implications of Communication Culture 84
Ecology of communication like negative wisdom of communication 90
…and a positive wisdom of communication 92
List of international conferences and word congresses where texts of this book were
presented 97
List of references 99
