Notas para una crítica de la "razón comunicativa"

Abstract

After pointing out that this paper has been made possible thanks to an informative process achieved by systematic means of communication and starting off from a dialogistic approach to social life as an informative activity, the author attempts to provoke a series of reflections on the subject of the urgency of differentiating between the concepts of information and of communication, both of which are nowadays confused and unbalanced. Social dialogue requires, apart from the terms transmitter and receiver of the message, acode and a channel or support, being the latter typical elements which instrumentalize this relation. Whereas the communicative activity aims at making possible the -placing in common», the in-formative supplies the content, «gives form to., ordains ideas, behavior, or things themselves. In this paper, the author also examines the mutual references existing between these two concepts. These principies being well established, we come across the emergence of a powerful and complex Communications System in our historical horizon which is continuously active and present, a sort of -artificial and interposed nature. between man and the world, an authentic deceptive media coercion which does not carry with itself a parallel in-formative transfer. The author then devotes attention to the more specific topic of the properly «journalistic- mean s of communication, in order to consider the contribution of the -imago mundi- supplied by these mean s toward the appraisal of that which is proper to the means themselves, that which is related, systematic and mechanical, in detriment of that which is truly substantial. The Means supply a partial view of reality, a view which is often spectacular, magical and structuralistic, imposed as unique and as the only accessible interpretation of man's milieu. This has repercussions with regard even to the mental categories of the members of its receptive audience, the result being that the public at large -as in the platonic allegory of the cave- finds itself with a message that has been tampered with but which the public takes to be true. The roots of this are to be found ancho red on the idealistic and mechanistic moorings of the so-called communicative reason, which is opposed to the ontological which corresponds to the informative reason, expressed according to the correct conception of news, that is, without its ceasing to be a reflection of reality and at the same time responding to the stimulus of events that really take place, beca use -that which takes place happens to something or somebody that are really there, not to those of us who see it take place-. From this stems the journalistic requirement to see and consider actuality as a manifestation of what really takes place, and this exigency converts itself into a firm strongpoint, so that the understanding and ordaining of a changing milieu, a milieu that is at the same time fleeting, unsteady and novel, can be undertaken. The Means have been raised from the rank of intermediaries to that of apparent creators of a relativistic universe which is nearby but inaccessible, shared by many but yet belonging to nobody, possessed but not understood due to a lack of in-formation. Finally, a critique is made of those who give themselves up to the fetishism of this instrumental vision which sets its sights on the relational complex and forgets that which in fact is being related. Equally censured are those who underestimate the evidence of this Communicative System returned to a certain naive atomism which rejects the presence of the already-mentioned coercion of the new - interposed nature- of the Means. Both realities thus have to be refitted and put correctly into place according to the very structure of the process of dialogue, thereby establishing a hierarchy with regard to the antecendency of the messages and of the subjects, and removing the myth surrounding communicative reason to bring it down to its proper function.