Just What is Communication?

People tend to use the word "communication" constantly but have you ever really stopped to think about what it means? Like any good abstract term its full meaning is difficult to contain to any one definition. However, that has not stopped entire generations of scholars from trying! One of my favorite definitions actually refers to rhetoric (although I think it applies to communication in general) and is given by George A. Kennedy in his book, Comparative Rhetoric. 

He begins by explaining that he wants to expand on the traditional definitions of rhetoric. Kennedy states:  

"Rhetoric is not, I think, just a convenient concept existing only in the mind of speakers, audiences, writers, critics, and teachers. It has an essence or reality that has not been appreciated. I shall argue in this book that rhetoric, in essence, is a form of mental and emotional energy. This is most clearly seen when an individual, animal or human, is faced with some serious threat or opportunity that may be affected by utterance. An emotional reaction takes place in the mind. The emotion may be fear, anger, lust, hunger, pity, curiosity, love--any of the basic emotions of sentient life. The probable source of such basic emotions, and thus of rhetoric, is the instinct for self-preservation, which in turn derives from nature's impulse to preserve the genetic line.... Rhetoric is thus a 'conservative' faculty."

Given my scholarly interests in affect & memory, it should not be a shock that I'm digging where Kennedy is going here. For Kennedy, one cannot separate rhetoric from the sensations & experiences that drive one to communicate. In this way, communication stems from a compulsion to survive within our social world. He continues by explicitly defining rhetoric as such:

"Rhetoric, in the most general sense, may thus be identified with the energy inherent in an utterance (or an artistic representation): the mental or emotional energy that impels the speaker to expression, the energy level coded in the message, the energy received by the recipient who then uses mental energy in decoding and perhaps acting on the message."

Kennedy's shift from thinking of communication as a material action to an embodied phenomenon that begins pre-language and even pre-cognition, is truly ground-breaking. My own definition of communication is, I believe, similar to Kennedy's. I tend to think of communication as a moment of relational becoming - through the act of translating thought to language, action, & image it changes something private to something public, something personal to something shared. This translation is an attempt to create, establish, maintain, or end the relations we have to people, spaces, objects, & concepts.

At any given time, people engage in communication by doing anything from talking & texting, to smiling & flipping someone off, to shooting a video & sharing an image, to engaging in conflict resolution & intercultural dialogue, to participating in social movements & promoting cultural change, to arguing over political policy & using public speech, to posting on social media & blogging, to consuming popular culture & crafting media representations. And the list goes on & on & on & on... 

Heck, I'm not even touching on entire sub-disciplines of this extensive field. But all of these examples do have two things in common, they highlight the relational foundation of communication and posit the never-ending state of possibility it creates. This is just a few thoughts on what my definition of communication is. What's yours?