Albert Camus and Absurd Communication: from Undecidability to Übercommunication
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Albert Camus and Absurd Communication: From Undecidability to Übercommunication by Jorge Lizarzaburu B.A., USFQ, 2010 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Communication 2012 This thesis entitled: Albert Camus and Absurd Communication: From Undecidability to Übercommunication written by Jorge M. Lizarzaburu has been approved for the Department of Communication Gerard Hauser Janice Peck Robert Craig Date 5/31/2012 The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline iii Lizarzaburu, Jorge M. (M.A., Communication, Department of Communication) Albert Camus and Absurd Communication: From Undecidability to Übercommunication Thesis directed by professor Gerard Hauser Communication conceived as understanding is a normative telos among scholars in the field. Absurdity, in the work of Albert Camus, can provide us with a framework to go beyond communication understood as a binary (understanding and misunderstanding) and propose a new conception of communication as absurd. That is, it is an impossible task, however necessary thus we need to embrace its absurdity and value the effort itself as much as the result. Before getting into Camus’ arguments I explain the work of Friedrich Nietzsche to understand the French philosopher in more detail. I describe eternal recurrence and Übermensch as two concepts that can be related to communication as absurd. Then I explain Camus’ notion of absurdity using a Nietzschean lens. Later I present an absurdist framework to understand communication. The framework is an aim to deconstruct communication conceptualized as understanding but at the same time go beyond and propose a new way of engaging in communication: Übercommunication. Finally I illustrate my arguments examining two novels of Albert Camus: The Stranger and The Plague. DEDICATION To my family who in front of the absurd has decided to keep rolling their boulder and now are able to read this. To my mother: Sisyphus herself. v CONTENTS CHAPTER I. COMMUNICATION AND THE ABSURD…….…………………………………1 Methodology……………………………………………………………………...4 Camus and Absurdity: The Myth of Sisyphus…………………………………....5 The Rebel: From Sisyphus to Prometheus……………………………………….8 Nietzsche and Camus…………………………………………………………….11 Camus and Poststructuralism…………………………………………………….15 Camus and Communication……………………………………………………...17 From The Stranger to The Plague: Mersault and Rieux…………………………22 The Stranger……………………………………………………………………...23 The Plague……………………………………………………………………......24 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..26 II. NIETZSCHE: CAMUS’ SPIRITUAL ANCESTOR………………………………29 What does it mean to be Nietzschean?..................................................................31 Camus’s Nietzscheanism…………………………………………………………37 The Will to power, The Overman, and eternal recurrence……………………….39 III. ALBERT CAMUS: HIS LIFE AND THOUGHT………………………………….49 A pied-noir in the center of France’s intellectual elite…………………………...50 The Myth of Sisyphus……………………………………………………………58 The Rebel………………………………………………………………………...65 vi Metaphysics of the absurd……………………………………………………….75 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………….79 IV. UNDECIDABILITY, ABSURDITY AND ÜBERCOMMUNICATION…………80 Communication as absurdity……………………………………………………..82 The communicative condition of existence………………………………………86 The poststructuralist move……………………………………………………….89 Camus, Derrida, and communication…………………………………………...100 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………111 V. MERSAULT CONTRA RIEUX………..…………………………………………113 The Stranger…………………………………………………………………115 Understanding Mersault….………………………………………………….120 The Plague…………………………………………………………………...126 VI. CONCLUSION…….……………………………………………………………...141 REFERENCES…….…………………………………………………………………………...157 1 Chapter 1 Communication and The Absurd: An examination through the work of Albert Camus Absurdity in the world is ubiquitous and along the same lines absurdity within communication is also omnipresent. Commonplace communicative transactions are most of the time based on faith: faith in rationality, systems, language, agency, etc. Take this paper for example: nothing guarantees that my argument will be understood as I want to convey it. Textual iterability and citationality, as Derrida (2001) thought, jeopardizes meaning and understanding. The hazard is at hand even when academic encounters are almost artificial communicative events. They occur in a sort of laboratory where the participants roughly have equal access to information, the relations of power are less pervasive than in other daily transactions, and under other conditions that make academia a sterile communicative environment, almost resembling Habermas (2007)’ Ideal Speech Situation. Let me present a more mundane example to illustrate communication’s undecidability which is consequence of absurdity itself: Imagine that you are walking through a crowded street and suddenly a person stops you and with a calm voice says: “Life makes no sense. Aren’t you bored of it?” and keeps walking. How do you assign meaning to such unusual exchange? There is no possible way of understanding what this person was trying to express because the possibilities are various and they are equally valid. The utterance could be a desperate cry for help, a way of venting after a bad day, irony, comedy, a philosophical inquiry, and the least could go on and on. Now, it is clear that such kinds of interactions are not common in daily life. People tend to follow linguistic rules to make meaning as clear as possible or perform arrival to clarity at least. Let us look at a different situation then, a student is in class listening to a professor lecturing 2 on X subject. The following week there is a quiz in class about this particular lecture and the student performs poorly. It could be argued that being a participant in class does not necessarily require satisfactory performance in terms of grades. The communicative aspect of a class could also be seen from a ritual perspective and not merely as transmission (Carey, 2009). On the other hand, it is obvious that although we attend class for several reasons besides learning, from obligation and necessity to narratives about success, learning still is an important factor in the process. The academic system relies on students acquiring information from professors and evaluates these transactions assigning numerical markers. In other words a grade is conferred to validate that a student understood his professor and by understanding I do not mean repeated information. It means that the student comprehended the professors’ grading policy, attitude, inclinations, philosophy, whether it is repeating or challenging information. Ultimately, how do we make sense of these kinds of communicative exchanges? Is it realistic to trust methods based on faith on systems developed following rational methods? Could an absurdist account of communication provide a more realistic explanation of interactions that occur on daily basis like the student who is forced to fit in the educational system’s definition of understanding or even extraordinary situations like a stranger uttering an enigmatic phrase? Theoretical frameworks to understand human communication cover a wide range of traditions and streams of thought. Craig (1999) proposed a theoretical matrix with seven of these traditions as an umbrella under which a vast amount of attempts to theorize communication are conceived. Some of these theories deal with communication as experience. Specifically the phenomenological tradition, as identified by Craig, treats communication as “the experience of otherness” (p.74). Nonetheless, among the theoretical frameworks included under this tradition, or any other for the case, none of them touches on a concept that seems to be implicit in human 3 existence: absurdity. Conceived by the existentialist philosophers, (Kierkegaard (1938) coined the term) absurdity deals with humans, their confrontation with a nonsensical world and the absurd feeling that emerges out of this encounter. My thesis will be an attempt to advance a framework to understand communication from an absurdist perspective. Distinctively, I will draw upon absurdity as conceived by Albert Camus, to understand communication as an impossible nonetheless imperative task. I will construct this framework extrapolating the ideas of Camus to understand how communication could be conceived following his thought. In order to do so, I shall incorporate other authors to complement Camus’ thought. I will dedicate the first chapter to Nietzsche as an introduction to the work of Camus. Later I will incorporate Poststructuralism to deconstruct communication and explain its absurdity. This will provide the theoretical ground to develop an absurdist perspective to understand communication as undecidable. Finally, I will use two of Camus’ novels, The Stranger (1988) and The Plague (2004a) to illustrate my claims about communication from a Camusean/absurdist perspective. Absurdity within communication has been widely overlooked. It is problematic to construct a literature review of the problem that I am trying to address in my thesis. The work of Albert Camus has been ignored in the humanities since the mid 90’s. He was a “master intellectual”, as the French critics called him in the 40’s and 50’s, then his work was ignored by leftist