What is Communicology?

Communicology is the study of human discourse in all of its semiotic and phenomenological manifestations of embodied consciousness and practice in the world of other people and their environment. Ever since the 1950s, the foundational work of Jürgen Ruesch, Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations (1972 reprint ed.), then Jürgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson in Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951: 277), the commonly accepted networks of human discourse are:

(1) the Intrapersonal Level (or psychiatric/aesthetic domain),
(2) the Interpersonal Level (or social domain),
(3) the Group Level (or cultural domain), and
(4) the Intergroup Level (or transcultural domain).

These four interconnected network levels contain the communicological process outlined by Roman Jakobson’s theory of human communication (“Verbal Communication”, Scientific American 1972: 37-44). In this homage to the phenomenological work in semiotics and normative logics by Charles S. Peirce, Jakobson explicates the relationship between an Addresser who expresses (emotive function) and an Addressee who perceives (conative function) a commonly shared Message (poetic function), Code (metalinguistic function), Contact (phatic function), and Context (referential function), all operating on at least one of the Ruesch and Bateson levels of discourse in a semiotic world of phenomenological experience, i.e., the Semiosphere (Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, 1990).

Thus, as a young discipline in Human Science research, Communicology is the critical study of discourse and practice, especially the expressive body as mediated by the perception of cultural signs and codes. Communicology uses the methodology of semiotic phenomenology in which the expressive body discloses cultural codes, and cultural codes shape the perceptive body—an ongoing, dialectical, complex helix of twists and turns constituting the reflectivity, reversibility, and reflexivity of consciousness and experience. This focus on human embodied comportment is illustrated in the research publication of such authors as Karl Jaspers, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Anthony Wilden.

Because of the breadth and depth of analytic inquiry made possible by a critical examination of the signs and codes of cultures, Communicology is one of the few scholarly disciplines which not only encourages, but also theoretically and practically engages in the description, reduction, and interpretation of the transdisciplinary understanding of cultural phenomena such that the human sciences/humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, education/pedagogy, and medical/institutional themes and methodologies of inquiry are often blended, or seen as appositional, complementary, and dialectical constitutions of the positive, rather than as dysfunctional, contradictory, or oppositional assertions of the negative.

The scope of Communicology includes — but is not limited to — communication, mass communications, popular culture, public relations, advertising, marketing, linguistics, discourse analysis, political economy, institutional analysis, organization of urban and rural spaces, ergonomics, body culture, clinical practice, health care, constructions of disease, health, and rehabilitation, human factors, signage, and so forth. Whenever and wherever the signs and codes of culture impact on the perception of bodily expressive modes, we have a communicological phenomenon to be investigated, interpreted, deconstructed, refigured, and described within a qualitative research methodology contributing to theory construction as understanding. Description is the human science research result in which validity and reliability are logic constructs based in the necessary and sufficient conditions of discovered systems (codes), whether eidetic (based in consciousness) or empirical (based in experience). The methodology is inherently heuristic (semiotic) and recursive (phenomenology) as a logic in the tradition of Peirce and Husserl.

  Who is a Communicologist?

Historically speaking, and as a measure of the speed of technology in changing our lived-world, it is important for those of us using the Internet (www) to remember that Communicology, as the recognized disciplinary subject matter of human communication, did not enter the world of the human and social sciences until 1931 when the American anthropologist and linguist, Edward Sapir, wrote the entry “Communication” for The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Of course, Sapir was building on the monumental work of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol. 1: Language, Vol. 2: Mythical Thought; Vol. 3: Phenomenology of Knowledge; Vol. 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (1923, 1925, 1929, 1995). Cassirer’s semiotic phenomenology and Edmund Husserl’s existential phenomenology were elaborated in Germany by Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie (1934), translated in 1990 as Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. In parallel fashion, Cassirer and Husserl were elaborated in the USA by the critical contribution of Wilbur Marshall Urban, Language and Reality: The Philosophy of Language and the Principles of Symbolism (1939), a work that first introduced Husserl’s phenomenology to the English speaking world.

Urban’s essay “Cassirer’s Philosophy of Language” in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (1949) further confirms his close connection to Cassirer. Urban’s doctoral student, Hubert Griggs Alexander, wrote his 1934 dissertation “The Intelligibility of Time” (published 1945: Time as Dimension and History) explicating and integrating the works of an extraordinary faculty group with whom he studied as a graduate student in philosophy at Yale University: Ernst Cassirer, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf. In 1967, Alexander wrote the first textbook, Language and Thinking, devoted to explicating the connection among Communication, Linguistics, and Philosophy. This paperback has become the textbook for undergraduate and graduate students alike in courses devoted to the Philosophy of Communication. The foundational model in Chapter One “Communication” is utilized closely by Roman Jakobson in his 1959 model. The third reprint edition uses as a title: The Language and Logic of Philosophy (1988). Also theoretically important is Alexander’s “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (The Philosophy Form, Vol 7: Communication, 1968). One of Alexander’s students who encountered these manuscripts in class is Richard L. Lanigan. And as noted, the books of Ruesch (psychiatrist) and Bateson (anthropologist) on Communicology in the early 1950s established the academic discipline of Communication in universities in the USA. Also relevant is the fact that in 1971, the first book written on Intercultural Communication was by L. S. Harms. In 1978, Joseph A. DeVito wrote the first university textbook, Communicology: An Introduction to the Study of Communication. Last, the theoretical and applied foundation of Communicology as a scientific discipline took firm shape with the publication by Richard L. Lanigan of The Human Science of Communicology (1992) and his entries “Communicology” and “Structuralism” for the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by Lester Embree et al. in 1997.

  From the First Textbook

"Communicology is the study of the science of communication, particularly that subsection concerned with communication by and among humans. Communicologist refers to the communication student-researcher-theorist or, more succinctly, the communication scientist. Franklin H. Knower, founder of the International Communication Association, and Wendell Johnson, another major figure in the field of semantics, speech, and learning sciences, have long advocated the use of these terms. The study of communication is still young, and still embroiled in the laborious process of defining itself. Until now, the term communication has been used as a catch-all to refer to three different areas of study: 1) the process or act of communicating, 2) the actual message or messages communicated, and 3) the study of the process of communicating. Communicology is a far more specific and accurate way to describe the focus of this book. It is not a piece of meaningless jargon; rather it represents an attempt to refine the language which relates to the field as a whole in order to pinpoint and clarify the broad areas of study within it" (Joseph A. DeVito. Communicology: An Introduction to the Study of Communication. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1978, page v, “The Title”).