_towards a common ecology of mind

on the collaborative practice of Stian Ådlandsvik and Lutz-Rainer Müller

Text accompanying the exhibition Still life with modern guilt, MOT International, London, 2010.

One Cannot Not Communicate
This seems at first hard to imagine, as communication is always thought of consisting of an interaction between people within real or virtual situations, which can take place in many kinds of social frameworks. Communication is a relational matter. However, that does not define the type of relationship or situation that can generate communication. We sometimes have to think quite outside the box to imagine a dialogue without words, without a partner, a communication with a stone, for example, or with anything.
As a matter of fact, anything is already communication. That anything is inevitable, unavoidable, and first and foremost consistent. The activity of communication is a priori to anything else, might it be dialogue, interaction, understanding, or sociality. One Cannot Not Communicate was as such postulated by the Austrian-American psychologist Paul Watzlawick as the first meta-communicational axiom of the pragmatics of communication. What actually defines communication as a relational matter is not information but commitment.

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