When I was a blob of cells glued to the walls of my mother’s uterus, I undertook a career in communication. I was young and ambitious, eager to get started. Furthermore, I was hungry. The only medium available to me at the time was chemistry. So with an ink of protein, I scrawled missives to my mother: More nourishment, please.
It was a symbolic beginning. Like all animal communication, my signals were bald attempts to bring the world in line with my desires. That theory of communication presents a bleak view of the thousands of words that flow from my face and fingers in a day. But I can’t find a flaw in the argument.
Evidence: The most basic “words” in the animal (or at least mammal) vocabulary are “Ow,” “Look out!,” “Come here,” and “Bug off.”
For humans, it’s not much different. All of our communications are about shortcomings in our environment, just with perhaps more specialized or highfalutin shortcomings. We are a relatively social and relatively attention whore-ish species, so things like bonding and “look at me” are more prevalent purposes of our communication, but they are still just needs/desires.
Our needs, you could say, have just moved higher up the pyramid:
It is a measure of how well we’ve met our needs as a species that we can now turn our attention to something as arcane as prairie-dog talk. But it also illuminates a need that is uniquely human—as far as we can figure: We feel the need to study prairie dog language because it can inform us about our own origins, the social and ecological milieu that drove us first to the pebbles of speech, then on to the masonry and castellations of language. We feel the need to understand ourselves. If we didn’t, we might, at this stage of our career as a species, sit on the porch in a rocking chair. With the status quo satisfactory, we’d have nothing to discuss. Homo sapiens would finally fall silent.
Here is a rather blunt (or “succinct,” if you prefer) way of saying it:
All communication is a sign of failure. If everybody is pleased with the situation, then there is no need for communication.
This idea bothered me for about two and half minutes. Then I discovered the problem. Watch as I make up a couple of theories that are equally as valid (= ridiculous):
All movement is a sign of failure. If I am pleased with the situation, then there is no need for movement.
All breathing is a sign of failure. If I am pleased with the situation, then there is no need for breathing.
In other words, the theory isn’t saying anything, because we are constantly in need, or at least constantly “unpleased” with the situation. That’s probably a good definition for what life is: A perpetual string of things that need doing, of unpleasedness. In a universe of scarcity, it is almost a logical impossibility that it could be any other way.
So the first half of this post was wasted on a useless idea. Sorry.
What’s more interesting about human communication is something that DFW observed in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again when he eavesdropped on people small-talking about why they signed up for a luxury cruise:
It’s the universal subject of discussion in here, like chitchatting in the dayroom of a mental ward: “So, why are you here?” And the striking constant in all the answers is that not once does somebody say they’re going on this 7NC Luxury Cruise just to go on a 7NC Luxury Cruise. Nor does anybody refer to stuff about travel being broadening or a mad desire to parasail. Nobody even mentions being mesmerized by Celebrity’s fantasy-slash-promise of pampering in uterine stasis—in fact, the word “pamper,” so ubiquitous in the Celebrity 7NC brochure, is not once in my hearing uttered. The word that gets used over and over in the explanatory small-talk is: relax. Everybody characterizes the upcoming week as either a long-put-off reward or a last-ditch effort to salvage sanity and self from some inconceivable crock pot of pressure, or both.
What really hit me was the footnote relating to the same paragraph:
I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive promise of total self-indulgence. What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a message just to get a massage, I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less forcing me to get a massage; or like: I never just “want” a cigarette, I always “need” a cigarette.
To relate this to the first point, maybe we could say that our attempt to conceal or downplay our self-indulgence is a need/desire of status or perception, where we feel under some subtle social obligation to seem like functioning, hard-working members of a sophisticated society instead of hairless apes who would really rather sleep in and be treated to cream puffs and vagina.
I’m not suggesting that this shame/concealment of self-indulgence is necessarily a “bad” thing. Personally, I’m glad to be living in a society with some social norms against open self-indulgence. I imagine that the type of society that was tolerant of open self-indulgence would look a lot like the open-toed shoe wearing and greasy hair sporting kind found in places like Carrboro, NC. (I may be trying to come to terms with humanity, but I’m not close to being ready for Really, Really Free Markets.)
The point: Maybe human communication is a way of preventing society from devolving into Carrboro.
