Lefebvre’s focus on the tridimensionality of everyday life and communication and Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1960/2004) argument that a human relation is a “ternary relation” (374) where the “unity of a dyad can be realised only within a totalisation performed from outside by a third party” (115), by a “human mediator” (106) (see also Fuchs 2021a for an analysis of Sartre’s contribution to critical communication theory).
Language is dialectically related to communications. Whereas communication is a process and human practice, language is a structure and means. There is dialectic of means of communication and communicative practices. Lefebvre stresses that language is a “means of action and communication” (CEL2, 165), that it mediates the lived/living-dialectic (166), and that it is a social fact that “plays a part in all social facts” (170). Language is “the active element of every social phenomenon. It helps to bring it into being and to fix it” (170). Although language helps to fix the social and society, it is itself not a static, fixed structure but evolves because it is made and changed by humans. “Language is a work, the work of a society” (257). What Lefebvre expresses by saying that language is a work is that it is the historical result of humans’ communicative practices and social relations. Humans work in society and thereby also collectively work on the development of language.
There are different forms of language such as written language, spoken language, visual language, abstract/formal languages, and so forth. Language is often a very structural concept devoid of its connection to communication and therefore to human practices and the human being. In contrast, the notion of the means of communication stresses the mediation of structures (“means”) and practices (“communication”). Table 5.3 gives an overview of five types of the means of production.
The means of communication are structures that operate at the level of the living. Communicative practices are a dimension of the lived. Seen from the point of view of information and communication, the dialectic of the lived and the living is a dialectic of the means of communication and communicative practices. Communication is a dialectic of means and practices of communication. It involves a double dialectic: Communication’s internal dialectic is a dialectic of communicative practices and means of communication. Communication’s external dialectic means that communication has a mediating role in society. It mediates the dialectic of society and the individual, the dialectic of structures and individual practices, the dialectic of society’s objects and subjects.
In volume two of Critique of Dialectical Reason, Lefebvre (CEL2, 276–314) introduces the notion of the semantic field. My own interpretation and understanding are that semantic field is the space where the dialectic of communicative practices and means of communication takes place. The semantic field has to do with (individual and social) consciousness (296), experience, knowledge, practices (299). It involves signals, signs (representations) such morphemes and the word (verbal and visual sign), language consisting of signs and syntactic and grammatical rules, symbols such as religious symbols (e.g. the cross) that operate at the level of affects, spontaneity and emotions; images, signification, expression, sense. All communication uses images. “The deepest communication of all is achieved through images” (289)
Chapter Five | Communication in Everyday (Digital) Life
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Communication in Everyday Life