On the improbability of intimate communication


Mario Marotta, Université du Québec à Montréal

Giddens (1992) has famously argued that modern intimate relationships are moving towards the model of a “pure relationship”, in which the partners involved can negotiate the norms that regulate their interaction through dialogue and negotiation. Intimacy is thus interpreted as moving towards a form of “democratization” that overcomes gender inequality, a position that has often been criticized from feminist authors (see Jamieson 1999, Smart 2007 and Mulinari and Sandell 2009), but has found at least some empirical support (see Poder 2023 for an overview). My critique will instead focus on some of the premises of Giddens’ theory, and specifically his concept of communication. I will show that his conception of intimate communication is grounded in the phenomenologically inspired bottom-up model of sense building first proposed by Berger and Kellner (1964) and then elaborated by Berger and Luckmann (1966) and I will argue that this model is not capable of describing the complexity of intimate communication. To find a better framework I will thus suggest we should turn to the cybernetic study of human communication initiated by Bateson (1936) and further developed by the Palo Alto School and by Niklas Luhmann and his students. I will identify three main phases of development of the cybernetic approach to human communication. The first phase is the one initiated by Bateson’s anthropological studies (mainly Bateson 1936 and 1972), where the main problem of human communication and of intimate communication is identified as the problem of “schismogenesis”. In this framework, the process of communication between two partners or two sets of partners is seen as having two possible trajectories: in the first one (complementary schismogenesis), one partner becomes more and more assertive while the other is forced to be increasingly submissive; in the second one (symmetrical schismogenesis), both partners become increasingly antagonistic towards one another in the effort to impose on the other. In both cases, communication is only sustainable if it creates mechanisms that stop and reset these trends, otherwise the system of interaction collapses and the social group grounded in this form of communication is disbanded. In this first phase, Bateson studies certain symbolically and ritually grounded mechanisms as the basis for the correction of schismogenesis and he specifically insists on the function of gender roles and parental structures in regulating communication. The second phase mainly consists of the numerous contributions of the members of the _Palo Alto Mental Research Institute_, who were all inspired and often worked side by side with Bateson, but who provided differing interpretations of the intersubjective dynamics of intimate communication (see Bateson, Jackson, Haley and Weakland 1956, Jackson 1965, Watzlawick, Beavine and Jackson 1967 and Laing 1971). The shared assumption of these theories is that the dynamics of intimate communication is internally regulated and its mechanisms are only developed in the context of communication, thus all these authors tend to disregard most cultural influences on communication. In these texts the centrality of schismogenesis is progressively abandoned in favor of the study of established patterns of communication. The third phase is initiated by Luhmann’s (1982) choice to abandon the problem of schismogenesis and to concentrate entirely on the crystallization of communicative patterns. The main innovation of Luhmann’s approach is that he once again highlights the importance of cultural influence on the formation of communicative patterns in the form of the establishment of a shared love semantics. This theoretical step is also linked to a restriction of Luhmann’s perspective to the study of intimate communication in modern (functionally differentiated) societies, so that his theory is not intended as a universal theory of intimate communication. According to Luhmann, intimate communication in modern societies could not initiate, let alone sustain itself, without a preliminary shared semantics that regulates the way different social actors enter the communicative interaction: he thus describes intimate communication as highly improbable to indicate its lack of spontaneity. As I will show, the return of the focus on culture also reignites the problem of gender roles in the context of intimate communication, a topic that has been often discussed by Luhmann’s students (see Leupold 1983 and Mahlmann 1991) but that still leaves plenty of questions open concerning the content of the contemporary semantics of love.

This paper will be presented at the following session: