Great communicators of the past and present have their locations in their approaches to resolving social crises of their times. Buddha excelled in communication because of his third perspective about the causes of human suffering and social inequalities his times harboured. In a different temporal context, Ilango Adigal excelled in epic narrative style, because of his vision to provide a unifying narrative context for the subjects and rulers of the three Tamil kingdoms – Chera, Chozha and Pandya dynasties. Neelakesi excelled as a great women character in the epic, bearing her name, for her rhetorical prowess and intellectual acumen to hit not just the bull’s eye, but decimate the bull to the point of shredding. She was a ghost as a being, to begin with, but her becoming becomes a possibility when a Jain saint succeeds in stoping animal sacrifices in the cremation ground where ghosts had their meals. Angered by the pangs of hunger, Neelakesi strikes terror as a furious ghost. When her attempts fail, she takes the form of a seductive women to teach a lesson to the saint. She was subjugated by the teachings of the Jain saint and eventually turns as an rhetorical anti-missile to destroy the religious construct of Sunyavada tradition of Buddhism.
Manimekalai excelled as a narrative character for her communication prowess rooted in her travails as a woman traveller. It was a world where being and becoming were problematic both for her and her fellow travellers, The travel becomes fortunate for those who were touched by her generosity to feed them and she felt fortunate enough in the company of a magical material entity that was more compassionate than humans.
Kambar excelled in communication for his ability to pre-conceive a narrative strategy that defied the conventions of inter-textual adaptations and devised his own style of cultural subversion of the original, to render the original as one of the texts and the adaptation as the new text for a new group of readers. Kambar’s encoding/decoding notions predate Stuart Hall’s (1980) notions by more than 1000 years.
Closer to contemporary times, Bharathi excelled in appropriating the centuries old Tamil literary tradition more as a subversion than as an assimilation. His communication strategy was more as a powerful interlocutor of the masses’ yearning for liberation as well as a personification of the masses. Bharathi is remembered even today as we tend to see his voice of liberation as our voice of liberation.
Periyar excelled as a communicator par excellence of last century as his speeches and writings were shorn of the alliterative, ornamental and political rhetoric of his disciples such as Anna. Periyar spoke from his mind, not from his heart. As a rationalist, he never failed to mention in his speeches that the audience should not trust his words alone, they should use their reason to relate to his words and opinions and come to a conclusion. His speeches and writings represent possibly the most original ideology to emerge from Tamil Nadu during the last century. His ideology was meant to liberate the Tamils from their worlds of dogmatic superstition, unbridled casteism, slavery of women and the ignorance borne of illiteracy. His vision of progress was not tied to atheism alone, as many mistakenly portray him. His vision was rooted in a critical communication context. A context where he had his diagnosis in place which pointed the causes for the backwardness of Tamils in the direction of religion, caste, patriarchy, feudalism and illiteracy for the lack of social justice. He had no inkling of the difference Frankfurt school founders, in particular, Horkheimer envisioned between theory and critical theory. Theory is a summation of the explanatory statements about the relationship between causes and effects. Critical theory seeks to go beyond the explanatory function and seeks to factor in a role for theory as a change agent, in particular as a change agent of the society, culture and politics.
Periyar’s communication strategy was rooted in this logic of early critical theorists. He wanted to go beyond writing, talking and conceptualising ideologies to relate to social, cultural and economic inequalities of his times. He wanted true social, economic and cultural liberation for the people of Tamil Nadu. That’s precisely the reason why he did not believe that the independence from British would help in the social liberation of Indians. He did not believe in the power of electoral politics either and wanted to stay as a social reformer. Because of this, he scored well on all important parameters of effective communication.
What are the important parameters of effective communication. The prerequisites for effective communication at the personal, group and mass communication levels include what can be termed as six Cs and three Ss. The six Cs are clarity, conciseness, continuity, credibility, critical thinking ability and commitment. The three Ss are substance,structure and style. The ordering of priorities in respect of the six Cs and three Ss differ among different ace communicators and their periods of existence. In the case of Buddha and Periyar, critical thinking, commitment and clarity led other parameters. In the case of both, substance took a lead over style. In the case of Anna, style took a lead over other parameters.
In the long history of Tamil intellectual tradition, which has its roots in what is widely accepted as the oldest available and the most cerebral classical Sangam age text, Tolkappiyam, one person’s communication strategy remains unique and unparalleled. The person is Thiruvalluvar and his treatise is Thirukural. In his magnum opus, Thirukural, we find in the major and minor units of analysis such as the entire body of work (Thirukural), the divisions or content categories (அறத்துப் பால், பொருள் பால், காமத்துப் பால்) and the chapters (அதிகாரங்கள்), very perfect adherence to the golden rules of effective communication.
The six Cs can not work in a structural, content and stylistic vacuum. Similarly the three Ss can not win without the six Cs. They are as interdependent as nail and skin. At the commonsensical level of understanding, communication ought to be communication. Communication ought to be effective as well. Is it superfluous, then, to talk of effective communication? The reason we stress on the effect of effectiveness when we speak of effective communication is a two fold reason. This is more like stressing the visual in visual communication and aural in aural communication. This is meant to uncover the potential of any act/context of communication to be inherently effective, if the rules of effective communication. This is also meant to convey the possibility that communication ought to be communication, to be effective.
Communication is a challenging everyday construct wherein what is transacted fails or succeeds depending on the communication context’s adherence to the six Cs and three Ss. Communication becomes effective when the adequacy level goes up and the inadequacy level comes down, depending on how the three Ss and Six Cs are deployed by the communicator. Communication is a state of being. We communicate all the time in our states of being. We communicate effectively when we allow ourselves and our audience to enter states of becoming.
Great communicators such as the ones mentioned above allowed themselves and their audience to be in changing states of becoming with their own communication strategies. Among them, Thiruvalluvar towers above the rest as he marshals the best possible effective communication contexts in every major and minor unit of analysis and categories one may employ to analyse his work from a critical communication perspective.
There are misconceptions about the critical communication perspective as well just as there are misconceptions about communication and what it has to include, effective communication. The major misconceptions are: i) critical communication perspective ought to have its location only in the critical theory traditions of the Frankfurt school ii) critical communication perspective ought to have its locations in both Frankfurt school’s theoretical tradition as well as what caused its birth, the need to rediscover marxism for the peculiar crises of Western Europe during the early part of last century because of the two World Wars, iii) critical theories of the Frankfurt school are now rather inadequate as the challenges before the World during this century are different from that of the 20th century, v) critical theories are inadequate in the face of critical philosophies of the West and the East which evolved over centuries. Likewise, one may find what appears as a perfect theoretical conception to deal with a contemporary or past crisis also as a misconception. If only the critical thinking ability of the person works in a ceaseless manner to see every state of theoretical or philosophical adequacy as essentially inadequacy, then the canvas of conceptions become mis conceptions and vice versa to promote critical understanding of the issues at hand.
Moreover, all the misconceptions, however, open up a great possibility to think that they can be the basis of a new conception of critical communication perspective, if only they are able to get out of their small circles of enquiry and embrace a larger circle that can accommodate all their visible and invisible essentialist positions as well as other positions which are yet to be captured by their theoretical radars. Their states of being have to be transformed as states of becoming.
In the history of human knowledge, the states of becoming were first revealed in the rhetorical duels of Indian and Tamil philosophers. This philosophical tradition became a very powerful interlocutor of the duels between the proponents of the Vedic tradition and those who took it upon themselves the need to counter the Vedic tradition with a strong sense of social reform. The works of the 24 Thirthankarars and Buddha represent the tradition of the later. The Vedic tradition had social discrimination and the law of the originary cause, the God, as its basis. Fate could be reversed, according to its conception, not because the law of Karma, wants it that way, but because of the ritual potential of the Vedic tradition to reverse Karma’s negative effects as positive.
The philosophical tradition of Ajivikam went a step ahead and propounded that the law of nature was the only law which defined the states of being and becoming. The classical works of Sangam period have their ideological basis in Ajivika philosophy. Buddhism and Jainism differed with this conception and took a reformist position against rituals, but still believed in the power of God and not the law of nature.
If all these conceptions can be also construed as misconceptions, as they remain essentialist to the core, they reveal their true states of being and becoming only in the critical perspectives of Thiruvalluvar. Communication becomes non-essentialist and effective when the communicator becomes well aware of the past,present and future possibilities of social and audience formations. Communication becomes effective when all the conceptions are simultaneously contested or read as conceptions and misconceptions and a way out is suggested in the form of a new conception that seeks to abandon the conventional dialectical approach in favour of the meta plane that pits countless number of dialectical approaches in fray against each other and against the very state of such a being as a discursive discourse of the highest order. There is a limit in any discourse and the limit is no different in the discursive discourse as well. The limit becomes obvious because of the visible and tangible planes of duels or countless number of axes. The limit becomes obvious because what is not visible and tangible.
Thiruvalluvar becomes aware of this and his Kurals are evocative of the limits of their states of being as discourses and discursive discourses as well as their states of becoming as they are making their presence and absence felt as communication contexts in a wider network of possibilities of conceptions and misconceptions with their own sub networks.
If one subscribes to the idea of the limit in terms of the number of Kurals (1330) or the number of words they contain (12000), there is a conception of the structure of his work in terms of the number of couplets, divisions or categories that contain them, but there is also a misconception here when we seek to have a new conception that every couplet harbours as many observational or intellectual positions as there are words or at least factor in the obvious that every couplet is in essence a sum of two ideas, two antithetical positions, then there is a theoretical possibility of reading the limit of every couplet as twosome and the entire body of work as 2660 different observational positions.
If we ascribe the dimension of critical thinking to these 2660 positions, then the limit is defined by the number 7980 as the 2660 observational positions are multiplied by a three positions of critical thinking, the first perspective (subjective), the second perspective (objective) and the third perspective (critical). This is also not the actual limit. The actual limit is inconceivable as the states of becoming are exponential and can not be captured by the limit that we indicate by numbers such as 1330, 2660 or 7980. For instance, if we seek to push the limit further than 7980, then we need not go further than the first visible count, that is 1330. 1330 Kurals are about 1330 contexts of everyday life contexts or the possibilities for human beings in these everyday life contexts. This gets us the possibility of a number higher than 7980 as we can indulge once again in a new order of multiplication, 7980×1330=10,613,400. If you multiply this number with the individual contexts of 7 Crore people of Tamil Nadu and more than 120 Crore population of India, the number edges towards 742 million possibilities and 1200 million possibilities of engagements with Thirukural. This is to point at a great possibility that there can be more than 1200 million ways of conceptions and misconceptions, even as we read Thirukural, purportedly written as a single conception or even as a misconception. Reading Thirukural as a misconception? Yes, that is a possibility too as every conception is countenanced by its misconception. There are as many million possibilities for Thirukural to exist as a misconception in the mind of one who seeks to get dismissive about the entire project of Thiruvalluvar. This can be further multiplied depending on the macro contexts of countless number of cultures, societies and geographies in our world.
(to be continued)
GR 