Medio y mensaje

Abstract

1. This article is an attempt to define the terms “medium” and “message”, and to indicate some of the ways in which the two are related. Also discussed are a number of the difficulties which occur when both notions are deliberately confused, or when it is supposed that there are on one hand “mediums”, and on the other “messages”.
For the moment it is convenient to think of “medium” and “message” as the elements of a communication which function as such. It is true that there are elements of communication which function more frequently as mediums than as messages, but that does not exclude the fact that the notions of message and medium are functional and relative: functional because their role as message or medium allows one to consider them respectively as messages or as mediums; relative because the notion of medium is in relation to that of the message, and vice versa. In fact, there cannot be a message without a medium or a medium without a message.
Generally speaking, we can term mediums all the signs which can be used, with the help of certain keys, to decipher a certain message. But even in the case where the signs are isomorphic with the realities to which the messages correspond, it would still be impossible to collate sign and message. This means that all the signs are conventional —an isolated sign as much as an entire symbolic system— and that therefore there is no necessary or intrinsic connection between sign and message. What are known as natural signs are not strictly speaking signs at all, although they might become so and fulfill the function of designation to the extent to which they form a part of a system of signs. The fact that they come to be considered as components of a system of signs is what allows them to “carry” a message, independently of the fact that they are cases of communication of messages and of responses in a different language from that in which they were transmitted.
Given the lack of intrinsic connection of the signs with the messages, it is obvious that one needs to know the key in order to cipher and decipher a certain system of signs. Even the simplest of signs can be used to transmit various messages, but in every case it will be a conventional use. Although at times it may seem that the use of a certain signal is more “natural” or more “appropriate” by being closer to the representative level, it will always be a conventional use and the “representativity” will be based on a former syntax, the ignorance of which leads us to decipher the message wrongly. The expressions “to seem more natural” or “to seem more representative” are merely modi dicendi; the differences between various signs and systems arise from the differences in their scope or, rather, in their radius of usability. The most natural or most representative signs are those whose possible uses are more circumscribed, although this varies according to the function they fulfill within a language.
The above seems to encounter a certain difficulty. It is often said that in emotive languages the expression is so direct that it forces one to recognize an intrinsic connection between sign and message, or else to conclude that the sign is actually the message. The weakness of that point of view is to presuppose that the understanding and deciphering of a sign demands a previous consulting of the corresponding key. But the key does not disappear even in the most extreme cases, like for example the comprehension of a gesture or interjection. What happens is that the key is inserted in the system of signs, either as the series of norms which governs the uses of the language, or as the consideration of a context of signs within which is the message to be deciphered. Languages that we call artistic, especially the visual ones, present another difficulty. But in these cases the distinction between sign and message is still maintained. The sign goes together with the message, but this would be incomprehensible if it were independent of a system of artistic forms, cultural uses and human situations. Far from possessing no keys, artistic expressions have many.
2. Having emphasized the absence of a necessary or intrinsic connection between sign and message, we must now stress that the latter is not in itself a subsistent reality which mayor may not be transmitted by way of signs —whichever way this reality is understood, whether as a meaning independent of the signs or as a psychic act, a thought or an intention. On the other hand, the sign cannot be understood as a covering for a “meaningful nucleus” which in some way subsists in it. The notion of the sign and in general of the medium is always relative to that of the message. There can’t be no message without a sign, because what we call message is “transmission of message” and the act of transmitting it is realized through signs.
Every message is information, in a very wide sense. There is always information when something is uttered, which depends naturally on whether the expression used fills some function within a “linguistic play” —using the expression in a very wide sense too. Here the scope of the word information is restricted to the semantic contents, but we point out that these are ruled by certain general conditions which apply to all information, whether semantic or not.
A quality of all information and consequently of all semantic information is that whatever one says is a function of what “can be said”. A theory of information relative to messages with semantic content and expressed in common language can consider factors other than the signs actually transmitted, like, for example, knowledge of the situation in which the message is transmitted, but such factors are not more or less “mysterious” elements which allow the receiver to receive a message, but elements susceptible to description which as such may come to form part of a system of signs within which exists the transmission of the message. This allows us to bear in mind the psychic or mental acts without making them the only content of the message; that is to say, it allows us to integrate them into the message as a part of the act of transmission. This implies no comment on the difficult question of the character of psychic or mental acts, it simply accepts that such acts lack meaning within the communication of messages unless they are cipherable and decipherable. In this way the elements which constitute the message are considerably amplified, and included among the signs are not only the ones actually transmitted, but others which are implicit or are understood in the transmission. Such amplification is indispensable, at least in the field of human communication, especially in that of human verbal communication.
The conception of the message as information transmitted through signs in which the message is ciphered and deciphered with the help of one or various keys (which may include the factors that constitute the situation in which the message is emitted) provides us with an answer to the question of there being indirect modes of expression, that is, entire indirect languages and not only indirect or oblique statements within a language.
3. We maintain the thesis that the notions of medium —sign or complex of signs— and message are relative to each other but at the same time extrinsic. However, this does not prevent one from recognizing that there are different kinds of relation between the signs and the messages. Here we have enumerated some of the kinds of relation: 1) Although in principle any sign could designate any thing, the quantity of conventions and rules that would have to be established could in some cases be considerable. Signs have each a different scope and not all are apt for the use one wishes to make of them. 2) Signs are extrinsic to whatever it is a sign of, but we should not suppose that there is only one way of being extrinsic to something: a sign can be the symbol of something, but at other times it can be the name of a thing or an event, or can also fulfill the function of indicating or of representing, etc. 3) Signs can be considered in two ways: as sign-events or as sign-symbols. A sign-event is unique and can be compared to a process that is generally though not exclusively physical. A sign-symbol on the other hand is nothing more than the regularization of sign-events. This does not mean to say that a sign-event has to be reiterated a certain number of times for it to be sign-symbol; it is enough that a sign should form part of a system of signs and have a function. 4) Sign means the way or ways in which a sign functions. The way in which the sign works for the message is the message itself. In this sense the sign (the medium) is the message. Strictly speaking, a system of sign symbols is such precisely because it supports a set of rules which allow the ciphering and deciphering of the signs. 5) The conventions upon which the uses of the signs are based are the rules that are established for such uses. These rules are conventional although they establish themselves and develop “naturally”. 6) For each classification of languages there is a corresponding classification of messages. Here we observe only that the signs themselves, like the rules for using them, can constitute the “content” of a message, in which case a metalanguage must be used for the transmission of the information. 7) Complex systems of sign-symbols can be characterized as objectivations of human acts. We understand by “human acts” the whole range of realizations of which we have experience or knowledge among human beings. Such acts are accomplished in the world —natural and social— and they are based therefore on a certain idea of reality. In this sense a language is an invention. It is not the product of something “real” nor a mere duplication of realities: the systems of sign-symbols are reality-meanings.