There comes a moment, or a site, in any communicative exchange, when (or where) something vital is lost. This could be simple misinterpretation or mistranslation, the need to exercise tact or restraint, a lack of context by which to understand what’s being communicated, or constraints of space or time. My interest is precisely those moments and sites, of the limits of contemporary forms of communication. In CCT, I plan to find out what those limits define, how they’re formed, and how one can communicate the limit of communication at all. I will bring interlinguistic skills, creative writing, and background that ranges from physical labor to cultural studies to bear on the problems I engage.
The most primary issue at stake in this question of limits is that of communication across technological and cultural boundaries, which is why this program seems well-suited to my needs and interests. Those boundaries – language, race, gender, class, religion, distance, politics, media, and physical bodies – lead to ends of one form of communication, forcing a change in that form. That force, that agency, demands early and frequent attention if I am to think what the change might look, act, or feel like. This would depend of the limits in question, like cultural literacy and legibility, or technological capacity and capability. For example, translation is one change in form brought about by the limits of language. My interest here rests in what’s lost in translation, and how that loss itself can be communicated.
Other changes of communicative form might include censorship, mediation, development, and revolution. This last is a good example of another important question I hope to ask: how can one represent the limit of representation? In this case, can revolution be represented by anything other than itself? And along those lines, might the impossibility of representation itself form the condition of possibility for such a change’s realization?
Understanding what stops us from exchanging information across these technological and cultural boundaries can only lead to a greater exchange of information, if only at the level of information about what we cannot communicate. This would be, then, the communication of the fact of communicating itself, which is (necessarily, and thereby) an establishment of community. I believe that by engaging the limits of communication across technological and cultural boundaries, we push those limits, giving new relevance to issues of policy, identity, production, and faith. I am here to find out just how far some limits can be pushed, and what remains when we move from one way of thinking to another.