BULLETIN NO. 11

Communication: a reflection in its beginnings

By Francesa Gargallo

For most people, communicating is a natural thing in so far as all human beings tend to enter into meaningful contact with others. We communicate our needs in different ways: we play, talk, paint, sing, write. We use languages, following the grammatical rules of each language. This proves that communicating is a tendency common to all human beings, while how we communicate depends on different cultures.

The contemporary world - which by 1990 had buried three centuries of modernity that included the burning of witches and Newton's physics, Cartesian logic and Hobbes' political philosophy - now has communications media that are remote from the human body, although they have not lost the historic mark of masculine dominance. The telegraph lets us have messages without messengers; on the radio we hear music without musicians, in movies we see images apparently in movement; television informs us about worlds whose exact geographic location we ignore. The Internet, the fastest way of communication since the last decade, allows us to exchange desires without censorship and that only need a cybernetic grammar to be expressed. And to get lost too.

The fact is that all these new ways of communicating have not replaced the old ones, that are still the most convincing although they are limited, nor have the technocrats who develop them changed the aggressive, sexist content full of male dominance and racism. In all of this century we have not known even 40 minutes of peace shared by all on the globe, women are still earning 40% less than men, genocides have multiplied. People kill and are killed in the name of ideas and benefits as people used to do in the name of divinity, while all the communications media - or should I say the means of dissemination? - cheapen the fundamental ideas of the relativity of ideological concepts and interpretations of reality.

In spite of this defect in the communications processes of the mass media, that are ever more rapid and repetitive, women this century have made ourselves heard, we have been the main gravediggers of that modernity built on the ashes of our eight million bodies burned in the seventeenth century. Bodies and knowledge, bodies and grammars of gossip, of embroidery, of shared child care, of interpreting the tolling of the bells, the peace movements, bodies and communications.

Suffragettes, socialists, feminists have questioned the centrality of the masculine body in the philosophy and in the representation of the human, developing interpretive grammars of reality based fundamentally in the search for a pacific coexistence of the sexes and of peoples. (Before and during the First and Second World Wars, on March 8 European women demonstrated always in favor of peace in the name of life, passing beyond the Marxist demands centered on the unity of workers.)

The transformation of language by women has been slow. Radio and cinema wanted women who would respond to the dominating image that they respected: martyrs and heroines, housewives and lovers, all had to be strictly heterosexual and in love with the culture, power and expressions incarnated in the male body.

In the beginning only a few magazines managed to break the silence of centuries of ignoring feminine culture. Learning to write, paradoxically, for many women meant learning to express what the spoken word did not permit. The university class rooms, however, that at the end of the 19th century began to receive women as students, remained closed to the teaching of feminine ideas up until relatively recently. Even a doctor and teacher as libertarian as Maria Montessori, due to the isolation from other women that she experienced, could not imagine the needs of girls in the class room and productive life. We can only understand others by talking to and with each other.

In this century where women have had a new encounter among themselves and with the world, speed - not a good ally of self-perception - has marked the destiny of contemporary western society. From transportation to communications, development has been measured in terms of speed. The need to control, to exercise power through the word, and to manipulate feelings, have been rapidly confirmed in the mass media.

Consciousness raising, that form of sexed communication that women invented during the 1960s to think about themselves, their lives, education and feelings, implied the meeting of bodies in freedom. Voices were expressed from the emerging emotions, and articulated around an effort to understand oneself, the other, and to build codes to exchange messages. Consciousness raising help reinvent the feminine body without having to pass through the sieve of the male tongue.

It is true that consciousness raising implied a form of feminist organization that was overtaken by the women's will for public action. I wish to emphasize, however, the importance of the consciousness raising language in the learning process, that relation that does not exist without the presence of a female teacher and female student.

In the traditional schools, the meta-linguistic self-regulation of the teacher and student rarely allows a space for real communication. We do not speak the same way in front of those we consider equal or in front of someone we fear (or do not respect).

School was and is the traditional space of competition and one of the most brutal and determining rites of passage to adulthood of all cultures. It's enough to think about its mechanisms of qualification, the exam. Feminist thinking has questioned the definitions of infancy, studentship and human subjectivity, when it refuses to accept the model of humanity built on the idea of a healthy adult male, economically active and dominating (colonizer). And given that there cannot be an idea without its expression, feminist didactic methods do not accept communicative situations like those of traditional teaching methods.

To share a common space, feel empathy, avoid the resource of systematizing ideas to let flow intuitions that become tips for later theoretical work - these are all elements of the educative communication in feminist teaching. Women have discovered that sexual inequality - sexism- is a power relationship between the sexes that forms the context of all expression produced in modern society and that still informs contemporary society. Generally women and men use the same set of signs for ideological communication. If our ideologies differ -for example with respect to the idea of humanity- we have a crossing of different interpretations for each symbol, a struggle of political and cultural interests. For a while, the interest of the dominating sexual group is imposed, while opposition grows in silence and the symbol's meaning is no longer just one accepted meaning. Only communication among women interested in learning from each other will enable us to understand how language and its grammar reflect the social power between the sexes.