An alternative starting point for thinking about communication, then, which I prefer, is not the individual, nor 'language', nor self and other, but the world. I have always been struck, ever since I started work on it, by the essential worldliness of broadcasting. That is why I was so bowled over by Heidegger's stunning analysis of the Umwelt, the round-about-me everyday world in which 'I', in each case, dwell. We encounter the world and all its everyday things as zuhanden, as 'ready-to-hand' or, simply, handy - a pragmatics, not an erotics, of touch. From reading Being and Time I at last came to understand the world as interactively communicative in all its parts and as a whole; the world 'as a relational totality of involvements'. Everyday things are indeed pragmata but we should pause to consider exactly how it is that they are so and not otherwise, and it is part of Heidegger's extraordinary genius to remind us of this.

¶ 8:15 PM