A jewish ontotheology of miscommunication: re-thinking the theological ground of Speaking into air Bryce Peake School of Journalism &

Communication, University of Oregon Introduction In his book Speaking into the Air, John Durham Peters (1999) posits that miscommunication is the truest state of communication, and often mistakenly framed as something that can be overcome through technological advances. Knowing this, one may ask "to what does speaking into the air refer?" As an action, it refers to one entity casting a message into the air, with the hopes that someonespecific or anonymousmight intercept the message. The question of who is what Peters intellectually plays with; he intends 'speaking into air' to be both the act of recording radio communicationwhich he examines most closely as a medium that absorbs and creates cultural pre-conditions for the interpretation of media in general, and as referring to spiritualism and the ways in which mediums speak with spirits during sancesthe cultural metaphor which comes to regiment the experience of radio. There is also a third 'speaking into air' which lies implicit in Peters' argument, and flows from his own subjective position: that of God1 speaking into air and it arriving in the ears of man. Such a conceptualization is abundant in the first chapter, in which Socrates and Jesus are contrasted in the appraisal of dialog versus dissemination, and whereby the one way communication of God (speaking) is taken as a given. In numerous instances throughout the book, God's speech provides a central point of return, and the Garden of Eden an origin myth for the unalterable fact of miscommunication. It is this theological assumption with which I hope to engage. My purpose for writing is not to dispute Peters' claim for miscommunication, but rather to reframe the explicitly modern Christian-ized presupposition his argument is based on. I do so by combining his project with the Judaic interpretation of the origins of language as presented in the philosophy of Walter Benjaminan author to whom Peters is much indebted. This perspective enhances Peters' claim that the most perfect state of communication will forever be miscommunication, and double-y so. In short, the Hebrew bible and Judaic understanding of the origins of miscommunication suggests that miscommunication developed twice over: before the fall between Adam and Eve, and after the Fall, between humans and G-d. In what follows, I first outline the concept of miscommunication as it existed in the paradisial Garden of Eden between Adam and Eve as presented by Walter Benjamin. I choose to use the term paradisial language, as opposed to Adamic language, in order to show a division between the two: in particular, Adam is charged with translating the paradisial language into
1

Throughout the essay, I alternate between God and G-d. I do so out of respect and reverence for the Jewish faith. Following Deut 12:3, there is no prohibition on writing the name of G-d, however there is one against erasinga form of defilement ofthe Holy Name. Observant Jews avoid writing the name casually because of the risk that it may be later destroyed accidentally or purposively. The exciting theological debate regarding typing the name aside, I use G-d to thus refer to the Judaic 'form', where God refers to the Mormon. 1

Adamic, and (opposite of the theology of Mormonism) G-d remains silent. This first section of the essay embodies a critical reading of Benjamin's work, particularly what I uncover and refer to as 'the paradox of Eve'. Second, I will show how this early philosophical work leads to the definition of media that Benjamin uses throughout his entire philosophical and critical career, and the ways in which this speaks further to Peters' theory. My purpose, with which I will conclude, is to show the ways in which a more holistic approach to communication, which considers the multitude of epistemological positions present in any one historical segment, can be used to strengthen and/or dissolve Peters' Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. The Speaking God "Modern men and women stand before bureaucracies and the representations, or wait by telephones in the same way that sinners stood before the God who hides his face: anxiously sifting the chaos of events for signs and messages.... To survive in the modern world, men and women must become diviners of inscrutable others, interpret the moods of secretaries, the words of department heads... as if they were the language of some hidden, murky, remote god, content to speak only in darkness and in dreams" (Peters 1999:202) As Jurgen Habermas (1967) has suggested, regardless of intentions of neutrality, no theorizing can be done in total neutrality; the theorist always leaves a trace of his own subjective position in the theory. This is not to devalue the theorist's attempts at understanding the world, but rather to suggest that the theory developed always comes with ideological strings attached. Peters is no exception to this. The benefits of his critique are impossible to deny, as are his statements regarding the perfect imperfection of communication. However, the trace of his subjectivity in his theory of (mis)communication bears heavily on his argument. The trace with which I will engage with are those of his own religious Mormon beliefs or at very least his indoctrination into those beliefs through his vast amounts of research on Mormonism and communication. Speaking to the quote above, Peters' belief reveals the understanding of contemporary miscommunication as being an inability for Adam to hear God. Such a belief implies a belief that God speaks. According to the Mormonism of Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, and Elizabeth Ann Whitney, Adamic language is that which God used to communicate directly to Adam, and later to Brigham Young (Robertson 1992). Indeed, Joseph Smith's own translation of the bible refers to "The Book of Remembrance," written in Adamic: "And a book of remembrance was kept, in which was recorded, in the language of Adam, for it was given unto as many as called upon God to write by the spirit of inspiration" (Moses 6:5-6). What these presuppose, however, is that God speaks unmediated unto them: the divine tongue is directly from God himself to Adam, and not mediated by things or signs. Furthermore, Adamic language never 'disappears'; that is to say, Mormon's do not believe in the Fall from Grace, or at least not in a sense of a true fall. Adam and Eve's partaking of the forbidden fruit was necessary so that they could bring joy to mankind (2 Nephi 2:23-25). The belief is that God expected Adam and Eve to understand that He wished for them to break the

command "of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it" in order to "be fruitful and multiply." As heavenly bodies, Mormonism teaches that Adam and Eve's bodies were only vessels, or more appropriately imago, and not them as such. Thus, they were unable to die and unable to create. In order to obey God, they understood that they must disobey2. To experience joy is the apotheosis of mankind, and it could only be gained through the procreation of children, which requires the bodies blessed unto them through the removal of Grace3. Following this, however, Adam writes down the word as he was given it by God. In the removal from the Garden, he is able to recall the ways in which God spoke to him, such that he could pass it on to future generations. Within this is a particular theological leaning: that what God spoke to Adam was translatable, and what Adam translated was the word of God. "If we believe Hegel, the Garden of Eden was a zoo. The first item of business was the naming of animals" (Peters 1999:242). To whom does Adam listen? To whom does the lamp communicate itself? The mountain? The fox?but here the answer is: to man. Walter Benjamin, 'On Language As Such' p. 64. In this section, I will introduce an alternative interpretation of Adamic and Paradisial language, and its relationship to communication as presented by Walter Benjaminwhile at the same time contextualizing Benjamin's thought. Particularly interesting is the way in which Adamic language is not the language of G-d, but a translation of the paradisial language- a language of things installed in them by G-d, yet distant from her own voice4. I begin by outlining, simply, Benjamin's interpretation of the Garden and what presents this problem. Following this, however, I engage exegetically with Benjamin's interpretation: as it exists, Eve presents an important paradox to the situation. The existence of Eve, I will suggest, allows us to assume that miscommunication is ontological twice over: first, between Adam and Eve, and then between them and God following the Fall. In the essay On Language as Such and the Language of Man (1999), Benjamin develops
2

Such an assumption seems like a heavy bet to place, and how could Adam have known this? According to Mormon beliefs, Adam is the name of an earthly form; before being Adam, Adam was the angel Michael who was responsible for leading the forces of heaven against those of Lucifer. Adam previously possessed divine logic, and thus we can assume he was able to reason through it, or had access to it, in some way. 3 We might also attribute Peters' devout interest to the concept of Eros to this religious drive. 4 In this essay, I gender G-d as her, so as to counter the masculine imaging of what is truly a gender-neutral, or 'beyond gender', entity. Where G-d might be translated as he, grammatical gender is not an indicator of actual gender in biblical Hebrewthere are no gender-neutral pronouns the equivalent of the word it. Given the metaphoric creation of the worldnot through logoi, but through techn, the feminine entity described through masculine grammar becomes the most appropriate understanding of G-d, and translation in this paper reflects understanding, not strict linguistic translation. (See, Paula Reimers, 1993. Feminism, Judaism, and God the Mother, Conservative Judaism 46.) 3

the concept of a language of things, descendent from the paradisial garden5. Benjamin's development of this theory stands in contrast to Peters' account of the Garden. For Peters, Adam is the name-giver, whereas for Benjamin he is simply the translator of a divinely given language which things always already speak. Thus, Peters assumes that Adam converses in the divine language of God, Benjamin instead suggests that Adam converses in the divine language inherent in things, put there by God but not the communication of God herself. Even in the contemporary, there is a language of stones, one of phones, and one of scones. Lamps speak as if possessed by spirits. Mountains and foxes engage in dialog. All of the silent shouts of things, according to Benjamin's conclusion, are G-d's own will but not G-d's voice. While Benjamins early philosophy was oriented towards the use of language, the focus is not so much on language content, but its form as communication; Benjamin's concern is not so much with language itself, but with 'language as such'. In essence, it is oriented towards highlighting the fallen-ness, and imperfection, of language 'as such'; after the Fall, language can do nothing more than fall short of true communication. To provide an example, we know where the meaning of a sentence comes from: it is borrowed from my act, or in Kantian terms my judgment (1790) and designation (1787). With words, however, whence comes their meaning? For Benjamin, pulling from stories of the paradisial garden, any word that is properly meaningful has its source in the thing it means, not in the name giver. Words that are properly meaningful derive from the things that they mean: all of nature speaks. This is not unlike Ludwig Wittgenstein's (1953) project in Philosophical Investigations as Stanley Cavell (1999) has suggested, Benjamin's philosophy "may be seen specifically as immeasurably distant from and close to Wittgenstein's anti- or counterphilosophy in Philosophical Investigations" (236). Logician Louis Carrol's (under the pseudonym Dodgson) (1865) Alice in Wonderland, a favorite story of Wittgenstein's, provides an ideal example.6 Correcting Alice's calling his cravat a tie, although it is really a belt, Humpty Dumpty succinctly states "When I use a word... it means just what I choose it to mean-- neither more nor less." Language as such must be considered both as a thing and the conditions that make the thing possible. As is such for Wittgenstein, the paradox that meaning is somehow both objective ('out there') and derived from a subject position (socially constructed) requires specific conceptual tools. Benjamin mobilizes two notions of meaning intended to parse these apart: authentic meaning, as in anything susceptible to designation) and inauthentic meaning (when a words meaning comes from stipulation).7 It is only under the condition of authentic meaning that inauthentic meaning is possible; speech requires that nature have spoken. This is Benjamin's conclusion from a larger project which he never finishes: a systematic treatment of language and mathematics as divine languages (Richter 2000). Thus, to return to the title, we are to understand Language as Such in
5

Important to note is that Benjamin does not take the biblical story as being metaphorical, but rather interprets it in a literal sense.
6

George Pitcher (1965) argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll investigate fantasy and fiction as an exercise in strengthening reason and its application; to imagine the world in its most absurd, and then insert logical conclusions, quickly reveals the illogicality of even the most rational claim. 7 Inauthentic meaning is not to say that it is not meaningful in some real sense, but instead to argue that the conditions of its meaningful-ness are mediated. 4

CONTRAST to mathematics. In this account, Benjamin develops a prototypical model for understanding the relationship between language and mathematics as things in themselves:

God Creates

Mathematics Think

Things Call

Human Beings Know Given the overwhelming difficulty with this, Benjamin decides only to work with the second triangular (God, Things, and Humans) in hopes of developing a second, opposite facing triangular (God, Human, Mathematics), and then combining them. It is important to recognize, however, that the source of this reflection is not mystical insight, but rather the Wittgenstein-ian notion that for things to be meaningful they must be the source of their own meaning. That is, to re-formulate in the notion of the language of things, that all things properly named, in terms of individuation, are properly named because the name is the translation of the thing's language's own self-name. Things speak, and that language is translated into another languageone of names, that of manwhere things gain names.8 We are wise, further, to understand this as very distinct from a Platonic anamnesis, where the true natural name is embedded in the thing's essence. Benjamin suggests "in philosophical contemplation the idea releases itself from the innermost region of reality as the word that reclaims its name-giving rights." Furthermore, "As ideas give themselves without intention in the act of naming, so must they renew themselves in philosophical contemplation" (Benjamin: GS vol. 1, pp217). The point here is that everything speaks. But if this is so, why do we not hear them? Benjamin states that we do not hear this speech because of the Fall from grace, but the conditions of possibility of meaning is that things speak to us. Every thing, in this sense, speaks its own language; it is not representing itself by name, but rather speaking its own existence: Benjamin's theory of language is not one of representation, but one of things. It may seem, at this point, that he is attempting to provide an objective encounter. The question that might arise then is, if a single object yields meaning, and two different people read that object differently, and they have rival conceptions, how does Benjamin offer a solution to the impasse. The answer is what takes us deeper into the ontotheological origins of language: there is only one person who names, or more aptly put, only one person who translates the
8

This is the divergence between Wittgenstein and Benjamin. Wittgenstein sees sentences as pictures; words are images that represent. This is different, because meaning is not a representationif it is authenticbut immanent in the things themselves. Radically different, no representation of picturing. Wittgenstein says a certain kind of sentence, in a b formula, is the equivalent of a stick figure doing something-throwing a ball. 5

language of things to the language of names: his name was Adam. Benjamin's return to the biblical text is done for this reason, and with one condition in mind: if the bible is revelation, then it has a corresponding revelatory conception of language (hence the use of Kant's term ontotheology in the title). The account of Adamic naming obviates the question. This return is brought about by this very problem of reception and judgment. Adamic man was receptive to meaning but not affected by it; he was able to hear, such that he was able to hear the voice that all things spoke as they were made able by the grace of G-d. Following the fall, however, man was no longer able to hear the paradisial language, and thus could not receive meaning, only judge its existence: the fall represents a removal from knowledge to that of judgment (in the Kantian sense, which I will return to). Whereas the world before the fall was immediate to Adamas in not mediated by names, language was not representative but of the things themselvesthe world after the fall becomes mediated; whereas meaning was inherent in the voices of G-d's creations 'as such'immediatethey now require a creation of meaning. But meaning, as it is developed in a theory of signs and interpretationjudging meaning , in the theo-epistemic sense is a sin: G-d created the world in perfection, and through judging meaning, one creates something which the creation does not need. This might best be seen in naming, whereby using an object's name works under the metaphysical assumption that the name of the thing is inherent to some essence of the thing itself: to use the name is to append to the object which speaks its own name, to which we are deaf in our fallen-ness, something for which G-d did not have a need. Thus, we would understand that Adam is called upon with one task in mind: to translate the language of things into the language of names. This translation is an intralinguistic process of moving a lower language into a higher language: lower in the sense that it is divided among the creatures, the higher language being such because it is sonorous, doesn't have to be material, and because it is universal. Before Adamic language, things were all different languages unknowable to one another, following they are given their own names such that they can be lumped together. However, such a notion creates an impasse: if G-d has called upon Adam to be the translator of things to names, how does one account for Eve, whom he must namewho does not have her own language? Eve is different than things, and thus has to be different in language. As Benjamin states "The theory of proper names is the theory of the frontier between finite language and infinite language9" (Benjamin 1991:69). When one names somebody Eve, they are naming her in such a way that she is different from one of her own kind, which is fundamentally different than naming things which are always only their own thing. Eve represents a designation of 'kind', not individuals. It is impossible to name somebody something without a trace of designation, in the Kantian sense. Eve is born fundamentally meaning-less. She doesn't speak her own language, she like Adam is a function of translation. Any language that is given to her, is given her meaning it is not hers. It is finite. Even before the fall, Eve represents a finite language. To recount and expand on what I am here on out referring to as "the paradox of Eve," there exists within this theory an over glorification of Adamic responsibility: Adam must enunciate the names of which things speak themselves vis a vis paradisial speech, and must also name Eve. Put differently, Adam enunciates the names of those things that speak their own names through the paradisial language they were divinely given, however, Adam must name
9

Infinite: language of things that can't be defined, infinite as in non-finable. 6

Eve, who does not speak her name to the world through the divinely installed paradisial language, in order to distinguish from her own kinda step not necessary if things truly speak their own name. If such is true, then Eve, by not speaking her own name, does not have a language through which to speak herself into existence. Furthermore, if not divinely installed with the paradisial language, Eves relationship to it is much different than Adams. For Adam, the paradisial tongue is part of his core subjectivity, whereas Eve is much less loosely tied to it. The implications of this, for Benjamin, is that the Fall was more detrimental for Adam than for Eve; Adam lost the immediacy of the world and the core to his subjectivity and purpose, Eve simply lost the echoes of things in themselves, which were never immediate.10 Miscommunication, as I have been highlighting in this section, is doubly present in the Jewish Biblical account of the Garden as presented by Benjamin: first between Eve and things (and possibly even Adam, given that Adam is granted access to a sphere of meaning which Eve is not- the language of things), and secondly between Adam and things following the Fall from Grace. Peters' quote seems exceptionally appropriate: "They are naked and not ashamed, They are some of the aliens among us; women are some other aliens as are men" (Peters 1999:260). The communication between men and women is, even divinely, fraught with at the very least noise on the line at Adam's connection. As Peters rightfully claims, miscommunication is the most perfect form of communication, as it was in the Garden of Eden, and as it exists today. Mediation and the impossibility of communication In principo erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum. Hoc erat in principo apud Deum. Having provided a new foundation for Peters' claim, I would like to take my essay one step further: Benjamin develops from this theory of the origin of language his definition of mediation. In what follows, I will show the ways in which Benjamin's theory of mediation aids Peters' own theory of miscommunication. From the perspective of Eve, and as is the case for all following the Fall, every language as such means the same thing: 'pure language'. Any meaning of language is always a deviation of what language itself means. To return to the Wittgenstein-ian problem, whatever I say, I never mean pure language, what I mean is the absence of a pure language- I mean what I mean, which is never pure because pure means non-subjective: talk without being affected.
10

Benjamin's early from philosophy is often divided from his later philosophy. Although not essential to this paper's argument, I think it is essential to note that this is not entirely the case. Benjamin believes, as does Peters, that neither communication, nor technology, re-organize the subject positions of its users; instead, it is understood through an already existing cultural logic. To put concretely in terms of Benjamin's psuedo-Marxist critique, the notion that the commodity speaks to us through the window of the arcade shopan idea which he takes from his study of Baudelairetaps into the fact that we are pre-conditioned to hear the speech of objects. Just as Adam translated the language of things into the language of names, so do 19th century men translate the language of commodities into the language of desire. This is the focus of an essay I am currently writing, with specific attention to what this means for those who occupy the ontological space of Eve- women. 7

For Benjamin, the contemporary ideal mediathose that come closest to divine language are language and color. Where Kant's Transcendental Doctrine of Elements (in the Critique of Pure Reason, 1787) suggested that space and time are non-derivatives, or transcendental givens, absolutes, the Neo-Kantians (Rickert [Benjamin's first mentor], Honigswald, Vorlnder, etc.) suggest rather that space and time are things used to create the measure of science, and therefore are not simply givens, but objects used in the construction of their own given-ness. Taking the notion that space and time are no longer givens, Benjamin mobilizes the Kantian typic so as to suggest that language as such, that is as a thing in the world where content and form are indistinguishable and inseparable in experience, and color, the perception and not the thing, are the true universal absolutes and transcendental givens. Interestingly, Benjamin defines media as something that mediates the mediation itself; as in language after the fall, media is the thing that carries the message that need not be but simultaneously must be in order for any trace of being-ness to exist. Language, in other words, signs our ability to sign and nothing more, and media is the system that recognizes our reliability of signing to stay connected to the world. Language is the media par excellence, in that it only mediates and nothing is immediate from it; there is a virtuality to the meaning of things, there but not truly. What Benjamins philosophy of language shows us is that we can define a media as anything in which the medium and the means for moving the mediums are mutually exclusive, and in which the means require the destruction of the medium in order to be mediated. Thus, to place it back into Benjamins theosophy of the origin of language as such, communication requires language, whereby the communication destroys the language such that it does not appear as language as such, but as virtually immediate communication. After the fall of man, language as such is the best that humans can achieve. Such a consideration is also essential for the spiritualist metaphor11 used by Peters. Peters suggests that William James question, in the context of communication, is about the possibility of communication through a media that makes invisible its technology. Radio, as people interact with it, comes to stand for the voice on the other end and the transmission that is heard. Nobody
11

There seems to me an ambiguity in Peters' argument: is he claiming that people understand radio as a spiritual media, or do they understand in terms of the spiritual medium? This has been an essential question in the anthropological study of religion throughout history. The early anthropologist Edward Tylor (1871) dealt specifically with religious terminology in the world, and its relation to religious experience. He suggested specifically that all primitive peoples were animists (everything has a soul, fetishism being that objects have souls) because they could not distinguish between dreams and waking consciousness. Tylors characterization resonates well with one interpretation of Peters and Douglas : that people listen to radio as if it is a spiritual medium. In 1912, however, Durkheims Les Formes lementaires de la Vie Religieuse provided evidence otherwise. Despite the fact that some dreams give rise to notions of spiritual doubles bodily and worldly, and that some religious ideas explain oneiric phenomena, there is no direct causation, and no proof, that all religious ideas originate from dreams. Durkheim suggests the exact opposite, actually: religion pre-existed dreams, and were used to transformer the scattered, meaningless images of an individuals dream into a socially meaningful occurrence that only served to buttress religion, and consequently the dominant ordering of society. That is, to return to Peters, spiritualism was used to make sense of communication, not communication was a form of spiritualism. 8

listens to the radio, unless it is turned on; the voice erases the thing, the media its source of mediated-ness As dialogue with the living no longer required proximity of their bodies, neither did dialogue with the dead... The central question of psychical research was the possibility of communication between discarnate minds and those still incarnate, and vice versa (Peters 1999:194). Put differently, the question was in what ways does the voice of the deceased whether it be an incorporeal visitor or a composite image built of the minds of those present in the sancerelate and affect the body of the one who speaks. What happens when there are two ghosts in the shell? Thought must be situated within the history of the body, just as communication in that of technology; where Peters' unique thought process departs is the fact that these must also be cross-examined. What happens, he might be seen as asking, when the mind spoken does away with the technology that transmits itself (184). "Reading, reverie, the phonograph, and film connect people as much as touch" (187) claims Peters, yet he scrutinizes the metaphysics of this touch. He does so, returning to the above notion of the perfect impossibility of pure communication, by suggesting that the touch itself is never clearly understood; what extra trouble should the virtual touch present to us? Communication, and this is Peters' major claim, is not perfect and can never be, to debate which form of communication is further from perfection is thus fool's errand. This same conclusion exists on a meta-level for Benjamin, and elucidates the way in which he thinks about technology. Just as the ideal media removes the traces of its mediation, so does technologyas its own type of mediaattempt to over-write the ontotheological foundations that mediate our thoughts of it; put differently, technology erases the fact that, as Kant was so apt to put, it is not simply the series of parts in a specific mechanism that makes a machine work, but something beyond that as well. We do not understand the way a machine works, but can only describe the ways in which it does. Benjamins philosophy of history is predicated on the notion that technology does not re-organize subjectivity; rather, it draws out and emphasizes a specific cultural pre-condition in order to make itself meaningful; that is, on the ideology that underlies that 'something more' beyond the parts of the machine. This same notion is deeply embedded in Peters' overall project, to declare that the rapid changes in communication did not create all new neural pathways in the brain, but instead routed together numerous pre-existing stations in new waysmetaphorically speaking. Communication, for Peters, was so radically new that it existed at the edges of understanding. Like Benjamin in the description of history, and Kant before him in the description of 'understanding' machines, Peters uses the word 'sublime' to describe the moment when communication existed in the outer limit of human experience (hence the use of spiritualism to understand it); but, just as the case was with philosophers before him, the words used to describe that zone outside our ability to speak of tell us nothing about the unsayable phenomenon itself. Conclusion The emphasis of this paper has been on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, as a modernist new-Kantian moreso than a critical theorist; however, the goal is not simply to use Benjamin and Peters as lenses onto one another. My goal, instead, was to show the ways in which new subject positions, in this case a Judaic version of the biblical creation myth, further affirms Peters' suggestion that miscommunication is the most perfect form of communication. At

a more broad level, it is intended to suggest that the inclusion of multiple subject positions allows us, not solely a critique of an idea, but also the opportunity to strengthen its foundations. Peters' claim for perfect miscommunication, here, is strengthened through an understanding of a Judaic subject position. Just as Peters claims, Benjamin suggests in his Trauerspiel and implicitly in the work on Baudelaire, that there is almost no element of modernity in which we have put so much belief as 'language'a rhetorical proxy for communication. As Jefferey St. John states in the essay Communication as Failure (2006:254), "I do not disparage that hope, but I do not for a moment believe it is a reasonable one."

Works Cited Benjamin, W. 1999. "On Language as such and on the language of man", in Gesammelte Schriften [Collected Writings]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag Dodgson, C.L. (aka Lewis Carroll). 1865. Alice in Wonderland. Online text used for citation. Durkheim, E. 1912. Les Formes lementaires de la Vie Religieuse. Paris: Habermas, J. 1967 (1990). On the logic of the social sciences. Boston: The MIT Press. Kant, I. 1787 (1998). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1790 (2007). Critique of Judgment, trans. N. Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press Peters, J.D. 1999. Speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Pitcher, G. 1965. Wittgenstein, nonsense, and Lewis Carroll. Massachusetts Review 6:591-611. Richter, G. 2000. Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (German Literary Theory and Culture Series). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Robertson, JS. 1991. "Adamic language", in Encyclopedia of Mormonism. New York: Macmillan. v. 1, pp. 18-19. Smith, J. (Trans.). 1830. "The book of Moses", in The Pearl of Great Price. St. John, J. 2006. "Communication as Failure", in Communication as... perspectives on theory, ed. G. Shepherd, J. St. John, & T. Striphas. London: Sage Press. . 1830. "The second book of Nephi", in The Book of Mormon. Tylor, E.B. 1871. Primitive Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.

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