It could be a bid to start a conversation, or it could be a conversational move intended not to start a conversation, somewhat as the monkey's playful nip is intended not to start a fight. ![]() Even a simple message like “please pass the salt,” said at dinner, implies some relationship between the speaker and the hearer, depending on the situational context and the use of metacommunicative signals such as facial expression and tone of voice. A message can only be produced in some particular context and manner, thus implying a relationship. It follows from Bateson's theory that much of our communication has the potential to generate paradox insofar as every message includes an implicit metacommunication about the relationship between the communicators that in effect classifies or frames the message as one of a particular type (e.g., friendly or hostile), thus violating the theory of logical types. One of Bateson's key insights is that ordinary communication necessarily seldom conforms to this logical rule. Therefore a question such as the following is logically impermissible, according to the theory of logical types: “Is the class of all classes that are not members of themselves a member of itself?” The question is impermissible because it precludes any logically consistent answer. ![]() The nature of this paradox can be explained by the theory of logical types introduced by Whitehead and Russell in the early 20th century, according to which terms at different levels of abstraction (such as “classes” and “classes of classes”) cannot be treated as equivalent in the same proposition. In Bateson's interpretation, the monkey's playful nip denotes a bite but does not denote what the bite for which it stands would denote (i.e., a hostile relationship). This metacommunication involves a paradox in that it contradicts the ordinary meaning of the primary message, somewhat as in the classic paradox of Epimenides: “All Cretans are liars,” uttered by a Cretan, is a statement that is false only if true, and true only if false. He hypothesized that monkeys must have ways of signaling one another that “this is play” while performing actions such as biting, which normally communicate hostility. Observing monkeys at play, Bateson noted the strong similarity between playful interaction and actual combat. Especially important is a type of implicit metacommunicative messages about how to interpret signals of friendliness or hostility. These metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages are usually implicit in the communication they can be explicit (e.g., someone could explicitly say “‘Media’ is a plural noun,” or “Let's be friends”), but more commonly the respective points would be made implicitly, by using the word media as a plural noun or by acting in a friendly way. Beyond the denotative level (the literal content of what is said) are more abstract levels of two kinds: metalinguistic (messages about the language being used) and metacommunicative (messages about the relationship between the communicators). One of those essays, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” opens with the observation that human verbal communication operates simultaneously at multiple levels of abstraction. Theoryīateson continued to develop the theory of metacommunication through a series of essays that were collected in his most influential book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson, 1972/1999). This entry introduces the theory of metacommunication and discusses applications and extensions of the theory, studies of metadiscourse and reflexive language use, and metacommunicative reflexivity in postmodernist theory and culture. Ruesch and Bateson described metacommunication as a “new order” of communication that arose in the evolution of mammals and explains some distinctively complex, creative, and deeply paradoxical qualities of social interaction. The significance of metacommunication goes well beyond the obvious fact that communication can be a topic of discussion, so we do sometimes communicate about communication. For example, “metadata” means data derived from and used to process data (thus, data about data), “metacognition” refers to an individual's awareness of his or her own mental processes, and “metatheory” is theory about theory. The prefix meta renders an ancient Greek preposition roughly meaning (in certain constructions) “after” or “next to,” but in modern English this prefix usually attributes a quality of self-reference such that something is “about” itself or its own kind of thing. ![]() ![]() Jurgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson introduced the term metacommunication, defined as “communication about communication,” in their 1951 book Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (Ruesch & Bateson, 1951/1968).
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