Corey Anton

How Non-being Haunts Being reveals how the human world is not reducible to “what is.” Human life is an open expanse of “what was” and “what will be,” “what might be” and “what should be.” It is a world of desires, dreams, fictions, historical figures, planned events, spatial and temporal distances, in a word, absent presences and present absences.

Corey Anton draws upon and integrates thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Bergson, Kenneth Burke, Terrence Deacon, Lynn Margulis, R. D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Douglas Harding, and E. M. Cioran. He discloses the moral possibilities liberated through death acceptance by showing how living beings, who are of space not merely in it, are fundamentally on loan to themselves.

A heady multidisciplinary work, How Non-being Haunts Being explores how absence, incompleteness, and negation saturate life, language, thought, and culture. It details how meaning and moral agency depend upon forms of non-being, and it argues that death acceptance in no way inevitably slides into nihilism. Thoroughgoing death acceptance, in fact, opens opportunities for deeper levels of self-understanding and for greater compassion regarding our common fate. Sure to provoke thought and to stimulate much conversation, it offers countless insights into the human condition.

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781683932840/How-Non-being-Haunts-Being-On-Possibilities-Morality-and-Death-Acceptance

"Corey Anton is quickly becoming a major voice in the developing interdisciplinary field of communication and philosophy. Selfhood and Authenticity explores the landscape marked out in his investigations with a combined theoretical incisiveness and praxis-oriented understanding. It makes a very important contribution to the existing literature in the field." -- Calvin O. Schrag, author of The Self after Postmodernity

"Corey Anton's creative utilization of phenomenologies of embodiment as a basis for a communicative self is accentuated by a clear command of phenomenological literature. The discussion of sociality is excellent, and the explication of temporality is grand in scope. The work is, in other words, a short systematic treatise." -- Lewis R. Gordon, Brown University

“...extending some important strains of his previous award-winning work, Selfhood and Authenticity (2001)...Anton breaks new ground by bringing the works of Ernest Becker,Kenneth Burke and Hans Jonas into resolute dialog, allowing each to interpret and extend the other. What emerges is a truly original perspective, emphasizing the universality in human affairs of ‘natural guilt’ and the various avenues provided by culture for its expiation.” —Daniel Liechty, Illinois State University, is Vice President of The Ernest Becker Foundation

“Deluding ourselves as self-made, denying death by ritual or cultural means (today by accumulating money and things), we fail to recognize the sources of our being and therefore to live graciously…. Like Stoics whose physics and metaphysics were hardly incidental to their ethics, Anton ontologically grounds this diagnosis in logos and the cosmos before moving to his ethical prescriptions.” —Richard H. Thames, Duquesne University, associate professor in Communication and Rhetorical Studies

“Corey Anton is an intellectual everyman, and everyman’s intellectual. His tours through the familiar always yield the unexpected, and his journeys to the esoteric end up feeling like long voyages home. —Douglas Rushkoff, author, Life Inc., Media Virus!, and Program or Be Programmed

Sources of Significance confronts consumer capitalism and religious fundamentalism as symptoms of death denial and degenerated cultural heroisms. Advancing and synthesizing the ideas of Ernest Becker, Kenneth Burke, Hans Jonas, Erving Goffman, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Epictetus, this multidisciplinary work offers a sustained response and corrective. It outlines heroisms worth wanting and reveals the forms of gratitude, courage, and purpose that emerge as people come to terms with the meaning of mortality.

Corey Anton opens a contemporary dialogue spanning theism, atheism, agnosticism, and spiritualist humanism by re-examining basic topics such as language, self-esteem, ambiguity, guilt, ritual, sacrifice, and transcendence. Acknowledging the growing need for theologies that are compatible with modern science, Anton shows how today’s consumerist lifestyles
distort and trivialize the need for self-worth, and he argues that each person faces the genuinely heroic tasks of contributing to the world’s beauty, harmony, and resources; of forgiving the cosmos for self-conscious finitude; and of gratefully accepting the ambiguity of life’s gifts.

In this highly readable and well-arranged compilation—including his much celebrated “The Practice of Reading Good Books” and award-winning “Playing with Bateson”—Corey Anton brings together some of his most accessible and well-received essays. The collection, in addition to advancing and integrating the fields of media ecology and general semantics, will be of great interest to people who are concerned over the changing role of reading and literacy in contemporary life. A stimulating and provocative book having wide relevance to scholars and students in the areas of semiotics, rhetorical theory, orality/literacy studies, philosophy of communication, pedagogical theory, and communication theory, Communication Uncovered offers countless insights and broad-based orientations regarding the nature of language, linguistic and communicative habits, communication technologies, and symbolic practices more generally. This is a “must have” resource for anyone interested in multidisciplinary communication theory.


“Superb scholarship. The range and depth of the author’s comprehension is stunning. Professor Anton has made a groundbreaking contribution to the field.
Scholars, take note!”
--Lee Thayer, Distinguished Professor (ret.) and author of Explaining Things

“Anton’s thoughts on reading and education, especially poignant in this time of rapidly declining literacy, are nicely complemented by the suggestions and observations on ecology of media. His characteristic wit and wisdom enliven every essay herein.”
--Eric McLuhan

“Corey Anton brings a brilliantly original voice to the discipline of general semantics, the field of media ecology, and the theories associated with cybernetics and the systems view. Scholarly, passionate, and inspired, this collection of essays should be required reading for anyone interested in human communication, signification, symbolization, and mediation.”
--Lance Strate, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; author of On the Binding Biases of Time and Other Essays on General Semantics and Media Ecology; past president of the Media Ecology Association and former Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics

“This book is for the growing number of professors who are concerned about reading and traditional literacy skills in education. Aspects of communication are revealed in Anton’s provocative essays which guide us to a better humanistic understanding of communication.”
--Susan B. Barnes, Professor, College of Liberal Arts, RIT

"This phosphorescent book shows genius in every chapter. Each is intellectual dynamite--from the majestic first where values, morals, ethics and law are woven into an organic whole, to the world of imagination and possibility in the last. Along a horizon of erudite to brilliant, splendidly well-written, the book establishes a fresh way of thinking about ethics 'in an age of legality.' We've been grinding away with overworked terms--judgment, value, morality, jurisprudence. Now a new day dawns, with values embedded in natural language rather than artifice. A star-studded cast working in harmony--some of the finest thinkers in communications, writing with a creativity and verve that is truly astonishing. In the tradition of Burke's Language as Symbolic Action, Ong's Orality and Literacy, and Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, Valuation and Media Ecology is destined for history." --Clifford G. Christians, Research Professor of Communications, University of Illinois-Urbana

"Media ecology, and its insistence on communication as the environment in which we live, offers a new perspective on communication ethics and valuation in general. If the means of communication change human experience, human thought patterns, and human interaction, then they also influence ethics. These essays explore how speech, writing, print, electronic and digital media affect the public sphere, power, law, morality, and even religion. One can only wonder how we never noticed the key role of communication in the central concerns of human life before." --Paul A. Soukup, S.J., Santa Clara University

How are ethics, morals, and laws related to communication and communication technologies? In what ways--and to what degree--do communication technologies shape, maintain, and/or alter moral practices and sensibilities regarding justice and the good? In this provocative and engaging collection, noted scholars and media ecologists address these questions and many more. A must have anthology for anyone seeking to understand how communication and communication technologies bear upon valuation and life more generally.

Contents: INTRODUCTION. Ethicality, Morality, Legality: Alignments of Speech, Writing and Print, Respectively, Corey Anton. OVERVIEWS AND ORIENTATIONS. Ethics Unwired: Some Retrospections, Lee Thayer. Why is There No Such Thing as a Bad Shark?, Frank E.X. Dance. Altruism and the Origin of Language and Culture, Robert K. Logan. Concerning Media Ecology, Eric McLuhan. STUDIES AND APPLICATIONS. Rene Girard as Media Ecologist, Phil Rose. Fugue in D Minor, Stephanie Gibson. The Digital Dark Ages: A Retro-Speculative History of Possible Futures, Phil Graham and Greg Hearn. Aristotle's Energeia as a Necessary Attribute for Moral Communication in the New "Flat World", Kathryn Egan. Communication at the Speed of Life: Tele-vision, Intimacy, Community, and Nostalgia, Frank Macke. Getting Our Bearings about Western Culture and the World Today: Walter J. Ong versus Sayyid Qutb as Guide, Thomas J. Farrell. On Matters of Imagination and Possibility, Amardo Rodriguez. Author Index. Subject Index.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2001 State University of New York All rights reserved Production by Susan Geraghty Marketing by Patrick Durocher Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner ...

ABSTRACT This essay offers a media ecological orientation to Western philosophy, showing the essential role that alphabetic writing and print play in making philosophy possible. It offers reviews of historical developments in alphabetic print-based literacy to show how modern literacy has congealed into a hermeneutic sociality undergirding philosophic culture.

GENERAL SEMANTICISTS routinely draw attention to the non-identification between the symbolic realm and first-order processes of reality. This distinction underlies many different expressions within GS: "Whatever I say a thing is, it is not," "The map is not the territory," "Symbols are not what they symbolize," "Representations are not the things they represent," and even Alan Watts' comical refrain: "The word is not the thing, the word is not the thing, Hi Ho the Derry-O, the word is not the thing" (Watts, 1974, p. 8). Not only do GS scholars commonly note the differences between the realm of words and the realm of first-order processes of reality (i.e., realm of not-words), they also commonly acknowledge that words operate at multiple and varying levels of abstraction. Consider, for example, a few illustrations from Irving Lee's Language Habits and Human Affairs: These illustrations are clear and helpful, and they are representative of the images throughout Lee's book. At many different places Lee illustrates not only varying levels of abstraction, but he demonstrates the kinds of confusion that emerge from failing to stay vigilant in these distinction. He advocates a careful practice of moving from observation to description to inference. All said, Lee differentiates many layers of abstraction: an event-process level, an objective level, a descriptive level, and finally, an inferential level (cf. 1941, p. 204). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For all that Lee's depiction does in clarifying the nature of abstraction, it unfortunately seems to suggest that inferential aspects should or ought enter with speech and description. First order abstractions are cast as sheer processes of sense organs and the nervous system transforming the silent eventfulness, the electronic dance, into a stable appearance of things, objects, and the world more generally. In this account, people use language too inferentially and too commonly fail to take the opportunity for careful observation and description prior to making their inferences. Stated a bit reductively, Lee's program seems to suggest that semantic confusions can be alleviated by always ensuring that description precedes inference. If at first this appears to be little more than a residual difficulty, it grows into a pernicious one as we consider the degree to which we remain unable to bracket out all of the aesthetic connections within our social and physical worlds. Part of the problem with the many means of human abstraction is therefore not merely that "the word is not the thing." It is that even things are never simply themselves. The issue is not merely that the word "apple" is not an apple or that we can't eat a picture or painting of an apple. It is that everyday objects transcend themselves, and when we attempt to describe them prior to making any inferences about them, we are, ironically, attempting to de-contextualize and de-realize the ways that items of the world actually show themselves. Aren't there, for example, inferential relations that are nearer to the objective level than to the verbal descriptive level? In such cases (perhaps the average and most likely case for everyday household artifacts), items are contextually imbued and transformed into vestiges of unseen relations. It is not then, as Lee suggests, that we jump past the descriptive level to the inferential level: on the contrary, it is rather that we jump over the non-verbal inferential level when we attempt to liquidate something into a careful objective verbal description that would precede all inference. It might help to consider the ways that sets and verbal classifications are easily recognized as multi-leveled but too commonly are contrasted with a kind of unified What Is Going On or WIGO. The process-level of reality, the unspeakable-only-showable, the immediate, all of these seem to imply that the phenomenon of levels is largely an issue of the verbal realm. …

This article reviews orders of intensionality and demonstrates how intersubjective confusions can emerge whenever we try to imagine what others think we think they think. By offering an adaptation and reconfiguration of the Interpersonal Perception Method (IPM), a couples therapy questionnaire developed by Laing, Phillipson, and Lee, the article clarifies how and why interpretation troubles can recur within interpersonal relationships. It also provides a highly practical and teachable method for systematically managing multiple orders of intensionality, and, hopefully, for minimizing some of life's interpersonal discord.

Abstract. This manuscript brings the early writings of MM Bakhtin to the contemporary concern over pluralist ethics. Generally, I argue that many ethical quandaries which individuals face cannot be ascribed to a plurality of ethics or a social indeterminacy of morals. I maintain that ...

Abstract. Scholars increasingly recognize that discourse is not a standing collection of rep-resentations for pre-existing thoughts and/or things in a pre-existing world. Still, many ob-stacles remain, and these seem to be inseparable from contemporary common-sense. When we ask ...

... together. In psychological terms, people seek to maximize the internal consistency of their cognitions (eg, beliefs and attitudes) and achieve "cognitive consistency" (O'Keefe, 1990, p. 61). ... (1946, 1958) balance theory and Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory. In a ...

CHAPTER ► Clocks, Synchronization, and the Fate of Leisure A Brief Media Ecological History of Digital Technologies ► COREY ANTON America:..." I'll see you at 4: 10, then" is a sentence that would have been compre-hensible to no other civilization this earth has seen. ...

Drawing mainly upon the thinking of Kenneth Burke, this essay overviews a few psychological functions performed within dramatic works of art. It shows how dramatic works of art (e.g. novels, plays, films, and even TV shows) operate as subtle modes of applied psychology: they offer different types of therapeutic benefits for those who produce such works and also for those who read them and/or audience members who witness them. I try to bring out how modes of catharsis as well as means of transcendence are afforded by dramatic form within art. Even more specifically stated, I review some of Burke’s ruminations upon his own semiautobiographical novel, Towards a Better Life, and I outline how dramatic works of art provide adequate symbolic distance for sizing up one’s life situations and for facing various challenges that can otherwise be too difficult to face head-on. Through symbolic and artistic maneuvers, which enable kinds of identification, authors and audience members learn to fa...

[B]ureaucratization' is an unwieldy word, perhaps even an onomatopoeia, since it sounds as bungling as the situation it would characterize. --Kenneth Burke (1984, p. 225) Count Alfred Korzybski (2001) delineated three classes of life on the planet: chemistry-binding, space-binding, and time-binding. He suggested that life, most broadly and fundamentally, consisted of "chemistry-binding." The binding of chemicals is required by organic life in all of its forms. Molecular bonding, cell growth, and photosynthesis are obvious examples. To that basic level, he added a second, what he called the "space-binding" of animals. Animals are binders of space because they roam to forage for food. They traverse and meaningfully integrate space ("bind" space) as they flee from predators, hunt prey, and look for mates. Third and finally, humanity occupies the unique location within nature designated by the term "time-binding." We humans are organic and volitional life forms who fall into history and open to culture. Memory, cognition, and consciousness of abstracting take us beyond instinct and beyond mere recollection of familiar pathways and feeding grounds. Our neuro-semantic processes bring us into worlds of imagination and possibility, of cultural achievement, art, music, mathematics, science, and philosophy. Korzybski's notion of "time-binding" offers a realistic account of how humanity differs from the rest of the natural world and also outlines the possibility of a more "sane" future. In and through time-binding, humans can take up where previous generations have left off, and ideally, make the world a better place-a more hospitable place-one that has taken sociohistorical advantage of the passage of time. One of his concerns about time-binding was that humans may not recognize or adequately appreciate this aspect of themselves. People can underestimate the role that time-binding plays in human affairs; they can neglect time-binding to their individual and collective detriment. This brief paper addresses the concerns mentioned above by investigating countercurrents to "time-binding" within modern bureaucratic workplaces. These countercurrents serve to "unbind" time. By the notion of "unbinding time," we refer to more than mere forgetfulness, disregard, or neglect of the past. Instead, we mean particular kinds of "anti-productivity" or "counter-productivity" that undermine the health and well-being of organizations and their members. This counter-productivity can be best understood by considering three different forms of dysfunction; (1) "make-work," (2) "passive-aggressive information-withholding," and (3) "the cow path." Individually, these dysfunctions can interfere with the productive functioning of a group and undermine its integration. When combined, and when amplified by communication technologies, effects of these dysfunctions can grow exponentially, further entrenching counter-productivity throughout the modern workplace. Make-Work "Make-work" is a broad category of human action referring mainly to pretend work, irrelevant work, inessential work, or work that is not meant to make any real difference. Make-work takes many different forms, but all varieties amount to keeping up the appearance of being busy or industrious, not openly wasting time or sitting idle. Make-work can include taking longer than necessary on everyday tasks; mystifying others regarding what is involved in doing what has been done; and overexaggerating the amount of time, effort, or energy that some project took, would take, or is taking. Make-work can also include hanging around on committees or task forces that barely meet (or hardly do anything), having more meetings rather than deciding and implementing decisions, and covering over how some tasks were completed before any official time was allocated for them. In short, whether accounted for or not, make-work is largely about "the performance" of work or the "image of being busy" rather than about actually, concretely, completing tasks in the best interest of the organization. …

Richard L. Lanigan, founder of the International Communicology Institute, has formulated a synergistic account of the relationship between sign-systems (semiotics) and lived experience (phenomenology). In this article I overview some of the technical vocabulary found within Lanigan’s “Semiotic Phenomenology” and attempt to clarify the parallel relations between (a) part/whole, (b) variance/invariance, (c) empirical/eidetic, and (d) context-dependence/decontextualization by examining the relationships between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of discourse. I also contextualize the relationship between “information” and “communication” by locating the former mainly within the evolutionary advent of denotation, and I furthermore spell out the role that alphabetic literacy plays in fortifying paradigmatic and syntagmatic resources.

... when speaking in conversation and even in lecturing, depart from the epistemology outlined in the previous chapter; and indeed the chapter * Corey Anton is ... abstract class of apples, and yet, if we do not yet have the class of apples, then how could any one apple be counted as ...

By re-examining the thought of Marshall McLuhan, showing how his work relies upon the notion of formal cause, this paper offers a heuristic framework for understanding the nature and future of technological mediation. It not only helps to disclose a great deal of coherence and order (a systematic method) to McLuhan's thought but also provides a useful multidisciplinary orientation for future research into the various impacts of technology upon thought, action, and life more broadly.

This essay examines the phenomenon of hypocrisy from a media ecological vantage. It walks through examples and cases of hypocrisy witnessed in the United States today, and then argues that dominant media forms have shaped and are continuing to shape our senses of self, community, constancy and consistency. Accounting for the apparent rise in hypocrisy – its near ubiquity in modern US culture – as well as clarifying why today's accusations of hypocrisy seem to carry little to no weight, the essay furthermore reveals key tensions between reason and rationalization in times of great technological change.

This essay offers a media ecological orientation to Western
philosophy, showing the essential role that alphabetic writing and
print play in making philosophy possible. It offers reviews of
historical developments in alphabetic print-based literacy to show
how modern literacy has congealed into a hermeneutic sociality
undergirding philosophic culture.

This introduction to the Media Ecology special issue of the Review of
Communication provides a broad overview of the history of media
ecology, clarifies its main orientations and key thinkers, and then
illustrates how problems and orientations within philosophy are
symptoms of various kinds of technological mediation.

This paper addresses the constitutive-representational dichotomy presented in John Stewart's two recent books. First, I review the logic of representation within the terms encoding and decoding, and, relying on the ideas of John Dewey, I explicate its various theoretical inadequacies. Hence, I add Dewey's support to Stewart's claim that speech is not a tool-like system of representations, but rather, is primarily constitutive. Second, and more critically, I appeal to several interrelated concepts in Dewey's writings to show that the representational view is valid and legitimate if it is taken as a derivative possibility given to speech's constitutive nature. Third, I unpack developments in the phenomenological notion of intentionality to argue that humans are fundamentally suspended in a network of intentional relations. Thus, with the notion of “intentionality” developed mainly by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I argue that we can accommodate for representational accounts while holding fast to speech's primary constitutive character. I conclude by suggesting that the different intentional relations (e.g., constitutive and representational) are nothing less than different modes by which we temporalize the temporality we are.

Richard L. Lanigan, founder of the International Communicology Institute, has formulated a synergistic account of the relationship between sign-systems (semiotics) and lived experience (phenomenology). In this article I overview some of the technical vocabulary found within Lanigan’s “Semiotic Phenomenology” and attempt to clarify the parallel relations between (a) part/whole, (b) variance/invariance, (c) empirical/eidetic, and (d) context-dependence/decontextualization by examining the relationships between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of discourse. I also contextualize the relationship between “information” and “communication” by locating the former mainly within the evolutionary advent of denotation, and I furthermore spell out the role that alphabetic literacy plays in fortifying paradigmatic and syntagmatic resources.

This paper provides a brief review of media ecology. It is partly a micro-history of the tradition, and partly a philosophical clarification of how and why " systems-theory orientations, " literacy studies, and the rapid spread of new media were all essential to its germination, growth, and proliferation. Finally, the paper offers concluding remarks regarding social constructionist thought and how it relates to the media ecology tradition.