Communicative
means are means of creation. We shape the worlds we exist in – we make
ourselves at home in them – and at the same time are shaped by them. These
processes do and at the same time do not take place in a technical sense. Signs
are enacted and decoded, and these signs can be recognized, described and
analyzed. Yet, communication is always at least a two-way street. We cannot
communicate on our own. The dynamics of making meaning are situated forever in
between; they rest temporary. Meaning is caused in between people: in between
an audience and a work of art, in between a word, the way it is used and the
way it is understood.
As we pour ourselves into the space we live in and are
sucked into it by those who inhabit it too, all those innumerable others who
have taught us to communicate and who have used and thereby shaped the
communicative means available to us before we even existed haunt our worlds as
well. We make ourselves at home; but it is always a place that we share
with those we love, those we meet and all those ghosts of the past. A past we
cannot even remember, a past we nevertheless keep alive by our very being here.
We thus exist in a temporary eternity.
