Watzlawick et al.’s book is often described as an unusual, impressive but underestimated<1> work. It is not the introduction to
pragmatics one might expect behind the title but it is full of interdisciplinary examples to illustrate several axioms and aspects of human communication. Also the impossibility of not communicating, probably Watzlawick’s most famous statement, is discussed extensively.
For my research interest in
intercultural communication and conflict resolution, the book does provide a lot of additional background information and interesting approaches to communication in general, although the authors never mention the problem of communication between people with
different ethnic backgrounds in particular. More specifically, I would like to point out the following aspects:
Watzlawick et al. emphasize that communication behavior can only be interpreted and understood in context. For intercultural communication, this means that we have to see the participants as members of different groups of whatever kind – following different rules, performing different roles, maybe even trying to adapt to other rules or to fulfil certain expectations – but also as individuals who might deviate from the stereotypical group member.
Not only once do the authors mention different layers of communication, namely the content and relationship level. While it can be simply entertaining for the reader to reflect one’s own dispute behavior and find out how many times the two levels are confused in everyday situations, this distinction has significant implications for intercultural communication: Just like there is no Archimedean point outside of language to talk about language, it is not possible to ignore one’s own
cultural or social values and discuss
culture without any presumption or bias. This would extend the relationship
level by a cultural awareness dimension, which would make it possible to understand that a given dispute only arose because of differing cultural values, and not (only) because of conflicting opinions (content level) or ways of interaction (relationship level).
The last distinction made by Watzlawick et al. that seems relevant for intercultural communication explains the concepts of analogic and digital communication. While the first basically includes all non- and paraverbal communication, the latter has to make use of arbitrary verbal signs to denote objects, feelings etc. The meanings of gestures, facial expressions, proximity, intonation and the like vary from culture to culture, so that misunderstandings can arise easily in analogic communication between members of different groups, while lack of language knowledge can cause misunderstandings on the digital level.
<1> Cf. http://h2hobel.phl.univie.ac.at/~yellow/Watzlawick/PHC_Review.html
More summaries about the Pragmatics of Human Communication