Communication, Manipulation, Seduction. The Pragmatics of Transparency

Abstract

Communicative interaction is never totally transparent. A definition in terms of pure information transfer constitutes an impoverishment of the semantic content of a message. Other emotional connotations of linguistic interaction are deeply rooted in the depths of the subjects' psychology. This means that interaction is often manipulative and even seductive. This article attempts to present more systematically the conditions of manipulative and seductive discursive production. Speech act theory (Austin, Searle) and conversational logic (Grice) offer some tools to more or less formalize these subtle conditions of production of non-transparent “communication”.