// RJC // Volume 1, Number 4 // Igor KLYUKANOV

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Igor KLYUKANOV

This issue of Russian Journal of Communication is what they'd call a no-special-theme issue. Indeed, it is not dedicated to a famous communication scholar, a controversial concept, or a momentous, revolutionary event (yet another one). It is dedicated to communication, as such, communication that escapes any measure or, rather, is its own measure; communication that simply is everywhere and "everywhen." Ethnomethodologists, conversations with our friends and colleagues, the sunrise and the sunset they all remind us that communication is an everyday and "everynight" process.

There really is nothing special about communication except that it is always successful. Success here is not to be equated with the so-called mutual understanding or reaching common ground. Communication, as such, always succeeds, because, like history, it is one experience succeeding another. For example, people in various cultures create and interpret signs, and signs, in their turn, create and interpret people; people attempt to bridge a gap between themselves and their experiences and, in the process, turn this gap into a meaningful interval that continues on and on; people move and change places, trying to adjust to new surroundings; people are affected by "new media" as they form images of one another.

Communication is always successful because there is something that communication follows or goes after, calling for our participation and exploration. Communication is our attempt to explain and understand our experiences, to give them names. And, those experiences that can't be named, are perhaps the most common and sacred; we all know, albeit tacitly, this rupture because words fail us (or we them), and communication is interrupted precisely when there is still so much to be said. Such experiences are beyond any current academic denomination intrapersonal, interpersonal, small group, organizational, etc. Or, rather, such experiences take the form of the deepest and most invigorating currents that are common to all. Communication is what we all experience together, what we have in common what is special about that?