Abstract

This monograph critically investigates the philosophical foundations of communication theory as shaped in the pre-digital decades of the 1960s and 1970s. It begins by challenging the limits of established linguistic models, focusing especially on Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar. The first chapter examines Chomsky’s shift from empiricism to formal abstraction, highlighting both the cognitive ambitions and the implicit political assumptions of his theory. The second chapter turns to the body as a site of meaning, analyzing the rise of non-verbal communication and its psychological and sociological implications. Here, the author makes a critical assessment of the simplistic equation of human gesture with instinctive behavior, arguing instead for a fundamentally existential difference. The third and final chapter deepen this inquiry through existentialist thought — drawing on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers — to show that communication is not simply the transfer of information, but an ontological event bound to human finitude, freedom, and co-being. Communication emerges as a mode of being-with, shaped by temporality, absence, and the struggle for authenticity. The work as a whole challenges technocratic and utilitarian reductions of language, offering instead a philosophical groundwork for a future Age of Access, in which communication must be thought beyond code, function, and control — as a shared existential adventure.