On Transmitting
On the Round Trip of a Signal — Emitted, Modulated by Reality, Received, and Returned
An essay on the round trip of a signal — emitted, modulated by reality, and returned changed. Transmitting, here, is read as a full circuit: what a life sends out into the field comes back altered by everything it passed through, and the self is partly made of these returns. The piece uses the vocabulary of signal and modulation to describe how we are shaped by the world's reply to us. It sits among the more structural On——ing essays, close to the physics of the framework, and it treats communication as something more than exchange — as a loop through reality that changes both the message and the sender.
It sits among the more structural essays in the series, close to the physics of the framework, and it rewards a reader who likes the machinery. Its image of the round trip — a signal emitted, modulated by reality, and returned changed — reframes communication as a loop that alters both the message and the sender, so that we are partly made of the world's replies to us.
Read “On Transmitting” (PDF) → Cite this work (DOI) →
Part of the open Legible Traces archive — every piece free under CC BY 4.0. The PDF here is byte-for-byte the record deposited on Zenodo; the DOI is the canonical citation. Return to All Works or the On ——ing series.