ABSTRACT
The too-long-neglected partners terms of tropes and tropisms may go far toward shedding some useful light on this most mysterious, mundane, but absolutely vital characteristic of acting out the role of human being. The more people there are who have perceptual/conceptual reflexes susceptible to certain tropes, the more powerful and universal those tropes are. The consumer of any kind of communication artifact seeks communication pleasure—the repetition of universal and reliable tropes—and avoids those that may bring communication pain, that is, those which are unfamiliar or novel. Most Western scholars who have written about communication—with exceptions as Vico and Collingwood—have assumed that communication is an individualistic, rational act of will. Most human communication, which is to say, most human behavior, is indeed more automatistic than consciously directed. That was the promise of the study of human communication when it came upon the scene.
