信使为理解传播提供了源初意象，一些西方传播学者已经有所意识并借用信使意象提出相应的传播理论。然而，当前信使研究不仅基于先入为主的传播观念而对信使的功能解释不一，而且过度依赖“天使”这一特殊的信使作为普遍原型，从而遮蔽了信使的历时性和传播的现代性。现代社会中上帝之死和中介的消失让人人成为“信使”，尽职尽责但却不知为何、为谁传递信息。这一交流困境要求重新审视介于主体性的“人”与功能性的“非人”之间的信使意象。威廉斯和本雅明都拒绝让信使独自作为“信源”的主体，前者提议回归经验与公共性以重塑信使的主体性，后者强调“姿态”作为“无目的的手段”以调和主体和媒介的冲突。本文认为，从信使展开的传播理论，若要切实回应现代人类的媒介化生存挑战，则不应停留于价值无涉的媒介观与功能化的“非人”信使观。

The messenger provides an archetypal image for understanding communication. Several Western communication scholars have recognized this and employed the messenger image to propose corresponding theories of communication. However, current research on the messenger not only offers inconsistent functional interpretations based on preconceived notions of communication, but also excessively relies on the universal archetype of the “angel,” thereby obscuring the historicity of the messenger and the modernity of communication. The “death of God” and the disappearance of intermediaries have turned everyone into a messenger—dutifully delivering messages yet unaware of the reason or the recipient. This predicament of communication demands a re-examination of the messenger image situated between the human and the non-human. Both Raymond Henry Williams and Walter Benjamin rejected the idea of the messenger acting solely as the sovereign “source” of the message. The former proposed returning to experience and the public sphere to reshape the messenger's subjectivity, while the latter emphasized “gesture” as a “means without end” to reconcile the conflict between subject and medium. This paper argues that only when the medium is not merely a value-neutral object, and when the messenger is not merely a functionalized “non-human entity,” can communication theory developed from the perspective of the messenger genuinely comprehend the mediatized existence of modern humans.