Date: 	Wed, 25 Mar 1998 22:41:18 -0500
Subject: HAB: Communicative Communism


I was reading Castoriadis's _The Imaginary Institution of 
Society_ and came across an interesting passage in his 
chapter on communism and the mythic:

	"If by communism ('higher phase') is meant a 
society in which all resistance, all depth, all opaqueness 
would be absent; a society that would be purely transparent to 
itself; in which everyone's desires would spontaneously 
harmonize with everybody else's, or, in order to harmonize 
would require merely an airborne dialogue which would never 
be weighted down by the gum of symbolism; a society that 
would discover, formulate and realize its collective will 
without having to pass through institutions, or in which 
institutions would never pose a problem - if this is what is 
meant, then we must clearly state that this is an incoherent 
reverie, an unreal and unrealizable state whose 
representation should be eliminated.  This is a mythical 
formation, equivalent and analogous to that of absolute 
knowledge or of an individual whose 'consciousness' has 
absorbed his entire being.
	No society will ever be totally transparent, first 
because the indivduals that make it up will never be 
transparent to themselvs, since there can be no question of 
eliminating the unconscious.  Then, because the social 
element implies not only indivudal consciousnesses, nor 
even their mutual intersubjective inherencies, which could 
never be given in its entirety as a content to all, unless we 
were to introduce the double myth of an absolute knowledge 
possessed equally by all: the social implies something that 
can never be given as such..."  (pg. 111).

I wonder if this insight could be applied to Habermas's 
understanding of speech... which *could* be interpreted as 
communicative communism.... (I am aware of some subtle 
differences but there seems to be some weight to this kind of 
critique).

ken




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