Subject: Re: HAB: Third rock from the Sun
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 10:31:55 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)



On Mon, 20 Nov 2000 10:52:33 GMT matthew piscioneri <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com> 
wrote:

> For me one of the importances of JH's work is that it focuses squarely on  
the fact that members of the human species on the planet earth not only NEED  
to talk to each other, but even WANT to talk to other.

I just came back from a conference in Nashville, and can assure you, quite 
vividly, that there are a good number of people who don't want to talk to one 
another. I bumped into someone with a button the size of my head, in the shape 
of a stopsign which read, "STOP LIBERALS!" A sentiment I could almost agree 
with if I didn't have such a good clue about why it was so prominently 
displayed.

However, this particularity aside (I had my button too, "Too concrete, be more 
abstract!"), I think it is really really important to think more about whether 
we want (desire) to talk to one another. I have a hermeneutic of suspicion 
dogging around in my pocket. It seems to me that we want to talk to the Other, 
not necessarily the other or others. As I've pointed out before, Maeve Cooke 
demonstrates, quite persuasively, that Habermas can only point to the 
conceptual priority of communicative action. If this is the case, then the 
'origin' (innate faculty) towards linguistic communication must be understood 
as both an address to the other (communicative) and Other (strategic) at the 
same time. In short, we speak in order to communicate and understand *and* to 
send a message to the Other (which does not exist). I'm reminded of a couple 
lines from Sneaker Pimps ('Six Underground'), "Don't think that just because 
we're talking, we're friends. Don't think that because I understand, I care." 
What is crucial here is the question, "Who is speaking." Habermas is enough of 
a psychoanalytic type to recognize that sometimes it isn't "we" or "I" 
communicating (which is what his theory of systematically distorted 
communication indicates)... there is an other. But somehow the 
conceptualization of distorted communication doesn't go deep enough in my view. 
I'm tempted to speculate that communication might, in fact, be more of a 
private affair than a public affair. In other words, only under certain 
(/democratic/theoretical discourse/?) social conditions does the "I" become 
reflexive/commmunicative at all. Prior to this, words simply pour out and 
understand might be little more than happenstance... to blur DeNiro and 
Eastwood together, "You have to ask yourself a question. Are you talking to 
me?" I think this is worth talking about because a lot is at stake in the 
question.

speculative regards,
ken



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