Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 00:59:39 +1100
Subject: Re: HAB: Third rock from the Sun


G'day Ken'n'all,

>> 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.

Reckon he wouldn't have to go beyond the assertions that we're
language-users, that the capacities of language are to that extent our
capacities, and that we do in fact talk to each 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.

You reckon he was the worst?  I chanced upon this strange-looking bloke who
was telling everyone who'd listen that he wasn't really talking to 'em!
I'll never forget him; he was dazzling in those maple leaves rampant on
that raucous pink, a rakish Che beret, and a weathered old Gauloise hanging
from the corner of his frothing lips -  frantically waving a dog-eared copy
of *Ecrits* at the bemused throngs he was so passionately not addressing,
and (get this) sported a big badge which admonished "Too Concrete, Be More
Abstract".

>However, this particularity aside (I had my button too, "Too concrete, be
>more
>abstract!"),

oops ...

>I think it is really really important to think more about whether
>we want (desire) to talk to one another.

Go tell that to all those people who subscribe to mailing lists!  Oh, right ...

>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.

Well, there's not necessarily a mutual exclusiveness here, is there?  After
all, you don't know what kind of other the other is until you've engaged
them in conversation.  Nor what manner of other you might be yourself by
the time the conversation has been had.  That's one of the beaut things
about conversation, I s'pose.

>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.

The flip-side of this is that a communicative dimension is always in the
realms of possibility, no matter how strategic one's intent.  Language is
an ornery medium; always liable to up and bite ya with its immanent
potentials.  My five-year-old is on to its capacities to torment the
would-be lawgiver that resides in all parents.  I deliver myself of a
plethora of dos and dont's, and then effortlessly (if not quite innocently)
he says 'why?'.

>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."

Yet we do arrive at, and then sustain, and then transform, and then
sustain, our norms.  And anyway, we don't have to be friends.  We just have
to be in each other's sphere.  And we don't have to understand.  But we are
each other's world, so there is a pragmatic drive to understand (if not
agree).  We needn't understand the reasoning behind the norm, but social
beings (which we are, are we not) require norms, whether they want to
discuss 'em or not.  So EVERYONE has 'em - 'tis a universal truth, I submit.

>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.

If it implies the possibility of undistorted communication, yeah, it
doesn't go deep enough (it'd be like the neoliberal zealot's invocation of
the 'free' market or 'undistorted' prices).  But if it understands
'undistorted communication' as a requisite of the fundamentally
legitimating norm that is 'democracy', and that it is therefore necessarily
a critical ideal (as sinlessness is to the Christian - something to be
deliberately approximated and seen to be approximated, but, natch, never to
be attained in this life), well, then it is as useful an idea (from the
point of view of we modernist would-be self-emancipators, anyway) as most.
Democracy means not deliberately getting in the way of linguistic reason, I
reckon.  It can't mean perfectly undistorted communication, because there
are always socialised beings doing the communicating, hence there are ever
power differentials.  Deliberately privileging power, say, by confining
fora to media where power is obviously especially privileged, is
definitively undemocratic - but then, demanding an absence of power
differentials is definitively utopian.

>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.

It ain't private in the sense you're in the company of somebody else by
definition.  The language you share always already brings communicative
rationality to the table.  And that 'reflexive I' of yours can be yanked to
the surface by any other speaker of your language at any time, no?  So I
don't think your reservations are very important to Habermas, Ken.

>Prior to this, words simply pour out and understand might be little more
>than >happenstance...

If it's just blind chance, there seems to be an awful lot of it about, no?
I know we can 'problematise' 'understanding' a lot.  But if people talk
about something, all agree that they agree, and then coordinate their
action such as obviously to pursue the agreed ends, I'd say 'there's
understanding!'  And it's happened in every game of football or cricket
I've ever played.

>I think this is worth talking about because a lot is at stake in the question.

Are you sure?

I never am sure I understand you, Ken.  But speculate I've said enough to
help you decide whether I have or not.

Cheers,
Rob.



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