Subject: Re: HAB: Third rock from the Sun
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 2000 11:00:12 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)


On Sat, 25 Nov 2000 20:45:14 +1100 Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comedu.canberra.edu.au> 
wrote:

> Well, doesn't H hold that all languages have an in-built capacity for 
communicative reason?

Well, that's nice for languages, but what about human beings? My speculation 
leans not toward the potential of communicative reason, but its immanence 
within each and every linguistic act. If I had to give this a name, I might 
call it hermeneutical positivism... The real question is not whether language 
can be reflexive, but is it *immanently* reflexive... is it an ontological 
truth than language use is always already conditioned by the attempt to 
understand, by a grasping. Is there an "Other" of language which is, in fact, a 
non-dialectical excess. My suspicion, and I'll draw on psychoanalysis to 
illustrate this, is that there is. The point, then, is to ask if this is 
parasitical (moral priority) or constitutive (conceptual priority).

> I'm happy to agree that understanding and agreement are immanent in language 
- its telos, even.

But this, then, appears to be the exact opposite of what Habermas intends. If 
the intention is to liberate human beings domination, does not this reading of 
language appear to be the complete colonization of language over our 'natural' 
sensibilities and drives?

> >I agree, of course. But "the Other" does not exist... which makes for strange
> >and stranger conversations...

> Yeah, but there are real others there when you're trying to engage this
> Other.  Once you're actually in a conversation, the real other trumps your
> ideal Other, no?  Linguistic intercourse brings the subjects to the fore.
> Hence 'intersubjectivity', no?

The Other, in psychoanalysis, is fantasy, the very source of meaning. The 
rejoinder from a 'concrete' other wouldn't mean anything apart from our 
capacity to impose meaning on their symbolic utterances. And I agree, we can't 
just impose any meaning on them, meaning is attached, but not conclusively, to 
specific forms. If we catch a sentence fragment, "That's it!" we built meaning 
around this. But without the before and after we're only speculating. But I 
don't see how 10 sentences before and 50 sentences after actually "complete" or 
"exhaust" an explanation. In short: our Imaginary, is precisely what fills in 
the gaps between fragmented symbolic utterances. In discourse this becomes 
highly channeled, where certain meanings are ruled out - but regardless of how 
technical or specific the discourse, the Imaginary cannot be completley 
suspended since it constitutes the very 'foundation' of all possible 
meaning(s). If the Imaginary is suspended, indefinitely, then the 'creation' of 
meaning, the inscription of meaning upon the symbolic, becomes impossible. In 
other words: we can only understand what we have already imagined, which isn't 
to say that our Imaginary is fixed, it moves and shifts, but at some point 
there is a limit. I propose that this limit manifests itself in drive, in 
communicative satisfaction - the point at which a conversation terminates.

The association of communicative satisfaction with consensus is precisely my 
problem. To put it another way, maybe we agree to something not necessarily 
because we understand everything about it, but, perhaps, because we're tired of 
talking.

ken



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