On Tue, 20 Jun 2000 21:44:13 +0930 Catherine Driscoll <catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au> wrote:
> Hi Ken -- I'm right now writing about consent. Talk to me about consent.
It's got to be a valid concept hasn't it, somehow detachable from this public
sphere consensus model?
Valid in relation to what? We need, first, to disengage consensus in the public sphere from the more hermeneutic notion of mutual agreement / understanding. They are related but the dynamics are different (I can only suspect). Two people can agree about what to make for dinner, but this isn't of the same quality as hammering out social policy.
Public Sphere Consensus
The aim of consensus is to establish the legitimacy of certain norms, which are then "translated" by a judiciary which is then "translated" again into administrative power. This is the predominant democratic model (or so they tell me). Analytically, we need to think about the notion of consensus. Does it spring from the logic of language-use itself (the context immanent / transcending aspect of speaking with one another oriented by the attempt to understand) or is it a shared presupposed value (we agree that consensus, regardless of anything else, is a mutually shared moral or ethical principle) or is it simply the minimal condition of justice (without consensus, there is no justice) ... or... whatever.
Here we have the three predominant "ethical" democratic theories: deliberative democracy (Habermas, Benhabib); good life communitarianism (Tayler, Heller); theory of justice liberalism (Rawls). I should point out that all three of these rest on an identical 'moral' premise: that ethics is about something GOOD and, in that, is all rather pro-Hegelian (ethical community as an argument, ethical community as shared ethos, ethical community as just) and anti-Kantian (my reading of Kant is based on Lacan, which disavows any good prior to the moral law - which all three of these positions, invariably, end up presupposing).
> Not legislation about consent I guess, but an ethical conception of consent?
Mutual Understanding
Ethical concept of consent. Again, this really depends on how we understand ethics and consent. What is ethics? For most of the position outlined above, ethics revolves around some notion of morality that we attempt to align ourselves with through a kind of praxis. Consensus, in this model, is the underlying moral principle which grounds, somehow, all of our efforts. The aim here is to be ethical: to live consensually with others. Problems that occur can be objective (no room big enough for everyone or not enough time) or intersubjective (deception, fraud, misunderstanding) or subjective (idiosyncraticies).
However, Lacan offers another reading of ethics: ethics as a viewpoint from the perspective of evil. This is compounded with his notion that understanding involves a moment of transference - when we "assume the subject to know." Coincidentally, this is also something Albrecht Wellmer raises against Gadamer, Habermas and Apel. Wellmer argues that in any understanding there is a "blind spot" - a point at which we give up and simply agree. So Wellmer's critique of Habermas here is in alignment with Lacan's notion of transference. In both Wellmer and Lacan: consensus is not so much an 'ethical ending point' like a bus stop, rather, a point at which we stop talking with one another. The ethical emerges here in the sense that consensus is read not to be justice, goodness or legitimacy, rather, it is a state of radical evil - where we "choose" (in retrospect) to cut off dialogue and simply assume we agree (this would be Lacan's formulation, not Wellmer's). In Lacanian terms: consensus is the product of "giving up on our desire" - the product of which is guilt. In contrast to Habermas's "guilt-free" consensus, Lacan might have argued that precisely when we agree we are in the most danger of being authoritarian.
> I think I mean -- can you have consent without contract? I concede the
'consent to...' of consent bothers me then, as well as its articulation in
terms of majority. But don't you/we/someone have to be responsive to the
ethical imperative that people be allowed to consent or withhold consent? Ah
then that bothers me too, it's always this dichotomy isn't it. Consent is
really about not consenting...
The notion of consenting to something is the idea of submission, isn't it? In submission we can think about Hegel's S/M dialectic - the tragic irony of the aim of dialogue, mutual recognition, is foiled by subjecting ones consciousness to the will of another, which results in the will of the Other being placed in an impossible situation: structurally unable to receive the recongition that they desire. Ah... spirals spirals...
> I know I know I failed to do my teaching Zizek report and all, but I'm
feeling so confused about all this, I'd love to talk about it without the
demand not to sound confused.
"True thoughts are only those which do not understand themselves." - Teddie
> Tell me something Lacanian about it all so I can disagree.
When we understand, we only understand our fantasies.
ken