On Wed, 21 Jun 2000 01:20:06 +0930 Catherine Driscoll <catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au> wrote:
> So far as i can see consensus can't be consensus when it is social policy.
Yes. This would make "consensus" a matter of conventional law (and any baggage that goes along with that). Consensus as a social policy might sound nice, but it is little more than a club - a friend of mine used the following image: Habermas standing with a gun pointed at your head -- "Be rational!"
> it's got to be something else where non-consent is implied, otherwise laws
etc policy and so on would be unnecessary. (there's a but... of course, but
I'll read the rest of your post)
The idea that consensus is one aspect of conventional law, which we agree isn't de facto a good thing, definitely implies a coercive element, which is precisely why it needs to be backed by state sanctions. Here, civil society appears to be one response: consensus forms the 'legitimacy shell' around which a dissenting public sphere swirls. In short: democracy as a procedure of argumentation where reasons are given and taken until there is agreement. This is on (Habermasian) reading of democracy. A more interesting, in my opinion, is Castoriadis's notion of democracy as regime: formal elements are present only as protective measure to guarantee effective human autonomy. Autonomy here is not necessarily the metaphysical autonomy of old ("free will") rather an "effective" notion of autonomy --> the capacity to make choices and carry out the implications of these choices. For Castoriadis, individual autonomy is completely caught up in institutional autonomy: one cannot exist without the other. For Castoriadis, the aim of a democractic society is not consensus, but freedom for all. So he regards, I think, the question of consensus quite differently that someone like Habermas. And I should not Agnes Heller is close to this position: legitimacy (consensus) is only one part of "a good life" (the bones of democracy... which still needs flesh and blood to fill it out).
> consent is agreement to something previously proposed (ie by another) so how
can it be about the attempt to understand.
In Habermas, validity claims ("something previously proposed") are detached from the person who proposes them: they have a kind of autonomy because of their inherent lack of 'private' interest. In this way, a validity claim is oriented by it being valid for all, not just for one or for many. So agreeing to a validity claim is not necessarily agreement to something previously proposed but also includes the generation and regeneration of good reasons to agree / disagree. Wellmer puts it this way, which, I think, serves as a rejoinder to the Habermasian approach: when we approach a validity claim, with good and bad reasons, we move in two directions simultaneously: between internal and external understanding. Internal understand has to do with the fusion of horizons - where we adopt the languageo f the 'text' as our own. External understanding is where we interpret the claim from our own perspetive, with a critical distance. Internal or immanent understand lacks productive distance from that which is to be understood. External understanding lacks distance from its own language of critique. Here we have two mutually opposed directions: the unproductive immancence of understanding, and the productive distance of understanding. For Wellmer, these stand in an irreducible relation which opens our eyes to the contingency, opaqueness and violence incorporated in all forms of linguistic meaning (language / symbolic, meaning / imaginary). The idea here is that only in a democracy, founded upon precisely this recognition of contingency, are we able to maintain the tension bewteen these two exclusive poles. Consensus, here, focuses *only* on immanent understand, in the end. In short, it fails to do justice to the necessary resistance involved in productive deconstruction. In short: consensus is one half of a sundered democratic totality (also - what is interesting here is the way in which hermeneutics and deconstruction are played off against one another; with neither being reducible to the other).
> but it [consensus, KM] can't be shared or ethical in that sense when it is
consented to, because that's the position of agreeing with an earlier position,
if you see what i mean
Consensus, in this sense, happens when the language used by all the parties involves is identical: "I say no means no." "I also say no means no." [both together] "We agree that no means no!" There is consensus present in the symbolic fomulations. However, there is an objective absence of meaning - which is precisely the criteria necessary to actually determine if an "understanding" truly exists. But, as we know, meaning is IMAGINED (it does not "ex-ist). So although there is agreement in the symbolic, the two people might very well be living in different worlds and attach completely different meanings to the language. This is what Lacan means when he talks about agreement being failed communication. When we agree, we stop talking (we consent) - our language "fails" because it stops. Consensus, then, is always based on a necessary misrecognition of what we say and mean in language.
> yes of course ethical doesn't mean good
> i wouldn't do hegel-lacan (aren't you shocked)
Not shocked at all, here we have to tango with kant-lacan.
> what about foucault's version of ethos?
According to Zizek, Foucault is a theoretical pervert. Transgression is constitutively necessary for sustaining the law. We wouldn't have laws if everyone agree (ie. we wouldn't think to pass a law if there wasn't already perceived violations). To transgress the law is simply to assign oneself knowledge of what the law means. This is perverted because the subject "assumes themself to know." In short: abiding by the law and transgressing the law both imply a subject "in the know" about the meaning of the law. This, effectively, negates any subjective relation to the imaginary (in the Lacanian sense).
> ok by ethics in general i would mean a relation to the other, relations with
others, and practices of enacting relations with others -- so ethics can be
really fucked, they don't have to be good for anyone. but then there's positive
ethical practices, desirable ethical practices, from of course specific
positions. my question is about what's desirable because you can't talk about
ethics in the 'public sphere' without engaging that claim that they should be
'good for...' X [the good society]
I thought ethics was about good and evil? If ethics isn't anything more or less
than relations to one another, then what distinguishes ethics from politics?
>From my perspective - ethics has to do with how we relate to our desire (which
is always the desire of the other) [hence, intersubjective and relational] and
politics is how this is duked out in relation to the law: politics <-> law <->
morality <-> desire <-> ethics <-> politics ... (my apologies for that... it is
surely damnable)
> how about the impossibility of consent as shared at all, i guess that's
where i am it has to be something else, not 'shared' not consensus
Can we all, then, agree that consensus is impossible? Symbolically consensus is indeed possible: we can agree on definitions. But this agreement is irreducible to the meaning of these definitions, ie. how they fit into our 'reality.' It is not, then, consensus that is impossible, but the sharing of something which does not objectively exist. Oh yeah, a nice definition of love: giving something to an other that one does not possess (objet petit a).
> >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."
> yes i've read that but isn't it foundationally hierarchical insofar as it
attaches to that subject presumed to know? ie. him, and people in comparable
positions
Yes! That's just it. In transference we impute to the other knowledge, knowledge that, in fact, they do not possess. This is why "understanding" is 'dangerous' in a sense. Because we give the other authority over us. There is nothing more insulting that when someone says, "I understand you!" because you always sense that they have no clue about what your talking about. Which is why understanding is always understanding of ones own fantasies (ie. we understand *our* sense of meaning not the imaginary of the other).
> i think you've lost me, at least on the question of why consensus is giving
up desire but obviously this matters to me, so... do you really believe that in
relation to that old public sphere, why was my/your/his desire at issue anyway?
In Lacan, the psychoanalytic notion of desire is very much linked to non-satisfaction, which means that we desire things because they are unavailable; and to keep desire alive, the subject needs to prevent its fulfillment. If we actually desire consensus, then we had better damn well make sure that we don't agree! If we agree, we won't desire democracy anymore.
> >When we understand, we only understand our fantasies.
> oh good. that's bullshit. thanks ken.
Ah, so you understand what I've said and are able, in short order, to dismiss it as bullshit! You've understood nothing! which is why understanding is always understand ones own fantasy!
ken