>>> kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca 08/10/01 10:38AM >>>
At 01:32 AM 8/10/01 -0400, you wrote:
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Sigh (of the unrecognized creature). Carrol, even you can acknowledge the importance of mutual recognition for the well-being and integrity of a human being. The mother-infant relationship, to name of field that has been woefully understudied, is a social relation - it is one of mimesis, mirroring, excitement, frustration and everything else. Without understanding how human beings communicate, we can have know understanding of what we are doing - ie. how to communicate. It is essential that we outline notions of grammar, outline what 'mirroring the other' is, to spell out the effects of playing with one another. Communication constitutes what can be called the bonds of love.
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CB: With due respect, Ken, I propose that the whole you want here is human sociality, or society, or communalism. And then communication would be an aspect of this more appropriate whole. Perhaps you will say that the real whole or whatever for you is "communicative action" . But that , by the normal connotation of "communicative" , places the linguistic in a sort of privileged category or aspect. It is more that the the "thing" is social or communal (communist even) action, and linguistic-communicative-symbolic action is one dimension, an important dimension for humans, of social action. But it is important to "reduce" the communicative to the communal and not vica versa.
I'd even say, again not trying to offend or namecall, that to reduce the other way is something analogous to Marx's commodity fetishism - linguistic fetishism. Commodity fetishism is the substitution of relationships between things for relationships between people , briefly. Analogously, we don't want to substitute the relationship among words and symbols for the relationships among people which they represent.
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Equally important is the way in which domination comes to be internalized *through* these relations. Your cracks about neuroscience are ridiculous when one considers sadomasochism in everyday life: why is it that one derives enjoyment from compliance, why is it that another derives enjoyment from being a dominator. Your neuroscience says nothing about this because it does not grasp the performative dimension, which is encapsulated in linguistic or communicative theory. You're simply wrong about this communications stuff. Sure, it is overemphasized at the expense (sometimes) of other elements of our sociation... but language is the medium of the coordination of our activity.
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CB: Language is a main medium of the coordination of our activity, as well as being itself an activity. (In capitalism, the production and exchange of commodities also is a main medium of coordination of our activities. )
However, what seems to me really big in language and culture (symbolic action) is that they "coordinate" the activity of the living generation with the activity of many past generations. Thereby it is an enormous expansion of the living generation's social being. The individuals of a living generation get to vicariously share the experiences of many , many other individuals from the past, thereby "coordinating" their activities. This also gives rise to a living generation purposefully communicating to future generations through symbols, especially language, that it leaves behind. So Shakespeare celebrates how his poetry will live on. I think the main importance of the symbolic is this role as the medium of enormously and qualitatively expanding the social in this way into the historical or socio-historical.
Of course, this is also a basis for social conservatisms and dogmatisms of all types ! For Levi-Straussian structures, the more things change , the more they stay the same. I won't get into this paradox for revolutionaries right now (!)
As far as I know, no other species has anything like this. Bees have enormous communication ( and communicative action) within the contemporaneous generation, but transgenerational communication among bees is nothing like that of humans, as far as we can detect, no ? The symbol ( both language and rituals , culture in general ) somehow carries out this transgenerational communication. How does it do this so powerfully and efficiently ? Even most of the communication within the living generation is carried out with a system , most of the elements of which are developed by past generations.
And what is the symbol, but an essential dialectic - not A is used to represent A , a unity and struggle of opposites. A symbol is defined as the opposite of an imitation or imitative representation such as a drawing. Does this give the symbol its transgenerational communicative ability ?
Maybe Habermas says this in a different way, I don't know ? I do think that anybody focussed on communication, symbols and language must consider these ideas .
As to your comment on consciousness below, I don't think materialism or Marxism denies the existence or effective causality of consciousness, but that it sees consciousness as the form and sociality or social relations as the substance in relation to consciousness's form. That is , individual's conduct is caused and shaped by their individual consciousness, but the main cause of individual consciousness in humans ( beyond the neuropsychological that Carrol refers to, the privileged individualness of which we share to an extent with other species more than we share the symbolic with them ) is social or symbolic ( as discussed above).
In case the latter is not clear, I mean that the privileges of our individual consciousness are probably pretty much shared by the individuals of other species , and are therefore more neuropsychologically or naturally rooted ( senses and the like). The symbolic we do not share with other species, but it is socially rooted.
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You're engaged in it right now. I don't see how you can deny this why using it at the same time. Explain Hegel's lord and bondage dialectic without a notion of consciousness, what is there to understand about human relations from The Story of O?
Damn, I wish I'd defined "lifeworld" for you. Is this what this is all about?
ken