lbo-talk-digest V1 #4738

Kenneth MacKendrick kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Mon Aug 13 21:25:59 PDT 2001



>Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 15:34:21 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Dennis Robert Redmond <dredmond at efn.org>
>Subject: Communication


>The antinomy of communicative action is, it's never clear what,
>precisely, is being communicated.

So, does this mean "One only understands what one thinks one already knows. More precisely, one never understands anything but a meaning whose satisfaction or comfort one has already felt. I=ll say it to you in a way you won=t understand: one never understands anything but one=s fantasies" (Jacques-Alain Miller). Now we're having a conversation! Finally, at last, someone who doesn't understand what they are saying - this is the essence of communication (and Kell's gonna have my head for this) - and it is precisely this point that must be stressed against Habermasians. I swore off earlier that I was defending a position that I did not hold, in part because I'm finishing a dissertation (11 out of 12 chapters finished as of today!) and, in part, because Habermas's position is invaluable in the sense that it clears through a lot of bullshit. But, without your comment above, there is an opening, a different way of understanding communication that acknowledges a 'non-communicative other' inherent to the medium itself, the medium being psychical *and* institutional. For this, a theory of fantasy and imagination is invaluable, and what I consider the only plausible route for articulating 'the demands of the day' - the global and the universal (as exception) - the way in which legitimation (symbolic identity) is struck by the enigma of its own strangeness to itself.


> > I find this dumbfounding. That you consider
> > the single most important aspect of cognition subjectivity and
> > intersubjectivity to be irrelevant is simply mind-blowing.
>
>Why is communication the be-all and end-all of subjectivity? This
>excludes vast arenas of human experience, bedrock things like memory,
>longing, affection, wishing, etc. Just as the best things in life are
>priceless, some of the best things in life are simply incommunicable.

Ok, back to Habermas (your argument here demands it). Communication isn't the be-all and end-all of subjectivity. Memory, longing, affection, wishing... there is nothing inherently incommunicable about these experiences, insofar as they are meaningful at all.

But, to pinch hit for something better (because you reached down and plucked fire from the sky earlier in your post) - we must turn to the 'navel of the dream' - the non-semantic psychophysical dimensions of the symbolic, what Lacan calls symptomatic agency, which reveals that 'ideology' is not simply deception or self-deception, the point is not to simply throw back the curtain and reveal the wizard who throws the switches, but to pay attention to the mindless within mindedness, which is none other than jouissance, which is defended against through the medium of fantasy - and legitimation - and keeps us in the thrall of something beyond, be it nation, sex, power, or lost objects.

thanks, ken



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